Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
INFLUENCE OF FORESTLAND TENURE REGIMES ON FOREST RESOURCE CONDITION AND LIVELIHOODS IN BABATI DISTRICT, TANZANIA

Forestland tenure regime has wide ranging implications on resource condition and livelihoods of forest adjacent communities. Historically, state forestland tenure regime was dominant in Tanzania, but the current move is towards allocating forests on general land to villages. However, there is little information on the influence of forestland tenure on resource condition and livelihoods. This study aimed at analysing the influence of forestland tenure regimes on forest resource condition and livelihoods in Bereku and Haraa Forest Reserves and Riroda and Bubu Village land Forest Reserves in Babati District. Specifically the study assessed the influence of state and communal tenure regimes on vegetation cover changes, forest stocking, tree diversity, removals and livelihoods. Primary data were obtained through interpretation of satellite images, forest inventory and questionnaires. The results on forest vegetation cover classification between 1993 and 2009; showed that forests under state forestland tenure regime had a higher proportion of closed woodland than communal forestland tenure regime (83 and 84% against 74 and 68% in 1993). The annual rate of change from closed woodland to other vegetation classes was higher in communal forestland tenure regime (-9.3 and -6.1% against -1.1 and -0.1% between 1993 and 2000). The findings further revealed that number of stems were higher in state forestland tenure regime with a highest mean of 1134±256 against 1015±216 stems ha -1 . Likewise, basal area was higher in state forestland tenure (15.0±1.8 m 2 ha -1 against 11.35±2.13 m 2 ha -1 ) compared to communal forestland tenure. Species diversity index H‟ was higher in forests under state forestland tenure regime and the index of dominance D‟ was low in state tenure regime indicating a stable structure in state forestland tenure. Disturbance level was higher in communal forestland tenure regime with a mean removal of 101±28 stems ha -1 . Access to natural capital was highest in communal forestland tenure regime. Forestland tenure regime was found to be one of the
Expression of E-cadherin and N-cadherin in Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition of Osteosarcoma: A Systematic Review

Osteosarcoma (OS) is a debilitating cancer of the bone that commonly afflicts the young and old. This may be de novo or associated with tumorigenic syndromes. However, many molecular mechanisms are still being uncovered and may offer greater avenues for screening and therapy. Cadherins, including E-cadherin and N-cadherin/vimentin, are involved in epithelial-to-mesenchymal transmission (EMT), which is key for tumor invasion. A study reviewing the relationship between OS and cadherins might elucidate a potential target for therapy and screening. A robust literature review was conducted by searching PubMed with the keywords “osteosarcoma”, “cadherin”, “e-cadherin” and “n-cadherin”. Of a preliminary 266 papers, 25 were included in the final review. Review articles and those without primary data were excluded. Loss of E-cadherin is noted in metastatic cell lines of osteosarcoma. Overexpression of E-cadherin or knockout of N-cadherin/vimentin results in loss of metastatic potential. There are several methods of gene knockout, including CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, viral vector insertion with micro RNA complementary to long noncoding RNA within gene segments, or proteomic editing. Screening for EMT and genetic treatment of EMT is a possible avenue for the treatment of refractory osteosarcoma. Several studies were conducted ex vivo. Further testing involving in vitro therapy is necessary to validate these methods. Limitations of this study involve a lack of in vivo trials to validate methods.
Control of Turbidity Currents in Reservoirs by Solid and Permeable Obstacles

Turbidity currents are often the main process for the transport and deposition of the sediments in narrow, alpine reservoirs. These underwater avalanches with high concentration of suspended sediments follow the thalweg of the lake to the deepest area near the dam, where the sediments can affect the operation of the bottom outlet and the intake structures. To control the sedimentation within the reservoir, the effects of solid and permeable obstacles on the turbidity current were investigated with physical experiments and numerical simulations. In the physical experiments, the velocity distributions as well as the spatial and temporal evolution of the deposits were measured. The investigated measures were also simulated by means of a two-dimensional numerical model, based on the flow solver CFX-4.4. The investigations showed that turbidity currents can be influenced effectively by properly designed constructive measures. Based on the results of the physical experiments and numerical simulations, some design recommendations for solid and permeable obstacles are proposed.
Late Luteal Subphase Food Craving Is Enhanced in Women with Obesity and Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD)

Dysregulated food craving is a complex weight-related behavior. To identify novel targets for enhancing the efficacy of weight loss interventions, we examined whether food craving varies across the menstrual cycle according to the abdominal obesity type and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) diagnosis, and, if so, whether it is related to affective symptomatology. Reproductive-age women were classified into one of the four study groups according to whether they have abdominal obesity (AO) or are abdominally lean (AL), and the presence of PMDD: (1) AO:PMDD+ (n = 13), (2) AL:PMDD+ (n = 14), (3) AO:PMDD− (n = 15), and (4) AL:PMDD− (n = 16). Self-report measures as well as urinary luteinizing hormone (LH) tests were provided by the participants across 2–3 menstrual cycles. The ratings of food cravings were similar across the menstrual cycle, except the last, late luteal subphase as the AO:PMDD+ participants had the highest food craving rating. Irritability and depression were correlated with food cravings, but not in a distinctive manner across the menstrual cycle by group. Our study found that women with abdominal obesity and PMDD display a temporal vulnerability to a food-related behavior. The possibility of shared neurobiology between the two conditions is discussed and should be examined in future studies.
Effects of Spring Phenology on Grassland Growth in Qilian Mountains Across Multiple Spatiotemporal Scales

Investigating the differences in grassland growth and its response to advancing spring phenology and climate change across various spatiotemporal scales is crucial for the sustainable development of alpine mountain regions under a warming and wetting climate. This study analyzed the growth dynamics of grassland in the Qilian Mountains from 2000 to 2019 at seasonal and periodic scales. Using partial wavelet coherency and partial correlation analysis, we investigated the influence of temperature, precipitation, and spring phenology on grassland growth. Additionally, we quantified the dominant factors affecting grassland growth in different ecological zones and elevational gradient. The results indicated that the mean normalized difference vegetation index increased at an average rate of 1.1 and 2.8 × 10−3/year for grassland in spring and summer, respectively. Furthermore, the start of vegetation growing season (SOS) has advanced 6.0 days during 2000–2019. The dominant factor for grassland growth shifted from spring temperature to summer precipitation. The importance of SOS ranked second, significantly influencing 29.3% and 25.1% of grassland during spring and summer, respectively. Grasslands situated above 4,000 m above sea level (ASL) were more sensitive to climate change, with SOS exerting the greatest influence within the elevation range of 2,800–4,000 m ASL. Additionally, the phase difference in the time‐frequency scale of partial wavelet coherency revealed a lag effect of approximately 1 month for summer grassland growth to respond to precipitation. These findings can provide a scientific basis for optimizing global vegetation models and predicting the productivity of alpine mountain grasslands.
Automatic Extractive Summarization using GAN Boosted by DistilBERT Word Embedding and Transductive Learning

—Text summarization is crucial in diverse fields such as engineering and healthcare, greatly enhancing time and cost efficiency. This study introduces an innovative extractive text summarization approach utilizing a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), Transductive Long Short-Term Memory (TLSTM), and DistilBERT word embedding. DistilBERT, a streamlined BERT variant, offers significant size reduction (approximately 40%), while maintaining 97% of language comprehension capabilities and achieving a 60% speed increase. These benefits are realized through knowledge distillation during pre-training. Our methodology uses GANs, consisting of the generator and discriminator networks, built primarily using TLSTM - an expert at decoding temporal nuances in timeseries prediction. For more effective model fitting, transductive learning is employed, assigning higher weights to samples nearer to the test point. The generator evaluates the probability of each sentence for inclusion in the summary, and the discriminator critically examines the generated summary. This reciprocal relationship fosters a dynamic iterative process, generating top-tier summaries. To train the discriminator efficiently, a unique loss function is proposed, incorporating multiple factors such as the generator’s output, actual document summaries, and artificially created summaries. This strategy motivates the generator to experiment with diverse sentence combinations, generating summaries that meet high-quality and coherence standards. Our model’s effectiveness was tested on the widely accepted CNN/Daily Mail dataset, a benchmark for summarization tasks. According to the ROUGE metric, our experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms existing models in terms of summarization quality and efficiency.
Temporal Trends in Atmospheric Heavy Metal and Organochlorine Concentrations at Zeppelin, Svalbard

Abstract As a part of the national Norwegian monitoring program, long-term surveys of contaminants have been carried out at the Zeppelin atmospheric research station (Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard ) since the early 1990s. In the present study, all obtained data have been summarized and analyzed in order to review possible temporal trends for selected atmospheric contaminants at Svalbard. The following heavy metals were determined in aerosols: Pb, Cd, Hg, Cu, Zn, Cr, Ni, Co, Mn, V, and As. Only Ni showed a decreasing trend in the concentrations over the past decade. Organochlorine compounds in combined gaseous phase and aerosol samples evaluated were the following: α-HCH (hexachlorocyclohexane), γ-HCH, HCB (hexachlorobenzene), and sum-DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane). Only those organochlorines exhibiting significant statistically confirmed temporal trends were chosen for the present comparison. Thus, although polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) as well as chlordanes are routinely monitored at the Zeppelin station, they were not considered for the here presented report because no clear trends were determined. Therefore all, but sum-DDT showed significant decreasing trends, correlating well with the national and international governmental regulations.
Depression and stress are associated with latent profiles of problematic social media use among college students

Background The previous literature has demonstrated that depression, anxiety, and stress are significant predictors of problematic social media use. However, the manifestation of problematic social media use varies, and the predictive relationship between depression, anxiety, and stress with different subgroups of problematic social media use remains unclear. The aim of this research was to evaluate latent subgroups of problematic social media use among college students and to investigate the impact of depression, anxiety, and stress on these latent subgroups. Methods A survey was carried out among college students in China using a cross-sectional approach. A total of 955 participants were included, with a mean age of 19.50 ± 1.22 years. Participants completed questionnaires containing the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale (BSMAS) and the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale-21 (DASS-21). The study employed latent profile analysis (LPA) to investigate latent subgroups of Chinese college students with problematic social media use, and a robust three-step approach was used to develop predictive regression mixed models of depression, anxiety, and stress on latent subgroups. Results Problematic social media use of Chinese college students can be categorized into four latent subgroups, namely, the high-risk group, the moderate-risk with pleasure group, the moderate-risk with compulsion group, and the low-risk group. The regression model showed that there was a significant difference between the high-risk group and the low-risk group on the stress scale. There was a significant difference between the moderate-risk with pleasure group and the moderate-risk with compulsion group on the depression scale. Conclusion Problematic social media use is heterogeneous, with depression and stress being potentially key factors influencing problematic social media use. Depression would make college students more likely to be moderate-risk with compulsion problematic social media users than moderate-risk with pleasure problematic social media users, and stress would make college students more likely to be high-risk problematic social media users than low-risk problematic social media users.
Adaptive Context-Aware Distillation for Industrial Image Anomaly Detection

Image anomaly detection is extremely challenging in industrial manufacturing processes due to unforeseen and diversified anomalies. Recently, unsupervised anomaly detection methods based on knowledge distillation have been developed and have shown remarkable potential. While most existing methods are devoted to knowledge generalization, they are inadequate for the fine-grained detection task. To address this issue, we propose a novel adaptive context-aware distillation (ACAD) paradigm that gives due consideration to distillation component dependencies and knowledge transfer optimization. Technically, a novel adaptive distillation module (ADM) is proposed for optimal context-aware knowledge transfer, which consists of contrastive decoupling distillation (CDD) and masked perceiving distillation (MPD). The proposed CDD helps to constrain the distribution of different semantic patterns and strengthen the discriminative capability. Vanilla methods treat every pixel as an equal contribution and fail to focus on critical information. To this end, the MPD is proposed to weigh different contextual knowledge adaptively. Extensive experiments with mainstream anomaly detection datasets show that ACAD outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors in accuracy and efficiency. In addition, the experimental results with a real-world inkjet printing organic electroluminescence display (OLED) panel dataset further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Bulgarian Vegetation Database: historic background, current status and future prospects

For geographical and historical reasons, the Bulgarian vegetation is quite diverse. In the past and up to the beginning of the new millennium, vegetation studies have been conducted in the country basically following the dominance approach. At the end of the 1990s, however, an initiative was started to collect new field data according to European floristic-ecological standards. In 1999, the Bulgarian Vegetation Database (GIVD ID EU-BG-001) was established to collect available data for getting a better insight in the diversity of Bulgarian vegetation. The database uses TURBOVEG software and is located in the Working Group for Vegetation and Habitats in the Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. In September 2010, this database contained 5,901 releves, most of them related to grasslands. The major part of the data has been collected after 2000. The geographic distribution of the field data over the country is uneven. Most of the data are derived from particular projects and gathered at locations with a relatively undisturbed environment. Altogether, thirty authors have contributed to the field sampling. Some 25.5% of the releves were taken from the literature. It has been estimated that some additional 2,900 releves can be derived from the literature and unpublished sources. For the purposes of the database, a full list of expected syntaxa for Bulgaria has been prepared.
Palaeomagnetism and Potassium-Argon Ages of Volcanic Rocks of Ngorongoro Caldera, Tanzania

Summary Natural remanent magnetization (NRM) has been measured in 21 lava flows and 1 tuff in the south-west wall of Ngorongoro caldera, Tanzania. The lowest three lavas are normally magnetized, the next two have intermediate directions, and the remainder are reversed; potassium-argon dating places the reversal at 2.45 My, corresponding to the Gauss Matuyama epoch boundary. Alternating-field demagnetization was effective in removing the ubiquitous lightning-produced secondary magnetizations, but partial thermal demagnetization was not. Curie temperatures of the lavas fell into two groups: 250°-350°C and 570°-585°C, probably corresponding to unoxidized and oxidized titanomagnetites respectively. NRM directions in the lavas occurred in several distinct and stratigraphically continuous groups, suggesting intermittent eruption of groups of lavas. No correspondence was found between NRM groups and other parameters, such as Curie temperatures. The dispersion of mean NRM directions is large in comparison with late Quaternary lavas from low latitudes in the Pacific basin, but probably is not large relative to the proportion of the geomagnetic field in Africa that is non-dipolar. The mean palaeomagnetic pole is offset 10.5° from the geographic pole, but because of the large dispersion, the difference is not considered significant.
Grimsdalea magnaclavata Germeraad, Hopping & Muller: An Enigmatic Pollen Type from the Neogene of Northern South America

Grimsdalea magnaclavata was first described by Germeraad, Hopping and Muller from Miocene and Pliocene deposits of northern South America, specifically Colombia and Venezuela. The specific epithet, ‘magnaclavata’, was selected by the authors to draw attention to the distinctive clavate processes of the pollen. A revised taxonomic description is supported by illustrations of fossil specimens from outcrop and well sections that show the range in morphology not previously recorded in the original description; the key difference is the wide variation in process morphology from clavae to clavae with interspersed echinae. Based on the new observations of the pollen morphology we conclude that the records from Cretaceous and Paleogene sediments in North and West Africa are invalid. G. magnaclavata is clearly restricted to northern South America from the Miocene to Pleistocene. The parent plant of G. magnaclavata probably grew in upper coastal plain or around swamps, commonly associated with shrubs and herbaceous savannah plants. The botanical affinity of G. magnaclavata has always been in question. Based on a review of pollen from several palm genera presently extant in northern South America we consider that the nearest living relatives, if indeed G. magnaclavata is an ancient palm, are the genera Mauritia and Mauritiella. The basis for this conclusion is the distinctive foot layer morphology of the processes in the fossil and the modern examples.
Intercomparison among chamber, tower, and aircraft net CO2 and energy fluxes measured during the Arctic System Science Land-Atmosphere-Ice Interactions (ARCSS-LAII) Flux Study

Measurements of net ecosystem CO 2 exchange (NEE) and energy balance were made using chamber-, tower-, and aircraft-based measurement techniques in Alaskan arctic tundra ecosystems during the 1994-1995 growing seasons (June-August). One of our objectives was to quantify the interrelationships between the NEE and the energy balance measurements made from different sampling techniques. Oualitative and quantitative intercomparisons revealed that on average the correspondence between the mass and energy fluxes measured by these sampling methods was good despite potential spatial and temporal mismatches in sampling scale. Quantitative comparisons using least squares linear regression analyses with the tower-based measurements of NEE as the independent variable indicate that the chamber- and aircraft-based NEE measurements were generally lower relative to the tower-based measurements (slope = 0.76-0.86). Similarly, tower-aircraft comparisons of latent (L e ) and sensible (H) heat exchange indicated that the aircraft-based measurements were lower than the tower-based measurements (slope = 0.72-0.80). Qualitative comparisons, however, indicate that the correspondence among the chamber-, tower-, and aircraft-measured fluxes varied both seasonally and interannually, suggesting the lack of a consistent bias between the sampling techniques. The results suggest that differences observed between the chamber, tower, and aircraft flux measurements were primarily due to the failure to account for the spatial distribution of surface types in the tower and aircraft sampling footprint, problems involved in the comparison of temporal and spatial averages, and temporal (e.g., seasonal and interannual) variance in rates of mass and energy flux for a given point. Other potential sources of variance include the underestimation of nocturnal NEE by the tower-based eddy covariance system, and the periodic occurrence of an elevated CO 2 plume in the atmosphere over the Prudhoe Bay oil field. Even with these potential sources of variation, the results reveal that the various methods give comparable estimates of NEE and energy flux within a range of temporal or spatial variability.
A 10-year retrospective study of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus from burn wound infection in southeast China from 2013 to 2022

Background Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is one of the most commonly encountered pathogens among burn patients incurring substantial morbidity and mortality. To investigate the epidemiology and features of MRSA in burn wound infections, we conducted a 10-year retrospective study on MRSA isolated from burn patients with burn wound infections from southeast China from 2013 to 2022. Methods One hundred MRSA isolates (10 isolates each year) from burn wound infection among burn patients from 2013 to 2022 were randomly selected and enrolled. In addition to the clinical data of the 100 burn patients, MRSA isolates were characterized by antimicrobial susceptibility testing, detection of toxin genes, and molecular typing. Results The median time from the onset of burns and admission to MRSA detected was 13 and 5 days, respectively. No MRSA isolate was found resistant to quinupristin/dalfopristin, linezolid, and vancomycin. Toxin gene seg was found most frequently (90%) followed by sea (70%) and eta (64%). CC8 (74%), ST239 (70%), and SCCmec III (72%) were the most common CC, ST, and SCCmec types, respectively. Conclusion ST239-III (70%) was the predominant clone found in MRSA from burn wound infection among burn patients in southeast China. ST239-III was less found from 2018 to 2022. A higher diversity of MRSA clones was observed in these recent 5 years than that from 2013 to 2017.