Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tree avenues as reservoir for epiphytic lichens in deforested landscapes

Abstract: Kubiak, D. & Osyczka, P. 2019. Tree avenues as reservoir for epiphytic lichens in deforested landscapes. – Herzogia 32: 398 – 420. Old tree avenues are a disappearing traditional element in European landscapes. Roadside trees constitute an important habitat for many groups of organisms and support the maintenance of biodiversity in deforested areas, but they are often neglected in conservation strategies. This study describes and analyses the conservation value of planted trees along rural roads in NE Poland for epiphytic lichens. A total of 105 trunks of seven deciduous tree species were examined. Lichen species inventories were assembled for trunks at a height up to two meters from the ground. A total of 99 lichen species was recorded. Lichen species richness and cover were dependent primarily on tree species. Diameter of trees was not significantly correlated with the number of species. Ulmus laevis and, to a lesser extent, Fraxinus excelsior and Acer platanoides, were be the most valuable tree species in terms of lichen species richness. Quercus robur as a roadside tree did not have above-average species numbers. Lichen species with a preference for eutrophicated or alkaline bark occurred in their largest numbers on Populus nigra agg. Betula pendula hosted the largest number of species avoiding eutrophication. Each tree species had its own set of exclusive lichens and hosted taxa which are red-listed in Poland; however, no single tree species alone guarantees preservation of the entire range of epiphytic lichens on roadside trees in the study area. Since tree avenues, especially those composed of multiple species, provide a suitable habitat for various rare and endangered lichens, potentially high conservation value should always be attributed to this element of local landscapes in low pollution areas.
A new species of Amblydromalus Chant & McMurtry (Acari: Mesostigmata: Phytoseiidae) from Brazil, with a key to Brazilian species of the genus

Abstract A new species, Amblydromalus itacoatiarensis sp. nov. is described and illustrated based on adults of both sexes. It was found in association with plants in natural and agro-ecosystems, in Amazonas state, Brazil. A key to Brazilian species of the genus is provided.
New records of Ixodes amarali (Acari: Ixodidae) in the Amazon biome, with description of the male

Abstract Ixodes amarali Fonseca, 1935 is a tick species endemic to Brazil, where it has been reported only in the Caatinga (semiarid), Cerrado (savannah), and Atlantic forest biomes. While females of I. amarali have been several times collected, the male has remained undescribed. Here we report new collections of larva, nymph, females, and one male of I. amarali from the Pará State, northern Brazil, which constitute the first records of this tick species in the Amazon biome. The male of I. amarali is morphologically described. Partial sequences of the mitochondrial 16S rRNA gene were generated from the single male and one female of I. amarali from the Amazon biome. Phylogenetic analysis inferred from 16S rRNA partial sequences showed that I. amarali (male and female) from Amazon grouped with a sequence of I. amarali from southeastern Brazil. These three sequences clustered into a monophyletic group with sequences of Ixodes loricatus Neumann, 1899, Ixodes luciae Sénevet, 1940, and Ixodes schulzei Aragão and Fonseca, 1951, which constitute the so-called “I. loricatus group”. Morphological characters to separate the male of I. amarali from I. loricatus, and I. luciae are provided.
Pathogens Causing Respiratory Tract Infections in Children Less Than 5 Years of Age in Senegal

Introduction: While acute respiratory tract infections are the main cause of paediatric mortality and morbidity worldwide, pathogen patterns shift due to factors such as hygiene, vaccinations, and antibiotic resistance. Knowledge about current cause of respiratory infections is lacking, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. The aim of this study was to identity the various respiratory pathogens causing acute respiratory tract infections in children below 5 years of age visiting a sub-urban primary care clinic in Senegal. Methods: A case-control study was performed in September and October 2018. Oropharyngeal swabs were collected from cases; infants with fever and respiratory symptoms, and controls; children involved in the vaccination programme. Viral identification was conducted by polymerase chain reaction for 21 different viruses; bacteria were identified by culture studies. Associations between microorganisms, acute respiratory infection and severity of disease were calculated by multivariate regression adjusting for confounders such as age, sex, and living area. Results: Overall, 102 cases and 96 controls were included. Microorganisms were detected in 90.1% of cases and 53.7% of controls (P < .001). Influenza virus A (including H1N1), influenza virus B, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and Streptococcus pneumoniae were independently associated with acute respiratory tract infections. Co-detection of two or more pathogens was present in 49.5% of cases; 31.7% of cases had a pneumonia and 90.2% was treated with antibiotics. Conclusions: This case-control study in a primary care setting in sub-Saharan Africa found influenza virus A and B, RSV, and S pneumoniae to be the main causes of acute respiratory tract infections in children below 5 years of age. We recommend evaluation of antibiotics prescription behaviour in this setting.
Use of healthcare services by patients with multiple sclerosis in France over 2010–2015: a nationwide population-based study using health administrative data

Background Most of the knowledge about people with multiple sclerosis (PwMS) in France comes from cohorts, which may suffer from recruitment bias or from the unique registry located in Lorraine, East France. Objective To describe use of care in the French population of PwMS, over 2010–2015. Methods All PwMS in the French national health data system (97% of the general population covered) were included. Demographics, and use of care were described (visits with general practitioners (GPs), neurologists, nurses, physiotherapists and hospitalisations). A focus on the neurological follow-up was also conducted. Results A total of 112,415 PwMS were identified (sex ratio F:M = 2.4, median age 46), of whom 5005 died during follow-up. The median numbers of visits with GPs and neurologists were 6.6 and 1.3 respectively per patient-year. Moreover, 53,457 (47.6%) received multiple sclerosis (MS) treatments; about 13% of patients had no neurological follow-up, and 81.8% had at least one hospitalisation. Conclusions For the first time in France, this exhaustive dataset offered the opportunity to provide objective figures regarding care practices for MS at the national level, without any selection bias. It also allowed description of patients with MS according to their neurological follow-up, especially those who were absent from cohorts led by neurologists.
A pilot study of diffusion tensor imaging metrics and cognitive performance pre and post repetitive, intentional sub-concussive heading in soccer practice

Background Although soccer players routinely head the ball in practice and games, recent research has suggested that cumulative effects of repetitive heading may cause sub-concussive injury with accompanying effects on brain and behavior. The current study aimed to prospectively investigate the effects of repetitive, intentional heading in soccer practice on brain structure and cognitive function, using a within-subjects design. Methods Participants included 10 soccer players (mean age 20.09 years ± 2.88) who were examined immediately pre- and post-heading practice. An accelerometer was used to measure the force of the impact during soccer heading. Magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired on a 3 T GE Scanner with diffusion tensor imaging. Diffusion tensor imaging analyses were completed using functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain software library’s Tract-Based Spatial Statistics to examine changes in both fractional anisotropy and mean diffusivity due to heading the soccer ball. Behavioral measures were also completed pre- and post-soccer heading and included the Sport Concussion Assessment Tool and three short-computerized executive function tasks; R studio was used to compare behavioral data within subjects. Results Accelerometer data revealed that none of the heading impacts were >10g. At this level of impact, there were no significant pre–post heading differences in either fractional anisotropy or mean diffusivity. Additionally, aside from minimal practice effects, there were no significant differences in Sport Concussion Assessment Tool scores and no significant differences in the performance of the three executive function tasks pre–post heading. Conclusions The results provide initial evidence that repetitive heading in soccer practice, at a g force of 10, does not cause changes in brain structure or executive function. Future research should investigate heading in the context of games and with a greater sample size that would allow for sex-based comparisons.
Association between air pollution and type 2 diabetes: an updated review of the literature

Air pollution and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) are critical public health issues worldwide. A large number of epidemiological studies have highlighted the adverse effects of air pollution on diabetes, and include risk profiles for different exposure durations, study design types, subgroup populations, and effects of air pollution components. We researched PubMed, Google Scholar, and Web of Science to identify studies on the association between air pollution and T2DM from January 2009 to January 2019. The aim of this review is to provide a brief overview of epidemiological and experimental studies on air pollution associated with T2DM from the latest research, which may provide practical information about this relationship and possible mechanisms. Current cumulative evidence appears to suggest that T2DM-related biomarkers increase with increasing exposure duration and concentration of air pollutants. The chemical constituents of the air pollutant mixture may affect T2DM to varying degrees. The suggested mechanisms whereby air pollutants induce T2DM include increased inflammation, oxidative stress, and endoplasmic reticulum stress.
The Impact of a Cycled Lighting Intervention on Nursing Home Residents: A Pilot Study

Purpose: Achieving adequate levels of illumination to stimulate the circadian system can be difficult in a nursing home. The aim of this study was to examine the impact that a 4-week cycled lighting intervention had on activity, sleep, and mood in older adults living in a nursing home. Patients and methods: Ten residents were given an activity monitor to objectively measure activity and sleep, and subjective mood scores were also recorded during the study period. The cycled lighting intervention was designed to mimic normal natural daylight. Results: Some participants responded positively to the lighting intervention showing improvements in activity levels, sleep, and mood, while others showed no change or a continued decline. Conclusion: Although the results are inconclusive, a cycled lighting intervention remains a potentially promising intervention in the nursing home setting. Further studies with more robust measurements and a larger, more homogeneous cohort are required to investigate this further.
Deep transfer learning for rolling bearing fault diagnosis under variable operating conditions

Rolling bearings are the vital components of rotary machines. The collected data of rolling bearing have strong noise interference, massive unlabeled samples, and different fault features. Thus, a deep transfer learning method is proposed for rolling bearings fault diagnosis under variable operating conditions. To obtain robust feature representation, the denoising autoencoder is used to denoise and reduce dimension of unlabeled rolling bearing signals. For those unlabeled target domain signals, a feature matching method based on multi-kernel maximum mean discrepancies between source domain and target domain is adopted to get enough labeled target domain samples. Then, these rolling bearing signals are converted to multi-dimensional graph samples and fed into a convolutional neural network model for fault diagnosis. To improve the generalization of convolutional neural network under variable operating conditions, we combine model-based transfer learning with feature-based transfer learning to initialize and optimize the convolutional neural network parameters. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through several comparative experiments of Case Western Reserve University data. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can learn features adaptively from noisy data and increase the accuracy rate by 2%–8% comparing with other models.
Rethinking Landscape Conservation: Linking Globalized Agriculture to Changes to Indigenous Community-Managed Landscapes

Community-managed landscapes have valuable conservation potential. In particular, indigenous community management has slowed deforestation. However, globalized agriculture is an underlying driver of changes to indigenous community-managed landscapes. Our objective is to explain a hypothesized global-to-local causal pathway that stems from processes of globalized agriculture and changes to indigenous community-managed landscapes. The global-to-local pathway involves a nested hierarchy of political–economic processes, specifically land and natural resource privatization, commodification, and acquisition. At the local landscape level, we focus on changes to land tenure, livelihoods, land use, and land cover. Changes to land tenure involve a shift away from community and toward individual ownership and management. Concurrently, livelihoods shift away from subsistence and toward market-oriented activities. Subsequently, land use shifts away from small-scale extensive and toward large-scale intensive crop cultivation, away from diverse crop cultivation and toward monocropping, and away from crop toward livestock farming. Ultimately, land cover shifts away from diverse agro-forested and toward homogeneous deforested lands. We illustrate our approach using ejidos, a type of community-managed lands, in Yucatán, México as an exploratory example. We use descriptive statistics to initially assess the shift in ejido land tenure, from community to individually parcelized systems, and the shift in a principal subsistence livelihood and land use activity, from maize cultivation to cattle rearing. We highlight that individually parceled areas within ejidos are more deforested than community-managed areas. In all, we urge landscape conservation scientists to more fully consider not just local actions but also impacts stemming from globalized agriculture and to advance the breadth and depth of more extensive studies and analyses.
Tumor and nodal staging of colon cancer: accuracy of preoperative computed tomography at a Swedish high-volume center

Background When deciding treatment options for patients with colon cancer, accurate staging is required. In Sweden, the main preoperative evaluation modality to determine tumor and nodal stage is computed tomography (CT). Purpose The aim of this study was to investigate how well the preoperative (CT-determined) clinical tumor and nodal stage (cTN) correlated with the postoperative histopathological stage (pTN). Another aim was to validate the tumor and nodal stage data in the Swedish Colorectal Cancer Registry (SCRCR). Material and Methods The SCRCR was used to identify patients with colon cancer, treated at a Swedish high-volume center during 2013–2016 (n = 974). Data were gathered from medical records regarding cTN and pTN stage, and predefined patient and tumor variables. The agreement between cTN and pTN was analyzed using kappa statistics. Results After excluding patients with either pre- or postoperative TN stage missing, 383 patients remained for further analyses. The analyses showed an agreement between cT and pT of κ: 0.27 and between cN and pN of κ: 0.21 (fair agreement). When comparing tumors with low (T1–3; N0) versus high risk (T4; N1–2), the kappa value was 0.19 (slight agreement). When comparing the SCRCR to medical records, 78% of completely staged tumors had been correctly reported. Conclusion The agreement between cTN and pTN was low in this study population, indicating a need for enhanced precision of the preoperative staging process. A high frequency of erroneous preoperative staging data in the SCRCR shows the need for further efforts of ensuring correct data transfers into the registry.
The role of the gastric bacterial microbiome in gastric cancer: Helicobacter pylori and beyond

A link between chronic inflammation and carcinogenesis has been depicted in many organ systems. Helicobacter pylori is the most prevalent bacterial pathogen, induces chronic gastritis and is associated with more than 90% of cases of gastric cancer (GC). However, the introduction of nucleotide sequencing techniques and the development of biocomputional tools have surpassed traditional culturing techniques and opened a wide field for studying the mucosal and luminal composition of the bacterial gastric microbiota beyond H. pylori. In studies applying animal models, a potential role in gastric carcinogenesis for additional bacteria besides H. pylori has been demonstrated. At different steps of gastric carcinogenesis, changes in bacterial communities occur. Whether these microbial changes are a driver of malignant disease or a consequence of the histologic progression along the precancerous cascade, is not clear at present. It is hypothesized that atrophy, as a consequence of chronic gastric inflammation, alters the gastric niche for commensals that might further urge the development of H. pylori-induced GC. Here, we review the current state of knowledge on gastric bacteria other than H. pylori and on their synergism with H. pylori in gastric carcinogenesis.
Bilateral phrenic neuropathy responsive to intravenous immunoglobulin treatment

The aetiology of phrenic neuropathy is often unknown, but immune mechanisms may play a role. In a typical case of bilateral phrenic neuropathy with paradoxical breathing (video), an inflammatory pathogenesis was suggested by prolonged distal latency of phrenic nerve compound muscle action potentials in nerve conduction studies and a clear-cut albumin-cytologic dissociation. This encouraged us to treat the patient with a standard dose of intravenous immunoglobulin. After obtaining a strong improvement at spirometry, we repeated the second cycle of intravenous immunoglobulin and observed normalization of symptoms within few weeks and no relapse after 3 years. This case suggests that lumbar puncture should be performed in the acute phase of phrenic neuropathies to detect potential responders to immunomodulatory treatment.
Clinical relevance of neutralizing antibodies in botulinum toxin long-term treated still-responding patients with cervical dystonia

Background: The aim of the study was to test the clinical relevance of neutralizing antibodies (NABs) in patients with cervical dystonia (CD) still responding to repeat injections with botulinum toxin type A (BoNT/A). Methods: Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA)-test evidence from a cross-sectional study on 221 CD-patients with treatment durations of between 2 and 21 years and still responding to repeat BoNT/A-injections showed the presence of antibodies against BoNT/A in 39 patients. A mouse hemi-diaphragm (MHDA) confirmation test was performed in these 39 ELISA-positive patients, and demographic (age, sex, age at onset of CD) and treatment-related (duration of treatment, mean dose of the last 10 injections, TSUI-score, patient’s subjective scoring of the treatment effect, patient’s scoring of quality of life by means of the CDQ24-questionnaire) data from these 39 patients were compared with data from ELISA-negative patients. Paralysis time, the MHDA outcome measure, was correlated with clinical data. Results: The ELISA-positive CD-patients had significantly higher TSUI-scores (p < 0.015), and had been treated for significant longer (p < 0.022) and with significantly higher doses (p < 0.001). Patient’s rating of BoNT/A-treatment effect and quality of life tended to be worse in ELISA-positive compared with ELISA-negative patients. The paralysis time of ELISA-positive patients was significantly correlated with the mean dose of the last 10 injections (p < 0.027) and the pain subscore of the CDQ24 (p < 0.012). Conclusions: Presence of NABs is clinically relevant in CD, leading to a significantly worse head position, therapy with significantly higher BoNT/A doses, and a correlation between the CDQ24 pain-subscore and antibody titers.
Acceptance of cloud computing in the Malaysian public sector: A proposed model

The Malaysian government has initiated a cloud government project as an integration of cloud computing and unified communication-based applications toward the digital and cloud work environment. However, the impact studies have found that the implementation of this project has several weaknesses such as lack of infrastructure support, weak IT knowledge, and lack of awareness among public sector employees causing applications not to be fully utilized. Therefore, it is crucial to conduct a study to measure the acceptance of government cloud project because there has been much investment in the project. This study applied Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), Technology Readiness Index (TRI) and several factors to develop the research model which is divided into two main factors: technological and human. The technological factor might determine the likelihood of its acceptance by the public sector and might stimulate them to accept it. The human factor as the characteristics of the people in the public sector that may contribute to creating the need for and ability to accept cloud computing. This proposed model will be used to evaluate the individual acceptance of cloud computing in the Malaysian public sector. For future work, this model needs to be enriched with interview sessions and quantitative surveys to validate the findings.
Lipid Droplet Motility and Organelle Contacts

Lipid droplets (LDs) are fat storage organelles integral to energy homeostasis and a wide range of cellular processes. LDs physically and functionally interact with many partner organelles, including the endoplasmic reticulum, mitochondria, lysosomes, and peroxisomes. Recent findings suggest that the dynamics of LD interorganelle contacts is in part controlled by LD intracellular motility. LDs can be transported directly by motor proteins along either actin filaments or microtubules, via Kinesin-1, Cytoplasmic Dynein, and type V Myosins. LDs can also be propelled indirectly, by hitchhiking on other organelles, cytoplasmic flows, and potentially actin polymerization. Although the anchors that attach motors to LDs remain elusive, other regulators of LD motility have been identified, ranging from modification of the tracks to motor cofactors to members of the perilipin family of LD proteins. Manipulating these regulatory pathways provides a tool to probe whether altered motility affects organelle contacts and has revealed that LD motility can promote interactions with numerous partners, with profound consequences for metabolism. LD motility can cause dramatic redistribution of LDs between a clustered and a dispersed state, resulting in altered organelle contacts and LD turnover. We propose that LD motility can thus promote switches in the metabolic state of a cell. Finally, LD motility is also important for LD allocation during cell division. In a number of animal embryos, uneven allocation results in a large difference in LD content in distinct daughter cells, suggesting cell-type specific LD needs.