Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Grand challenges in entomology: Priorities for action in the coming decades

Entomology is key to understanding terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems at a time of unprecedented anthropogenic environmental change and offers substantial untapped potential to benefit humanity in a variety of ways, from improving agricultural practices to managing vector‐borne diseases and inspiring technological advances. We identified high priority challenges for entomology using an inclusive, open, and democratic four‐stage prioritisation approach, conducted among the membership and affiliates (hereafter ‘members’) of the UK‐based Royal Entomological Society (RES). A list of 710 challenges was gathered from 189 RES members. Thematic analysis was used to group suggestions, followed by an online vote to determine initial priorities, which were subsequently ranked during an online workshop involving 37 participants. The outcome was a set of 61 priority challenges within four groupings of related themes: (i) ‘Fundamental Research’ (themes: Taxonomy, ‘Blue Skies’ [defined as research ideas without immediate practical application], Methods and Techniques); (ii) ‘Anthropogenic Impacts and Conservation’ (themes: Anthropogenic Impacts, Conservation Options); (iii) ‘Uses, Ecosystem Services and Disservices’ (themes: Ecosystem Benefits, Technology and Resources [use of insects as a resource, or as inspiration], Pests); (iv) ‘Collaboration, Engagement and Training’ (themes: Knowledge Access, Training and Collaboration, Societal Engagement). Priority challenges encompass research questions, funding objectives, new technologies, and priorities for outreach and engagement. Examples include training taxonomists, establishing a global network of insect monitoring sites, understanding the extent of insect declines, exploring roles of cultivated insects in food supply chains, and connecting professional with amateur entomologists. Responses to different challenges could be led by amateur and professional entomologists, at all career stages. Overall, the challenges provide a diverse array of options to inspire and initiate entomological activities and reveal the potential of entomology to contribute to addressing global challenges related to human health and well‐being, and environmental change.
The Role of Airborne Particles in the Epidemiology of Clade 2.3.4.4b H5N1 High Pathogenicity Avian Influenza Virus in Commercial Poultry Production Units

Since October 2021, Europe has experienced the largest avian influenza virus (AIV) epizootic, caused by clade 2.3. 4.4b H5N1 high pathogenicity AIV (HPAIV), with over 320 poultry and captive bird infected premises (IPs) and 2480 dead H5N1 positive wild birds detected in Great Britain alone. Many IPs have been detected as geographical clusters, raising questions around potential lateral spread between premises by airborne particles. Airborne transmission over short distances has been reported for some AIVs strains. However, the risk of airborne spread of this strain remains to be elucidated. We conducted extensive sampling from IPs where clade 2.3. 4.4b H5N1 HPAIVs was confirmed during the 2022/23 epizootic, each representing a major poultry species (ducks, turkeys, and chickens). A range of environmental samples were collected inside and outside houses, including deposited dust, feathers, and other potential fomites. Viral RNA (vRNA) and infectious virus were detected in air samples collected from inside and outside, but in close proximity, of infected houses, with vRNA alone being detected greater distances (>10m) outside. Some dust samples collected outside of the affected houses contained infectious virus, while feathers from the affected houses, located up to 60m away, only contained vRNA. Together, these data suggest that airborne particles harbouring infectious HPAIV can be translocated short distances (<10m) through the air, while particles containing vRNA might travel further (<50m). Therefore, the potential for airborne transmission of clade 2.3. 4.4b H5N1 HPAIV between premises is considered low. Other factors, including indirect contact with wild birds, fomite spread and the efficiency of biosecurity represent greater importance in disease incursion. IMPORTANCE Understanding the routes of avian influenza virus incursion into poultry premises is critical to ensure the implementation of effective preventative measures, reducing the risk of spread of the virus. Extensive environmental sampling across three infected premises, representing the major global commercial poultry species, detected viral RNA and infectious virus in air samples, dust, and other fomites inside of the houses containing infected poultry, as well as within the immediate proximity of infected houses. This suggests that particles harbouring infectious virus may travel short distances outside of affected houses, which may potentially contribute to house-to-house transmission on the same premises, but not at distances likely to contribute to the transmission to another poultry premises. Consequently, control efforts should be focused on traditional, robust biosecurity measures at key barriers on poultry houses. Human behaviour in and around poultry houses as factors contributing to biosecurity risks should be considered.
Group 2 innate lymphoid cells promote inhibitory synapse development and social behavior

The innate immune system plays essential roles in brain synaptic development, and immune dysregulation is implicated in neurodevelopmental diseases. Here we show that a subset of innate lymphocytes (group 2 innate lymphoid cells, ILC2s) is required for cortical inhibitory synapse maturation and adult social behavior. ILC2s expanded in the developing meninges and produced a surge of their canonical cytokine Interleukin-13 (IL-13) between postnatal days 5-15. Loss of ILC2s decreased cortical inhibitory synapse numbers in the postnatal period where as ILC2 transplant was sufficient to increase inhibitory synapse numbers. Deletion of the IL-4/IL-13 receptor (Il4ra) from inhibitory neurons phenocopied the reduction inhibitory synapses. Both ILC2 deficient and neuronal Il4ra deficient animals had similar and selective impairments in adult social behavior. These data define a type 2 immune circuit in early life that shapes adult brain function. One sentence summary Type 2 innate lymphoid cells and Interleukin-13 promote inhibitory synapse development.
Magnipore: Prediction of differential single nucleotide changes in the Oxford Nanopore Technologies sequencing signal of SARS-CoV-2 samples

Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) allows direct sequencing of ribonucleic acids (RNA) and, in addition, detection of possible RNA modifications due to deviations from the expected ONT signal. The software available so far for this purpose can only detect a small number of modifications. Alternatively, two samples can be compared for different RNA modifications. We present Magnipore, a novel tool to search for significant signal shifts between samples of Oxford Nanopore data from similar or related species. Magnipore classifies them into mutations and potential modifications. We use Magnipore to compare SARS-CoV-2 samples. Included were representatives of the early 2020s Pango lineages (n=6), samples from Pango lineages B.1. 1.7 (n=2, Alpha), B.1. 617.2 (n=1, Delta), and B.1. 529 (n=7, Omicron). Magnipore utilizes position-wise Gaussian distribution models and a comprehensible significance threshold to find differential signals. In the case of Alpha and Delta, Magnipore identifies 55 detected mutations and 15 sites that hint at differential modifications. We predicted potential virus-variant and variant-group-specific differential modifications. Magnipore contributes to advancing RNA modification analysis in the context of viruses and virus variants.
Human assembloids reveal the consequences of CACNA1G gene variants in the thalamocortical pathway

Abnormalities in crosstalk between the thalamus and the cerebral cortex are thought to lead to severe neuropsychiatric disorders, such as epilepsy and psychotic disorders. Pathogenic variants in the CACNA1G gene, which encodes the α1G subunit of the thalamus-enriched T-type voltage-gated calcium channel CaV3.1, are associated with absence seizures, intellectual disability, and schizophrenia, but the cellular and circuit level consequences of these genetic variants in humans remain unknown. Here, we developed an in vitro human assembloid model of the thalamocortical pathway to systematically dissect the contribution of genetic variants in T-type calcium channels. We discovered that a CACNA1G variant (M1531V) associated with seizures led to hypersynchronous activity in the thalamus and in cortical neurons in thalamo-cortical assembloids. In contrast, CACNA1G loss, which has been associated with risk of schizophrenia, resulted in abnormal thalamocortical connectivity that was related to both increased spontaneous thalamic activity and aberrant thalamic axonal projections. Taken together, these results illustrate the utility of organoid and assembloid systems for interrogating human genetic disease risk variants at both cellular and circuit level.
Single cell RNA sequencing in isogenic FUS and TARDBP mutant ALS lines reveals early mitochondrial dysfunction as a common pathway in motor neurons

Mutations in the RNA/DNA-binding proteins FUS and TDP-43 cause amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) with distinct neuropathological features. It is currently unclear how these gene mutations lead to selective motor neuron death and if there are common mechanisms across disease causations. Using single cell RNA sequencing of neurons derived from isogenic induced pluripotent stem cell lines, we demonstrate that motor neurons harbouring FUS P525L or FUS R495X mutations show a 4.9- to 15.5-fold larger transcriptional response than interneurons. About 20% of transcripts were coregulated across FUS mutations in motor neurons and about half of these were caused by FUS gain-of-function. Comparison with TDP-43 M337V motor neurons, identified common mitochondrial dysfunction across gene mutations. Metabolic assessment confirmed a decrease in mitochondrial respiration and ATP turnover in mutant FUS and TARDBP motor neurons and live cell microscopy revealed impaired mitochondrial motility across ALS motor axons. Thus, we have identified early mitochondrial dysfunction in motor neurons shared across ALS-causative mutations, that could have major implications for their survival and which could be targeted therapeutically.
Exploring the Relationship between Dataset Size and Image Captioning Model Performance

Image captioning is a deep learning task that involves computer vision methods to extract visual information from the image and also natural language processing to generate the result caption in natural language. Image captioning models, just like other deep learning models, need a large amount of training data and require a long time to train. In this work, we investigate the impact of using a smaller amount of training data on the performance of the standard image captioning model Oscar. We train Oscar on different sizes of the training dataset and measure its performance in terms of accuracy and computational complexity. We observe that the computational time increases linearly with the amount of data used for training. However, the accuracy does not follow this linear trend and the relative improvement diminishes as we add more data to the training. We also measure the consistency of individual sizes of the training sets and observe that the more data we use for training the more consistent the metrics are. In addition to traditional evaluation metrics, we evaluate the performance using CLIP similarity. We investigate whether it can be used as a fully-fledged metric providing a unique advantage over the traditional metrics; it does not need reference captions that had to be acquired by human annotators. Our results show a high correlation between CLIP with the other metrics. This work provides valuable insights for understanding the requirements for training effective image captioning models. We believe our results can be transferred to other models, even in other deep-learning tasks.
Pre-pathological Diagnostic Criteria for Professional Burnout in Healthcare Workers

The work is devoted to identifying significant changes in the individual and psychological characteristics of medical workers with the initial level of professional burnout according to the MBI-GS questionnaire. 28 respondents (emergency medical services staff: doctors, paramedics) took part in the questionnaire to determine the level of professional burnout, as well as testing psychophysiological reactions of the central nervous system for a comprehensive assessment of the respondents’ general condition. The proposed mathematical approach enabled us to determine a group of pre-pathological states of professional burnout and to establish informative psychophysiological criteria, which will make it possible to substantiate and implement preventive measures against the professional burnout development. According to the "visual-motor reaction with counting" method, significant criteria indicators are an increase in the "number of mistakes made", "attention span and working memory" and a decrease in the "root mean square deviation of the sensorimotor reaction rate". According to the "choice reaction" method, all indicators had the same low level of information content. According to the "choice reaction" method, only a decrease in the "number of clicks" indicator is informative. The indicators of the "critical flicker fusion frequency" method are quite informative compared to the indicators of the "memory for images" method.
An overview of micro air vehicle aerodynamics

Nomenclature AR = full-span aspect ratio, b/S b = wingspan CD = drag coefficient (three-dimensional) Cd = section drag coefficient Cf = skin friction coefficient CL = lift coefficient (three-dimensional) Q = section lift coefficient CL I CD = endurance parameter Ci/Cd = section lift-to-drag ratio c = root-chord length Rec = root-chord Reynolds number S = wing area t = wing thickness a = angle of attack
Surface magnetism of Fe(001)

Results of all-electron self-consistent semirelativistic full-potential linearized augmented-plane-wave local-density and local-spin-density studies are reported for a seven-layer Fe(001) thin film. The calculated work function for the ferromagnetic state is found to be in excellent agreement with experiment, whereas that calculated for the paramagnetic state is significantly worse (namely, 0.5 eV too large), indicating the importance of spin polarization on this electrostatic property. For both states, partial densities of states (projected by layer and by orbital angular momentum), surface states, and charge (and spin) densities are presented and their differences employed to discuss the origin of surface magnetism. No Friedel oscillation is found in the layer-by-layer charge density. The surface-layer magnetic moment is found to have been increased by 0.73. mu. /sub B/ from the center layer to 2.98. mu. /sub B//atom; a very small Friedel oscillation is obtained for the spin density, which indicates possible size effects in this seven-layer film. Layer-by-layer Fermi contact hyperfine fields are presented: While the core-polarization contributions are proportional to the magnetic moment, the conduction-electron contribution shows a pronounced Friedel oscillation in the central layer and, significantly, a change of sign and increase in the magnitude for the surface-layer contribution. The hyperfine field at the nucleus of the center-layermore » atoms is found to be in excellent agreement with experiment. « less
Working memory and spatial representation in mapuche and non-mapuche schoolchildren from La Araucanía

The objective of this study was to determine if there are differences in performance in working memory and spatial representation in rural Mapuche children and non-Mapuche urban children, from the Araucanía region, Chile. 96 students between 8 and 12 years old participated ( M = 10.33; SD = 1.02) who answered tasks of working memory and spatial representation in verbal and non-verbal format. A multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) was performed, controlling for the effect of age and gender. The results show that Mapuche participants scored lower than their non-Mapuche peers in verbal working memory and marginally significant differences were found in non-verbal working memory. In the verbal spatial representation, no differences will be obtained in the groups and in the non-verbal spatial representation Mapuche children obtained a significantly higher performance than their non-Mapuche peers. Non-Mapuche children perform better on verbal tasks, while Mapuche children perform similarly or higher on non-verbal tasks. The relevance of ecological validity from the situated cognition paradigm is discussed.
Low-Scatter Mirror Degradation by Particle Contamination

Mirrors with very low-scattering optical surfaces (BRDF <1 x 10-5 sr-1) are being used in military applications. Energy scattered from dust particles on the surface of these mirrors can cause a degradation of the performance of the sensor. A study was made to determine the effect of particle contaminant on the mirror-scattering properties. The study involved contaminating low-scatter mirrors, characterization of the contamination level, and measurement of the Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF). Comparison of experimental measurements was made with values of BRDF predicted by the Mie particle-scattering theory.
Energetics during the main phase of geomagnetic superstorms

The study of energy transfer between the different regions of the solar wind - magnetosphere - ionosphere system is a fundamental issue in Solar-Terrestrial Physics. In this work we have studied the degradation of the solar wind energy budget through the solar wind - magnetosphere coupling down to the ring current injection and the auroral ionospheric dissipation during the main phase of magnetic superstorms (Dst < −240 nT). The interplanetary magnetic field, density, temperature, and solar wind velocity measurements collected by the ISEE 3 satellite, and the total energy flux of high-latitude precipitating particles collected by the NOAA 6 satellite were used for this study. The solar wind energy budget was determined from the kinetic energy flux of the particles in the interplanetary medium. The energy transfer from the solar wind into the magnetosphere was estimated through a dayside magnetopause ram pressure corrected version of the Perrault and Akasofu e function. The energy injection into the ring current was estimated under the DPS theorem restriction and introducing the decay parameter τ in the evolution equation as a continuous function of the Dst index. The energy dissipation estimate in the auroral ionosphere via Joule heating in one hemisphere was computed using ionospheric and interplanetary data through a new method. Previous statistical and case studies for substorms have shown that the total energy dissipated as Joule heating is roughly twice that of the ring current injection. Our results show that the energy dissipation via Joule heating in the auroral ionosphere is about half of the ring current energy injection during superstorms.
Flat Embeddings of Genetic and Distance Data

The idea of displaying data in the plane is very attractive in many different fields of research. This thesis will focus on distance-based phylogenetics and multidimensional scaling (MDS). Both types of method can be viewed as a high-dimensional data reduction to pairwise distances and visualization of the data based on these distances. The difference between phylogenetics and multidimensional scaling is that the first one aims at finding a network or a tree structure that fits the distances, whereas MDS does not fix any structure and objects are simply placed in a low-dimensional space so that distances in the solution fit distances in the input as good as possible. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the phylogenetics and multidimensional scaling. Chapter 2 focuses on the theoretical background of flat split systems (planar split networks). We prove equivalences between flat split systems, planar split networks and loop-free acyclic oriented matroids of rank three. The latter is a convenient mathematical structure that we used to design the algorithm for computing planar split networks that is described in Chapter 3. We base our approach on the well established agglomerative algorithms Neighbor-Joining and Neighbor-Net. In Chapter 4 we introduce multidimensional scaling and propose a new method for computing MDS plots that is based on the agglomerative approach and spring embeddings. Chapter 5 presents several case studies that we use to compare both of our methods and some classical agglomerative approaches in the distance-based phylogenetics.
Electromagnetic coupling mechanism to a conducting strip through a narrow slit in a parallel-plate waveguide

The problem of electromagnetic coupling to a conducting strip through a narrow slit in a parallel-plate waveguide (PPW) is reconsidered with an emphasis on the radiative coupling mechanism. Two different types of coupling are discussed: cavity and parasitic. The maximum coupled power in both cases is observed to be almost the maximum available power from the slit (half of the incident power in the PPW), even though the two types of coupling are quite different from each other in their equivalent circuit representation or coupling mechanism. The similarity between the problem of cavity-type coupling and the previously reported transmission resonance problem through a narrow slit in thick screens is also described in connection with the aperture-body resonance phenomenon.
Identification of HOTS Creative Thinking, Science Process Skills and Digital Literacy in Physics Subject

High Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) creative thinking, science process skills and digital literacy of students are important components in learning, especially learning physics. The purpose of this study was to find out how High Order Thinking Skills creative thinking, science process skills and digital literacy of students at SMAN 8 Muaro Jambi. The data collection instrument used a question sheet for HOTS creative thinking, an observation sheet for science process skills and a questionnaire for digital literacy. The data analysis in this study was quantitative using descriptive statistics and qualitative using Miles & Huberman. The results of the data obtained are then grouped using a Likert scale. The flow of this research is to prepare instruments and interview sheets, conduct interviews with teachers and students, distribute instruments, analyze data and obtain data results. The results of this study are HOTS, KPS and digital literacy in class X MIPA 5 are greater than X MIPA 3 with successive values ​​in class X MIPA 5 are 80.25, 83.20 and 72.87 while class X MIPA 3 is 80.69, 85.40 and 74.81. So from these data it can be seen that the ability of students to think creatively increases in line with science process skills and digital literacy and vice versa. Science process skills help improve students' creative thinking skills by using practicum-based learning. Digital literacy helps students to get various kinds of physics learning resources, materials, modules, questions and exercises. Digital literacy also helps students to do online practicum by utilizing digital media and the web. So that the creative thinking skills, science process skills and digital literacy skills of students influence each other.