Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of Median Lethal Dose and Subchronic Oral Toxicity Assessment of Ethanolic Leaf Extract of Phyllanthus amarus

Aims: To determine the median lethal dose (LD50) of crude ethanolic leaf extract of Phyllanthus amarus and evaluate its sub-chronic oral toxicity in experimental mice (BALB/C strain). Study Design: One-factor, one-control, one-test group experimental design. Place and Duration of Study: Department of Medical Biochemistry, Delta State University, Abraka, Nigeria, between December, 2014 and November, 2015. Methodology: Crude ethanolic leaf extract of P. amarus was prepared as previously described and twenty (20) Swiss albino mice (BALB/C strain) were randomly and equally divided into two (2) groups and administered 2000 mg/kg body weight (Group A) and 5000 mg/kg body weight (Group B) of the prepared extract as single oral dose in line with the limit dose method of determining LD50. For the sub-chronic oral toxicity study, ten (10) mice were assigned into control (n=5) and experimental (n=5). The control animals were given placebo-normal saline, but the experimental mice were administered with nocebo – 300 mg/kg body weight of P. amarus crude ethanolic extract for twenty one (21) days. Thereafter, the animals in each group were sacrificed and then, serum and liver homogenate were obtained for the assay of total antioxidant capacity (TAC) and oxidative damage (Malondialdehyde-MDA) Using documented methods. Liver tissue was also processed for histopathological examination using H&E stain. Results: Data showed LD50 of the extract to be greater than 5000 mg/kg. Assessment of the herb’s sub-chronic oral toxicity indicates that the leaf extract significantly (P=.03) enhanced total antioxidant capacity (TAC) in both serum (Control: TAC = 0.10±0.03 mM, Experimental: TAC = 0.33±0.05 mM) and liver (Control: TAC = 0.12±0.09 mM, Experimental: TAC = 0.34±0.06 mM) but reduced (P = .01) the biomarker for liver tissue damage (Control: MDA = 41.89±3.36 µM, Experimental: MDA = 4.67±4.04 µM). In addition, hepatic cells were invigorated by P. amarus treatment as suggested by the histopathological features. Conclusion: Collectively, P. amarus crude ethanolic leaf extract possesses high degree of tolerance and hepatic tonic potential with no identifiable toxic or side effects.
Retinal neuroanatomy of two emerging model organisms, the spiny mouse (Acomys dimidiatus) and the Mongolian gerbil (Meriones unguiculatus)

Purpose Degenerative eye diseases such as macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa slowly deteriorate vision, ultimately leading to blindness. Current research with laboratory animal models largely utilizes small mammals that are nocturnal and lack the ability to restore lost vision. In contrast, the Mongolian gerbil is a diurnal rodent with good photopic vision, and the eastern spiny mouse is a small desert-dwelling rodent with remarkable regenerative capabilities. The goal of this study was to identify several antibodies that detect retinal cell classes in Meriones and Acomys, and to describe the retinal anatomy of these two species in comparison to outbred laboratory mice (Mus musculus). Methods Retinal sections were obtained from adult eyes and subjected to histological or immuno-staining with antibodies for various retinal cell types. Sections were imaged by light, fluorescence, and confocal microscopy, assessing cell number and morphology. Cell density, morphology, and placement were compared between species qualitatively and quantitatively. Results Immunohistochemical visualization and analysis of all general classes of retinal neurons and Müller glia revealed a classic assembly of retinal cells with a few deviations compared to Mus. Meriones displayed the highest density of cone photoreceptors and Acomys the lowest. A higher density of bipolar cell bodies in the proximal portion of the inner nuclear layer was observed in both Acomys and Meriones compared to Mus, and both species exhibited an increase in amacrine cell density compared to Mus. Conclusion We have characterized similarities and differences in the retinal anatomy and cellular density between Meriones, Acomys, and Mus. We identified several commercially available antibodies that reliably detect retinal cell types in the Acomys and Meriones retina. Our results provide a foundation for future research into the visual system adaptations of both of these interesting rodent species.
Pharmacogenomics Guided Spaceflight: the intersection between space-flown drugs and space genes

Ten years ago, it was predicted that the multi-omics revolution would also revolutionize space pharmacogenomics. Current barriers related to the findable, accessible, interoperable, and reproducible use of space-flown pharmaceutical data have contributed to a lack of progress beyond application of earth-based principles. To directly tackle these challenges, we have produced a novel database of all the drugs flown into space, compiled from publicly available ontological and spaceflight-related datasets, to exemplify analyses for describing significant spaceflight-related targets. By focusing on mechanisms perturbed by spaceflight, we have provided a novel avenue for identifying the most relevant changes within the drug absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion pathways. We suggest a set of space genes, by necessity limited to available tissue types, that can be expanded and modified based on future tissue-specific and mechanistic-specific high-throughput assays. In sum, we provide the justification and a definitive starting point for pharmacogenomics guided spaceflight as a foundation of precision medicine, which will enable long-term human habitation of the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Graphical Abstract
Coastal changes in western Turkey; rapid delta progradation in historical times

La cote mediterraneenne de la Turquie temoigne d'un des plus importants deplacements vers la mer de la ligne de rivage connus dans l'histoire. Les anciens ports de celebres cites telles Ephese, Milet, Kaunos et Troie se trouvent aujourd'hui a plusieurs kilometres a l'interieur des terres. Les sediments transportes en grande quantite par les fleuves - en raison le plus souvent de l'activite humaine - ont provoque l'envasement des anciens ports. Les cites ont alors perdu une de leurs fonctions essentielles. Les phases de cette avancee de la cote ont ete dechiffrees en interpretant les sources historiques et les faits geologiques. L'etude des sediments et de la faune renseigne sur le milieu (marin, lagunaire, marecageux ou terrestre) de deposition; le materiel date au carbone-14 et les artefacts fournissent le cadre chrono-stratigraphique. La recherche geoarcheologique vise a reconstruire le paysage ancien et a retracer les phases de la sedimentation dans les temps prehistoriques et historiques. Ce chapitre documente l'evolution des deltas de Buyuk Menderes (Milet), Kucuk Menderes (Ephese), Dalyan (Kaunos) and Karamenderes (Troie).
Spatial and temporal variabilities of spring Asian dust events and their impacts on chlorophyll‐a concentrations in the western North Pacific Ocean

As the western North Pacific Ocean is located downwind of the source regions for spring Asian dust, it is an ideal location for determining the response of open waters to these events. Spatial analysis of spring Asian dust events from source regions to the western North Pacific, using long‐term daily aerosol index data, revealed three different transport pathways supported by the westerly wind system: one passing across the northern East/Japan Sea (40°N–50°N), a second moving over the entire East/Japan Sea (35°N–55°N), and a third flowing predominantly over the Siberian continent (>50°N). Our results indicate that strong spring Asian dust events can increase ocean primary productivity by more than 70% (>2‐fold increase in chlorophyll‐a concentrations) compared to weak/nondust conditions. Therefore, attention should be paid to the recent downturn in the number of spring Asian dust events and to the response of primary production in the western North Pacific to this change.
Dynamic connectivity profiles characteristic of conscious states are associated with enhanced conscious processing of external stimuli

One of the goals of the neuroscience of consciousness is to identify neural markers capable of distinguishing brain dynamics in awake, healthy individuals from unconscious conditions. This problem also has a clinical diagnostic interest in disorders of consciousness. Recent research has shown that brain connectivity patterns characterized by long-range interactions and anticorrelations are associated with conscious states and diminish with loss of consciousness in human and non-human primates. However, the precise contribution of these patterns to conscious processing and subjective experience formation remains unclear. In this study, we investigated the functional role of these brain patterns in shaping conscious content by examining their influence on participants’ ability to process external information during wakefulness. Participants underwent fMRI recordings during an auditory detection task. Phase coherence-based functional connectivity and k-means clustering confirmed that the ongoing dynamics were underpinned by brain patterns consistent with those identified in previous research, including the “high pattern” characteristic of conscious states. We found that the detection of auditory stimuli at threshold was specifically improved when the connectivity pattern at the time of presentation corresponded to this high-pattern. In return, the occurrence of the high-pattern increased after detection, indicating that participants were more likely to transition to a high-pattern following stimulus detection. Our findings suggest that ongoing brain dynamics and conscious perception mutually influence each other and that certain brain configurations are more favorable for conscious processing of external stimuli. In the future, targeting these moments of favorable patterns in patients with disorders of consciousness may help us identify windows of greater receptivity to the external world, paving the way for developing individualized patient care protocols.
PYK2 in the dorsal striatum of Huntington’s disease R6/2 mouse model

Huntington’s disease (HD) is a devastating disease due to autosomal dominant mutation in the HTT gene. Its pathophysiology involves multiple molecular alterations including transcriptional defects. We previously showed that in HD patients and mouse model, the protein levels of the non-receptor tyrosine kinase PYK2 were decreased in the hippocampus and that viral expression of PYK2 improved the hippocampal phenotype. Here, we investigated the possible contribution of PYK2 in the striatum, a major brain region altered in HD. PYK2 mRNA levels were decreased in the striatum and hippocampus of R6/2 mice, a severe HD model. PYK2 protein levels were also decreased in the dorsal striatum of R6/2 mice and in the putamen of human patients. PYK2 knockout by itself did not result in motor symptoms observed in HD mouse models. Yet, we examined whether PYK2 deficiency participated in the R6/2 mice phenotype by expressing PYK2 in the dorsal striatum using AAV vectors. With an AAV1/Camk2a promoter, we did not observe significant improvement of body weight, clasping, motor activity and coordination (rotarod) alterations observed in R6/2 mice. With an AAV9/SYN1 promoter we found an improvement of body weight loss and a tendency to better rotarod performance. DARPP-32 immunofluorescence was increased following AAV9/SYN1-PYK2 injection compared to AAV9/SYN1-GFP, suggesting a possible partial beneficial effect on striatal projection neurons. We conclude that PYK2 mRNA and protein levels are decreased in the striatum as in hippocampus of HD patients and mouse models. However, in contrast to hippocampus, striatal viral expression of PYK2 has only a slight effect on the R6/2 model striatal motor phenotype. Highlights Huntington’s disease is a lethal genetic disease altering striatum, cortex, and hippocampus Restoring PYK2 levels in hippocampus improved hippocampal phenotype of a Huntington mouse model We show that PYK2 levels are decreased in the striatum of R6/2 mice and human patients Viral expression of PYK2 in the striatum has only a small effect on R6/2 mouse model motor phenotype but improves weight loss
Tibial Lengthening Using A Magnetic Lengthening Intramedullary Nail in an HIV-Positive Patient: A Case Report and Review of Literature

Limb lengthening can be affected by poor bone healing in patients with human immunodeﬁciency virus. This is a case report of a 56-year-old man with 6.1 cm leg length discrepancy and end-stage arthritis in the hip. The patient had total hip arthroplasty prior to his lengthening procedure. The patient was human immunodeﬁciency virus positive. This case report describes the experiences of using a motorized intramedullary magnetic lengthening nail in equalization of limb length discrepancy. Treatment for the patient included tibial lengthening with a motorized nail to correct the limb length discrepancy, with adequate bone healing in a patient with an human immunodeﬁciency virus infection.
KD-Zero: Evolving Knowledge Distiller for Any Teacher-Student Pairs

Knowledge distillation (KD) has emerged as an effective technique for compressing models that can enhance the lightweight model. Conventional KD methods propose various designs to allow student model to imitate the teacher better. However, these handcrafted KD designs heavily rely on expert knowledge and may be sub-optimal for various teacher-student pairs. In this paper, we present a novel framework, KD-Zero, which utilizes evolutionary search to automatically discover promising distiller from scratch for any teacher-student architectures. Specifically, we first decompose the generalized distiller into knowledge transformations, distance functions, and loss weights. Then, we construct our distiller search space by selecting advanced operations for these three components. With sharpness and represent gap as fitting objectives, we evolve candidate populations and generate better distillers by crossover and mutation. To ensure efficient searching, we employ the loss-rejection protocol, search space shrinkage, and proxy settings during the search process. In this manner, the discovered distiller can address the capacity gap and cross-architecture challenges for any teacher-student pairs in the final distillation stage. Comprehensive experiments reveal that KD-Zero consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art methods across diverse architectures on classification, detection, and segmentation tasks. Noticeably, we provide some practical insights in designing the distiller by analyzing the distiller discovered. Codes are available in supplementary materials.
The competence, interest, and perceived self-efficacy of undergraduate students in science communication

Science communication is an important part of science literacy that helps build trust in science, promotes the public interest, and supports informed decision-making on scientific issues. However, the literature lacks studies examining undergraduate student’s competence, interest, and self-efficacy in science communication. This study investigated undergraduate student’s competence, interest, and perceived self-efficacy skills in science communication. Two instruments were used to collect data from 226 undergraduate students in a public research university. The findings revealed that participants’ competence and interest in science communication were moderate. The data shows that STEM students lack confidence in their ability to engage in science communication and are not particularly interested in it. The study found no significant differences in competence, interest, perceived self-efficacy, and gender. Likewise, no significant differences were found in competence and perceived self-efficacy across different grade levels. However, there was a significant relationship between participants’ interests and their grade levels. The effect size was small for competence and interests in science communication. The conclusion discusses the implications of the findings for future studies.
UvA-DARE (

Most neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease are hallmarked by aggregate formation of disease-related proteins. In these diseases transfer of aggregation-prone proteins between neurons and between neurons and glial cells has been shown, thereby initiating aggregation in neighboring cells and so propagating the disease phenotype. Whereas this prion-like transfer is well studied in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, only a few studies have addressed this potential mechanism in Huntington’s disease. Here, we present an overview of in vitro and in vivo methodologies to study release, intercellular transfer, and uptake of aggregation-prone protein fragments in Huntington’s disease models.
Morphological Identi ﬁ cation of Bighead Carp, Silver Carp, and Grass Carp Eggs Using Random Forests Machine Learning Classi ﬁ cation

Visual identi ﬁ cation of ﬁ sh eggs is dif ﬁ cult and unreliable due to a lack of information on the morphological egg characteristics of many species. We used random forests machine learning to predict the identity of genetically identi-ﬁ ed Bighead Carp Hypophthalmichthys nobilis , Grass Carp Ctenopharyngodon idella , and Silver Carp H. molitrix eggs based on egg morphometric and environmental characteristics. Family, genus, and species taxonomic-level random forests models were explored to assess the performance and accuracy of the predictor variables. The egg characteristics of Bighead Carp, Grass Carp, and Silver Carp were similar, and they were dif ﬁ cult to distinguish from one another. When combined into a single invasive carp class, the random forests models were ≥ 97% accurate at identifying invasive carp eggs, with a ≤ 5% false positive rate. Egg membrane diameter was the most important predictive variable, but the addition of ten other variables resulted in a 98% success rate for identifying invasive carp eggs from 26 other upper Mississippi River basin species. Our results revealed that a combination of morphometric and environmental measurements can be used to identify invasive carp eggs. Similar machine learning approaches could be used to identify the eggs of other ﬁ shes. These results will help managers more easily and quickly assess invasive carp reproduction.
STARS STARS

Since the legalization of abortion in 1973, abortion continues to be an ongoing debate among pro-choice and pro-life groups, and politicians, and is one of the many barriers women may face. As rape continues in being a significant social issue, rape-related pregnancies and abortions have been understudied. By using the General Social Survey (GSS), this paper analyzes various sociodemographic variables which may influence social attitudes toward rape-related abortions. Findings indicate that Blacks, women, those living in the South, and age were not significant predictors of whether a pregnant woman should have a legal abortion as a result of rape. Other sociodemographic variables were significant; many supporting previous studies. However, this paper adds to the literature since social attitudes related to rape-related abortions have not been thoroughly studied. As this issue may arise, it is critical for professionals working with victims/survivors to understand, offer, and not judge women’s decision should they decide to terminate their pregnancy. Due to various potential barriers women face, we may never obtain an accurate number of rape-related abortions or pregnancies. Because women may not report their rape, future research should focus on women in hospitals, abortion clinics, etc. to get a better understanding of the issue.
Sociotechnical Factors Affecting Patients’ Adoption of Mobile Health Tools: Systematic Literature Review and Narrative Synthesis

Background: Mobile health (mHealth) tools have emerged as a promising health care technology that may contribute to cost savings, better access to care, and enhanced clinical outcomes; however, it is important to ensure their acceptance and adoption to harness this potential. Patient adoption has been recognized as a key challenge that requires further exploration. Objective: The aim of this review was to systematically investigate the literature to understand the factors affecting patients’ adoption of mHealth tools by considering sociotechnical factors (from technical, social, and health perspectives). Methods: A structured search was completed following the participants, intervention, comparators, and outcomes framework. We searched the MEDLINE, PubMed, Cochrane Library, and SAGE databases for studies published between January 2011 and July 2021 in the English language, yielding 5873 results, of which 147 studies met the inclusion criteria. The PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines and the Cochrane Handbook were followed to ensure a systematic process. Extracted data were analyzed using NVivo (QSR International), with thematic analysis and narrative synthesis of emergent themes. Results: The technical factors affecting patients’ adoption of mHealth tools were categorized into six key themes, which in turn were divided into 20 subthemes: usefulness, ease of use, data-related, monetary factors, technical issues, and user experience. Health-related factors were categorized into six key themes: the disease or health condition, the care team’s role, health consciousness and literacy, health behavior
Seasonal Prediction Skill of Northern Extratropical Surface Temperature Driven by the Stratosphere

AbstractThis study explores the role of the stratosphere as a source of seasonal predictability of surface climate over Northern Hemisphere extratropics both in the observations and climate model predictions. A suite of numerical experiments, including climate simulations and retrospective forecasts, are set up to isolate the role of the stratosphere in seasonal predictive skill of extratropical near-surface land temperature. It is shown that most of the lead-0-month spring predictive skill of land temperature over extratropics, particularly over northern Eurasia, stems from stratospheric initialization. It is further revealed that this predictive skill of extratropical land temperature arises from skillful prediction of the Arctic Oscillation (AO). The dynamical connection between the stratosphere and troposphere is also demonstrated by the significant correlation between the stratospheric polar vortex and sea level pressure anomalies, as well as the migration of the stratospheric zonal wind anomalies to.