Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chemical composition, Antibacterial and Antioxidant Activities of the Essential Oil of Lavandula Pedunculata from Khenifra Morocco

Essential oils (EO) extracted from medicinal and aromatic plants (MAP) have proven to be good sources of bioactive compounds with antibacterial and antioxidant properties. This work presents the study of the chemical composition of Essential Oil extracted from Lavandula Pedunculata from the middle atlas of Morocco and its antioxidant and antibacterial power. The EO was obtained by hydrodistillation and analyzed by gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry. The antibacterial power of EO was estimated by the disk diffusion method against six bacterial species stemming from the hospital. Antioxidant activity was tested by two methods: measuring the trapping power of DPPH radical and measuring the Ferric Reducing/Antioxidant Potential (FRAP). The chromatographic analysis of Lavandula Pedunculata essential oil allowed the identification of 55 compounds representing 98.9% of the essential oil, of which the major compounds are camphor (44.16%), 1 –epi-cubenol (8.61%), fenchone (7.48%), camphene (6.45%) and α-pinene (4.86%). Antibacterial power tests showed that L. Pedunculata EO effect on all the tested bacteria is lower than that of the most powerful Antibiotic and even powerless on certain strains. The obtained results from antioxidant power tests by both methods proved the antioxidant power of Lavandula Pedunculata EO but was less effective than ascorbic acid. The obtained results indicate that the plant EO’s antibacterial and antioxidant activities are not powerful compared to antibiotics and ascorbic acid respectively, but enough to explain the traditional therapeutic use of the plant.
The Orbits of the Main Saturnian Satellites, the Saturnian System Gravity Field, and the Orientation of Saturn’s Pole

Four spacecraft have been sent to investigate the Saturnian system: Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2, and Cassini. By analyzing data acquired with these spacecraft together with Earth-based and Hubble Space Telescope satellite astrometry and Saturnian ring and satellite occultations, we constructed a model for the orientation and precession of Saturn’s pole and determined gravitational parameters of the system and the orbits of the Saturnian satellites. This article provides details of our analysis and its results.
Impact of bad odors from the wastewater treatment plant on the well-being of the population of M’rirt (Morocco)

In the city of M’rirt, the odour nuisance caused by the wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) has led to numerous complaints from residents whose quality of life has been affected by these odours. Therefore, the objective of our study is to evaluate, in the field, the “real” impact of bad odours emanating from the WWTP with the help of a questionnaire during a period of 6 months. Our study sample composed of 1473 respondents chosen in a simple random way from the two municipalities surrounding the said odour source. The survey results revealed that among the 1473 respondents 71 (n=1040) confirmed “yes” the odour of the WWTP presents a real olfactory annoyance and 29% said “no” and that several factors are involved in its prediction. The statistical analysis of our study confirmed the negative impact of WWTP odours on the well-being of the city’s population, its spatial and temporal distribution with the establishment of a map of the olfactory discomfort in the city.
Effect of Shuangdan Mingmu Capsule on Diabetic Retinopathy in Rats via Regulation of miRNAs

Purpose To evaluate the effects of Shuangdan Mingmu (SDMM) capsule on diabetic retinopathy in rats by regulating miRNAs. Materials and Methods Streptozotocin (STZ) (50 mg/kg) was successfully used to induce diabetes in male Sprague-Dawley rats, which were randomly assigned to a group taking SDMM capsules (“diabetic+SDMM”) or a control group (“diabetic”), and the normal group (n=10/group). The diabetic+SDMM capsule group received 1.89g/kg/d of SDMM capsule by gavage, whereas the other groups received the same amount of distilled water. After 12-weeks of gavage, the retina was removed from all rats for histopathological analysis, and miRNA sequencing experiments were carried out to identify the differential expression of miRNAs. These results were then confirmed by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). Results SDMM capsules improved retinal morphology, restored the number of cells in the ganglion cell layer (p<0.0001) and reduced apoptosis in all retinal layers (p values in the outer nuclear layers, inner nuclear layers and ganglion cell layers 0.0001, 0.0147, 0.0034, respectively). In addition, miRNA expression was changed in rats taking SDMM capsules. Compared with the diabetic group, six miRNAs were up-regulated and four miRNAs were down-regulated in the diabetic+SDMM capsule group. The qRT-PCR validation results showed that the expression levels of miR-450b-5p, miR-1249 and miR-155-5p were consistent with the trend of miRNA sequencing results, and were all up-regulated after SDMM capsule treatment. Target gene prediction and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) analysis of differentially expressed miRNAs showed that these pathways were mainly concentrated in the focal adhesions and PI3K/Akt, MAPK, and neural factor signaling pathways. Conclusion SDMM capsules may prevent and treat diabetic retinopathy by regulating the expression of miR-450b-5p, miR-1249 and miR-155-5p.
The Role of Perceived Social Support on Quality of Life in People with Cardiovascular Diseases

Background Cardiovascular Diseases (CVDs) are one of the major causes of hospitalization and mortality worldwide. Strengthening perceived social support and quality of life can reduce these problems. This study aimed to describe the role of perceived social support on cardiovascular patients' quality of life. Methods This cross-sectional study was conducted from September 2020 to February 2021. We selected 150 cardiovascular patients through convenience sampling. The questionnaires included: the Persian version of the WHOQOL-BREF, Perceived Social Support, and demographic variables. Hierarchical linear regression was used to explore the association between perceived social support and quality of life. Data were analyzed by SPSS version 21.0 software. A P-value less than 0.05 is considered statistically significant. Results The demographic variables could predict 12.2% of the variance of quality of life in the first step. In the second step, after adjusting control variables and dimensions of social support, the predictability increased to 29% of the variance with the addition of variables. All dimensions of social support, excluding tangible assets support, were significant predictors of quality of life and monthly income status. Self-esteem support (β= 0.387) was the strongest predictor of quality of life in cardiovascular patients. Conclusions Patients with higher perceived social support have a better quality of life than the other patients. Perceived social support is one of the strategies that can be utilized to improve quality of life and overcome disease in cardiovascular patients.
An Update on Novel Ocular Nanosystems with Possible Benefits in the Treatment of Corneal Neovascularization

Abstract Corneal neovascularization (CNV) is an ocular pathological change that results from an imbalance between angiogenic factors and antiangiogenic factors as a result of various ocular insults, including infection, inflammation, hypoxia, trauma, corneal degeneration, and corneal transplantation. Current clinical strategies for the treatment of CNV include pharmacological treatment and surgical intervention. Despite some degree of success, the current treatment strategies are restricted by limited efficacy, adverse effects, and a short duration of action. Recently, gene-based antiangiogenic therapy has become an emerging strategy that has attracted considerable interest. However, potential complications with the use of viral vectors, such as potential genotoxicity resulting from long-term expression and nonspecific targeting, cannot be ignored. The use of ocular nanosystems (ONS) based on nanotechnology has emerged as a great advantage in ocular disease treatment during the last two decades. The potential functions of ONS range from nanocarriers, which deliver drugs and genes to target sites in the eye, to therapeutic agents themselves. Various preclinical studies conducted to date have demonstrated promising results of the use of ONS in the treatment of CNV. In this review, we provide an overview of CNV and its current therapeutic strategies and summarize the properties and applications of various ONS related to the treatment of CNV reported to date. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive review of these considerable advances in ONS in the field of CNV therapy over the past two decades to fill the gaps in previous related reports. Finally, we discuss existing challenges and future perspectives of the use of ONS in CNV therapy, with the goal of providing a theoretical contribution to facilitate future practical growth in the area.
Maternal Vitamin D Status and Its Associated Environmental Factors: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background Vitamin D deficiency is common among women during pregnancy. This study aims to determine the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency and their shared modifiable environmental factors among pregnant women in Indonesia and Malaysia. Methods Blood samples of 844 third-trimester pregnant women (Indonesians: 311; Malaysians: 533) were collected to determine their serum 25(OH) D levels. Information on sun exposure and sun protection behaviours were obtained through face-to-face interviews. Dietary vitamin D intake was assessed by using a semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire. Results The prevalence of vitamin D deficiency (<30 nmol/L) among Indonesian and Malaysian pregnant women were 42.4% and 72.0%, respectively. Percentage of exposed body surface area was inversely associated with vitamin D deficiency among Indonesian pregnant women (OR = 0.21, 95% CI = 0.09–0.48). Among Malaysian pregnant women, higher intakes of dietary vitamin D were associated with lower risk of vitamin D deficiency (OR = 0.48, 95% CI = 0.29–0.81). Analysis of the combined cohorts revealed a lower risk of vitamin D deficiency among pregnant women who had a daily intake of at least 15 mcg vitamin D (OR = 0.58, 95% CI = 0.38–0.88) and exposure of more than 27% body surface area to the sunlight (OR = 0.30, 95% CI = 0.16–0.60). Conclusions Despite abundant sunshine, vitamin D deficiency is prevalent among pregnant women in tropical countries. The present study suggests that nutrition education on vitamin D intake and sun exposure during pregnancy is necessary for primary prevention of vitamin D deficiency in pregnant women living in the tropical countries.
Correlation between Fear of Missing out and Night Eating Syndrome among University Students

Objective: The aim was to explore the relationship between Night Eating Syndrome (NES) and experiencing Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) among college students in Oman. Method : A descriptive, correlational and cross-sectional design was performed on 266 university students studying at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. The data were collected using a demographic questionnaire, Night Eating Syndrome and Fear of Missing Out questionnaires. Data analysis was performed through Pearson correlation, One-way ANOVA and independent t-test using SPSS 24 software Results: The participants’ ages ranged between 18 and 30 years (M = 21.15; SD = 1.97). The majority of the participants were female (204, 76.7%), single (266, 97.7%), and 152 (57.1%) lived on campus Overall, a weak positive and nonsignificant correlation between FoMO and NES and a significant difference between males and females in the mean score of FoMO (P = 0.005) was noticed. The mean score of NES among students who live on campus was higher than for those living off campus (P < 0.05). Conclusion: This study explored a limited aspect of the relationship between fear of missing out and night eating behaviors among university students in Oman. There was no significant direct relationship between both variables. The study needs to be repeated using a larger sample size and more rigorous methods to calculate the number of snacks/day, and the number of meals/day
A Comparison of the ANCILLES and LOGIST Parameter Estimation Procedures for the Three-Parameter Logistic Model Using Goodness of Fit as a Criterion.

Abstract : A study was conducted to compare the quality of the item parameter estimates obtained from the ANCILLES and LOGIST estimation procedures using goodness of fit as a criterion. Statistics used to compare the fit yielded by the procedures included a chi-square statistic and a mean square deviation statistic. Other analyses performed included comparisons of the distributions of the parameter estimates obtained from the procedures, and a set of meta-analyses performed on the chi-square statistics obtained for the items. The data for the study was composed of 50 items and 2,000 cases obtained using a stratified random sample of 357 items and 4,000 cases of the Iowa Tests of Educational Development. Results indicated that differences did exist in the quality of parameter estimates obtained from the ANCILLES and LOGIST procedures. More items for ANCILLES showed significant lack of fit than for LOGIST, based on the chi-square tests. However, a test to determine whether the ANCILLES chi-squares were longer than the LOGIST chi-squares significantly more than half the time was not significant. Also, the dependent t-computed for the MSD statistics was not significant. Further analyses indicated that the parameter estimates obtained from the two procedures were highly correlated. Comparisons of the item parameter estimates with the chi-square values indicated that ANCILLES yielded poor fit for items with extreme difficulty values. Because of this, and the fact that ANCILLES did not provide estimates for all the items, it was conducted that there were real differences in the quality of the parameter estimates obtained for the two procedures. (Author)
Quick Graph Conversion for Robust Recommendation

Implicit feedback plays a huge role in recommender systems, but its high noise characteristic seriously reduces its effect. To denoise implicit feedback, some efforts have been devoted to graph data augmentation (GDA) methods. Although the bi-level optimization thought of GDA guarantees better recommendation performance theoretically, it also leads to expensive time costs and severe space explosion problems. Specifically, bi-level optimization involves repeated traversal of all positive and negative instances after each optimization of the recommendation model. In this paper, we propose a new denoising paradigm, i.e., Quick Graph Conversion (QGrace) , to effectively transform the original interaction graph into a purified (for positive instances) and densified (for negative instances) interest graph during the recommendation model training process. In QGrace, we leverage the gradient matching scheme based on elaborated generative models to fulfill the conversion and generation of an interest graph, elegantly overcoming the high time and space cost problems. To enable recommendation models to run on interest graphs that lack implicit feed-back data, we provide a fine-grained objective function from the perspective of alignment and uniformity. The experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the QGrace outperforms the state-of-the-art GDA methods and recommendation models in effectiveness and robustness.
LaMAR: Benchmarking Localization and Mapping for Augmented Reality

Localization and mapping is the foundational technology for augmented reality (AR) that enables sharing and persistence of digital content in the real world. While significant progress has been made, researchers are still mostly driven by unrealistic benchmarks not representative of real-world AR scenarios. These benchmarks are often based on small-scale datasets with low scene diversity, captured from stationary cameras, and lack other sensor inputs like inertial, radio, or depth data. Furthermore, their ground-truth (GT) accuracy is mostly insufficient to satisfy AR requirements. To close this gap, we introduce LaMAR, a new benchmark with a comprehensive capture and GT pipeline that co-registers realistic trajectories and sensor streams captured by heterogeneous AR devices in large, unconstrained scenes. To establish an accurate GT, our pipeline robustly aligns the trajectories against laser scans in a fully automated manner. As a result, we publish a benchmark dataset of diverse and large-scale scenes recorded with head-mounted and hand-held AR devices. We extend several state-of-the-art methods to take advantage of the AR-specific setup and evaluate them on our benchmark. The results offer new insights on current research and reveal promising avenues for future work in the field of localization and mapping for AR.
Discovery of a Filamentary Synchrotron Structure Connected to the Coherent Magnetic Field in the Outer Galaxy

Using data from the Galactic Arecibo L-band Feed Array Continuum Transit Survey, we report the discovery of two previously unidentified, very compressed, thin, and straight polarized filaments approximately centered at Galactic coordinates, (l, b) = (182.°5, − 4.°0), which we call G182.5–4.0. Using data from the Isaac Newton Telescope Galactic Plane Survey, we also find straight, long, and extremely thin Hα filaments coincident with the radio emission. These filaments are positioned in projection at the edge of the Orion-Eridanus superbubble and we find evidence indicating that the filaments align with the coherent magnetic field of the outer Galaxy. We find a lower limit on the total radio flux at 1.4 GHz to be 0.7 ± 0.3 Jy with an average linearly polarized fraction of 40−20+30% . We consider various scenarios that could explain the origin of these filaments, including a shell-type supernova remnant (SNR), a bow shock nebula associated with a pulsar, or relic fragments from one or more supernova explosions in the adjacent superbubble, with a hybrid scenario being most likely. This may represent an example of a new class of objects that is neither an SNR nor a bow shock. The highly compressed nature of these filaments and their alignment with the Galactic plane suggests a scenario where this object formed in a magnetic field that was compressed by the expanding Orion-Eridanus superbubble, suggesting that the object is related to this superbubble and implying a distance of ∼400 pc.
Polynomial $D(4)$-quadruples over Gaussian Integers

A set $\{a, b, c, d\}$ of four non-zero distinct polynomials in $\mathbb{Z}[i][X]$ is said to be a Diophantine $D(4)$-quadruple if the product of any two of its distinct elements increased by 4 is a square of some polynomial in $\mathbb{Z}[i][X]$. In this paper we prove that every $D(4)$-quadruple in $\mathbb{Z}[i][X]$ is regular, or equivalently that the equation $$(a+b-c-d)^2=(ab+4)(cd+4)$$ holds for every $D(4)$-quadruple in $\mathbb{Z}[i][X]$.
Curriculum Reinforcement Learning using Optimal Transport via Gradual Domain Adaptation

Curriculum Reinforcement Learning (CRL) aims to create a sequence of tasks, starting from easy ones and gradually learning towards difficult tasks. In this work, we focus on the idea of framing CRL as interpolations between a source (auxiliary) and a target task distribution. Although existing studies have shown the great potential of this idea, it remains unclear how to formally quantify and generate the movement between task distributions. Inspired by the insights from gradual domain adaptation in semi-supervised learning, we create a natural curriculum by breaking down the potentially large task distributional shift in CRL into smaller shifts. We propose GRADIENT, which formulates CRL as an optimal transport problem with a tailored distance metric between tasks. Specifically, we generate a sequence of task distributions as a geodesic interpolation (i.e., Wasserstein barycenter) between the source and target distributions. Different from many existing methods, our algorithm considers a task-dependent contextual distance metric and is capable of handling nonparametric distributions in both continuous and discrete context settings. In addition, we theoretically show that GRADIENT enables smooth transfer between subsequent stages in the curriculum under certain conditions. We conduct extensive experiments in locomotion and manipulation tasks and show that our proposed GRADIENT achieves higher performance than baselines in terms of learning efficiency and asymptotic performance.
On the Perturbation Function of Ranking and Balance for Weighted Online Bipartite Matching

Ranking and Balance are arguably the two most important algorithms in the online matching literature. They achieve the same optimal competitive ratio of $1-1/e$ for the integral version and fractional version of online bipartite matching by Karp, Vazirani, and Vazirani (STOC 1990) respectively. The two algorithms have been generalized to weighted online bipartite matching problems, including vertex-weighted online bipartite matching and AdWords, by utilizing a perturbation function. The canonical choice of the perturbation function is $f(x)=1-e^{x-1}$ as it leads to the optimal competitive ratio of $1-1/e$ in both settings. We advance the understanding of the weighted generalizations of Ranking and Balance in this paper, with a focus on studying the effect of different perturbation functions. First, we prove that the canonical perturbation function is the \emph{unique} optimal perturbation function for vertex-weighted online bipartite matching. In stark contrast, all perturbation functions achieve the optimal competitive ratio of $1-1/e$ in the unweighted setting. Second, we prove that the generalization of Ranking to AdWords with unknown budgets using the canonical perturbation function is at most $0.624$ competitive, refuting a conjecture of Vazirani (2021). More generally, as an application of the first result, we prove that no perturbation function leads to the prominent competitive ratio of $1-1/e$ by establishing an upper bound of $1-1/e-0.0003$. Finally, we propose the online budget-additive welfare maximization problem that is intermediate between AdWords and AdWords with unknown budgets, and we design an optimal $1-1/e$ competitive algorithm by generalizing Balance.