Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Triglyceride and Glucose Index Predicts Acute Coronary Syndrome in Patients with Antineutrophil Cytoplasmic Antibody-Associated Vasculitis

This study investigated whether the triglyceride (TG) glucose (TyG) index at diagnosis could predict acute coronary syndrome (ACS) in patients with antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA)-associated vasculitis (AAV). The medical records of 152 AAV were reviewed. Clinical and laboratory data were collected. The TyG index was calculated by TyG index = Ln (fasting TG (mg/dL) × fasting glucose (mg/dL)/2). The cut-offs of Birmingham vasculitis activity score (BVAS) and the TyG were obtained by the receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve and the highest tertile (9.011). The mean age was 57.2 years and 32.9% were male. AAV patients with a TyG index ≥ 9.011 exhibited a lower cumulative ACS-free survival rate than those with a TyG index < 9.011. However, a TyG index ≥ 9.011 was not independently associated with ACS in the multivariable Cox analysis. Meanwhile, there might be a close relationship for predicting ACS among the TyG index, metabolic syndrome (MetS), and BVAS. AAV patients with a TyG index ≥ 9.011 exhibited a higher risk for MetS than those with a TyG index < 9.011 (relative risk 2.833). AAV patients with BVAS ≥ 11.5 also exhibited a higher risk for ACS than those with BVAS < 11.5 (relative risk 10.225). Both AAV patients with MetS and those with BVAS ≥11.5 exhibited lower cumulative ACS-free survival rates than those without. The TyG index at AAV diagnosis could estimate the concurrent presence of MetS and predict the occurrence of ACS during follow-up along with high BVAS at diagnosis in patients with AAV.
Systemic redox imbalance in severe COVID‐19 patients

The aim of this study was to evaluate the systemic redox state and inflammatory markers in intensive care unit (ICU) or non‐ICU severe COVID‐19 patients during the hospitalization period. Blood samples were collected at hospital admission (T1) (Controls and COVID‐19 patients), 5–7 days after admission (T2: 5–7 days after hospital admission), and at the discharge time from the hospital (T3: 0–72 h before leaving hospital or death) to analyze systemic oxidative stress markers and inflammatory variables. The reactive oxygen species (ROS) production and mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP) were analyzed in peripheral granulocytes and monocytes. THP‐1 human monocytic cell line was incubated with plasma from non‐ICU and ICU COVID‐19 patients and cell viability and apoptosis rate were analyzed. Higher total antioxidant capacity, protein oxidation, lipid peroxidation, and IL‐6 at hospital admission were identified in both non‐ICU and ICU COVID‐19 patients. ICU COVID‐19 patients presented increased C‐reactive protein, ROS levels, and protein oxidation over hospitalization period compared to non‐ICU patients, despite increased antioxidant status. Granulocytes and monocytes of non‐ICU and ICU COVID‐19 patients presented lower MMP and higher ROS production compared to the healthy controls, with the highest values found in ICU COVID‐19 group. Finally, the incubation of THP‐1 cells with plasma acquired from ICU COVID‐19 patients at T3 hospitalization period decreased cell viability and apoptosis rate. In conclusion, disturbance in redox state is a hallmark of severe COVID‐19 and is associated with cell damage and death.
Rising threat of H1N1 Cases in Dakshina Kannada, India: An Epidemiological Assessment from January 2011 To August 2017

Background: H1N1 or swine flu is a disease caused my influenza virus of family Orthomyxoviridae. Initial cases in India were seen in 2009 and ever since then it has been adding to the mortality rate over the years across various parts of the country. Dakshina Kannada district of Karnataka, India, had several cases of H1N1. But despite the efforts, the magnitude is rising inconspicuously. Aim & Objective: Assessment of H1N1 cases throughout Dakshina Kannada district from Jan 2011 to August 2017. Objectives: To observe the disease trend, its factors and provide certain recommendations to control the disease and promote Health. Material & Methods:H1N1 cases notified to District surveillance unit from all the Health collaborated settings over a period of six years from January 2011 to August 2017 were assessed to measure the burden of the disease across different age groups and Gender. Result: The study revealed a considerable increase in H1N1 cases compared to previous years with peak during monsoon and difference in risk among the gender. Conclusion: Vaccination of Health professionals, High alert for travelers, Pregnant women and individuals with co-morbid conditions is essential. Control of disease transmission with early diagnosis, isolation and treatment, effective vaccination to high risk individuals will be helpful to reduce disease burden
DASCO: A workflow to downscale alien species checklists using occurrence records and to re-allocate species distributions across realms

Information about occurrences of alien species is often provided in so-called checklists, which represents lists of reported alien species in a region. In many cases, available checklists cover whole countries, which is too coarse for many analyses and limits capabilities of assessing status and trends of biological invasions. Information about point-wise occurrences is available in large quantities at online facilities such as GBIF and OBIS, which, however, do not provide information about the invasion status of individual populations. To close this gap, we here provide a semi-automated workflow called DASCO to downscale regional checklists using occurrence records obtained from GBIF and OBIS. Within the workflow, coordinate-based occurrence records for species listed in the provided regional checklists are obtained from GBIF and OBIS, and the status of being an alien population is assigned using the information in the provided checklists. In this way, information in checklists is made available at the local scale, which can then be re-allocated to any other spatial categorisation as provided by the user. In addition, habitats of species are determined to distinguish between marine, brackish, terrestrial, and freshwater species, which allows splitting the provided checklists to the respective realms and ecoregions. By using checklists of global databases, we showcase the usage of the DASCO workflow and revealed > 35 million occurrence records of alien populations in terrestrial and marine regions worldwide, which were back-transformed to terrestrial and marine regions for comparison. DASCO has the potential to be used as a basis for the widely applied species distribution models or assessments of status and trends of biological invasions at large geographic scales. The workflow is implemented in R and in full compliance with the FAIR data principles of open science.
L 1 − L 2 , 3 M Coster-Kronig transitions in argon

The ${L}_{1}\ensuremath{-}{L}_{2,3}M$ Coster-Kronig spectrum of argon has been measured by using photon excitation. The intensity ratio of $0.30\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.02$ between the ${L}_{1}\ensuremath{-}{L}_{2,3}{M}_{1}$ main lines and the ${L}_{1}\ensuremath{-}{L}_{2,3}{M}_{2,3}$ lines is extracted from experiment. The experimental results for the ratio and partial decay rates are compared with present and previous theoretical estimates.
Radiolarian faunal changes during the Eocene-Oligocene transition in the Southern Ocean (Maud Rise, ODP Leg 113, Site 689) and its significance in paleoceanographic change

Quantitative analysis of radiolarian assemblages from the late middle Eocene to late Oligocene at Hole 689B (ODP Leg 113, Maud Rise, Southern Ocean) reveal that radiolarian faunal turnovers occurred at ~38.5 Ma (Subchron C18n1n), ~36.3 Ma (Subchron C16n2n), 34.5-33.9 Ma (Subchron C13r), ~28.3 Ma (Subchron C9r), ~26.9 Ma (Subchron C8r), and 26.4-26.2 Ma (Subchron C8n2n). These faunal turnovers are characterized by an increase or decrease of the Antarcticdiagnostic assemblage. Furthermore, species diversity indexes such as species richness, diversity and equitability and total accumulation rate of radiolarians decreases signifi cantly near the turnover events. The patterns of increase and decrease in the Antarctic group suggest that the faunal turnover events are interpreted as replacement events between the Antarctic and Subantarctic assemblages. The intervals with higher levels of the Antarctic group at 38.5-36.3 Ma, 34.5-33.9 Ma, and 28.3-26.9 Ma were under the infl uence of the Antarctic bioprovince. Two faunal turnover events at 34.5-33.9 Ma and ~28.3 Ma are correlated with the positive shift of δ18O isotopes in the early stage of Oi-1 glaciation and Oi-2a event, respectively. Events at ~36.3 Ma and 26.9-26.2 Ma when the Antarctic-dominant assemblages decreased correspond to warming events in late Eocene and the late Oligocene warming, respectively. Thus, faunal changes in radiolarians can be used to monitor paleoceanographic change in the Southern Ocean and migration of the high-latitude water mass boundary during the Eocene- Oligocene interval.
Changes in Rhizosphere Soil Fungal Communities of Pinus tabuliformis Plantations at Different Development Stages on the Loess Plateau

The soil fungal community is an important factor in the forest ecosystems, and a better understanding of its composition and dynamic changes will contribute to the maintenance, preservation, and sustainable development of the forest ecosystems. Pinus tabuliformis has been widely planted for local ecological restoration on the Loess Plateau in China in recent decades. However, these plantations have been degraded to different degrees with increasing stand age. Hence, we tried to find the possible causes for the plantation degradation by analyzing soil environmental changes and soil fungal community composition at different stand ages. We collected rhizosphere soil samples from young (10-year-old), middle-aged (20-year-old), and near-mature (30-year-old) P. tabuliformis plantations in this region and characterized their soil properties and soil fungal community diversity and composition. Our results showed that with increasing stand age, the contents of organic carbon, ammonium nitrogen (AN) and nitrate nitrogen (NN) in the soil increased significantly, while the content of available phosphorus (AP) decreased significantly. The main factors affecting the composition of the soil fungal community were the contents of AP, AN, and NN in the soil. In addition, the genus Suillus was the dominant ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungus in all periods of P. tabuliformis plantations in this region. The results of structural equation modeling showed that the community composition of ECM fungi was significantly correlated with stand age, soil NN, and AP contents, and that of pathogenic (PAG) fungi was significantly correlated with soil AN and AP contents. The decrease in the relative abundance of ECM fungi and the increase in the relative abundance of PAG fungi would exacerbate the degradation of P. tabulaeformis plantation. Our results illustrated that the content of soil AP is not only an important factor limiting the development of plantations, but it also significantly affects the community composition of soil fungi in the rhizosphere of the P. tabuliformis plantation. This study provides a novel insight into the degradation of P. tabuliformis plantations and builds a solid foundation for their subsequent management, restoration, and sustainable development on the Loess Plateau of China.
Investigation on Deep Speaker Embedding Extraction Methods for Multi-Genre Speaker Verification

In this paper, we provide description of our experimented systems on the CNCeleb dataset. The CNCeleb dataset provides a difficult set of trial that were collected from multiple gen-res of speech and consists of real-world adversaries, including noise, overlapped background speakers, cross-channel, and short durational test samples. In order to extract a reliable speaker embedding vector under such harsh environment, we have trained multiple systems with different training strategies and architectures. More specifically, we have experimented with not only the conventional ECAPA-TDNN or ResNet architectures, but also the recently proposed multi-stream hybrid neural network. Furthermore, we have trained the systems with speaker discriminative losses, along with a domain generalization training strategy. Our experimental results show that the hybrid architectures can effectively improve the speaker verification performance in a multi-genre scenario. Moreover, fusing different types of hybrid systems further improved the performance, which indicates that different hybrid architectures can learn complementary speaker-dependent information to each other.
Focal therapy for prostate cancer: what is really needed to move from investigational to valid therapeutic alternative?—a narrative review

Background and Objective The most widely accepted therapeutic alternatives for men with intermediate risk prostate cancer (PCa) are mainly represented by whole gland therapies such as surgery or radiotherapy. However, these treatments can carry in some cases profound functional side effects. With the improvement of risk assessment tools and imaging modalities, in particular with the introduction of multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging of the prostate, a fine topographic characterisation of PCa lesions within the prostatic gland is now possible. This has allowed the development of gland-sparing therapies such as focal therapy (FT) as a means to provide an even more tailored approach in order to safely reduce, where feasible, the harms carried by whole gland therapies. Unfortunately, adoption of FT has been considered so far investigational due to some unsolved issues that currently hamper the use of FT as a valid alternative. Here, we aim to identify the main aspects needed to move FT forward from investigational to a valid therapeutic alternative for clinically localized PCa. Methods The literature discussing the evolution of focal therapy in the years and its current landscape was broadly searched to identify the factors hindering FT adoption and possible solutions. Key Content and Findings There are three broad areas hindering FT as a valid therapeutic alternative: (I) Correct patient selection; (II) harmonising the different FT technologies; (III) the lack of oncological outcomes. Conclusions By targeting the three aforementioned weaknesses of FT, greater adoption is expected, finally making FT a valid therapeutic alternative, potentially reshaping prostate cancer treatment and functional outcomes.
SARS-CoV-2 Transmission in the Military during the Early Phase of the Pandemic—A Systematic Analysis

Militaries worldwide have been affected by COVID-19 pandemic. However, the impact and epidemiological characteristics of transmission during the early phase of the pandemic is not well-studied. This study aims to systematically estimate the baseline incidence of COVID-19 in the military worldwide and identify the potential risk factors of transmission and clinical characteristics of the cases. English and Chinese literature reporting COVID-19 cases in military worldwide published on four electronic databases (PubMed, Scopus, EMBASE, and CKNI) through 28 May 2021 were systematically screened and synthesized qualitatively. Forty-six studies involving at least 711,408 military personnel in 17 countries were synthesized. Low incidence of cases was observed in the military with pooled COVID-19 incidence of 0.19% (95%CI: 0.00–9.18%). We observed a higher incidence among those (1) with overseas exposure (39.85%; 95%CI: 0.00–95.87%) rather than local exposure (3.03%; 95%CI: 0.00–12.53%), (2) who were on either local/overseas military deployment (26.78%; 95%CI: 0.00–71.51%) as compared to those not deployed (4.37%; 95%CI: 0.00–17.93%), and (3) on overseas military deployment (39.84%; 95%CI: 0.00–95.87%) as compared to local military deployment (3.03%; 95%CI: 2.37–3.74%). The majority of the cases were symptomatic (77.90% (95%CI: 43.91–100.00%)); hospitalization and mortality rates were low at 4.43% (95%CI: 0.00–25.34%) and 0.25% (95%CI: 0.00–0.85%), respectively; and headache, anosmia, ageusia, myalgia, nasal congestion, and cough were the most commonly observed symptoms. Overseas and local deployment were observed to have higher risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Sustainable, active SARS-CoV-2 surveillance strategies are crucial to detect and contain transmission early during military deployments.
Future Objectivity Requires Perspective and Forward Combinatorial Meta-Analyses

This manuscript contributes to a future definition of objectivity by bringing together recent statements in epistemology and methodology. It outlines how improved objectivity can be achieved by systematically incorporating multiple perspectives, thereby improving the validity of science. The more result-biasing perspectives are known, the more a phenomenon of interest can be disentangled from these perspectives. Approaches that call for the integration of perspective into objectivity at the epistemological level or that systematically incorporate different perspectives at the statistical level already exist and are brought together in the manuscript. Recent developments in research methodology, such as transparency, reproducibility of research processes, pre-registration of studies, or free access to raw data, analysis strategies, and syntax, promote the explication of perspectives because they make the entire research process visible. How the explication of perspectives can be done practically is outlined in the manuscript. As a result, future research programs can be organized in such a way that meta-analyses and meta-meta-analyses can be conducted not only backward but forward and prospectively as a regular and thus well-prepared part of objectification and validation processes.
Influence of Soil Wetting and Drying Cycles on Soil Detachment

Agricultural soils undergo periods of saturation followed by desiccation throughout the course of a growing season. It is believed that these periods of wetting and drying influence soil structure and may affect the rate of soil detachment. Thus, an experiment was conducted to investigate the influence of a disturbed soil (soil sieved to simulate tillage) subjected to various wetting and drying cycles, on soil bulk density and the resistance to soil detachment with runoff. Seven treatments consisting of wetting and drying cycles ranging from 0 to 6 cycles were evaluated under laboratory conditions using an experimental flume apparatus. A Richards growth model proposed for predicting the influence of wetting and drying on soil detachment was also evaluated. Results showed that the soil bulk density increased as the number of wetting and drying cycles increased. The soil detachment rate decreased as the number of wetting and drying cycles increased. Moreover, initial soil detachment (occurring as soon as runoff began) rates were high for 1 to 3 wetting and drying cycles, while the rate of initial detachment decreased after the third cycle. For example, soils with two and three wetting and drying cycles took 6.5 and 7 min to reach the maximum 1 cm souring depth, respectively, while the soils subjected to four or more wetting and drying cycles did not reach the maximum 1 cm depth during the 15 min runoff experiment. In addition, the proposed S-Shaped Richards growth model was a good predictor for estimating the soil detachment of soils experiencing various wetting and drying cycles. Findings from this study suggest that more attention should be given to the influence that soil wetting and drying have on the prediction of soil detachment. Information from this study is expected to be useful for improving soil management strategies for reducing soil erosion.
Reinke's edema management and voice outcomes

Reinke's edema is a chronic disease of the respiratory tract that occurs in adults with a history of chronic smoke exposure. Also known as polypoid corditis, polypoid laryngitis, and polypoid degeneration of the vocal fold, it is strongly associated with smoking, frequently with vocal misuse/abuse, and occasionally with laryngopharyngeal reflux. Reinke's edema remains a cause of chronic dysphonia that is difficult to manage. This review provides perspectives on current and future management of Reinke's edema.
Events and the semantic content of thematic relations

problem of variable polyadicity as reflected in the inferential relations among the sentences in (1) is treated by a decomposition of the common predicate stab. (1) a. Brutus stabbed Caesar in the back with a knife. (Parsons 1990) b. Brutus stabbed Caesar in the back. c. Brutus stabbed Caesar with a knife. d. Brutus stabbed Caesar. e. Brutus stabbed. (a) entails (b) & (c) & (d) & (e). (b) & (c) & (d) & (e) does not entail (a). (b) entails (c) & (d) & (e). (c) & (d) & (e) does not entail (b). (c) entails (d) & (e). (d) & (e) does not entail (c). (d) entails (e). (e) does not entail (d). Let's call any relation to events, R(e,x), a thematic relation, among which are stabber(e,x), stabbee(e,x), in(e,x) and with(e,k). For the inferences of (1), the decomposition into thematic relations can remain lexical as in (2), or it can be carried over into the syntax as in (3).
Virtual Reality to Evaluate the Impact of Colorful Interventions and Nature Elements on Spontaneous Walking, Gaze, and Emotion

Green environments are said to have a positive impact on spontaneous physical activity and well-being. However, high quality psychological measures in natural settings are difficult to collect. In the present study, we offer a detailed report on how virtual reality may provide a controlled environment for immersive user testing. Virtual Reality (VR) was here used to test the impact of colorful floor markings on the spontaneous speed of walking, gaze behaviour, as well as perceived changes in and physiological mesures of affective states. The reactions of 36 adult participants were evaluated in Grey and Green VR environments of an urban university campus. Results in VR revealed similar results than that reported in natural settings: participants walked slower and had higher heart rates in Green than in Grey urban settings, indicating more pleasurable experiences. VR results provided nevertheless more detailed description of user experience with the possibility to quantify changes in gaze strategy as a function of the presence or absence of color designs. Spontaneous walking was slower with colorful designs than without. Gaze behaviour presented longer fixation times with colorful designs than without. Finally, physiological responses indicated that mean heart rates were similar across environments and predicted the physical effort of the task. However, greater means in heart rates were observed in the environments presenting colorful designs, suggesting that colors may be a powerful tool to trigger alertness and pleasure in Grey urban cities. Virtual reality is reported here as an innovative method to quantify psychological experiences during free exploration in gait. Applicable to a broad range of research topics in the psychological sciences, explicit guidelines are made available to share computer code and data sets for further exploitation.