Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Kinetics of Silver Accumulation in Tissues of Laboratory Mice after Long-Term Oral Administration of Silver Nanoparticles

Since ancient times, silver has been known for its pronounced bactericidal, antiviral and fungicidal properties. Currently, nanoparticles of this metal are widely used in the food, light and pharmaceutical industries, as well as in medicine. Silver in any form can have a toxic effect not only on pathogens, but also on healthy cells. The biological activity and bioavailability of silver preparations depend on the degree of their solubility in water. In addition, the maximum permissible concentration of soluble forms of silver is an order of magnitude lower than that of insoluble forms. This makes nanoparticles of silver with a hydrophilic coating that form stable colloidal solutions in aqueous media potentially unsafe objects. In this work, we studied the kinetics of the accumulation of silver nanoparticles with an average size of 34 ± 5 nm stabilized with polyvinylpyrrolidone in the organs of laboratory C57Bl/6 mice. The administration of nanoparticles was carried out orally for 30, 60, 120 and 180 days at the dose of 50 µg/day/animal. All the mice developed and gained weight normally during the experiment. No adverse effects were observed. Determination of the silver content in biological tissues of mammals was accomplished by neutron activation analysis. The masses and concentrations of silver in the brain and its different sections (hippocampus, cerebellum, cortex and remnants), as well as in the lungs, testes, liver, blood, kidneys, spleen and heart, were determined. The injection times at which the accumulation curves reached saturation were established. An extremely high accumulation of silver in the testes was shown at 120 days of administration, and a significant accumulation of silver in the lungs and brain was observed. The accumulation of silver in all parts of the brain except the cortex was significant, and its trend was similar to that in the whole brain.
High-Speed Roller Ginning of Upland Cotton

An experiment was conducted to determine if upland cotton could be roller ginned at a considerably higher than normal rate without compromising fiber properties and at a rate comparable to saw ginning. A conventional roller gin stand was modified to run at high speed by increasing the frequency of the ginning roller and rotary knife, and increasing the force between the ginning roller and stationary knife. Other changes included adding a spray system to cool the ginning roller, enlarging the lint-flue transition, and modifying the seed-cotton feeder for increased throughput. When ginning upland cotton, the high-speed roller gin stand ginned at a rate comparable to saw ginning. The high-speed roller gin stand had the same horsepower requirement of a saw gin stand. Roller ginning, when compared to saw ginning, produced upland fiber that was about one staple length longer, had less short fiber and neps, had higher turnout, but contained more foreign matter in the lint and cottonseed. Although roller ginning did not increase bale value, the improvement in fiber properties may open up new markets for upland cotton, especially in export markets that value the significance of increased staple length and decreased short fiber contents.
Talking about what would happen versus what happened: Tracking Congressional speeches during COVID-19

In counterfactual thinking, an imagined alternative to the reality that comprises an antecedent and a consequent is widely adopted in political discourse to justify past behaviors (i.e., counterfactual explanation) or to depict a better future (i.e., prefactual). However, they have not been properly addressed in political communication literature. Our study examines how politicians used counterfactual expressions for explanation of the past or preparation of the future during COVID-19, one of the most severe public health crises. All Congressional speeches of the Senate and House in the 116th Congress (2019-2020) were retrieved, and counterfactual expressions were identified along with time-focusing in each speech, using recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) techniques. The results show that counterfactuals were more practiced among Democrats in the Senate and Republicans in the House. With the spread of the pandemic, the use of counterfactuals decreased, maintaining a partisan gap in the House. However, it was nearly stable, with no party differences in the Senate. Implications of our findings are discussed, regarding party polarization, institutional constraints, and the quality of Congressional deliberation. Limitations and suggestions for future research are also provided.
Impact of Oropharyngeal Administration of Colostrum in Preterm Newborns’ Oral Microbiome

The initial colonization of the human microbiota is of paramount importance. In this context, the oropharyngeal administration of colostrum is a safe, viable, and well-tolerated practice even by the smallest preterm infants. Therefore, this study evaluated the effects of oropharyngeal administration of colostrum on the establishment of preterm infants’ oral microbiota. A longitudinal observational study was carried out with 20 premature neonates, divided into two groups: one receiving the protocol (Oropharyngeal Administration of Colostrum; OAC) and the other one receiving Standard Caare (SC). Saliva samples were collected from the newborns weekly during the study period (from the day of birth until the 21st day of life) for analysis of oral microbiota through 16S rRNA gene sequencing. We observed that the colonization of the oral microbiota of preterm newborns preseanted a higher relative abundance of Staphylococcus on the 7th day of life, mainly in the OAC group. Additionally, an increased abundance of Bifidobacterium and Bacteroides was observed in the OAC group at the first week of life. Regarding alpha and beta diversity, time was a key factor in the oral modulation of both groups, showing how dynamic this environment is in early life.
Two User Clustering Schemes for Cell-Free Massive MIMO-NOMA System

User clustering (UC) has a significant impact on the sum spectrum efficiency (SSE) and user equipment (UE) fairness in cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output non-orthogonal multiple access (MIMO-NOMA) systems. The exhaustive search UC algorithm can achieve the maximum SSE of the system, but it will greatly increase the overload of central processing unit, notably for the systems of medium-to-large size. In order to approximate the optimal UC without a lot of computational overhead, two UC algorithms are proposed from the perspective of the similarity of large-scale fading coefficients, which are named as UE Similarity Combination algorithm and Mean Shift Clustering algorithm, respectively. In addition, in the case of leveraging full-pilot zero-forcing at the access point and considering the impact of imperfect successive interference cancellation, intra-cluster pilot contamination and inter-cluster interference, we derive closed-form SSE expression of cell-free massive MIMO-NOMA system. Our results confirm that our proposed UC algorithms have better SSE and UE fairness than the existing UC algorithms in the literature.
Effect of Coronavirus-19 Restrictions in Male Handball Players: Physical Activity, Sedentary Behavior, and Satisfaction with Life

This experiment examined physical activity (PA), sitting time, and satisfaction with life (SL) in European (45%) and Middle Eastern and North African (MENA; 55%) handball players (n = 418; age: 25.6 ± 6.8 years; body mass: 88.1 ± 11.7 kg; height: 1.83 ± 0.08 m) during the coronavirus (COVID)-19 pandemic. The International Physical Activity (IPAQ) and Satisfaction of Life (LS) Questionnaires were administered. All PA variables (vigorous, moderate, walking, total PA) were negatively influenced, but no interaction effects (IE; region x time) were observed. Sitting time increased from 2.5 to 4.9 h∙weekday−1 (ηp2 = 0.80) and walking time decreased from 66.8 to 33.5 min∙day−1 (ηp2 = 0.83). Based on effect sizes (d), pre- to during-confinement reductions were similar between regions (MENA: d = 3.29; Europe: d = 3.41; IE: ηp2 = 0.01). The largest regional difference was in moderate PA (MENA: d = 1.88; Europe: d = 2.99; IE: ηp2 = 0.09). SL in the total sample reduced from 30.6 ± 2.02 to 13.9 ± 2.20 arbitrary units (AU). SL reduction was similar in both regions (dMENA = 8.44; dEUROPE = 8.06; IE: ηp2 = 0.01). To conclude, PA decreased during COVID-19 confinement, sitting time increased, and SL decreased irrespective of geographical region. These preliminary findings highlight risk of SL and physical inactivity during COVID-19 restrictions in 2021.
Influence of Government Information on Farmers’ Participation in Rural Residential Environment Governance: Mediating Effect Analysis Based on Moderation

Rural revitalisation in China relies heavily on the rural residential environment and is vital to the well-being of farmers. The governance of rural human settlements is a kind of public good. The external economy of governance results in the free-riding behaviour of some farmers, which does not entice farmers to participate in governance. However, current research seldom considers the public good of rural human settlements governance. This research is based on the pure public goods attribute of rural human settlements governance. It begins with government information and, using structural equation modelling (SEM), researchers construct the influence mechanism of government information, attitude, attention, and participation ability on the depth of farmers’ participation. The empirical results show that ability, attention, and attitude all have a dramatic positive influence on the depth of farmers’ participation, and the degree of impact gradually becomes weaker. Additionally, government information stimulus is not enough to promote farmers’ deep participation in governance. It needs to rely on intermediary variables to indirectly affect the depth of participation (ability, attention, attitude), and there is a path preference for the influence of government information on the depth of participation. As an important organisation in the management of rural areas, the village committee can significantly adjust the effect of the degree of attention on the depth of participation of farmers. Therefore, the government not only needs to provide farmers with reliable and useful information, but also needs to combine necessary measures to guide farmers to participate in the governance of rural human settlements.
Data augmentation by a CycleGAN-based extra-supervised model for nondestructive testing

The deep learning method is widely used in computer vision tasks with large-scale annotated datasets. However, obtaining such datasets in most directions of the vision based nondestructive testing (NDT) field is very challenging. Data augmentation is proved as an efficient way of dealing with the lack of large-scale annotated datasets. In this paper, we propose a CycleGAN-based extra-supervised (CycleGAN-ES) model to generate synthetic NDT images, where the ES is used to ensure that the bidirectional mapping is learned for corresponding labels and defects. Furthermore, we show the effectiveness of using the synthesized images to train deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) for defect recognition. In the experiments, we extract a number of x-ray welding images with both defect and no defects from the published GDXray dataset, and CycleGAN-ES is used to generate the synthetic defect images based on a small number of extracted defect images and manually drawn labels that are used as a content guide. For quality verification of the synthesized defect images, we use a high-performance classifier pretrained using a big dataset to recognize the synthetic defects and show the comparability of the performances of classifiers trained using synthetic defects and real defects, respectively. To present the effectiveness of using the synthesized defects as an augmentation method, we train and evaluate the performances of DCNN for defect recognition with or without the synthesized defects.
Teamwork in an Emergency

During highly stressful, dynamic, and life threatening situations such as an emergency on board an aircraft, decision making is subjected to particularly challenging conditions which increase the potential for errors. Several authors have studied traps for such errors in the cockpit, but to our knowledge so far, nobody has considered the role of the cabin crew, who have to closely collaborate with pilots in these situations. This study investigates decision making and distributed leadership (i.e. leadership functions are carried out by formal & informal leaders depending on situational demands) in 84 cockpit and cabin crews (N=504) during a simulated emergency in the A320 cabin-cockpit flight simulator. Results indicate that distributed leadership plays an important role in decision making and strongly correlates with the quality of the decision and crew performance. In crews who reached the correct decision (N=63) both formal and informal leaders displayed significantly more leadership behavior (M = 4.68, SE =.14, t (82) = 2.88, p < . 01) than crews who made a wrong decision (N=21) (M =3.71, SE = .37). Interestingly, the effect of informal leadership, entered as a second factor into the hierarchical regression model, predicted crew performance even more strongly than leadership demonstrated by formal leaders. To conclude, we discuss the implications of those results for decision making in aviation and recommend changes in the design and content of CRM (Crew Resource Management) training which could also be useful for interdisciplinary teams in other high risk areas such as medicine, railway, power plants, policing or fire fighting.
GaN-Based Trench Gate Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors with Over 100 cm2/(V s) Channel Mobility

Enhancement-mode metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs) with trench gate structures have been developed. These MOSFETs show excellent DC characteristics with on-voltage of 5.1 V, i.e., enhancement-mode operation and extremely high channel mobilities of 133 cm2/(V s). This structure enables us to realize vertical switching devices with high breakdown voltage and highly integrated low on-resistance with the usage of excellent physical parameters of GaN. This excellent performance of these devices breaks though the realization of GaN-based power switching transistors.
Oxcarbazepine was associated with risks of newly developed hypothyroxinaemia and impaired central set point of thyroid homeostasis in schizophrenia patients

Hypothyroxinaemia might be easily ignored, because attention is typically paid to individuals with elevated thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH). In this study, we aimed to evaluate the association of oxcarbazepine use as adjuvant for treatment of schizophrenia with hypothyroxinaemia and central set point of thyroid homeostasis.
Valproic Acid Prodrug Affects Selective Markers, Augments Doxorubicin Anticancer Activity and Attenuates Its Toxicity in a Murine Model of Aggressive Breast Cancer

We studied the unique inhibitor of the histone deacetylases (HDAC) valproate-valpromide of acyclovir (AN446) that upon metabolic degradation release the HDAC inhibitor (HDACI) valproic acid (VPA). Among the HDAC inhibitors that we have tested, only AN446, and to a lesser extent VPA, synergized with doxorubicin (Dox) anti-cancer activity. Romidepsin (Rom) was additive and the other HDACIs tested were antagonistic. These findings led us to test and compare the anticancer activities of AN446, VPA, and Rom with and without Dox in the 4T1 triple-negative breast cancer murine model. A dose of 4 mg/kg once a week of Dox had no significant effect on tumor growth. Rom was toxic, and when added to Dox the toxicity intensified. AN446, AN446 + Dox, and VPA + Dox suppressed tumor growth. AN446 and AN446 + Dox were the best inhibitory treatments for tumor fibrosis, which promotes tumor growth and metastasis. Dox increased fibrosis in the heart and kidneys, disrupting their function. AN446 most effectively suppressed Dox-induced fibrosis in these organs and protected their function. AN446 and AN446 + Dox treatments were the most effective inhibitors of metastasis to the lungs, as measured by the gap area. Genes that control and regulate tumor growth, DNA damage and repair, reactive oxygen production, and generation of inflammation were examined as potential therapeutic targets. AN446 affected their expression in a tissue-dependent manner, resulting in augmenting the anticancer effect of Dox while reducing its toxicity. The specific therapeutic targets that emerged from this study are discussed.
A 7.5-GHz super regenerative detector

In this paper, simulated and measured results are presented for a microwave-integrated-circuit super regenerative detector operating at 7.5 GHz and brief comparisons made to a monolithic-microwave integrated-circuit super regenerative detector operating at 34 GHz. The sensitivity of the 7.5-GHz detector was measured at -83-dBm (AM, 1 kHz, 100 % mod) RF signal for 12 dB (signal + noise + distortion)/(noise + distortion). Simulation results show that, to produce a sensitive super regenerative detector, a high rate of change in loop gain of the oscillator circuit with respect to the gate bias (quenching) voltage and a high maximum loop gain at the point of detection is required. It has also been shown, by simulation and measurement, that the detection frequency of the super regenerative detector is lower than the normal free-running oscillation frequency.
Investigating human and technological requirements for successful implementation of a BIM-based mobile augmented reality environment in facility management practices

Purpose – With the facility management industry increasingly adopting building information modeling (BIM) technologies, there is a need to investigate where this industry stands in its application. Moreover, studies on efficient and cost-effective solutions to integrate BIM and mobile augmented reality (MAR) present an environment where facility managers can experience an intuitive natural interaction with their mobile interfaces to efficiently access needed information. The industry’s view on this new approach of accessing information from BIM models should also be investigated, and its feedback should be considered for future phases of this avenue of research. Design/methodology/approach – This paper explores not only how BIM can be beneficial to facility management practitioners, but also how its integration with MAR and making the data accessible through handheld mobile devices can enhance current facility management practices. An online survey was conducted to assess professional facility managers’ c.
Urban Building Mesh Polygonization Based on 1-Ring Patch and Topology Optimization

With the development of UAV and oblique photogrammetry technology, the multi-view stereo image has become an important data source for 3D urban reconstruction, and the surface meshes generated by it have become a common way to represent the building surface model due to their high geometric similarity and high shape representation ability. However, due to the problem of data quality and lack of building structure information in multi-view stereo image data sources, it is a huge challenge to generate simplified polygonal models from building surface meshes with high data redundancy and fuzzy structural boundaries, along with high time consumption, low accuracy, and poor robustness. In this paper, an improved mesh representation strategy based on 1-ring patches is proposed, and the topology validity is improved on this basis. Experimental results show that our method can reconstruct the concise, manifold, and watertight surface models of different buildings, and it can improve the processing efficiency, parameter adaptability, and model quality.
A framework for resource assignments in skill- based environments

The development of effective personnel assignment methodologies has been the focus of research to academicians and practitioners for many years. The common theory among researchers is that improvements to the effectiveness of personnel assignment decisions are directly associated with favorable outcomes to organizations. Today, companies continue to struggle to develop high quality products in a timely fashion. This elevates the necessity to further explore and improve the decision-making science of personnel assignments. The central goal of this research is to develop a novel framework for human resource assignments in skill-based environments. An extensive literature review resulted in the identification of the following three areas of the general personnel assignment problem as potential improvement opportunities: determining assignment criteria, properly evaluating personnel capabilities, and effectively assigning resources to tasks. Thus, developing new approaches to improve each of these areas constitute the objectives of this dissertation work. The main contributions of this research are threefold. First, this research presents an effective two-stage methodology to determine assignment criteria based on data
Biomedical potential of silver nanoparticles capped with active ingredients of Hypnea valentiae, red algae species

Abstract In this present study, marine red algae Hypnea valentiae capped silver nanoparticles (Hv-AgNPs) have been prepared through the green method and characterized by various analytical tools. The prepared Hv-AgNPs were confirmed by Ultraviolet-visible (UV) spectroscopy at 430 nm. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis affirmed the face-centered cubic crystalline structure of Hv-AgNPs. Transmission electron microscope (TEM) revealed the Hv-AgNPs shape as spherical with an average size of 10–45 nm. Fourier Transform Infrared (FR-IR) analysis depicted the presence of various biomolecules such as carboxyl, phenolic, and amine groups, which acted as reducing and capping agents of biosynthesized silver nanoparticles. The Hv-AgNPs had significant antibacterial activity against four bacterial pathogens. The 2,2’-Diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazy (DPPH) assay revealed the strong free radical scavenging ability of Hv-AgNPs. The Hv-AgNPs exhibited excellent anti-cancer activity against HT-29 human colon cancer (IC50–24.6 μg/ml) and A549 lung cancer cell lines (IC50–5.917 µg/ml) by MTT assay. Furthermore, the investigations demonstrated that green synthesized silver nanoparticles possess high anti-bacterial, anti-oxidant and anti-cancer activities. Graphical Abstract
Towards the third stage of the lighting profession

The notion of stages of the lighting profession is examined to identify the main themes that have directed the objectives of the lighting profession. It is proposed that the objective of the first stage was provision of uniform illumination over a horizontal plane, and that of the second stage has been to provide illuminance suited to human need, based on visual performance. This brings us up to the current era, and it is the author’s opinion that the second stage has failed to achieve its objective. While codes and standards pay lip service to visual performance, the reality is that for the vast majority of situations where lighting standards are applied, the aim is to meet user expectations for the spaces they occupy to appear adequately lit. The metrics currently used to specify, measure, and calculate lighting levels are inappropriate for this purpose. The concept of mean room surface exitance is proposed as a basis for lighting standards. Procedures for calculation and measurement lead to some startling conclusions. Familiar notions of lighting effectiveness and efficiency are turned upside down, and an entirely different way of thinking about interior lighting design is revealed. The essential difference is a switch from assessing light incident on planes to assessing light arriving at the eye. Such a change of thinking may be seen as a precursor for the third stage of the lighting profession.