Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sodium metatungstate: a new heavy-mineral separation medium for the extraction of conodonts from insoluble residues

Sodium metatungstate (SMT), 3Na2WO4 · 9WO3 · H2O, is a nontoxic (Sax, 1979), high-density (1.00-3.10 g/cm3) separating compound which results in nearly neutral (pH 6) solutions of relatively low viscosity. It was presented as a medium for density gradient centrifugation by Plewinsky and Kamp (1984). Since then, investigators have used SMT (or sodium polytungstate) as a high-density medium for routine mineral separations, for recovery of conodonts from insoluble residues, for separation of various feldspar species from one another, and for segregation of inorganic mineral fractions (ash) from coal.
Dissociable e ﬀ ects of inter-stimulus interval and presentation duration on rapid face categorization

Fast periodic visual stimulation combined with electroencephalography (FPVS-EEG) has unique sensitivity and objectivity in measuring rapid visual categorization processes. It constrains image processing time by presenting stimuli rapidly through brief stimulus presentation durations and short inter-stimulus intervals. However, the selective impact of these temporal parameters on visual categorization is largely unknown. Here, we presented natural images of objects at a rate of 10 or 20 per second (10 or 20Hz), with faces appearing once per second (1Hz), leading to two distinct frequency-tagged EEG responses. Twelve observers were tested with three squarewave image presentation conditions: 1) with an ISI, a traditional 50% duty cycle at 10Hz (50-ms stimulus duration separated by a 50-ms ISI); 2) removing the ISI and matching the rate, a 100% duty cycle at 10Hz (100-ms duration with 0-ms ISI); 3) removing the ISI and matching the stimulus presentation duration, a 100% duty cycle at 20Hz (50-ms duration with 0-ms ISI). The face categorization response was signi ﬁ cantly decreased in the 20Hz 100% condition. The conditions at 10Hz showed similar face-categorization responses, peaking maximally over the right occipito-temporal (ROT) cortex. However, the onset of the 10Hz 100% response was delayed by about 20ms over the ROT region relative to the 10Hz 50% condition, likely due to immediate forward-masking by preceding images. Taken together, these results help to interpret how the FPVS-EEG paradigm sets temporal constraints on visual image categorization.
Diagnosis of pleural tuberculosis by multi-targeted loop-mediated isothermal amplification assay based on SYBR Green I reaction: comparison with GeneXpert® MTB/RIF assay

ABSTRACT Background Diagnosis of pleural tuberculosis (TB) is tedious owing to its close resemblance with malignant pleural effusion and sparse bacterial load in clinical specimens. There is an immediate need to design a rapid and dependable diagnostic test to prevent unnecessary morbidity/mortality. Research design and methods A multi-targeted loop-mediated isothermal amplification (MT-LAMP) was deliberated using mpt64 and IS6110 to diagnose pleural TB within pleural fluids/biopsies. MT-LAMP products were analyzed by gel-based and visual detection methods, viz. SYBR Green I, SYBR Green I+deoxyuridine triphosphate uracil-N-glycosylase (dUTP-UNG), and dry methyl green reactions. Results In a pilot study, while assessing pleural TB/non-TB control subjects (n = 40), both SYBR Green I+dUTP-UNG/gel-based MT-LAMP assays exhibited better sensitivity/specificity than SYBR Green I and dry methyl green MT-LAMP. Since it is facile to work with SYBR Green I+dUTP-UNG than gel-based MT-LAMP, we validated the performance of SYBR Green I+dUTP-UNG in a higher number of specimens (n = 97), which revealed somewhat higher sensitivity (85.2 vs. 81.5%) and specificity (97.7 vs. 90.7%) than SYBR Green I MT-LAMP. Furthermore, the sensitivity attained by SYBR Green I+dUTP-UNG MT-LAMP was significantly higher (p < 0.001) than GeneXpert. Conclusions Our SYBR Green I+dUTP-UNG MT-LAMP is a simple and reliable method to diagnose pleural TB, which may translate into a point-of-care test.
Recent advances in the treatment of hip fractures in the elderly [version 1; peer review: 2 approved]

The treatment of hip fractures in the elderly represents a major public health priority and a source of ongoing debate among orthopaedic surgeons and anesthesiologists. Most of these injuries are treated with surgery in an expedient fashion. From the surgical perspective, there are certain special considerations in this population including osteoporosis, pre-existing arthritis, age, activity level
Effectiveness of an educational intervention in promoting antibiotic awareness among 8th to 10th grade students in Kerala, India

Objectives: To assess the effectiveness of a training program on the knowledge, attitude, and behavior of antimicrobial resistance determinants among high school students in Kerala, India. Methods: This quasi-experimental study was conducted among 8th – 10th grade students for six months in a high school in Kerala, India . This study consisted of a baseline assessment of consenting participants, educational intervention using PowerPoint slides, and post-intervention assessment. Assessments were done using a validated Knowledge, Attitude, and Behavior questionnaire. Results: Among the 223 eligible students in the selected school, 159 (71.3%) participated in the study. The follow-up rate was 93.08%. Considering a p-value of less than 0.05 to be statistically significant, there was a statistically significant difference in the knowledge (pre-intervention mean score = 6.26 ± 2.06, post-intervention mean score = 7.44 ± 1.81), attitude (pre-intervention mean score = 2.51 ± 1.13, post-intervention mean score = 3.29 ± 1.19), and behavior (pre-intervention score = 4.27 ± 1.40, post-intervention score = 4.74 ± 1.38) of study participants. Conclusion: Educational intervention based on improving the knowledge, attitude, and practice of school children is an effective strategy to address the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance.
Impact of different ANCA serotypes on the long-term outcome of ANCA-associated vasculitis patients

Abstract Objectives To investigate the clinical features and long-term outcomes of Chinese anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCAs)-associated vasculitis (AAV) patients with different ANCA serotypes. Methods Two hundred and twenty-four AAV patients from January 2010 to June 2021 were divided into myeloperoxidase (MPO)-ANCA and proteinase 3 (PR3)-ANCA groups. Clinical and long-term outcomes were compared. Results In this study, the average follow-up was 46.4 months (range 0.3–188.4 months). One hundred and seventy-seven (79.0%) patients were MPO–ANCA-positive and 47 were PR3–ANCA-positive; the mean age of MPO–ANCA positive patients at diagnosis was elder than that of PR3–ANCA positive patients (67.0 vs. 60.0 years, p = .004). Among PR3–ANCA-positive patients, ear, nose and throat symptoms were more common (p = .014). Between two ANCA serotypes, there were no differences in complement 3 (C3), Birmingham vasculitis activity score (BVAS), five-factor score (FFS) or other organ involvements. For all AAV patients, the overall survival rates at one, three and five years were 80.0%, 67.0% and 56.4%, respectively. The cumulative relapse-free rates of one, three and five years were 89.5%, 76.4% and 68.4%, respectively. The survival of AAV patients was unaffected by the ANCA serotype (p = .23). The ANCA serotype also had no effect on either disease relapse (p = .20) or remission rates (p = .10). In our study, PR3–ANCA patients showed a better long-term survival, as the 5-year survival rate and the 5-year relapse-free survival rate of PR3–ANCA patients were 60.7% and 76.9%, while that of MPO–ANCA patients were 55.2% and 65.8%, respectively. Rather than ANCA serotype, younger patients with milder kidney involvement and lower disease assessment scores (BVAS and FFS) might be more relevant to better prognosis. Conclusions The likelihood of induced remission, patient survival or disease recurrence is all unaffected by ANCA serotypes. A better prognosis is seen in younger patients with milder kidney involvement and lower BVAS/FFS scores.
a significant cell nuclear viscosity

Cytoplasmic viscosity is a crucial parameter in determining rates of diffusion-limited reactions. Changes in viscosity are associated with several diseases, whilst nuclear viscosity determines gene integrity, regulation and expression. Yet how drugs including DNA-damaging agents affect viscosity is unknown. We demonstrate the use of a platinum complex, Pt[L]Cl, that localizes efficiently mostly in the nucleus as a probe for nuclear viscosity. The phosphorescence lifetime of Pt[L]Cl is sensitive to viscosity and provides an excellent tool to investigate the impact of DNA damage. We show using Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging (FLIM) that the lifetime of both green and red fluorescent proteins (FP) are also sensitive to changes in cellular viscosity and refractive index. However, Pt[L]Cl proved to be a more sensitive viscosity probe, by virtue of microsecond phosphorescence lifetime versus nanosecond fluorescence lifetime of FP, hence greater sensitivity to bimolecular reactions. DNA damage was inflicted by either a two-photon excitation, one-photon excitation microbeam and X-rays. DNA damage of live cells causes significant increase in the lifetime of either Pt[L]Cl (HeLa cells, 12.5–14.1 µs) or intracellularly expressed mCherry (HEK293 cells, 1.54–1.67 ns), but a decrease in fluorescence lifetime of GFP from 2.65 to 2.29 ns (in V15B cells). These values represent a viscosity change from 8.59 to 20.56 cP as well as significant changes
Prognostic significance of nutritional indices in patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors

Abstract Background Although patients with head and neck squamous cell cancer (HNSCC) often show malnutrition, its effects on immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) treatment outcomes in these patients are unclear. Objectives To investigate the prognostic influence of nutritional indices in patients with HNSCC treated with ICIs and determine the optimal indices. Methods This retrospective study included 106 patients with HNSCC treated with ICIs between 2017 and 2022. The prognostic influences of body mass index (BMI), geriatric nutritional risk index (GNRI), and prognostic nutritional index (PNI) on overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) were analysed using the Kaplan–Meier method and Cox-regression models. Results The 1-year PFS rates in the groups with high and low BMI, GNRI, and PNI were, respectively, 24.2% and 28.4% (p = .731), 29.7% and 14.4% (p = .024), and 30.3% and 13.9% (p = .015). PNI was an independent prognostic factor for both PFS (hazard ratio (HR) = 1.89; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.08–3.29) and OS (HR = 3.26; 95% CI, 1.66–6.40). Conclusions PNI can predict ICI outcomes and should be assessed when ICI treatment is considered.
A minimal model for prestacks via Koszul duality for box operads

Prestacks are algebro-geometric objects whose defining relations are far from quadratic. Indeed, they are cubic and quartic, and moreover inhomogeneous. We show that box operads, a rectangular type of operads introduced in arXiv:2305.20036, constitute the correct framework to encode them and resolve their relations up to homotopy. Our first main result is a Koszul duality theory for box operads, extending the duality for (nonsymmetric) operads. In this new theory, the classical restriction of being quadratic is replaced by the notion of being $\textit{thin-quadratic}$, a condition referring to a particular class of ``thin'' operations. Our main case of interest is the box operad $Lax$ encoding lax prestacks as algebras. We show that $Lax$ is not Koszul by explicitly computing its Koszul complex. We then go on to remedy the situation by suitably restricting the Koszul dual box cooperad $Lax^{\antishriek}$ to obtain our second main result: we establish a minimal (in particular cofibrant) model $Lax_{\infty}$ for the box operad $Lax$ encoding lax prestacks. This sheds new light on Markl's question on the existence of a cofibrant model for the operad encoding presheaves of algebras from arXiv:math/0103052. Indeed, we answer the parallel question with presheaves viewed as prestacks, and prestacks considered as algebras over a box operad, in the positive.
Extension of summer climatic conditions into spring in the Western Mediterranean area

From a local point of view, in May/June, there is an important and positive 2 m temperature trend at Palma (Mallorca), which is simultaneous and highly correlated with a strong increase in the 500 hPa geopotential height. This study analyses this fact as well as the observed tendencies in a wider seasonal and geographical context.
Hospital Performance Evaluation Checklist in Context of COVID-19 Pandemic: Design and Validation

Abstract Objective: Around the world, pandemics have been considered among the main hazards in the last 2 decades. Hospitals are 1 of the most important organizations responding to pandemics. The aim of this study was to design and develop a valid checklist for evaluating the hospitals’ performance in response to COVID-19 pandemic, for the first time. Methods: This study is a mixed method research design that began in February, 2020 and was conducted in 3 phases: Designing a conceptual model, designing a primary checklist structure, and checklist psychometric evaluation. Known-groups method has been used to evaluate construct validity. Two groups of hospitals were compared: group A (COVID-19 Hospitals) and group B (the other hospitals). Results: The checklist’s main structure was designed with 6 main domains, 23 sub-domains, and 152 items. The content validity ratio and index were 0.94 and 0.79 respectively. Eleven items were added, 106 items were removed, and 40 items were edited. Independent t-test showed a significant difference between the scores of the 2 groups of hospitals (P < 0.0001). Pearson correlation coefficient test also showed a high correlation between our checklist and the other. The internal consistency of the checklist was 0.98 according to Cronbach’s alpha test. Conclusions: Evaluating the hospitals’ performance and identifying their strengths and weaknesses, can help health system policymakers and hospital managers, and leads to improved performance in response to COVID-19.
A High Coverage Cybersecurity Scale Predictive of User Behavior

Psychometric security scales can enable various crucial tasks (e.g., measuring changes in user behavior over time), but, unfortunately, they often fail to accurately predict actual user behavior. We hypothesize that one can enhance prediction accuracy via more comprehensive scales measuring a wider range of security-related factors. To test this hypothesis, we ran a series of four online studies with a total of 1,471 participants. First, we developed the extended security behavior scale (ESBS), a high-coverage scale containing substantially more items than prior ones, and collected responses to characterize its underlying structure. Then, we conducted a follow-up study to confirm ESBS’s structural validity and reliability. Finally, over the course of two studies, we elicited user responses to our scale and prior ones while measuring three security behaviors reflected by Internet browser data. Then, we constructed predictive machine-learning models and found that ESBS can predict these behaviors with statistically significantly higher accuracy than prior scales (6.17%–8.53% ROC AUC), thus supporting our hypothesis.
Integrated EPANET‐MSX process models of chlorine and its by‐products in drinking water distribution systems

EPANET and its commercial derivatives are the most widely‐used software packages for modeling free chlorine and its by‐products in drinking water distribution systems. Yet, they are not sufficiently accurate, general, or efficient for deriving optimal chlorine dosing strategies at different seasonal temperatures. To overcome EPANET's limitations, an integrated set of rigorously validated multispecies process models are proposed for application within the EPANET‐MSX environment. An executable (command‐line) version of these MSX models is supplied for use either within the MSX environment or embedded in commercial versions of MSX. A new general method was devised to obtain output of any intermediate coefficient or variable involved in the simulation. This overcomes MSX's limited output options. When the debugged models were applied to a real distribution system, the optimal chlorine dose for summer required almost double the chlorine dose needed in winter. A lower initial dose combined with a downstream booster dose required less chlorine in total. Formal optimization techniques are needed to efficiently obtain similar strategies in more complex systems.
Conditional Prompt Tuning for Multimodal Fusion

We show that the representation of one modality can effectively guide the prompting of another modality for parameter-efficient multimodal fusion. Specifically, we first encode one modality and use its representation as a prior to conditionally prompt all frozen layers of the other modality. This is achieved by disentangling the vanilla prompt vectors into three types of specialized prompts that adaptively capture global-level and instance-level features. To better produce the instance-wise prompt, we introduce the mixture of prompt experts (MoPE) to dynamically route each instance to the most suitable prompt experts for encoding. We further study a regularization term to avoid degenerated prompt expert routing. Thanks to our design, our method can effectively transfer the pretrained knowledge in unimodal encoders for downstream multimodal tasks. Compared with vanilla prompting, we show that our MoPE-based conditional prompting is more expressive, thereby scales better with training data and the total number of prompts. We also demonstrate that our prompt tuning is architecture-agnostic, thereby offering high modularity. Extensive experiments over three multimodal datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art results, matching or surpassing the performance achieved through fine-tuning, while only necessitating 0.7% of the trainable parameters. Code will be released: https://github.com/songrise/ConditionalPrompt.
Stability of buoyant-Couette flow in a vertical porous slot

The stability of two-dimensional buoyancy-driven convection in a vertical porous slot, wherein a plane Couette flow is additionally present, is studied. This complex fluid flow scenario is examined under the influence of Robin-type boundary conditions, which are applied to perturbations in both velocity and temperature. The inclusion of a time-derivative velocity term within the Darcy momentum equation notably introduces intricacies to the study. The stability of the basic natural convection flow is primarily governed by several key parameters namely, the P\'eclet number, the Prandtl-Darcy number, the Biot number and a non-negative parameter that dictates the nature of the vertical boundaries. Through numerical analysis, the stability eigenvalue problem is solved for a variety of combinations of boundary conditions. The outcomes of this analysis reveal the critical threshold values that signify the onset of instability. Furthermore, a detailed examination of the stability of the system has provided insights into both its commonalities and distinctions under different conditions. It is observed that, except for the scenario featuring impermeable-isothermal boundaries, the underlying base flow exhibits instability when subjected to various other configurations of perturbed velocity and temperature boundary conditions. This underscores the notion that the presence of Couette flow alone does not suffice to induce instability within the system. The plots depicting neutral stability curves show either bi-modal or uni-modal characteristics, contingent upon specific parameter values that influence the onset of instability.
Robust Topological Bound States in the Continuum in a Quantum Hall Bar with an Anti-dot

Bound states in the continuum (BICs) are quantum states with normalizable wave functions and energies that lie within the continuous spectrum for which extended or dispersive states are also available. These special states, which have shown great applicability in photonic systems for devices such as lasers and sensors, are also predicted to exist in electronic low-dimensional solid-state systems. The non-trivial topology of materials is within the known mechanisms that prevent the bound states to couple with the extended states. In this work we search for topologically protected BICs in a quantum Hall bar with an anti-dot formed by a pore far from the borders of the bar. The bound state energies and wavefunctions are calculated by means of the Recursive S-Matrix method. The resulting bound state energies coexist with extended states and exhibit a pattern complimentary to the Hofstadter butterfly. A symmetry-breaking diagonal disorder was introduced, showing that the BICs with energies far from the Landau levels remain robust. Moreover, the energy difference between consecutive BICs multiplied by the anti-dot perimeter follows the same curve despite disorder. Finally, a BIC-mediated current switching effect was found in a multi-terminal setup, which might permit their experimental detection.
Effects of Density on Timing of Emergence and its Consequences Effects of Density on Timing of Emergence and its Consequences for Survival and Growth in Two Communities of Annual Plants for Survival and Growth in Two Communities of Annual Plants

We tested whether increasing seed density results in a change in the timing of emergence in two communities of sand dune annual plants in Israel. Speciﬁcally we tested (i) if emergence is accelerated or delayed due to high seed density. We also tested two predictions about the consequences of changes in the timing of emergence; (ii) seedlings emerging earlier will have higher survival and growth; (iii) the advantage of earlier emergence increases as seed density increases. We examined these predictions for both monocots and dicots growing under different irrigation regimes and using species from a desert and a semi-arid community of sand dune annual plants. Dicots showed increasing negative density-dependent emergence in later cohorts, consistent with the prediction of delayed emergence. In contrast, grasses showed no shift in timing of emergence, although they did experience strongly negative density-dependence in the large intermediate cohort, with the ﬁrst and the last-emerging cohort