Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Future regime shift in feedbacks during Arctic winter

The Arctic is among the regions where climate is changing most rapidly today. Climate change is amplified by a variety of positive feedbacks, many of which are linked with changes in water vapor, cloud cover, and other cloud properties. We use a global climate model to examine several of these feedbacks, with a particular emphasis on determining whether there are significant temporal changes in these feedbacks that would make them stronger or weaker during the 21st century. The model results indicate that one of the significant positive feedbacks on Arctic surface air temperature in winter weakens substantially toward the end of the 21st century. The feedback loop begins with a temperature increase that produces increases in water vapor, cloud cover, and cloud optical depth which increase the downward longwave flux by 30 Wm−2 by 2060 which then increases the surface air temperature.
Taxonomic Studies and Traditional Uses of Zingiberaceae in Khao Luang National Park, Nakhon Si Thammarat Province, Thailand

Taxonomic studies and traditional uses of Zingiberaceae were conducted in Khao Luang National Park from March 2011 to March 2012, in order to study species diversity, ecology, distribution, and uses. Plant samples were collected from 6 waterfalls in the southern part of the park. Thirty-four species in 10 genera, 3 tribes of Zingiberaceae were collected. A key to species for each genus is provided. Four taxa could not yet be identified. Ka Rome waterfall has the highest number of Zingiberaceae species (23 species in 10 genera, H’ = 3.091, D’ = 0.948) because this area may be less disturbed. Some areas of the park were degraded and changed to plantations, such as Wang Mai Pak waterfall, which has the lowest number of species (13 species in 7 genera, H’ = 2.432, D’ = 0.904). Information on traditional uses of the collected plants was gathered by interviewing villagers and folks who live nearby the areas. Zingiberaceae plants are found to be important natural resources for villagers and mostly used as medicines, foods, drinks, and ornaments. doi: 10.14456/WJST.2015. 64
Impact of adherence to guideline‐directed therapy on risk of death in HF patients across an ejection fraction spectrum

How different degrees of adherence to guideline‐directed medical therapy (GDMT) affect mortality risk in patients with heart failure (HF) in a real‐world clinical setting is poorly understood. This study sought to investigate how different levels of adherence to GDMT were associated with the risk of all‐cause mortality in patients with HF across a spectrum of left ventricular ejection fractions (LVEFs) in a real‐world clinical setting.
Fear-Neuro-Inspired Reinforcement Learning for Safe Autonomous Driving

Ensuring safety and achieving human-level driving performance remain challenges for autonomous vehicles, especially in safety-critical situations. As a key component of artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning is promising and has shown great potential in many complex tasks; however, its lack of safety guarantees limits its real-world applicability. Hence, further advancing reinforcement learning, especially from the safety perspective, is of great importance for autonomous driving. As revealed by cognitive neuroscientists, the amygdala of the brain can elicit defensive responses against threats or hazards, which is crucial for survival in and adaptation to risky environments. Drawing inspiration from this scientific discovery, we present a fear-neuro-inspired reinforcement learning framework to realize safe autonomous driving through modeling the amygdala functionality. This new technique facilitates an agent to learn defensive behaviors and achieve safe decision making with fewer safety violations. Through experimental tests, we show that the proposed approach enables the autonomous driving agent to attain state-of-the-art performance compared to the baseline agents and perform comparably to 30 certified human drivers, across various safety-critical scenarios. The results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our framework while also shedding light on the crucial role of simulating the amygdala function in the application of reinforcement learning to safety-critical autonomous driving domains.
Dating the Late Precambrian volcanicity of England and Wales

Abstract: Ages for volcanism in the British Late Precambrian have been inferred from interpretations of SHRIMP zircon ages as follows: 559.3 ± 2.0 Ma for a tuff from the Beacon Hill Formation of the Charnian Supergroup; 566 ± 3 Ma for a tuff at Bardon Hill also in the Charnwood Forest area with abundant inherited grains at 590.5 ± 1.6; 566.6 ± 2.9 Ma and 555.9 ± 3.5 Ma for bentonite and tuff in the Stretton Group of the Longmyndian Supergroup; 604.7 ± 1.6 Ma for an ignimbrite of the Padarn Tuff Formation of the Arfon Group, and 572.5 ± 1.2 Ma for a tuff within the Fachwen Formation of the Arfon Group. These ages confirm that there were two major phases of volcanic activity in the English Midlands and Wales, one about 620–590 Ma and another about 575–550 Ma. This was followed in most of England and Wales by a major phase of tectonism before the Cambrian (Tommotian) transgression across the Midland Platform. Within the depocentre of the Welsh early Palaeozoic basin, however, sedimentation started within the second period of volcanism and may have continued without interruption well into the Cambrian Period. It is probable that the late phases of the Avalonian Orogeny lasted until after the beginning of the Cambrian. These new data show that the terranes of the Avalonian of England and Wales are comparable with those of eastern Canada and New England. The age estimate for the Charnia horizon is broadly similar to those obtained elsewhere in the world on rocks containing the earliest Ediacaran fauna and adds to the building of an extended time-scale for the global Ediacaran.
Effect of movement‐evoked and tonic experimental pain on muscle force production

Abstract Introduction When performing an exercise or a functional test, pain that is evoked by movement or muscle contraction could be a stronger stimulus for changing how individuals move compared to tonic pain. We investigated whether the decrease in muscle force production is larger when experimentally‐induced knee pain is directly associated to the torque produced (movement‐evoked) compared to a constant painful stimulation (tonic). Methods Twenty‐one participants performed three isometric knee extension maximal voluntary contractions without pain (baseline), during pain, and after pain. Knee pain was induced using sinusoidal electrical stimuli at 10 Hz over the infrapatellar fat pad, applied continuously or modulated proportionally to the knee extension torque. Peak torque and contraction duration were averaged across repetitions and normalized to baseline. Results During tonic pain, participants reported lower pain intensity during the contraction than at rest (p < 0.001), whereas pain intensity increased with contraction during movement‐evoked pain (p < 0.001). Knee extension torque decreased during both pain conditions (p < 0.001), but a larger reduction was observed during movement‐evoked compared to tonic pain (p < 0.001). Participants produced torque for longer during tonic compared to movement‐evoked pain (p = 0.005). Conclusion Our results indicate that movement‐evoked pain was a more potent stimulus to reduce knee extension torque than tonic pain. The longer contraction time observed during tonic pain may be a result of a lower perceived pain intensity during muscle contraction. Overall, our results suggest different motor adaptation to tonic and movement‐evoked pain and support the notion that motor adaptation to pain is a purposeful strategy to limit pain. This mechanistic evidence suggests that individuals experiencing prevalently tonic or movement‐evoked pain may exhibit different motor adaptations, which may be important for exercise prescription.
Decreased need for RRT in liver transplant recipients after pretransplant treatment of hepatorenal syndrome-type 1 with terlipressin.

Hepatorenal Syndrome-Acute Kidney Injury (HRS-AKI), a serious complication of decompensated cirrhosis, has limited therapeutic options and significant morbidity and mortality. Terlipressin improves renal function in some patients with HRS-1, while liver transplantation (LT) is a curative treatment for advanced chronic liver disease. Renal failure post-LT requiring renal replacement therapy (RRT) is a major risk factor for graft and patient survival. A post hoc analysis with 12-month follow-up of LT recipients from a placebo-controlled trial of terlipressin (CONFIRM; NCT02770716) was conducted to evaluate the need for RRT, and overall survival. Patients with HRS-1 were treated with terlipressin plus albumin or placebo plus albumin for up to 14 days. RRT was defined as any type of procedure that replaced kidney function. Outcomes compared between groups included the incidence of HRS-1 reversal, need for RRT (pre- and post- transplant), and overall survival. Of the 300 patients in CONFIRM (Terlipressin n=199; Placebo, n=101), 70 (23%) underwent LT alone (Terlipressin, n=43; Placebo, n=27) and 5 had simultaneous liver-kidney transplant (SLKT) (Terlipressin, n=3, Placebo, n=2). The rate of HRS reversal was significantly higher in the terlipressin group compared with the placebo group (37%, n=16 vs. 15%, n=4; p=0.033). The pre-transplant need for RRT was significantly lower among those who received terlipressin (p=0.007). The post-transplant need for RRT, at 12 months, was significantly lower among those patients who received terlipressin and were alive at Day 365, compared to placebo (p=0.009). Pre-transplant treatment with terlipressin plus albumin in patients with HRS-1 decreased the need for RRT pre- and post-transplant.
CO2 surface fluxes at grid point scale estimated from a global 21 year reanalysis of atmospheric measurements

This paper documents a global Bayesian variational inversion of CO2 surface fluxes during the period 1988-2008. Weekly fluxes are estimated on a 3.75 degrees x 2.5 degrees (longitude-latitude) grid throughout the 21 years. The assimilated observations include 128 station records from three large data sets of surface CO2 mixing ratio measurements. A Monte Carlo approach rigorously quantifies the theoretical uncertainty of the inverted fluxes at various space and time scales, which is particularly important for proper interpretation of the inverted fluxes. Fluxes are evaluated indirectly against two independent CO2 vertical profile data sets constructed from aircraft measurements in the boundary layer and in the free troposphere. The skill of the inversion is evaluated by the improvement brought over a simple benchmark flux estimation based on the observed atmospheric growth rate. Our error analysis indicates that the carbon budget from the inversion should be more accurate than the a priori carbon budget by 20% to 60% for terrestrial fluxes aggregated at the scale of subcontinental regions in the Northern Hemisphere and over a year, but the inversion cannot clearly distinguish between the regional carbon budgets within a continent. On the basis of the independent observations, the inversion is seen to improve the fluxes compared to the benchmark: the atmospheric simulation of CO2 with the Bayesian inversion method is better by about 1 ppm than the benchmark in the free troposphere, despite possible systematic transport errors. The inversion achieves this improvement by changing the regional fluxes over land at the seasonal and at the interannual time scales. (Less)
Prediction of mountain stream morphology

We use a large and diverse data set from mountain streams around the world to explore relationships between reach‐scale channel morphology and control variables. The data set includes 177 step‐pool reaches, 44 plane‐bed reaches, and 114 pool‐riffle reaches from the western United States, Panama, and New Zealand. We performed several iterations of stepwise discriminant analysis on these data. A three‐variable discriminant function using slope (S), D84, and channel width (w) produced an error rate of 24% for the entire data set. Seventy percent of plane‐bed reaches were correctly classified (16% incorrectly classified as pool‐riffle and 14% incorrectly classified as step‐pool). Sixty‐seven percent of pool‐riffle channels were correctly classified (31% incorrectly classified as plane‐bed and 2% as step‐pool). Eighty‐nine percent of step‐pool reaches were correctly classified (9% incorrectly classified as plane‐bed and 2% as pool‐riffle). The partial R2 values and F tests indicate that S is by far the most significant single explanatory variable. Comparison of the eight discriminant functions developed using different data sets indicates that no single variable is present in all functions, suggesting that the discriminant functions are sensitive to the specific stream reaches being analyzed. However, the three‐variable discriminant function developed from the entire data set correctly classified 69% of the 159 channels included in an independent validation data set. The ability to accurately classify channel type in other regions using the three‐variable discriminant function developed from the entire data set has important implications for water resources management, such as facilitating prediction of channel morphology using regional S‐w‐D84 relations calibrated with minimal field work.
Interannual variability of precipitation in an ensemble of AMIP Climate simulations conducted with the CCC GCM2

Abstract In this paper log–linear analysis and analysis of variance methods were used to analyze the interannual variability and potential predictability of precipitation as simulated in an ensemble of six 10-yr Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project climate simulations conducted with CCC GCM2, the second-generation general circulation model of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis. Since observed 1979–88 sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and sea ice extent were prescribed as lower boundary conditions in all six simulations, it is possible to diagnose the extent to which the variability of the seasonal frequency, seasonal mean intensity, and seasonal total of precipitation is affected by the prescribed boundary conditions. The specified SST–sea ice forcing was found to significantly affect both the frequency and intensity of precipitation, particularly in the Tropics, but also in the temperate latitudes. Precipitation frequency appears to be more sensitive to the external forcing than pr.
Adaptive scaling for an enhanced dynamic interpretation of 4D seismic data

In this study, importance is drawn to the role of engineering principles when interpreting dynamic reservoir changes from 4D seismic data. In particular, it is found that in clastic reservoirs the principal parameters controlling mapped 4D signatures are not the pressure and saturation changes per se but these changes scaled by the corresponding thickness (or pore volume) of the reservoir volume that these effects occupy. For this reason, pressure and saturation changes cannot strictly be recovered by themselves, this being true for all data interpretation. This understanding is validated both with numerical modelling and analytic calculation. Interestingly, the study also indicates that the impact of gas saturation on the seismic can be written using a linear term but that inversion for gas saturation can yield at best only the total thickness/pore volume of the distribution. The above provides a basis for a linear equation that can readily and accurately be used to estimate pressure and saturation changes. Quantitative updates of the static and dynamic components of the simulation model can be achieved by comparing thickness or pore volume‐scaled changes from the simulator with the corresponding quantities on the inverted observations.
Petroleum Geochemistry and Source Rock Potential of Carbonate Rocks

Carbonate rocks have diverse characteristics. They can be excellent reservoirs as well as prolific source rocks for oil. Oils from carbonate rocks commonly have distinctive bulk chemical and molecular characteristics that reveal their origin. The lack of widespread appreciation for these facts in the geological community was one reason that a symposium entitled “Petroleum Geochemistry and Source Rock Potential of Carbonate Rocks” was organized and held at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, in October 1980. The symposium was sponsored by the Organic Geochemistry Division of the Geochemical Society during my term as chairman of the division. Of the 18 papers given in the symposium, 12 papers and four abstracts are included herein. Also included in this volume are two papers that were prepared later. I hope that this collection of original papers, which synthesize data from about 20 different sedimentary basins, will help to correct any lingering misconceptions concerning the effectiveness of carbonate rocks as major sources of petroleum. I also believe that the information presented herein, including the references, will serve as a valuable resource for evaluating petroleum occurrence in other carbonate sequences and for locating petroleum reserves in unexplored, partially explored, and even maturely explored basins where possible carbonate-generated oil and gas may have been overlooked. The first 11 papers, arranged in geo-chronological order, are descriptions and interpretations (that is, case histories) of specific carbonate source rocks that range in age from Precambrian to Miocene. Some of the highlights of these papers are summarized below. The paper by Fu Jia Mo, Dai Yong Ding, Liu De Han, and Jia Rong Fen, in addition to describing the geochemistry of petroleum accumulations and source rocks ranging in age from Precambrian to Triassic, points out some interesting differences in thermal histories of Precambrian carbonate-rock sequences in eastern China. In one basin, Precambrian carbonate rocks are surprisingly thermally immature and have yielded heavy oils and asphalts. In another basin, on the other hand, Precambrian carbonate rocks are definitely overmature and have generated methane-rich gas. The paper by McKirdy, Kantsler, Emmett, and Aldridge on the Eastern Officer basin, South Australia, includes the first reported examples of nonmarine carbonate rocks and oils of Cambrian age that are similar to those of the Eocene Green River Formation, Utah. In their study of crude oils in the Michigan basin, Gardner and Bray indicate that the interreef, laminated carbonate rocks of Silurian age are the primary source of commercial oil accumulations in the Silurian pinnacle reefs.
Mantle viscosity beneath the Galapagos 95.50°W propagating rift

Detailed geophysical surveys in the vicinity of the Galapagos 95.5°W propagating rift tip establish the opening history of the rift and its velocity of propagation. These data together with a theory for mantle upwelling into slowly widening lithospheric cracks constrain the viscosity of the asthenosphere beneath the propagating rift to be less than about 1017 to 1018 Pa s.
Cross-domain Feature Distillation Framework for Enhancing Classification in Ear-EEG Brain-Computer Interfaces

Ear-electroencephalography (EEG) holds significant promise as a practical tool in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) due to its enhanced unobtrusiveness, comfort, and mobility in comparison to traditional steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based BCI systems. However, achieving accurate SSVEP classification in ear-EEG faces a major challenge due to the significant attenuation and distorted amplitude of the signal. To address this challenge, this paper focuses on enhancing ear-EEG feature representations by training the model to learn feature representations similar to those of scalp-EEG. We propose a cross-domain feature distillation (CD-FD) framework, which facilitates the extraction of shared features between the two domains. This framework facilitates the identification of crucial features concealed within ear-EEG signals, leading to more effective SSVEP classification. We evaluate the proposed CD-FD framework through single-session decoding and session-to-session transfer decoding, comparing it with EEGNet and canonical correlation analysis (CCA). The results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves the best classification results in all experiments.
Acoustic and Visual Knowledge Distillation for Contrastive Audio-Visual Localization

This paper introduces an unsupervised model for audio-visual localization, which aims to identify regions in the visual data that produce sounds. Our key technical contribution is to demonstrate that using distilled prior knowledge of both sounds and objects in an unsupervised learning phase can improve performance significantly. We propose an Audio-Visual Correspondence (AVC) model consisting of an audio and a vision student, which are respectively supervised by an audio teacher (audio recognition model) and a vision teacher (object detection model). Leveraging a contrastive learning approach, the AVC student model extracts features from sounds and images and computes a localization map, discovering the regions of the visual data that correspond to the sound signal. Simultaneously, the teacher models provide feature-based hints from their last layers to supervise the AVC model in the training phase. In the test phase, the teachers are removed. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art audio-visual localization models on 10k and 144k subsets of the Flickr and VGGS datasets, including cross-dataset validation.
The effect of temperature change of the warm surface waters of the oceans on atmospheric CO2

It is widely believed that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is largely controlled by the high-latitude oceans, because these waters can be viewed as an outcropping of oceanic deep water. If this tenet is correct, cooling of the low-latitude surface oceans could contribute only marginally to an explanation of the observed decrease in atmospheric CO2 concentration of about 80 ppm during glacial periods. This tenet is examined with three-dimensional ocean chemical models based on the circulation fields from 10-level and 15-level ocean general circulation models developed at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Meteorologie, Germany. The three-dimensional models predict atmospheric CO2 changes that are much larger than those predicted by outcrop models, thereby casting doubt on the use of outcrop models to model atmospheric CO2 changes. The atmospheric response time to a change in sea surface temperature is about 120 years in the 15-level model, the more realistic of the two three-dimensional models. This response is fast enough, and the predicted amplitude is of the right size, for one to explain the CO2 increase associated with the Dansgaard-Oeschger warming events observed in ice core measurements as the effect of a warming of the surface oceans.