Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vascular Plant Diversity of Forested Wetlands in Southern New England

ABSTRACT. The forested wetland is one of the most common wetland types in eastern North America and has been subject to substantial changes in legislation, management, and climate in the past fifty years. Despite the predominance of wetland forests on the region's landscape, the contemporary botanical composition of these forests is not well described. We developed a baseline inventory of the vascular plant taxa present in six wetlands across a second-growth forest in southern New England and then compared community composition within and across forested wetlands. Despite similarities in soils, landscape position, and land use history, sites varied significantly from each other in canopy and understory composition. We found that the site-specific nature of wetland plant assemblages overwhelms commonalities between sites. Inventories of common habitats are important for conservation and management concerned with biodiversity, culturally important species, and game and non-game animals.
FLT3 Mutations in Acute Myeloid Leukemia: Key Concepts and Emerging Controversies

The FLT3 receptor is overexpressed on the majority of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) blasts. Mutations in FLT3 are the most common genetic alteration in AML, identified in approximately one third of newly diagnosed patients. FLT3 internal tandem duplication mutations (FLT3-ITD) are associated with increased relapse and inferior overall survival. Multiple small molecule inhibitors of FLT3 signaling have been identified, two of which (midostaurin and gilteritinib) are currently approved in the United States, and many more of which are in clinical trials. Despite significant advances, resistance to FLT3 inhibitors through secondary FLT3 mutations, upregulation of parallel pathways, and extracellular signaling remains an ongoing challenge. Novel therapeutic strategies to overcome resistance, including combining FLT3 inhibitors with other antileukemic agents, development of new FLT3 inhibitors, and FLT3-directed immunotherapy are in active clinical development. Multiple questions regarding FLT3-mutated AML remain. In this review, we highlight several of the current most intriguing controversies in the field including the role of FLT3 inhibitors in maintenance therapy, the role of hematopoietic cell transplantation in FLT3-mutated AML, use of FLT3 inhibitors in FLT3 wild-type disease, significance of non-canonical FLT3 mutations, and finally, emerging concerns regarding clonal evolution.
Prevalence of Haemosporidian Parasite Infections in Raptors of Iran

Abstract. Birds are infected by several genera of blood parasites in the phylum Apicomplexa, Order Haemosporidia: Haemoproteus, Plasmodium, and Leucocytozoon. This broadly distributed and diverse group of parasites greatly influences many aspects of the hosts' lifecycle and can cause diseases and even mortality in birds under natural and captive conditions. We determined the prevalence of haemosporidian blood parasites in raptors in Iran by examining blood samples from 62 raptors (13 species from three families: Accipitridae, Falconidae and Strigidae). We documented the first known report in Iran of haemosporidian infection for several raptor species, including eight novel host records for Haemoproteus and two novel host records for Leucocytozoon. Raptors were infected by Haemoproteus spp. (24% of 62 individuals), Leucocytozoon spp. (3% of individuals), and microfilaria (58% of individuals). Such new information from less-studied countries such as Iran can potentially be used to address conservation and management questions in epidemiological studies of wildlife diseases, veterinary medical treatment of captive birds, and in the investigation of host–parasite relationships.
Machine Translation for English–Inuktitut with Segmentation, Data Acquisition and Pre-Training

Translating to and from low-resource polysynthetic languages present numerous challenges for NMT. We present the results of our systems for the English–Inuktitut language pair for the WMT 2020 translation tasks. We investigated the importance of correct morphological segmentation, whether or not adding data from a related language (Greenlandic) helps, and whether using contextual word embeddings improves translation. While each method showed some promise, the results are mixed.
Findings of the WMT 2020 Shared Task on Quality Estimation

We report the results of the WMT20 shared task on Quality Estimation, where the challenge is to predict the quality of the output of neural machine translation systems at the word, sentence and document levels. This edition included new data with open domain texts, direct assessment annotations, and multiple language pairs: English-German, English-Chinese, Russian-English, Romanian-English, Estonian-English, Sinhala-English and Nepali-English data for the sentence-level subtasks, English-German and English-Chinese for the word-level subtask, and English-French data for the document-level subtask. In addition, we made neural machine translation models available to participants. 19 participating teams from 27 institutions submitted altogether 1374 systems to different task variants and language pairs.
A comparison of cardiovascular risk factors among Asian migrants and the native population in Korea

OBJECTIVES To investigate cardiovascular risk factors among Asian migrants in Korea, compared to Koreans and the general population in the home countries, according to nationality. DESIGN Longitudinal ecological study SETTING 282 local authorities in Korea, classified by city, province and district, 2009-2015. PARTICIPANTS 987,214 Asian migrants and 1,693,281 Koreans aged 20 years and older. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES First, the prevalence of current smokers, physical inactivity, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and hypercholesterolemia; second, incident type 2 diabetes and hypertension. RESULTS Among participants who were 20 years and older, the age-adjusted prevalence of obesity in Chinese migrant women (25.6%) was higher than that in Korean women (23.2%) (P < 0.0001). The age-adjusted prevalence of obesity in Filipino migrant women (30.9%) was higher than that in Korean women (23.2%) (P = 0.0023). The age-adjusted prevalence of obesity in other Asian migrant women (35.5%) was higher than that in Korean women (23.2%) (P < 0.0001). In addition, among participants aged 20-49 years, the age-adjusted prevalence of diabetes in Filipino migrant women (2.6%) was higher than that in Korean women (1.8%) (P = 0.0090). The age-adjusted prevalence of hypertension in Filipino migrant women (7.7%) was higher than that in Korean women (4.2%) (P < 0.0001). In the multivariate analyses, compared to Koreans, the odds ratios of developing type 2 diabetes and hypertension were 0.82 (95% CI, 0.78 to 0.86) and 0.77 (95% CI, 0.75 to 0.79) among Asian migrants, respectively. However, the odds ratio of developing type 2 diabetes was 1.32 (95% CI, 1.11 to 1.57) among Vietnamese migrant men aged 20-39 years compared to Korean men. Compared to Korean women, the odds ratios of developing hypertension were 1.49 (95% CI, 1.05 to 2.11) and 2.22 (95% CI, 1.17 to 4.19) among Filipino migrant women aged 20-39 years and more than 40 years, respectively. Moreover, the age-adjusted prevalence of obesity (41.4%) in Filipino migrant men was higher than that (30.4%) in men from the general population in the Philippines in 2015. Furthermore, in 2014, the age-adjusted prevalence of diabetes (12.5%) among Filipino migrant men was higher than that (7.1%) in men from the general population in the Philippines. CONCLUSIONS Although most Asian migrants were less likely to have type 2 diabetes and hypertension than Koreans, primary and secondary prevention of type 2 diabetes and hypertension among the majority of Asian migrants in Korea, especially targeting the specific age and sex groups according to nationality, is required. In addition, the problem of obesity among Asian migrants in Korea, especially in Asian migrant women, should be addressed.
Inhibition of Cathepsin S Induces Mitochondrial Apoptosis in Glioblastoma Cell Lines Through Mitochondrial Stress and Autophagosome Accumulation

Cathepsin S (CTSS), a lysosomal cysteine protease, is overexpressed in various cancers, including glioblastoma (GB). A high level of CTSS is associated with tumor progression and poor outcome in GB. However, the underlying mechanisms of its role in the biological characteristics of G5B remain to be elucidated. Here, we uncovered a potential role of CTSS in the lysosomes and mitochondria of GB cells (GBCs). Downregulation of CTSS in GBCs could increase the expression of autophagy-related proteins; however, there was no significant change in p62, suggesting autophagy blockade. Moreover, inhibition of CTSS increased the expression of mitochondrial calcium uniporter (MCU) and enhanced mitochondrial Ca2+ uptake ability, causing mitochondrial Ca2+ overload, the generation of copious reactive oxygen species (ROS) and eventual mitochondrial apoptosis. Additionally, elevated damage to mitochondria exacerbated the burden of autophagy. Finally, we found that silence of MCU could alleviate the inhibition of CTSS-induced autophagosome accumulation and mitochondrial stress. Collectively, these results demonstrate that CTSS plays an important role in the process of autophagic flux and mitochondrial functions in GBCs.
NJU’s submission to the WMT20 QE Shared Task

This paper describes our system of the sentence-level and word-level Quality Estimation Shared Task of WMT20. Our system is based on the QE Brain, and we simply enhance it by injecting noise at the target side. And to obtain the deep bi-directional information, we use a masked language model at the target side instead of two single directional decoders. Meanwhile, we try to use the extra QE data from the WMT17 and WMT19 to improve our system’s performance. Finally, we ensemble the features or the results from different models to get our best results. Our system finished fifth in the end at sentence-level on both EN-ZH and EN-DE language pairs.
Toward internationalization: A bibliometric analysis of the social sciences in Mainland China from 1979 to 2018

The past 40 years have witnessed profound changes in the international competitiveness of Mainland China’s scientific research. Based on publication data from Chinese researchers in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) from the Web of Science (WoS), this study aims to provide a bird’s-eye view of how social science research in Mainland China has internationalized over the past four decades. The findings show that the number of social science articles published by Chinese authors in international journals has experienced a noticeable increase, and the collaboration networks of researchers from Mainland China have broadened, with the number of articles with a Chinese first author showing a strong upward trend. In addition, findings show that Chinese scholars are published in a wider range of journals, and there has been a steady increase in their appearance in higher impact journals (influenced in part by certain journals). Finally, different social science disciplines show various degrees of internationalization. This study provides a broad view from which to examine the internationalization process in Mainland China’s social science landscape in the last four decades, while also noting some of the possible explanations for these changes, thereby deepening our understanding of social science research stemming from the region.
Findings of the WMT 2020 Shared Task on Machine Translation Robustness

We report the findings of the second edition of the shared task on improving robustness in Machine Translation (MT). The task aims to test current machine translation systems in their ability to handle challenges facing MT models to be deployed in the real world, including domain diversity and non-standard texts common in user generated content, especially in social media. We cover two language pairs – English-German and English-Japanese and provide test sets in zero-shot and few-shot variants. Participating systems are evaluated both automatically and manually, with an additional human evaluation for ”catastrophic errors”. We received 59 submissions by 11 participating teams from a variety of types of institutions.
HW-TSC’s Participation at WMT 2020 Automatic Post Editing Shared Task

The paper presents the submission by HW-TSC in the WMT 2020 Automatic Post Editing Shared Task. We participate in the English-German and English-Chinese language pairs. Our system is built based on the Transformer pre-trained on WMT 2019 and WMT 2020 News Translation corpora, and fine-tuned on the APE corpus. Bottleneck Adapter Layers are integrated into the model to prevent over-fitting. We further collect external translations as the augmented MT candidates to improve the performance. The experiment demonstrates that pre-trained NMT models are effective when fine-tuning with the APE corpus of a limited size, and the performance can be further improved with external MT augmentation. Our system achieves competitive results on both directions in the final evaluation.
Results of the WMT20 Metrics Shared Task

This paper presents the results of the WMT20 Metrics Shared Task. Participants were asked to score the outputs of the translation systems competing in the WMT20 News Translation Task with automatic metrics. Ten research groups submitted 27 metrics, four of which are reference-less “metrics”. In addition, we computed five baseline metrics, including sentBLEU, BLEU, TER and using the SacreBLEU scorer. All metrics were evaluated on how well they correlate at the system-, document- and segment-level with the WMT20 official human scores. We present an extensive analysis on influence of different reference translations on metric reliability, how well automatic metrics score human translations, and we also flag major discrepancies between metric and human scores when evaluating MT systems. Finally, we investigate whether we can use automatic metrics to flag incorrect human ratings.
Investigating the Impact of Exchange Rate Volatility, Inflation and Economic Output on International Trade of India

Four models have been constructed separately for exports of goods, imports of goods, exports of services and imports of services to explore the impact of exchange rate volatility, inflation and economic output on India’s foreign trade. AutoRegressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds test run on monthly data over the period of 2011–2020 reports that in the long run, growth in production positively impacts the trade in goods and services. Rise in level of prices negatively impacts the exports of goods. In the short run, a rise in volatility brings a decline in the imports of goods but in the long run, it has a positive impact on the exports of goods. Volatile exchange rate has no impact on trade in services. An increase in inflation in the short run leads to a rise in the imports of goods but brings a decline in the trade of services.
On the main factors influencing COVID-19 spread and deaths in Mexico: A comparison between Phase I and II

This article investigates the geographical spread of COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths across municipalities in Mexico. It focuses on the spread dynamics between Phase I (from March 23th to May 31st, 2020) and II (from June 1st to August 22th, 2020) of the social distancing measures. It also examines municipal-level factors associated with cumulative COVID-19 cases and deaths to understand the spatial determinants of the pandemic. The analysis of the geographic pattern of the pandemic via Space-Time Scan Statistics (SaTScan) revealed fast spread among municipalities. During Phase I, clusters of infections and deaths were mainly located at the center of the country, while in Phase II, these clusters dispersed to the rest of the country. The regression results from the Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial Regression analysis suggested that income inequality, prevalence of obesity and diabetes, and concentration of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) are strongly positively associated to confirmed cases and deaths regardless of lockdown.
Widespread Prevalence of Plasmid-Mediated Colistin Resistance Gene mcr-1 in Escherichia coli from Père David's Deer in China

The mcr-1 gene is widely reported around the world and has been identified on various plasmids with different replicon types. Resistance to the last-line antibiotic colistin mediated by mcr-1 still represents a threat to global public health. ABSTRACT Père David’s deer (Elaphurus davidianus or milu) is an endangered species, and the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) such as mcr-1-positive strains among them has been unknown. In this study, we aimed to investigate the genomic characterizations of mcr-1-positive strains and provide insight into the dissemination of AMR in nature reserve settings. Sixty-seven mcr-1-positive Escherichia coli isolates from 97 fecal samples were identified by PCR and found resistant to colistin. The prevalence of β-lactam resistance was very high, and there were 64 mcr-1-positive isolates containing β-lactamase genes. Transconjugants of 66 mcr-1-positive isolates were acquired through conjugation experiments. PCR-based replicon typing (PBRT) showed that 44 strains harbored IncI2 mcr-1-bearing plasmids, eight strains harbored IncX4 mcr-1-carrying plasmids, and 14 strains harbored IncHI2 mcr-1-positive plasmids. Notably, mcr-1 was located in the chromosome of LD27-1. Clonal dissemination and horizontal dissemination of mcr-1 by plasmids coexist. We first report the prevalence of plasmid-mediated mcr-1 in E. coli from Père David’s deer in China. mcr-1-bearing IncI2 plasmid was the most frequent plasmid type, and the first IncI2 plasmid harboring both blaCTX-M-132 and mcr-1 is characterized here. Our results support the implication of Père David’s deer as a potential reservoir for MCR-1-producing E. coli. IMPORTANCE The mcr-1 gene is widely reported around the world and has been identified on various plasmids with different replicon types. Resistance to the last-line antibiotic colistin mediated by mcr-1 still represents a threat to global public health. Père David’s deer is a highly endangered species originating in China, and many deer are currently being raised in captivity for gradual reintroduction to the wild. If this species carries AMR bacteria, it will pose a potential threat to the environment. Therefore, research on the dissemination of mcr-1-positive E. coli from Père David’s deer is of great significance. This is the first study to investigate the microbiological and genomic surveillance of MCR-1-producing bacteria colonized among Père David’s deer in China, and we uncovered a high prevalence of MCR-1-producing E. coli. The importance of constant surveillance for AMR bacteria in nature reserve settings is emphasized.
Specificity of saturated absorption spectroscopy on Cs D2 line induced by a multi-wavelength laser

We present a study of the saturated absorption spectroscopy on cesium D2 line (6S1/2F = 4 → 6P3/2) induced by a multiwavelength laser and its specificity. Compared with the traditional saturated absorption spectroscopy induced by single-frequency laser, the major difference is that the peak amplitude can reach more than half of the Doppler background, and the second is that the number of the saturated absorption peaks is increased and not in the same direction, the line shape and amplitude of the spectrum change with the magnetic field. The frequency components of the multi-wavelength laser need to be studied in order to further analyze the principle of generation of the spectrum. The cesium atom laser spectroscopy induced by this unique multi-wavelength laser can be used for laser frequency stabilization. The interaction of multi-wavelength laser and atom can increase the utilization rate of the atoms, increase the signal amplitude, help to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, and then improve the frequency stability of lasers. In this experiment, the multiwavelength laser spectroscopy induced by the superposition of saturation effect, absorption effect, optical pumping effect and other physical effect is of great interest in high resolution laser spectroscopy and laser frequency stabilization.
The First Plants to Recolonize Western North America Following the Cretaceous-Paleogene Mass Extinction Event

Premise of research. A two-phase fern spike occurred immediately after the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K/Pg) mass extinction event. Solely on the basis of palynological evidence, researchers have traditionally attributed the first phase of this spike to the proliferation of a single species of a Cyathea-like fern in the earliest Danian. This traditional perspective is challenged by recent investigations linking Anemia-like fern foliage with Cyathidites spores at K/Pg boundary localities in the Raton Basin, where the fern spore spike was first discovered by R. H. Tschudy. Although evidence emerging from neighboring basins appears to corroborate this new perspective, it remains to be seen whether this generalization applies to the northern Great Plains. Methodology. A comprehensive list of the most common fern megafossils collected from earliest Danian plant localities across western North America was compiled to determine the number and potential identity of Cyathidites-producing ferns. Pivotal results. Three K/Pg survivors commonly collected from basal Paleocene strata in western North America conceivably produced psilate, trilete (Cyathidites) fern spores essentially identical to those observed at the K/Pg boundary fern spore spike: Anemia elongata (Newberry) Knowlton, Dennastra sorimarginata McIver et Basinger, and the Coniopteris-like fern “Dennstaedtia” americana Knowlton. Conclusions. Arborescent ferns were not among the first plants in western North America to thrive in the immediate wake of ecological collapse at the K/Pg boundary. Basal polypod ferns can be linked to Cyathidites spores in the northern Great Plains, perhaps because of a latitudinal climatic gradient. These results could explain taxonomic inversion in the dual-phase fern spore spike between western North America and New Zealand.