Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cytotoxic assessment of flying barb fish (Esomus metallicus) from a gold mine area with heavy metal contamination

Abstract This study aimed to investigate contamination by heavy metals including arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), chromium (Cr), lead (Pb), and manganese (Mn) and to conduct a cytotoxic assessment of Esomus metallicus from a gold mine area compared with that from the non-affected area. The E. metallicus samples were collected downstream of a gold mine area. The heavy metal concentrations were analysed by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES). The average amounts of As, Cd, Cr, Pb and Mn in water and E. metallicus samples from the gold mine area were 0.368 ± 0.009, 0.008 ± 0.006, 0.009 ± 0.001, 0.006 ± 0.002, 1.438 ± 0.058 mg/L, 0.65 ± 0.25, 0.03 ± 0.03, 2.12 ± 0.05, 0.25 ± 0.07 and 18.28 ± 6.82 mg/kg, respectively. The difference of As, Cr and Mn concentrations in E. metallicus samples between gold mine and non-affected areas was statistically significant (p < 0.05) except for Cd and Pb. The diploid chromosome number of E. metallicus from both areas was 2n = 50. There are six types of chromosomal aberrations including centric fragmentation (CF), centric gap (CG), single chromatid gap (SCG), fragmentation (F), deletion (D) and polyploidy (P). The most common chromosomal aberration type in the samples from the gold mine area was CG, and the difference in chromosomal aberration and the number of cells with chromosomal aberrations in E. metallicus between the study areas was statistically significant (p < 0.05). The percentages of chromosomal aberrations in the E. metallicus samples from gold mine and non-affected areas were 14.66 and 3.00, respectively.
A PRIMARY APPROACH FOR SEPARATION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF α-AMYLASE FROM WHITE PITAYA (HYLOCEREUS UNDATUS) PEELS BY POLYMER/SALT TWO PHASE SYSTEM

α-Amylase was isolated from white pitaya peel with two phase system in aqueous media and then characterized. The effects of polyethylene glycol (PEG), PEG concentration, molecular weight, sodium citrate, and sodium chloride (NaCl) on yield and purification factor were studied. The highest purification factor (4.5) and yield (83%) were obtained in system PEG 6000 (14% w/w)-sodium citrate (18% w/w) with 6% (w/w) NaCl. The purified α-amylase molecular weight exhibited a band above 40 KDa by SDS-PAGE. α-Amylase showed optimum activity at pH of 6.0 and temperature of 55 °C. The activity of this enzyme was stable in the pH scope of 6-8 and temperature scope of 10-55 °C. Various metal ions were evaluated for amylase activation/inhibition effect. Na+ and Ca2+ were exhibited to have appropriate activating effect, where as Mn2+, Zn2+, Fe3+, Ni+, Ba+ and Cu2+ had inhibition effect. In addition, this enzyme showed remarkable stability in the existence of TritonX-100, SDS, sodium perborate, Tween 20 and Tween-80. In conclusion, this enzyme has high stability and activity at suitable temperature and pH, and in the existence of different surfactants and metal ions. This approach has a potential in progress of various industrial applications by introducing a method for applying new, low-cost, and biocompatible amylases source.
The role of the iron ore deposit of Mugharet el-Wardeh / Jordan in the development of the use of iron in southern Bilad el-Sham

Chalcolithic period hematitic mace heads collected from different archaeological sites; Late Bronze copper lump, iron slag and iron ore samples from Mugharet el-Wardeh were analysed into their chemistry, mineralogy and lead isotopes. Mugharet el-Wardeh was exploited since the Chalcolithic period to produce high valuable objects. Those people were also familiar with copper smelting. Copper smelters of the Bronze Ages occasionally produced phosphor rich useless iron. Accumulated knowledge of a metal other than copper when smelting some kinds of copper ores and the knowledge about the iron ore mine of MeW played a vital role in the development of iron smelting. Iron Age II iron metallurgical remains were uncovered in different sites. Extra amounts of SiO\(_{2}\) and CaO were used during Iron Age II. In later periods, reduced amounts were used. During the Ayyubid-Mamluki period, different amounts of SiO\(_{2}\) were used in the smelting process. This would have resulted due to extreme need of iron.
Heterogeneity-aware Twitter Bot Detection with Relational Graph Transformers

Twitter bot detection has become an important and challenging task to combat misinformation and protect the integrity of the online discourse. State-of-the-art approaches generally leverage the topological structure of the Twittersphere, while they neglect the heterogeneity of relations and influence among users. In this paper, we propose a novel bot detection framework to alleviate this problem, which leverages the topological structure of user-formed heterogeneous graphs and models varying influence intensity between users. Specifically, we construct a heterogeneous information network with users as nodes and diversified relations as edges. We then propose relational graph transformers to model heterogeneous influence between users and learn node representations. Finally, we use semantic attention networks to aggregate messages across users and relations and conduct heterogeneity-aware Twitter bot detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposal outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a comprehensive Twitter bot detection benchmark. Additional studies also bear out the effectiveness of our proposed relational graph transformers, semantic attention networks and the graph-based approach in general.
Effect of mineral salt replacement on properties of Turkish White cheese

In this study, combinations of different mineral salt replacement for sodium chloride were used in Turkish White cheese production. The effect of sodium chloride substitutes on the physical, chemical and textural characteristics of cheese samples was examined. Five types of brine solution including NaCl only (K: control) (16 % w/w), only 50 % NaCl (L) (8 % w/w), 30 % CaCl2 and 70 % NaCl (M) (16 % w/w), 30% KCl and 70 % NaCl (N) (16% w/w), and PanSalt (P) (16 % w/w) were used in cheese production. PanSalt (57 % NaCl+28 % KCl+12 % MgSO4) is a commercial salt with low sodium content. The characteristics of cheeses determined within the study included the total dry matter, ash, protein, fat, salt, titratable acidity, pH values, percentage of water soluble nitrogen, percentage of trichloroacetic acid soluble nitrogen and proteose-pepton nitrogen; the sodium, calcium, potassium, phosphorus and magnesium content and the textural characteristics (via a texture profile analysis). In comparison to the control cheese, this substitution showed no significant effect on the comprehensive parameters evaluated. The Na, K, Ca and P content showed important differences among the cheese samples. The total sodium content of L, M, N and P samples decreased significantly. In regard to this research results it can be said that it is possible to produce low sodium cheese with using proper quantity of mineral salt replacers.
Comparative pharmacokinetics of four active components on normal and diabetic rats after oral administration of Gandi capsules

The Gandi capsule, a famous traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), is a hospital preparation that has been widely used in China for decades for the treatment of diabetes. The aim of this study is to compare the pharmacokinetics of four of the active components of Gandi capsules, which are the primary antidiabetic ingredients, on normal and diabetic Sprague-Dawley rats following oral administration of the capsules. Baicalin, wogonoside, wogonin, loganin and puerarin (internal standard) were prepared using methanol precipitation, and the separation of the five components was achieved through a ZORBAX Eclipse Plus C18 column by gradient elution using water (containing 0.1% formic acid) and acetonitrile as the mobile phase. After oral administration of Gandi capsules to the normal and diabetic rats, plasma was harvested and analyzed using liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry, and the primary pharmacokinetic parameters were calculated by DAS 2.0. Compared with the normal group, some pharmacokinetic parameters especially the AUC0–48 h of the four compounds significantly increased in the diabetic groups. The results demonstrated that the four constituents in normal and diabetic rats had obvious differences in some pharmacokinetic characteristics, suggesting that the rate and extent of drug metabolism were altered in diabetic animals. The results could be helpful for demonstrating the compatibility mechanism and providing clinical medication guidance for Gandi capsules.
Selected properties of organic soils under boreal mire spruce forest in the Romincka Forest, NE Poland

Abstract The paper presents selected properties of the organic soils developed in boreal mire spruce forests (Sphagno girensohnii-Piceetum) in the Romincka Forest (NE Poland). Additionally, the relationship between soil fertility and forest stand productivity was investigated. Data from 12 soil profiles, differing in terms of peatland ecological type (raised bog, transitional bog and fen) was used. The significance of the differences in soil properties among peatland types was assessed with the Kruskal-Wallis test. Soil fertility was described using soil trophic index (SIGo), whereas stand productivity according to site index (SI) value. The properties of the analysed soils varied significantly in terms of peatland type. Soils from fens were more fertile (SIGo 25–31), less acidic (pH > 5.7), with lower total potential acidity (36–40 cmol(+)·kg−1), higher base saturation (77–79%), Ca2+ content (116–136 cmol(+)·kg−1) and base exchange capacity (123–145 cmol(+)·kg−1) than soils from transition or raised bogs. No significant effect of soil fertility on the site index of stands growing on analysed soils was observed (r = 0.385, p = 0.216).
Can Language Models Learn Commonsense Truisms?

Language Models (LMs) pre-trained on extremely large corpora have achieved significantly better performances than previous models on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) benchmarks including commonsense reasoning tasks. Speciﬁcally, prior studies have shown that simply ﬁne-tuned LMs can achieve performances on Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) close to human-level. However, the crucial question of whether LMs can solve commonsense tasks due to the capability of reasoning or just shallow pattern matching has not been addressed. This work aims to extensively analyze the current LMs and probe their capacity to understand commonsense tru-isms regardless of how they are phrased. We found that current state-of-the-art LMs are just picking up statistical patterns in the training data and do not have the capacity to fully understand commonsesne truisms.
A numerical model for drying of spherical object in an indirect type solar dryer and estimating the drying time at different moisture level and air temperature

ABSTRACT A numerical model for simultaneous heat and mass transfer was developed for solar drying of spherical objects and the object considered is green peas. Solar collector outlet temperature is assumed as drying chamber temperature and justified through energy balance equations. Assumptions are imposed on heat and mass transfer governing equations without losing the physics of the problem. Discretization is performed by finite difference method with implicit scheme. To generalize, the governing equation and boundary conditions are non-dimensionalized. The set of finite difference equations was solved by Tridiagonal Matrix Algorithm and a computer code in MATLAB was developed to solve them. The drying curves showed two stages of drying, initial, and secondary drying stage. At all drying temperatures and drying time, the center moisture was maximum and it was minimum at the boundary. A percentage of 85.67 surface moisture content and 25.33% center moisture was eliminated in the first 1 hr at 348 K. The product should be dried up to 7.45, 4.74, and 3.74 hr at air drying temperatures of 318, 333, and 348 K respectively, to maintain 10% of the product’s initial moisture content. The result is compared with the experimental result from literature and they are found to be in good agreement.
Effect of Work from Home on Job Satisfaction in Response to the Outbreak of COVID 19

COVID-19 pandemic has made it impossible for the current workforce to interact with stakeholders, and this is to mitigate the viral spread for a significant proportion of the workforce. The pandemic situation in the country led both employers and employees to look for alternative work arrangements. According to various research findings, the empirical knowledge gap was identified regarding the work from home and job satisfaction of women employees in Sri Lanka. To fill this empirical knowledge gap, this study was conducted with two research objectives to determine the level of WFH and job satisfaction and explore the impact of WFH factors on the job satisfaction of women employees who WFH in Sri Lanka. Primary data were collected from 120 women employees working from home for the companies located in the Colombo area, Sri Lanka using structured questionnaires. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and multiple regression analysis. Based on the findings of this study, the level of the WFH factors and job satisfaction was high. Multiple regression analysis revealed that among all WFH factors, seven of them including time planning skills, reduce the time for communication with co-workers, possibility to WFH in case of sickness, supervisor’s trust and support, possibility to save expenses, possibility to take care of family members and suitability of working place at home has a significant impact on the job satisfaction of women employees and the possibility to access the organization documents at home has no significant impact on the job satisfaction of women employees. The findings of this study identify a significant positive effect of WFH on the job satisfaction of women employees. Moreover, the results of this study guide to exercise effective strategies to direct employees for the usage of modern technology to access documents online.
Intervening role of supervisor trust and leader-member exchange: an investigation into the role of supervisor support on employee innovative behaviour

ARTICLE INFO Abstract The hospitality industry is extremely competitive, and employee innovative behaviour plays an essential role in determining whether hotels survive, grow, or achieve a competitive advantage. This research implements structural equations modelling via SMART-PLS3 to analyse the 504 valid questionnaires to assess the theoretical framework and identify the factors that influence employee innovative behaviour. This paper focuses on five-star hotels in Egypt which use an innovative approach to evaluate the influence of Perceived supervisor support (PSS) through supervisor trust (ST) and Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) on employee innovative behaviour (EIB). The investigation depicts the relations among the different variables of the study and has enhanced our understanding of EIB. Results indicated the PSS predicted LMX significantly, which in turn influenced the ST. PSS has also been found to have an indirect impact on the EIB through LMX and ST. The variation clarified by the proposed research model in the EIB is 32.3%.
The Shadow of Deterrence: Why capable actors engage in conflict short of war

Recent conflicts have increasingly occurred in the “gray zone” between peace and open warfare. Novel tactics—from cyber operations to “little green men”—may make aggression at low intensities more attractive to challengers (cheaper/more effective). Alternatively, existing deterrence networks may force motivated challengers to act more furtively (stability-instability). These dueling “push-pull” logics suggest contrasting conflict dynamics impacting stability and peace. We develop a game theoretic model to analyze gray zone conflict in which deterrence success is variable, rather than dichotomous. In the model, the scope and intensity of a challenger’s provocation varies inversely with the implicit credibility of the defender’s deterrent threat. We find empirical support for the stability-instability logic in Russian military actions since the 1990s; Russia is more restrained, and less effective, against nations in, or closely tied to, NATO. States face inherent trade-offs between stability and military potency in limiting the risk of escalation. ∗Electronic address: jagannon@ucsd.edu †Electronic address: egartzke@ucsd.edu ‡Electronic address: jon.lindsay@utoronto.ca Electronic address: peter.schram@vanderbilt.edu
Physico-chemical parameters and culturable yeast diversity in surface water: a consequence of pollution

COPYRIGHT © The Author(s) Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0) Rivers in the North West Province (NWP) of South Africa are polluted by various anthropogenic activities that are associated with agricultural, domestic, industrial, and mining activities. Pollutants and effluent resulting from these activities impact the physico-chemical and biological characteristics of river water. More particularly, domestic and agricultural pollution has been associated with the occurrence of pathogenic yeast species in water. The aim of this study was to determine physico-chemical parameters, yeast levels, and the antifungal susceptibility of pathogenic yeasts in river water. Physico-chemical parameters and yeast levels were determined using standard procedures. Yeasts were identified by biochemical tests and 26S rRNA gene sequencing. Disc diffusion antifungal susceptibility tests were conducted on identified potential pathogenic yeasts. Physico-chemical parameters were within target water quality ranges (TWQR) for livestock farming but were mostly out of range for irrigation. Yeast levels (incubation at 37°C) ranged from 363 to 1 778 CFU/L. There were significant differences (p < 0.05) in the physico-chemical parameters and yeast levels between some seasons and among the river systems under study. A positive association was observed between temperature, COD and yeast levels in all the river systems. Ascomycetes, which were the most prevalent isolates, were identified as Candida spp. (35%), Pichia spp. (13%), Cyberlinera spp. (12%), Meyerozyma spp. (11%), Clavispora spp. (10%), Saccharomyces spp. (6%), Kluyveromyces spp. (5%), Yamadazyma spp. (4%), Trichosporon spp. (3%), and Wickerhamomyces spp. (1%). Antifungal resistance of the potential pathogenic yeasts was as follows: flucytosine and miconazole (100%) > fluconazole (78.5%) > econazole, and miconazole and ketoconazole (49.6%) > nystatin (15.2%). The river water systems explored in the study are used for agricultural, domestic and recreational purposes. Direct contact with the water, especially by immune-compromised people, may pose a health threat and should be further investigated. Physico-chemical parameters and culturable yeast diversity in surface water: a consequence of pollution
The DKU-DukeECE System for the Self-Supervision Speaker Verification Task of the 2021 VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge

This report describes the submission of the DKU-DukeECE team to the self-supervision speaker verification task of the 2021 VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge (VoxSRC). Our method employs an iterative labeling framework to learn self-supervised speaker representation based on a deep neural network (DNN). The framework starts with training a self-supervision speaker embedding network by maximizing agreement between different segments within an utterance via a contrastive loss. Taking advantage of DNN's ability to learn from data with label noise, we propose to cluster the speaker embedding obtained from the previous speaker network and use the subsequent class assignments as pseudo labels to train a new DNN. Moreover, we iteratively train the speaker network with pseudo labels generated from the previous step to bootstrap the discriminative power of a DNN. Also, visual modal data is incorporated in this self-labeling framework. The visual pseudo label and the audio pseudo label are fused with a cluster ensemble algorithm to generate a robust supervisory signal for representation learning. Our submission achieves an equal error rate (EER) of 5.58% and 5.59% on the challenge development and test set, respectively.
Synchronized Coevolution between Supermassive Black Holes and Galaxies over the Last Seven Billion Years as Revealed by Hyper Suprime-Cam

We measure the evolution of the BH–⋆ relation using 584 uniformly selected Sloan Digital Sky Survey quasars at 0.2 < z < 0.8. The black hole masses ( BH ) are derived from the single-epoch virial mass estimator using the Hβ emission line and span the range 7.0<logBH/M⊙<9.5 . The host-galaxy stellar masses ( ⋆ ), which cover the interval 10.0<log⋆/M⊙<11.5 , are determined by performing two-dimensional quasar-host decomposition of the Hyper Suprime-Cam images and spectral energy distribution fitting. To quantify sample selection biases and measurement uncertainties on the mass terms, a mock quasar sample is constructed to jointly constrain the redshift evolution of the BH–⋆ relation and its intrinsic scatter (σ μ ) through forward modeling. We find that the level of evolution is degenerate with σ μ , such that both a positive mild evolution (i.e., BH/⋆ increases with redshift) with a small σ μ and a negative mild evolution with a larger σ μ are consistent with our data. The posterior distribution of σ μ enables us to put a strong constraint on the intrinsic scatter of the BH–⋆ relation, which has a best inference of 0.25−0.04+0.03 dex, consistent with the local value. The redshift evolution of the BH–⋆ relation relative to the local relation is constrained to be 1+z0.12−0.27+0.28 , in agreement with no significant evolution since z ∼ 0.8. The tight and unevolving BH–⋆ relation is suggestive of a coupling through active galactic nuclei feedback or/and a common gas supply at work, thus restricting the mass ratio of galaxies and their black holes to a limited range. Given the considerable stellar disk component, the BH–bulge relation may evolve as previously seen at higher redshifts.
Visualization of chromatin higher-order structures and dynamics in live cells

Chromatin has highly organized structures in the nucleus, and these higher-order structures are proposed to regulate gene activities and cellular processes. Sequencing-based techniques, such as Hi-C, and fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) have revealed a spatial segregation of active and inactive compartments of chromatin, as well as the non-random positioning of chromosomes in the nucleus, respectively. However, regardless of their efficiency in capturing target genomic sites, these techniques are limited to fixed cells. Since chromatin has dynamic structures, live cell imaging techniques are highlighted for their ability to detect conformational changes in chromatin at a specific time point, or to track various arrangements of chromatin through long-term imaging. Given that the imaging approaches to study live cells are dramatically advanced, we recapitulate methods that are widely used to visualize the dynamics of higher-order chromatin structures.