Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nest‐site selection by Interior Least Terns and Piping Plovers at managed, off‐channel sites along the Central Platte River in Nebraska, USA

Given the high productivity of Interior Least Terns (Sternula antillarum athalassos) and Piping Plovers (Charadrius melodus) on constructed off-channel nesting sites along the central Platte River in Nebraska, USA, and the possibility of creating similar habitats at other locations in their breeding range, understanding how these species use off-channel nesting habitats is important. We used data collected along the central Platte River in Nebraska, USA, over a 15-year period (2001–2015), and a discrete-choice modeling framework to assess the effects of physical site attributes and inter- and intraspecific associations on off-channel nest-site selection by Interior Least Terns and Piping Plovers. We found that Piping Plovers avoided nesting near each other, whereas colonial Interior Least Terns selected nest sites near those of conspecifics. In addition, the relative probability of use for both species was maximized when distance to the nearest predator perch was ≥ 150 m and elevation above the waterline was ≥ 3 m. Probability of use for nesting by Interior Least Terns increased as distance to water increased, whereas the probability of use by Piping Plovers was maximized when distance to water was ~50 m. Our results suggest that important features of constructed, off-channel nesting sites for both species should include no potential predator perches within 150 m of nesting habitat and nesting areas at least 3 m above the waterline. Efficient site designs for Interior Least Terns would be circular, maximizing the area of nesting habitat away from the shoreline, whereas an effective site design for Piping Plovers would be more linear, maximizing the area of nesting habitat near the waterline. An efficient site design for both species would be lobate, incorporating centralized nesting habitat for Interior Least Terns and increased access to foraging areas for nesting and brood-rearing Piping Plovers.
Antimicrobial activity of Annona crassiflora Mart. against Candida albicans

This study evaluated the antimicrobial activity of the ethanol extract of Annona crassiflora Mart. , against the fungus, Candida albicans present in the oral microbiota. The tests showed that the fractions of ethanol extract of the root bark and wood root of A. crassiflora showed a positive result. Of the strains studied, three showed sensitivity to 12 fractions and sub-fractions of A. crassiflora (66%). In the strains studied, strain 05 was the one that proved the most sensitive statistically (p <0.05). Their structures were determined using spectral techniques (NMR 1H and 13C) and based on literature data. Key words: Annona classiflora, Candida albicans, antimicrobial activity.
Prevalence and antimicrobial susceptibility pattern of ESBL producing gram negative rods causing nosocomial infection

To find the possible risks to hospitalized patients from hospital environment, this study was conducted with aim to investigate about prevalence of Gram Negative Rods (GNRs), their antibiotics susceptibility profile and ESBL producing ability of strains from a tertiary care hospital in Kohat, Pakistan. Total 120 samples were collected from medical, surgical, orthopedic, children and gyneae wards. All the samples were inoculated on various media including Blood Agar, MacConky Agar, EMB Agar and Clid Agar. All GNRs were identified on the basis of biochemical tests performed on API20E kit. ESBL detection and antimicrobial susceptibility profile of all isolates was performed on Mueller-Hinton Agar plates using Kirby Bauer's Disc Diffusion method. From all the samples, Pseudomonas aeruginosa was isolated from 49 (40.83%) samples, Proteus sp. from 35 (29.17%) samples, Klebsiella pneumoniae from 21 (17.50%) samples and Escherichia coli from 15 (12.50%) samples. ESBL producing strains were found as 47.36% in Klebsiella pneumoniae, 46.42% in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, 77.7% in E. coli, and 20% in Proteus sp. Antibiotics resistance profile of both ESBL producing and non-ESBL producing bacteria was also too high.
Tomato fertigation with dairy cattle wastewater

ABSTRACT The use of wastewater in the fertigation of agricultural crops increases productivity and product quality, and contributes to reduce environmental pollution. In this work, the objective was to evaluate how the use of dairy cattle wastewater (DCWW) in the fertigation of tomatoes affected production and productivity, as well as foliar nutritional contents, in an organic farming system. Treatments consisted of six nitrogen doses (0, 50, 100, 200, 300 and 400%), having N recommendation for tomato (100 kg/ha) as reference, applied using DCWW via fertigation. DCWW is made up of washing water, urine, feces and milk. Stem diameter, branch length, weekly fruit yield per plant and aggregate productivity were evaluated. N, P, K, Ca, Mg, S, Cu, Mn, Fe, Zn and B foliar contents were quantified. Data were submitted to analysis of variance (p≤0.05) and, where significant, polynomial regression models were applied. Treatment means were compared by the Tukey test (p≤0.05). The highest production, productivity and nutrient foliar accumulation were observed when 400% of the N dose recommended for tomato was used. There was an increasing linear effect on weekly and aggregate yield and also on nutrient accumulation in leaves as function of the applied N dose. N fertilization in tomato organic production can be carried out using DCWW via fertigation, but with a complementary mineral fertilization to supply plants with adequate amounts of phosphorus and potassium.
Variations in abundance and community composition of denitrifying bacteria during a cyanobacterial bloom in a eutrophic shallow lake in China

ABSTRACT Although cyanobacterial blooms can change microbial communities, it is still unclear what impact such harmful blooms will have on denitrifying bacteria, the drivers of the removal of excessive nitrogen from water. In order to clarify the impact, populations of denitrifying bacteria, with periodic proliferation and dominance of cyanobacteria in a eutrophic shallow lake located in southeast China, were investigated using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) and 454-pyrosequencing based on the copper-containing nitrite reductase (nirK) gene, cytochrome cd1-containing nitrite reductase (nirS) gene and nitrous oxide reductase (nosZ) gene. Samples were collected periodically during a three-month period when the cyanobacterial density gradually increased. In the qPCR analyses, abundances of nirK, nirS and nosZ were intensely positively correlated with the biomass of cyanobacteria. Moreover, 454-pyrosequencing revealed that the community composition of denitrifying bacteria shifted with the increase in cyanobacterial density. These results indicated that the shifts of the community composition of denitrifying bacteria might be related to cyanobacterial blooms, which could potentially lead to alterations of denitrification in eutrophic water.
Impact of Agro-forestry Systems on Nutritional Status and Biological Activity on Rainfed Red Sandy Loam Soils

Different agroforestry systems and tree systems (15 years old) were studied for their microbial buildup in red sandy loam soil at Agroforestry Research Unit of Acharya N.G. Ranga Agricultural University, Hyderabad. Significant differences were observed in the nature of microbial population viz., bacteria, actinomycetes and fungi. Agri-silvi-horti system harboured more number of bacteria than other systems, signifying that multi-component systems have a role to play in microbial proliferation. In Eucalyptus plantation, the population of fungi was less comparative to bacteria and actinomycetes. The presence of allelochemicals and reduction in pH might be the reason for such situation. There was significant correlation between microbes and various soil chemical parameters. C:N and C:P ratios were calculated and it was found that tree leaves with fast decomposition rate showed higher ratios than those with slow decomposition such as in teak. Significant differences were also observed in physio-chemical properties of soils between agroforestry and tree systems studied. It was found that organic carbon is a principle component which can cause significant improvement or otherwise of microbial population build up in soils of light textured nature.
The effect of teaching the nature of science on students’ acceptance and understanding of evolution: myth or reality?

Abstract The results of studies of the nature of science (NOS) as a factor that enhances students’ understanding of evolution have been inconclusive. Therefore, the main purpose of this study was to test the role of NOS instruction in enhancing students’ learning about evolution. We used a quasi-experimental design with pre- and post-tests to investigate the impact of teaching evolution with and without NOS in two classes with 15–16-year-old students, who were randomly assigned to these two classes. To measure their understanding of NOS and their acceptance and understanding of evolution, we used three different instruments that have been shown to generate reliable and valid inferences in comparable populations. The main results of this study were that, in the class in which the teaching of evolution included NOS instruction, the students’ understanding of NOS and their acceptance of evolution significantly improved. However, irrespective of the use of NOS instruction, both classes increased their understanding of evolution. These results support the claim that NOS instruction may influence students’ acceptance of evolution but not their understanding of evolution and natural selection.
Insights into mechanisms of metal homeostasis in Staphylococcus aureus

Staphylococcus aureus does not produce the low-molecular-weight (LMW) thiol glutathione, but it does produce the LMW thiol bacillithiol (BSH). To better understand the roles that BSH plays in staphylococcal metabolism, we constructed and examined strains lacking BSH. Phenotypic analysis found that the BSH-deficient strains cultured either aerobically or anaerobically had growth defects that were alleviated by the addition of exogenous iron (Fe) or the amino acids leucine and isoleucine. The activity of the iron-sulfur (Fe-S) clusterdependent enzymes LeuCD and IlvD, required for the biosynthesis of leucine and isoleucine, were decreased in strains lacking BSH. The BSH-deficient cells also had decreased aconitase and glutamate synthase activities suggesting a general defect in Fe-S cluster biogenesis. The phenotypes of the BSH-deficient strains were exacerbated in strains lacking the Fe-S cluster carrier Nfu and partially suppressed by multicopy expression of either sufA or nfu, suggesting functional overlap between BSH and Fe-S carrier proteins. Biochemical analysis found that SufA bound and transferred Fe-S clusters to apo-aconitase, verifying that it serves as an Fe-S cluster carrier. The results presented are consistent with the hypothesis that BSH has roles in Fe homeostasis and the carriage of Fe-S clusters to apo-proteins in S. aureus.
Influence of eggshell colour on egg yolk antibody level, incubation results, and growth in broiler breeders

ABSTRACT This study was performed to determine the effect of shell colour in eggs acquired from Ross-308 broiler breeders on the interior and exterior quality of the egg, the antibody content of the egg yolk, and growth performance. The shell colours of a total of 1350 eggs were classified, using a colorimeter, into three groups: dark (E67). The difference between groups with respect to egg weight, shape index, shell weight, and Haugh unit value was significant. Egg yolk antibody content [. ]
Growth, symbiotic and yield response of N-fertilized and Rhizobium inoculated common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.)

Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is one of the most important and widely cultivated pulse crops in most developing countries. However, its cultivation is globally constrained mainly by low soil fertility and lack of improved agronomic practices. A field experiment was conducted at Hawassa University College of Agriculture, Hawassa Southern Ethiopia to determine the effect of N fertilization and Rhizobium phaseoli strain HB-429 inoculation on growth, nodulation, yield and yield components of common bean variety Hawassa Dume. The experiment was laid out as a randomized complete block design with three replications. Results showed significant increase in growth, nodulation, yield and yield components in plants inoculated with Rhizobium strain HB-429 over the control. Thus, from the results of this study, it can be concluded that Rhizobium inoculation with strain HB-429 is the best performing treatment to be recommended for profitable grain yield of common bean at the Hawassa and other similar areas. Key words: Common bean, grain yield, nitrogen, nodulation, Rhizobium inoculation
Comparison of the physicochemical and sensory characteristics of Rhode Island Red (R-11) capons and cockerels

Abstract The aim of the study was the comparison of the physicochemical and sensory characteristics of capons and cockerels. The experiment involved 80 Rhode Island Red (R-11) cockerels, which were randomly assigned to two groups with 40 birds per group. Group I (control) consisted of uncastrated cockerels, and group II was comprised of birds subjected to castration at 9 weeks of age. The castration was performed under local anaesthesia by a veterinary surgeon. The birds received the same diets ad libitum and were kept on litter under optimal environmental conditions, at a stocking density of 7 birds/m2. At the end of fattening, 8 birds whose body weights were similar to the group average were selected for slaughter from each group. After slaughter, the birds were checked for castration success (removal of the testes), analysed for dressing percentage and technological parameters of the meat and subjected to chemical and sensory evaluation of the breast and leg muscles. In summary, the castration of Rhode Island Red cockerels (R-11) had a favourable effect on body weight, feed conversion ratio, dressing percentage and carcass muscling. The breast and leg muscles of the capons were characterised by better water holding capacity, tenderness and sensory score compared to the uncastrated cockerels. In addition, the castration had a positive effect on the content of crude protein in both the breast and leg muscles which, with a higher crude fat content, were characterised by a more favourable profile of fatty acids, i.e. lower SFA and higher n-6 and n-3 PUFA content.
Inoculation with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, fertilization and seed rates influence growth and development of lyme grass seedlings in two desert areas in Iceland

The potential benefits of artificial inoculation with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) for lyme grass seedling establishment were tested in combination with varying fertilizer and seed rates in a long term revegetation study in two sandy deserts in Iceland. Fertilizer inputs proved more effective than other treatment variables in increasing vegetative growth, flowering and sand accretion of lyme grass seedlings. For this, re-fertilization was more important than the initial dose. AMF inoculation initially improved seedling growth but after the first year the effects became neutral or negative. While fertilization generally reduced AMF colonization, the negative effects of inoculation on lyme grass were enhanced by fertilization. Larger seed doses raised interand intraspecific competition, decreasing lyme grass vegetative regeneration and associate vegetation. Based on the current results, the application of AMF inoculation cannot be recommended for lyme grass establishment at the present. However, low seed rates (≤50 seeds m-2) and low initial fertilizer doses (≤10 g m-2) in combination with moderate re-fertilization application rates for a few years are apparently economical for the establishment of lyme grass for revegetation projects.
Learning to Form Skill-based Teams of Experts

We focus on the composition of teams of experts that collectively cover a set of required skills based on their historical collaboration network and expertise. Prior works are primarily based on the shortest path between experts on the expert collaboration network, and suffer from three major shortcomings: (1) they are computationally expensive due to the complexity of finding paths on large network structures; (2) they use a small portion of the entire historical collaboration network to reduce the search space; hence, may form sub-optimal teams; and, (3) they fall short in sparse networks where the majority of the experts have only participated in a few teams in the past. Instead of forming a large network of experts, we propose to learn relationships among experts and skills through a variational Bayes neural architecture wherein: i) we consider all past team compositions as training instances to predict future teams; ii) we bring scalability for large networks of experts due to the neural architecture; and, iii) we address sparsity by incorporating uncertainty on the neural network's parameters which yields a richer representation and more accurate team composition. We empirically demonstrate how our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of effectiveness and efficiency based on a large DBLP dataset.
Bovine Milk Allergens: A Comprehensive Review.

Cow milk allergy is one of the most common food allergies in early childhood and often persists through adult life, forcing an individual to a complete elimination diet. Milk proteins are present in uncounted food products, such as cheese, yogurt, or bakery item, exposing allergic persons to a constant threat. Many efforts have been made to overcome this global problem and to improve the life quality of allergic individuals. First, proper and reliable food labeling is fundamental for consumers, but the verification of its compliance is also needed, which should rely on accurate and sensitive analytical methods to detect milk allergens in processed foods. At the same time, strategies to reduce milk allergenicity, such as immunotherapy or the use of food processing techniques to modify allergen structure, have to be extensively studied. Recent research findings on the applicability of food processing, such as heat treatment, fermentation, or high pressure, have revealed great potential in reducing milk allergenicity. In this review, significant research advances on cow milk allergy are explored, focusing on prevalence, diagnosis, and therapy. Molecular characterization of cow milk allergens and cross-reactivity with other nonbovine milk species are described, as well as the effects of processing, food matrix, and digestibility on milk allergenicity. Additionally, analytical methods for the detection of milk allergens in food are described, from immunoassays and mass spectrometry methods for protein analysis to real-time polymerase chain reaction for DNA analysis.
Evaluation of anti-microbial activity of leaf and bark extracts of Murraya koenigii (curry leaves)

Aim of the study is to evaluate the Anti-Microbial activity of Murraya Koenigii. It is an aromatic more or less deciduous shrub or a small tree. It shares the aromatic nature. It is a plant which has important uses in traditional system of medicine. Leaves are used internally in dysentery also checking vomiting. Steam distillate of the leaves can be used as stomachic & purgative and bark powder is used as tonic, stomachic, & carminative. In the present study preliminary phytochemical screening was performed for Ethanolic leaf and bark extracts and results showed the presence of carbohydrates, alkaloids, tannins & saponins. These extracts were screened for their anti-microbial activity against the pathogens namely Staphylococcus aureus, Proteus vulgaris, Enterobacter aerogenes & Lactobacillus by agar cup-plate method. The pattern of inhibition varied with both the extracts and the microorganism tested. Among these extracts, Ethanolic bark extract showed the significant anti-bacterial activity against most tested microbes. The most susceptible micro-organism was Staphylococcus aureus followed by Proteus vulgaris and Enterobacter aerogenes.
Effect of melatonin on GnIH precursor gene expression in Nile tilapia, Oreochromis niloticus

Abstract Sexual maturation and gonadal development of fish is greatly influenced by photic information, an external environmental factor, and melatonin mediates this information to regulate gonadotropin (GTH) secretion and gonadal activation. The relationship between gonadotropin inhibiting hormone (GnIH) and melatonin in fish, however, has not been studied to date. Here, the GnIH expression pattern and daily change of melatonin levels were compared to each other in mature tilapia (body length 16.1 ± 0.2 cm, body weight 77.7 ± 3.43 g), and the effect of melatonin injection on GnIH gene expression was investigated. GnIH gene expression increased at night when the secretion of melatonin increased, whereas gene expression decreased during the day when melatonin secretion decreased. Injecting tilapia intraperitoneally with melatonin increased GnIH gene expression and decreased the expression of gonadotropin releasing hormone (GnRH) and GTH. Furthermore, the injection decreased the 11-KT concentration in male tilapia. These results indicate that melatonin is likely to suppress the hypothalamus-pituitary-gonad (HPG) axis via the action of GnIH in this species.
Deep Behavior Tracing with Multi-level Temporality Preserved Embedding

Behavior tracing or predicting is a key component in various application scenarios like online user modeling and ubiquitous computing, which significantly benefits the system design (e.g., resource pre-caching) and improves the user experience (e.g., personalized recommendation). Traditional behavior tracing methods like Markovian and sequential models take recent behaviors as input and infer the next move by using the most real-time information. However, these existing methods rarely comprehensively model the low-level temporal irregularity in the recent behavior sequence, i.e., the unevenly distributed time intervals between consecutive behaviors, and the high-level periodicity in the long-term activity cycle, i.e., the periodic behavior patterns of each user. In this paper, we propose an intuitive and effective embedding method called Multi-level Aligned Temporal Embedding (MATE), which can tackle the temporal irregularity of recent behavior sequence and then align with the long-term periodicity in the activity cycle. Specifically, we combine time encoding and decoupled attention mechanism to build a temporal self-attentive sequential decoder to address the behavior-level temporal irregularity. To embed the activity cycle from the raw behavior sequence, we employ a novel temporal dense interpolation followed by a self-attentive sequential encoder. Then we first propose the periodic activity alignment to capture the long-term activity-level periodicity and construct the activity-behavior alignment to combine the activity-level with behavior-level representation to make the final prediction. We experimentally prove the effectiveness of the proposed model on a game player behavior sequence dataset and a real-world App usage trace dataset. Further, we deploy the proposed behavior tracing model into a game scene preloading service which can effectively reduce the waiting time of scene transfer by preloading the predicted game scene for each user.