Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Structures of PKA–phospholamban complexes reveal a mechanism of familial dilated cardiomyopathy

Several mutations identified in phospholamban (PLN) have been linked to familial dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) and heart failure, yet the underlying molecular mechanism remains controversial. PLN interacts with sarco/endoplasmic reticulum Ca2+-ATPase (SERCA) and regulates calcium uptake, which is modulated by the protein kinase A (PKA)-dependent phosphorylation of PLN during the fight-or-flight response. Here, we present the crystal structures of the catalytic domain of PKA in complex with wild-type and DCM-mutant PLNs. Our structures, combined with the results from other biophysical and biochemical assays, reveal a common disease mechanism: the mutations in PLN reduce its phosphorylation level by changing its conformation and weakening its interactions with PKA. In addition, we demonstrate that another more ubiquitous SERCA-regulatory peptide, called another-regulin (ALN), shares a similar mechanism mediated by PKA in regulating SERCA activity. Significance Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a common type of heart disease. Familial DCM is associated with mutations on phospholamban (PLN), but the mechanism remains elusive. Phosphorylation of PLN is known to influence its physiological function. We hypothesize that the connection between such mutations and DCM may involve decreased PLN phosphorylation levels due to less efficient binding to protein kinase A. We utilize x-ray crystallography, SPR, enzyme kinetic assays, thermal melt assays, and NMR to examine the structural and energetic consequences for PKA-catalyzed phosphorylation of PLN variants containing DCM-associated mutations. Our results provide a foundation to understand the general working mechanism of PKA and the physiological regulation of PLN by PKA, and also provide important insight into the pathological mechanism of DCM.
Use of palm oil biodiesel blends as a fuel for compression ignition engine.

Problem statement: The increasing awareness of the environmental haza rds and the alarming levels of air pollution have led to more r estrictive regulations on engines emission control in recent years. Approach: The dwindling resources and rising cost of crude o il had resulted in an intensified search for alternate fuels. In the pres ent study biodiesel (palm oil methyl ester) blends with diesel was investigated in a direct injection stati onary diesel engine. The stationary engine test bed used consists of a single-cylinder four stroke dies el engine, eddy current dynamometer with computer control data acquisition system and exhaust emissio ns analyzer. Results: Engine tests were conducted at constant speed using neat diesel fuel and variou s proportions of biodiesel blends. The exhaust emissions such as CO, HC and NOx were measured using exhaust gas analyzer. Performance characteristics like brake thermal efficiency and s pecific fuel consumption were recorded. The differences in the measured emissions and performance of the biodiesel-diesel fuel blends from the baseline operation of the engine, i.e., when workin g with neat diesel fuel were determined and compared. Conclusion: It is concluded that the lower blends of biodiesel increased the brake thermal efficiency and reduced the fuel consumption. Biodie sel blends produces lower engine emissions than diesel. From the result, it has been established th at 20-40% of palm oil biodiesel can be use as a substitute for diesel without any engine modificati ons.
Robust gain-scheduling energy-to-peak control of vehicle lateral dynamics stabilisation

In this paper, we investigate the vehicle lateral dynamics stabilisation problem to enhance vehicle handling by considering time-varying longitudinal velocity. The longitudinal velocity is described by a polytope with finite vertices and a novel technique is proposed to reduce the number of vertices. Since the tyre dynamics is nonlinear, the cornering stiffness is represented via the norm-bounded uncertainty. Concerning the time-varying velocity and the nonlinear tyre model, a linear parameter-varying vehicle model is obtained. As the velocity and the states are measurable, a gain-scheduling state-feedback controller is introduced. In the lateral control, the sideslip angle is required to be as small as possible and the yaw rate is constrained to a certain level. Thus, the control objective is to minimise the sideslip angle while the yaw rate is under a prescribed level or constrain both the sideslip angle and the yaw rate to prescribed levels. To consider the transient response of the closed-loop system, the -stability is also employed in the energy-to-peak control. The optimal controller can be obtained by solving a set of linear matrix inequalities. A nonlinear vehicle model is utilised to illustrate the design procedure and the effectiveness of the proposed design method. Finally, simulations and comparisons are carried out to show the significant advantage of the designed controller. Compared to the open-loop system, the closed-loop system with the designed controller can achieve much smaller sideslip angle and the yaw rate is closer to the desired yaw rate from a reference model. Therefore, the vehicle safety and the handling are both improved in our simulation cases.
EFFECTS OF FLOW INJECTION FROM OUTER CASING UPON TURBINE NOZZLE VANE FLOW FIELD

In the present paper steady three-dimensional numerical calculations were performed in order to investigate the effects of flow injection from the outer casing upon turbine nozzle vane flow field. Several test cases were analyzed by applying different nozzle vane configurations such as the blade lean, injection slot width and distance from the leading edge. Numerical simulations were conducted considering the no injection case, 5% and 10% main stream flow injection from the outer casing. The impact of the flow injection design variables and the blade lean angle on the aerodynamic loss in terms of the energy loss coefficient and the outlet flow angle were analyzed through a parametric study.
Visual Attention with Sparse and Continuous Transformations

Visual attention mechanisms have become an important component of neural network models for Computer Vision applications, allowing them to attend to ﬁnite sets of objects or regions and identify relevant features. A key component of attention mechanisms is the differentiable transformation that maps scores representing the importance of each feature into probabilities. The usual choice is the softmax transformation, whose output is strictly dense, assigning a probability mass to every image feature. This density is wasteful, given that non-relevant features are still taken into consideration, making attention models less interpretable. Until now, visual attention has only been applied to discrete domains – this may lead to a lack of focus, where the attention distribution over the image is too scattered. Inspired by the continuous nature of images, we explore continuous-domain alternatives to discrete attention models. We pro-pose solutions that focus on both the continuity and the sparsity of attention distributions, being suitable for selecting compact and sparse regions such as ellipses. The former encourages the selected regions to be contiguous and the latter is able to single out the relevant features, assigning exactly zero probability to irrelevant parts. We use the fact that the Jacobian of these transformations are generalized covariances to derive efﬁcient backpropagation algorithms for both unimodal and multimodal attention distributions. Experiments on Visual Question Answering show that continuous attention models generate smooth attention maps that seem to better relate with human judgment, while achieving improvements in terms of accuracy over grid-based methods trained on the same data. Code is available at https://github.com/deep-spin/mcan-vqa-continuous-attention .
The Study of Groundwater Treatment by Household Reverse Osmosis System

Water desalination systems; especially household reverse osmosis; have become widely used in Iraqi homes due to lack of water that conforms to the global standards of drinking water in recent times. The ability of RO system to treat groundwater has been tested within a period of time. Water samples have been analyzed before and after entering the system for physical, chemical and biological parameters. The results showed that the RO system was efficient in removal different types of contaminants; and the removal efficiency was as follows: Electrical Conductivity (EC) (92.9%); Turbidity (78.5%); Total Hardness (T.H) (96.8%); Calcium (Ca) (97.1%); Magnesium (Mg) (96.4%); Sulfate (So4) (92.2%); Nitrate (No3) (92%); Sodium (Na) (91.6%); Potassium (K) (84.9%); Chloride (Cl); Bicarbonate (Hco3) (87.7%); Cadmium (Cd) (100%); Iron (Fe) (80%); Lead (Pb) (100%). The biological results showed that the ability of RO system to decrease the numbers of different types of bacteria. From these results; the Ro system was efficient in treating groundwater.
A SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF WESTERN PARANÁ: SCENARIOS FOR REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT UMA ANÁLISE ESPACIAL DO OESTE DO PARANÁ: CENÁRIOS PARA O DESENVOLVIMENTO REGIONAL

The study analyzes whether there is a direct relationship between neighboring municipalities of western Paraná and their regional development. Thus, the spatial autocorrelation of livestock production (cattle, pork, poultry and milk production) from 2011 to 2017, of gross value of agricultural production and of additional fiscal value from 2013 to 2015 was analyzed. In addition, a bivariate spatial correlation analysis of the additional fiscal value per capita in relation to livestock production from 2013 to 2017 was carry out. The theoretical framework was based on the spatial performance assessment using the global, local and bivariate autocorrelation indexes of Moran. The results allow identifying regions with low and high livestock production, gross value of agricultural production and human development index per municipality. Pork and milk production have the highest positive autocorrelation, followed by the additional fiscal value per capita. The development human index had significant spatial autocorrelations, and the additional fiscal value per capita presented similar values among the studies regions. The bivariate spatial correlation between the additional fiscal value per capita and livestock production showed a positive spatial correlation for pork, poultry and milk production. For cattle, the result showed a significant negative spatial correlation.
Laptops for teachers' policy initiative in New Zealand: Impacts and consequences

In this paper we draw on the results of the 2003, 2004 and 2005 national questionnaire, focus group and case study evaluation findings to discuss the impact of the Digital Horizons: Laptops for teachers scheme as a policy tool intended to leverage teacher use of ICT for collaboration, communication, administration, and lesson planning and preparation. The findings indicate that secondary teachers are making use of the laptops out of the classroom for communication with colleagues, reporting to parents, and the development of classroom materials. Teachers, even those who rated themselves as experts, are making less use of the laptops in the classroom for teaching and learning. Teacher commentary indicates that school technological infrastructure and access to professional development constrain and enable their use of their laptop. Drawing on Engelbart's notion of improvement infrastructure we discuss factors that have the potential to accelerate the integration of the laptop into teachers' professional lives. Initial analysis suggests these factors include school and departmental leadership and the nature of the professional development that teachers experience. Engelbart (1992) argued that it is the factors at this level that are the most important if the benefits of policy initiatives are to be maximized for teachers, schools and governments.
Prevalence of Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease and Associated Risk Factors in the Eastern Region, Saudi Arabia

Background Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) is a common upper gastrointestinal disorder characterized by heartburn and acid regurgitation. A higher incidence is found in Arab countries. Untreated GERD has a negative impact on individuals that interfere with daily activities and impaired quality of life. This study aims to estimate the prevalence of GERD and associated risk factors in the Eastern region, Saudi Arabia. Material & Methodology A descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out among 1517 healthy participants from the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia from May to August 2021. The sample was randomly collected through a structured self-administered questionnaire. The questionnaire was composed of questions related to sociodemographic and lifestyle characteristics as risk factors for GERD. The existence of GERD was assessed by using GERD Questionnaire (GerdQ) for diagnosing GERD, when the score is 8 or more. Results A total of 1517 participants were included in the study: 58.8% male, 41.2% female; 9% of whom were pregnant. The age of participants ranged from 18 to 58 with a mean age of 27.5 ± 11.4 years old. The existence of GERD was 20.6% among the total participants, in which their GerdQ scores were 3-7 (68.9%), 8-10 (22.1%), and 8-11 (8.5%). The higher risk groups of having GERD were pregnant women, smoker, being male, regular usage of analgesia, soft drinks, and having a family history of GERD. Conclusion This study showed the prevalence of GERD among the general population of the Eastern region, Saudi Arabia was 20.6%. Several sociodemographic and lifestyle characteristics were associated with the disease. Further studies are needed to explore the role of psychological factors in developing GERD.
Determining the effect of natural inhibitors on sesame meal degradability using in vitro three step method

The aim of this experiment was to investigate the beneficial effect of monensin, tannic acid and cinnamon essential oil addition on sesame meal degradability by the three-step in vitro method. The effect of experimental additives on the degradability of sesame meal in the rumen, after rumen and in the whole gastrointestinal tract was significant (P<0.05). The in vitro ruminal and intestinal digestibility of sesame meal crude protein with experimental additives was in the range of 76 to 84% and 49 to 60%, respectively. The intestinal degradability of crude protein increased with the addition of cinnamon essential oil (about 10%). Addition of monensin, tannic acid, and cinnamon essential oil significantly increased the degradability of Neutral Detergent Fiber (NDF) and Acid Detergent Fiber (ADF) in the rumen, intestines and the whole gastrointestinal tract. The results showed that cinnamon essential oil (125 mg/L) increased the degradability of dry matter (DM), organic matter (OM), crude protein (CP), ADF and NDF in the rumen, after rumen and the whole digestive tract compared to all treatments (P<0.05). The results showed that addition of tannic acid (100 mg/L) decreased the disappearance of crude protein in the rumen, while it increased crude protein’s disappearance in the after rumen (P<0.05).
Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of Capirona (Caly- cophyllum spruceanum Benth.) from the Peruvian Amazon As- sessed by RAPD Markers

Capirona (Calycophyllum spruceanum Benth) is a tree species of commercial importance widely distributed in South American forests and is traditionally used for its medicinal properties and wood quality. Studies on this tree species have been focused mainly on wood properties, propagation and growth. Genetic studies on capirona are very limited to date. Today it is possible to explore genetic diversity and population structure in a fast and reliable manner by using molecular markers. We here used 10 Random Amplified Polymorphic DNAs (RAPDs) markers to analyze genetic diversity and population structure of 59 samples of capirona that were sampled from four provinces located in the eastern region of the Peruvian amazon. A total of 186 bands were manually scored, generating a 59 x 186 presence/absence matrix. We used R software to calculate genetic distances based on provesti coefficient. A dendrogram was generated using the UPGMA clustering algorithm and showed four groups that correspond to the geographic origin of the capirona samples. Similarly, a discriminant analysis of principal components (DAPC) confirmed that capirona is grouped into four clusters. However, we also noticed few accessions are intermingled. Genetic diversity estimation was conducted considering the four groups (populations) identified by adegenet package in R. Nei's genetic diversity estimate varied from 0.26 to 0.39 and Shannon index ranged from 2.48 to 2.83. AMOVA analysis revealed the greatest variation exist within populations (69.7%) and indicated that variability among populations is 31.5%. To our best knowledge, this is the first investigation employing molecular markers in capirona in Peru considering their natural distribution, and sheds light towards its modern genetic improvement and for the sustainable management of forests in Peru.
Wireless Data Transmission of Networked Sensors in Grain Storage

Current grain-temperature monitoring systems employ sensors that are hard-wired into a structure. Thermocouples are typically used and are integrated into a supporting cable which is suspended between the ceiling and floor of a structure. Multiplexed signal conditioning is performed outside the structure with the data transmitted to a display and storage device. Wireless sensors were studied as an alternative to these systems. The main issue addressed in this study was the data transmission distance through grain that can be achieved by a low-power radio frequency (RF) device designed to operate in the unlicensed FCC spectrum. Results showed that sensors transmitting at 915 MHz and 1 mW power were able to communicate reliably over a 2-m distance, although this was close to their transmission limit. Measured signal attenuation displayed typical small-scale fading patterns, i.e. sub-wavelength changes in position caused high variability in signal strength. A 2-m range would allow reasonable spatial resolution for monitoring grain conditions, such as temperature, although sensors would have to be networked in order for data to be sent to an external gateway. Theory on RF attenuation in grain gave an approximation of experimental transmission signal loss but did not provide the accuracy desired to determine RF range. It was, however, helpful in selecting the most appropriate frequency range to achieve the greatest transmission distance.
Determinants of Participation in Multi-Family Recycling Programs1

The determinants of recycling in multi-family residences were investigated by administering a 50-item questionnaire to 230 residents of buildings where recycling collection systems had been installed. The level of tenant participation, defined by a composite index of self-reported usage, was positively associated with income, education, recycling motivation, and cleanliness of the recycling system. It was negatively associated with the number of different types of collection containers. At the aggregate level, participation varied considerably between the complexes. These differences were largely accounted for in terms of three system support variables, specified in terms of the “user friendliness” of the recycling system, its spatial location within the complex, and the degree to which the manager supported the program. Multiple regression analysis indicated that user friendliness and manager commitment together accounted for 85.3% of the variance in the aggregate participation index. These results suggested several experimental interventions designed to increase participation in multi-family recycling programs.
Evaluating Marketing Efficiency of Tomato in Khartoum State, Sudan

The study aimed to evaluate the marketing efficiency of tomato in Khartoum State central markets at winter 2010. The study depended mainly on primary data, which was collected through questionnaire. About 18 and 30 wholesaler and retailer were selected, respectively. Relevant secondary data was also collected. The data was analyzed using descriptive statistics. Also, the study specifically estimated the distribution of net margins among the various marketing agents: wholesaler and retailer. The study revealed that; the majority of respondents were aged group more than 31 years of age, about 100% of respondents were male, and about 20, 13, 20, 45 and 2% were represented illiterate, organic, primary, secondary and university education level for wholesalers, respectively. The study indicated that retailers had education level scattered from organic (10%), primary (80%) to secondary (10%) education. About 81% and 90% of wholesalers and retailers had experience of more than five years. Wholesalers generally got higher marketing margins than retailers with exception of Khartoum market, where retailers got higher marketing margins than wholesalers. By the same sequence of marketing margins, net marketing margins followed at wholesaler. Retailers got higher marketing efficiency than wholesalers. Omdurman market was ranked at the top with respect to marketing efficiency followed by Bahari and Khartoum (at wholesale & retail levels). Increasing marketing efficiency at wholesalers in Khartoum market through reducing marketing costs (transportation & handling, packing & other cost items) and encouragement of investment in this efficiency activity represented the recommendations of the study. © 2011 Friends Science Publishers Key Word: Marketing efficiency; Marketing margins; Wholesaler; Retailer
The simulation of complex whole-body activity. Simulator design considerations and methodological parameters

This paper reports on the novel design and user-trialling of a prototype device to simulate the muscular coordination and sensations of a complex whole body activity with particular reference to snow skiing. Simulation and its benefits are well documented in the fields of aviation and medicine. However, there is little published evidence that simulation is effective in acquiring complex whole-body skills and control necessary in the sporting arena. In scope, this paper covers development of a machine for simulating down-hill skiing. The aims of this research were twofold: Firstly, to design and construct a machine to simulate the physical and sensory aspects of down-hill skiing; and secondly, to user trial and evaluate the effectiveness of this device using expert skiers. The paper begins with an introduction and brief literature search, followed by details of the design process involved in the development of the actual simulator. The results of the user trials have found a significant agreement between t.
Experiments on hot electron noise in semiconductor materials for high-speed devices

Experimental results on noise temperature and spectral density of current fluctuations (electron diffusion) at high electric fields in silicon, gallium arsenide, and indium phosphide are presented. The dominant noise sources are discussed in their relation to electron scattering mechanisms. Physical backgrounds of high speed-low noise performance (noise-speed tradeoff) are considered. Suppression in short samples of the fluctuations having long correlation time constant and (or) high threshold energy is discussed. >