Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Insight into reactive oxygen plasma characteristics and reaction mechanism on SRF accelerator plasma cleaning

Reactive oxygen plasma treatment is an effective technique to eliminate hydrocarbon and improve the performance of superconducting radio frequency (SRF) cavities. This work investigated the reaction mechanism between reactive oxygen plasma and hydrocarbon, surface reaction kinetics, and cleaning process optimization through experiments, analytical models, and numerical simulations. The experimental results declare that the reaction between oxygen plasma and hydrocarbon is dominated by ion-assisted chemical sputtering, and the hydrocarbon attenuates exponentially, increasing the work function exponentially. To study the surface reaction kinetic process in-depth, we proposed a plasma cleaning rate model based on the Langmuir–Hinshelwood theory. This study found that the plasma cleaning rate primarily depends on the sheath potential, electron temperature, O atoms density, O+ ions, and Ar+ ions densities. Furthermore, we did a control-parameter simulation and found that increasing gas pressures or O2 ratios are conducive to enhancing the chemical reaction rate between O atoms and hydrocarbon. Also, the power increase can enhance the physical effect of ions. It shows that increasing the gas pressure and power and reducing the oxygen content can achieve a better cleaning effect while reducing the radio frequency power loss caused by the oxide. Those results provide valuable guidance for optimizing the cleaning process, deepening the understanding of the cleaning mechanism, and improving the performance of SRF cavities.
Thermohaline changes in the Irminger Sea

The Inninger Sea is part of the Subpolar Gyre in the northwestern North Atlantic and plays a central role in the large-scale thennohaline overturning of Atlantic Water which is believed to influence the long-tenn changes of the climate system. In this area thennohaline changes are observed at almost all depth levels in the nineties. The most pronounced change is connected to the Modified North Atlantic Water (MNAW) where an overall increase of temperature and salinity were observed during the nineties. Time series from the Icelandic continental slope reveal that the recent onset of increasing temperatures took place in the winter 199511996 and was accompanied by a more pronounced salinity increase in late summer 1997. A historical comparison with nearby sections occupied in the early eighties and late nineties reveals that changes in the distribution of water masses have taken place recently. The reason is likely to be connected to the densification of the Labrador Sea Water (LSW) since the late eighties. The change is seen as a downward movement of the LSW core now occupying in the Inninger Sea the depth range of 1500 to 2100 m instead of 500 to 1200 m in e.g. 1981. The changes are observed as a freshening and cooling of the LSW.
The Summertime Atmospheric Hydrologic Cycle over the Southwestern United States

Abstract In this paper the authors examine the large-scale summertime hydrologic cycle associated with the northwestern branch of the North American monsoon, centered on the southwestern United States, using a suite of surface-and upper-air-based observations, reanalysis products, and regional model simulations. In general, it is found that on an area-averaged basis, seasonal precipitation is balanced predominantly by evaporation; in addition, this evaporation also supports a net, vertically integrated moisture flux divergence from the region of the same magnitude as the precipitation itself. This vertically integrated large-scale moisture flux divergence is the result of an offsetting balance between convergence of low-level moisture and divergence of moisture aloft (<750 mb). Over the western portion of the domain, most of this low-level moisture convergence is related to advection from the Gulf of California and eastern Pacific; over the eastern portion of the domain, low-level moisture convergence is .
Experimental Inoculation of Porcine Circovirus 3 (PCV-3) in Pregnant Gilts Causes PCV-3-Associated Lesions in Newborn Piglets that Persist until Weaning

Porcine circovirus 3 (PCV-3) has been detected in cases of reproductive failure but the pathogenesis of such infection is poorly understood. So far, experimental PCV-3 inoculations have been performed only in piglets. Therefore, through the experimental inoculation of pregnant gilts at two different time points (second and last third of gestation), this study aimed to evaluate the outcome of PCV-3 infection in dams and their offspring until weaning age. Two weeks postinoculation, all gilts became viremic and the infection lasted until the end of study. Farrowing occurred naturally, without evidence of reproductive disorders, and piglets showed no significant clinical signs from farrowing to weaning (21 day-old). However, majority of the delivered piglets were viremic, mostly until weaning age. Both newborn and weaned pigs showed different degrees of systemic, lymphohistiocytic arteritis and periarteritis. Lesions were more severe in the piglets infected during the second third of gestation and worsened at weaning. Additionally, PCV-3 detection in nervous and cardiac tissue and development of histopathological lesions in these tissues were gestational dependent, as only occurred in piglets infected at second third of pregnancy. Piglets with lesions raised to weaning age had less body weight than those without them. This study represents the first description of a PCV-3 experimental infection in pregnant gilts, which resulted in transplacental infection, histological lesions in piglets mimicking those of natural occurring disease, and lesser body weight in piglets with vascular lesions at weaning age. Obtained results allowed proposing a potential pathogenesis model for PCV-3 infection in swine.
Copy Number Variation in the GSTM1 and GSTT1 Genes and the Risk of Liver Cirrhosis in Eastern Ethiopia

Background Polymorphisms in glutathione S-transferase M1 (GSTM1) and T1 (GSTT1) can cause an entire gene deletion. The current methodology can accurately identify GSTM1 and GSTT1 copy number variants (CNVs), which may shed light on the true contribution of each gene copy to the cellular detoxification process and disease risk. Because liver cirrhosis is becoming a critical worldwide health issue, this study determined the CNVs of GSTM1 and GSTT1 and their relationship to the risk of liver cirrhosis. Methods In this study, we compared 106 patients with liver cirrhosis to 104 healthy controls. Real-time PCR was used to identify the CNVs of GSTM1 and GSTT1. Logistic and linear regression models were used to estimate the relationship between liver cirrhosis and clinical chemistry variables with the CNVs, respectively. Results In 3.3% of the study participants, >2 copies of the GSTM1 or GSTT1 genes were detected. GSTT1 carriers had a significantly lower risk of liver cirrhosis (p<0.05) compared with individuals who had homozygous deletion (adjusted odds ratio (AOR) = 0.47; 95% CI: 0.25, 0.86). This risk reduction was significant (p<0.05) in patients with a single copy of the GSTT1 gene (AOR = 0.48; 95% CI: 0.25, 0.91). Those with ≥2 copies of combined GSTM1 and GSTT1 also had a significantly (p<0.05) lower risk of developing liver cirrhosis compared with double null genotypes (AOR = 0.38; 95% CI: 0.16, 0.91, p trend <0.001). Moreover, ≥2 copies of combined GSTM1 and GSTT1 genes were associated with a substantial decrease in alanine amino transferase (ALT) and aspartate aminotransferase (AST) levels, respectively. Conclusion A single copy number of GSTT1, and ≥2 copies of combined GSTM1 and GSTT1 genes were associated with a reduced risk of liver cirrhosis in Ethiopians. These findings underscore the importance of gene–environment interactions in the multifactorial development of liver cirrhosis.
Mental Illnesses and Quality of Sleep Among Nurses Working at a Tertiary Hospital in Riyadh During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Objectives This study primarily aimed to estimate the prevalence of mental illnesses (depression, anxiety, and stress) along with the poor quality of sleep, with a secondary focus on determining whether there was an association between mental health and quality of sleep among nurses working at King Khalid University Hospital, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted from June to December 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic on 309 nurses from different departments at King Khalid University Hospital. Depression, anxiety, and stress were measured by the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale - 21 Items (DASS-21), and sleep quality was measured by the Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) via an online survey. Results The prevalence of depression, anxiety, and stress was 30.4%, 43.7%, and 16.5%, respectively, while 61.5% showed poor sleep quality. The association between poor quality of sleep and the other outcome variables of mental health (depression, anxiety, and stress) was highly significant (p<0.0001). Conclusion Nurses have reported an increased prevalence of depression, anxiety, stress, and poor quality of sleep during the COVID-19 pandemic, making them particularly vulnerable to mental illnesses and sleep difficulties in the event of future pandemics. There is a clear link between mental health issues and poor quality of sleep, necessitating the provision of psychological support for nurses. Enhancing sleep quality is recommended as a way to decrease the prevalence of mental health concerns.
Towards High-quality HDR Deghosting with Conditional Diffusion Models

High Dynamic Range (HDR) images can be recovered from several Low Dynamic Range (LDR) images by existing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) techniques. Despite the remarkable progress, DNN-based methods still generate ghosting artifacts when LDR images have saturation and large motion, which hinders potential applications in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we formulate the HDR deghosting problem as an image generation that leverages LDR features as the diffusion model's condition, consisting of the feature condition generator and the noise predictor. Feature condition generator employs attention and Domain Feature Alignment (DFA) layer to transform the intermediate features to avoid ghosting artifacts. With the learned features as conditions, the noise predictor leverages a stochastic iterative denoising process for diffusion models to generate an HDR image by steering the sampling process. Furthermore, to mitigate semantic confusion caused by the saturation problem of LDR images, we design a sliding window noise estimator to sample smooth noise in a patch-based manner. In addition, an image space loss is proposed to avoid the color distortion of the estimated HDR results. We empirically evaluate our model on benchmark datasets for HDR imaging. The results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performances and well generalization to real-world images.
The Lower Carboniferous shrimp Tealliocaris from Gullane, East Lothian, Scotland

ABSTRACT Tealliocaris is probably one of the best preserved of all Carboniferous crustaceans. It occurs scattered through the 12 cm thick laminated Gullane ‘shrimp-bed’. The cuticle is exceptionally well preserved and the specimens, which are normally complete, are infilled with fluorapatite. The carapace has an elongate rostrum, a defined frontal area, a median ridge and paired gastric and inner and outer lateral ridges. The eyes are borne on a stout peduncle. The first antenna bears a pair of flagella, the second an antennal scale and long flagellum. The mandible is large and heavily sclerotised with molar and incisor process. The maxillae and anterior thoracopods are poorly preserved. The posterior six thoracopods each have a long segmented endopod and annulated setose exopod. More than half the specimens preserve lamellae which may represent branchial epipods, or floor a brood chamber beneath the carapace on either side of the thorax. The pleopods are biramous. The telson and uropods form a tail fan. In the absence of oostegites Tealliocaris cannot be assigned to the order Mysidacea but its affinities lie close to these Eumalacostraca. Tealliocaris walked on the thoracic endopods, but could also swim using the pleopods and thoracic exopods. The mode of feeding is uncertain. Tealliocaris probably inhabited a brackish lake or lagoon, but its distribution elsewhere suggests that it may have been tolerant of a range of salinities.
Improving critical thinking skills of high school students through learning mini research projects on household waste management activities

This study explores the effect of mini research project learning on high school students critical thinking skills in household waste management activities. To achieve this goal, this study used a pre-experiment method with one group pre-test post-test design. Data were taken from first-grade students in one of the senior high schools in Bandung as research subjects for the experimental class without a control class. The test instrument (essay) adapted from Facione (2011) was used to measure students' critical thinking skills. The results showed that there was an increase in students' critical thinking skills after learning the mini research project with an average N-gain score of 0.55 (medium). The criteria for critical thinking skills had also changed from the average critical thinking score achievement which was very low (not manifested) to high (strong) which was seen based on the results of the initial and final tests.
Investigation of Wetland Soil Properties affecting Optimum Soil Cultivation

An investigation was carried out on wetland (fadama) soil properties affecting optimum soil cultivation. A cone penetrometer and a shear vane apparatus (19 mm) were used to determine the cone index and the torque that cause the soil to shear at different moisture contents. The study shows that the cone index and shear vane of fadama soils increased with depth and decreased with increase in moisture content. High moisture content reduced the soil cohesion. The internal frictional angle of the soil was 37.9 0 . The following values were obtained for soil cohesion 112 kN/m 2 , 62 kN/m 2 , 38 kN/m 2 , 30 kN/m 2 , and 12 kN/m 2 at moisture contents of 0%, 5%, 10%, 15% and 20% respectively. Moisture content between 10% -15% (dry basis) appeared ideal for cultivation of the soil. For this soil the critical moisture content was found to be 23.72%. Moisture content beyond the critical level needs to be drained before cultivation is carried out.
Effects of hydromechanical loading history and antecedent soil mechanical damage on shallow landslide triggering

Evidence suggests that the sudden triggering of rainfall‐induced shallow landslides is preceded by accumulation of local internal failures in the soil mantle before their abrupt coalescence into a landslide failure plane. The mechanical status of a hillslope at any given time reflects competition between local damage accumulated during antecedent rainfall events and rates of mechanical healing (e.g., rebonding of microcracks and root regrowth). This dynamic interplay between damage accumulation and healing rates determines the initial mechanical state for landslide modeling. We evaluated the roles of these dynamic processes on landslide characteristics and patterns using a hydromechanical landslide‐triggering model for a sequence of rainfall scenarios. The progressive nature of soil failure was represented by the fiber bundle model formalism that considers threshold strength of mechanical bonds linking adjacent soil columns and bedrock. The antecedent damage induced by prior rainfall events was expressed by the fraction of broken fibers that gradually regain strength or mechanically heal at rates specific to soil and roots. Results indicate that antecedent damage accelerates landslide initiation relative to pristine (undamaged) hillslopes. The volumes of first triggered landslides increase with increasing antecedent damage; however, for heavily damaged hillslopes, landslide volumes tend to decrease. Elapsed time between rainfall events allows mechanical healing that reduces the effects of antecedent damage. This study proposed a quantitative framework for systematically incorporating hydromechanical loading history and information on precursor events (e.g., such as recorded by acoustic emissions) into shallow landslide hazard assessment.
High-Accuracy Positioning Services for High-Speed Vehicles in Wideband mmWave Communications

It is expected that the sixth-generation (6G) cellular networks will provide high-accuracy positioning services. For the millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency band in 6G, both the Doppler and the spatial wideband effects can lead to channel variation in time and space domains, respectively. However, the impact of these effects on the positioning performance is not well studied. In this paper, we will investigate this issue and show that these two effects are not only challenges, but also provide great opportunities in terms of positioning in vehicular networks. Particularly, we will conduct system modeling, algorithm design, and fundamental performance analysis of simultaneous localization and communications (SLAC) in mmWave-based vehicular networks, exclusively dependent on channel state information. The major challenge in algorithm design is the high computational complexity that comes with the huge antenna arrays and bandwidth. For high-speed vehicle positioning, timeliness is as important as accuracy. For performance evaluation, the Cramér-Rao lower bounds (CRLB) will be derived as benchmarks. We will show that it is possible to achieve CRLB-level positioning accuracy, with almost linear complexity. With the closed-form theoretical results, we will evaluate how different system parameters contribute to positioning accuracy, such as bandwidth, carrier frequency, size and orientation of antenna arrays, etc. These results will shed light on system-level design and optimization of SLAC with ultra-wide frequency band in highly dynamic environments, i.e., very strong spatial wideband and Doppler effects. Comprehensive numerical results will also be presented to verify the theoretical analyses and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.
Comparing NISAR (Using Sentinel-1), USDA/NASS CDL, and Ground Truth Crop/Non-Crop Areas in an Urban Agricultural Region

A general limitation in assessing the accuracy of land cover mapping is the availability of ground truth data. At sites where ground truth is not available, potentially inaccurate proxy datasets are used for sub-field-scale resolution investigations at large spatial scales, i.e., in the Contiguous United States. The USDA/NASS Cropland Data Layer (CDL) is a popular agricultural land cover dataset due to its high accuracy (>80%), resolution (30 m), and inclusions of many land cover and crop types. However, because the CDL is derived from satellite imagery and has resulting uncertainties, comparisons to available in situ data are necessary for verifying classification performance. This study compares the cropland mapping accuracies (crop/non-crop) of an optical approach (CDL) and the radar-based crop area (CA) approach used for the upcoming NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) L- and S-band mission but using Sentinel-1 C-band data. CDL and CA performance are compared to ground truth data that includes 54 agricultural production and research fields located at USDA’s Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) in Maryland, USA. We also evaluate non-crop mapping accuracy using twenty-six built-up and thirteen forest sites at BARC. The results show that the CDL and CA have a good pixel-wise agreement with one another (87%). However, the CA is notably more accurate compared to ground truth data than the CDL. The 2017–2021 mean accuracies for the CDL and CA, respectively, are 77% and 96% for crop, 100% and 94% for built-up, and 100% and 100% for forest, yielding an overall accuracy of 86% for the CDL and 96% for CA. This difference mainly stems from the CDL under-detecting crop cover at BARC, especially in 2017 and 2018. We also note that annual accuracy levels varied less for the CA (91–98%) than for the CDL (79–93%). This study demonstrates that a computationally inexpensive radar-based cropland mapping approach can also give accurate results over complex landscapes with accuracies similar to or better than optical approaches.
Do Sensor-Based Interventions Differ from Traditional Physical Therapies in Improving Older Adults’ Balance?

Interventions using sensor technologies have the potential to facilitate balance improvement in clinical practice and, to some extent, are recommended as an alternative to traditional physical therapies. However, whether sensor-based technologies differ from traditional physical therapies in improving older adults’ balance remains unclear. Our systematic review identified 25 randomized controlled trials for the meta-analysis. The findings showed that sensor-based interventions performed better than traditional physical therapies in improving balance performance (mean difference = -0.448s, p < 0.001). In subgroup analyses by dividing sensors into three categories (i.e., optical, perception, and wearable sensors), interventions using optical sensors were more effective than traditional physical therapies (mean difference = -0.681s, p < 0.001); while no significant differences were found for the interventions using perception sensors (mean difference = -0.226 s, p =0.106) and wearable sensors (mean difference = -0.490s, p < 0.328) as compared to traditional physical therapies.
Complete characterization of NADH dehydrogenase subunit 1 gene in human hydatid cysts

Echinococcus granulosus sensu stricto possesses very similar strains G1 and G3. Mitochondrial genes from NADH dehydrogenase (NAD) family have prominent roles in the identification of very similar strains G1 and G3. Thus, the present study mainly aimed to characterize the whole NAD1 gene (from the start codon to the stop codon) of hydatids isolated from humans. Hydatids were surgically isolated from the livers of patients, who are from Basrah and Maysan provinces, at Al-Sadir Teaching Hospital in Basrah province, Iraq. Protoscoleces were aseptically isolated from hydatid cysts and were used to extract DNA. Specific primers were employed to amplify the total NAD1 gene. A consensus sequence of nucleotides was separately generated from Basrah and Maysan sample sequences. Each consensus sequence had 1038 bp and it contained a start codon GTG at residues 87- 89 and a stop codon TAA at residues 978 – 980. The present study results displayed that each deduced amino acid sequence, predicated from a consensus sequence of nucleotides, had 297 amino acids. Furthermore, bioinformatics analysis revealed that each deduced amino acid sequence included a residue isoleucine (I188). This residue is only retained in the NAD1 protein of the G1 strain. The current study results also showed a predicated structural model of Basrah and Maysan NAD1 proteins and both of which had very similar homology models and the important residue I188 was located in the α10 helix. In total, for the first time in Iraq, this study characterized the whole NAD1 genes of E. granulosus protoscoleces and confirmed these NAD1 genes belonging to the G1 sheep strain.