Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Circulating Levels of Short-Chain Fatty Acids during Pregnancy and Infant Neurodevelopment

Background: Short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) play a key role in the gut microbiota–brain crosstalk regulating the main neurodevelopmental processes during pregnancy. The aim of this study is to investigate the longitudinal relationship between prenatal levels of the main SCFAs in maternal serum and infant cognitive development and temperament on day 40 postpartum after adjusting for several pre-, peri- and post-natal confounders. Methods: A sample of 357 healthy mother–infant pairs were followed from the beginning of pregnancy to 40 days after birth. Serum SCFA concentrations were assessed in the first and third trimester of pregnancy by LC-MS/MS; and socio-demographic, nutritional, and psychological variables were collected. At 40 days, the Bayley Scales of Infant Development-III and the Early Infancy Temperament Questionnaire were administered. Results: Lower serum levels of acetic, butyric and isobutyric acid, mainly during the first trimester, were related to better language and psychomotor development and, in the case of butyric acid, better intensity behavior in infants. Medium levels of propionic acid were related to better scores for development, mood and temperament. Conclusions: These findings suggest that in a community sample of healthy pregnant women from a Mediterranean region of northern Spain, lower serum levels of SCFAs, especially in the first trimester of pregnancy, seem to be related to better infant neurodevelopment
Mrk 421 as a case study for TeV and X-ray variability in leptohadronic models

We investigate the origin of high-energy emission in blazars within the context of the leptohadronic one-zone model. We find that γ -ray emission can be attributed to synchrotron radiation either from protons or from secondary leptons produced via photohadronic processes. These possibilities imply differences not only in the spectral energy distribution (SED) but also in the variability signatures, especially in the X- and γ -ray regime. Thus, the temporal behaviour of each leptohadronic scenario can be used to probe the particle population responsible for the high-energy emission as it can give extra information not available by spectral fits. In this work, we apply these ideas to the non-thermal emission of Mrk 421, which is one of the best monitored TeV blazars. We focus on the observations of 2001 March, since during that period Mrk 421 showed multiple flares that have been observed in detail both in X-rays and γ -rays. First, we obtain pre-flaring fits to the SED using the different types of leptohadronic scenarios. Then, we introduce random-walk-type, small-amplitude variations on the injection compactness or on the maximum energy of radiating particles and follow the subsequent response of the radiated photon spectrum. For each leptohadronic scenario, we calculate the X-ray and γ -ray fluxes and investigate their possible correlation. Whenever the ‘input’ variations lead, apart from flux variability, also to spectral variability, we present the resulting relations between the spectral index and the flux, both in X-rays and γ -rays. We find that proton synchrotron models are favoured energetically but require fine tuning between electron and proton parameters to reproduce the observed quadratic behaviour between X-rays and TeV γ -rays. On the other hand, models based on pion decay can reproduce this behaviour in a much more natural way.
Effectiveness of Shock-Absorbing Insole for High-Heeled Shoes on Gait: Randomized Controlled Trials

This study was carried out to identify the influence of a shock-absorbing insole, developed by the author for use with high-heeled shoes, on walking. The research design included single-blind randomized parallel groups; namely, a group of 26 participants who wore the shock-absorbing insoles and another group of 26 participants who did not wear the insoles, both carried out walking while wearing 7 cm high-heels. During walking, plantar pressure analysis (via in-shoe plantar pressure measurements), surface electrode electromyography (surface EMG), gait analysis, subjective comfort evaluation, and functional movement (functional mobility) analysis were carried out. In order to compare the two groups, statistical verification (paired t-test) was performed. Wearing the shock-absorbing insole with the high-heeled shoes improved posture stability during walking, as well as increasing the walking speed. In addition, the heel pressure, the pressure of the front foot at the inner side, and the shock ability were decreased. For these reasons, the wearers reported higher comfort. Changes in the muscle activities of the tibialis anterior muscle (TA) and the gastrocnemius muscle (GA) heightened the stability of the ankle joints. Overall, the proposed shock-absorbing insole for use with high-heeled shoes improved the postural stability when walking, as well as improving the distribution of pressure on the soles. A decrease in the diverse side-effects of wearing high-heeled shoes can thus be expected.
Social Factors Contributing to Healthcare Service Requirements during the First COVID-19 Lockdown among Older Adults

This study examined social characteristics and their relations to healthcare service demand among older adults during the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. The sample was based on a cohort of 103,955 adults over the age of 65. A general index of needs was composed based on healthcare service use data and was predicted in a multi-nominal logistic regression. The frequency of the total needs significantly (p < 0.000) declined while supportive community services (4.9%, 2.0%), living in a community framework (27.0%, 15.2%), and living in a private residence (29.7%, 20.1%) were significantly associated (p < 0.000) with less frequent needs compared to the complementary groups. Supportive communities turned out to be an extremely important service for older adults. Policy makers should consider expanding supportive community services for older adults, as it was shown to have a positive correlation with lower healthcare service use, which might be an indicator of better overall health.
Performance Analysis and Power Allocation of Multi-Pair Two-Way Massive MIMO Full-Duplex DF Relaying Systems Under Rician Fading Channels

This paper investigates a two-way full-duplex decode-and-forward relaying system under Rician fading channels with imperfect channel state information. In this system, multiple pairs of users exchange information via a relay equipped with a large number of antennas. Both the maximum-ratio combining/maximum-ratio transmission (MRC/MRT) and the zero-forcing (ZF) processing methods are considered at the relay. We derive the closed-form approximations for the spectral efficiencies (SEs) of the considered system. Then, we study the power-scaling laws for two typical scenarios, which show that as the number of the relay antennas <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$</tex-math></inline-formula> grows large, the SEs converge to positive limits when the power scaling factors <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\alpha _{\mathrm{u}}$</tex-math></inline-formula> of the users and <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\alpha _{\mathrm{r}}$</tex-math></inline-formula> of the relay satisfy <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\alpha _{\mathrm{u}} = 1$</tex-math></inline-formula> or <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\alpha _{\mathrm{r}} = 1$</tex-math></inline-formula>, i.e., the transmit power of the users or the relay is scaled down proportionally to <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1/M$</tex-math></inline-formula>. Furthermore, for MRC/MRT and ZF processing methods, the optimal power allocation scheme we proposed largely improves the sum SEs compared with the average power scheme. Simulation results verify the correctness of the derived results.
Is it sustainability or fashion? Young educated consumers’ motivations for buying second-hand clothing

Drawing upon the Theory of Planned Behaviour, this study explores young educated consumers’ motivations for buying second-hand clothing, including four additional constructs; novelty-seeking, frugality, being environmentally friendly, and treasure hunting in the original model. The additional constructs are derived from the Theory of Basic Values. Data were gathered from 344 participants through the judgmental sampling technique. In addition, hypothesised associations between the variables were tested with structural equation modelling. The study's findings indicated that attitudes towards second-hand clothing, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control are the predictors of intention to buy second-hand clothing. Additionally, intention to buy second-hand clothing and perceived behavioural control predict second-hand clothing buying behaviour. Moreover, the direct effects of novelty-seeking, frugality, being environmentally friendly, and treasure hunting on the intention to buy second-hand clothing and second-hand clothing buying behaviour are significant and positive. However, when the intention to buy second-hand clothing is included in the model as a mediator, the effect of these variables on second-hand clothing buying behaviour is either partially reduced or finished. So, the study's findings reported the mediating role of intention to buy second-hand clothing in the extended model. Also, this study ensures applicable insights to young consumers and practitioners of the fashion industry.
Biological Evaluation of the Effect of Root Canal Sealers Using a Rat Model

Gutta-percha points and root canal sealers have been used for decades in endodontics for root canal obturation. With techniques such as single cone methods, the amount of sealer is larger, making their properties more critical. However, relatively few reports have comprehensively evaluated their biological effects. To this end, we evaluated three types of sealers, zinc oxide-fatty acid-, bio-glass- and methacrylate resin-containing sealers were considered. Their biological effects were evaluated using a rat subcutaneous implantation model. Each sealer was loaded inside a Teflon tube and implanted subcutaneously in the backs of rats. Inflammatory cells were observed around all samples 7 days after implantation and reduced after 28 days. Our results revealed that all samples were in contact with the subcutaneous tissue surrounding the sealer. Additionally, Ca and P accumulation was observed in only the bio-glass-containing sealer. Furthermore, each of the three sealers exhibited unique immune and inflammatory modulatory effects. In particular, bio-glass and methacrylate resin sealers were found to induce variable gene expression in adjacent subcutaneous tissues related to angiogenesis, wound healing, muscle tissue, and surrounding subcutaneous tissue. These results may help to understand the biological impacts of root canal sealers on surrounding biological tissues, guiding future research and comparisons with new generations of materials.
Effect of Important Food Sources of Fructose-Containing Sugars on Inflammatory Biomarkers: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Controlled Feeding Trials

Background: Fructose-containing sugars as sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) may increase inflammatory biomarkers. Whether this effect is mediated by the food matrix at different levels of energy is unknown. To investigate the role of food source and energy, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of controlled trials on the effect of different food sources of fructose-containing sugars on inflammatory markers at different levels of energy control. Methods: MEDLINE, Embase, and the Cochrane Library were searched through March 2022 for controlled feeding trials ≥ 7 days. Four trial designs were prespecified by energy control: substitution (energy matched replacement of sugars); addition (excess energy from sugars added to diets); subtraction (energy from sugars subtracted from diets); and ad libitum (energy from sugars freely replaced). The primary outcome was C-reactive protein (CRP). Secondary outcomes were tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) and interleukin-6 (IL-6). Independent reviewers extracted data and assessed risk of bias. GRADE assessed certainty of evidence. Results: We identified 64 controlled trials (91 trial comparisons, n = 4094) assessing 12 food sources (SSB; sweetened dairy; sweetened dairy alternative [soy]; 100% fruit juice; fruit; dried fruit; mixed fruit forms; sweetened cereal grains and bars; sweets and desserts; added nutritive [caloric] sweetener; mixed sources [with SSBs]; and mixed sources [without SSBs]) at 4 levels of energy control over a median 6-weeks in predominantly healthy mixed weight or overweight/obese adults. Total fructose-containing sugars decreased CRP in addition trials and had no effect in substitution, subtraction or ad libitum trials. No effect was observed on other outcomes at any level of energy control. There was evidence of interaction/influence by food source: substitution trials (sweetened dairy alternative (soy) and 100% fruit juice decreased, and mixed sources (with SSBs) increased CRP); and addition trials (fruit decreased CRP and TNF-α; sweets and desserts (dark chocolate) decreased IL-6). The certainty of evidence was moderate-to-low for the majority of analyses. Conclusions: Food source appears to mediate the effect of fructose-containing sugars on inflammatory markers over the short-to-medium term. The evidence provides good indication that mixed sources that contain SSBs increase CRP, while most other food sources have no effect with some sources (fruit, 100% fruit juice, sweetened soy beverage or dark chocolate) showing decreases, which may be dependent on energy control. Clinicaltrials.gov: (NCT02716870).
SPECTRAL LINE SURVEY TOWARD MOLECULAR CLOUDS IN THE LARGE MAGELLANIC CLOUD

Spectral line survey observations of seven molecular clouds in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) have been conducted in the 3 mm band with the Mopra 22 m telescope to reveal chemical compositions in low metallicity conditions. Spectral lines of fundamental species such as CS, SO, CCH, HCN, HCO+, and HNC are detected in addition to those of CO and 13CO, while CH3OH is not detected in any source and N2H+ is marginally detected in two sources. The molecular-cloud scale (10 pc scale) chemical composition is found to be similar among the seven sources regardless of different star formation activities, and hence, it represents the chemical composition characteristic of the LMC without influences by star formation activities. In comparison with chemical compositions of Galactic sources, the characteristic features are (1) deficient N-bearing molecules, (2) abundant CCH, and (3) deficient CH3OH. Feature (1) is due to a lower elemental abundance of nitrogen in the LMC, whereas features (2) and (3) seem to originate from extended photodissociation regions and warmer temperature in cloud peripheries due to a lower abundance of dust grains in the low metallicity condition. In spite of general resemblance of chemical abundances among the seven sources, the CS/HCO+ and SO/HCO+ ratios are found to be slightly higher in a quiescent molecular cloud. An origin of this trend is discussed in relation to possible depletion of sulfur along the molecular cloud formation.
Style Transfer with Bio-realistic Appearance Manipulation for Skin-tone Inclusive rPPG

Data-driven remote vital sign estimation provides an efficient alternative to on-site clinical monitoring, however, its performance can be biased due to the imbalanced training sets. In this work, we take remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) as an example to examine the performance bias from skin tone variations in non-contact heart rate estimation. In rPPG, recent deep learning models have significantly improved the accuracy of the physiological measurement, however, the existing datasets MMSE-HR, AFRL, and UBFC-RPPG only contain roughly 10%, 0%, and 5% of dark-skinned subjects respectively. The imbalanced training sets result in a poor generalization capability of these models and lead to unwanted bias toward different demographic groups. In Western academia, it is regrettably difficult in a university setting to collect data on these dark-skinned subjects. Here we show a first attempt to overcome the lack of dark-skinned subjects by synthetic augmentation. A joint optimization framework is utilized to translate real videos from light-skinned subjects to dark skin tones while retaining their pulsatile signals. In the experiment, our method exhibits around 38% reduction in mean absolute error for the dark-skinned group and 49% improvement on bias mitigation, as compared with the previous work trained with just real samples. Project website: https://visual.ee. ucla.edu/rppg_augmentation. htm/.
H-Diffu: Hyperbolic Representations for Information Diffusion Prediction

With the proliferation of online social networks, a great deal of online user action data has been generated. Such data has enabled the study of information diffusion prediction, which is a fundamental problem for understanding the propagation of information on social media platforms. In diffusion prediction models, there are two standard components, i.e., a social graph and information diffusion cascades. We observe that both components exhibit latent hierarchical structures. However, most existing models are designed based on euclidean spaces, and hence cannot effectively capture complex patterns, especially hierarchical structures. Therefore, we investigate a novel research problem to learn hyperbolic representations for information diffusion prediction. To reflect the different characteristics of social graphs and diffusion cascades, we encode them into two latent hyperbolic spaces with different trainable curvatures. In addition, to model influence dependencies, we propose a co-attention mechanism to capture the processes of diffusion cascades using positional embeddings. Given a set of activated seed users, we jointly exploit diffusion cascades and social links to predict which users will be influenced. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed H-Diffu model significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art diffusion prediction frameworks.
Study on Mechanical Properties of Permeable Polymer Treated Loess

The reinforcement and durability of loess are of great importance for road performance. In this study, a self-designed grouting system and newly permeable polymers were adopted to investigate the mechanical properties and durability of solidified loess (SL), considering different dry densities and water contents. The unconfined compression test and piezocone penetration (CPTU) test were used to examine the mechanical properties. The mechanism of the loess solidified by permeable polymer was analyzed from the micro-level by SEM, MIP, and XRD tests. The test results show that the effect of polymer grouting is obvious, the unconfined compressive strength (UCS) of the SL after grouting is as high as 3.05–5.42 MPa; it is 11.83–20.99 times that of unsolidified loess (UL). The UCS of the SL after grouting is inversely proportional to the dry densities and water contents. After 56 days of immersion, the SL still shows a high compressive strength. The additional erosion of the SL was not caused by the salt solution; the durability is significantly better than that of cement mixing soil. The sensitivity of various factors on the UCS of the SL are service environment > water content > dry density. The SEM tests clearly show that the gel formed by the reaction of the polymer with water on the surface of soil particles makes the bond of soil particles tighter. It can be observed from the MIP test that the cumulative mercury of SL was 0.115 mL/g, which was 33.72% of UL (0.341 mL/g), and the cumulative mercury of SL after immersion in water and salt solutions was 0.183 mL/g and 0.175 mL/g, which was 53.7% and 51.3% of UL (0.341 mL/g), respectively. The XRD results show that there are no other new mineral components produced after grouting and the spacing between crystalline planes decreases, which proves that permeable polymer grouting makes the soil denser and does not erode the soil particles.
Lam'e Instantons

We perform a precise analytic test of the instanton approximation by comparing the exact band spectrum of the periodic Lam\'e potential to the tight-binding, instanton and WKB approximations. The instanton result gives the correct leading behavior in the semiclassical limit, while the tight-binding approximation does even better. WKB is off by an overall factor of $\sqrt{e/\pi}$.
Stokes imaging of AM Her systems using 3D inhomogeneous models – II. Modelling X-ray and optical data of CP Tucanae

The viewing geometry of the polar CP Tuc that better explains its optical and X-ray light curves is controversial. Previous modelling of white-light polarimetric data considered the partial self-eclipse of an extended inhomogeneous emitting region. Alternatively, phase-dependent absorption has been used to reproduce the X-ray data. This paper presents new optical polarimetric data of CP Tuc and a model that consistently explains its optical and X-ray data. The model was based on an extension of the CYCLOPS code that added X-ray bremsstrahlung emission and pre-shock region absorption to the original version, which only accounted for cyclotron emission. The new code creates the possibility of simultaneous optical and X-ray fitting. We show that self-eclipse and absorption data have distinct signatures on the X-ray spectra. Although we were able to reasonably fit the CP Tuc optical data to cases of absorption and self-eclipse, we were only able to reproduce the X-ray orbital modulation after considering the absorption in the pre-shock region. Specifically, we were unable to reproduce the X-ray observations in the self-eclipse case. We found that the primary emitting region in CP Tuc is located near the rotation pole that approximately points to the observer.
Trapping ultracold atoms in time-averaged adiabatic potentials

This thesis describes the trapping and manipulation of ultracold atoms in time-averaged adiabatic potentials (TAAP). The time-averaged adiabatic potential, proposed in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 083001 (2007)], uses resonant radio frequency (rf) radiation to couple the different magnetic substates of a hyperfine level manifold. The resultant dressed states are time-averaged and produce smooth and versatile trapping geometries. More specifically, we apply rf-radiation (MHz) to a quadrupole magnetic field, which results in an ellipsoidal trapping potential for rubidium-87 atoms in the F=1 manifold. This geometry is time-averaged with the help of oscillating (kHz) Helmholtz fields. We develop a convenient loading scheme for the TAAP which uses a standard TOP trap and suffers negligible atom losses and heating. Subsequently we characterize the TAAP trap itself and observe low heating rates and sufficient lifetimes (>3s). Furthermore it is possible to use a second, weaker rf-field to evaporatively cool the atoms to quantum degeneracy [Phys. Rev. A. 81, 031402 (2010)]. This opens up a route for further experiments in this potential: we show how atoms can be trapped in a double well potential and a ring trap geometry. Additionally a process to instigate rotation in these potentials by rotating the polarization of the rf-radiation is developed and implemented. This allows us to impart angular momentum onto the atomic cloud and spin it into a ring.