Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Engineered Genes in Wild Populations: Fitness of Weed-Crop Hybrids of Raphanus Sativus

The transfer of engineered genes (transgenes) from crops to natural popu- lations will depend first on mating between the crop and related weeds and then upon the relative fitness of the weed-crop hybrid. While weed-crop hybridization is known to occur readily under agricultural conditions, almost nothing is known of the fitness of the hybrids produced. Therefore, we measured the relative fitness of weedy radishes and their sibling weed-crop hybrids under field conditions. Specifically, we compared germination success, time to first flowering, fruit production, seed production, and frequency of transmission of the crop allele to seed progeny. Hybrids showed significantly greater fruit and seed production, and equaled weeds in all other measured characters. Thus, in this experiment, the fitness of hybrids exceeded that of their wild siblings. These results suggest that, in at least this system, neutral or advantageous transgenes introduced into natural populations will tend to persist.
Inhibition of LPS-induced systemic and local TNF production by a synthetic anti-endotoxin peptide (SAEP-2)

Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) exerts its biological activity through the lipid A moiety. We tested the efficiency in inhibiting TNF production in sera and in tissues of mice and in the derma of rabbits challenged with LPS, of a synthetic anti-LPS peptide (SAEP-2) previously shown to specifically detoxify the lipid A region of LPS on the basis of structural similarities with the antibiotic polymyxin B (PMXB). In mice, SAEP-2 (100 μg/mouse, i.v.) injected with various schedules ('-30 to +10 min from LPS at 50 ng/mouse, i.v.) significantly inhibited serum TNF as well as liver, spleen and lung-associated TNF. In rabbits, SAEP-2 significantly inhibited TNF produced in dermal tissue and the resulting local hemorrhagic necrosis. The amount of tissue-associated TNF released by LPS challenge in the mouse was up to 6 times that present in the serum and inhibition by SAEP-2 or PMXB accounted for 75% of the total. Direct measurement of the binding kinetics by surface plasmon resonance and molecular filtration at equilibrium revealed that SAEP-2 and PMXB bind to LPS only in the presence of a significant amount of water but that they are unable to bind LPS in undiluted serum. Altogether these findings strongly suggest that inhibition of LPS-induced TNF by SAEP-2 and PMXB may occur in tissues.
CHANGES IN ANTIOXIDANT ENZYME ACTIVITIES IN SOYBEAN UNDER CADMIUM STRESS

Soybean (Glycine max L.) seedlings were grown in a hydroponic system containing nutrient solution with varying concentrations (0, 0.01, 0.5 mM) of cadmium (Cd) for a 48 h period. Roots and leaves were analyzed for catalase, glutathione reductase, and superoxide dismutase activities. Although a clear effect of Cd on plant growth was observed, the activities of catalase and superoxide dismutase were not altered significantly in the roots or leaves at all concentrations tested. Glutathione reductase did not exhibit any variation in activity in leaves, however, in roots an increase in activity was observed at 0.5 mM Cd. Catalase and superoxide dismutase isoenzymes were further characterized by analysis in non-denaturing PAGE. Activity staining for superoxide dismutase (SOD) revealed seven isoenzymes in leaves and eight isoenzymes in roots, corresponding to Mn-SOD and Cu/Zn-SOD. No Fe-SOD isoenzymes were observed. For catalase, one band of activity was observed in leaves and roots. Although no significant variation was observed in leaf tissue, in roots the 0.5 mM Cd treatment exhibited a slight increase in catalase activity. The results suggest that in soybean, glutathione reductase is stimulated by Cd in roots, to produce reduced glutathione to be used in the synthesis of phytochelatins or possibly as a response to the generation of reactive oxygen species induced by Cd.
Microcavity Polaritons for Quantum Simulation

Quantum simulations are one of the pillars of quantum technologies. These simulations provide insight in fields as varied as high energy physics, many‐body physics, or cosmology to name only a few. Several platforms, ranging from ultracold‐atoms to superconducting circuits through trapped ions have been proposed as quantum simulators. This article reviews recent developments in another well established platform for quantum simulations: polaritons in semiconductor microcavities. These quasiparticles obey a nonlinear Schrödigner equation (NLSE), and their propagation in the medium can be understood in terms of quantum hydrodynamics. As such, they are considered as “fluids of light. ” The challenge of quantum simulations is the engineering of configurations in which the potential energy and the nonlinear interactions in the NLSE can be controlled. Here, some landmark experiments with polaritons in microcavities are revisited, how the various properties of these systems may be used in quantum simulations is discussed, and the richness of polariton systems to explore nonequilibrium physics is highlighted.
Indicator Patterns of Forced Change Learned by an Artificial Neural Network

Many problems in climate science require the identification of signals obscured by both the “noise” of internal climate variability and differences across models. Following previous work, we train an artificial neural network (ANN) to predict the year of a given map of annual‐mean temperature (or precipitation) from forced climate model simulations. This prediction task requires the ANN to learn forced patterns of change amidst a background of climate noise and model differences. We then apply a neural network visualization technique (layerwise relevance propagation) to visualize the spatial patterns that lead the ANN to successfully predict the year. These spatial patterns thus serve as “reliable indicators” of the forced change. The architecture of the ANN is chosen such that these indicators vary in time, thus capturing the evolving nature of regional signals of change. Results are compared to those of more standard approaches like signal‐to‐noise ratios and multilinear regression in order to gain intuition about the reliable indicators identified by the ANN. We then apply an additional visualization tool (backward optimization) to highlight where disagreements in simulated and observed patterns of change are most important for the prediction of the year. This work demonstrates that ANNs and their visualization tools make a powerful pair for extracting climate patterns of forced change.
Antibacterial activity of coffee: Relationship between biological activity and chemical markers

The antibacterial activity of coffee depends mainly on the degree of roasting of the coffee beans. To identify easily determinable chemical markers which relate to coffee's antibacterial activity, 5-caffeoylquinic acid, caffeic acid, nicotinic acid, trigonelline, 5-(hydroxymethyl)furfuraldehyde, the content of which changed throughout the roasting process, and caffeine were considered. A new HPLC method that allows determination of these compounds simultaneously was developed. Two antibacterial activity chemical markers were found: (1) the sum of trigonelline and nicotinic acid contents and (2) the 5-caffeoylquinic acid/caffeine ratio
Motion by curvature and large deviations for an interface dynamics on Z 2

We study large deviations for a Markov process on curves in Z 2 mimicking the motion of an interface. Our dynamics can be tuned with a parameter β, which plays the role of an inverse temperature, and coincides at β = ∞ with the zero-temperature Ising model with Glauber dynamics, where curves correspond to the boundaries of droplets of one phase immersed in a sea of the other one. We prove that contours typically follow a motion by curvature with an influence of the parameter β, and establish large deviations bounds at all large enough β < ∞. The diffusion coefficient and mobility of the model are identified and correspond to those predicted in the literature.
Fine-Grained 3D Shape Classification With Hierarchical Part-View Attention

Fine-grained 3D shape classification is important for shape understanding and analysis, which poses a challenging research problem. However, the studies on the fine-grained 3D shape classification have rarely been explored, due to the lack of fine-grained 3D shape benchmarks. To address this issue, we first introduce a new 3D shape dataset (named FG3D dataset) with fine-grained class labels, which consists of three categories including airplane, car and chair. Each category consists of several subcategories at a fine-grained level. According to our experiments under this fine-grained dataset, we find that state-of-the-art methods are significantly limited by the small variance among subcategories in the same category. To resolve this problem, we further propose a novel fine-grained 3D shape classification method named FG3D-Net to capture the fine-grained local details of 3D shapes from multiple rendered views. Specifically, we first train a Region Proposal Network (RPN) to detect the generally semantic parts inside multiple views under the benchmark of generally semantic part detection. Then, we design a hierarchical part-view attention aggregation module to learn a global shape representation by aggregating generally semantic part features, which preserves the local details of 3D shapes. The part-view attention module hierarchically leverages part-level and view-level attention to increase the discriminability of our features. The part-level attention highlights the important parts in each view while the view-level attention highlights the discriminative views among all the views of the same object. In addition, we integrate a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to capture the spatial relationships among sequential views from different viewpoints. Our results under the fine-grained 3D shape dataset show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. The FG3D dataset is available at https://github.com/liuxinhai/FG3D-Net.
The Cauchy problem for the L 2–critical generalized Zakharov-Kuznetsov equation in dimension 3

Abstract We prove local well-posedness for the L 2 critical generalized Zakharov-Kuznetsov equation in We also prove that the equation is “almost well-posedness” for initial data in the sense that the solution belongs to a certain intersection and is unique within that class, where we can ensure continuity of the data-to-solution map in an only slightly larger space. We also prove that solutions satisfy the expected conservation of mass for the whole range, and energy for By a limiting argument, this implies, in particular, global existence for small initial data in Finally, we study the question of almost everywhere (a.e.) convergence of solutions of the initial value problem to initial data.
Bidirectional Electro-Optic Wavelength Conversion in the Quantum Ground State

Fiber optic communication is the backbone of our modern information society, offering high bandwidth, low loss, weight, size and cost, as well as an immunity to electromagnetic interference. Microwave photonics lends these advantages to electronic sensing and communication systems, but - unlike the field of nonlinear optics - electro-optic devices so far require classical modulation fields whose variance is dominated by electronic or thermal noise rather than quantum fluctuations. Here we present a cavity electro-optic transceiver operating in a millikelvin environment with a mode occupancy as low as 0.025 $\pm$ 0.005 noise photons. Our system is based on a lithium niobate whispering gallery mode resonator, resonantly coupled to a superconducting microwave cavity via the Pockels effect. For the highest continuous wave pump power of 1.48 mW we demonstrate bidirectional single-sideband conversion of X band microwave to C band telecom light with a total (internal) efficiency of 0.03 % (0.7 %) and an added output conversion noise of 5.5 photons. The high bandwidth of 10.7 MHz combined with the observed very slow heating rate of 1.1 noise photons s$^{-1}$ puts quantum limited pulsed microwave-optics conversion within reach. The presented device is versatile and compatible with superconducting qubits, which might open the way for fast and deterministic entanglement distribution between microwave and optical fields, for optically mediated remote entanglement of superconducting qubits, and for new multiplexed cryogenic circuit control and readout strategies.
InfantNet: A Deep Neural Network for Analyzing Infant Vocalizations

Acoustic analyses of infant vocalizations are valuable for research on speech development as well as applications in sound classification. Previous studies have focused on measures of acoustic features based on theories of speech processing, such spectral and cepstrum-based analyses. More recently, end-to-end models of deep learning have been developed to take raw speech signals (acoustic waveforms) as inputs and convolutional neural network layers to learn representations of speech sounds based on classification tasks. We applied a recent end-to-end model of sound classification to analyze a large-scale database of labeled infant and adult vocalizations recorded in natural settings outside the lab with no control over recording conditions. The model learned basic classifications like infant versus adult vocalizations, infant speech-related versus non-speech vocalizations, and canonical versus non-canonical babbling. The model was trained on recordings of infants ranging from 3 to 18 months of age, and classification accuracy changed with age as speech became more distinct and babbling became more speech-like. Further work is needed to validate and explore the model and dataset, but our results show how deep learning can be used to measure and investigate speech acquisition and development, with potential applications in speech pathology and infant monitoring.
ISTITUTO NAZIONALE DI FISICA NUCLEARE

The Time Projection Chamber (TPC) is an ideal candidate to finely study the charged particle ionization in a gaseous medium. Large volumes TPCs can be readout with a suitable number of channels offering a complete 3D reconstruction of an ultra-relativistic charged particle track, that is the sequence of its energy releases in the TPC gas volume. Moreover, He-based TPCs are very promising to study keV energy particles as nuclear recoils, opening the possibility for directional searches of Dark Matter (DM) and the study of Solar Neutrinos (SN). In this paper we report the analysis of the data acquired with a small TPC prototype (named LEMOn) built by the CYGNO collaboration that was ex∗Corresponding author URL: giovanni.mazzitelli@lnf.infn. it (G. Mazzitelli) Preprint submitted to Journal of LATEX Templates November 20, 2020 posed to a beam of 450 MeV electrons at the Beam Test Facility of National Laboratories of Frascati. LEMOn is operated with a He-CF4 mixture at atmospheric pressure and is based on a Gas Electron Multipliers amplification stage that produces visible light collected by a sub-millimeter position resolution scientific CMOS camera. This type of readout in conjunction with a fast light detection allows a 3D reconstruction of the electrons tracks. The electrons are leaving a trail of segments of ionizations corresponding to a few keV energy release each. Their study leads to predict a keV energy threshold and 1-10 mm longitudinal and 0.1-0.3 mm transverse position resolution for nuclear recoils, very promising for the application of optically readout TPC to DM searches and SN measurements.
Mechanisms Involved in the Therapeutic Effects of Soybean (Glycine Max)

Soybeans contain nutritional and medicinal properties. It is a rich source of quality proteins, phytosterols, fibers, and other biologically active compounds, notably daidzein and genistein. Soybeans provide health benefits due to their functional ingredients such as proteins, polysaccharides, and isoflavones. These functional ingredients play a vital role in the reduction of different types of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, postmenopausal problems, diabetes, and some neurodegenerative disorders. This review primarily envisages the different mechanisms involved in the therapeutic effects of soybean components as well as their contribution toward the reduction of different diseases.
Utilization of Phosphorus from Various Phosphate Supplements by Chicks

Abstract THE recommended nutrient allowances for chickens of the National Research Council (1950) advocate 1.0 percent calcium and 0.6 percent phosphorus in the ration of chicks to 8 weeks of age, with the proviso that inorganic phosphorus should constitute 0.4 percent. However, in the 1954 revision, although the total phosphorus requirement is set at the 0.6 percent level, it is recommended that at least 0.45 percent should be inorganic phosphorus, all of the phosphorus of non-plant feed ingredients being considered inorganic, together with approximately 30 percent of the phosphorus of plant products. Almquist (1954) concluded, from a review of all evidence on readily available phosphorus requirement for the chick to 4 weeks of age, that this requirement should be placed at a minimum of 0.45 percent in the presence of ample amounts of vitamin D. After this age, the requirement may drop to 0.37 percent to 10 weeks of age. O’Rourke …
On quasi-parallel whistler waves in the solar wind

The recent simulations showed that the whistler heat flux instability, which presumably produces the most of quasi-parallel coherent whistler waves in the solar wind, is not efficient in regulating the electron heat conduction. In addition, recent spacecraft measurements indicated that some fraction of coherent whistler waves in the solar wind may propagate anti-parallel to the electron heat flux, being produced due to a perpendicular temperature anisotropy of suprathermal electrons. We present analysis of properties of parallel and anti-parallel whistler waves unstable at electron heat fluxes and temperature anisotropies of suprathermal electrons typical of the pristine solar wind. Assuming the electron population consisting of counter-streaming dense thermal core and tenuous suprathermal halo populations, we perform a linear stability analysis to demonstrate that anti-parallel whistler waves are expected to have smaller frequencies, wave numbers and growth rates compared to parallel whistler waves. The stability analysis is performed over a wide range of parameters of core and halo electron populations. Using the quasi-linear scaling relation we show that anti-parallel whistler waves saturate at amplitudes of one order of magnitude smaller than parallel whistler waves, which is at about $10^{-3}\;B_0$ in the pristine solar wind. The analysis shows that the presence of anti-parallel whistler waves in the pristine solar wind is more likely to be obscured by turbulent magnetic field fluctuations, because of lower frequencies and smaller amplitudes compared to parallel whistler waves. The presented results will be also valuable for numerical simulations of the electron heat flux regulation in the solar wind.
Responses of Guava ( Psidium guajava L.) to Boron Spray

The effects of three concentrations i.e., 0.0%, 0.1% and 0.2% of boron sprayed on guava variety‘Allahabad Safeda’in the form of boric acid were studied in Horticultural Garden, College of Agriculture, Banaras Hindu University, during 1966-1968.Highly significant increase in extension of terminal shoot, number of leaves, leaf area per shoot and significant reduction in leaf chlorosis were recorded under 0.2% and 0.1% respectively. Significant earliness in fruit maturity and increase in yield were recorded with boron spray. The physico-chemical composition of fruits markedly improved but only fruit weight and Vit. ‘C’were significantly increased at harvest. The maximum effect was exhibited by 0.1% spray.Chemical analysis for different nutrients reflected the better balance of constituents in the leaves. There was increase in boron content, dry weight, ash and phosphorus with boron spraying and 0.2% spray gave maximum effect. Potassium content was unaffected with boron treatment. Marked reduction in nitrogen and carbohydrate content was recorded and maximum was exhibited under 0.2% spray.
Quantitative tauberian approach to collisionless transport equations with diffuse boundary operators

This paper gives a spectral approach to time asymptotics of collisionless transport semi-groups with general diffuse boundary operators. The strong stability of the invariant density is derived from the classical Ingham theorem. A recent quantitative version of this theorem provides algebraic rates of convergence to equilibrium. MSC: primary 82C40; secondary 35F15, 47D06
Approximation Schemes for ReLU Regression

We consider the fundamental problem of ReLU regression, where the goal is to output the best fitting ReLU with respect to square loss given access to draws from some unknown distribution. We give the first efficient, constant-factor approximation algorithm for this problem assuming the underlying distribution satisfies some weak concentration and anti-concentration conditions (and includes, for example, all log-concave distributions). This solves the main open problem of Goel et al., who proved hardness results for any exact algorithm for ReLU regression (up to an additive $\epsilon$). Using more sophisticated techniques, we can improve our results and obtain a polynomial-time approximation scheme for any subgaussian distribution. Given the aforementioned hardness results, these guarantees can not be substantially improved. Our main insight is a new characterization of surrogate losses for nonconvex activations. While prior work had established the existence of convex surrogates for monotone activations, we show that properties of the underlying distribution actually induce strong convexity for the loss, allowing us to relate the global minimum to the activation's Chow parameters.
The PHLEK Survey: A New Determination of the Primordial Helium Abundance

We present Keck NIRSPEC and Keck NIRES spectroscopy of sixteen metal-poor galaxies that have pre-existing optical observations. The near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy specifically targets the He i λ10830 Å emission line, due to its sensitivity to the physical conditions of the gas in H ii regions. We use these NIR observations, combined with optical spectroscopy, to determine the helium abundance of sixteen galaxies across a metallicity range = 7.13–8.00. This data set is combined with two other samples where metallicity and helium abundance measurements can be secured: star-forming galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectroscopic database, and existing low-metallicity systems in the literature. We calculate a linear fit to these measurements, accounting for intrinsic scatter, and report a new determination of the primordial helium number abundance, , which corresponds to a primordial helium mass fraction . Using our determination of the primordial helium abundance in combination with the latest primordial deuterium measurement, , we place a bound on the baryon density and the effective number of neutrino species . These values are in 1. 3σ agreement with those deduced from the Planck satellite observations of the temperature fluctuations imprinted on the cosmic microwave background.