Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Flow Distortion Measurements in Convoluted Aeroengine Intakes

The unsteady flowfields generated by convoluted aeroengine intakes are sources of instabilities that can compromise the performance of the downstream turbomachinery. Hence, there is a need for synchronous high-spatial-resolution measurements that will allow a greater understanding of the aerodynamics. In this work, stereo particle image velocimetry is used in a new application to characterize the distorted flow at the outlet of complex intakes. A suite of measurements and analyses for two S-duct configurations across a range of inlet Mach numbers is presented. The work demonstrates the feasibility of using stereo particle image velocimetry techniques for determining the flowfield at the exit of convoluted intakes with a higher spatial resolution than typical pressure measurements. Analysis of the distortion descriptors quantifies the dependency upon the S-duct configuration and highlights that the more high-offset duct generates greater levels of swirl distortion relative to the low-offset configuration.
Pandemic Roller‐Coaster? Birth Trends in Higher‐Income Countries During the COVID‐19 Pandemic

We use monthly birth data collected by the Human Fertility Database to analyze the impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on birth trends until September 2022 in 38 higher‐income countries. We also present estimates of the monthly total fertility rate adjusted for seasonality. Our analysis reveals that the pandemic led to distinct swings in births and fertility rates. The initial pandemic shock was associated with a fall in births in most countries, with the sharpest drop in January 2021. Next, birth rates showed a short‐term recovery in March 2021, following the conceptions after the end of the first wave of the pandemic. Most countries reported a stable or slightly increasing number of births in the subsequent months, especially in autumn 2021. Yet another, quite unexpected, downturn in births started in January 2022, linked with the conceptions in spring 2021 when the pandemic measures were mostly eased out and vaccination was gaining momentum. Taken together and contrary to some initial expectations, the coronavirus pandemic did not bring a lasting "baby bust” in most of the analyzed countries. Especially the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States experienced an improvement in their birth dynamics in 2021 compared with the prepandemic period. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Population & Development Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
Inflation and Primordial Black Holes

We review conceptual aspects of inflationary scenarios able to produce primordial black holes by amplifying the size of curvature fluctuations to the level required to trigger black hole formation. We identify general mechanisms to do so, both for single- and multiple-field inflation. In single-field inflation, the spectrum of curvature fluctuations is enhanced by pronounced gradients of background quantities controlling the cosmological dynamics, which can induce brief phases of non-slow-roll inflationary evolution. In multiple-field inflation, the amplification occurs through appropriate couplings with additional sectors characterized by tachyonic instabilities that enhance the size of their fluctuations. As representative examples, we consider axion inflation and two-field models of inflation with rapid turns in field space. We develop our discussion in a pedagogical manner by including some of the most relevant calculations and by guiding the reader through the existing theoretical literature, emphasizing general themes common to several models.
The role of inflammation, oxidative stress, angiogenesis, and apoptosis in the pathophysiology of endometriosis: Basic science and new insights based on gene expression

Endometriosis is a frequent and chronic illness in young women which could be defined by the existence of endometrial stroma and glands outside of the normal site of the lining of the uterus. It has painful symptoms. The advanced stage of endometriosis may lead to gynecological malignancies, such as ovarian cancer, and other complications, including infertility. However, its exact physiopathology is not well known. Recent studies have shown the possible roles of inflammation along with oxidative stress. Additionally, angiogenesis and apoptosis dysregulation contribute to endometriosis pathophysiology. Therapeutic strategies and continuing attempts, to conquer endometriosis should be done regarding molecular signaling pathways. Thus, the present review summarizes current studies and focuses on molecular mechanisms.
Management of pulmonary nodules in women with pregnant intention: A review with perspective

The process for the management of pulmonary nodules in women with pregnant intention remains a challenge. There was a certain proportion of targeted female patients with high-risk lung cancer, and anxiety for suspicious lung cancer in early stage also exists. A comprehensive review of hereditary of lung cancer, effects of sexual hormone on lung cancer, natural history of pulmonary nodules, and computed tomography imaging with radiation exposure based on PubMed search was completed. The heredity of lung cancer and effects of sexual hormone on lung cancer are not the decisive factors, and the natural history of pulmonary nodules and the radiation exposure of imaging should be the main concerns. The management of incidental pulmonary nodules in young women with pregnant intention is an intricate and indecisive problem we have to encounter. The balance between the natural history of pulmonary nodules and the radiation exposure of imaging should be weighed.
Relationship between Serial Serum Neutrophil-Lymphocyte Ratio, Cardiovascular Mortality, and All-Cause Mortality in Chinese Peritoneal Dialysis Patients

Introduction: It is believed that the excessive cardiovascular (CV) burden of patients on peritoneal dialysis (PD) is closely associated with chronic inflammation. Neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) is an inflammatory marker that was shown to correlate with CV outcomes. However, little is known about the significance of serial monitoring of serum NLR. We aimed to determine the prognostic value of serial NLR on all-cause mortality and CV mortality in PD patients. Methods: Serial measurement of NLR was obtained from 225 incident PD patients in a single center, with each measurement 1 year apart. Patients were divided into two groups (“high” vs. “low”) by the median value of NLR. The primary and secondary outcome measure was all-cause and CV mortality, respectively. Results: After a median of follow-up for 43.9 months, patients with lower baseline NLR demonstrated a higher survival rate (p = 0.01). Patients with persistently high NLR values on serial measurement had the lowest survival rate (p = 0.03). Multivariate Cox regression showed that this group of patients had significantly higher all-cause mortality (HR: 1.74, 95% CI: 1.09–2.79, p = 0.02). However, the NLR failed to demonstrate a statistically significant relationship with CV mortality. Conclusions: While baseline NLR was an independent predictor of all-cause mortality in PD patients, persistent elevation in NLR appeared to further amplify the risk. Regular monitoring of serial serum NLR may enable early identification of patients who are at risk of adverse outcome.
Encapsulation of beta-pancreatic cells in a hydrogel based on alginate and graphene oxide with high potential application in the diabetes treatment

Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a chronic metabolic disease. Current therapies, including islet transplantation suffer instant blood mediated inflammatory reaction, nutrition and oxygen supply deficiency. Graphene oxide (GO) has shown to promote proliferation of different cells and alginate-based scaffolds are alternatives for beta-pancreatic cell functional improvement. We developed an alginate-GO based hydrogel that allows encapsulation and supporting beta-pancreatic cell survival. Physicochemical analysis revealed that a high GO concentration contributed to the morphological and chemical modification of the polymer matrix. Further analysis showed that alginate-GO hydrogel presented a more compact structure, less swelling, and lower degradation rate at high GO concentrations. Mechanical analysis revealed similar behaviour to that of the pancreas. Biocompatibility analysis demonstrated a relative increase in viability, proliferation, and cellular respiration due to GO content. 25 µg/mL alginate-GO hydrogel is a potential candidate for cell encapsulation and in vitro studies suggest a low cytotoxic effect in pancreatic cells, and enhanced functional behaviour, which may be favourable for diabetes treatment. Graphical Abstract
Development, Characterization, and Distribution of New, High-yielding, and Highly Palatable Japanese Rice Cultivars “Tsukiakari” and “Niji-no-kirameki”

As a consequence of extreme changes in climate, farming scale, and social structure, the requirements for rice yield potential and grain quality have been changing in Japan. To meet the demands of consumers, rice processing companies, and paddy farmers, “Tsukiakari” and “Niji-no-kirameki” were developed as high-yielding and highly palatable rice cultivars. The palatability of both cultivars is excellent and is as high as the leading Japanese cultivar, “Koshihikari. ” The yield potential of the new cultivars is over 700 g m −2 (brown rice, 15% moisture basis), and their shorter culm lengths provide greater lodging tolerance. “Tsukiakari” has been mainly distributed in the northern and central regions of Honshu, whereas “Niji-no-kirameki” has been distributed in the central and western regions. An early maturity cultivar, “Tsukiakari,” is useful for separating harvest schedule from “Koshihikari. ” “Niji-no-kirameki” has been replacing “Koshihikari” in heat-vulnerable regions due to its superior heat resilience during the ripening period. Establishing proper cultivation methods for “Tsukiakari” and “Niji-no-kirameki” through multiple environmental tests helps local farmers efficiently manage their farms and produce high-yielding and highly palatable crops. Superior characteristics of “Tsukiakari” and “Niji-no-kirameki” will be useful to develop new rice genotypes that highly meet the needs of the times.
Platelet HIF-2α promotes thrombogenicity through PAI-1 synthesis and extracellular vesicle release

Oxygen-compromised environments, such as high altitude, are associated with platelet hyperactivity. Platelets confined within the relatively impervious core of an aggregate/thrombus have restricted access to oxygen, yet they continue to perform energy-intensive procoagulant activities that sustain the thrombus. Studying platelet signaling under hypoxia is, therefore, critical to our understanding of the mechanistic basis of thrombus stability. We report here that hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF)-2α is translated from pre-existing mRNA and stabilized against proteolytic degradation in enucleate platelets exposed to hypoxia. Hypoxic stress, too, stimulates platelets to synthesize plasminogen-activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) and shed extracellular vesicles, both of which potentially contribute to the prothrombotic phenotype associated with hypoxia. Stabilization of HIF-α by administering hypoxia-mimetics to mice accelerates thrombus formation in mesenteric arterioles. In agreement, platelets from patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and high altitude residents exhibiting thrombogenic attributes have abundant expression of HIF-2α and PAI- 1. Thus, targeting platelet hypoxia signaling could be an effective anti-thrombotic strategy.
Dietary Trace Elements and the Pathogenesis of Neurodegenerative Diseases

Trace elements such as iron (Fe), zinc (Zn), copper (Cu), and manganese (Mn) are absorbed from food via the gastrointestinal tract, transported into the brain, and play central roles in normal brain functions. An excess of these trace elements often produces reactive oxygen species and damages the brain. Moreover, increasing evidence suggests that the dyshomeostasis of these metals is involved in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, prion diseases, and Lewy body diseases. The disease-related amyloidogenic proteins can regulate metal homeostasis at the synapses, and thus loss of the protective functions of these amyloidogenic proteins causes neurodegeneration. Meanwhile, metal-induced conformational changes of the amyloidogenic proteins contribute to enhancing their neurotoxicity. Moreover, excess Zn and Cu play central roles in the pathogenesis of vascular-type senile dementia. Here, we present an overview of the intake, absorption, and transport of four essential elements (Fe, Zn, Cu, Mn) and one non-essential element (aluminum: Al) in food and their connections with the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases based on metal–protein, and metal–metal cross-talk.
Effects of Fiscal Policy on Economic Growth: Empirical Evidence from South Asian Countries

This study aims to find the effects of fiscal policy variables on economic growth in South Asian nations based on panel data of 21 years from 2001 to 2021.The study adopted descriptive and causal relationship research design. In this study, the correlation matrix is used to describe the relationship between variables, and the hausman test is applied to select the fixed and random effect models. The results revealed that gross capital formation and public debt had significant and positive effect on economic growth in South Asian countries. Tax revenue was found to have significant but negative effect on economic growth while government expenditure was found to have insignificant and positive effect on economic growth. The study therefore concludes that fiscal policy has significant relationship with economic growth in South Asian Countries. Additionally, efforts should be made while implementing fiscal reforms that focuses public expenditure to a manageable and specified economic sectors.
A Smaller and Better Word Embedding for Neural Machine Translation

Word embeddings play an important role in Neural Machine Translation (NMT). However, it still has a series of problems such as ignoring the prior knowledge of the association between words, relying on specific task constraints passively in parameter training, and isolating individual embedding’s learning process from one another. In this paper, we propose a new word embedding method to add the prior knowledge of the association between words to the training process, and at the same time to share the iterative training results among all word embeddings. This method is applicable to all mainstream NMT systems. In our experiments, it achieves an improvement of +0.9 BLEU points on the WMT’14 English<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\rightarrow $ </tex-math></inline-formula>German task. On the Global Voices v2018q4 Spanish<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\rightarrow $ </tex-math></inline-formula>Czech low-resource translation tasks, it leads to a more prominent performance improvement over the strong baselines (a +2.6 BLEU improvement on average). As another “bonus”, the new word embedding has far fewer parameters than the traditional word embedding, even as low as 15% of the parameters of the baselines.
A Self-Adaptive Evolutionary Deception Framework for Community Structure

The rapid development of community detection algorithms, while serving users in social networks, also brings about certain privacy problems. In this work, we study community deception, which aims to counter malicious community detection attacks by imperceptibly modifying a small part of the connections. However, it is computationally challenging to find an optimal edge set since it is an NP-hard problem. To address this issue, we propose a self-adaptive evolutionary deception (SAEP) framework. In SAEP, a novel fitness function that is able to capture local and global community change is being proposed. SAEP also provides a well-designed initialization mechanism to reduce the size of the solution space. In addition, we assign an indicator to each gene to reflect its strength within the chromosome that it belongs to, thereby a set of self-adaptive operations can be defined to enhance the algorithm’s stability and efficacy. Furthermore, we define a new “edge distance” to conserve the limited modification resource on the graph. In the experiment, the proposed method is tested against different community detection methods using various real-world datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that SAEP improves significantly over state-of-the-art approaches in terms of effectiveness.
Role discovery in node-attributed public transportation networks: the model description

Modeling public transport systems from the standpoint of the theory of complex networks is of great importance to improve their efficiency and reliability. An important task here is to analyze the roles of nodes and weighted links in the network, respectively modeling groups of public transport stops and their linking routes. In previous works, this problem was solved based on only topological and geospatial information about the presence of routes between stops and their geographical location which led to the problem of uninterpretability of the discovered roles. In this article, to solve the problem, the model additionally considers information about the social infrastructure around the stops and discovers topological, geospatial, and infrastructure roles jointly. The public transport system is modeled using a special weighted network — with node attributes where nodes are non-overlapping groups of stops united by geospatial location, node attributes are vectors containing information about the social infrastructure around stops, and weighted links integrate information about the distance and number of transfers in routes between stops. To identify the model, it is sufficient to use only open urban data on the public transport system. Role discovery for stops is carried out by clustering network nodes in accordance with their topological and attributive features. An extended model of the public transport system and a new approach to solving the problem of discovering the roles of stops, providing interpretability from the topological, geospatial and infrastructural points of view, are proposed. The model was identified on the open data of Saint Petersburg about metro stations, trolleybus and bus stops as well as organizations and enterprises around the stations and stops. Based on the data, balanced parameters for grouping stops, assigning link weights and constructing attribute vectors are found for further use in the role discovery task. The results of the study can be used to identify transport and infrastructure shortcomings of real public transport systems which should be considered to improve the functioning of these systems in the future.
SFRP4 Reduces Atherosclerosis Plaque Formation in ApoE Deficient Mice

Secreted frizzled related protein 4 (SFRP4), a member of the SFRPs family, contributes to a significant function in metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. However, there is not enough evidence to prove the antiatherosclerosis effect of SFRP4 in ApoE knock-out (KO) mice. ApoE KO mice were fed a western diet and injected adenovirus (Ad)-SFRP4 through the tail vein for 12 weeks. Contrasted with the control cohort, the area of atherosclerotic plaque in ApoE KO mice overexpressing SFRP4 was reduced significantly. Plasma high-density lipoprotein cholesterol was elevated in the Ad-SFRP4 group. RNA sequence analysis indicated that there were 96 differentially expressed genes enriched in 10 signaling pathways in the mRNA profile of aortic atherosclerosis lesions. The analysis data also revealed the expression of a number of genes linked to metabolism, organism system, and human disease. In summary, our data demonstrates that SFRP4 could play an important role in improving atherosclerotic plaque formation in the aorta.
Effectiveness and Safety of SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination in HIV-Infected Patients—Real-World Study

The development of COVID-19 vaccines has been a triumph of biomedical research. However, there are still challenges, including assessment of their immunogenicity in high-risk populations, including PLWH. In the present study, we enrolled 121 PLWH aged >18 years, that were vaccinated against COVID-19 in the Polish National Vaccination Program. Patients filled in questionnaires regarding the side effects of vaccination. Epidemiological, clinical, and laboratory data were collected. The efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines was evaluated with an ELISA that detects IgG antibodies using a recombinant S1 viral protein antigen. The interferon-gamma release assay (IGRA) was applied to quantitate interferon-gamma (IFN-γ) to assess cellular immunity to SARS-CoV-2. In total, 87 patients (71.9%) received mRNA vaccines (BNT162b2-76 (59.5%), mRNA-1273- 11 (9.1%)). A total of 34 patients (28.09%) were vaccinated with vector-based vaccines (ChAdOx Vaxzevria- 20 (16.52%), Ad26.COV2. S- 14 (11.6%)). A total of 95 (78.5%) of all vaccinated patients developed a protective level of IgG antibodies. Only eight PLWH (6.6%) did not develop cellular immune response. There were six patients (4.95%) that did not develop a cellular and humoral response. Analysis of variance proved that the best humoral and cellular response related to the administration of the mRNA-1273 vaccine. COVID-19 vaccines were found to be immunogenic and safe in PLWH. Vaccination with mRNA vaccines were related to better humoral and cellular responses.
Explaining Russia’s Inertia in the Azerbaijan–Armenia Dispute: Reward and Punishment in an Asymmetric Alliance

Abstract Russia has been conventionally portrayed in the area studies literature as a close ally of Armenia, although the latter is a subordinate rather than an equal partner. More recent scholarship has focused on Armenia’s dilemma as to whether to align itself with the liberal West or to enhance ties with its former patron. The Armenian foreign policy establishment has demonstrated in political action and discourse a marked preference for Europe’s institutions and political vision. Russia’s neutrality in the recent escalation of tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan, despite bilateral security arrangements with Armenia, showed the inherent fragilities of this asymmetric alliance. Drawing on asymmetric alliance literature, this article seeks to explain Russia’s reluctance to involve itself in the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute in favour of Armenia and identifies how Russia rewards or punishes its ally, based on its assessment of whether the ‘side payments’ attached to the alliance have been honoured.