Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Catecholaminergic and Cholinergic Systems Mediate Beneficial Effect of Vortioxetine on Diabetes-Induced Neuropathic Pain

The therapeutic potential of vortioxetine on mechanical hyperalgesia/allodynia was investigated in rats with streptozotocin-induced diabetes, and its possible mechanism of action was elucidated in this study. The obtained findings demonstrated that subacute vortioxetine treatment (5 and 10 mg/kg for 2 weeks) increased the reduced paw-withdrawal thresholds of diabetic rats both in the Randall–Selitto and Dynamic plantar tests. Moreover, the falling latencies of animals did not change in the Rota-rod assessments. These results suggest that vortioxetine administration significantly improved diabetes-induced hyperalgesia and allodynia responses in the rats without affecting their motor coordination. The vortioxetine (5 mg/kg)-induced antihyperalgesic and antiallodynic effects were reversed by AMPT, yohimbine, ICI 118,551, sulpiride and atropine pre-treatments, suggesting the involvement of the catecholaminergic system, α2- and β2-adrenoceptors, D2/3 dopaminergic receptors and cholinergic muscarinic receptors in the exhibited pharmacological activity, respectively. Moreover, the data from the immunohistochemical studies indicated that the inhibition of c-Fos overexpression in dorsal horn neurons also mediates the beneficial effect of this drug. Vortioxetine induced no difference in plasma glucose levels in diabetic rats. If clinical studies confirm these findings, the concomitant beneficial effect of vortioxetine on mood disorders and its neutral activity profile on glycemic control may make it an alternative drug for the treatment of neuropathic pain.
Oxygen–Ion Conductivity, Dielectric Properties and Spectroscopic Characterization of “Stuffed” Tm2(Ti2−xTmx)O7−x/2 (x = 0, 0.1, 0.18, 0.28, 0.74) Pyrochlores

Tm2(Ti2−xTmx)O7−x/2 (x = 0, 0.1, 0.18, 0.28, 0.74) solid electrolytes have been investigated as potential electrolyte materials for solid oxygen fuel cells (SOFCs), operating in the medium temperature range (600–700 °C). The design of new oxygen-conducting materials is of importance for their possible utilization in the solid oxide fuel cells. The oxygen–ion conductivity of the Tm2(Ti2−xTmx)O7−x/2 (x = 0, 0.1, 0.18, 0.28, 0.74) “stuffed” pyrochlores ceramics was investigated by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (two-probe AC) in dry and wet air. The synthesis of precursors via co-precipitation and the precipitate decomposition temperature have been shown to be of key importance for obtaining dense and highly conductive ceramics. At ~770 °C, the highest total conductivity, ~3.16 × 10−3 S/cm, is offered by Tm2Ti2O7. The conductivity of the fluorite-like solid solution Tm2(Ti2−xTmx)O7−x/2 (x = 0.74) is an order of magnitude lower. However, for the first time a proton contribution of ~5 × 10−5 S/cm at 600 °C has been found in Tm2(Ti2−xTmx)O7−x/2 (x = 0.74) fluorite. Until now, compositions with proton conductivity were not known for the intermediate and heavy rare earth titanates Ln2(Ti2−xLnx)O7−x/2 (Ln = Ho − Lu) systems. The use of X-ray diffraction (structural analysis with Rietveld refinement), optical spectroscopy and dielectric permittivity data allowed us to follow structural disordering in the solid solution series with increasing thulium oxide content. High and low cooling rates have been shown to have different effects on the properties of the ceramics. Slow cooling initiates’ growth of fluorite nanodomains in a pyrochlore matrix. The fabrication of such nanostructured dense composites is a promising direction in the synthesis of highly conductive solid electrolytes for SOFCs. We assume that high-temperature firing of nanophase precursors helps to obtain lightly doped “stuffed” pyrochlores, which also provide the high oxygen–ion conductivity.
Feature Selection and Multi-task Learning for Pedestrian Crossing Prediction

Understanding pedestrians’ behaviour is a major challenge for autonomous vehicles in urban environments. An intelligent driving system needs to recognize intentions and anticipate future actions. For the task of pedestrian crossing prediction, we aim to predict the crossing of a pedestrian in traffic from visual features, such that an oncoming vehicle has sufficient time to react. In this work, we assess the efficacy of different input modalities such as human poses, bounding boxes, ego vehicle speed and image-based features for pedestrian crossing prediction. Our findings indicate that image-based features are less effective than suggested in the literature and that our newly generated human poses improve pedestrian crossing prediction. Furthermore, we present a neural network architecture based on recurrent units and multi-task learning which demonstrates that the joint training of multiple tasks has beneficial influence on the capability to identify crossing pedestrians. We evaluate our methods based on the public PIE and JAAD datasets, and generate models on par with state-of-the-art methods with a limited set of features.
Synthesis of Graphene Oxide from Sugarcane Dry Leaves by Two-Stage Pyrolysis

Natural or synthetic graphite as precursors for the preparation of graphene oxide (GO) have constraints due to their limited availability, high reaction temperature for processing of synthetic graphite and higher generation cost. The use of oxidants, long reaction duration, the generation of toxic gases and residues of inorganic salts, the degree of hazard and low yield are some of the disadvantages of the oxidative-exfoliation methods. Under these circumstances, biomass waste usage as a precursor is a viable alternative. The conversion of biomass into GO by the pyrolysis method is ecofriendly with diverse applications, which partially overcomes the waste disposal problem encountered by the existing methods. In this study, graphene oxide (GO) is prepared from dry leaves of sugarcane plant through a two-step pyrolysis method using ferric (III) citrate as a catalyst, followed by treatment with conc. H2SO4. The synthesized GO is analyzed by UV-Vis. , FTIR, XRD, SEM, TEM, EDS and Raman spectroscopy. The synthesized GO has many oxygen-containing functional groups (–OH, C–OH, COOH, C–O). It shows a sheet-like structure with a crystalline size of 10.08 nm. The GO has a graphitic structure due to the Raman shift of G (1339 cm−1) and D (1591 cm−1) bands. The prepared GO has multilayers due to the ratio of 0.92 between ID and IG. The weight ratios between carbon and oxygen are examined by SEM-EDS and TEM-EDS and found to be 3.35 and 38.11. This study reveals that the conversion of sugarcane dry leaves into the high-value-added material GO becomes realistic and feasible and thus reduces the production cost of GO.
Trajectories of value capture, strategic coupling and labour regime reconfiguration: Coal mining, automotives and business services in post-socialist Romania

Drawing on global production network research and conceptual explanations of the changing spatial divisions of labour, this article investigates the transformative effects of the dynamic interplay between strategic coupling and multiscalar changes across labour regimes in Central and Eastern European post-socialist sectoral trajectories. It interrogates critically whether sectors across peripheral regions have been able to slot themselves into lead firms’ transnational production systems, resulting in processes of value creation, value capture or value destruction. The empirical analysis reveals that the capacity of domestic resources to purposively match and align themselves to global lead firms and their strategic objectives is influenced by local historical legacies, spatiality, elite agency and labour agency, which combined to shape distinct meso-level transformations. The methodology is based on analysing the post-socialist transformation of three sectors in Romania, which have different historical legacies, institutional configurations, and spatial and temporal vectors of development, allowing us to trace interactions between different modes of strategic coupling or decoupling and labour regime reconfiguration. The central thrust of the article highlights how different modes of strategic coupling into global production networks, or decoupling from global production networks, are causally linked to the reconfiguration of labour regimes, leading to long-term regional socio-economic transformations.
Adaptive Mutual Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to transfer knowledge from labeled source domain to unlabeled target domain. The semi-supervised method based on mean-teacher framework is one of the main stream approaches. By enforcing consistency constraints, it is hopeful that the teacher network will distill useful source domain knowledge to the student network. However, in practice negative transfer often emerges because the performance of the teacher network is not guaranteed to be always better than the student network. To address this limitation, a novel Adaptive Mutual Learning (AML) strategy is proposed in this paper. Specifically, given a target sample, the network with worse prediction will be optimized by pushing its prediction close to the better prediction. This is in the spirit of traditional knowledge distillation. On the other hand, the network with better prediction is further refined by requiring its prediction to stay away from the worse prediction. This can be regarded conceptually as reverse knowledge distillation. In this way, two networks learn from each other according to their respective performance. At inference phase, the averaged output of these two networks can be taken as the final prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that our AML achieves competitive results.
Recent Advances in Mitochondrial Fission/Fusion-Targeted Therapy in Doxorubicin-Induced Cardiotoxicity

Doxorubicin (DOX) has been recognized as one of the most effective chemotherapies and extensively used in the clinical settings of human cancer. However, DOX-mediated cardiotoxicity is known to compromise the clinical effectiveness of chemotherapy, resulting in cardiomyopathy and heart failure. Recently, accumulation of dysfunctional mitochondria via alteration of the mitochondrial fission/fusion dynamic processes has been identified as a potential mechanism underlying DOX cardiotoxicity. DOX-induced excessive fission in conjunction with impaired fusion could severely promote mitochondrial fragmentation and cardiomyocyte death, while modulation of mitochondrial dynamic proteins using either fission inhibitors (e.g., Mdivi-1) or fusion promoters (e.g., M1) can provide cardioprotection against DOX-induced cardiotoxicity. In this review, we focus particularly on the roles of mitochondrial dynamic pathways and the current advanced therapies in mitochondrial dynamics-targeted anti-cardiotoxicity of DOX. This review summarizes all the novel insights into the development of anti-cardiotoxic effects of DOX via the targeting of mitochondrial dynamic pathways, thereby encouraging and guiding future clinical investigations to focus on the potential application of mitochondrial dynamic modulators in the setting of DOX-induced cardiotoxicity.
Dynamic response localization in one-dimensional periodic systems

This thesis contributes a novel receptance coupling technique to analyse dynamic response localization induced by bandgap mechanisms in advanced periodic light weight material and structural systems. One-dimensional structural systems are used to illustrate the technique. Localization induced by disorder and nonlinearity is investigated using numerical simulations. The receptance coupling technique yields closed-form expressions for the location of bandgaps and their width. Numerical simulations of Blochwaves are presented for the Bragg and sub-Bragg bandgaps and compared with the bounding frequency predictions given by the receptance analysis. It is observed that the introduction of periodic local resonators narrows Bragg bandgaps above the local resonant bandgap. Introduction of two fold periodicity is shown to widen the Bragg bandgap, thus expanding the design space. Experimental measurements on a structural beam with one and two-fold periodicity are provided for validation. It is concluded that for a fixed target frequency (local resonance) of the sub-Bragg bandgap, the width can be increased by proportionally increasing the mass (and the stiffness) of the resonator. This implies that stronger coupling and heavier resonator masses yield wider sub-Bragg bandgaps. The generality of the receptance technique presented here allows straightforward extension to higher dimensional systems with multiple degrees of freedom coupling. Insights on bandgap localization mechanisms offered by the receptance technique can be used to design periodic composite materials such as Phononic Crystals and metamaterials, and periodic structures with enhanced vibroacoustic performance characteristics.
Effect of Microencapsulated Basil Extract on Cream Cheese Quality and Stability

The antimicrobial and antioxidant effects of plant extracts are well known, but their use is limited because they affect the physicochemical and sensory characteristics of products. Encapsulation presents an option to limit or prevent these changes. The paper presents the composition of individual polyphenols (HPLC–DAD-ESI-MS) from basil (Ocimum basilicum L.) extracts (BE), and their antioxidant activity and inhibitory effects against strains of Staphylococcus aureus, Geobacillus stearothermophilus, Bacillus cereus, Candida albicans, Enterococcus faecalis, Escherichia coli, and Salmonella Abony. The BE was encapsulated in sodium alginate (Alg) using the drop technique. The encapsulation efficiency of microencapsulated basil extract (MBE) was 78.59 ± 0.01%. SEM and FTIR analyses demonstrated the morphological aspect of the microcapsules and the existence of weak physical interactions between the components. Sensory, physicochemical and textural properties of MBE-fortified cream cheese were evaluated over a 28-day storage time at 4 °C. In the optimal concentration range of 0.6–0.9% (w/w) MBE, we determined the inhibition of the post-fermentation process and the improvement in the degree of water retention. This led to the improvement of the textural parameters of the cream cheese, contributing to the extension of the shelf life of the product by 7 days.
Untargeted Lipidomic Profiling Reveals Lysophosphatidylcholine and Ceramide as Atherosclerotic Risk Factors in apolipoprotein E Knockout Mice

Despite the availability and use of numerous cholesterol-lowering drugs, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) remains the leading cause of mortality globally. Many researchers have focused their effort on identifying modified lipoproteins. However, lipid moieties such as lysophosphatidylcholine (LPC) and ceramide (CER) contribute to atherogenic events. LPC and CER both cause endothelial mitochondrial dysfunction, leading to fatty acid and triglyceride (TG) accumulation. In addition, they cause immune cells to differentiate into proinflammatory phenotypes. To uncover alternative therapeutic approaches other than cholesterol- and TG-lowering medications, we conducted untargeted lipidomic investigations to assess the alteration of lipid profiles in apolipoprotein E knockout (apoE−/−) mouse model, with or without feeding a high-fat diet (HFD). Results indicated that, in addition to hypercholesterolemia and hyperlipidemia, LPC levels were two to four times higher in apoE−/− mice compared to wild-type mice in C57BL/6 background, regardless of whether they were 8 or 16 weeks old. Sphingomyelin (SM) and CER were elevated three- to five-fold in apoE−/− mice both at the basal level and after 16 weeks when compared to wild-type mice. After HFD treatment, the difference in CER levels elevated more than ten-fold. Considering the atherogenic properties of LPC and CER, they may also contribute to the early onset of atherosclerosis in apoE−/− mice. In summary, the HFD-fed apoE−/− mouse shows elevated LPC and CER contents and is a suitable model for developing LPC- and CER-lowering therapies.
Design of Energy Efficient and Low Delay Posit Multiplier

This paper focuses on the hardware implementation of the Posit Multiplier unit. The Posit number system is an alternative to the IEEE-754 Floating point unit because it provides more accurate results over the same word size. The better dynamic range is achieved by combining regime bits (of run-time varying length) and exponent bits, known as the run-time-varying exponent component. The existing leading one detector uses a Multiplexer-based logic, accounting for more area and data path delay in the higher-order posit arithmetic units. An Adder-based Leading One Detector has been proposed to reduce the delay and area. The Proposed Posit multiplier uses the proposed LOD to extract the data bits from the posit data for any given posit data width (N), exponent size (ES), and regime size (RS), achieving less area and data path delay. The separate calculation of the final exponent and final regime results in further improvement in the area due to the reduction of adder size. We synthesized the posit multiplier units for 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit and compared the results with the existing work. The synthesis results show that reduction in delay of 17.55% and an increase in the energy efficiency of 28.35%, respectively.
Color and Chemical Composition of Timber Woods (Daniellia oliveri, Isoberlinia doka, Khaya senegalensis, and Pterocarpus erinaceus) from Different Locations in Southern Mali

Wood characteristics and properties are related to various factors connected to the biochemical processes that occur in the tree during wood formation, but also, to the interactions with the environmental conditions at the tree growing location. In addition to climatic factors, several investigations drew attention to the significance of the influence of other environmental parameters at the tree growing location. In this perspective, this work aimed to characterize the variation in color and chemical composition of timber wood from different locations in southern Mali, of trees growing under the same climatic conditions. To do so, a total of 68 grounded wood samples, from 4 timber wood species (Daniellia oliveri, Isoberlinia doka, Khaya senegalensis, and Pterocarpus erinaceus), were analyzed using CIELab color space and FTIR-ATR. Overall, the results indicated that the variation in wood color and chemical properties can be related to the local environmental conditions. Pterocarpus erinaceus presented significant differences between samples from the three areas according to the highest number of variables (color parameters, molecular composition determined by FTIR-ATR spectroscopy, and FTIR-ATR ratios). Daniellia oliveri and Khaya senegalensis, however, showed significant differences between areas of provenance for a lower number of variables. Isoberlinia doka, for its part, showed no significant differences and seems to be less sensitive to environmental factors. Furthermore, the results revealed that important differences exist between wood samples from Kati and Kéniéba.
Distributed Detection in EH-Powered Mobile WSNs: Adaptive Transmission over Temporally Correlated MIMO Channels with Limited Feedback

We address distributed detection problem in a mobile wireless sensor network, where each deployed sensor stores randomly arriving energy units in a finite-size battery. Sensors transmit their symbols simultaneously to a mobile fusion center (FC) with $M > 1$ antennas, over temporally correlated fading channels. To characterize the time variation of the fading channel, we adopt a Markovian model and assume that the fading channel time-correlation is defined by the Jakes-Clark's correlation function. We consider limited feedback of channel gain, defined as the Frobenius norm of MIMO channel matrix, at a fixed feedback frequency from the FC to sensors. Modeling the randomly arriving energy units during a time slot as a Poisson process, and the quantized channel gain and the battery dynamics as homogeneous finite-state Markov chains, we propose an adaptive transmission scheme such that the $J$-divergence based detection metric is maximized at the FC, subject to an average per-sensor transmit power constraint. The proposed scheme is parameterized in terms of the scale factors (our optimization variables) corresponding to the channel gain quantization intervals. This scheme allows each sensor to adapt its transmit power in each time slot, based on its current battery state and the latest available channel gain feedback.
Optimization of the Black Garlic Processing Method and Development of Black Garlic Jam Using High-Pressure Processing

Black garlic has many beneficial effects, and it has a less spicy flavor. However, its aging conditions and related products still need to be further investigated. The present study aims to analyze the beneficial effects under different processing conditions and utilize high-pressure processing (HPP) in the production of black garlic jam. The highest antioxidant activities, including the DPPH scavenging, total antioxidant capacity, and reducing power (86.23%, 88.44%, and A700 = 2.48, respectively), were observed in black garlic that had been aged for 30 days. Similarly, the highest total phenols and flavonoids were observed in black garlic that had been aged for 30 days (76.86 GAE/g dw and 13.28 mg RE/g dw, respectively). The reducing sugar in black garlic was significantly increased to about 380 (mg GE/g dw) after 20 days of aging. The free amino acids in black garlic were decreased time-dependently to about 0.2 mg leucine/g dw after 30 days of aging. For the browning indexes of black garlic, the uncolored intermediate and browning products were increased in a time-dependent manner and reached a plateau at day 30. Another intermediate product in the Maillard reaction, 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (5-HMF), was observed in concentrations that increased to 1.81 and 3.04 (mg/g dw) at day 30 and 40, respectively. Furthermore, the black garlic jam made by HPP was analyzed for its texture and sensory acceptance, showing that a 1:1.5:2 ratio of black garlic/water/sugar was the most preferred and was classified as “still acceptable”. Our study suggests suitable processing conditions for black garlic and outlines the prominent beneficial effects after 30 days of aging. These results could be further applied in HPP jam production and increase the diversity of black garlic products.