Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Involvement of the Sigma-1 Receptor in Methamphetamine-Mediated Changes to Astrocyte Structure and Function

OF THESIS Involvement of the Sigma-1 Receptor in Methamphetamine Mediated Changes to Astrocyte Structure and Function Methamphetamine is a highly addictive psychostimulant drug. There are currently no FDA-approved pharmacological treatments for methamphetamine addiction. Pharmacologically, (+)-methamphetamine is a dopamine releasing agent and dopamine transporter substrate that redistributes dopamine from intracellular vesicles via the vesicular monoamine transporter 2 (VMAT2) and reverses the direction of dopamine transport in the dopamine transporter. Methamphetamine, cocaine, and other drugs of abuse are also sigma-1 receptor ligands, and previous studies have demonstrated the role of the sigma-1 receptor in modulating the behavioral and cellular effects of these drugs. However, almost all these studies were conducted in cell culture systems or with emphasis on the neuronal effects of sigma-1 receptor binding. In the literature, the sigma-1 receptor localizes robustly within neurons throughout the brain. However, there are conflicting results regarding localization in astrocytes. Here, immunohistochemical experiments were conducted on rat brain tissue containing either the nucleus accumbens or the prelimbic cortex, two brain regions critical in mediating drugseeking behavior, in order to confirm expression of the sigma-1 receptor in astrocytes. It was determined that the sigma-1 receptor is ubiquitously expressed among neurons and modestly expressed among glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP)-positive astrocytes. There were no noted statistically significant differences between the proportion of cell types expressing the sigma-1 receptor in the prelimbic cortex and the nucleus accumbens. Next, the effect of methamphetamine and the role of the sigma-1 receptor on astrocytic morphology and sigma-1 receptor distribution were probed by incubating slices of striatal tissue in methamphetamine solution with or without the sigma-1 receptor antagonist BD1063 and the sigma-1 receptor agonist PRE-084. Only the methamphetamine-treated slice exhibited a significantly different amount of stellations than the other slices. The sigma-1 receptor antagonist BD-1063 and PRE-084 abolished the redistribution of sigma-1 receptor to the processes of the astrocytes induced by methamphetamine. Thus, the data confirms that astrocytes in both the prelimbic cortex and nucleus accumbens express the sigma-1 receptor. Moreover, methamphetamine induces statistically significant redistribution of the sigma-1 receptor that is abolished by BD-1063 and PRE-084.
The Influence of Chromıum Sources on Mortality Percentage in Japanese Quails

An experiment was conducted to study the comparative influence of organic and inorganic chromium on mortality percentage in Japanese quails. A total of 700, day old Japanese quail chicks were randomly divided into seven treatment groups with four replicates consisting of 25 quail chicks in each replicate. Quails were provided with feed supplemented with inorganic chromium, organic chromium in the form of chromium with azolla and chromium with yeast at 500 and 1000 ppb levels and a control diet without chromium supplement from day old to six weeks of age. The incidence of mortality was higher during early stages of life (0-3weeks) rather than later stages (4-6weeks) in all the treatment groups including control. Highest mortality (14 per cent) was observed in control group and lowest mortality (3 per cent) was observed in the treatment group provided with 500 ppb of chromium with azolla.
Universal Transient DC-Bias Current Suppression Strategy in Dual-Active-Bridge Converters for Energy Storage Systems

The dc-bias current may result in the magnetic flux saturation and endanger the safe operation of switching devices. By regulating the inductor current slope during the transient, this article proposes a novel transient phase shift control (TPSC) to suppress the dc-bias current in dual-active-bridge (DAB) converters, which is universal for different phase shift control strategies. First, the dc-bias current models under different transient scenarios are built. Then, the optimal switching transient is determined so that the proposed TPSC is able to achieve the possible maximum inductor current slope and the shortest settling time. Furthermore, the settling time is independent of the specific circuit parameters, such as inductance, which improves the universality of the proposed TPSC algorithm. With the TPSC, the inductor current slope, which depends on the appropriate combination of bridge voltages in DAB converters, becomes the sole variable in the practical algorithm implementation. Moreover, the inductor current can be changed linearly rather than in a piecewise linear way. Thus, the implementation of the TPSC becomes straightforward and the complicated calculations in conventional methods are avoided. The proposed TPSC was compared with other advanced dc-bias eliminating strategies experimentally under different transient scenarios. The results show that the TPSC can successfully eliminate the dc-bias current, and the transient process can be accelerated within 12% of a switching cycle.
QUALIDADE DE MUDAS DE Tabebuia aurea (Manso) Benth. & Hook. EM DOIS AMBIENTES E DIFERENTES NÍVEIS DE FERTIRRIGAÇÃO

A qualidade de mudas de espécies arbóreas é de fundamental importância para se obter êxito em projeto de reflorestamento ou de exploração comercial. Este trabalho foi desenvolvido com o objetivo de avaliar a influência de dois ambientes (AMB-1, casa de vegetação; AMB-2, câmara plástica instalada dentro da casa de vegetação) e concentrações de nutrientes aplicados via fertirrigação (0, 50, 100 e 150% de uma solução nutritiva padrão) na produção de mudas de Tabebuia aurea, utilizando delineamento inteiramente casualizado, com quatro repetições. Foram avaliadas as seguintes características: altura (H), diâmetro do coleto (DC), número de folhas (NF), área foliar (AF), massa seca da parte aérea (MSPA), massa seca de raiz (MSR) e massa seca total (MST), relação H/DC, área foliar específica (AFE), razão de área foliar (ARF) e índice de qualidade de Dickson (IQD). A análise dos dados revelou que houve interação significativa entre os fatores para a maioria das variáveis. O uso da câmara plástica (AMB-2) proporcionou maior crescimento das mudas de Tabebuia aurea. Soluções de fertirrigação com concentração de nutrientes variando de 80 a 100% da solução padrão proporcionam mudas de Tabebuia aurea de melhor qualidade.
Neuro- and Hepatoprotective Effects of Methylene Blue in Rats Treated with Lipopolysaccharide Endotoxin

The effects of methylene blue (MethyB) on oxidative stress markers in the serum and on the brain and liver tissue damage following lipopolysaccharide (LPS) injection in rats were studied. Rats received intraperitoneal (i.p.) injection of LPS (300 µg/kg) alone or along with MethyB (5 and 10 mg/kg) and euthanized 4 h later. Malondialdehyde (MDA), nitric oxide, paraoxonase-1 (PON-1) activity, cholinesterase activity, and glucose were measured in the serum. The brain and liver histopathology, glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), and caspase-3 immunostaining in the brain were performed. Results indicated that LPS treatment caused significantly raised MDA and nitric oxide concentrations by 52.8% and 47.5%, respectively. Cholinesterase activity was not significantly changed, but PON1 activity fell by 48.1%. Serum glucose increased by 48.7%. When administered to LPS-injected rats, MethyB resulted in significant decreases in serum MDA and nitric oxide concentrations, respectively. PON-1 activity increased by 37.8-89.3%, cholinesterase activity decreased by 33.4-41.2%, and serum glucose decreased by 39.6% uponMethyB treatment. Neurodegeneration, increased capsase-3 staining, decreased GFAP immunostaining in the brain and vacuolar degeneration and inflammatory cell infiltrates in the liver of LPS-treated rats were almost prevented by MethyB. These data suggest that MethyB exerts an antioxidant action and ameliorates brain and liver tissue damage during endotoxemia.
The Self-Determined Learning Model of Instruction: Promoting Implementation Fidelity

There has been an increased focus on the tenets of implementation science in special education research, namely on the degree to which interventions are implemented as intended (i.e., fidelity of implementation) and factors that influence fidelity of implementation. For complex interventions, such as the Self-Determined Learning Model of Instruction (SDLMI), there is an ongoing need to refine conceptualizations of fidelity of implementation and the factors that influence it in inclusive educational contexts. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is two-fold: (1) to describe a framework for conceptualizing fidelity of implementation factors that influence fidelity when evaluating a complex intervention like the SDLMI and (2) to present initial content validity and internal consistency of a new measure designed to assess specific aspects of fidelity of implementation of the SDLMI in inclusive, general education classrooms. Implications and future directions for research in implementation science, special education, and self-determination interventions are described.
Effect of Turmeric rhizome (Curcuma longa) powder and coconut oil mixture on growth performance, haematological and biochemical parameters of noiler birds

This study was conducted to assess the effect of Curcuma longa on growth performance, haematological and biochemical parameters of noiler birds. A total of sixty-four (64) noiler birds of both sexes with an average weight of 1974±0.03 g were randomized into four treatment groups. Each treatment group comprised of eight birds per replicate and was replicated twice. Treatment 1 (control), treatment 2 (turmeric at 10 g/kg of feed), treatment 3 (turmeric at 20 g/kg of feed) and treatment 4 (selcon forte at 0.5 g/kg of feed). Weekly body weight and daily feed intake of the birds were recorded for 6 weeks, after which daily weight gain and the feed conversion ratio were calculated. At the end of the feeding trial, blood samples were collected for hematology and biochemical parameters, whole blood was analyzed for hematological parameters while serum was used for biochemical parameters. There was no significant difference (p>0.05) in the daily weight gain and the feed intake of the birds in all the treatments. The packed cell volume (PCV) of birds administered 10 g of turmeric per kg of feed (T2) (35.00±1.88%) was significantly higher when compared with birds in treatments T1 (31.09±2.3%), T3 (33.17±0.79%) and T4 (31.33±2.23%). The hemoglobin value of T2 birds (11.48±0.67 g/dl) was also significantly higher than birds in the other groups. The total protein of birds in groups T2 (5.28±0.45 g/dl) and T3 (5.63±0.34 g/dl) were significantly (p<0.05) higher compared to birds in groups T1 (5.03±0.48 g/dl) and T4 (4.93±0.40 g/dl). The birds fed diets supplemented with turmeric (T2 and T3) had significantly low total cholesterol level and higher value of high density lipoprotein and reduced the level of low density lipoprotein when compared to T1 and T4 birds. It can be concluded that turmeric fed to noiler chickens have no deleterious effect and can be included in their feed at 10 g/kg.
Speed tuning to real-world-and retinal motion in cortical motion regions

Motion signals can arise for two reasons in the retina: due to self-motion or due to real motion in the environment. Prior studies on speed tuning always measured joint responses to real and retinal motion, and for some of the more recently identified human motion processing regions, speed tuning has not been examined in at all. We localized motion regions V3A, V6, V5/MT, MST and cingulate sulcus visual area (CSv) in 20 human participants, and then measured their responses to motion velocities from 1-24 degrees per second. Importantly, we used a pursuit paradigm that allowed us to quantify responses to objective and retinal motion separately. In order to provide optimal stimulation, we used stimuli with natural image statistics derived from Fourier scrambles of natural images. The results show that all regions increased responses with higher speeds for both, retinal and objective motion. V3A stood out in that it was the only region whose slope of the speed-response function for objective motion was higher than that for retinal motion. V6, V5/MT, MST and CSv did not differ in objective and retinal speed slopes, even though V5/MT and MST tended to respond more to objective motion at all speeds. These results reveal highly similar speed tuning functions for early and high-level motion regions, and support the view that human V3A encodes primarily objective rather than retinal motion signals.
Protein folding and macromolecular dynamics: Fundamental limits of length and time scales

In this thesis, physics-based models of protein folding at the secondary and tertiary level are developed to resolve long-standing issues of protein folding kinetics. As discussed in the Introduction, the main objective is to provide fundamental limits on the length and time scales involved in protein folding. Protein folding is also placed within the broader context of macromolecular dynamics, which is extensively studied in the unfolded, folded, and unfolding regimes for the key molecular motifs of cellular biochemistry, including lipids, nucleic acids, and proteins. The effect of the water hydration and temperature are systematically probed to elucidate the crucial role of the environment in macromolecular stability and dynamics. For a wide range of bio-molecular phenomena, the observed collective behavior is shown to arise directly from first principles. Throughout, the emphasis is on analytic results free of tunable parameters, supported by ensemble-converging computational simulations, and corroborated by experimental evidence.
Ship Classification in Medium-Resolution SAR Images via Densely Connected Triplet CNNs Integrating Fisher Discrimination Regularized Metric Learning

Thanks to the medium-to-high resolution and wide coverage imaging ability, satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems are momentously developed for intelligent maritime surveillance, especially for ship classification in SAR images. Previous researchers mostly utilized the geometric, radiometric, and structural features combined with the traditional machine-learning (ML) methods to conduct ship classification in high-resolution (HR) SAR images. However, the handcrafted features showed weak representation for the medium-resolution (MR) SAR images, and the normal ML methods are less powerful to deal with the intraclass diversity and interclass similarity in the MR SAR ship images. To address these issues, this article extends the dense convolutional networks to the MR SAR ship classification for better deep features extraction and proposes a multitask learning framework within which the softmax log-loss and the triplet loss are jointly minimized for more effective ship classification in MR SAR images. The triplet loss is computed by imposing a similarity constraint on the deep embeddings via the deep metric learning (DML) scheme such that the deep representations of the same class are pulled much closer to each other and those from different classes are pushed as farther apart as possible. However, the triplet loss in the usual DML utilizes the triplets mined in a training batch independently, which ignores the contextual information. So, we propose to impose a Fisher discrimination regularization term on the deep embeddings to explore the global information of learned embeddings, and hence the designed task-specific networks will be trained to have more robust and better recognition performance. Extensive experiments on the MR SAR ship data set collected from the Sentinel-1 SAR images demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve superior performance for the 3- and 5-class recognition tasks with regard to the comparing CNN models.
A Review of Stunting Growth in Children: Relationship to the Incidence of Dental Caries and its Handling in Children

Introduction: Nutritional problems that may arise due to the low quality of food consumed is called stunting on children. Stunting describes the inadequacy of body heigh according to its age due to malnutrition or chronic malnutrition. Stunting is often not known in the society where the treatment of such issue is very general thus considered as normal. Stunting also affects oral health of children. Objective: To review the relationship of dental and oral condition with the incidence of stunting on children. Methods: Scientific evidence and clinical cases are drawn from the literature to support this review and gather scientific information about the relationship of teeth to the incidence of stunting in children. Results: There are several relationships of dental or oral conditions in children with the incidence of stunting experienced. Some of them are related to the incidence of dental caries in children, delayed eruption of permanent teeth, and have an influence on the flow rate of saliva in children. Conclusion: The incidence of stunting in children is a condition that describes the lack of nutritional status that has a chronic nature during the growth and development of children since the beginning of life. Scientific studies from several literatures prove that there are some relationships between the incidence of stunting in children with the state of oral health of children.
The influence of different soil vegetation covers onto the volumetric water content in upper soil layers

The influence of different vegetation cover of the set aside land on the volumetric water content VWC (%) and its variations during the day in upper soil layers (5 and 15 cm) using the TDR method was observed in 15 min intervals from May to August in 2002 and 2003. A spontaneous fallow was established in autumn 2001 and plots with artificial revegetation sowed with grass-legume mixture of Dactylis polygama Horv. and Trifolium repens L. in spring 2002. The experimental plots were mulched twice during the vegetation period. VWC (%) was registered in the same time also on bare ground. The control plot was sown with crops ( Brassica napus L. – 2002 and Triticum aestivum L. – 2003) and regular tillage using ploughing was applied. The highest values of VWC (%) during observed period were recorded on bare ground. The values of VWC (%) on set aside soil with vegetation cover and on control plot were lower. The lowest values of VWC (%) were recorded in 5 cm depth on plot sowed with grass-legume mix ture of D. polygama and T. repens. Values of VWC (%) on spontaneous fallow were lower in depth of 15 cm compared to the 5 cm depth. The highest variation of daily VWC (%) run was recorded on bare ground.
Heterosis in early maturing high yielding quality protein maize (Zea mays) hybrids

The present investigation was undertaken in F1 population of 14 crosses, obtained by crossing 7 inbred lines of maize with two diverse testers in line x tester mating design during Rabi 2016. The 14 hybrids along with 9 parents (7 lines x 2 testers) and standard check were evaluated in Randomised Block Design with three replications at Field Experimentation Centre of the Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, Sam Higginbottom University of Agriculture, Technology and Sciences, Naini Agricultural Institute, Allahabad (U.P) during the year kharif 2017. Crosses L4 X T1 and L4 X T2 exhibited maximum negatively significant economic heterosis for days to maturity followed by L2 X T2 and L2 XT1. The crosses L7 X T1, L7 X T2 and L4 X T1 exhibited significant positive standard heterosis over the check for yield and other attributes in maize.
ON THE VALUE RELEVANCE OF INFORMATION ON ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL, AND GOVERNANCE (ESG): AN EVIDENCE FROM INDONESIA

This paper intends to extend prior developed market-based researches on the value relevance of non-financial information, which is reflected in Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) disclosure, by examining the association between companies� financial performances and their non-financial performances. We use 281 firm-year observations of 34 public-listed firms in Indonesia during the period of 2012 - 2018. As the majority of prior studies have focused on the use of price model, we employ regression of both price and return models to assess the value relevance. We also analyze the value relevance of ESG disclosure on both aggregate and singular aspects. We employ sensitivity analysis to assess any differences in the value relevance of both models. The findings show that environmental, social, and ESG disclosure have significant impacts on share prices and stock returns, therefore they have value relevance in both price model and return model. Only governance disclosure has no effect on both share prices and stock returns. Our paper addresses an additional approach in assessing the value relevance of non-financial information. By incorporating two models, we provide a better understanding of the value relevance of ESG information. Our empirical evidence supports the process of developing sustainability reporting regulation in Indonesia regarding the value relevance of non-financial information.
Nurient Management Trial on Foxtail Millet at Sundarbazar, Lamjung

Foxtail millet is an indigenous crop known for its rich nutritive value, drought tolerance ability and low input requirements. Though it is grown in marginal condition, it can give the best production with the proper nutrient management for its cultivation. In this respect, an experiment was conducted in Agronomy farm of Lamjung Campus, Sundarbazar during March-June 2017. The main objective of the experiment was to explore the performance of local foxtail millet under different level of nutrients. The experiment was carried out in Randomized Complete Block Design with three replications and seven treatments viz. FYM 6 t/ha, FYM 6 t/ha+60:30:20 kg NPK/ha, 60:30:20 kg NPK/ha, FYM 6t/ha+30:20kg PK/ha, FYM 6t/ha+60:30 kg NK/ha, FYM 6 t/ha+60:30 kg NP/ha and Control (no fertilizers). Results revealed that highest grain yield (2.47t/ha) (152% higher than control), was obtained from FYM 6 t/ha+60:30:20 kg NPK/ha which was followed by 60:30:20 kg NPK/ha (2.45 t/ha) and were statistically at par with each other. The highest grain yield in FYM 6 t/ha+60:30:20 kg NPK/ha was supported by higher no. of grains per panicle (2870), more test weight (1.79 gm) and more harvest index (19.3%). However, the straw yield (12.6t/ha), biological yield (15.02t/ha) along with B: C ratio was found slightly higher in 60:30:20 kg NPK/ha. The growth characters viz. plant height, flag leaf area and panicle length of all the treatments were significantly higher than Control (T7). The treatment having balanced plant nutrients (T2) produced significantly higher yield and can be recommended to mid-hill farmers for obtaining good yield.