Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Motor unit discharge rate modulation during isometric contractions to failure is intensity and task dependent

The nature of neuromuscular decrements associated with contractions to task failure is known to dependent on task demands. Task-specificity of the associated adjustments in motor unit discharge rate (MUDR) behaviour, however, remains unclear. This study examined MUDR adjustments during different submaximal isometric knee-extension tasks to failure. Participants performed a sustained and an intermittent task at 20 and 50% of maximal voluntary torque (MVT), respectively (Experiment 1). High-density surface electromyography signals were recorded from vastus lateralis (VL) and medialis (VM) and decomposed into individual MU discharge timings, with the identified MUs tracked from recruitment to task failure. MUDR was quantified and normalised to intervals of 10% of contraction time (CT). MUDR of both muscles exhibited distinct modulation patterns in each task. During 20% MVT sustained task, MUDR decreased until ∼50% CT, after which it gradually returned to baseline. Conversely, during the 50% MVT intermittent task, MUDR remained stable until ∼40-50% CT, after which it started to continually increase until task failure. To explore the effect of contraction intensity on the observed patterns, VL and VM MUDR was quantified during sustained contractions at 30 and 50% MVT (Experiment 2). During the 30% MVT sustained task, MUDR remained stable until ∼80-90% CT in both muscles, after which it continually increased until task failure. During the 50% MVT sustained task the increase in MUDR occurred earlier, after ∼70-80% CT. Our results suggest that adjustments in MUDR during submaximal isometric contractions to failure are task- and intensity-dependent.
Effectiveness of oral prednisone tapering following intravenous methylprednisolone for acute optic neuritis in multiple sclerosis

Acute optic neuritis treatment lacks standardized protocols. The value of oral prednisone taper (OPT) following intravenous methylprednisolone (IVMP) on visual outcome parameters in optic neuritis (ON) has never been explored. In the present retrospective study, we investigated whether OPT after IVMP affects the structural and functional visual outcomes of inaugural clinically isolated syndrome (CIS)- or multiple sclerosis (MS)-ON. Adult patients with acute, inaugural, unilateral CIS- or MS-ON, treated with IVMP in Germany and Israel were stratified into patients treated with IVMP alone—versus IVMP and OPT. Inclusion criteria were age ≥18, CIS or MS diagnosis according to McDonald criteria 2017, available visual acuity (VA) at nadir before treatment initiation and at follow-up ≥5 months, as well as a spectral domain optic coherence tomography (OCT) data scan at follow-up. Exclusion criteria included recurrent ON, concomitant ophthalmological comorbidities, optical coherence tomography (OCT) of insufficient quality and ON-related escalation therapy after IVMP. The structural outcome was defined as the average retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) difference between the ON-affected and the unaffected eye, while the functional outcome was defined as the final high-contrast best-corrected VA (HC-BCVA) at follow-up compared to nadir. The comparative analysis was performed using linear regression analysis, adjusted for sex, age, and days-to-treatment. Fifty-one patients met the inclusion criteria (25% male). The mean age was 33.9 (±10.23) years. Twenty-six patients (51%) received OPT following IVMP. There was no difference in nadir HC-BCVA between the groups (0.39 No OPT; 0.49 With OPT, P = 0.36). Adjusted linear regression analysis did not indicate an influence of OPT on RNFL thickness or on HC-BCVA (beta coefficient for RNFL difference in percentages: 0.51, 95%-CI: [-4.58, 5.59], beta coefficient for logMAR: 0.11, 95%; CI [-0.12, 0.35] at follow-up. In conclusion, the addition of OPT to IVMP did not affect RNFL thickness or the final VA in a retrospective cohort of 51 patients with inaugural acute CIS- or MS-ON. The results of this exploratory study are currently being re-examined in a large-scale, demographically diverse, prospective study.
Evolution of a biological thermocouple by adaptation of cytochrome c oxidase in a subterrestrial metazoan

In this study we report a naturally evolved temperature-sensing electrical regulator in the cytochrome c oxidase of the Devil Worm, Halicephalobus mephisto. This extremophile metazoan was isolated 1.3 km underground in a South African goldmine, where it adapted to heat and potentially to hypoxia, making its mitochondrial sequence a likely target of adaptational change. We obtained the full mitochondrial genome sequence of this organism, and show through dN/dS analysis statistically robust evidence of positive selection in H. mephisto cytochrome c oxidase subunits. Seventeen of these positively-selected amino acid substitutions were localized in proximity to the H- and K-pathway proton channels of the complex. Surprisingly, the H. mephisto cytochrome c oxidase proton pump completely shuts down at low temperatures (20°C) leading to approximately a 4.8-fold reduction in the transmembrane proton gradient voltage (ΔΨm) compared to optimal temperature (37°C). Direct measurement of oxygen consumption found a corresponding 4.7-fold drop at 20°C compared to 37°C. Correspondingly, the lifecycle of H. mephisto takes four-fold longer at the low temperature compared to higher. This elegant evolutionary adaptation creates a finely-tuned mitochondrial temperature sensor, allowing this ectothermic organism to maximize its reproductive success in varying environmental temperatures. Our study shows that evolutionary innovation may remodel core metabolism to make it more accurately map onto environmental variation.
Beyond Accuracy: Evaluating Self-Consistency of Code Large Language Models with IdentityChain

Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs) are being increasingly employed in real-life applications, so evaluating them is critical. While the conventional accuracy evaluates the performance of Code LLMs on a set of individual tasks, their self-consistency across different tasks is overlooked. Intuitively, a trustworthy model should be self-consistent when generating natural language specifications for its own code and generating code for its own specifications. Failure to preserve self-consistency reveals a lack of understanding of the shared semantics underlying natural language and programming language, and therefore undermines the trustworthiness of a model. In this paper, we first formally define the self-consistency of Code LLMs and then design a framework, IdentityChain, which effectively and efficiently evaluates the self-consistency and conventional accuracy of a model at the same time. We study eleven Code LLMs and show that they fail to preserve self-consistency, which is indeed a distinct aspect from conventional accuracy. Furthermore, we show that IdentityChain can be used as a model debugging tool to expose weaknesses of Code LLMs by demonstrating three major weaknesses that we identify in current models using IdentityChain. Our code is available at https://github.com/marcusm117/IdentityChain.
Block-structured, equal workload, multigrid nesting interface for Boussinesq wave model FUNWAVE-TVD

We describe the development of a block-structured, equal CPU-load, multigrid nesting interface for the Boussinesq wave model FUNWAVE-TVD. The new model framework does not interfere with the core solver, and thus the core program, FUNWAVE-TVD, is still a stand-alone model used for a single grid. The nesting interface manages the time sequencing and two-way nesting processes between the parent grid and child grid with grid reﬁnement in a hierarchical manner. Workload balance in the MPI-based parallelization is handled by an equal-load scheme. A strategy of shared array allocation is applied 5 for data management that allows a large number of nested grids without creating additional memory allocations. Four model tests are conducted to verify the nesting algorithm with assessments of model accuracy and the robustness in the application in modeling transoceanic tsunamis and coastal effects
High prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in pregnant women, after the second wave of infections in the inner of

After South Africa’s second wave of COVID-19, this study estimated the SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence among pregnant women in inner-city Johannesburg, South Africa. Methods In this cross-sectional survey, 500 non-COVID-19-vaccinated pregnant women (aged ≥12 years) were enrolled, and demographic and clinical data were collected. Serum samples were tested using the Wantai SARS-CoV-2 spike Ab ELISA and Roche Elecsys® Anti-SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid antibody assays. Seropositivity was defined as SARS-CoV-2 antibodies on either (primary) or both (secondary) assays. Univariate Poisson regression assessed risk factors associated with seropositivity. Seroprevalence surveys in pregnant women present a feasible method of monitoring the course of the pandemic over time.
Temporal Dynamics and Stability of Spatial Soil Matric Potential in Two Land Use Systems

The spatial variance of ψm at the 10‐cm soil depth decreased with median ψm. Weekly precipitation and ψm had common temporal periodicities. The response of ψm to precipitation was faster and more common in cropland. Wavelet analysis revealed two different behaviors of water infiltration. The ψm spatial pattern was more related to elevation than soil texture in grassland.
Ecological distribution of the water grimmia (Schistidium agassizii Sull. & Lesq.), a nationally scarce semi-aquatic moss in the U.K., with a new record from an upland tributary of the River Dee, N.E. Scotland

Bryophytes comprise a highly successful group of plants that have managed to exploit environmental conditions generally unsuitable for sustaining vascular plant growth (Stream Bryophyte Group, 1999; Lang, 2010). For example, in fast flowing and boulder-strewn upland headwater streams, bryophytes are often the dominant form of plant life, tolerating being pummeled by harsh current velocities and dislodged or rolling substratum (Lang, 2010; Lang & Murphy, 2012). These stream bryophytes encompass a relatively small proportion of the moss and liverwort flora capable of occupying habitats frequently inundated with water (Stream Bryophyte Group, 1999). Recent work has placed emphasis on the potential value of bryophyte communities for making integrated bioassessments of water quality, and through their prevailing life strategies, also reveal important information concerning the physical character of rivers (Lang & Murphy, 2012; Vieira et al., 2012).
Discriminative Dissolution Method Development Through an aQbD Approach

Using a one-factor-at-a-time approach for dissolution method and discrimination analysis can be time-consuming and may not yield the optimal and discriminative method. To address this, we have developed a two-stage workflow for the dissolution method development followed by demonstration of discrimination power through an analytical Quality by Design (aQbD) approach. In the first stage, an optimal dissolution method was achieved by determining the method operable design region (MODR) through a design of experiment study of the high-risk method-related parameters. In the second stage, we established a Formulation-Discrimination Correlation Diagram strategy to examine the method discrimination capability, through which one can determine the method discriminative design region (MDDR) and visualize the impact of each formulation parameter and their interactions on dissolution. The application of aQbD principles into a workflow provides a scientific-driven guidance for robust method development and demonstrating discrimination power for dissolution methods.
Multiple fault slip triggered above the 2016 Mw 6.4 MeiNong earthquake in Taiwan

Rapid shortening in convergent mountain belts is often accommodated by slip on faults at multiple levels in upper crust, but no geodetic observation of slip at multiple levels within hours of a moderate earthquake has been shown before. Here we show clear evidence of fault slip within a shallower thrust at 5–10 km depth in SW Taiwan triggered by the 2016 Mw 6.4 MeiNong earthquake at 15–20 km depth. We constrain the primary coseismic fault slip with kinematic modeling of seismic and geodetic measurements and constrain the triggered slip and fault geometry using synthetic aperture radar interferometry. The shallower thrust coincides with a proposed duplex located in a region of high fluid pressure and high interseismic uplift rate, and may be sensitive to stress perturbations. Our results imply that under tectonic conditions such as high‐background stress level and high fluid pressure, a moderate lower crustal earthquake can trigger faults at shallower depth.
A Voice-Activity-Aware Loss Function for Continuous Speech Separation

Continuous speech separation (CSS) is gaining popularity as a realistic scenario in which speech utterances partially overlap. Most previous studies on CSS employed the conventional scale-invariant signal-to-noise ratio (SI-SNR) loss, which is ill-defined when the reference audio is silent and thus requires some modifications. Hence, we propose a voice-activity-aware loss function that combines SI-SNR loss for speech segments and logarithmic root mean square loss for nonspeech segments. We trained and evaluated the block-online temporal convolutional network models on synthetic single-channel speech mixtures in noisy and reverberant environments. The results demonstrated that the proposed loss function outperformed the conventional loss function. Furthermore, qualitative analyses indicated that the proposed loss function accurately detected speech onsets and offsets, yielding reduced residual noise in nonspeech segments.
GDI Logic Based Design of Decoder Circuit for Low Power Applications

In this paper a novel design of a low power based 3:8 decoder circuit is proposed for high speed operations. Decoders having great application usage in the field of Address Decoding for Memory devices, Control Logic for Processors and Controllers, etc., make them an essential part of the design where further power and area reduction can be achieved. The proposed design utilizes the Gate Diffusion Technique (GDI) to recreate the conventional decoder circuit. Cadence Virtuoso tool is used for design of the proposed circuit on 90nm technology. Performance analysis of power, delay and layout area are observed and tabulated for comparison. Overall the proposed design has 60% less power, 55.4% reduced delay & takes 62. % less area when compared to CMOS design decoder circuit. The proposed design can be used to optimize both area and power consumption in various low-power applications such as mobile devices, IoT devices, and other battery-operated systems.
Consensus Knowledge Exploitation for Partial Query Based Image Retrieval

Partial Query based Image Retrieval (PQIR) enables a search engine to perform an interactive retrieval given by only an initial query and actively provide alternative feedbacks for a user to refine a set of retrieval results. It alleviates the deficiency in practice interactive image retrieval that requires the user to laboriously provide detailed feedbacks, and enables the retrieval on-the-fly with the incomplete initial query. Although significant progress has been made, existing works remain have challenge in actively providing more discriminative feedbacks. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Attributes&Objects-based Consensus Extraction and Representation (AoCer) framework. Specifically, we formulate a simple but effective Attribute&Object Feedback (AOF) paradigm, which employs both attributes and objects as intermediate feedbacks to carry out multiple rounds of interaction. To mine the intrinsic associations among concepts and enhance their feature representations, we further propose an Interventional Consensus Representation Learning (ICRL) module, which mainly constructs an interventional concept graph to yield the Interventional Consensus Representation (ICR). In addition, a Dual-Head Feedback Sampler (DHFS) is developed to sample objects and attributes for conducting the next round retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework. Our source code will be released at https://github.com/zhangy0822/AoCer.
Environmental Stability Study of Solution-Processed Black Phosphorus

As two-dimensional materials gain increased traction toward device applications, the need to expand on the material used proportionally increases. Black phosphorus (BP) is a notable two-dimensional material that exhibits favorable optical characteristics such as a bandgap tunable by the thickness of the material. Despite the favorable properties of the material, BP is highly susceptible to environmental conditions such as moisture and oxygen exposure. This shortcoming has stunted the growth of BP manufacture via additive manufacturing methods such as ink-jet printing with chemically exfoliated material. In this work, we fabricated graphene and BP electronic devices on silicon substrates via ink-jet printing and tested their stability when subjected to varying temperatures and ambient exposure times. To ensure the quality of the both devices, Raman spectroscopy was performed where both $A_{g}^{l}$ and $A_{g}^{2}$ vibrational modes were observed in BP. To combat the onset of oxidative degradation, the BP device was coated with ionic liquids (ILs) as a passivation layer. Two-terminal I/V measurements were conducted at 0,6,24, and 48 hours to monitor current changes over a 48-hour period, as well as an 18-month test for graphene. We also tested the effects of temperature from 5 - 335 Kelvin for BP. Overall, this study demonstrates that passivating with ionic liquids is an effective avenue for more robust solution processed black phosphorus devices.
Comparative Vegetation Analysis of some Plantation Ecosystems

The present study deals with the comparative vegetation analysis of the four plantations of sal, teak, pine and eucalypts at New Forest, Dehra Dun. The higher density values and species richness in the plantations of pine, sal and teak were due to the stand maturity. The total basal cover (cm 2 100 m -2 ) followed the order; Pine (5308.33)> sal (4002.21)> teak (2887.27)> eucalypts (1106.88), whereas IVI was the highest for eucalypts and sal (300) followed by teak (203.18) and pine (142.61) in their respective plantations. Comparatively, more diversity was observed for pine, while minimum for euculypts stand on both density and IVI basis. The distribution pattern of different tree species was contagious in all the plantations except pine, where it was random for most of the species. The highest values of concentration of dominance (on IVI basis) observed for sal and eucalypts, are attributed to the monospecific nature of their stands. In conclusion, it seems that different silvicultural operations like thinning, burning, weeding, etc. may create a possible route for the invasion of new species even during the premature age of the plantation.
Master Computer Science Improve Answer Retrieval in the Legal Domain with Structured Inputs for Cross-Encoder Re-rankers

This thesis examines the answer retrieval task in the legal community question answering (CQA) system, with the goal of identifying relevant answers from a repository of certified legal practitioners in response to a given question. Our approach uses a two-stage retrieval pipeline that first applies lexical similarity functions such as BM25, followed by a re-ranking of results using a fine-tuned Cross-Encoder. To improve the performance of the Cross-Encoder, we propose injecting query tags and splitter tokens into the input to create a structured input format as follows:
Detection of Cyber Attacks in Self-Driving Vehicles By Machine Learning

The paper describes three machine learning models for detecting cyber attacks in self-driving vehicles. The aim is recognition of abnormal data, inserted into the CAN bus of self-driving car. Two of the models are neural networks and the third one is implemented by logistic regression. The models are simple and at the same time the results show that some of them have high accuracy. The models are trained and tested on a widely accessible hardware. Experimental results from training and validation of the models are presented and discussed.
Climate fluctuations in Illinois, 1901-1980

Changes in climate directly affect four areas of major activity and concern in Illinois – water, energy, agriculture, and transportation. This report presents selected Illinois records for 1901-1980 on a variety of atmospheric conditions that allow assessment of climate fluctuations, climate trends, variability around the trends, and impacts of these changes on the four areas of concern. Documented are changes in statewide and regional precipitation and temperature, plus selected point (station) data. Also presented are changes in other atmospheric conditions including relative humidity, sky cover and sunshine, visibility and related air quality, severe local storms, and wind speed and direction. The historical records are carefully evaluated as to quality. Analyses of the data indicate changes in the more recent 20 years (1961-1980 vs 1901-19601 to wetter and cooler conditions: more rain and snow and fewer droughts; decreases in temperatures especially in summer and winter, with fewer extremely warm days and many more extremely cold days; increases in cloudiness and decreases in sunshine and clear days especially in summer; and increases in wind speeds with more diverse wind directions. All trends are more marked in the extreme seasons of summer and winter than in the transition seasons of spring and fall. Mixed regional changes are noted in other atmospheric conditions, and no trend is seen for relative humidity. Reference: Changnon, Stanley A. , Jr. Climate Fluctuations in Illinois: 1901-1980. Illinois State Water Survey, Champaign, Bulletin 68. Indexing Terms: air quality, climate change, Illinois, precipitation, relative humidity, severe local storms, sky cover, sunshine, temperature, visibility, wind speed and direction. STATE OF ILLINOIS HON. JAMES R. THOMPSON, Governor DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY AND NATURAL RESOURCES MICHAEL B. WITTE, B.A., Director BOARD OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND CONSERVATION Michael B. Witte, B.A., Chairman Walter E. Hanson, M.S., Engineering Laurence L. Sloss, Ph.D., Geology H. S. Gutowsky, Ph.D., Chemistry Lorin I. Nevling, Ph.D., Forestry Robert L. Metcalf, Ph.D., Biology Daniel C. Drucker, Ph.D. University of Illinois John C. Guyon, Ph.D. Southern Illinois University STATE WATER SURVEY DIVISION STANLEY A. CHANGNON, JR., M.S., Chief