Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Recurrence in Plasmodium vivax malaria: a prospective cohort study with long follow-up from a coastal region in South-West India.

Background: India is endemic for Plasmodium vivax (Pv) malaria. Despite a decrease in incidence, its elimination is hampered by recurrences. This study aimed to characterize recurrences in Pv malaria and study its association with primaquine (PQ) usage. Methods: Symptomatic adult Pv patients were followed-up for up to 23 months for recurrences. The time to recurrence was compared by the PQ dosage they received using a log-rank test. Results: Of the 294 malaria patients, 206 (70%) patients had Pv infection during the study period. A total of 20 (9.7%) recurrences were seen in 17 (8.2%) patients of Pv. The percentage of first-time recurrences were highest in the no PQ group (25%), followed by the weekly PQ group (20%), low dose daily PQ (8.2%) group, and high dose daily PQ group (3.1%). Conclusions: Recurrence in Pv malaria is common, especially in those who receive an inappropriate prescription of primaquine.
Reproductive Isolation in the Cryptic Species Complex of a Key Pest: Analysis of Mating and Rejection Behaviour of Onion Thrips (Thrips tabaci Lindeman)

Simple Summary The onion thrips (Thrips tabaci), which is a key pest worldwide, includes three characteristic, distinct groups (i.e., lineages) under the same species name. In the current report, we addressed the question of whether individuals from these lineages recognize and assess each other as potential mating partners. We demonstrated that at least two of these lineages do not belong to the same species, since under our laboratory conditions no mating occurred between them. Moreover, specimens from these cross pairings often exhibited an escape response upon contact with the other thrips, while most of the pairs from the same lineages readily mated at their first interaction. The behaviour of males clearly indicated that they can assess the mating status of a female and usually only try to copulate with virgins. Our findings are important not only because in agriculture it is vital to know whether morphologically similar entities belong to the same species, but also because knowledge about the communication of insects and the possible role of the cues involved can help the development of new plant protection techniques. Abstract Thrips tabaci Lindeman is a serious pest of various cultivated plants, with three, distinct lineages within a cryptic species complex. Despite the well-known significance of this pest, many attributes of these lineages are not yet fully understood, including their reproductive behaviour. We performed no-choice-design cross-mating experiments under a controlled laboratory environment with virgin adult individuals from all three lineages. The behaviour of thrips was recorded with a camera mounted on a stereomicroscope, and the recordings were analysed in detail. We found that the so-called leek-associated lineages of this cryptic species complex are reproductively isolated from the tobacco-associated lineage; therefore, they represent different species. Divergence in the behaviour of conspecific and heterospecific pairs became evident only after contact. There were no marked differences between the lineages in their precopulatory and copulatory behaviour, except in the duration of the latter. We confirmed mating between thelytokous females and arrhenotokous males; however, we assume some form of loss of function in the sexual traits of asexual females. The post-mating behaviour of males indicated the presence and role of an anti-aphrodisiac pheromone. We also demonstrated differences between lineages regarding their activity and their propensity for exhibiting an escape response upon interaction with heterospecific thrips.
Effects of Dietary Rapeseed and Camelina Seed Cakes on Physical–Technological Properties of Goose Meat

Simple Summary The diets fed to geese traditionally contain more forages and less concentrates, but there are many reasons, including veterinarian and environmental restrictions when intensive rearing should be adopted. It is also important to use different cheaper feed resources for geese, and one of these could be by-products of oil production such as rapeseed and camelina cakes. The present study was aimed at assessing the effects of rapeseed cake and camelina seed cake supplements on the physical and technological attributes of goose meat quality. The oil seed cake-supplemented diets did not reveal any differences in goose meat colour; however, it demonstrated the effects on moisture loss and on texture parameters determined by the texture profile analysis. Abstract The objective of the present study was to investigate the effects of commercial diet supplemented with rapeseed and camelina seed cakes on the physical and technological attributes of goose meat quality. The breast and thigh muscles from thirty geese of both sexes of the Lithuanian native breed Vištinės fed the diet containing either rapeseed cake (group 1) or camelina cake (group 2) at the age of 13 weeks were used for the evaluation of physical and technological attributes. The diet did not affect the colour of goose meat; however, females showed higher (p < 0.05) values of breast yellowness (b*) and hue angle (h). The camelina group demonstrated higher (p < 0.001) cooking losses of breast and thigh muscles and also higher (p < 0.05) EZ drip loss and thawing loss of thigh muscles compared with the rapeseed group. Females had higher (p < 0.05) cooking loss of the breast, whereas males had higher (p < 0.05) cooking loss of the thigh. The growth rate of geese and their slaughter time showed an effect (p < 0.05 and p < 0.01, respectively) on pH of thigh muscles. Higher (p < 0.01) hardness of the breast muscle in the camelina group compared with the rapeseed group was detected by the texture profile analysis (TPA) as well as other parameters such as cohesiveness and gumminess, chewiness. Despite some differences in technological meat quality attributes, the quality of goose meat produced with diet supplementation of 10% of rapeseed cake and camelina seed cake can be considered as suitable.
Encapsulation of bioinsecticide oil in phenol-urea-formaldehyde terpolymer

Abstract Novel microcapsules were developed by in situ polymerization of phenol-urea-formaldehyde (PUF) terpolymer and employed for the first time for the encapsulation of neem oil bioinsecticide. Neem oil’s rapid degradation in open environment does not permit its use in crops fields. Therefore, microencapsulation seems to be better method to protect it, make it effective and user-friendly. The prepared PUF microcapsules were analyzed by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, scanning electron microscopy, optical microscopy and particle size analyzer. The controlled release properties of prepared microcapsules were studied by using loss on drying method and by ultraviolet spectrometry. The release kinetics and stability of prepared microcapsules were studied under different pH and temperature conditions. In conclusion, spherical microcapsules with mean particle size 29.8 μm and good thermal stability have been developed. They could release core more at alkaline pH (26%) than acidic (9%) and neutral (18%). Microcapsules follow first order release kinetics and are operational at or below 45 °C. We propose here further that an environment friendly microcapsule suspension formulation of neem oil is possible for application in agriculture which is not explored yet by using terpolymer. Graphical Abstract
Expanding electric-vehicle adoption beyond the national border: Insights for developing marketing policies for global electric-vehicle manufacturers

Abstract The widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is one of the keys to achieving carbon-neutral by mid-century. This research examined the Americans’ perception of Chinese-brand electric vehicles (CBEVs) made in the US via structural equation modeling. The authors contracted a professional web survey company, which surveyed 400 Californian respondents in December 2020. We focused on California because the state has the greatest EV registration and accounts for approximately 260,000 or 47 percent of the US’s entire EV population. There are two unique approaches to this research, (1) proposing a mediation model and (2) examining country-of-origin effects in evaluating the factors influencing EV purchase intention in California households. The study results revealed that eco-consciousness does not directly invoke consumers’ purchase intention. Instead, the influence of eco-consciousness on purchasing behavior is mediated by quality judgment and the product's perceived value. The study also found that consumers’ animosity affects purchase intention indirectly by eroding consumers’ perceived value of CBEVs. Even though many foreign EV makers are attempting to increase their market presence and product adoption in the US market, their market share is still insignificant compared to conventional vehicles. Understanding factors that increase consumer acceptability of EVs is inevitable for building a successful market penetration.
Frontal Asymmetry as a Neural Correlate of Motivational Conflict

Motivational systems of approach, avoidance, and inhibition are fundamental to human behavior. While past research has linked approach motivation with greater relative left frontal asymmetry, many attempts to link avoidance motivation with greater relative right frontal asymmetry have been mixed. These mixed effects could be due to coactivation of the avoidance and behavioral inhibition system (BIS). Much recent evidence indicates that the behavioral inhibition system may be associated with greater relative right frontal activation. The current review examines evidence linking traits associated with the behavioral inhibition system with resting right frontal asymmetry. Other research links individual differences associated with the behavioral inhibition system with state changes in relative right frontal asymmetry. Moreover, activation of the behavioral inhibition system, but not activation of withdrawal motivation, increases greater relative right frontal asymmetry. Together, this work highlights the role of relative frontal asymmetry as a neural correlate in motivational conflict and helps to disentangle behavioral inhibition from avoidance motivation.
Blood Group Type Association with Head and Neck Cancer

Background: We conducted an analysis to check whether the ABO blood group impacts the susceptibility or protection against different types of head and neck cancers. Method: We analyzed the medical records of 61,899 cancer patients from “Prof. Dr. Alexandru Trestioreanu” Institute of Oncology from Bucharest, along with the corresponding blood group type. Data were scraped using Python. For analysis, we used Chi-square test. Results: The blood group count was A (245, 45.12%) followed by 0 (160, 24.66%), B (110, 20.26%), and AB (28, 5.16%). Hypopharyngeal cancer was associated with B group, oral cavity cancer was associated with a lower risk in patients with B group while AB patients had a higher risk for oral cavity cancer (χ2 = 36.136, df = 18, p = 0.007). Conclusion: Blood group B is associated with an increased incidence for hypopharyngeal cancer, whereas, for the oral cavity, was associated lower incidence. Blood antigen A is associated with a higher risk of oral cavity cancer development, independent of B blood antigen.
Inviting inquiry on pedagogical documentation in Singapore: perspectives of parents and teachers

ABSTRACT Pedagogical documentation within early childhood centres is a key component of pedagogy and teacher accountability. In Singapore, documentation is a requirement specified under legislative policies included in the national Pre-school Accreditation Framework, with parents often perceived as the main audience. This paper reports on a study utilising Rogoff’s observation on social cultural activities to focus on the interconnectedness between children, parents and teachers as stakeholders in the early childhood sector. An electronic survey was used to ascertain parents’ perspectives on documentation of their child’s learning and development. Analysis of this data was shared in five individual teacher interviews to explore responses to the parents’ perspectives. Findings of this study affirmed that documentation varied as a process and a product of pedagogy in early childhood centres. Within a climate of assessment and accountability, these findings invite inquiry and offer possibilities for professional learning on improving pedagogical documentation across the sector.
A Novel Text Mining Approach for Mental Health Prediction Using Bi-LSTM and BERT Model

With the current advancement in the Internet, there has been a growing demand for building intelligent and smart systems that can efficiently address the detection of health-related problems on social media, such as the detection of depression and anxiety. These types of systems, which are mainly dependent on machine learning techniques, must be able to deal with obtaining the semantic and syntactic meaning of texts posted by users on social media. The data generated by users on social media contains unstructured and unpredictable content. Several systems based on machine learning and social media platforms have recently been introduced to identify health-related problems. However, the text representation and deep learning techniques employed provide only limited information and knowledge about the different texts posted by users. This is owing to a lack of long-term dependencies between each word in the entire text and a lack of proper exploitation of recent deep learning schemes. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to efficiently and effectively identify depression and anxiety-related posts while maintaining the contextual and semantic meaning of the words used in the whole corpus when applying bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). In addition, we propose a knowledge distillation technique, which is a recent technique for transferring knowledge from a large pretrained model (BERT) to a smaller model to boost performance and accuracy. We also devised our own data collection framework from Reddit and Twitter, which are the most common social media sites. Finally, we employed word2vec and BERT with Bi-LSTM to effectively analyze and detect depression and anxiety signs from social media posts. Our system surpasses other state-of-the-art methods and achieves an accuracy of 98% using the knowledge distillation technique.
THE DYNAMIC CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN OIL PRICE AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN OIL-IMPORTING SSA COUNTRIES: A MULTIVARIATE MODEL

This study examines the causal relationship between oil price and economic growth in 14 oil-importing countries in sub-Saharan Africa during the period 1990 to 2018. The countries are further divided into two groups, namely seven low-income countries (LICs) and seven middle-income countries (MICs) in order to test whether the causality between oil price and economic growth depends on the countries’ income levels. Unlike previous studies that used a bivariate model, this study employs a multivariate Granger-causality model, which incorporates oil consumption and real exchange rate as intermittent variables in a bivariate setting between oil price and economic growth. The study employs panel cointegration and the panel Granger-causality tests to examine this linkage. The results of the study show that in the short run, there is a bidirectional causality between oil price and economic growth for the entire dataset, and both for the LICs and MICs. However, in the long run, there is a bidirectional causal relationship between oil price and economic growth for the entire dataset and MICs, but a unidirectional causality from economic growth to oil price for the LICs. Overall, the study found a feedback relationship between oil price and economic growth to be predominant.
Commensal Microbiota and Cancer Immunotherapy: Harnessing Commensal Bacteria for Cancer Therapy

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide and the number of cancer patients is expected to continuously increase in the future. Traditional cancer therapies focus on inhibiting cancer growth while largely ignoring the contribution of the immune system in eliminating cancer cells. Recently, better understanding of immunological mechanisms pertaining to cancer progress has led to development of several immunotherapies, which revolutionized cancer treatment. Nonetheless, only a small proportion of cancer patients respond to immunotherapy and maintain a durable response. Among multiple factors contributing to the variability of immunotherapy response rates, commensal microbiota inhabiting patients have been identified as one of the most critical factors determining the success of immunotherapy. The functional diversity of microbiota differentially affects the host immune system and controls the efficacy of immunotherapy in individual cancer patients. Moreover, clinical studies have demonstrated that changing the gut microbiota composition by fecal microbiota transplantation in patients who failed a previous immunotherapy converts them to responders of the same therapy. Consequently, both academic and industrial researchers are putting extensive efforts to identify and develop specific bacteria or bacteria mixtures for cancer immunotherapy. In this review, we will summarize the immunological roles of commensal microbiota in cancer treatment and give specific examples of bacteria that show anticancer effect when administered as a monotherapy or as an adjuvant agent for immunotherapy. We will also list ongoing clinical trials testing the anticancer effect of commensal bacteria.
Concern, Cynicism, and the Coronavirus: Assessing the Influence of Instrumental and Normative Factors on Individual Defiance of COVID-19 Mitigation Guidelines

In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments enacted guidelines to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. Public defiance of these guidelines invoked instrumental concerns about the virus and normative concerns regarding government mandates and overreach during the pandemic. Drawing on normative and instrumental explanations for compliance with the law, the current study uses a national sample of 600 American adults surveyed during the beginning of the pandemic to examine defiance of these guidelines. Using structural equation modeling, we find that legal cynicism is positively associated with defiance, while fear and perceived severity of the coronavirus are negatively related to defiance. Findings suggest that fostering compliance with public health guidelines will involve reducing legal cynicism among the public.
Urban soundscapes: a quasi-experiment in landscape architecture

Abstract Soundscapes are becoming increasingly recognised as significant for sustainable development, since they involve issues of health and quality of life. With this in mind, the present study aims to further our understanding of how urban soundscapes can be altered through design of outdoor space. The study took the form of a quasi-experiment on an urban square, involving sound screens covered with ivy to form a small arbour. Assessment was effected using a mixed-method approach that included measurements of sound pressure levels as well as self-reports from (in total) 205 visitors (198 questionnaires and 9 semi-structured interviews were used for analysis). The findings reveal that the arbour improved the soundscape. This effect was further enhanced when forest sounds were added through loudspeakers, underlining the importance of qualitative considerations. The study additionally highlights potential applications of soundscape design, by examining a number of issues encountered during the project in relation to landscape architecture.
Perceived knowledge and perceptions toward biostatistics among dental and medical undergraduate students in International Islamic University Malaysia

Research into dental and medical student on biostatistics may inform the educational policy changes. Therefore, it was vital to assess the level of knowledge and perception about biostatistics among dental and medical undergraduate students in order to determine their proficiency in this subject. A cross-sectional study was undertaken among dental and medical undergraduate students in International Islamic University Malaysia, Kuantan. The assessment of perceived and perception toward biostatistics was based on a 5-points Likert scale including 50 questions distributed into five domains to assess the knowledge, course value, difficulty, behavioural and expectations. A total of 158 out of 190 students responded to the questionnaire yielding a response rate of 83.2%. It was observed that more than 70% of students acknowledged that knowledge gained from biostatistics courses is useful to their future career, and almost 80% realized the relevance of biostatistics to real health issues. This study concludes that undergraduate dental students have almost similar and moderate level of knowledge in biostatistics as compared to the medical students. However, it is important to have additional practice and training through workshop to improve their level of comprehension in biostatistics.
A hidden Amazonian fauna: first record of Neoempheria bilobata Edwards, 1940 (Diptera: Mycetophilidae) in Pará State, Brazil

Neoempheria Osten Sacken is a genus of Mycetophilidae that has a life cycle associated with fungi. The genus is diverse in the Neotropical region, with 41 species known from Brazil that are predominantly known in southern and southeastern areas. This study reports on the first record of this genus for Pará state and redescribes Neoempheria bilobata Edwards, which was previously decribed from a male holotype from southern Brazil. We furnished high-resolution images and illustrations, as well as a detailed redescription of this species, based on male and female specimens.
Low Vertebrobasilar Velocity Is Associated with a Higher Risk of Posterior Circulation Ischemic Lesions

Background: Transcranial color-coded sonography (TCCS) is used as a real-time tool to evaluate patients suspected of having vertebrobasilar insufficiency (VBI). However, the sonographic criteria for VBI remain inconclusive. The purpose of this study was to analyze the velocity in the vertebrobasilar system, which links the risk for posterior circulation infarction (POCI) and total ischemic stroke (TIS) in patients with VBI. Methods: Patients’ data were retrospectively reviewed if they were suspected of having VBI within a 2-year period. Baseline characteristics, brain images, and a series of sonography data were recorded and analyzed. We compared vertebrobasilar (VB) velocities in different age groups and in patients with infarctions. Results: A total of 875 patients were enrolled, with 112 and 427 candidates in the POCI and TIS groups, respectively. The mean velocity (MV)s of BA and bilateral VAs were all negatively correlated with age (all p < 0.001). The adjusted odds ratio was 2.55 (1.58–4.13, p < 0.001) in POCI and 1.75 (1.15–2.67, p = 0.009) in TIS if the mean velocity of the VB arteries was below 15 cm/s. Conclusions: Low VB velocity detected in TCCS was more commonly associated with ageing-related changes and a higher risk of both POCI and TIS. Recognition and aggressive treatment for these patients are necessary.