Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Phytochemical Analysis and Antioxidant Properties of the Various Extracts of Catharanthus roseus

The estimation of various phytochemicals and the antioxidant power of various extracts of Catharanthus roseus was carried out by various chemical and spectroscopic methods. Various types of phytochemicals have been identified both qualitatively as well their quantification had been carried out. The observed results so for obtained showed that the plant in reference posses all types of phytochemical in a good quantity which are essential for the human consumption, like alkaloids, flavonoids and saponins. Catharanthus roseus also has been found to have the capacity to neutralize the free radicals from which various types of disease visit humans from time to time. Three solvents namely Acetone, DMSO and Water) have been used for extraction of various phytochemicals from the plant parts. Among the various extracts of the plant, water extract had been found more potent as per the phytochemical analysis and the antioxidant properties of the plant are taken into consideration.
Effects of the expression of serum PLA2R antibody on the diagnosis and immunological therapy of idiopathic membranous nephropathy

Objective: To explore the correlation between the expression of serum phospholipase A2 receptor (PLA2R) antibody and the diagnosis and immunological therapy of idiopathic membranous nephropathy (IMN). Methods: A total of 329 patients undergoing renal biopsy were enrolled and analyzed prospectively, including 142 patients with IMN and 187 patients with non-IMN, and 40 healthy individuals during the same period were also enrolled for control. The expression of serum PLA2R in all enrolled patients was determined, and the efficacy of immunological therapy on IMN patients with different expression of serum PLA2R antibody was evaluated. Results: Among the three groups, the highest serum PLA2R antibody titer was found in the IMN group, which was significantly different from that in the non-IMN group and the healthy group (both P<0.001). The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of serum PLA2R antibody in diagnosing IMN was 0.961, and when the cut-off value of serum PLA2R antibody was 29.09 RU/mL, its Youden index, specificity, and sensitivity were 0.908, 1 and 0.908, respectively. In addition, comparison of the efficacy between the two patient groups revealed that there were significant differences between the two groups in complete remission, partial remission, and non-remission (all P<0.05). The effective rate of the negative group was significantly higher than that of the positive group (87.50% vs. 66.36%, P<0.05), and the negative group showed higher serum albumin level and less 24 h-proteinuria than the positive group after treatment (both P<0.001). Conclusion: Serum PLA2R antibody is highly expressed in IMN patients and enjoys a high diagnostic value. In addition, the effective treatment rate of the positive serum PLA2R antibody expression group was lower than that of the negative group, implying that the positive expression of serum PLA2R antibody suggested poor prognosis.
External Motivation, the Key to Success in the MOOCs Framework

: This paper aims at presenting the findings and sharing the experiences of a case study whose data were gathered from an experimental MOOC (massive open online course) platform. The content was designed with an end view of favoring media-based education, students' activities, and their interactive communication. The main advantage of the devised system is that students were able to learn using their mother tongue, Hungarian. This research involved 208 students, enabling the authors to test the following variables by applying statistical methods: residence (country), sex, occupation, age, external (offline) motivation, amount of time spent in front of the computer, length of time in the LMS (learning management system) and achievements during a specific course. Statistical analysis revealed correlations between numerous factors, which may later serve as a solid ground for further studies in this field.
A new resistance to pyrethroids in Tribolium castaneum (Herbst).

The characteristics of a new high-level, field-derived resistance to pyrethroids in Tribolium castaneum (Herbst) were investigated using impregnated-paper and treated-grain assays. Piperonyl butoxide almost completely suppressed the resistance, suggesting that the major resistance mechanism was microsomal oxidation. Resistance extended to all pyrethroids tested and to carbaryl but not to organophosphorus insecticides or to methoprene. Resistance was strongest against α—CN phenoxybenzyl cyclopropanecarboxylate pyrethroids and was correlated with structural modifications of the pyrethroid molecule, results also consistent with oxidative resistance. This resistance will ultimately result in failures to control T. castaneum if pyrethroids, such as deltamethrin, cypermethrin or cyfluthrin, are used in the field, even if they are synergised with piperonyl butoxide. The resistance does not jeopardise organophosphorus materials (e.g. fenitrothion, chlorpyrifos-methyl, pirimiphos-methyl, methacrifos) or methoprene.
Hearing and Oral Language Skill Development in Children with Unilateral and Simultaneous Bilateral Cochlear Implants in the First Year of Device Use

This longitudinal study aimed to verify the advantages of simultaneous bilateral stimulation for the development of hearing and oral language skills over unilateral stimulation in children using cochlear implants, in the first year of electronic device use. The study included twenty children divided into two matched groups (n=10): children using unilateral cochlear implant (UCI), and those using simultaneous bilateral cochlear implant (BCI). The IT-MAIS or MAIS and MUSS questionnaires were used for evaluated language and auditory performance at three, six, and twelve months after activation of the electrodes. A gradual increase in auditory speech perception and oral language development was seen over the first year of device use in both groups; however, there was no significant difference between the two groups. In conclusion, in the first year of cochlear implant use, children using UCI and those using simultaneous BCI showed similar development of auditory perception of speech and oral language. Research Article Hearing and Oral Language Skill Development in Children with Unilateral and Simultaneous Bilateral Cochlear Implants in the First Year of Device Use Simone Fiuza Regaçone1, Kátia de Freitas Alvarenga1*, Julia Speranza Zabeu-Fernandes2, Adriane Lima Mortari Moret1, Eduardo Boaventura Oliveira2, Rafaela Cristina da Silva Bicas2, and Orozimbo Alves Costa1 1Department, of Speech Pathology, University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil 2Hospital of Rehabilitation of Craniofacial Anomalies, University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil
EFFECT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY CAPABILITY ON COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE OF THE KENYAN BANKING SECTOR: A CRITIQUE

For many years, the importance of technology has greatly influenced the society and the business world. Today, everything in our environment is purely a product of high-end advancement. Information technology has fully grown with outstanding drive and acquired a noble rank for itself and all those that are linked to it. Moreover, today competitive advantage of the banking industry is associated with information technology. This paper critiqued a journal article, “Effect of Information Technology (IT) Capability on Competitive Advantage of the Kenyan Banking Sector” by Kamau et al., (2019), whose objective was to establish the impact of Information Technology on the competitive advantage of Kenya's financial industry. The study discovered that information technology capability management practices like investing towards improvement of the ICT hardware and skills of the ICT personnel resulted to a significant improvement in the competitive advantage of commercial banks in Kenya.
Evaluation of oxygen isotopes and trace elements in planktonic foraminifera from the Mediterranean Sea as recorders of seawater oxygen isotopes and salinity

The Mediterranean Sea is characterized by a relatively strong west to east salinity gradient, which makes it an area suitable for testing the effect of salinity on foraminiferal shell geochemistry. We collected living specimens of the planktonic foraminifer Globigerinoides ruber albus to analyse the relation between element /Ca ratios, stable oxygen isotopes of their shells, and surface seawater salinity, isotopic composition and temperature. The oxygen isotopes of sea surface water also correlate with salinity in the Mediterranean during winter, which is when sampling for this study took place. Seawater oxygen and hydrogen isotopes are positively correlated in both the eastern and western Mediterranean Sea, although the relationship differs from previously reported values, especially in the eastern region. The slope between salinity and seawater oxygen isotopes is lower than previously published results. Still, despite the rather modest slope, seawater and foraminiferal carbonate oxygen isotopes are correlated in our dataset, albeit with large residuals and high residual variability. This scatter could be due to either biological variability in vital effects or environmental variability. Numerical models backtracking particles show that ocean-current-driven mixing of particles of different origins might dampen sensitivity and could result in an offset caused by horizontal transport. Results show that Na /Ca is positively correlated with salinity and independent of temperature. As expected, foraminiferal Mg /Ca increases with temperature, which is in line with earlier calibrations, and in the high salinity environment. By using living foraminifera during winter, the previously established Mg /Ca–temperature calibration is extended to temperatures below 18 C, which is a fundamental prerequisite of using single foraminifera for reconstructing past seasonality.
Incidence of Cardiac Arrhythmias in Acute Myocardial Infarction Patients Undergoing Primary Percutaneous Coronary Intervention and Associated Outcomes During the First 24 Hours

Background Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) is the most life-threatening manifestation of coronary artery diseases. The majority of deaths in AMI are due to arrhythmias. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate the incidence and risk factors and outcomes of cardiac arrhythmias in AMI patients undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) during the first 24 hours of the index hospitalization. Methodology This prospective observational study was conducted at the adult cardiology department of the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICVD), Karachi, Pakistan. Patients undergoing primary PCI were included in this study. All the patients were kept under observation for the first 24 hours of AMI and monitored through telemetry system monitoring and the incidence of cardiac arrhythmias and the outcomes were recorded. Results A total of 110 patients were included; the mean age was 59.6±13.1 years. Most of them were male (70.9%). Arrhythmias were observed in 89.1% of the patients, with 169 episodes. The accelerated idioventricular rhythm was the most common type of arrhythmia (37.3%) followed by sinus tachycardia (36.4%), ventricular tachycardia (22.7%), and complete heart block (20.0%). Lethal arrhythmias were observed in 64.5% (71) of the patients. During the hospital course, 65.5% developed arrhythmias during arrival to balloon time, 30% during the procedure, and 53.6% within 24 hours of the procedure. The in-hospital mortality rate was 15.5% with a significant association with the development of lethal arrhythmias within 24 hours of the procedure (21.1% vs. 5.1%; p=0.026). Conclusions The incidence of arrhythmias within 24 hours of hospitalization is high in patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) undergoing primary PCI, and it has been observed to be associated with an increased rate of in-hospital mortality.
Oxygen Release by Roots of Typha latifolia and Juncus effusus in Laboratory Hydroponic Systems

Laboratory-scale investigations using individual T.latifolia and J. effusus plants in hydroponic systems were carried out to evaluate the potentials and differences in the species regarding the release of oxygen into their rhizospheres. Their oxygen release intensities were found to vary between the species and also to depend on the redox state of the rhizosphere. The highest release rates with mean values of 1.1 mg/h plant for T.latifolia and 0.5 mg/h plant for J.effusus were estimated at Eh - - 200 mV for both species. The amounts of oxygen released were sufficient to be of biotechnological relevance for oxidative processes in constructed wetlands. The plants even released oxygen under oxidized rhizospheric conditions and for individual plants, an intensification of the oxygen release was estimated, forming further local release maxima at Eh = 250-400 mV with about 0.2 mg/h plant. The total size of the root system does not significantly affect the intensity of oxygen release; instead, the oxygen release state was governed by the size of the above-ground biomass. The intensification of illumination causes an increase in the oxygen release rates, which is pronounced for T.latifolia but small for J.effusus. Further investigations involving other wetland species and using laboratory-scale, pilot-scale and full-scale wetland systems to evaluate oxygen release are of biotechnological interest.
Surface Transport Processes and Sticking Probability of Aromatic Molecules in HZSM-5

The elementary steps of the sorption of aromatic molecules such as benzene, toluene, p-xylene, and o-xylene on nonporous amorphous SiO2 (Aerosil) and microporous silicas using HZSM-5 as an example are studied by time-resolved rapid scan IR spectroscopy. Sorption into the zeolite pores proceeds via a weakly bound physisorbed and nonlocalized state on the external surface as the dominating reaction pathway. The weak interaction leads to very low sticking probabilities on the order of 10-7 for porous and nonporous materials alike. Within the molecules investigated, the sticking coefficient increases in the series toluene, o-xylene, benzene, and p-xylene. Using a statistical thermodynamic analysis, this sequence is attributed to the symmetry of the sorbate molecule, the sorption enthalpy of the sorbate increasing with the molar mass, and the space the sorbate molecule occupies on the surface.
Multiple regression analysis of anthropogenic and heliogenic climate drivers, and some cautious forecasts

The two main drivers of climate change on sub-Milankovic time scales are re-assessed by means of a multiple regression analysis. Evaluating linear combinations of the logarithm of carbon dioxide concentration and the geomagnetic aa-index as a proxy for solar activity, we reproduce the sea surface temperature (HadSST) since the middle of the 19th century with an adjusted $R^2$ value of around 87 per cent for a climate sensitivity (of TCR type) in the range of 0.6 K until 1.6 K per doubling of CO$_2$. The solution of the regression is quite sensitive: when including data from the last decade, the simultaneous occurrence of a strong El Ni\~no on one side and low aa-values on the other side lead to a preponderance of solutions with relatively high climate sensitivities around 1.6 K. If those later data are excluded, the regression leads to a significantly higher weight of the aa-index and a correspondingly lower climate sensitivity going down to 0.6 K. The plausibility of such low values is discussed in view of recent experimental and satellite-borne measurements. We argue that a further decade of data collection will be needed to allow for a reliable distinction between low and high sensitivity values. Based on recent ideas about a quasi-deterministic planetary synchronization of the solar dynamo, we make a first attempt to predict the aa-index and the resulting temperature anomaly for various typical CO$_2$ scenarios. Even for the highest climate sensitivities, and an unabated linear CO$_2$ increase, we predict only a mild additional temperature rise of around 1 K until the end of the century, while for the lower values an imminent temperature drop in the near future, followed by a rather flat temperature curve, is prognosticated.
Towards Faster and Stabilized GAN Training for High-fidelity Few-shot Image Synthesis

Training Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) on high-fidelity images usually requires large-scale GPU-clusters and a vast number of training images. In this paper, we study the few-shot image synthesis task for GAN with minimum computing cost. We propose a light-weight GAN structure that gains superior quality on 1024*1024 resolution. Notably, the model converges from scratch with just a few hours of training on a single RTX-2080 GPU, and has a consistent performance, even with less than 100 training samples. Two technique designs constitute our work, a skip-layer channel-wise excitation module and a self-supervised discriminator trained as a feature-encoder. With thirteen datasets covering a wide variety of image domains (The datasets and code are available at: https://github.com/odegeasslbc/FastGAN-pytorch), we show our model's superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art StyleGAN2, when data and computing budget are limited.
Powerful winds in high-redshift obscured and red quasars

Quasar-driven outflows must have made their most significant impact on galaxy formation during the epoch when massive galaxies were forming most rapidly. To study the impact of quasar feedback we conducted rest-frame optical integral field spectrograph (IFS) observations of three extremely red quasars (ERQs) and one type-2 quasar at z = 2− 3, obtained with the NIFS and OSIRIS instruments at the Gemini North and W. M. Keck Observatory with the assistance of laser-guided adaptive optics. We use the kinematics and morphologies of the [O III] 5007Å and Hα 6563Å emission lines redshifted into the near-infrared to gauge the extents, kinetic energies and momentum fluxes of the ionized outflows in the quasars host galaxies. For the ERQs, the galactic-scale outflows are likely driven by radiation pressure in a high column density environment or due to an adiabatic shock. For the type-2 quasar, the outflow is driven by radiation pressure in a low column density environment or due to a radiative shock. The outflows in the ERQs carry a significant amount of energy ranging from 0.05-5% of the quasar’s bolometric luminosity, powerful enough to have a significant impact on the quasar host galaxies. However, the outflows are likely only impacting the inner few kpc of each host galaxy. The observed outflow sizes are generally smaller than other ionized outflows observed at high redshift. The high ratio between the momentum flux of the ionized outflow and the photon momentum flux from the quasar accretion disk and high nuclear obscuration makes these ERQs great candidates for transitional objects where the outflows are likely responsible for clearing material in the inner regions of each galaxy, unveiling the quasar accretion disk at optical wavelengths.
Sharing Heartbeats: Motivations of Citizen Scientists in Times of Crises

With the rise of COVID-19 cases globally, many countries released digital tools to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. In Germany the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) published the Corona-Data-Donation-App, a virtual citizen science (VCS) project, to establish an early warning system for the prediction of potential COVID-19 hotspots using data from wearable devices. While work on motivation for VCS projects in HCI often presents egoistic motives as prevailing, there is little research on such motives in crises situations. In this paper, we explore the socio-psychological processes and motivations to share personal data during a pandemic. Our findings indicate that collective motives dominated among app reviews (n=464) and in in-depth interviews (n=10). We contribute implications for future VCS tools in times of crises that highlight the importance of communication, transparency and responsibility.
Re-analysis of Breakthrough Listen Observations of FRB 121102: Polarization Properties of Eight New Spectrally Narrow Bursts

We report polarization properties for eight narrowband bursts from FRB 121102 that have been re-detected in a high-frequency (4–8 GHz) Breakthrough Listen observation with the Green Bank Telescope, originally taken on 2017 August 26. The bursts were found to exhibit nearly 100% linear polarization, Faraday rotation measures bordering 9.3 × 104 rad m−2, and stable polarization position angles, all of which agree with burst properties previously reported for FRB 121102 at the same epoch. We confirm that these detections are indeed physical bursts with limited spectral occupancies and further support the use of sub-banded search techniques in FRB detection.
Effects of Kaolin and Pinolene Film-forming Polymers on Water Relations and Photosynthetic Rate of Tuberose (Polianthes tuberosa L.)

The effects of pinolene-base Vapor Gard (VG) emulsion type film and Kaolin (Surround WP) particle type film antitranspirants on stomatal behavior, water status, carbon assimilation and transpiration rate of tuberose (Polianthes tuberosa L.) cv. double plants grown under the irrigation regimes of 100, 80 and 60% of total evapotranspiration (ET) values were investigated to select the most suitable antitranspirant for conserving irrigation water, less detrimental effects on growth and production of tuberose plants grown in Al- Qassim region. Severe water stress, decreased stomatal frequency and conductance (gs), leaf water potential (Ψw), osmotic potential (Ψπ), turgor potential (Ψp), relative water content (RWC), chlorophyll content (chl), carbon assimilation rate (A) and the transpiration rate (E). Both types of antitranspirants effectively enhanced the performance and physiological activities of water-stressed plants particularly, at the 80% ET, but they did not compensate for the negative effects caused by the 60% ET treatment. However, the particle type (Kaolin) was more effective than the emulsion type (VG) due to its ability to reduce leaf temperature. The increased gs caused by VG and Kaolin sprays were accompanied by increased A suggesting that gs might have a limiting effect on A in water-stressed plants. Water use efficiency (WUE) of Kaolin-sprayed leaves was significantly higher than that of VG-sprayed leaves. However, no significant differences between both antitranspirants on E were recorded. Increased WUE, therefore, could be attributed to a higher A by using Kaolin as compared with VG sprays. Thus, particle type antitranspirants are more effective in regulating water status, WUE and the photosynthetic activity of tuberose plants in Al-Qassim regions, Saudi Arabia.