Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nutrition Practices among Adult Cancer Survivors Living on the Island of Ireland: A Cross-Sectional Study

The purpose of this research was to explore the nutrition practices among post-treatment cancer survivors across Ireland. Cancer survivors aged 18+ years living across Ireland, who were not palliative and had completed active cancer treatment at least six months previous, were recruited to complete an online survey assessing dietary quality, food choice and satisfaction with food-related life as well as clinical and nutrition status. It was circulated by cancer support networks and on social media. Descriptive statistics are presented. The cohort (n = 170) was predominantly female (85.9%) and had breast cancer (64.7%). Mean age was 51.5 ± 10.9 years and 42.7% of the cohort were >five years post-treatment. Only 20% and 12% of the cohort had been assessed by a dietitian during and post-treatment, respectively. The mean dietary quality score was 10.3 ± 1.7, which was measured by the Leeds short-form food frequency questionnaire (SFFFQ). Using a 5-point Likert scale, the median satisfaction with food-related life score was 19 (3.3), which evaluates cognitive judgements on the person’s food-related life. The food choice questionnaire (FCQ) assesses the relative importance of a range of factors related to dietary choice to individuals. The primary determinant of food choice in this cohort was the natural content (31.7%) followed by health (24.7%). Vitamin and mineral supplement use was reported by 69.8% of the cohort; the most consumed was Vitamin D. Four themes emerged from an optional open-ended question: awareness of nutritional importance; desire for specific nutritional advice and dietetic referral; cancer and treatment nutrition impacts were highlighted; as well as struggles with weight gain. This research provides useful insight into the nutrition practices of Irish cancer survivors. A desire and need for individualised and specific advice are evident.
Globally Stabilizing Triangularly Angle Rigid Formations

The global stabilization of planar angle rigid formations is acknowledged to be a challenging problem in the existing literature even when relative position measurements are available among neighboring agents. Inspired by an angle-induced linear constraint imposed on each triangle, this article first proposes formation control laws to achieve almost global stabilization of triangularly angle rigid formations using local relative position measurements. Compared with some other globally stable formation control systems using local relative position measurements, our approach is shown to be more computationally effective and scalable. Moreover, by additionally controlling the relative position between a pair of neighboring agents, we also propose formation control laws to globally stabilize triangularly angle rigid formations with prescribed orientation and scale. Compared with other angle-constrained formations with prescribed orientation and scale, our proposed formation control law guarantees global stability instead of almost global stability. Finally, we remark that the proposed approach can also be used to globally stabilize triangular formations specified by ratio-of-distance constraints. Simulation examples validate the effectiveness of the proposed formation control approaches.
An Italian Adaptation of the Burnout Assessment Tool-Core Symptoms (BAT-C) for Students

Burnout is psychological, physical, and emotional suffering that may affect students with low or inadequate resources to face stressful events at school. Although the existing instruments are used worldwide to assess school burnout risk, they show several flaws and mainly focus on the emotional facets of the syndrome. No previous studies have developed a multi-component tool to reveal students’ burnout by simultaneously analyzing cognitive, behavioral, and emotional problems. The central core of the current study is to adapt the Burnout Assessment Tool-Core symptoms (BAT-C; Schaufeli et al., 2020), comprising four subscales, exhaustion, mental distance, cognitive impairment, and emotional impairment, for a sample of Italian students. The factor structure, the reliability, and the validity of the scale are investigated. The participants are 745 middle school students (male, 52.2%; aged 9–13, M = 11.84, and SD = 1.21). Confirmatory factor analyses confirmed the best fit of the second-order model (four first-order factors and one second-order factor). Specifically, four factors were loaded onto a main high-order factor, which constitutes the BAT-C. Our findings support the Italian adaptation of the BAT-C for students’ samples as a valid instrument for measuring the core symptoms of school burnout.
Nauclea orientalis (L.) Bark Extract Protects Rat Cardiomyocytes from Doxorubicin-Induced Oxidative Stress, Inflammation, Apoptosis, and DNA Fragmentation

The therapeutic efficacy of anthracycline antibiotic, doxorubicin (Dox), is hampered due to the dose-dependent cardiotoxicity. The objective of the study was to explore the counteraction of aqueous bark extract of Nauclea orientalis in Dox-induced cardiotoxicity in Wistar rats. The acute and subchronic toxicity study performed with 2.0 g/kg of the plant extract revealed biochemical and haematological parameters to be within the physiological range, and no histological alterations were observed in any organs isolated. Screening of plant extract for the protection of the myocardium from Dox-induced oxidative stress, inflammation, and apoptosis was performed on five groups of rats: control, plant extract control, Dox control (distilled water (D.H2O) 2 weeks + on the 11th day single injection of Dox, 18 mg/kg), plant + Dox (2.0 g/kg plant extract 2 weeks + on the 11th day Dox, 18 mg/kg), and positive control, dexrazoxane. A significant increase in cardiac biomarkers and lipid peroxidation (p < 0.001) and a significant decrease in antioxidant parameters (p < 0.001) were observed in the Dox control group. All these parameters were reversed significantly (p < 0.05) in the plant-pretreated group. The histopathological assessment of myocardial damage provided supportive evidence for the biochemical results obtained. Inflammatory markers, myeloperoxidase, expression of TNFα and caspase-3, and DNA fragmentation (TUNEL positive nuclei) were significantly elevated (p < 0.05), and expression of Bcl-2 was significantly decreased (p < 0.05) in the Dox control; however, all these parameters were significantly reversed in the plant extract-treated group. In conclusion, the aqueous bark extract of Nauclea orientalis (2.0 g/kg) has the ability to attenuate the Dox-induced oxidative stress, inflammation, apoptosis, and DNA fragmentation in Wistar rats.
Flow of River Tigris and its Effect on the Bed Sediment within Baghdad, Iraq

Abstract River Tigris is a major river in Iraq. Sediment at the bed of the river within a reach of about 18 km from the center of Baghdad upstream was investigated. Sixty five cross sections were surveyed, and 46 sediment samples were collected and analyzed. It was noticed that fine sand was dominant in the bed (90.74%). The average median size within the reach was 2.49 phi (0.177 mm), while the mean size was 2.58 phi (0.16 mm). In addition, the sediments were moderately sorted, fine skewed and leptokurtic. The size of the bed sediment decreased relative to previous investigations due to the construction of the Adhaim dam on tributary, which used to be the main sediment supplier to the Tigris River before entering Baghdad. Furthermore, the discharge of the Tigris River for the period 1983–2013 (715 m3/s) decreased by about 40% and 30%since 1983when compared with the periods 1931–1956 (1208 m3/s) and 1956–1980 (1015 m3/s), respectively, due to climate change and construction of dams upstream from Baghdad. This has decreased the capacity and the competence of the river. The bed elevation has increased compared to previous surveys. Itwas noticed that dredging operations and obstructions (e.g. fallen bridges and islands) have disturbed the flow of the river and sediment characteristics in several sites.
Particle-Induced Electrostatic Repulsion within an Electric Curtain Operating below the Paschen Limit

The electric curtain is a platform developed to lift and transport charged particles in air. Its premise is the manipulation of charged particles; however, fewer investigations isolate dielectric forces that are observed at lower voltages (i.e., less than the Paschen limit). This work focuses on observations of simultaneous dielectrophoretic and electrostatic forces. The electric curtain was a printed circuit board with interdigitated electrodes (0.020 inch width and spacing) coated with a layer of polypropylene, where a standing wave or travelling wave AC signal was applied (50 Hz) to produce an electric field below the Paschen limit. Soda lime glass beads (180–212 µm) demonstrated oscillatory rolling via dielectrophoretic forces. In addition, several particles simultaneously experienced rapid projectile repulsion, a behavior consistent with electrostatic phenomena. This second result is discussed as a particle-induced local increase in the electric field, with simulations demonstrating that a particle in close proximity to the curtain’s surface produces a local field enhancement of over 2.5 times. The significance of this is that individual particles themselves can trigger electrostatic repulsion in an otherwise dielectric system. These results could be used for advanced applications where particles themselves provided triggered responses, perhaps for selective sorting of micrometer particles in air.
NetVisGame: Mobile Gamified Information Visualization of Home Network Traffic Data

: The awareness of everyday internet users for cyber security becomes ever more important considering the ubiquity of the Internet in everyday life. However, people usually lack the necessary understanding of this topic or the motivation to pay attention to the problem and its possible consequences. In this paper, we present the novel idea of combining visualization of one’s own personal data related to cyber-security literacy with a casual gaming approach. We therefore introduce our prototype, NetVisGame , in which we have implemented the idea for personal network trafﬁc data based on a preliminary user study. The evaluation results of the ﬁrst iteration of the user-centered design process supports the assumption that this approach is feasible to raise interest for and foster understanding of network trafﬁc data and therefore could be a promising approach for data and technologies related to cyber-security literacy.
Common species contribute little to spatial patterns of functional diversity across scales in coastal grasslands

Spatial patterns of functional diversity are important in understanding community assembly as well as spatial variation in ecosystem functioning, yet the contribution of different species to these patterns remains unclear, making it difficult to generalise. Several studies have previously used a sequential addition approach to determine the subsets of species that contribute to the spatial distribution of species richness, frequently showing the importance of common species to richness patterns. This approach, however, has not been applied to functional diversity despite the central role of species traits in community ecology. Here we use a multiscale survey of plants from the Machair grassland system of the Western Isles of Scotland to ask the following questions: (i) Do functional diversity patterns correlate better with geographically common or geographically rare species? ; (ii) Do their relative contributions vary with spatial scale? ; and (iii) Do these patterns vary between functional diversity measures? We show that while species richness patterns correlate with geographically common species, common species contribute less than expected to spatial patterns of functional diversity at frequently used spatial monitoring scales. The relative contribution of species to overall biodiversity patterns, however, can vary with spatial scale. Synthesis. Surveying only common species may be inadequate for estimating spatial patterns of functional diversity, especially if using occurrence as opposed to percentage cover or abundance data, and spatial scale needs to be considered when designing surveys. Our approach highlights the species that may be adequate indicators of different dimensions of biodiversity and contributes to our understanding of the distribution of functional diversity in space.
Monocular Estimation of Translation, Pose and 3D Shape on Detected Objects using a Convolutional Autoencoder

This paper present a 6DoF-positioning method and shape estimation method for cars from monocular images. We pre-learn principal components, using Principal Component Analysis (PCA), from the shape of cars and use a learnt encoder-decoder structure in order to position the cars and create binary masks of each camera instance. The proposed method is tailored towards usefulness for autonomous driving and traffic safety surveillance. The work introduces a novel encoder-decoder framework for this purpose, thus expanding and extending state-of-the-art models for the task. Quantitative and qualitative analysis is performed on the Apolloscape dataset, showing promising results, in particular regarding rotations and segmentation masks.
Divergence amid recurring gene flow: complex demographic processes during speciation are the growing expectation for forest trees

Long-lived species of trees, especially conifers, often display weak patterns of reproductive isolation, but clear patterns of local adaptation and phenotypic divergence. Discovering the evolutionary history of these patterns is paramount to a generalized understanding of speciation for long-lived plants. We focus on two closely related yet phenotypically divergent pine species, Pinus pungens and P. rigida, that co-exist along high elevation ridgelines of the southern Appalachian Mountains. Based on genome-wide RADseq data, patterns of population structure for each species were uncorrelated to geography and the environment. Signals of admixture, however, were present range-wide. When combined with information from contemporary and historical species distribution models, these patterns are consistent with a complex evolutionary history of speciation. This was confirmed using inferences based on the multidimensional site-frequency spectrum, where demographic modeling inferred recurring gene flow since divergence (9.3 – 15.4 million years ago) and population size reductions that align in timing with the last interglacial period (~120 – 140 thousand years ago). This suggests that phenotypic and genomic divergence, including the evolution of divergent phenological schedules leading to partial reproductive isolation, as previously documented for these two species, can happen rapidly, even between long-lived species of pines.
The Psychedelic Renaissance: a Convergence of Indigenous Knowledge and Science

In recent times, psychedelics are back in the public eye, mostly through scientific intrigue about their healing potential. In the past decade, hundreds of studies have been conducted to explore the possible benefits, or risks, that these substances could bring to people – and there is great potential being found. This is the psychedelic renaissance, and with this phenomenon in full swing, it is important to take a step back and look at the full picture of our history with these substances. By doing so, it starts to become clear that psychedelics have guided human perception and understanding of our world for a very long time. The recognition of how important these substances are did not start last year or within the decade, or even back in the 20 th century with Albert Hoffman’s discovery of LSD. Humankind have been utilizing these substances for thousands of years – and the spiritual significance they contain for Indigenous people is almost unfathomable. That being said, the current psychedelic renaissance is being guided almost entirely by science and academia – as it has been since the colonization of Indigenous people, followed up by a Western takeover of the psychedelic healing paradigm starting in the late 1940’s. This literature review aims to catalog and make clear the role of Indigenous practices within psychedelic healing, and explores how a White-dominant scientific understanding of the same phenomenon has overshadowed these previous understandings, and why that is problematic. It’s not that one understanding is better than the other – but due to factors of structural racism, the same individuals who have been utilizing these healing practices for thousands of years are now being barred from the current conversations. There are multiple sections to this paper. First, there is an extensive history section that outlines both ancient history, as well as modern history starting in the 1940s and moving through to the present day. Then, to gain insight into our recent scientific understanding, I shall outline
Questions and Challenges for the Upcoming Trends in Practical Colloid Science

Practical scope of modern-day colloid science may be presented through a set of achievements and actual aims in preparation of novel materials and construction of novel technologies based on the foundation of knowledge on colloid systems. Yet many uncertainties pervade such field, ranging from the true potential of self-organizing and self-assembling systems in the design of advanced material structures to numerous encounters over the question of practical viability between tendencies to invest in knowledge on small-scale, molecular recognition processes and on spontaneous, largescale mesoscopic formation phenomena. Albeit the existence of belief in advancement of knowledge on stereoscopic molecular recognition and molecular assembly manipulation that will eventually lead to perfect control inherent in the design of macroscopic structures, trial-and-error phenomena seem to permeate all relevant levels of organization within practical colloid science approaches, from enzymatic, biomolecular recognition processes to the macroscopic design of novel functional outcomes. As genetic evolution teaches us, the major point of any design conductance is not elimination of inherent mistakes, but their productive acceptance, that is mutual coupling with development of improved and more richly organized contexts of knowledge. Within this perspective, inter-disciplinarity, that is constructive crossing of separate scientific areas of investigation, presents a necessary approach immanent in advancement of practical colloid science achievements in the coming era.
Quantum Metrological Bounds for Vector Parameter in Presence of Noise

Precise measurement is crucial to science and technology. However, the rule of nature imposes various restrictions on the precision that can be achieved depending on specific methods of measurement. In particular, quantum mechanics poses the ultimate limit on precision which can only be approached but never be violated. Depending on analytic techniques, these bounds may not be unique. Here, in view of prior information, we investigate systematically the precision bounds of the total mean-square error of vector parameter estimation which contains d independent parameters. From quantum Ziv-Zakai error bounds, we derive two kinds of quantum metrological bounds for vector parameter estimation, both of which should be satisfied. By these bounds, we show that a constant advantage can be expected via a simultaneous estimation strategy over the optimal individual estimation strategy, which solves a long-standing problem. A general framework for obtaining the lower bounds in a noisy system is also proposed.
Monte-Carlo Convolutions on Foveated Images

: Foveated vision captures a visual scene at space-variant resolution. This makes the application of parameterized convolutions to foveated images difﬁcult as they do not have a dense-grid representation in cartesian space. Log-polar space is frequently used to create a dense grid representation of foveated images, however this image representation may not be appropriate for all applications. In this paper we rephrase the convolution operation as the Monte-Carlo estimation of the ﬁlter response of the foveated image and a continuous ﬁlter kernel, an idea that has seen frequent use for deep learning on point clouds. We subsume our convolution operation into a simple CNN architecture that processes foveated images in cartesian space. We evaluate our system in the context of image classiﬁcation and show that our approach signiﬁcantly outperforms an equivalent CNN processing a foveated image in log-polar space.
Effect of Treatment Compositions on the Plasticity of Tropical Red Soil Treated with Bacillus Coagulans

The study evaluated the effect of four treatment compositions on the plasticity of tropical red soil (Lateritic soil) admixed with Bacillus coagulans (B. coagulans). Samples for Atterberg limits test were prepared using four treatment compositional variables. They include 25% B. coagulans suspension and 75% cementation reagent, (25%B /75%C); 50% B. coagulans suspension and 50% cementation reagent (50% B /50%C); 75% B. coagulans suspension and 25% cementation reagent, (75%B /25% C) with the above three being in equivalent volumes of the corresponding liquid limit(LL) and 50% of the optimum moisture content (OMC) of compaction, to be both B. coagulans suspension and cementation reagent (i.e. 50% OMC B /50%OMC C) of the natural soil. Results showed that the LL for; 25%B /75% C, 50% B /50% C and 75% B /25%C generally increased from 0 up to peak values at 1.8 x 109 cells/ml and then declined at 2.4 x 109 cells/ml. In the case of samples treated with 50% OMC B/50% OMC C, the LL initially decreased from 0 up to 6.0 x 108 cells/ml and thereafter increased significantly. Plastic limit (PL), Plasticity index (PI) and Linear shrinkage (LS), recorded improvement. Regression analysis for the best treatment composition (i.e 75%B /25%C) has regression coefficient of 91.8%. Based on the four treatment compositions considered, 75%B/25%C enhanced the soil workability significantly and is suggested for geotechnical engineering applications such as road pavements that are lightly trafficked.