Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multifunctional phosphate based nanoparticles as a platform for imaging, targeting and doxorubicin delivery to human breast cancer CD44+ cells

Functionalized nanostructured systems can be used for imaging and drug delivery for anti-tumor therapy, including breast tumors. This is a more efficient approach that offers reduced systemic side effects compared to conventional diagnostic and chemotherapy methods. Multifunctional nanoparticles are potential tools in the diagnosis, location tracing and kill tumor cells through a less invasive manner. Functionalized phosphate-based nanoparticles are capable of encapsulating, or may be associated, with fluorescent probes. In this study, we synthesize a nanoparticle phosphate-based composite (NPC) and functionalize it with poly-ethylene glycol (PEG), hyaluronic acid (HA), the fluorescent probe rhodamin 6G (R6G) and the antimitotic doxorubicin (DOX). We focused on targeting human breast cancer cells reporting the biological effects of functionalized NPC on them. NPC and NPC formulations containing PEG, HA, and R6G did not cause cell viability reduction on MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231 cell lines. The cellular internalization of NPC was quantified by real-time in vitro observation, and confirmed by electron microscopy techniques. Intracellular NPC distribution is detected in the cytoplasm and nucleus of tumor cells by confocal fluorescent images. The percent association of doxorubicin to NPC matrix was approximately 18% and NPC formulations associated with doxorubicin led to a significant reduction in cell viability in MDA-MB-231 and MCF-7 cells. This data suggest the potential use of NPC as a non-cytotoxic platform for association with functional ligands to selective targeting breast cancer cells. NPC use can be also explored in drug delivery to cancer cells.
I still wanna be an engineer! Women, education and the engineering profession

Women's low enrolment in post-school engineering degrees continues to be a problem for engineering faculties and the profession generally. A qualitative interview-based study of Australian women engineers across the range of engineering disciplines showed the relevance of success in math and science at school to their enrolling in engineering at university. However, for a significant number of the women the positive self-image connected with school success was not maintained by their workplace experience. Using a mixed methods approach, further investigations of the attitudes and experiences of working engineers at three large firms suggest that engineering workplaces continue to be uneasy environments for professional women. Particular issues for women working as professional engineers are identified in this paper and some educational strategies are suggested in order to better prepare engineers for an inclusive and participatory professional life.
Empirical Features of Congested Patterns at Highway Bottlenecks

An empirical study was undertaken of congested patterns at highway bottlenecks. On the basis of statistical data it was found that the spatialtemporal structure of congested patterns possesses some predictable features. From these features a classification of congested patterns was made. It was found that the most frequently observed congested pattern is the general pattern (GP). In GP synchronized flow occurs upstream of a bottleneck and wide moving jams spontaneously emerge in that synchronized flow. Capacity in free flow can be about twice as high as capacity in congested traffic upstream of the on-ramp if the GP has formed.
An investigation of coarticulation resistance in speech production using ultrasound.

Sound segments show considerable influence from neighbouring segments, which is described as being the result of coarticulation. None of the previous reports on coarticulation in vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) sequences has used ultrasound. One advantage of ultrasound is that it provides information about the shape of most of the midsagittal tongue contour. In this work, ultrasound is employed for studying symmetrical VCV sequences, like /ipi/ and /ubu/, and methods for analysing coarticulation are refined. The use of electropalatography (EPG) in combination with ultrasound is piloted in the study. A unified approach is achieved to describing lingual behaviour during the interaction of different speech sounds, by using the concept of Coarticulation Resistance, which implies that different sounds resist coarticulatory influence to different degrees. The following research questions were investigated: how does the tongue shape change from one segment to the next in symmetrical VCV sequences? Do the vowels influence the consonant? Does the consonant influence the vowels? Is the vocalic influence on the consonant greater than the consonantal influence on the vowels? What are the differences between lingual and non-lingual consonants with respect to lingual coarticulation? Does the syllable/word boundary affect the coarticulatory pattern? Ultrasound data were collected using the QMUC ultrasound system, and in the final experiment some EPG data were also collected. The data were Russian nonsense VCVs with /i/, /u/, /a/ and bilabial stops; English nonsense VhV sequences with /i/, /u/, /a/; English /aka/, /ata/ and /iti/ sequences, forming part of real speech. The results show a significant vowel influence on all intervocalic consonants. Lingual consonants significantly influence their neighbouring vowels. The vocalic influence on the consonants is significantly greater than the consonantal influence on the vowels. Non-lingual consonants exhibit varying coarticulatory patterns. Syllable and word boundary influence on VCV coarticulation is demonstrated. The results are interpreted and discussed in terms of the Coarticulation Resistance theory: Coarticulation Resistance of speech segments varies, depending on segment type, syllable boundary, and language. A method of quantifying Coarticulation Resistance based on ultrasound data is suggested.
Smart city development: research on major infrastructure policy and project appraisal in the UK

Our cities are on the verge of a radical transformation, a revolution driven by smart city technology from tranportation, engery, water supply to intelligent construction. Infrastructure is the backbone of cities and its relevant policy plays an essential role in the development of smart city. The appraisal for the policy is indispensable, however, which is often ignored. The research attempts to explore appraisal of major infrastructure policy of the UK through scenario-based multicriteria analysis (SMCA) and discuss impact of major infrastructure policy and projects on social, ecnomic, and enviroment factors of cities. This paper finds different scenarios can be incorporated into multi-criteria analysis (MCA) to investigate future uncertainty for the policy statement appraisal. However, the hybrid approach through combining scenario planning and MCA increases the complexity of the sustainability appraisal. Although more and more research has focused on comparing the strengths and weaknesses of SMCA and existing methods, the research results in the paper provide evidence that SMCA might be a more useful tool in appraising major infrastructure planning policy and projects of smart city in the furture.
Predicting torsion‐induced lateral displacements for pushover analysis: Influence of torsional system characteristics

The increasing popularity of simplified nonlinear methods in seismic design has recently led to many proposals for procedures aimed at extending pushover analysis to plan asymmetric structures. In terms of practical applications, one particularly promising approach is based on combining pushover analysis of a 3D structural model with the results of linear (modal) dynamic analysis. The effectiveness of such procedure, however, is contingent on one fundamental requirement: the elastic prediction of the envelope of lateral displacements must be conservative with respect to the actual inelastic one.
Continuous Workspace Analysis, Synthesis and Optimization of Wire Robots

Wire robots (also called Tendon-based parallel manipulators) use a movable end-effector which is connected to a machine frame by motor driven tendons. Since tendons can transmit only pulling forces, at least m = n + 1 cables are needed to tense a system having n degrees-of-freedom. The resulting redundancy gives m − n degrees-of-freedom in the wire force distribution, making workspace analysis a complex and computationally expensive task. Discrete methods are widely used to solve this problem, but their drawback is that intermediate points on the discrete calculation grid are neglected which may lead to false results. This paper provides detailed algorithms for continuous workspace analysis for wire robots which avoid the discretization and have additional advantages. Especially, it is easy to extend the analysis methods to methods usable for the workspace synthesis.Copyright © 2008 by ASME
SwinNet: Swin Transformer Drives Edge-Aware RGB-D and RGB-T Salient Object Detection

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are good at extracting contexture features within certain receptive fields, while transformers can model the global long-range dependency features. By absorbing the advantage of transformer and the merit of CNN, Swin Transformer shows strong feature representation ability. Based on it, we propose a cross-modality fusion model, SwinNet, for RGB-D and RGB-T salient object detection. It is driven by Swin Transformer to extract the hierarchical features, boosted by attention mechanism to bridge the gap between two modalities, and guided by edge information to sharp the contour of salient object. To be specific, two-stream Swin Transformer encoder first extracts multi-modality features, and then spatial alignment and channel re-calibration module is presented to optimize intra-level cross-modality features. To clarify the fuzzy boundary, edge-guided decoder achieves inter-level cross-modality fusion under the guidance of edge features. The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on RGB-D and RGB-T datasets, showing that it provides more insight into the cross-modality complementarity task.
A Single-Layer Dual-Band Dual-Sense Circularly Polarized Patch Antenna Array With Small Frequency Ratio

A planar dual-band dual-sense circularly polarized (CP) microstrip array is proposed. This array is implemented on a single-layer substrate and easily extended to the design of a larger array. A new antenna element is exploited by symmetrically placing the nonradiative resonators on four side edges of a square patch. A quantitative design method is proposed based on the equivalent circuit model of the antenna element. For given two operating frequencies, the required design parameters of the patch and nonradiative resonators can be calculated. Theoretical magnitude ratio and phase difference responses of two far-field components, as well as axial ratio responses under different parameters, are presented to reveal the characteristics of the antenna element. Full-wave simulation results are found to agree well with the theoretical ones. To further validate the effectiveness, a $2 \times 2$ element dual-band dual-sense CP array operating at 2.40 and 2.68 GHz is designed, fabricated, and measured, where a small frequency ratio of 1.117 is achieved. The measured realized gains in the low and high bands are 11.7 and 11.8 dBi, respectively, which are approximately equal.
The Behavior Change Design Cards: A Design Support Tool for Theoretically-Grounded Design of Behavior Change Technologies

ABSTRACT Despite a wealth of behavior change theories and techniques available, designers often struggle to apply theory in the design of behavior change technologies. We present the Behavior Change Design (BCD) cards, a design support tool that makes behavioral science theory accessible to interaction designers during design meetings. Grounded on two theoretical frameworks of behavior change, the BCD cards attempt to map 34 behavior change techniques to five stages of behavior change, thus assisting designers in selecting appropriate techniques for given behavioral objectives. We present the design of the BCD cards along with the results of two formative and one summative study that aimed at informing the design of the cards and assessing their impact on the design process.
Event-Triggered Cooperative Path Following of Autonomous Surface Vehicles Over Wireless Network With Experiment Results

This article addresses cooperative path-following problem of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) over a wireless network with constrained resources. A network-based resource-aware control architecture is presented to avoid unnecessary communications, computations, and actuations. Specifically, an event-triggered cooperative control law is designed to deal with the limited network bandwidth. Each ASV broadcasts its cooperation variable to its neighboring ASVs based on predefined event conditions under directed communication links. Then, an event-triggered path-following control law is proposed based on a line-of-sight approach. An event-triggered extended state observer is developed to estimate the uncertainties and external disturbances without periodic estimation. Finally, an event-triggered kinetic control law with aperiodic actuation is developed. The input-to-state stability of the closed-loop path-following system is analyzed by employing cascade theory, and Zeno behavior is excluded. A salient feature of the proposed network-based resource-aware control architecture is that cooperative path following can be achieved with low network traffic and reduced computation. Experiment results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed network-based resource-aware control architecture for multiple ASVs by using aperiodic communications, estimations, and executions.
TIR domains of plant immune receptors are 2′,3′-cAMP/cGMP synthetases mediating cell death

2′,3′-cAMP is a positional isomer of the well-established second messenger 3′,5′-cAMP, but little is known on the biology of this noncanonical cyclic nucleotide monophosphate (cNMP). Toll/interleukin-1 receptor (TIR) domains of nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLR) immune receptors have NADase function necessary but insufficient to activate plant immune responses. Here we show that plant TIR proteins, besides being NADases, act as 2′,3′-cAMP/cGMP synthetases by hydrolyzing RNA/DNA. Structural data shows that a TIR domain adopts distinct oligomers with dual and exclusive enzymatic activity. Mutations specifically disrupting the synthetase activity abrogate TIR-mediated cell death in Nicotiana benthamiana, supporting an important role for these cNMPs in TIR signaling. Furthermore, the Arabidopsis negative regulator of TIR-NLR signaling, NUDT7 displays 2′,3′-cAMP/cGMP but not 3′,5′-cAMP/cGMP phosphodiesterase activity and suppresses cell death activity of TIRs in N. benthamiana. Our study identifies a novel family of 2′,3′-cAMP/cGMP synthetase and establishes a role for the noncanonical cNMPs in plant immune responses.
Seismic Damage to Segmented Buried Pipe

A fragility relation for buried segmented pipe subject to either the wave propagation or permanent ground deformation (PGD) hazard is presented. In the past, relations to estimate wave propagation damage to buried segmented pipe frequently use peak particle velocity (Vmax) to characterize the seismic hazard. For example, in 1993, O'Rourke and Ayala developed an empirical relation between damage (quantified by repairs per kilometer of pipe) and Vmax using data from four U.S. and two Mexican events. Existing fragility relations for PGD typically characterize the hazard by the amount of permanent ground movement. It is shown herein that for statistically reliable data, differences in estimated wave propagation repair rates become much smaller when the seismic shaking is characterized by ground strain as opposed to Vmax. Furthermore, damage rates for PGD are shown to be consistent with those for wave propagation when the PGD hazard is similarly characterized by ground strain. The combined wave propagation and PGD relation is quite consistent for four orders of magnitude of ground strain.
Bulk micromachined energy harvesters employing (K, Na)NbO3 thin film

In this paper, a micromachined energy harvester employing a lead-free (K, Na)NbO3 (KNN) thin film was reported. KNN is one of the lead-free piezoelectric materials. It is a promising alternative to Pb(Zr, Ti)O3 (PZT). In a micromachined energy harvester, a 2 µm thick KNN film was deposited on a silicon cantilever integrated with a proof mass. The energy harvester achieved an output power of 731 nW and a normalized power density (NPD) of 2.29 μW (g−2 mm−3) at the resonant frequency of 1509 Hz with the acceleration of 10 m s−2. The harvested energy was enhanced considerably by applying bulk micromachining, and was comparable to the PZT-based energy harvesters.
“Do you find it normal to be so fat?” Weight stigma in obese gym users

Weight stigma is a negative social process that involves discrimination against overweight and obese people. Gyms are important environments to promote exercise where weight stigma can be a hindrance for obese exercise practitioners. This critical-oriented study provides evidence-based answers to this question: How do obese users experience weight stigma in gyms? Six obese gym users (BMI >30) participated in semi-structured interviews and provided visual data for photo-elicitation. A thematic analysis enabled the grouping of their experiences around weight stigma into three forms of discrimination: 1) direct: negative comments about body weight and body size; 2) indirect: internalization of negative stereotypes on weight, ability or appearance; 3) structural: explicit or symbolic rejection related with weight-centric exercise, equipment and recommendations implicit in marketing and advertising. The results provide evidence and interpretations of different forms of discrimination and inequality that operate in gyms, and how they affect obese users’ experiences. Based on these results, we compile a list of measures to prevent weight stigma and recommendations for exercise professionals to relate with obese users.
Increasing productivity through performance appraisal

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mTOR inhibition overcomes RSK3-mediated resistance to BET inhibitors in small cell lung cancer

Purpose SCLC is a recalcitrant malignancy with limited treatment options. BET inhibitors have shown promising preclinical activity in SCLC, but their broad sensitivity spectrum limits their clinical prospects in this malignancy. Drug combination could be a solution. Experimental design We performed high-throughput drug combination screens in SCLC cell lines to identify potential therapeutics synergizing with BET inhibitors. Validation was performed in SCLC cell lines and patient-derived xenograft models. Genome-wide RNA sequencing of xenograft tumors was performed to determine the mechanism underlying the synergy of the drug combination. Results Inhibitors of the PI-3K-AKT-mTOR pathway were the top candidates from the screens. Among the therapeutics targeting this pathway, mTOR inhibitors showed the highest degree of synergy with BET inhibitors in vitro. Furthermore, the combination of these two classes of drugs showed superior antitumor efficacy and tolerability in vivo. Using both in vitro and in vivo SCLC models, we demonstrate that BET inhibitors activate the intrinsic apoptotic cascade, and mTOR inhibitors further enhance these apoptotic effects. Mechanistically, BET inhibitors activate the TSC2-mTOR-p70S6K1 signaling cascade by upregulating RSK3, an upstream kinase of TSC2. Activation of p70S6K1 leads to BAD phosphorylation and cell survival. mTOR inhibition blocks this survival signaling cascade and potentiates the antitumor effects of BET inhibitors. Conclusions Our results demonstrate that RSK3 upregulation is a novel resistance mechanism of BET inhibitors in SCLC, and mTOR inhibition can overcome this resistance and enhance apoptosis. These findings provide a rationale to evaluate the combination of mTOR and BET inhibitors in patients with SCLC.
Effects of a Cloth Panel Containing a Specific Ore Powder on Patients with Chamaecyparis obtusa (Cypress) Pollen Allergy

Pollen allergy to Japanese cedar and cypress is a serious illness that impairs daily life and sleep, especially during pollen season. We have reported that placing a cloth panel containing a specific natural ore powder (CCSNOP) in a room may alleviate the symptoms of hay fever and may also benefit the immune system. This ore is from the Aso mountain range, a volcano on Kyushu Island in the southwestern part of Japan. The purpose of this study was to verify the effect of CCSNOP on cypress pollen. Thirty-one double-blind tests, which investigated cedar pollen allergies, were conducted from February to March 2018 and have already been reported. After this, in early April, 10 of these cases were recruited and all had CCSNOP installed in their bedrooms. Before that, various symptoms and changes in medication were recorded in a “Symptom Diary” and included a mood survey by a questionnaire, stress test using saliva amylase, changes in cypress-specific immunoglobulins IgE and IgG4 by blood sampling, and eosinophil changes. In addition, changes in 29 types of cytokines were investigated. Exposure to CCSNOP relieved symptoms and subjects decreased their intake of medication. There was no change in mood or stress, but eosinophil levels tended to decrease. Although there were no statistical changes in cypress-specific IgE or IgG4, an increase in the former and a decrease in the latter were observed in some individuals during the period of pollen dispersal. Furthermore, levels of GM-CSF and IL8 decreased significantly after use of CCSNOP. The CCSNOP was shown to be effective against cypress pollen allergy, and future investigations will be necessary to observe the long-term effects of CCSNOP.
Controlled order release: a performance assessment in job shops with sequence-dependent set-up times

Findings from recent implementations of Workload Control (WLC) have called for research to investigate how sequence-dependent set-up times can best be handled within the design of the concept. In response, this study assesses the performance of four of the best-performing release methods from the literature in a job shop with sequence-dependent set-up times by simulation. First, the four methods are compared without considering set-up requirements at release. Second, the methods are refined to consider set-up requirements before being compared against the original methods. A release method that combines continuous and periodic release emerges as the best-performing method. Findings further suggest that considering set-up requirements at release do not have a significant positive effect on performance and may even be counterproductive: conflicting goals between the selection rules employed at release and dispatching may lead to an increase in the percentage of tardy jobs. Future research should consider whether the results hold if set-up times are not distributed equally across job types and work centres.