Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gammaridean Amphipoda of Australia, Part III. the Phoxocephalidae

Barnard, J. Laurens, and Margaret M. Drummond. Gammaridean Amphipoda of Australia, Part III: The Phoxocephalidae. Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology, number 245, 551 pages, 269 figures, 1978. —Phoxocephaiidae are found to be the most diverse family of benthic marine amphipods in southern Australia. This study reports on 88 species in 26 genera. Most of the taxa are described as new. The Phoxocephalidae of the world are reorganized by the description of 8 new subfamilies and the removal of all but 2 species from Paraphoxus either to new genera or by indication that new genera must be described. Some taxa of Australian phoxocephalids are shown to be the most primitive known to exist, especially Pontharptnia and a new subfamily Tipimeginae. Lines of evolutionary deployment radiate outward from Australia to South America and then northward into the northern hemisphere. The expected close relationship to urothoids and pontoporeids is briefly discussed; in addition, an affinity to Ponto-Caspian gammaroids is also explored. Extraordinarily dense populations of phoxocephalids are found in embayments of Australia, especially Western Port and Port Phillip Bay. OFFICIAL PUBLICATION DATE is handstamped in a limited number of initial copies and is recorded in the Institution's annual report, Smithsonian Year. SERIES COVER DESICN: The coral Montastrea cavernosa (Linnaeus). Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data (Revised) Barnard, Jerry Laurens, 1928Gammaridean Amphipoda of Austrialia. (Smithsonian contributions to zoology, no. 103, 139, 245) Bibliography: pt. 1, p. 318; p i 2, p. 135; pt3, p. Includes index.
Effect of extenders on semen quality of Beetal bucks preserved at 5 °C

A total of 22 pooled ejaculates comprising 94 ejaculates collected using artificial vagina from five adult Beetal bucks maintained at Goat Research Station, AAU, Burnihat were used to study the effect of extenders on the quality of buck semen preserved at 5 oC. Each pooled ejaculate was split into three equal parts. The parts were extended using three extenders viz., Tris extender containing 20 percent egg yolk, Tris extender containing 1.5 percent soya lecithin and commercial Ovixcell extender by split-sample technique and then preserved in a refrigerator at 5 oC. The extended semen samples were evaluated about two hours after collection before cooling to 5 °C and then at 24, 48, 72 and 96 hours of preservation at 5 °C for sperm motility, live sperm, intact acrosome and HOST-reacted sperm. The sperm motility and live sperm count in Tris extender containing 20 percent egg yolk were significantly (P<0.05) higher than Tris extender containing 1.5 percent soya lecithin and Ovixcell extender. A significant (P<0.05) decline was also observed in both sperm motility and live sperm count at each hour of preservation period in all the three extenders. The incidence of intact acrosome and HOST-reacted sperm in Tris extender containing 20 percent egg yolk was significantly (P<0.05) higher than the other two extenders and in Tris extender containing 1.5 percent soya lecithin than in Ovixcell extender. Both the acrosome and HOST-reacted sperm were significant (P<0.05) decline at each hour of the preservation period in all three extenders. It can be concluded that Tris-egg yolk extender is superior to Tris-soya lecithin and Ovixcell extenders for the preservation of buck semen at 5 °C.
Mapping QTL Associated with Traits Affecting Grain Yield in Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) under Terminal Drought Stress

The aim of this study was to evaluate a set of recombinant inbred lines (RILs) for agronomic and physiological traits under drought conditions and to locate quantitative trait loci (QTL) associated with them. This study used a RIL population derived from a cross between drought tolerant (ILC 588) and susceptible (ILC 3279) genotypes. The population consisting of 155 RILs was grown under drought conditions in the field at Tel Hadya, Syria, in 2006 and 2007 and at Breda, Syria, in 2007. A genetic map consisting of eight linkage groups was developed using 97 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. The results revealed that high harvest index (HI), early flowering, and early maturity were the important attributes contributing to higher grain yield under drought. Higher stomatal conductance (g s ) and cooler canopies (canopy temperature minus air temperature [Tc-Ta]) can also lead to better performance under drought conditions. Quantitative trait locus analysis identified 15 genomic regions significantly associated with various traits affecting drought tolerance in chickpea. Important QTL detected in this study included two QTL for HI explaining 38% of the total phenotypic variability of the trait, four QTL for flowering explaining 45%, and three QTL for maturity explaining 52% on a cumulative basis. Three QTL for gs and six QTL for Tc-Ta also detected explained 7 to 15% phenotypic variability individually. Two QTL (Q3-1 and Q1-1) on linkage group 3 (LG3) and LG1 showed effects on many traits related to drought. Hence, these regions can be further explored in future drought studies.
DOES INTERNALLY GENERATED REVENUE (IGR) HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO ENHANCE FISCAL VIABILITY OF STATE GOVERNMENTS IN NIGERIA?

The study examined the determinants of Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) of State governments in Nigeria with a view to examining the potential of independent revenue sources open to this tier of government. A technique of Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) was employed and the results revealed that the main determinants of IGR for the States are the PAYE and Road taxes as these two IGR sources appeared to be less affected by the prevalence of corrupt practices in Nigerian public sector. The study concluded that State governments in Nigeria have failed over the years to optimally harness other sources of internal revenue open to them.
Role of GSH in the amelioration of chromium-induced membrane damage

Membrane damage is one of the important consequences of chromium (Cr), an environmental toxicant, induced cytotoxicity. Reduced glutathione (GSH), a membrane protectant may be used to reduce the Cr-induced membrane damage. In the present study, the impact of Cr in presence and absence of GSH was studied on plasma membrane of the liver and kidneys in male Wistar rats. Significant increases in membrane cholesterol levels as well as significant decreases in membrane phospholipid levels in Cr exposed (0.8 mg per 100 g body weight, i.p., for 28 days) animals suggest structural alterations in both the liver and kidney plasma membranes. Alkaline phosphatase (ALP), total ATPase, and Na+–K+–ATPase activities of plasma membrane were significantly decreased in both the liver and kidneys after Cr treatment. This treatment also produced significant weight loss and increased Cr content in the liver and kidneys. However, GSH (8 mg per 100g body weight, i.p., daily at an interval of 6 h after injection of Cr for a period of 28 days) supplementation restored alterations induced by Cr in plasma membrane of both the liver and kidneys but was not able to eliminate the deposited Cr from the liver and kidney tissues.
Effects of Four Independent Low-Phytate Mutations on Barley Agronomic Performance

The seed phosphorus storage compound phytic add (myo-inositol-1,2,3,4,5,6-heakisphosphate) is poorly utilized by nonruminant animals. Low Phytate (LP) crops, in which reductions of phytate are accompanied by increases in nutritionally available P, are in development and their utility will be enhanced by competitive agronomic performance. To assess the performance of LP barley (Hordeum vulgare L.), sets of sib lines that are homozygous wild type (WT), or homozygous for one of four independent low phytic acid mutations (lpa1-1, lpa2-1, lpa3-1, and M955), were developed via backcrosses to Harrington. The WT sibsets performed similarly to the Harrington parent, suggesting that the major variable in these experiments was the presence or absence of the LP alleles. Under irrigation, M955, which has an extreme reduction in phytate, was associated with reduced yield and percentage plump kernels; all mutations except lpa2-1 were associated with reduced test weight. In rain-fed locations, all mutations were associated with reduced test weight and percentage plump kernels, and all except lpa1-1 were associated with reduced yield. These results suggest that one component of yield loss in LP types is reduced stress tolerance. The performance of the lpa1-1 mutation, which appears to be aleurone specific, suggests a potential strategy to avoid this source of yield loss: the use of genotypes where the desirable effect is limited to a target tissue, in this case the aleurone layer.
PatchGuard: Provable Defense against Adversarial Patches Using Masks on Small Receptive Fields

Localized adversarial patches aim to induce misclassification in machine learning models by arbitrarily modifying pixels within a restricted region of an image. Such attacks can be realized in the physical world by attaching the adversarial patch to the object to be misclassified. In this paper, we propose a general defense framework called PatchGuard that can achieve both high clean accuracy and provable robustness against localized adversarial patches. The cornerstone of PatchGuard is to use convolutional networks with small receptive fields that impose a bound on the number of features corrupted by an adversarial patch. Given a bound on the number of corrupted features, the problem of designing an adversarial patch defense reduces to that of designing a secure feature aggregation mechanism. Towards this end, we present our robust masking defense that robustly detects and masks corrupted features to recover the correct prediction. Our defense achieves state-of-the-art provable robust accuracy on ImageNette (a 10-class subset of ImageNet), ImageNet, and CIFAR-10 datasets. Against the strongest untargeted white-box adaptive attacker, we achieve 94.4% clean accuracy and 86.5% provable robust accuracy on 10-class ImageNette images against an adversarial patch consisting of 1% image pixels, 55.1% clean accuracy and 18.6% provable robust accuracy on 1000-class ImageNet images against a 1% pixel patch, and 84.5% clean accuracy and 58.1% provable accuracy on CIFAR-10 images against a 2.4% pixel patch.
TinyLSTMs: Efficient Neural Speech Enhancement for Hearing Aids

Modern speech enhancement algorithms achieve remarkable noise suppression by means of large recurrent neural networks (RNNs). However, large RNNs limit practical deployment in hearing aid hardware (HW) form-factors, which are battery powered and run on resource-constrained microcontroller units (MCUs) with limited memory capacity and compute capability. In this work, we use model compression techniques to bridge this gap. We define the constraints imposed on the RNN by the HW and describe a method to satisfy them. Although model compression techniques are an active area of research, we are the first to demonstrate their efficacy for RNN speech enhancement, using pruning and integer quantization of weights/activations. We also demonstrate state update skipping, which reduces the computational load. Finally, we conduct a perceptual evaluation of the compressed models to verify audio quality on human raters. Results show a reduction in model size and operations of 11.9$\times$ and 2.9$\times$, respectively, over the baseline for compressed models, without a statistical difference in listening preference and only exhibiting a loss of 0.55dB SDR. Our model achieves a computational latency of 2.39ms, well within the 10ms target and 351$\times$ better than previous work.
Graph Random Neural Network

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have generalized deep learning methods into graph-structured data with promising performance on graph mining tasks. However, existing GNNs often meet complex graph structures with scarce labeled nodes and suffer from the limitations of non-robustness, over-smoothing, and overfitting. To address these issues, we propose a simple yet effective GNN framework---Graph Random Neural Network (Grand). Different from the deterministic propagation in existing GNNs, Grand adopts a random propagation strategy to enhance model robustness. This strategy also naturally enables Grand to decouple the propagation from feature transformation, reducing the risks of over-smoothing and overfitting. Moreover, random propagation acts as an efficient method for graph data augmentation. Based on this, we propose the consistency regularization for Grand by leveraging the distributional consistency of unlabeled nodes in multiple augmentations, improving the generalization capacity of the model. Extensive experiments on graph benchmark datasets suggest that Grand significantly outperforms state-of-the-art GNN baselines on semi-supervised graph learning tasks. Finally, we show that Grand mitigates the issues of over-smoothing and overfitting, and its performance is married with robustness.
The Preservation of Super-Earths and the Emergence of Gas Giants after Their Progenitor Cores Have Entered the Pebble-isolation Phase

The omnipresence of super-Earths suggests that they are able to be retained in natal disks around low-mass stars, whereas exoplanets' mass distribution indicates that some cores have transformed into gas giants through runaway gas accretion at 1AU from solar-type stars. In this paper, we show that transition to runaway gas accretion by cores may be self-impeded by an increase of the grain opacity in their envelope after they have acquired sufficient mass (typically 10Mearth) to enter a pebble-isolation phase. The accumulation of mm-m size pebbles in their migration barriers enhances their local fragmentation rates. The freshly produced sub-mm grains pass through the barrier, elevate the effective dust opacity and reduce the radiative flux in the cores envelope. These effects alone are adequate to suppress the transition to runaway accretion and preserve super-Earths in the stellar proximity (0.1 AU), albeit entropy advection between the envelope and the disk can further reduce the accretion rate. At intermediate distance (1AU) from their host stars, the escalation in the dust opacity dominates over entropy advection in stalling the transition to runaway accretion for marginally pebble-isolated cores. Beyond a few AU, the transformation of more massive cores to gas giants is reachable before severe depletion of disk gas. This requirement can be satisfied either in extended disks with large scale height via orderly accretion of migrating pebbles or through the mergers of oligarchic protoplanetary embryos, and can account for the correlated occurrence of long-period gas giants and close-in super-Earths.
Facilitation between Higher Plant Species in a Semiarid Environment

A major role of facilitation between higher plant species, particularly in stressful environments, has recently been reported in several papers that suggest that ben- eficial interactions could be more important in the dynamics of plant communities than has been recognized to date. In a semiarid region in southeastern Spain we determined the effect of a leguminous shrub, Retama sphaerocarpa, on its environment, testing the hy- pothesis that facilitation by the shrub of one species of its understory, Marrubium vulgare, is reciprocal and that the shrub benefits from sheltering herbs beneath its canopy. Marrubium plants under Retama had greater specific leaf area, leaf mass, shoot mass, leaf area, more flowers, a higher nitrogen (N) concentration in leaf tissue, and more N per plant than isolated plants, suggesting a facilitative effect of Retama on Marrubium including increased availability of resources. Biomass of 1-yr-old cladodes, total biomass, total ni- trogen content of 3-yr-old branches, and shoot water potential at midday were higher for Retama shrubs with Marrubium beneath them than in shrubs without Marrubium. Retama strongly improved its own environment, facilitated the growth of Marrubium and other species underneath its canopy, and at the same time obtained benefits from sheltering herbs underneath. The interaction between these two species was indirect, as- sociated with differences in soil properties and with improved nutrient availability under shrubs compared with plants growing on their own. We propose that the mutual benefit of the association between Retama and Marrubium is best termed a facultative mutualism. Each partner benefits from greater availability of resources in the "island of fertility" that results from their association. If beneficial plant- plant interactions as described here are widespread, positive relationships may have a major role in determining the pattern and structure of plant communities.
Optimal eddy viscosity for resolvent-based models of coherent structures in turbulent jets

Abstract Response modes computed via linear resolvent analysis of a turbulent mean-flow field have been shown to qualitatively capture characteristics of the observed turbulent coherent structures in both wall-bounded and free shear flows. To make such resolvent models predictive, the nonlinear forcing term must be closed. Strategies to do so include imposing self-consistent sets of triadic interactions, proposing various source models or through turbulence modelling. For the latter, several investigators have proposed using the mean-field eddy viscosity acting linearly on the fluctuation field. In this study, a data-driven approach is taken to quantitatively improve linear resolvent models by deducing an optimal eddy-viscosity field that maximizes the projection of the dominant resolvent mode to the energy-optimal coherent structure educed using spectral proper orthogonal decomposition (SPOD) of data from high-fidelity simulations. We use large-eddy simulation databases for round isothermal jets at subsonic, transonic and supersonic conditions and show that the optimal eddy viscosity substantially improves the agreement between resolvent and SPOD modes, reaching over 90 % agreement at those frequencies where the jet exhibits a low-rank response. We then consider a fixed model for the eddy viscosity and show that with the calibration of a single constant, the results are generally close to the optimal one. In particular, the use of a standard Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes eddy-viscosity resolvent model, with a single coefficient, provides substantial agreement between SPOD and resolvent modes for three turbulent jets and across the most energetic wavenumbers and frequencies.
The Mean Absorption-line Spectra of a Selection of Luminous z ∼ 6 Lyman Break Galaxies

We examine the absorption-line spectra of a sample of 31 luminous ( ) Lyman break galaxies at redshift z ≃ 6 using data taken with the FOCAS and OSIRIS spectrographs on the Subaru and GTC telescopes. For two of these sources we present longer exposure data taken at higher spectral resolutions from ESO’s X-shooter spectrograph. Using these data, we demonstrate the practicality of stacking our lower-resolution data to measure the depth of various interstellar and stellar absorption lines to probe the covering fraction of low-ionization gas and the gas phase and stellar metallicities near the end of the era of cosmic reionization. From maximum absorption-line depths of Si ii λ1260 and C ii λ1334, we infer a mean covering fraction of ≥0.85 ± 0.16 for our sample. This is larger than that determined using similar methods for lower-luminosity galaxies at slightly lower redshifts, suggesting that the most luminous galaxies appear to have a lower escape fraction than fainter galaxies, and therefore may not play a prominent role in concluding reionization. Using various interstellar absorption lines we deduce gas-phase metallicities close to solar, indicative of substantial early enrichment. Using selected stellar absorption lines, we model our spectra with a range of metallicities using techniques successfully employed at lower redshift and deduce a stellar metallicity of solar, consistent with the stellar mass—stellar metallicity relation recently found at z ∼ 3–5. We discuss the implications of these metallicity estimates for the typical ages of our luminous galaxies and conclude our results imply initial star formation at redshifts z ∼ 10, consistent with independent analyses of earlier objects.
Semimetal–Mott insulator quantum phase transition of the Hubbard model on the honeycomb lattice

The Hubbard model on a honeycomb lattice is known to exhibit a semimetal-insulator quantum phase transition into an antiferromagnetic Mott insulating phase at a critical on-site coupling of $U_c \simeq 3.8$, with critical exponents thought to fall into the universality class of the Gross-Neveu model. We present a novel analysis of this transition by means of grand canonical Hybrid Monte Carlo simulations. For the first time we control all the systematics of the single-particle gap, extrapolating to the temporal continuum and thermodynamic limits. The critical coupling and exponents are determined by a finite-size scaling analysis in the inverse temperature, which gives a critical exponent of $\beta=1. 232_{-0.097}^{+0.069}$ and a critical coupling of $U_c=3.844_{-0.044}^{+0.061}$. The strong anti-correlation between $\beta$ and $U_c$ is carefully accounted for. We discuss the implications of our findings for carbon-based nano-materials, such as graphene, carbon nanotubes and fullerenes. We also comment on the computational scaling of our Hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm.
Supermassive binary black hole evolution can be traced by a small SKA pulsar timing array

Supermassive black holes are commonly found in the centers of galaxies and evolve with their hosts. Supermassive binary black holes (SMBBH) are thus expected to exist in close galaxy pairs; however, none has been unequivocally detected. The square kilometer array (SKA) is a multipurpose radio telescope with a collecting area approaching ${10}^{6}$ square meters, with great potential for detecting nanohertz gravitational waves (GWs). In this paper, we quantify the GW detectability by SKA for a realistic SMBBH population using a pulsar timing array (PTA) technique, and we quantify its impact on revealing SMBBH evolution with redshift for the first time. With only $\ensuremath{\sim}20$ pulsars, a much smaller requirement than in previous work, the SKAPTA is expected to obtain detection within about 5 years of operation and to achieve a detection rate of more than 100 SMBBHs/yr after about 10 years. Although beyond the scope of this paper, we must acknowledge that the presence of persistent red noise will reduce the number of expected detections here. It is thus imperative to understand and mitigate red noise in the PTA data. The GW signatures from a few well-known SMBBH candidates, such as OJ 287, 3C 66B, NGC 5548, and Ark 120, will be detected given the currently best-known parameters of each system. Within 30 years of operation, about 60 individual SMBBH detections with $zl0.05$ and more than ${10}^{4}$ with $zl1$ are expected. The detection rate drops precipitately beyond $z=1$. The substantial number of expected detections and their discernible evolution with redshift by the SKAPTA will make SKA a significant tool for studying SMBBHs.