Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of a Proteinase K-Based Extraction Method to Detect Hepatitis A Virus, Hepatitis E Virus and Norovirus in Artificially Contaminated Dairy Products

Human norovirus and hepatitis viruses (hepatitis A (HAV) and hepatitis E (HEV)) are leading causes of foodborne disease worldwide. Among the various food products, different types of dairy products can be implicated in viral foodborne outbreaks and contamination can occur at different stages, such as preparation, contact with contaminated equipment or via other foods. The aim of this study was to characterise a proteinase K method adapted from the ISO 15216 method for the detection of HAV, HEV and norovirus in artificially contaminated dairy products, based on the recent international standard of ISO 16140-4. Results showed that the recovery yields obtained from pure RNA in dairy products ranged from 5.76% to 76.40% for HAV, from 35.09% to 100.00% for HEV, from 25.09% to 100.00% for norovirus GI and from 47.83% to 100.00% for norovirus GII. The process control MNV-1 was detected in all RNA extracts, with recovery yields between 36.83% and 100.00%. The limit of detection (LOD) of the method was between 184 and 642 genome copies/mL (or/g) for the LOD50 and 802 and 2800 genome copies/mL or/g for the LOD95 according to the virus analysed. This method proved to be suitable for detecting viruses in dairy products for routine diagnostic needs.
Infant Iris Biometric Recognition System: Can the iris be used for a secure infant recognition system?

This study examines the application of infant iris biometrics as a method of identification for newborns and young children. Infant iris photos were collected using an IriShield-USB BK 2121U camera at a variety of locations, including public clinics and preschools. Before image segmentation, the quality of acquired images was evaluated. Subsequently, the traits were retrieved and matched online and the matching results were good enough to distinguish between minors two years old and older. However, the system did not show adequate recognition performance for infants under the age of two years. This approach can be used successfully to track the stability of iris traits from conception to death, as well as to identify minors from birth.
Too Early to Abandon Convalescent Plasma for Supportive Treatment of COVID-19

The authors of a systematic review and meta-analysis conclude that the benefit of convalescent plasma (CP) in the treatment of COVID-19 is limited. Among other systematic reviews, only one found an indication of benefit of CP. However, a meta-analysis needs a focused and meaningful clinical question and should include studies which are designed to test a reasonable hypothesis. Clinical trials to support the licensing of medicines should aim to define as exactly as possible the investigational drug and target disease. In the case of COVID-19, trial details (e.g., duration, stage and severity of disease, and antibody content and dose of CP) are quite heterogeneous. The so far available evidence suggests that the hypothesis should be sharpened as to treat COVID -19 patients at risk for developing severe disease as early enough with a sufficiently high dose of specific antibodies. It has been demonstrated that such an approach is feasible, and the lack of an independent reproduction by further trials with a really comparable design can probably not be compensated by compiling all available, heterogenous trials, even with the best methodology of a systematic review and meta-analysis. Though the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be fading, we should not neglect the search for effective prevention and treatments, given the still high death toll of COVID-19. Monoclonal antibodies were found effective in the early phase of the pandemic; however, due to new variants of SARS-COV2 undermining their efficacy they are no longer recommended by the current NIH guidelines. CP can provide a spectrum of polyclonal antibodies in close timely and regional connection to the particular prevalent virus variant. It would be extremely valuable to obtain a solid scientific foundation for the principle of target specific and temporarily adapted passive immunization, which could be a fast and flexible instrument also in future outbreaks of novel pathogens.
One-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks for Detecting Transiting Exoplanets

The transit method is one of the most relevant exoplanet detection techniques, which consists of detecting periodic eclipses in the light curves of stars. This is not always easy due to the presence of noise in the light curves, which is induced, for example, by the response of a telescope to stellar flux. For this reason, we aimed to develop an artificial neural network model that is able to detect these transits in light curves obtained from different telescopes and surveys. We created artificial light curves with and without transits to try to mimic those expected for the extended mission of the Kepler telescope (K2) in order to train and validate a 1D convolutional neural network model, which was later tested, obtaining an accuracy of 99.02% and an estimated error (loss function) of 0.03. These results, among others, helped to confirm that the 1D CNN is a good choice for working with non-phased-folded Mandel and Agol light curves with transits. It also reduces the number of light curves that have to be visually inspected to decide if they present transit-like signals and decreases the time needed for analyzing each (with respect to traditional analysis).
A systematic review of natural flood management modelling: Approaches, limitations, and potential solutions

The Pitt Review of the 2007 summer floods in the UK, published in 2008, commended the potential of natural flood management (NFM) for reducing flood risk. NFM is a nature‐based approach that has since gained substantial interest from both practitioners and academics. The review further highlighted the need for catchment‐based flood management (CBFM) to enhance resilience to flooding and climate change by incorporating NFM and wider nature‐based solutions into hard flood protection systems. Such integrated approaches are considered to be more sustainable and adaptable than the traditional hard‐engineered measures. More recently, the European Commission's European Green Deal also highlighted the need for greater use of nature‐based solutions including NFM for managing flood risk. Whilst there have been many attempts to quantify the effects of NFM through hydraulic and hydrological modelling, there is still no systematic review conducted for these modelling works. This review aims to summarise the current NFM modelling approaches, as well as discussing their key limitations related to data, model methods, and real‐world applications. This paper then goes further to highlight potential solutions to some of these challenges and provides guidance to assist modellers to improve future modelling and data collection process.
“It Makes Me Feel like I Can Make a Difference”: A Qualitative Exploration of Peer Mentoring with Black and Hispanic High School Students

Peer mentoring programs have proven to be extremely successful for high school students. Yet, most educational research studies rarely seek to understand the perspectives of peer mentors and the impact peer mentoring can have on their development. Even more limited is the research highlighting the experiences of Black and Hispanic peer mentors who reside in urban communities. This qualitative study examines (n = 14) Black and Hispanic high school peer mentors’ roles in providing support to their mentees and their perceived benefit of being a mentor. All peer mentors in the study attended high school in an urban, under resourced community in New Jersey. Analysis revealed three major themes: (1) leadership abilities; (2) witnessing their strengths through motivating others; and (3) Family influences on their mentoring style. We discuss the implications of our findings on future research and educational programming utilizing peer mentors to benefit urban youth of color.
An examination of factors contributing to a reduction in race-based subgroup differences on a constructed response paper-and-pencil test of achievement

An Examination of Factors Contributing to a Reduction in Race–Based Subgroup Differences on a Constructed Response Paper–and–Pencil Test of Achievement. (August 2003) Bryan D. Edwards, B.S., The University of Alabama; M.S., University of South Alabama Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Winfred Arthur, Jr. The objectives of the present study were to: (a) replicate the results of Arthur et al. (2002) by comparing race–based subgroup differences on a multiple–choice and constructed response test in a laboratory setting using a larger sample, (b) extend their work by investigating the role of reading ability, test–taking skills, and test perceptions that could explain why subgroup differences are reduced when the test format is changed from multiple–choice to a constructed response format, and (c) assess the criterion–related validity of the constructed response test. Two hundred sixty White and 204 African Americans completed a demographic questionnaire, Test Attitudes and Perceptions Survey, a multiple–choice or constructed response test, the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices Short Form, the Nelson–Denny Reading Test, Experimental Test of Testwiseness, and a post–test questionnaire. In general, the pattern of results supported the hypotheses in the predicted direction. For example, although there was a reduction in subgroup differences in performance on the constructed response compared to the multiple–choice test, the difference was not
An application of a smart production system to control deteriorated inventory

Deteriorating products require different handling procedures. Handling procedure includes prevention of the natural deterioration rate of the product. The production of deteriorating products requires prevention technology for those products to use for a long time. Overproduction of deteriorating types of products causes more trouble in preventing deterioration. This study uses a smart production system to control the production of deteriorating products. A controllable production rate controls the production of deteriorating products, and preservation technology reduces the deterioration rate of products. Preservation technology helps extend the life of products, but it requires a specific temperature-controlled environment to work at maximum efficiency. Transportation of these products uses refrigerated transportation to maintain the quality during the transportation time. The purpose of using all these features for deteriorating products is to reduce the deterioration rate, which helps to reduce waste generation from production. Besides, imperfect products from the production system pass through a remanufacturing process to support the waste reduction process. A sustainable supply chain management model under the above-stated strategies is described here. A classical optimization is used to find global optimum solution of the objective function. Then, the total cost of the supply chain is optimized using unique solutions of production rate, number of deliveries, delivery lot size, system reliability, and preservation investment. Global optimum solutions are established theoretically, and few propositions are developed. Some special cases, case studies, and a comparison graph are provided to validate the results. The beta distribution provides the minimum total cost of the system than uniform, gamma, triangular, and double triangular distribution. Smart production allows 72% system reliability with a negligible amount of imperfect products. Besides, the proposed policy gain 22.72% more profit than exiting literature. The model is more realistic through convex 3D graphs, sensitivity analyses, and managerial insights.
STRUCTURAL REORGANISATION OF A COMPANY IN A CRISIS OF SUPPLY DISCREPANCIES

The relevance of research is determined by the risk of any organisation being affected by the negative effects of overproduction. This requires businessmen to quickly identify and solve related problems by carrying out structural reorganisation of their companies. As such, the main goal of the article is to research the problematic of the overproduction crisis, which is concluded by such objectives as crisis consequences for government and manufacturing organizations evaluation, and development of recommendations regarding the structural reorganization of organizations in the current conditions. The main research methods are graphical and tabular methods, as well as synthesis and analysis in combination in a complex approach, which allows to study crisis processes in order to optimise the company's activity through effective structural reorganisation. The main results of the research are the study of the concept of overproduction crisis and its problematic consequences for the country and the industry. The analysis of the influence of overproduction on the production and trade organisation and the development of proposals for the structural reorganisation of the company in crisis conditions. Organisational reconstruction in the modern environment was studied through the use of careful management, careful problem solving, visual management, quick configuration tool, autonomy, process balancing, careful quality assurance, careful human resource usage, careful supply chain management and production flexibility. Organisational restructuring can also be aimed at the implementation of digital technology, which can be categorised by the scenarios of forecasting, waste analysis and redistribution. Organisational restructuring in the modern environment has been studied through the use of careful management, careful problem solving, visual management, quick configuration tool, autonomy, process balancing, careful quality assurance, careful human resource usage, careful supply chain management, and production flexibility. In order to prevent the influence of crisis occurrence through changes in organisational structure, these procedures were proposed: assembly line load stabilisation, manufacturing analysis and 5S system. The results of this article and the conclusions based on them may be of practical value for students studying the peculiarities of effective financial management in the conditions of crisis, as well as for businessmen interested in maintaining their financial results, maximising profits, preventing crisis problems and optimising business activity through changes in the company structure.
Impaired Mitochondrial Function in T-Lymphocytes as a Result of Exposure to HIV and ART

Mitochondrial dysfunction is a described phenomenon for a number of chronic and infectious diseases. At the same time, the question remains open: is this condition a consequence or a cause of the progression of the disease? In this review, we consider the role of the development of mitochondrial dysfunction in the progression of HIV (human immunodeficiency viruses) infection and the onset of AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), as well as the direct impact of HIV on mitochondria. In addition, we will touch upon such an important issue as the effect of ART (Antiretroviral Therapy) drugs on mitochondria, since ART is currently the only effective way to curb the progression of HIV in infected patients, and because the identification of potential side effects can help to more consciously approach the development of new drugs in the treatment of HIV infection.
Anticancer activity of Acmella uliginosa against WiDr colon cancer cell line and T47D breast cancer cell line

Cancer is chronic disease that contribute to increasing of death in the world, containing of breast cancer and colon cancer. Natural bioactive compounds have been an important source to exploring drug candidate and drug discovery. Acmella uliginosa is herbaceous plant that has many pharmacology activities. The aim of this study was analysis anti-cancer activity of A. uliginosa. The first step, A. uliginosa was extracted with ethanol and n-hexane, then the extract was evaporated using a rotary evaporator and then analysis to determine phytochemistry compound. Then, brine shrimp lethal test (BSLT) for analysis toxicity effect and preliminary screening anti-cancer compound as well. Moreover, anti-cancer cytotoxic was analyzed using MTT method. This study shows that A. uliginosa contains several phytochemical compounds such as steroid, alkaloid and flavonoid. The preliminary testing of anticancer show n-hexane extract more potent than ethanolic extract, the LC50 value of ethanol and n-Hexane extract was 174.8751mg/L and 60.06807mg/L, respectively. Then the cytotoxic effect of n-hexane extract against WiDr colon cancer cell line and T47D breast cancer cell line was 628.48 µg/ml and 1235.84 µg/ml and 1235.84mcg, respectively. Therefore, n-hexane extract was chosen to be a good candidate for further studies as a new anticancer drug in the treatment of colon cancer.
Super-Resolving Face Image by Facial Parsing Information

Face super-resolution is a technology that transforms a low-resolution face image into the corresponding high-resolution one. In this paper, we build a novel parsing map guided face super-resolution network which extracts the face prior (i.e., parsing map) directly from low-resolution face image for the following utilization. To exploit the extracted prior fully, a parsing map attention fusion block is carefully designed, which can not only effectively explore the information of parsing map, but also combines powerful attention mechanism. Moreover, in light of that high-resolution features contain more precise spatial information while low-resolution features provide strong contextual information, we hope to maintain and utilize these complementary information. To achieve this goal, we develop a multi-scale refine block to maintain spatial and contextual information and take advantage of multi-scale features to refine the feature representations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-arts in terms of quantitative metrics and visual quality. The source codes will be available at https://github.com/wcy-cs/FishFSRNet.
Comparing Central Europe and the Baltic macro-economies: A Bayesian approach

Applying the Bayesian approach, a small open economy DSGE model was estimated using a sample of quarterly data for a macro-region formed by six Central Europe and Baltic economies: Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovakia. Estimates have been employed to investigate the effects of a financial crisis, exploring the role played by country differences in the relative performances. We also use our Bayesian estimations to compute two measures of resilience in the considered region.
Toward Fast and Energy-Efficient Access to Cloudlets in Hostile Environments

Cloudlets, which refer to the edge computing services deployed at the proximity of end devices, are key providers of connectivity, storage, and computation resources to many applications. While access to cloudlets is pervasive in typical settings, it can be difficult in challenging, even hostile environments, such as military or post-disaster scenarios, featuring multi-hop communication and energy-constrained end devices. In these cases, cloudlets may have become the only equipment powerful enough to execute life-critical applications, such as battle-field situation awareness, tactic cooperation, and search-and-rescue missions. Quality of these services is greatly influenced by the minimum time that a packet can be delivered, i.e., the cloudlet access delay (CAD), whose characteristics remain unknown. To address the open question of fast and efficient cloudlet access, we establish a packet mobility model that allows CAD and energy consumption to be analyzed as a function of the initial device-cloudlet distance. We find that the expected CAD scales either linearly or quadratically under distinct types of packet mobility, and the successful access rate (SAR) can be bounded by functions of the delay constraint. Based on these findings, we develop a packet shedding algorithm that saves 24% transmission power, and reduces the average CAD by 2%, while maintaining a similar SAR in simulated cloudlet access environments.
Millimeter-Wave Co-Polarized In-Band Full-Duplex Antenna Based on a Mode Superposition Method

In this article, a novel mode superposition method is proposed to implement a millimeter-wave (MMW) shared-radiator co-polarized in-band full-duplex (IBFD) antenna at 29 GHz. The proposed method is realized based on a dielectric resonator antenna (DRA). By simultaneously exciting the TM<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$_{01\delta }$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and HEM<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$_{21\delta }$ </tex-math></inline-formula> modes of a DRA, a superposed mode with a field pattern analogous to the TE211 mode can be produced. Since both the transmitter (TX) and the receiver (RX) ports locate at the weak-field regions of the superposed mode, a decoupling performance is therefore obtained without the use of any additional decoupling structures or circuits. For validation, a DRA with artificial electromagnetic boundaries (AEMBs) is employed, so that the TM<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$_{01\delta }$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and HEM<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$_{21\delta }$ </tex-math></inline-formula> modes can be simultaneously excited using a simple microstrip proximity coupling. It only needs to properly adjust the geometric parameters of the DRA, and the mutual coupling is substantially suppressed. The experiment demonstrates that the antenna can achieve maximum isolation of 42 dB and peak gain of 8.65 dBi. Due to the simple and integrated architecture, the proposed method is promising for MMW IBFD applications.
The Cell-Mediated Immune Response against Bovine alphaherpesvirus 1 (BoHV-1) Infection and Vaccination

Bovine Alphaherpesvirus 1 (BoHV-1) is one of the major respiratory pathogens in cattle worldwide. Infection often leads to a compromised host immune response that contributes to the development of the polymicrobial disease known as “bovine respiratory disease”. After an initial transient phase of immunosuppression, cattle recover from the disease. This is due to the development of both innate and adaptive immune responses. With respect to adaptive immunity, both humoral and cell-mediated immunity are required to control infection. Thus, several BoHV-1 vaccines are designed to trigger both branches of the adaptive immune system. In this review, we summarize the current knowledge on cell-mediated immune responses directed against BoHV-1 infection and vaccination.