Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Direct metal nano-imprinting using an embossed solid electrolyte stamp

In this paper, we report direct patterning of metal nanostructures using an embossed solid electrochemical stamp. Microforming of solid superionic stamps using Si templates—analogous to polymer patterning in nano-imprint lithography—is explored. Silver sulfide (Ag2S)—a superionic conductor with excellent microforming properties—is investigated as a candidate material. Important parameters of the superionic stamp, including mechanical behavior, material flow during forming and feature recovery after embossing, are studied. Excellent feature transferability during embossing as well as etching is observed. To illustrate the capability of this approach silver nano-antennas with gaps < 10 nm were successfully fabricated. The possibility for large area patterning with stamp diameters > 6 mm is also demonstrated. Embossing-based metal patterning allows fabrication beyond two-dimensional nanofabrication and several patterning schemes are reported.
U SING A UTOMATED L EXICAL R ESOURCES IN A RABIC S ENTENCE S UBJECTIVITY

A common point in almost any work on Sentiment analysis is the need to identify which elements of language (words) contribute to express the subjectivity in text. Collecting of these elements (sentiment words) regardless the context with their polarities (positive/negative) is called sentiment lexical resources or subjective lexicon. In this paper, we investigate the method for generating Sentiment Arabic lexical Semantic Database by using lexicon based approach. Also, we study the prior polarity effects of each word using our Sentiment Arabic Lexical Semantic Database on the sentence-level subjectivity and multiple machine learning algorithms. The experiments were conducted on MPQA corpus containing subjective and objective sentences of Arabic language, and we were able to achieve 76.1 % classification accuracy.
Optimizing phylogenetic supertrees using answer set programming

Abstract The supertree construction problem is about combining several phylogenetic trees with possibly conflicting information into a single tree that has all the leaves of the source trees as its leaves and the relationships between the leaves are as consistent with the source trees as possible. This leads to an optimization problem that is computationally challenging and typically heuristic methods, such as matrix representation with parsimony (MRP), are used. In this paper we consider the use of answer set programming to solve the supertree construction problem in terms of two alternative encodings. The first is based on an existing encoding of trees using substructures known as quartets, while the other novel encoding captures the relationships present in trees through direct projections. We use these encodings to compute a genus-level supertree for the family of cats (Felidae). Furthermore, we compare our results to recent supertrees obtained by the MRP method.
Producing fine resolution thematic map using interpolation then classification

In this paper, a framework based on fine resolution thematic map, namely, interpolation then classification (ITC) is proposed. Firstly interpolation algorithm is applied in the original coarse hyperspectral imagery to derive a high-resolution imagery with generous prior information. Then fine resolution thematic map is derived from the high-resolution imagery by the available classification methods. Experiments on two real hyperspectral imagery showed that the proposed method produced higher accuracy result than interpolation-based soft-then-hard super-resolution mapping (I-STHSRM).
B@SE: Blocks for @rduino in the Students’ educational process

Block-Based Programming Environments (BBPE) are an emerging way for teaching programming in individuals with minimum programming skills. In such environments, blocks are used to represent instructions and learners construct programs by snapping these blocks together. However, there are not any satisfactory research data in the literature related to how learners perceive the utility of this approach and the evaluation of BBPE in middle school classrooms. Moreover, there exists a great interest in Physical Computing using Blockly@rduino which is a widely used visual programming editor. This paper aims at applying the Blocks for @rduino in the Students' Educational (B@SE) Process as a school project that will last up to three years starting in the current school year with the first class middle-school and continue with the same students for the next two years.
Maximum Lifetime Routing to Mobile Sink in Wireless Sensor Networks

We address the problem of maximizing the lifetime in a wireless sensor network with energy-constrained sensor nodes and mobile data collection points (sinks). Information generated by the monitoring sensors needs to be routed efficiently to the location where the sink is currently located across multiple hops with different transmission energy requirements. We exploit the capability of the sink to be located in different places during network operation and give a novel linear programming formulation that maximizes network lifetime. We show that the maximum lifetime can only be achieved by solving optimally two joint problems: a scheduling problem that determines the sojourn times of the sink at different locations, and a routing problem in order to deliver the sensed data to the sink in an energy-efficient way. Our model provides the optimal solution to both of these problems and gives the best achievable network lifetime. We evaluate numerically the performance of our model by comparing it with the case of static sink and with previously proposed models that focus mainly on the sink movement patterns and sojourn times, leaving the routing problem outside the linear programming formulation. Our approach always achieves higher network lifetime, as expected, leading to a lifetime up to more than twice that obtained with models previously proposed as the network size increases. It also results in a fair balancing of the energy depletion among the sensor nodes.
Preparation and characteristics of chitosan microspheres in different acetylation as drug carrier system

Chitosan microspheres (CM) and reacetylated chitosan microspheres (ACM) were successfully made by the methods of oil/water emulsification and acetic anhydride. The characteristics of the microspheres as a drug carrier system were investigated. Two microsphere samples had spherical shape with the mean diameter of 80.79 µm for CM and 81.25 µm for ACM. The in vitro degradation (pH 7.4) in the presence of lysozyme showed a slow mass loss and ACM was higher degradation compared to CM. The microspheres, especially ACM, had a high drug loading capacity of Adriamycin hydrochloride (ADM) (12.4%) and had sustained release. The cytotoxicity was evaluated in vitro via MTT assay, ACM with steadily continual adhesion to cells had no fibroblast cytotoxicity. The inhibitory rates of ADM-loading CM, ACM suspension to Tca 8113 cells were significantly outperformed that of ADM solution.
Four genes encoding MYB28, a major transcriptional regulator of the aliphatic glucosinolate pathway, are differentially expressed in the allopolyploid Brassica juncea

Glucosinolates are Capparales-specific secondary metabolites that have immense potential in human health and agriculture. Unlike Arabidopsis thaliana, our knowledge about glucosinolate regulators in the Brassica crops is sparse. In the current study, four MYB28 homologues were identified (BjuMYB28-1,-2,-3,-4) from the polyploid Brassica juncea, and the effects of allopolyploidization on the divergence of gene sequence, structure, function, and expression were assessed. The deduced protein sequences of the four BjuMYB28 genes showed 76.1–83.1% identity with the Arabidopsis MYB28. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that the four BjuMYB28 proteins have evolved via the hybridization and duplication processes forming the B. juncea genome (AABB) from B. rapa (AA) and B. nigra (BB), while retaining high levels of sequence conservation. Mutant complementation and over-expression studies in A. thaliana showed that all four BjuMYB28 genes encode functional MYB28 proteins and resulted in similar aliphatic glucosinolate composition and content. Detailed expression analysis using qRT-PCR assays and promoter-GUS lines revealed that the BjuMYB28 genes have both tissue- and cell-specific expression partitioning in B. juncea. The two B-genome origin BjuMYB28 genes had more abundant transcripts during the early stages of plant development than the A-genome origin genes. However, with the onset of the reproductive phase, expression levels of all four BjuMYB28 increased significantly, which may be necessary for producing and maintaining high amounts of aliphatic glucosinolates during the later stages of plant development. Taken together, our results suggest that the four MYB28 genes are differentially expressed and regulated in B. juncea to play discrete though overlapping roles in controlling aliphatic glucosinolate biosynthesis.
Unusual Association of Intractable Temporal Lobe Seizures and Intracranial Aneurysms in an Adolescent: Is It a Coincidence?

Intracranial aneurysms in the pediatric age group are rare occurrences. They usually present with subarachnoid hemorrhage or mass effect. Their association with epilepsy has rarely been reported; such concurrence may not be a coincidence. We present a 16-year-old girl with a 5-year history of medically intractable complex partial seizures. Preoperative electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies demonstrated an epileptogenic focus and atrophy in the right mesial temporal lobe, and ipsilateral incidental aneurysm at the carotid artery bifurcation. The patient underwent a complete right anterior temporal lobectomy, followed by clipping of the aneurysm. We concluded that the epilepsy management in association with cerebral aneurysms is controversial, but when surgery is indicated, clipping of the aneurysm and resection of the epileptogenic focus may provide the optimal outcome. The relevant literature is reviewed and the possible mechanisms of production of epilepsy by intracranial aneurysms are discussed.
Control of Adipocyte Differentiation in Different Fat Depots; Implications for Pathophysiology or Therapy

Adipocyte differentiation and its impact on restriction or expansion of particular adipose tissue depots have physiological and pathophysiological significance in view of the different functions of these depots. Brown or “beige” fat [brown adipose tissue (BAT)] expansion can enhance thermogenesis, lipid oxidation, insulin sensitivity, and glucose tolerance; conversely expanded visceral fat [visceral white adipose tissue (VAT)] is associated with insulin resistance, low grade inflammation, dyslipidemia, and cardiometabolic risk. The largest depot, subcutaneous white fat [subcutaneous white adipose tissue (SAT)], has important beneficial characteristics including storage of lipid “out of harms way” and secretion of adipokines, especially leptin and adiponectin, with positive metabolic effects including lipid oxidation, energy utilization, enhanced insulin action, and an anti-inflammatory role. The absence of these functions in lipodystrophies leads to major metabolic disturbances. An ability to expand white adipose tissue adipocyte differentiation would seem an important defense mechanism against the detrimental effects of energy excess and limit harmful accumulation of lipid in “ectopic” sites, such as liver and muscle. Adipocyte differentiation involves a transcriptional cascade with PPARγ being most important in SAT but less so in VAT, with increased angiogenesis also critical. The transcription factor, Islet1, is fairly specific to VAT and in vitro inhibits adipocyte differentiation. The physiological importance of Islet1 requires further study. Basic control of differentiation is similar in BAT but important differences include the effect of PGC-1α on mitochondrial biosynthesis and upregulation of UCP1; also PRDM16 plays a pivotal role in expression of the BAT phenotype. Modulation of the capacity or function of these different adipose tissue depots, by altering adipocyte differentiation or other means, holds promise for interventions that can be helpful in human disease, particularly cardiometabolic disorders associated with the world wide explosion of obesity.
Paragraph vector based topic model for language model adaptation

Topic model is an important approach for language model (LM) adaptation and has attracted research interest for a long time. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which assumes generative Dirichlet distribution with bag-of-word features for hidden topics, has been widely used as the state-of-the-art topic model. Inspired by recent development of a new paradigm of distributed paragraph representation called paragraph vector , a new topic model based on paragraph vector is proposed in this work. During training, each paragraph is mapped to a unique vector in continuous space. Then unsupervised clustering is performed to construct topic clusters. Topic-speciﬁc LM is then built based on clustering results. During adaptation, topic posterior is ﬁrst estimated using the paragraph vector based topic model and new adapted LMs are constructed by interpolating the existing topic-speciﬁc models using topic posteriors. The proposed topic model is applied for N-gram LM adaptation and evaluated on Amazon Product Review Corpus for perplexity and a Chinese LVCSR task for CER evaluation. Results show that the proposed approach yields 11.1% relative perplexity reduction and 1.4% relative CER reduction over N-gram baseline, outper-forming LDA based method proposed by previous work.
Retargeting of Coronavirus by Substitution of the Spike Glycoprotein Ectodomain: Crossing the Host Cell Species Barrier

ABSTRACT Coronaviruses generally have a narrow host range, infecting one or just a few species. Using targeted RNA recombination, we constructed a mutant of the coronavirus mouse hepatitis virus (MHV) in which the ectodomain of the spike glycoprotein (S) was replaced with the highly divergent ectodomain of the S protein of feline infectious peritonitis virus. The resulting chimeric virus, designated fMHV, acquired the ability to infect feline cells and simultaneously lost the ability to infect murine cells in tissue culture. This reciprocal switch of species specificity strongly supports the notion that coronavirus host cell range is determined primarily at the level of interactions between the S protein and the virus receptor. The isolation of fMHV allowed the localization of the region responsible for S protein incorporation into virions to the carboxy-terminal 64 of the 1,324 residues of this protein. This establishes a basis for further definition of elements involved in virion assembly. In addition, fMHV is potentially the ideal recipient virus for carrying out reverse genetics of MHV by targeted RNA recombination, since it presents the possibility of selecting recombinants, no matter how defective, that have regained the ability to replicate in murine cells.
Robustness margins for indirect field-oriented control of induction motors

The influence of the rotor time constant mismatch on the stability of induction motors under indirect field oriented control is analyzed. The results of De Wit et al. (1996) are generalized. A Lyapunov function which provides a global stability test and allows to compute robustness margins is given. Different mechanisms for the loss of stability are detected by means of bifurcation analysis. Robustness margins and design guidelines are derived from these results.
Application of kinesiotherapy and electrothermotherapy in the treatment of elderly with knee osteoarthrosis: a comparative study

Introducao Dentre as modalidades de tratamento na Osteoartrose, destacam-se a forma cirurgica e conservadora atraves dos recursos fisioterapeuticos como a eletrotermoterapia e a cinesioterapia. Objetivo Verificar os efeitos de dois protocolos terapeuticos em mulheres idosas com Osteoartrose de joelho. Metodos Realizou-se um estudo do tipo ensaio clinico nao controlado com delineamento pre-teste e pos-teste, onde foram selecionadas para a pesquisa 30 pacientes do sexo feminino, com idade entre 61 a 80 anos, com diagnostico de Osteoartrose de joelho primaria, atendidas em um Centro de Referencia Integral a Saude do Idoso (CAISI), que foram divididas em 2 grupos de 15 pessoas para cada modalidade de terapias: o grupo I foi tratado com a cinesioterapia, e o grupo II foi tratado com eletrotermoterapia. Pacientes de ambos os grupos realizaram 36 atendimentos fisioterapeuticos durante 12 semanas. Para a coleta dos dados foi utilizada ficha protocolo contendo dados socio-demograficos, indice de massa corporal (IMC), escala visual analogica (EVA) e medida da amplitude do movimento (ADM). Para analise estatistica, foram utilizados os testes nao parametricos de Mann-Whitney e Wilcoxon, o teste parametrico t de Student para amostras independentes e para verificar as associacoes o teste qui-quadrado. Resultados Os tratamentos realizados nos dois grupos contribuiram para a reducao do nivel de dor. Houveram diferencas nos grupo I e II quanto ao aumento da ADM, exceto na flexao do joelho esquerdo no grupo II. Conclusoes Conclui-se que ambas as modalidades de terapias demonstraram respostas terapeuticas pela reducao da dor e melhora da ADM, porem o grupo que foi tratado pela cinesioterapia obteve uma melhora mais acentuada.
Development of a Real-Time PCR Assay for Quantitative Detection of Encephalitozoon intestinalis DNA

ABSTRACT A new real-time PCR assay for quantitation of Encephalitozoon intestinalis DNA was developed which used a TaqMan fluorescent probe for specific detection. Serial dilutions of E. intestinalis spore suspensions obtained from tissue culture were used as external standards. The detection limit of the technique was 20 spores per ml, with a good interassay reproducibility (coefficient of variation of 7.1% for the suspension containing 20 spores/ml, 5.0% for the suspension containing 75 spores/ml and below 3.5% for higher concentrations). Quantitative detection of E. intestinalis DNA was similar whether the serial dilutions of spores were made in distilled water or in a stool suspension, allowing the use of the assay for stool specimens. The assay was then applied to 14 clinical specimens from 8 immunocompromised patients with proven E. intestinalis infection. The quantitation of the parasitic burden was achieved in stools, blood, urine, tissue biopsies, and bronchopulmonary specimens. The highest parasitic burdens were noted in stools, urine, and bronchopulmonary specimens, reaching 105 to 106 spores/g or ml. Dissemination of the infection was also evidenced in some patients by demonstration of E. intestinalis DNA in blood and serum. We conclude that real-time PCR is a valuable tool for quantitation of E. intestinalis burden in clinical specimens.
The Effects of Two Different Reading Acceleration Training Programs on Improving Reading Skills of Second Graders

It has been well established that poor reading skills in the first grades of primary school can lead to poor reading skills in all coming years. A reading acceleration program (RAP) known to improve reading skills in adults and children with and without reading difficulties (RD) was tested for its effect on children in second grade with standard reading skills. The influence of the RAP on improving all reading skills—decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension—was examined. Seventy-nine children in second grade were divided into two study groups and one control group. Each study group received a training program that emphasizes reading skills: decoding, fluency, and comprehension were trained at the levels of words and sentences in Version A and at the levels of words and paragraphs in Version B. Both programs significantly improved reading skills compared with the control group that was not trained: Group A improved word fluency whereas Group B improved accuracy measures (word, pseudo-word, and text). Both training groups showed significantly greater improvement over time than the control group on reading comprehension. We conclude that a RAP training that combines words, sentences, and paragraphs is the most effective for improving reading skills.
Rapid measurement of B-type natriuretic peptide in the emergency diagnosis of heart failure.

BACKGROUND B-type natriuretic peptide is released from the cardiac ventricles in response to increased wall tension. METHODS We conducted a prospective study of 1586 patients who came to the emergency department with acute dyspnea and whose B-type natriuretic peptide was measured with a bedside assay. The clinical diagnosis of congestive heart failure was adjudicated by two independent cardiologists, who were blinded to the results of the B-type natriuretic peptide assay. RESULTS The final diagnosis was dyspnea due to congestive heart failure in 744 patients (47 percent), dyspnea due to noncardiac causes in 72 patients with a history of left ventricular dysfunction (5 percent), and no finding of congestive heart failure in 770 patients (49 percent). B-type natriuretic peptide levels by themselves were more accurate than any historical or physical findings or laboratory values in identifying congestive heart failure as the cause of dyspnea. The diagnostic accuracy of B-type natriuretic peptide at a cutoff of 100 pg per milliliter was 83.4 percent. The negative predictive value of B-type natriuretic peptide at levels of less than 50 pg per milliliter was 96 percent. In multiple logistic-regression analysis, measurements of B-type natriuretic peptide added significant independent predictive power to other clinical variables in models predicting which patients had congestive heart failure. CONCLUSIONS Used in conjunction with other clinical information, rapid measurement of B-type natriuretic peptide is useful in establishing or excluding the diagnosis of congestive heart failure in patients with acute dyspnea.
Wavelet image decomposition based variable density compressive sampling in MRI

This paper considers compressive sampling in magnetic resonance imaging. The structure of the sparsity domain is analyzed and based on the conclusions, probability profile for random sampling is proposed. This probability profile divides the k-domain into tiles with constant probability for sampling. The value of the probability for sampling k-space frequencies in every tile is found based on the content of the specific image or similar images. The performance of the proposed probability profile is compared to the performance of the distance based probability profile.
Trends in Molecular Anthropological Studies in India

Abstract Indian population is characterized by wide diversity and unique population structure shaped by different waves of migration and the practice of caste endogamy. Anthropologists have been studying the peopling of India and the relationships between different populations using traditional genetic markers. With the advent of molecular genetic techniques the focus has turned to using the DNA polymorphisms for resolving different anthropological questions and to test the different hypotheses in vogue. In this paper we make an attempt to critically review the trends in molecular anthropological studies till date and bring out salient features of the findings. An attempt has been made to evaluate the merit of the molecular studies in the perspective of unique population structure of India.