Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nitrogen-regulated Genes for the Metabolism of Cyanophycin, a Bacterial Nitrogen Reserve Polymer

Two gene clusters each encoding the cyanophycin-metabolism enzymes cyanophycin synthetase and cyanophycinase are found in the heterocyst-forming cyanobacterium Anabaena sp. PCC 7120. In cluster cph1, the genes cphB1 and cphA1 were expressed in media containing ammonium, nitrate, or N2 as nitrogen sources, but expression was higher in the absence of combined nitrogen taking place both in vegetative cells and heterocysts. Both genes were cotranscribed from three putative promoters located upstream of cphB1, and, additionally, the cphA1 gene was expressed monocistronically from at least two promoters located in the intergenic cphB1-cphA1 region. Both constitutive promoters and promoters dependent on the global nitrogen control transcriptional regulator NtcA were identified. In cluster cph2, the cphB2 and cphA2 genes, which are found in opposite orientations, were expressed as monocistronic messages in media containing ammonium, nitrate, or N2, but expression was higher in the absence of ammonium. Expression of the cph2 genes was lower than that of cph1 genes. Analysis of cph gene insertional mutants indicated that cluster cph1 genes contributed more than cluster cph2 genes to cyanophycin accumulation in the whole filament as well as in heterocysts. Diazotrophic growth was more severely impaired in cyanophycinase than in cyanophycin synthetase mutants, indicating that cyanophycin, although normally synthesized in the heterocysts, is not required for heterocyst function and that the inability to degrade this polymer is detrimental for the diazotrophic growth of the cyanobacterium.
A Symbol-by-Symbol Cooperative Diversity Scheme for Relay-Assisted UWB Communications with PPM

In this paper, we propose a novel cooperation strategy for coherent Impulse-Radio Ultra-Wideband (IR-UWB) communication systems with one relay. While non-orthogonal cooperation in narrow-band wireless networks often requires deploying distributed space-time codes with joint encoding of several symbols at the source and relays and joint decoding of these symbols at the destination, the proposed non-orthogonal cooperation scheme constitutes the first known symbol-by-symbol-based scheme where cooperation is entirely realized within one symbol duration. This follows from the fact that the proposed strategy is adapted to the structure of the Pulse Position Modulation (PPM) that constitutes the most popular modulation scheme associated with UWB transmissions. We also propose a simple and efficient power allocation strategy that further boosts the performance of the proposed cooperation strategy. The error performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated analytically while simulations performed over the IEEE 802.15. 3a UWB channel model are provided to support the theoretical results.
Toxicoproteomics and its application to human health risk assessment

Toxicoproteomics is the use of proteomic technologies to better understand environmental and genetic factors, toxic mechanisms, and modes of action in response to acute exposure to toxicants and in the long‐term development of diseases caused or influenced by these exposures. Use of toxicoproteomic technologies to identify key biochemical pathways, mechanisms, and biomarkers of exposure and toxicity will decrease the uncertainties that are associated with human health risk assessments. This review provides an overview of toxicoproteomics from human health risk assessment perspectives. Key toxicoproteomic technologies such as 2‐D gel‐based proteomic methods and toxicoproteomic approaches are described, and examples of applications of these technologies and methodologies in the risk assessment context are presented. The discussion includes a focus on challenges and future directions.
The Effectiveness of a Stimulation Program on Cognitive Capacity Among Individuals Older Than 60

The purpose of this study was to test the effects of a multistimulant home-based intervention program on cognitive function, anxiety, and depression among older adults with cognitive impairment. This research is quasi-experimental and was designed in an effort to increase the cognitive capacity of individuals above the age of 60 with reduced cognitive capacities. Each senior received a total of seven home visits, including intervention conversation, newspaper/ book reading, painting/handcraft activities, and physical exercise. The Mini Mental State Test scores of the participants statistically increased, whereas the Beck Anxiety and the Geriatric Depression Scale scores showed a decrease (p < .05) after the intervention. Findings demonstrate that the multistimulant approach to improve cognitive capacity among individuals older than 60 years was successful.
Low consumption home femto base stations

The expected massive adoption of home femto base stations will increase the overall power consumption, requiring eco-designed sleep modes. Whenever there are no user under the coverage of a home femto base station (at night for example), keeping it on can be seen as a waste of power, excessive interferences and lack of security. This paper proposes a method to switch-off the femto base station radio emission and wake it up when necessary. Our approach uses a second low-power channel that carries out-of-band control information to maintain connectivity. The paper will provide the software and hardware architecture and performance results of a Wi-Fi demonstrator.
Nondirected axonal growth on basal lamina from avian embryonic neural retina

The vitreous surface of the embryonic avian retinal neuroepithelium was isolated by mechanical disruption of the retina mounted between 2 adhesive substrata. The 200-micron-thick sheath covered an area of up to 1 cm2 and consisted of the vitreal basal lamina with a lamina densa, 2 laminae rarae, and a carpet of ventricular cell endfeet on top of the lamina. The vitreal endfeet were removed by detergent treatment and an extracellular basal lamina was obtained. The laminae were further characterized by immunohistochemistry and immunoblotting. A 190 kDa laminin protein was detected in laminae with and without vitreal endfeet, whereas the membrane-bound neural cell adhesion molecule (N- CAM) was detectable only on the endfeet of the ventricular cells and was absent in the detergent-treated basal laminae. Neither immunoblotting nor immunostaining revealed fibronectin in these preparations. Explants of retina, sensory ganglia, and cerebellum from chick, quail, and mouse were cultured on the basal lamina as a substratum. In all cases axonal outgrowth was excellent, with a growth rate similar to that in situ. Outgrowing axons from sensory ganglia and cerebellar explants were accompanied by migratory cells, which, in the case of sensory ganglia, were flat cells and, in the case of cerebellar explants, resembled granular neurons. Optic axons grew on the laminae in an asymmetric, explant-inherent pattern specific for the position of origin of the explant. On detergent-treated basal laminae, as well as on laminin, the retinal axons grew in a clockwise orientation. This axonal growth pattern was specific for retinal tissue and was not observed with axons from other neural explants. In spite of the excellent substrate properties provided by the substratum, cues for growing axons (toward or away from the optic disk) were not detectable in the basal lamina preparations.
Comparison of cortical and cancellous bone remodeling of the pelvis after press-fit cup total hip arthroplasty dependent on patient and prosthesis-specific characteristics: a computed tomography-assisted osteodensitometry study in vivo

Abstract Even though periprosthetic bone loss is common after total hip arthroplasty, there is no scientific evidence whether it compromises the survival of the prosthesis. Using quantitative computed tomography-assisted osteodensitometry, we determined the pattern of periacetabular bone density (BD) changes of two different press-fit cups (54 hips) 10 days, 1 year and 3 years post-operatively. We measured cortical and cancellous BD at three points of time and evaluated the effects of patient-specific characteristics [age, gender, body mass index (BMI)], clinical function, and BD at index operation. Cancellous BD decreased in all periacetabular regions by up to -52% (p≤0.001). In contrast, cortical BD above the dome of the cup remained constant while at the level of the cup it decreased by up to -17% (p≤0.001). Older patients had significantly lower cortical (ventral and dorsal) and cancellous (cranial) BD values, obese patients had a higher cortical BD ventral, and patients with excellent clinical results had a higher cancellous BD ventral and dorsal to the cup. Changes in BD suggest high stress shielding of retroacetabular cancellous bone, while load is transmitted to cortical bone above the dome of the cup. Patient-specific characteristics were shown to affect BD, but long-term analysis is needed to show whether these effects are of clinical importance.
Unscented filtering and nonlinear estimation

The extended Kalman filter (EKF) is probably the most widely used estimation algorithm for nonlinear systems. However, more than 35 years of experience in the estimation community has shown that is difficult to implement, difficult to tune, and only reliable for systems that are almost linear on the time scale of the updates. Many of these difficulties arise from its use of linearization. To overcome this limitation, the unscented transformation (UT) was developed as a method to propagate mean and covariance information through nonlinear transformations. It is more accurate, easier to implement, and uses the same order of calculations as linearization. This paper reviews the motivation, development, use, and implications of the UT.
Effects of elevated Homocysteine hormone on electrical activity in the human atrium: A simulation study

Atrial fibrillation (AF) accounts for a large proportion of healthcare expenditure world wide. Mechanisms underlying the genesis and maintenance of AF are still poorly understood. Though AF is largely thought to be caused and perpetuated by dysfunctions of cellular ion channels, disrupted intercellular gap junctional electrical coupling, and/or structural changes in the atria, it is also associated with abnormal secretion of hormones, such as a high level of Homocysteine (Hcy). It was found that a high concentration Hcy induces electrical remodeling of ion channels in human atrial cells that include the ultra rapid potassium, inward rectifier potassium and transient outward potassium currents. Such Hcy-induced ion channel remodeling in repolarising potassium currents has been hypothesized to be pro-arrhythmic. In this study, we carried out multi-scale simulations to evaluate the effects of Hcy-induced changes in potassium currents on the electrical activity of human atrium at single cell, 1D strand of tissue, and 3D anatomical models. We found that high Hcy concentration produced marked changes in atrial action potentials, including a more hyperpolarized resting potential, elevated plateau potential during early stages of repolarization and abbreviated action potential duration (APD). Losses in rate dependent accommodation of APD and effective refractory period were observed. In the tissue models, high Hcy concentration slowed down atrial excitation conduction at low rates, but facilitated it at high rates. Simulated re-entrant scroll waves in the 3D model self-terminated under Control condition, but sustained under high Hcy condition. These results collectively demonstrate the pro-arrhythmic effects of a high level Hcy in promoting and sustaining AF.
Review on Vocational Predictors: A Systematic Review of Predictors of Vocational Outcomes Among Individuals with Schizophrenia: An Update Since 1998

Objective: Predictors of employment outcomes of individuals with schizophrenia have continued to be studied over the past decade with implications for the development of vocational interventions to help the mentally ill get and keep jobs. Methods: A total of 62 relevant studies since 1998 were systematically reviewed by means of meta-analysis and frequency counts. Frequency count allowed all 62 studies to be included, whereas the meta-analysis excluded studies with inadequate information but made it possible to estimate the magnitude of effects. Results: Both methods resulted in similar findings. In contrast to an earlier review, cognitive functioning received overwhelming support as a significant predictor. Other significant predictors included education, negative symptoms, social support and skills, age, work history (previous history of successful employment), and rehabilitation service to restore community functioning and well-being by occupational therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and other mental health professionals. Positive symptoms, substance abuse, gender and hospitalization history were found to be non-significant predictors. The frequency count did not support marital status as a significant predictor but the meta-analysis did. Conclusions: This review highlights increasing sophistication in understanding the links between individual characteristics and functional impairments. It also suggests that more research is needed into other potentially important predictors that may be changeable and relate to recovery. These include attitudes and beliefs about disability payments and psychological processes such as self-stigmatization, negative beliefs, and social skills deficits for which intervention may be possible.
Enhancement of terahertz wave generation from laser induced plasma

It is well known that air plasma induced by ultrashort laser pulses emits broadband terahertz waves. The authors report the study of terahertz wave generation from the laser induced plasma where there is a preexisting plasma background. When a laser beam from a Ti:sapphire amplifier is used to generate a terahertz wave, enhancement of the generation is observed if there is another laser beam creating a plasma background. The enhancement of the terahertz wave amplitude lasts hundreds of picoseconds after the preionized background is created, with a maximum enhancement up to 250% observed.
Morph-to-word transduction for accurate and efficient automatic speech recognition and keyword search

Word units are a popular choice in statistical language modelling. For inflective and agglutinative languages this choice may result in a high out of vocabulary rate. Subword units, such as morphs, provide an interesting alternative to words. These units can be derived in an unsupervised fashion and empirically show lower out of vocabulary rates. This paper proposes a morph-to-word transduction to convert morph sequences into word sequences. This enables powerful word language models to be applied. In addition, it is expected that techniques such as pruning, confusion network decoding, keyword search and many others may benefit from word rather than morph level decision making. However, word or morph systems alone may not achieve optimal performance in tasks such as keyword search so a combination is typically employed. This paper proposes a single index approach that enables word, morph and phone searches to be performed over a single morph index. Experiments are conducted on IARPA Babel program languages including the surprise languages of the OpenKWS 2015 and 2016 competitions.
Nemo: an evolutionary and population genetics programming framework

UNLABELLED Nemo is an individual-based, genetically explicit and stochastic population computer program for the simulation of population genetics and life-history trait evolution in a metapopulation context. It comes as both a C++ programming framework and an executable program file. Its object-oriented programming design gives it the flexibility and extensibility needed to implement a large variety of forward-time evolutionary models. It provides developers with abstract models allowing them to implement their own life-history traits and life-cycle events. Nemo offers a large panel of population models, from the Island model to lattice models with demographic or environmental stochasticity and a variety of already implemented traits (deleterious mutations, neutral markers and more), life-cycle events (mating, dispersal, aging, selection, etc.) and output operators for saving data and statistics. It runs on all major computer platforms including parallel computing environments. AVAILABILITY The source code, binaries and documentation are available under the GNU General Public License at http://nemo2.sourceforge. net.
The Ethnic and Family Nexus of Homeleaving and Returning Among Canadian Young Adults

Coupling a life course and social capital perspective, this article examines the influence of cultural and family diversity on homeleaving and home returning behavior of young adults. Survival analyses are performed on data from a survey of 1,907 Canadian young adults aged 19-35 of four distinct ethnic origins — British, Indo, Chinese, and Southern European. Ethnocultural factors are found to play a more important role in shaping the timing and pathways of homeleaving than for returning. In particular, compared to the British, all ethnic contrasts display longer durations before their first homeleaving. Parent-child relationship quality, and parental financial support, surface as key family environment determinants of homeleaving and returning home. Furthermore, income, marital status, and main activity of the young adult at the time of the event, as well as the pathway out of the parental home, strongly affect duration away from home after an initial departure. En associant une perspective de vie et de capital social, cet article examine l'influence de la diversité culturelle et familiale sur le comportement des jeunes adultes vis-à-vis du départ et du retour au foyer familial. Les données obtenues lors d'un sondage de 1 907 jeunes adultes Canadiens âgés de 19-35 ans, de quatre origines ethniques distinctes — Britannique, Indochinoise, Chinoise, et Sud-européenne — ont été soumises à des analyses de survie. Les résultats démontrent que les facteurs ethnoculturels jouent un rôle plus important dans la détermination du moment et des trajectoires du départ du foyer que du retour au foyer. En particulier, comparativement aux Britanniques, les autres ethnies mettent plus longtemps à réaliser leur départ initial. La qualité de la relation parent-enfant et le soutien financier parental ressortissaient comme étant les facteurs du contexte familial qui jouent un rôle essentiel dans le départ et dans le retour au foyer familial. De plus, le revenu, le statut marital et l'activité principale du jeune adulte au moment de l'événement, ainsi que la voie suivie au départ du foyer parental, affectent profondément la durée du séjour hors du foyer après le départ initial.
Instantaneous A Priori SNR Estimation by Cepstral Excitation Manipulation

As the <italic>a priori</italic> signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) contains crucial information about a signal's mixture of speech and noise, its estimation is subject to steady research. In this paper, we introduce a novel <italic> a priori</italic> SNR estimator based on synthesizing an idealized excitation signal in the cepstral domain. Our approach utilizes a source-filter decomposition in combination with a cepstral excitation manipulation in order to recreate an idealized excitation, which is subsequently shaped by an immanent envelope. In contrast to the well-known decision-directed approach by Ephraim and Malah, an <italic>instantaneous</italic> estimate is obtained, which is less prone to sudden acoustic environmental changes and musical noise. Additionally, the proposed estimator is able to preserve weak harmonic structures resulting in a spectrum that is more full-bodied. We present both a speaker-independent and a speaker-dependent variant of the new <italic>a priori</italic> SNR estimator, both showing more than 2 dB <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\Delta \textrm {SNR}$</tex-math></inline-formula> improvement versus state of the art, without any significant increase in speech distortion.
A Parallel Solid Mechanics Solver for Multi‐physics Finite Element Problems

While solid mechanics codes are now proven tools both in the industry and research sectors, the increasingly more exigent requirements of both sectors are fuelling the need for more computational power and more advanced algorithms. While commercial codes are widely used in industry during the design process, they often lag behind academic codes in terms of computational efficiency. In fact, the commercial codes are usually general purpose and include millions of lines of codes. Massively parallel computers appeared only recently, and the adaptation of these codes is going slowly. In the meantime, academy adapted very quickly to the new computer architectures and now offers an attractive alternative: not so much modeling but more accuracy. Alya is a computational mechanics code developed at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BCS-CNS) that solves Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) on non-structured meshes. To address the lack of an efficient parallel solid mechanics code, and motivated by the demand coming from industrial partners, Alya-Solidz, the specific Alya module for solving computational solid mechanics problems, has been enhanced to treat large complex problems involving solid deformations and fracture. Some of these developments have been carried out in the framework of PRACE2IP European project. In this article a solid mechanics simulation strategy for parallel supercomputers based on a hybrid approach is presented. A hybrid parallelization approach combining MPI tasks with OpenMP threads is proposed in order to exploit the different levels of parallelism of actual multicore architectures. This paper describes the strategy programmed in Alya and shows nearly optimal scalability results for some solid mechanical problems.
Exploring preservice teachers' attitudes towards inclusion

This study responds to a call for research into existing teacher-education programmes and their impact on teacher candidates' attitudes. An inclusive education course that examined the difference between ‘soft inclusion’ (inclusion which addresses the issue of place rather than substance of learning) and genuine inclusion was used to explore pre-existing teacher candidate beliefs and assumptions. Using the Opinions Relative to Mainstreaming-Adapted, four classes of students from two different teacher-preparation programmes within the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, Canada, were surveyed pre- and post-course. A statistically significant change in the scores was found for all of the classes. A significant difference was also found between the changes in scores of the two programme groups. Results indicate that the course was successful at shifting preservice students towards inclusion and gave the students a foundation that will hopefully translate into practice.