Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The relationship between eruptive activity, flank collapse, and sea level at volcanic islands: A long‐term (>1 Ma) record offshore Montserrat, Lesser Antilles

Hole U1395B, drilled southeast of Montserrat during Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 340, provides a long (>1 Ma) and detailed record of eruptive and mass‐wasting events (>130 discrete events). This record can be used to explore the temporal evolution in volcanic activity and landslides at an arc volcano. Analysis of tephra fall and volcaniclastic turbidite deposits in the drill cores reveals three heightened periods of volcanic activity on the island of Montserrat (∼930 to ∼900 ka, ∼810 to ∼760 ka, and ∼190 to ∼120 ka) that coincide with periods of increased volcano instability and mass‐wasting. The youngest of these periods marks the peak in activity at the Soufrière Hills volcano. The largest flank collapse of this volcano (∼130 ka) occurred toward the end of this period, and two younger landslides also occurred during a period of relatively elevated volcanism. These three landslides represent the only large (>0.3 km3) flank collapses of the Soufrière Hills edifice, and their timing also coincides with periods of rapid sea level rise (>5 m/ka). Available age data from other island arc volcanoes suggest a general correlation between the timing of large landslides and periods of rapid sea level rise, but this is not observed for volcanoes in intraplate ocean settings. We thus infer that rapid sea level rise may modulate the timing of collapse at island arc volcanoes, but not in larger ocean‐island settings.
Host immunity to a growing transplanted methylcholanthrene-induced guinea pig sarcoma.

Host immunity to a growing antigenic solid tumor was studied with a transplanted methylcholanthrene-induced sarcoma (MCA-25) in inbred female strain 2 guinea pigs. Tumor-specific cellular immunity was evaluated in vivo by delayed cutaneous hypersensitivity reactions to a transplantation antigen extract of the tumor and in vitro by splenic lymphocyte-mediated cytoxicity. Animals receiving 100,000 MCA-25 cells i.m. demonstrated tumor-specific cellular cytotoxicity from 7 days to the conclusion of the study 28 days after tumor transplant. Tumors were 10% body weight at this time. MCA-25-bearing animals had a degree of tumor-specific cellular cytotoxicity similar to those of guinea pigs “hyperimmunized” to the MCA-25 antigen. Guinea pigs presensitized to dinitrochlorobenzene developed a delayed cutaneous hypersensitivity reaction to a dinitrochlorobenzene challenge in the presence of a growing MCA-25 tumor. Animals 7 and 14 days after tumor transplant developed a delayed cutaneous hypersensitivity reaction to MCA-25 antigen extract. Animals with tumors larger than 1 cm reacted to dinitrochlorobenzene but minimally to the tumor antigen. To explain the discrepancy between in vitro and in vivo detectable tumor-specific cellular immunity in animals with tumors larger than 1 cm, we evaluated the effects of serum from these animals on cellular cytotoxicity. Serum from animals with palpable MCA-25 tumors completely inhibited MCA-25-specific cellular cytotoxicity but not cellular cytotoxicity directed against another methylcholanthrene-induced tumor. Studies with serum from animals bearing 1- to 1.5-cm tumors suggested that this inhibition was mediated, at least in part, by antibody directed against the MCA-25 tumor-specific antigen.
Use of Random Dot Patterns in Achieving X-Ray Vision for Near-Field Applications of Stereoscopic Video-Based Augmented Reality Displays

This article addresses some of the challenges involved with creating a stereoscopic video augmented reality “X-ray vision” display for near-field applications, which enables presentation of computer-generated objects as if they lie behind a real object surface, while maintaining the ability to effectively perceive information that might be present on that surface. To achieve this, we propose a method in which patterns consisting of randomly distributed dots are overlaid onto the real surface prior to the rendering of a virtual object behind the real surface using stereoscopic disparity. It was hypothesized that, even though the virtual object is occluding the real object’s surface, the addition of the random dot patterns should increase the strength of the binocular disparity cue, resulting in improved performance in localizing the virtual object behind the surface. In Phase I of the experiment reported here, the feasibility of the display principle was confirmed, and concurrently the effects of relative dot size and dot density on the presence and sensitivity of any perceptual bias in localizing the virtual object within the vicinity of a flat, real surface with a periodic texture were assessed. In Phase II, the effect of relative dot size and dot density on perceiving the impression of transparency of the same real surface while preserving detection of surface information was investigated. Results revealed an advantage of the proposed method in comparison with the “No Pattern” condition for the transparency ratings. Surface information preservation was also shown to decrease with increasing dot density and relative dot size.
Adaptation to hypoxia alters energy metabolism in rat heart

Rumsey, William L. , Brian Abbott, Darci Bertelsen, Michael Mallamaci, Kevin Hagan, David Nelson, and Maria Erecinska. Adaptation to hypoxia alters energy metabolism in rat heart. Am. J. Physiol. 276 (Heart Circ. Physiol. 45): H71–H80, 1999. —The present study characterized metabolic changes in the heart associated with long-term exposure to hypoxia, a potent stimulus for pulmonary hypertension and right ventricular hypertrophy. When anesthetized rats adapted to chronic hypoxia spontaneously respired room air, their mean right intraventricular peak systolic pressure (RVSP) was twice that in normal control animals with the same arterial PO2. RVSP was linearly related to right ventricular mass (r 5 0.78). Oxidative capacity (O2 consumption) of homogenates of right and left ventricles from both groups of rats was measured with one of the following substrates: pyruvate, glutamate, acetate, and palmitoyl-Lcarnitine. Oxidation of all substrates was significantly greater in the left than in the right ventricle in normal rats but not in hypoxia-adapted animals, where it was the same, within the experimental error. O2 consumption by the left ventricle was greater in control than in experimental rats, but right ventricular O2 consumption was similar in the two groups. Maximal reaction velocity of cytochrome-c oxidase was about the same in the two ventricles, and there were no significant differences between control and hypoxia-adapted animals. HPLC analyses showed significantly higher aspartate levels and aspartate-to glutamate concentration ratios in both ventricles of hypoxic rats than in corresponding tissues from controls, indicative of a decreased flux through the malateaspartate shuttle under conditions of O2 limitation. Myocardial glutamine levels were lower in hypoxic rats, and glutamine-to-glutamate concentration ratios decreased, although primarily in the pressure-overloaded right ventricle. These findings indicate that normal energy metabolism in the left ventricle differs from that in the right and that the differences, particularly those of amino acid metabolism, are markedly influenced by chronic exposure to hypoxia.
Humoral immune response to Q fever: enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay antibody response to Coxiella burnetii in experimentally infected guinea pigs

The response of guinea pigs experimentally infected with Coxiella burnetii organisms, the etiologic agents of Q fever, was obtained by the measurement of fever, circulating infectious C. burnetii cells, and anti-C. burnetii antibodies. The detection of antibodies by the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and traditional methods against phase I whole cells, phase II whole cells, and phase I lipopolysaccharide (LPS-I) (a virulence marker for phase I cells) antigens in the serum samples of infected animals revealed marked differences between intrastrain phase variants. Animals infected with the phase I Nine Mile strain produced a concomitant increase in temperature, circulating infectious C. burnetii cells, and antibodies against phase II cells, phase I cells, and LPS-I. At 15 weeks, a challenge of phase I-infected animals with viable phase I cells resulted in anamnestic antibody responses to phase I cells and LPS-I but not to phase II cells. Infection of animals with the phase II Nine Mile strain produced antibodies against only phase II cells. The challenge of phase II-infected animals at 15 weeks with viable phase II cells resulted in anamnestic antibody responses to phase I and phase II cells but not to LPS-I. Suppression of anti-phase II responses by the phase I challenge was apparent with only the ELISA, because the immunofluorescence, microagglutination, and complement fixation assays were insensitive to these changes. The sensitivity and specificity of the ELISA with whole-cell and the LPS-I antigens in the detection of phase-specific antibody revealed that avirulent phase II cells induced an immune response to phase I antigenic epitopes. Although the avirulent phase II cells were rapidly cleared by the host immune responses, they were sufficiently infective to induce antibody responses to both phase variants. Thus, in the occurrence of Q fever, any conventional serological technique that uses only phase II antigens may not provide a true incidence of naturally acquired infection with both phase I and II C. burnetii organisms.
Open problems in the physics of volume H/sup -//D/sup -/ sources

Old and new problems in the physics of magnetic multipole sources for the production of negative H/sup -//D/sup -/ ions are presented and discussed. We emphasize particularly, in this kind of plasmas, both the vibrational and electron nonequilibrium energy distributions, the role of Rydberg states in enhancing the negative ion production, the production of vibrationally excited states by atomic recombination on surfaces through different mechanisms, and the enhancement of negative ion concentrations in pulsed discharges.
Can we use these masks? Rapid Assessment of the Inhalation Resistance Performance of Uncertified Medical Face Masks in the Context of Restricted Resources Imposed during a Public Health Emergency

In the case of a public health emergency such as the COVID-19 pandemic, access to large quantities of appropriate personal protection equipment (PPE) has presented a significant problem. A shortage of face masks and respirators has been widely reported across the world. A concerted effort to manufacture high volumes has not unsurprisingly put pressure on the supply chain and the important certification processes. PPE procured or donated as uncertified stock requires rigorous, expedient and scientifically informed evidence before decisions can be made regarding suitable deployment, expensive certification, return or possible destruction of stock. This paper reports a series of experiments devised in reaction to this situation. In this study, an experimental methodology for the assessment of the filtration performance of samples of real-world, uncertified, fluid resistant surgical masks (FRSM type IIR) was evaluated in the resource limited (lockdown) environment of the COVID-19 pandemic. A steady-state flow rig was adapted to incorporate a bespoke filter flow chamber for mounting face masks in order to evaluate the resistance to air flow as an indicator of mask inhalation performance. Pure air was drawn through a specified control surface area at known flow rate conditions; the resistance to the air flow through the masks was measured as the resulting pressure drop. Over 60 tests were performed from 4 different, randomly sampled batches and compared to a control sample of EN Type IIR certified FRSM masks. Steady-state volumetric airflow rates of 30 and 95 lmin-1 were chosen to represent deep breathing and vigorous exercise conditions respectively. The results showed that the sample masks produced a pressure drop of between 26% to 58% compared to the control batch at the lower flow rate and 22% to 55% at the higher rate. The results for each sample were consistent across both flow rates. Within the group of masks tested, two sets (between 48% and 58% of the reference set) showed the potential to be professionally assessed for appropriate deployment in a suitable setting. Although the absolute values of pressure drop measured by this method are unlikely to correlate with other testing approaches, the observed, indicative trends and relative performance of the masks is key to this approach. Critically, this method does not replace certification but it has enabled a public body to quickly make decisions; certify, re-assign, refund, thus saving time and resources. The total time spent conducting the tests was less than 8 hours and the low cost method proposed can be repurposed for low resource regions.
Multi-transceiver multiple access (MTMA) for mobile wireless ad hoc networks

Recently, lots of RTS/CTS-similar MAC protocols, based on multi-channel and reservation for mobile wireless ad hoc networks, have been proposed, which can improve the performance of the network to some extent. However, the throughput improvement is still limited because there is only one wireless transceiver per node. In this paper, we propose a multi-transceiver multiple access (MTMA) protocol for ad hoc networks in which each node has multiple sub-nodes equipped with independent wireless transceivers and the whole wireless channel is divided into multiple sub-channels. Every sub-node dynamically reserves an idle traffic channel by RTS/CTS dialogue on the common channel that enables a node to perform parallel communications with other nodes. Fast packet switching is enabled between sub-nodes within the same node. The MTMA protocol outperforms the single-transceiver RTS/CTS protocols with single channel or multi-channel in the case of the same total wireless bandwidth.
A Mobility Analytical Framework for Big Mobile Data in Densely Populated Area

Due to the pervasiveness of mobile devices, a vast amount of geolocated data is generated, which allows us to gain deep insight into human behavior. Among other data sources, the analysis of data traffic from mobile Internet enables the study of mobile subscribers' movements over long time periods at large scales, which is paramount to research over a wide range of disciplines, e.g., sociology, transportation, epidemiology, networking, etc. However, to efficiently analyze the massive data traffic from the view of user mobility, several technical challenges have to be tackled before releasing the full potential of such data sources, including data collection, trajectory construction, data noise removing, data storage, and methods for analyzing user mobility. This paper introduces a mobility analytical framework for big mobile data, based on real data traffic collected from second-, third- and fourth-generation networks, which covered nearly 7 million people. To construct a user's history trajectories, we apply different rules to extract users' locations from different data sources and reduce oscillations between the cell towers. The comparison of mobility characteristics between our mobile data and other existing data sources shows the large potential of mobile Internet data traffic to study human mobility. In addition, our experiments discover the changing of city hotspots, the movement patterns during peak hours, and people with similar history trajectories, which uncover the common rules that exist among huge populations in a city.
Swarming behaviour of salps algorithm for predicting chemical compound activities

The increasing size of chemical search space of chemical compound databases and importance of similarity measurements to drug discovery are main factors in chem.-informatics research. This paper introduces a swarming behavior of salps algorithm for predicting chemical compound activities. The salp optimization algorithm is proposed for chemical descriptor selection with three initialization (small, mixed and large). The K-nearest neighbor (KNN) was utilized for the fitness function of salps swarm optimization algorithm (SSOA) to choose a small number of features and achieve high classification accuracy. Experimental results reveal the capability of SSA to find an optimal feature subset which maximizes the classification performance and minimizes the number of selected features. A set of assessment indicators are used to evaluate and compared with different algorithms inclduing particle swarm optimization (PSO), Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm (GOA), Grey Wolf Optimizer(GWO), Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA), Whale Optimization algorithm (WOA) using three initialization method and a superior accuracy was obtained with our proposed approach. Also, in comparison with other algorithms that used the same data, our approach has a higher performance using less number of features. The previous algorithms (GOA, GWO, PSO, SSA, SCA, WOA) are compared and three different methods are used to initialize the different optimization algorithms to ensure capability of the different optimizers to converge from different initial positions namely mixed initialization, small initialization, and large initialization.
Functional and molecular evidence of myelin‐ and neuroprotection by thyroid hormone administration in experimental allergic encephalomyelitis

M. L. Dell'Acqua, L. Lorenzini, G. D'Intino, S. Sivilia, P. Pasqualetti, V. Panetta, M. Paradisi, M. M. Filippi, C. Baiguera, M. Pizzi, L. Giardino, P. M. Rossini and L. Calzà (2012) Neuropathology and Applied Neurobiology38, 454–470
Insights Into the Role of Extracellular DNA and Extracellular Proteins in Biofilm Formation of Vibrio parahaemolyticus

The extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) construct the three-dimensional (3-D) structure of biofilms, but their respective roles are still not clear. Therefore, this study aimed to illuminate the role of key chemical components [extracellular DNA (eDNA), extracellular proteins, and carbohydrates] of EPS in biofilm formation of Vibrio parahaemolyticus. The correlations between each key chemical component and biofilm formation were first determined, showing that the biofilm formation of V. parahaemolyticus was strongly positively correlated with both eDNA and protein content (P < 0.01), but not with carbohydrates. Subsequently, individual DNase I or protease K treatment markedly reduced the initial adhesion and structural stability of the formed biofilms by hydrolyzing the eDNA or extracellular proteins, but did not induce significant dispersion of mature biofilms. However, the combination of DNase I and protease K treatment induced the obvious dispersion of the mature biofilms through the concurrent destruction of eDNA and extracellular proteins. The analysis at a structural level showed that the collapse of biofilms was mainly attributed to the great damage of the loop configuration of eDNA and the secondary structure of proteins caused by the enzyme treatment. Therefore, this study provides a deep understanding of the role of key chemical components of EPS in biofilm development of V. parahaemolyticus, which may give a new strategy to develop environmentally friendly methods to eradicate the biofilms in food industry.
Dual-Energy CT Follow-Up After Stroke Thrombolysis Alters Assessment of Hemorrhagic Complications

Background and Purpose: We aimed to determine whether dual-energy CT (DECT) follow-up can differentiate contrast staining (CS) from intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) in stroke patients treated with intravenous thrombolysis (IVT), who had undergone acute stroke imaging using CT angiography (CTA), and CT perfusion (CTP). Materials and Methods: Between November 2012 and January 2018, 168 patients at our comprehensive stroke center underwent DECT follow-up within 36 h after IVT and acute CTA with or without CTP but did not receive intra-arterial imaging or treatment. Two independent readers evaluated plain monochromatic CT (pCT) alone and compared this with a second reading of a combined DECT approach using pCT and water- and iodine-weighted images, establishing and grading the ICH diagnosis, per Heidelberg and Safe Implementation of Treatments in Stroke Monitoring Study (SITS-MOST) classifications. Results: On pCT alone within 36 h, 31/168 (18.5%) patients had findings diagnosed as ICH. Using combined DECT (cDECT) changed ICH diagnosis to “CS only” in 3/168 (1.8%) patients, constituting 3/31 (9.7%) of cases with initially pCT-diagnosed ICH. These three cases had pCT diagnoses of one SAH, one minor, and one more extensive petechial hemorrhage (hemorrhagic infarction types 1 and 2), respectively. pCT alone had a 100% sensitivity, 98% specificity, 90% positive predictive value (PPV), 100% negative predictive value (NPV), and 98% accuracy for any ICH, compared to the cDECT. Inter-reader agreement for ICH classification using pCT compared to DECT was weighted kappa 0.92 (95% CI 0.87–0.98) vs. 0.91 (0.85–0.95). Conclusion: Compared to pCT, DECT within 36 h after IV thrombolysis for acute ischemic stroke, changes the radiological diagnosis of post-treatment ICH to “CS only” in a small proportion of patients. Studies are warranted of whether the altered radiological reports have an impact on patient management, for example initiation timing of antithrombotic secondary prevention.
Co-designs of parallel Rijndael

State-of-the-art Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have inspired the innovation of hardware/software co-design methodologies that provide a high-level of abstraction in the design process. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of a formal methodology in the co-design of parallel versions of the Rijndael cryptographic algorithm. The investigated methodology employs the functional paradigm for specifications, derived concurrency, and hardware mapping. Several implementations are developed with different performance characteristics. The refined designs are tested under RC-1000 reconfigurable computer with its two million gates FPGA.
Nondeterministic exponential time has two-prover interactive protocols

The exact power of two-prover interactive proof systems (MIP) introduced by M. Ben-Or et al. (Proc. 20th Symp. on Theory of Computing, 1988, p.113-31) is determined. In this system, two all-powerful noncommunicating provers convince a randomizing polynomial-time verifier in polynomial time that the input x belongs to the language L. It was previously suspected (and proved in a relativized sense) that coNP-complete languages do not admit such proof systems. In sharp contrast, it is shown that the class of languages having two-prover interactive proof systems is computable in nondeterministic exponential time (NEXP). This represents a further step demonstrating the unexpectedly immense power for randomization and interaction in efficient provability. <<ETX>>
Perceptual Issues of a Passive Haptics Feedback Based MR System

This paper introduces a unique type of mixed reality system based on passive-haptic feedback, which enables its user to manipulate real objects with bare hands while seeing its counterpart in the HMD with more information attached. The system provides users in MR systems with a more realistic sense of touch and costs less money comparing to the active force feedback devices. In this paper, accuracy of tactile and visual perception in user interaction with real objects in close range MR environment is studied. A calibration method of the user's head and hands is proposed and the calibration accuracy of head and hands tracking has been evaluated respectively with different experiments. An application of chemical experiment is also implemented to prove the reliability of the proposed system.