Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
North Atlantic Aerosol Properties and Direct Radiative Effects: Key Results from TARFOX and ACE-2

Aerosol effects on atmospheric radiative fluxes provide a forcing function that can change the climate in potentially significant ways. This aerosol radiative forcing is a major source of uncertainty in understanding the observed climate change of the past century and in predicting future climate. To help reduce this uncertainty, the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry Project (IGAC) has endorsed a series of multiplatform aerosol field campaigns. The Tropospheric Aerosol Radiative Forcing Observational Experiment (TARFOX) and the second Aerosol Characterization Experiment (ACE-2) were the first IGAC campaigns to address the impact of anthropogenic aerosols. Both TARFOX and ACE-2 gathered extensive data sets on aerosol properties and radiative effects. TARFOX focused on the urban-industrial haze plume flowing from the eastern United States over the western Atlantic Ocean, whereas ACE-2 studied aerosols carried over the eastern Atlantic from both European urban/industrial and African mineral sources. These aerosols often have a marked influence on the top-of-atmosphere radiances measured by satellites. However, the accurate derivation of flux changes, or radiative forcing, from the satellite-measured radiances or retrieved optical depths remains a difficult challenge. In this paper we summarize key initial results from TARFOX and ACE-2, with a focus on those results that allow an improved assessment of the flux changes caused by North Atlantic aerosols at middle latitudes. We then compute aerosol-induced radiative flux changes over the midlatitude North Atlantic Ocean by combining AVHRR-derived fields of aerosol optical depth (AOD) with a TARFOX-derived aerosol microphysical model. The microphysical model has been shown to give computed radiative flux sensitivities (dF/dAOD) that agree with (1) values measured in TARFOX and (2) preliminary values computed for the polluted marine boundary layer aerosol in ACE 2. We exclude African dust from our calculations, primarily by restricting calculations to latitudes north of 25 N. We compute the net flux change for cloud-free and cloudcontaining conditions for the winter, spring, summer and fall seasons as well as the annual average. The local, cloud-free effects using the TARFOX derived aerosol properties range from –9 W/m near the eastern US coastline in the summer to –1 W/m in the mid-Atlantic during winter. The North Atlantic cloud-free regional averages range from –1.7 W/m in the winter to – 5.1 W/m in the summer. The cloud-free regional annual average is –3.5 W/m. The effect of changing the aerosol single-scattering albedo from the TARFOXderived value of 0.9 (moderately absorbing) to 1.0 (no absorption) is to increase the flux change by about 30%. We used the ISCCP cloud data to compute the effect of clouds in the region. Including the cloudiness reduced the regional annual net flux change to –0.8 W/m for the TARFOX aerosol and –1.1 W/m for the non-absorbing aerosol.
Finding the Missing Link between Landscape Structure and Population Dynamics: A Spatially Explicit Perspective

We construct and explore a general modeling framework that allows for a systematic investigation of the impact of changes in landscape structure on population dynamics. The essential parts of the framework are a landscape generator with independent control over landscape composition and physiognomy, an individual‐based spatially explicit population model that simulates population dynamics within heterogeneous landscapes, and scale‐dependent landscape indices that depict the essential aspects of landscape that interact with dispersal and demographic processes. Landscape maps are represented by a grid of \documentclass{aastex} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{bm} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{pifont} \usepackage{stmaryrd} \usepackage{textcomp} \usepackage{portland,xspace} \usepackage{amsmath,amsxtra} \usepackage[OT2,OT1]{fontenc} \newcommand\cyr{ \renewcommand\rmdefault{wncyr} \renewcommand\sfdefault{wncyss} \renewcommand\encodingdefault{OT2} \normalfont \selectfont} \DeclareTextFontCommand{\textcyr}{\cyr} \pagestyle{empty} \DeclareMathSizes{10}{9}{7}{6} \begin{document} \landscape $$50\times 50$$ \end{document} cells and consist of good‐quality, poor‐quality, or uninhabitable matrix habitat cells. The population model was shaped in accordance to the biology of European brown bears (Ursus arctos), and demographic parameters were adjusted to yield a source‐sink configuration. Results obtained with the spatially explicit model do not confirm results of earlier nonspatial source‐sink models where addition of sink habitat resulted in a decrease of total population size because of dilution of high‐quality habitat. Our landscape indices, which describe scale‐dependent correlation between and within habitat types, were able to explain variations in variables of population dynamics (mean number of females with sink home ranges, mean number of females with source home ranges, and mean dispersal distance) caused by different landscape structure. When landscape structure changed, changes in these variables generally followed the corresponding change of an appropriate landscape index in a linear way. Our general approach incorporates source‐sink dynamics as well as metapopulation dynamics, and the population model can easily be modified for other species groups.
Energy efficiency in multi-cell MIMO broadcast channels with interference alignment

Characterizing the fundamental metric of energy efficiency (EE) of multiple-input multiple-output interfering broadcast channels (MIMO-IFBC) is important for the development of green wireless communications. In this paper, we address the EE optimization problem for multi-cell MIMO-IFBC within the context of interference alignment (IA). We employ grouping-based IA scheme to cancel both inter-cell interference (ICI) and inter-user inference (IUI), and thus transform the MIMO-IFBC to a single cell single user MIMO scenario. A gradient-based optimal power adaptation scheme is proposed which utilizes water-filling approach and singular value decomposition (SVD) to maximize EE for each cell. Simulation results confirm the theoretical findings and demonstrate that the proposed resource allocation algorithm can efficiently approach the optimal EE.
Lying Because We Care: Compassion Increases Prosocial Lying

Prosocial lies, or lies intended to benefit others, are ubiquitous behaviors that have important social and economic consequences. Though emotions play a central role in many forms of prosocial behavior, no work has investigated how emotions influence behavior when one has the opportunity to tell a prosocial lie—a situation that presents a conflict between two prosocial ethics: lying to prevent harm to another, and honesty, which might also provide benefits to the target of the lie. Here, we examine whether the emotion of compassion influences prosocial lying, and find that compassion causally increases and positively predicts prosocial lying. In Studies 1 and 2, participants evaluated a poorly written essay and provided feedback to the essay writer. Experimentally induced compassion felt toward the essay writer (Study 1) and individual differences in trait compassion (Study 2) were positively associated with inflated feedback to the essay writer. In both of these studies, the relationship between compassion and prosocial lying was partially mediated by an enhanced importance placed on preventing emotional harm. In Study 3, we found moderation such that experimentally induced compassion increased lies that resulted in financial gains for a charity, but not lies that produced financial gains for the self. This research illuminates the emotional underpinnings of the common yet morally complex behavior of prosocial lying, and builds on work highlighting the potentially harmful effects of compassion—an emotion typically seen as socially beneficial.
A novel method to detect android malware using Locality Sensitive Hashing algorithms

Malware are programs which created to sabotage a system or do some other malicious tasks. In this article, a new method for classifying malware using a Locality Sensitive Hashing algorithm called Simhash will be proposed. In this article, a hash will be generated from specific parts of a file with the use of Simhash algorithm and the bits of this hashes will be considered as the features of the file. Finally, with the use of some of machine learning algorithms, a model will be created from these features and classifying is done using the model.
Quantitative histochemistry for macrophage biodistribution on mice liver and spleen after the administration of a pharmacological-relevant dose of polyacrylic acid-coated iron oxide nanoparticles

Abstract Understanding in vivo biodistribution of iron oxide nanoparticles (IONs), and the involvement of the phagocyte system in this process, is crucial for the assessment of their potential health risk. In the present study, the histochemical expression of iron in liver and spleen sections of CD-1 mice (aged 8 weeks) was quantified, 24 h after intravenous administration of polyacrylic acid-coated IONs (PAA-coated IONs) (8, 20, 50 mg/kg). Organ sections were stained with Perls’ Prussian blue for iron detection, followed by the quantification of iron deposition with ImageJ software. Our study revealed the existence of a linear dose-dependent increase of iron deposition in macrophages of both organs. Exposed animals showed hepatic iron deposition in all zones, although most marked in periportal region. In the spleen, no iron was detected in the white splenic pulp of both control and treated animals. When compared with control mice, a positive correlation between histochemical detection of iron and PAA-coated ION doses was observed in splenic red pulp of animals. The results confirmed our assumption that liver and spleen are involved in the clearance pathways of PAA-coated IONs from the blood. Excess iron was cytotoxic at the highest dose of PAA-coated IONs tested, but no significant morphologic alterations were observed for the lower doses. Clusters of early necrotic hepatocytes were observed in the hepatic periportal region of mice injected with the higher dose (50 mg/kg) of PAA-coated IONs. Further studies are necessary to determine if liver and spleen macrophages will degrade these IONs, or eventually exocytose both the degraded and intact ones.
Timing speculation-aware instruction set extension for resource-constrained embedded systems

Performance, area, and power are important issues for many embedded systems. One area- and power-efficient way to improve performance is instruction set architecture (ISA) extension. Although existing works have introduced application-specific accelerators co-operating with a basic processor, most of them are still not suitable for embedded systems with stringent resource and/or power constraints because of excess, power-hungry resources in the basic processor. In this paper, we propose ISA extension for such stringently constrained embedded systems. Contrary to previous works, our work rather simplifies the basic processor by replacing original power-hungry resources with power-efficient alternatives. Then, considering the application features (not only input patterns but also instruction sequence), we extend software binary with new instructions executable on the simplified processor. These hardware and software extensions can jointly work well for timing speculation (TS). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first TS-aware ISA extension applicable to embedded systems with stringent area- and/or power-constraints. In our evaluation, we achieved 29.9% speedup in execution time and 1.5× aggressive clock scaling along with 8.7% and 48.3% reduction in circuit area and power-delay product, respectively, compared with the traditional worst-case design.
Further delineation of an entity caused by CREBBP and EP300 mutations but not resembling Rubinstein–Taybi syndrome

In 2016, we described that missense variants in parts of exons 30 and 31 of CREBBP can cause a phenotype that differs from Rubinstein–Taybi syndrome (RSTS). Here we report on another 11 patients with variants in this region of CREBBP (between bp 5,128 and 5,614) and two with variants in the homologous region of EP300. None of the patients show characteristics typical for RSTS. The variants were detected by exome sequencing using a panel for intellectual disability in all but one individual, in whom Sanger sequencing was performed upon clinical recognition of the entity. The main characteristics of the patients are developmental delay (90%), autistic behavior (65%), short stature (42%), and microcephaly (43%). Medical problems include feeding problems (75%), vision (50%), and hearing (54%) impairments, recurrent upper airway infections (42%), and epilepsy (21%). Major malformations are less common except for cryptorchidism (46% of males), and cerebral anomalies (70%). Individuals with variants between bp 5,595 and 5,614 of CREBBP show a specific phenotype (ptosis, telecanthi, short and upslanted palpebral fissures, depressed nasal ridge, short nose, anteverted nares, short columella, and long philtrum). 3D face shape demonstrated resemblance to individuals with a duplication of 16p13.3 (the region that includes CREBBP), possibly indicating a gain of function. The other affected individuals show a less specific phenotype. We conclude that there is now more firm evidence that variants in these specific regions of CREBBP and EP300 result in a phenotype that differs from RSTS, and that this phenotype may be heterogeneous.
A 512-point 8-parallel pipelined feedforward FFT for WPAN

This paper presents a 512-point feedforward FFT architecture for wireless personal area network (WPAN). The architecture processes a continuous flow of 8 samples in parallel, leading to a throughput of 2.64 GSamples/s. The FFT is computed in three stages that use radix-8 butterflies. This radix reduces significantly the number of rotators with respect to previous approaches based on radix-2. Besides, the proposed architecture uses the minimum memory that is required for a 512-point 8-parallel FFT. Experimental results show that besides its high throughput, the design is efficient in area and power consumption, improving the results of previous approaches. Specifically, for a wordlength of 16 bits, the proposed design consumes 61.5 mW and its area is 1.43 mm2.
On the study of predictors in Single Shot Multibox Detector

Single shot multibox detector (SSD) is a state-of-the-art network for real-time object detection. It is originally designed for general datasets. While, for specific datasets, their distribution of ground truth boxes is somehow different and thus, SSD shows unsatisfying performance. In this paper, we improve the performance of SSD on specific datasets. We first dissect the mechanism of predictors, the predicting parameters of a potential detection, in two aspects: classification and localization. Then we reveal the relationship between default boxes and predictors. With this point we finally make an improvement on default box setting and achieve a higher mAP over the original SSD on specific datasets.
The Effect of Cross-Linking on Nano-Mechanical Properties of Polyamide

Radiation crosslinking of polyamidu 6 (PA 6) is a well-recognized modification of improving basic material characteristics. Radiation, which penetrated through specimens and reacted with the cross-linking agent, gradually formed cross-linking (3D net), first in the surface layer and then in the total volume, which resulted in considerable changes in specimen behaviour. This research paper deals with the possible utilization of irradiated PA6. The material already contained a special cross-linking agent TAIC (5 volume %), which should enable subsequent cross-linking by ionizing β – radiation (15, 30 and 45 kGy). The effect of the irradiation on mechanical behavior of the tested PA 6 was investigated. Material properties created by β – radiation are measured by nanoindentation test using the DSI method (Depth Sensing Indentation). Hardness increased with increasing dose of irradiation at everything samples; however results of nanoindentation test shows increasing in nanomechanical properties of surface layer. The highest values of nanomechanical properties were reached radiation dose of 45 kGy, when the nanomechanical values increased by about 95%. These results indicate advantage cross-linking of the improved mechanical properties.
CLUH couples mitochondrial distribution to the energetic and metabolic status

ABSTRACT Mitochondrial dynamics and distribution are critical for supplying ATP in response to energy demand. CLUH is a protein involved in mitochondrial distribution whose dysfunction leads to mitochondrial clustering, the metabolic consequences of which remain unknown. To gain insight into the role of CLUH on mitochondrial energy production and cellular metabolism, we have generated CLUH-knockout cells using CRISPR/Cas9. Mitochondrial clustering was associated with a smaller cell size and with decreased abundance of respiratory complexes, resulting in oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) defects. This energetic impairment was found to be due to the alteration of mitochondrial translation and to a metabolic shift towards glucose dependency. Metabolomic profiling by mass spectroscopy revealed an increase in the concentration of some amino acids, indicating a dysfunctional Krebs cycle, and increased palmitoylcarnitine concentration, indicating an alteration of fatty acid oxidation, and a dramatic decrease in the concentrations of phosphatidylcholine and sphingomyeline, consistent with the decreased cell size. Taken together, our study establishes a clear function for CLUH in coupling mitochondrial distribution to the control of cell energetic and metabolic status. Summary: Mitochondrial distribution within the cell is critical for supplying ATP at specific sites. We show here that CLUH couples mitochondrial distribution to the energetic and metabolic status in human cells.
35.1: Invited Paper: Quantum Dot Light Emitting Devices for Pixelated Full Color Displays

Quantum dot light emitting devices (QD‐LEDs) developed over the past four years demonstrate high external quantum efficiencies, saturated visible color emission, narrow‐band infra‐red emission, and can be fabricated with a scalable fabrication technique of high resolution. These recent advancements of QD‐LED technology are due to progress in the chemistry of colloidal quantum dot synthesis and the development of new fabrication methods for generating thin films of QDs as outlined in this letter.
Reliable estimation of inhibitory efficiency: to anticipate, choose or simply react?

Response inhibition is an important executive process studied by clinical and experimental psychologists, neurophysiologists and cognitive neuroscientists alike. Stop‐signal paradigms are popular because they are grounded in a theory that provides methods to estimate the latency of an unobservable process: the stop‐signal reaction time (SSRT). Critically, SSRT estimates can be biased by skew of the response time distribution and gradual slowing over the course of the experiment. Here, we present a series of experiments that directly compare three common stop‐signal paradigms that differ in the distribution of response times. The results show that the widely used choice response (CR) and simple response (SR) time versions of the stop‐signal paradigm are particularly susceptible to skew of the response time distribution and response slowing, and that using the anticipated response (AR) paradigm based on the Slater‐Hammel task offers a viable alternative to obtain more reliable SSRT estimates.
Microinjection of anti-topoisomerase I immunoglobulin G into nuclei of Chironomus tentans salivary gland cells leads to blockage of transcription elongation

Purified anti-topoisomerase I immunoglobulin G (IgG) was microinjected into nuclei of Chironomus tentans salivary gland cells, and the effect on DNA transcription was investigated. Synthesis of nucleolar preribosomal 38S RNA by RNA polymerase I and of chromosomal Balbiani ring RNA by RNA polymerase II was inhibited by about 80%. The inhibitory action of anti-topoisomerase I IgG could be reversed by the addition of exogenous topoisomerase I. Anti-topoisomerase I IgG had less effect on RNA polymerase II-promoted activity of other less efficiently transcribing heterogeneous nuclear RNA genes. The pattern of inhibition of growing nascent Balbiani ring chains indicated that the transcriptional process was interrupted at the level of chain elongation. The highly decondensed state of active Balbiani ring chromatin, however, remained unaffected after injection of topoisomerase I antibodies. These data are consistent with the interpretation that topoisomerase I is an essential component in the transcriptional process but not in the maintenance of the decondensed state of active chromatin.
Down‐regulation of microRNA‐19b in hormone receptor‐positive/HER2‐negative breast cancer

miR‐19b (miR‐19b‐3p) has been reported to be correlated with either favorable or unfavorable events in several cancers. However, no study has been conducted to evaluate the expression level of miR‐19b in patients with breast cancer (BC). This study was aimed to investigate the expression level of miR‐19b in human malignant and healthy breast tissues with histopathology of ER+/PR+/HER2−. We performed a miRNA real‐time PCR to detect differential expression of miR‐19b in 40 BC, including 17 BC with familial background and 23 BC without familial background, and 12 non‐tumoral tissues. Moreover, a bioinformatics prediction upon miR‐19b functionality in BC cells was performed. The miR‐19b expression level was significantly down‐regulated in BC, BC with familial background, and BC without familial background compared with its expression in normal tissue (p value, <0.0001; fold change, −7.45; p value, 0.0003; fold change, −6.45; and p value, 0.0005; fold change, −8.41, respectively). Moreover, according to the AUCs (area under curve) of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, miR‐19b can significantly distinguish all defined categories. Last, in agreement with our experimental findings, proteoglycans in cancer, pathways in cancer, FoxO signaling pathway, central carbon metabolism in cancer, p53 signaling pathway, transcriptional misregulation in cancer, and prolactin signaling pathway were predicted as miR‐19b‐related signaling pathways. In summary, down‐regulation of miR‐19b in BC vs healthy tissue suggests that mir‐19b can function as a tumor suppressor. Our results shed additional information on controversial expression pattern of miR‐19b depending on different cancer types.