Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact ionization coefficients for electrons and holes in In$sub 0$.$sub 14$Ga$sub 0$.$sub 86$As

We report the measurement of impact ionization rates for electrons and holes in the direct band-gap semiconductor alloy In$sub 0$. $sub 14$Ga$sub 0$. $sub 86$As. Our results show clearly that the ionization rate for holes is greater than that for electrons. The measurments were made for electric fields between 2.6times10$sup 5$ and 3.4times10$sup 5$ V cm$sup -1$. In this range, the ionization coefficients can be expressed as $alpha$=$alpha$/sub infinity/ exp(-A/ E) for electrons and $beta$=$beta$/sub infinity/ exp(-B/E) for holes with $alpha$/ sub infinity/=1.0times10$sup 9$ cm$sup -1$, A=3.6times10$sup 6$ V cm$sup -1$, and $beta$/sub infinity/=1.3times10$sup 8$ cm$sup -1$, B=2.7times10$sup 6$ V cm$sup - 1$.
Robustness in Consensus Networks

We consider the problem of robustness in large consensus networks that occur in many areas such as distributed optimization. Robustness, in this context, is the scaling of performance measures, e.g. H2-norm, as a function of network dimension. We provide a formal framework to quantify the relation between such performance scaling and the convergence speed of the network. Specifically, we provide upper and lower bounds for the convergence speed in terms of robustness and discuss how these bounds scale with the network topology. The main contribution of this work is that we obtain tight bounds, that hold regardless of network topology. The work here also encompasses some results in convergence time analysis in previous literature.
Total motile sperm count has a superior predictive value over the WHO 2010 cut‐off values for the outcomes of intracytoplasmic sperm injection cycles

The objective of this study was to compare (i) the intracytoplasmic sperm injection outcomes among groups with different total motile sperm count ranges, (ii) the intracytoplasmic sperm injection outcomes between groups with normal and abnormal total motile sperm count, and (iii) the predictive values of WHO 2010 cut‐off values and pre‐wash total motile sperm count for the intracytoplasmic sperm injection outcomes, in couples with male infertility. This study included data from 518 patients undergoing their first intracytoplasmic sperm injection cycle as a result of male infertility. Couples were divided into five groups according to their total motile sperm count: Group I, total motile sperm count <1 × 106; group II, total motile sperm count 1–5 × 106; group III, total motile sperm count 5–10 × 106; group IV, total motile sperm count 10–20 × 106; and group V, total motile sperm count >20 × 106 (which was considered a normal total motile sperm count value). Then, couples were grouped into an abnormal and normal total motile sperm count group. The groups were compared regarding intracytoplasmic sperm injection outcomes. The predictive values of WHO 2010 cut‐off values and total motile sperm count for the intracytoplasmic sperm injection outcomes were also investigated. The fertilization rate was lower in total motile sperm count group I compared to total motile sperm count group V (72.5 ± 17.6 vs. 84.9 ± 14.4, p = 0.011). The normal total motile sperm count group had a higher fertilization rate (84.9 ± 14.4 vs. 81.1 ± 15.8, p = 0.016) and lower miscarriage rate (17.9% vs. 29.5%, p = 0.041) compared to the abnormal total motile sperm count group. The total motile sperm count was the only parameter that demonstrated a predictive value for the formation of high‐quality embryos on D2 (OR: 1.18, p = 0.013), formation of high‐quality embryos on D3 (OR: 1.12, p = 0.037), formation of blastocysts on D5 (OR: 1.16, p = 0.011), blastocyst expansion grade on D5 (OR: 1.27, p = 0.042), and the odds of miscarriage (OR: 0.52, p < 0.045). The total motile sperm count has a greater predictive value than the WHO 2010 cut‐off values for laboratory results and pregnancy outcomes in couples undergoing intracytoplasmic sperm injection as a result of male infertility.
Glaucoma Association of Glaucoma-Susceptible Genes to Regional Circumpapillary Retinal Nerve Fiber Layer Thickness and Visual Field Defects

Citation: Yoshikawa M, Nakanishi H, Yamashiro K, et al.; for the Nagahama Study Group. Association of glaucomasusceptible genes to regional circumpapillary retinal nerve fiber layer thickness and visual field defects. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2017;58:2510–2519. DOI:10.1167/ iovs.16-20797 PURPOSE. To examine the associations of the earlier reported glaucoma-related genes to the regional circumpapillary retinal nerve fiber layer thicknesses (cpRNFLTs) and corresponding visual field defects.
Kitsune: An Ensemble of Autoencoders for Online Network Intrusion Detection

Neural networks have become an increasingly popular solution for network intrusion detection systems (NIDS). Their capability of learning complex patterns and behaviors make them a suitable solution for differentiating between normal traffic and network attacks. However, a drawback of neural networks is the amount of resources needed to train them. Many network gateways and routers devices, which could potentially host an NIDS, simply do not have the memory or processing power to train and sometimes even execute such models. More importantly, the existing neural network solutions are trained in a supervised manner. Meaning that an expert must label the network traffic and update the model manually from time to time. In this paper, we present Kitsune: a plug and play NIDS which can learn to detect attacks on the local network, without supervision, and in an efficient online manner. Kitsune's core algorithm (KitNET) uses an ensemble of neural networks called autoencoders to collectively differentiate between normal and abnormal traffic patterns. KitNET is supported by a feature extraction framework which efficiently tracks the patterns of every network channel. Our evaluations show that Kitsune can detect various attacks with a performance comparable to offline anomaly detectors, even on a Raspberry PI. This demonstrates that Kitsune can be a practical and economic NIDS.
Nodal-reduced modeling of single-phase Dual-Active Bridge converters for EMTP-type simulations

Transient system-level simulations of future DC grids require modeling the behavior at the terminals of the power system's components, and thus also of power converters. The internal electrical variables of the power electronic devices are not relevant in such simulations. Based on this, this paper presents an approach for eliminating all the internal electrical nodes of a single-phase Dual-Active Bridge DC-DC converter for EMTP-type simulations. Nonetheless, the switching dynamics at the terminals of the converter are maintained, while the dynamic effects of the converter-internal circuitry like transformer and capacitors are accounted for. By reducing all internal nodes of the converter model, the computational burden is reduced, which is especially important for system-level simulations of large grids. The approach presented here is a first step towards a similar implementation for the three-phase Dual-Active Bridge DC-DC converter topology, a promising converter topology for future DC grids.
Association of the DNA repair SMUG1 rs3087404 polymorphism and its interaction with high sensitivity C-reactive protein for age-related macular degeneration in Iranian patients

ABSTRACT Background: Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a complex disease and recently the role of DNA repairing genes in its susceptibility has been studied. It has been hypothesized that polymorphism in DNA repair system genes reduce the capacity to repair DNA damages which may lead to a greater susceptibility to AMD. C-reactive protein (CRP) production is shown to enhance inflammatory processes by increasing oxidative stress and inducing DNA damage. We planned to evaluate the possible association of SMUG1 variants and their possible interaction with high sensitivity CRP levels in AMD. Materials and methods: We included 500 case-control samples consisting of 279 advanced type AMD patients and 221 genetically unrelated healthy controls enrolled for evaluation. Extracted-DNA samples were amplified to obtain fragments including the polymorphic region SMUG1 rs3087404. We calculated relative excess risk due to interaction (RERI), attributable proportion (AP), and synergy index (S) to clarify possible interaction of different genotypes and CRP levels for AMD. Results: The distribution of the genotypes were not significantly different in the AMD patients compared to that of controls (p = 0.849). The allele frequency for SMUG1 was not different between study groups. No difference of SMUG1 polymorphism between case and control groups was evident in higher CRP levels (CRP>3mg/dl) compared with lower CRP levels. SMUG1/CRP synergy indices calculated as RERI = −0.12 and AP = −0.18 while S was not calculable. Conclusions: Our study showed that c. -31A/G-SMUG1 genotypes/alleles do not have any association with the occurrence or severity of advanced type AMD. There was no interaction of CRP levels and SMUG1 genotypes in AMD susceptibility.
Ab-Initio Modelling of Point Defect-Impurity Interaction in Tungsten and other BCC Transition Metals

Ab-initio calculations have been performed to investigate systematically defect-impurity interaction in Tungsten and other bcc transition metals. It is found that the most stable configuration of C and N atoms is the octahedral interstitial site whereas O and H atoms are located in the tetrahedral configuration. For the particular case of bcc-W, the binding energies formed by the carbon and nitrogen atoms located at octahedral sites, and mono-vacancy on a nearest neighbor site are very large, 1.39 eV and 1.91 eV, respectively. Implication of these results of diffusion of point defects in tungsten is discussed and compared with the case of bcc-Fe.
A design method to reduce pulsating torque in PM assisted synchronous reluctance machines with asymmetry of rotor barriers

In this paper a design method for ferrite assisted synchronous reluctance machine is proposed in order to reduce torque ripple and cogging torque. An asymmetrical layout of the rotor flux barriers is proposed in order to reduce the harmonics components of the pulsating torque. The proposed analytical method is validated, employing finite elements simulations, for pure synchronous reluctance (SyR) and permanent magnet assisted synchronous reluctance machines (PMSyR) considering different slot-pole configurations. Simulated machines present a cogging torque and a torque ripple reduction respectively up to 92% and up to 70%. Moreover the electromotive force waveform is improved too. These results are achieved without reducing nominal torque and without increasing machines production costs.
A functional link between NAD+ homeostasis and N-terminal protein acetylation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) is an essential metabolite participating in cellular redox chemistry and signaling, and the complex regulation of NAD+ metabolism is not yet fully understood. To investigate this, we established a NAD+-intermediate specific reporter system to identify factors required for salvage of metabolically linked nicotinamide (NAM) and nicotinic acid (NA). Mutants lacking components of the NatB complex, NAT3 and MDM20, appeared as hits in this screen. NatB is an Nα-terminal acetyltransferase responsible for acetylation of the N terminus of specific Met-retained peptides. In NatB mutants, increased NA/NAM levels were concomitant with decreased NAD+. We identified the vacuolar pool of nicotinamide riboside (NR) as the source of this increased NA/NAM. This NR pool is increased by nitrogen starvation, suggesting NAD+ and related metabolites may be trafficked to the vacuole for recycling. Supporting this, increased NA/NAM release in NatB mutants was abolished by deleting the autophagy protein ATG14. We next examined Tpm1 (tropomyosin), whose function is regulated by NatB-mediated acetylation, and Tpm1 overexpression (TPM1-oe) was shown to restore some NatB mutant defects. Interestingly, although TPM1-oe largely suppressed NA/NAM release in NatB mutants, it did not restore NAD+ levels. We showed that decreased nicotinamide mononucleotide adenylyltransferase (Nma1/Nma2) levels probably caused the NAD+ defects, and NMA1-oe was sufficient to restore NAD+. NatB-mediated N-terminal acetylation of Nma1 and Nma2 appears essential for maintaining NAD+ levels. In summary, our results support a connection between NatB-mediated protein acetylation and NAD+ homeostasis. Our findings may contribute to understanding the molecular basis and regulation of NAD+ metabolism.
2 XLANG : Web Services for Business Process Design

The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) tries to address the challenge of integrating services spread across distributed, heterogenous, dynamic v rtual organizations, using the concepts and technologies from both the Grid and Web service communities. The Web service community has realized that Web services can reach their full potential only if there exists a mechanism to describe the various interactions between the services and dynamically compose new services out of existing ones. This is true in the case of Grid services as well. In this paper, we analyze existing technologies that address workflowfor Web services, and try to leverage them for Grid services, which have different needs from standard Web services. We discuss these special needs, and present the Grid Services Flow Language (GSFL), which addresses them for Grid services within the OGSA framework.
Bromodomain inhibitor OTX015 (MK-8628) combined with targeted agents shows strong in vivo antitumor activity in lymphoma

The bromodomain inhibitor OTX015 (MK-8628) has shown anti-lymphoma activity as a single agent in both the preclinical and clinical settings, as well as in vitro synergism with several anticancer agents. Here, we report in vivo data for OTX015 in combination with the histone deacetylase inhibitor vorinostat, the Bruton's tyrosine kinase inhibitor ibrutinib, the anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody rituximab, and the mTOR inhibitor everolimus in a diffuse large B cell lymphoma model. The antitumor effect of OTX015-containing combinations in SU-DHL-2 xenografts in mice was much stronger than the activity of the corresponding single agents with almost complete tumor eradication for all four combinations. Pharmacokinetic analyses showed similar OTX015 levels in plasma and tumor samples of approximately 1.5 μM, which is equivalent to the concentration showing strong in vitro activity. For all four combinations, mean terminal levels of the bromodomain inhibitor differed from those in mice exposed to single agent OTX015, indicating a need for thorough pharmacokinetic investigations in phase I combination studies. In conclusion, our results provide a strong rationale to explore OTX015-containing combinations in the clinical lymphoma setting.
Two classes of intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma defined by relative abundance of mutations and copy number alterations

Intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC) is a biliary tree-origin epithelial malignancy in liver with unfavorable clinical outcomes. Systematic genome analyses may advance our understanding of ICC pathogenesis also improving current diagnostic and therapeutic modalities. In this study, we analyzed 17 ICC tumor-vs-matched normal pairs using either whole-exome (n = 7), transcriptome sequencing (n = 7) or both platforms (n = 3). For somatic mutations, we identified recurrent mutations of previously reported genes such as KRAS, TP53, APC as well as epigenetic regulators and those of TGFβ signaling pathway. According to the abundance of somatic mutations and DNA copy number alterations (CNA), ten ICC exome cases were distinguished into two classes as those primarily driven by either somatic mutations (M class) or CNAs (C class). Compared to M class ICCs (92–147 somatic mutations; n = 5) with a relative deficit of CNAs, C class ICCs (54–84 mutations; n = 5) harbor recurrent focal CNAs including deletions involving CDKN2A, ROBO1, ROBO2, RUNX3, and SMAD4. We also show that transcriptome sequencing can be used for expression-based ICC categorization but the somatic mutation calling from the transcriptome can be heavily influenced by the gene expression level and potentially, by posttranscriptional modification such as nonsense mediated decay. Along with a substantial level of mutational heterogeneity of ICC genomes, our study reveals previously unrecognized two ICC classes defined by relative abundance of somatic mutations over CNAs or vice versa, which should be considered in the selection of genotyping platforms and sensitive screening of targets for ICC therapeutics.
Stimulus Selectivity of Drug Purchase Tasks: A Preliminary Study Evaluating Alcohol and Cigarette Demand

The use of drug purchase tasks to measure drug demand in human behavioral pharmacology and addiction research has proliferated in recent years. Few studies have systematically evaluated the stimulus selectivity of drug purchase tasks to demonstrate that demand metrics are specific to valuation of or demand for the commodity under study. Stimulus selectivity is broadly defined for this purpose as a condition under which a specific stimulus input or target (e.g., alcohol, cigarettes) is the primary determinant of behavior (e.g., demand). The overall goal of the present study was to evaluate the stimulus selectivity of drug purchase tasks. Participants were sampled from the Amazon.com’s crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk. Participants completed either alcohol and soda purchase tasks (Experiment 1; N = 139) or cigarette and chocolate purchase tasks (Experiment 2; N = 46), and demand metrics were compared to self-reported use behaviors. Demand metrics for alcohol and soda were closely associated with commodity-similar (e.g., alcohol demand and weekly alcohol use) but not commodity-different (e.g., alcohol demand and weekly soda use) variables. A similar pattern was observed for cigarette and chocolate demand, but selectivity was not as consistent as for alcohol and soda. Collectively, we observed robust selectivity for alcohol and soda purchase tasks and modest selectivity for cigarette and chocolate purchase tasks. These preliminary outcomes suggest that demand metrics adequately reflect the specific commodity under study and support the continued use of purchase tasks in substance use research.
Investigation on Seismic Behavior of KP_1 Masonry Wall Strengthened

An experiment of four KP1 masonry walls was carried out. At first, the wall was under low cycle reversal load till shear failure and then the cracked wall was strengthened with steel mesh cement mortar and tested under lower cycle reversal load. The appearance and development of cracks, failure mechanism, strength and ductility of the strengthened masonry wall was analyzed and the design method of the brick wall strengthened with steel mesh cement mortar is proposed. 
Robust Biometrics-Based Authentication Scheme for Multiserver Environment

The authentication scheme is an important cryptographic mechanism, through which two communication parties could authenticate each other in the open network environment. To satisfy the requirement of practical applications, many authentication schemes using passwords and smart cards have been proposed. However, passwords might be divulged or forgotten, and smart cards might be shared, lost, or stolen. In contrast, biometric methods, such as fingerprints or iris scans, have no such drawbacks. Therefore, biometrics-based authentication schemes gain wide attention. In this paper, we propose a biometrics-based authentication scheme for multiserver environment using elliptic curve cryptography. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed scheme is the first truly three-factor authenticated scheme for multiserver environment. We also demonstrate the completeness of the proposed scheme using the Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic.
NEW ADAPTIVE ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR MANET

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) rely on wireless connections between mobile nodes, which mean limited bandwidth & high rate of disconnections between nodes. So there is a great need for a new routing protocol that have low routing message overhead to enhance the performance of MANET. The reduction of routing message overhead will decrease the wasted portions of bandwidth that used for exchange routing messages between nodes, and increase the bandwidth available for transferring data, which in turn increases the network throughput and decreases the latency. This paper proposes a new MANET routing protocol that decreases both of the routing message overhead and the average end to end delay by on average 27.9%, 13.7% respectively less than the well known AODV routing protocol. This led to increase the throughput by 23.87% more than AODV routing protocol.
An Efficient Labelling Approach to Harness Backbone and Side-Chain Protons in 1H-Detected Solid-State NMR Spectroscopy

1H-detection can greatly improve spectral sensitivity in biological solid-state NMR (ssNMR), thus allowing the study of larger and more complex proteins. However, the general requirement to perdeuterate proteins critically curtails the potential of 1H-detection by the loss of aliphatic side-chain protons, which are important probes for protein structure and function. Introduced herein is a labelling scheme for 1H-detected ssNMR, and it gives high quality spectra for both side-chain and backbone protons, and allows quantitative assignments and aids in probing interresidual contacts. Excellent 1H resolution in membrane proteins is obtained, the topology and dynamics of an ion channel were studied. This labelling scheme will open new avenues for the study of challenging proteins by ssNMR.
Genomic toolboxes for conservation biologists

Conservation genetics is expanding its research horizon with a genomic approach, by incorporating the modern techniques of next‐generation sequencing (NGS). Application of NGS overcomes many limitations of conservation genetics. First, NGS allows for genome‐wide screening of markers, which may lead to a more representative estimation of genetic variation within and between populations. Second, NGS allows for distinction between neutral and non‐neutral markers. By screening populations on thousands of single nucleotide polymorphism markers, signals of selection can be found for some markers. Variation in these markers will give insight into functional rather than neutral genetic variation. Third, NGS facilitates the study of gene expression. Conservation genomics will increase our insight in how the environment and genes interact to affect phenotype and fitness. In addition, the NGS approach opens a way to study processes such as inbreeding depression and local adaptation mechanistically. Conservation genetics programs are directed to a fundamental understanding of the processes involved in conservation genetics and should preferably be started in species for which large databases on ecology, demography and genetics are available. Here, we describe and illustrate the connection between the application of NGS technologies and the research questions in conservation. The perspectives of conservation genomics programs are also discussed.