Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Insight into the mechanism of modulated syntheses: in situ synchrotron diffraction studies on the formation of Zr-fumarate MOF

In this work, the formation of a Zr-based metal–organic framework (MOF), Zr-fumarate MOF (Zr-fum MOF), is studied in situ by energy-dispersive diffraction. The Zr-fum MOF can be synthesised in DMF as well as in water-based synthesis systems. In both cases, its formation requires modulation, i.e. a monocarboxylic acid which is used as the modulator has to be added to the synthesis mixture. In general, different mechanisms of modulation are possible, for example, deprotonation of the linker molecule (deprotonation modulation) or coordination modulation (wherein the molecules of the modulator compete with the linker molecules for the coordination sites at the inorganic building units). Independently of the specific mechanism, modulation often improves the reproducibility of the MOF synthesis and the crystallinity of the product and may be used to control crystal size and morphology. This study is the first to investigate the kinetics of modulated MOF syntheses with regard to coordination modulation. According to this concept, the addition of a modulator usually decelerates the reaction. Our kinetic investigations show that this is the case for the formation of Zr-fum MOF in the water-based synthesis with formic acid used as a modulator. On the contrary, the addition of formic acid to the DMF-based synthesis results in an accelerating effect. This unexpected effect can be attributed to a small amount of water present in formic acid. Correspondingly, the addition of water to the synthesis mixture also showed an accelerating effect. These investigations emphasise the subtle interplay of the different ingredients in a MOF synthesis. In the case of the Zr-fum MOF, both the modulator formic acid and the water content strongly affect the kinetics of crystallisation. Quantitative evaluation of the kinetic data using the Gualtieri equation provides additional insight into the mechanisms of coordination-modulated MOF formation reactions and excludes the idea of deprotonation modulation.
Comprehensive analysis of long noncoding RNA and mRNA expression patterns in sheep testicular maturation†

Abstract Long noncoding RNAs (LncRNAs) have been identified as important regulators of testis development; however, their expression patterns and roles in sheep are not yet clear. Thus, we used stranded specific RNA-seq to profile the testis transcriptome (lncRNAs and mRNAs) in premature and mature sheep. Hormone levels and the testis index were examined, and histological analyses were performed at five stages of testis development, 5-day-old (D5), 3-month-old (3M), 6-month-old (6M), 9-month-old (9M), and 2-year-old (2Y), the results of which indicate a significant difference in hormone levels and testis morphometries between the 3M and 9M stages (P < 0.05). Based on the comparison between 3M and 9M samples, we found 1,118 differentially expressed (DE) lncRNAs and 7,253 DE mRNAs in the testes, and qRT-PCR analysis showed that the results correlated well with the transcriptome data. Furthermore, we constructed lncRNA–protein-coding gene interaction networks. Forty-seven DE lncRNA-targeted genes enriched for male reproduction were obtained by cis- and trans-acting; 51 DE lncRNAs and 45 cis-targets, 2 DE lncRNAs and 2 trans-targets were involved in this network. Of these, 5 lncRNAs and their targets, PRKCD, NANOS3, SERPINA5, and CYP19A1, were enriched for spermatogenesis and male gonad development signaling pathways. We further examined the expression levels of 5 candidate lncRNAs and their target genes during testis development. Lastly, the interaction of lncRNA TCONS 00863147 and its target gene PRKCD was validated in vitro in sheep Leydig cells. This study provides a valuable resource for further study of lncRNA function in sheep testis development and spermatogenesis. Summary Sentence The lncRNA profiles during Sheep testicular maturation.
Bread type intake is associated with lifestyle and diet quality transition among Bedouin Arab adults

The traditionally semi-nomadic Bedouin Arabs in Israel are undergoing urbanisation with concurrent lifestyle changes, including a shift to using unfortified white-flour bread instead of wholewheat bread as the main dietary staple. We explored associations between the transition from wholewheat to white-flour bread and (1) lifestyle factors, (2) overall diet quality, and (3) health status. We conducted a nutrition survey among 451 Bedouin adults, using a modified 24 h recall questionnaire. Bread intake accounted for 32·7 % of the total energy intake. Those consuming predominantly white bread (PWB) (n 327) were more likely to be urban (OR 2·79; 95 % CI 1·70, 4·58), eating store-bought rather than homemade bread (OR 8·18; 95 % CI 4·34, 15·41) and currently dieting (OR 4·67; 95 % CI 1·28, 17·11) than those consuming predominantly wholewheat bread (PWWB) (n 124). PWB consumption was associated with a lower intake of dietary fibre (23·3 (se 0·6) v. 41·8 (se 1·0) g/d; P ≤ 0·001), a higher intake of saturated fats (26·9 v. 24·6 % of total fat; P = 0·013) and lower intakes of Fe (11·0 (se 0·3) v. 16·7 (se 0·4) mg/d), Mg (262·2 (se 5·9) v. 490·3 (se 9·8) mg/d), vitamin E (6·5 (se 0·2) v. 8·6 (se 0·3) mg/d) and most B vitamins than PWWB consumption (P < 0·001 for all), after adjusting for total energy intake. Among those aged ≥ 40 years, PWB consumption was associated with a 9·85-fold risk (95 % CI 2·64, 36·71; P = 0·001) of having one or more chronic conditions, as compared with PWWB consumption, after controlling for other risk factors. White bread intake was associated with a less traditional lifestyle and poorer diet quality, and may constitute a useful marker for at-risk subgroups to target for nutritional interventions.
Identification of 3- deoxyanthocyanins from red sorghum ( Sorghum bicolor ) bran and its biological properties

Anthocyanins known as potent antioxidant provides attractive colours and used as an ingredient in food systems. This study aims to evaluate a potential anthocyanin extraction method from red sorghum bran and to investigate its antioxidant and cytotoxic properties. The anthocyanin content was found to be higher in acidified methanol and on separation was identified as apigeninidin and leuteolinidin, which obviously could attribute to its antioxidant properties and cytotoxic activity. Anthocyanins are natural pigments used as food additives and known for its potent antioxidant and antiproliferative property. In addition to their potential as food colorants, anthocyanins are nowadays regarded as an important nutraceuticals mainly due to their possible antioxidant effects and they have been given a potential therapeutic role related to some cardiovascular diseases, cancer treatment, inhibition of certain types of virus including Human Immunodeficiency Virus type 1 (HIV-1) and improvement of visual acuity (Stintzing et al., 2002; Talavera et al., 2006; Sandvik et al., 2004; Beattie et al., 2005; Jang et al., 2005; Cooke et al., 2005; Andersen et al., 1997; Nakaishi et al., 2000). This study aims to evaluate anthocyanin content, to analyze antioxidant and antipropliferative activity from red sorghum bran. When acidified methanol was used as a solvent for extraction, maximum amount of anthocyanin was obtained as compared to methanol alone. On separation by Thin Layer Chromatography and High Pressure Liquid Chromatography, the compounds were identified as apigenindin and luteolindin. The antioxidant activity was found to be higher in red sorghum bran. Anthocyanin from red sorghum bran also showed moderate cytotoxic activity against HT 29 and HEP G2 cell lines. Is assumed that the antioxidant and antiproliferative activity of the extract from red sorghum bran was due to apigenindin and luteolindin. So the anthocyanins extracted from easily available red sorghum bran would be a valuable source for antioxidant and antiproliferative activity in food industry.
Influence of the Al2O3 Solid Phase on the Kinetics of Binding Ceramic Moulds

The investigation results of the kinetics of binding ceramic moulds, in dependence on the solid phase content in the liquid ceramic slurries being 67, 68 and 69% - respectively, made on the basis of the aqueous binding agents Ludox AM and SK. The ultrasonic method was used for assessing the kinetics of strengthening of the multilayer ceramic mould. Due to this method, it is possible to determine the ceramic mould strength at individual stages of its production. Currently self-supporting moulds, which must have the relevant strength during pouring with liquid metal, are mainly produced. A few various factors influence this mould strength. One of them is the ceramic slurry viscosity, which influences a thickness of individual layers deposited on the wax model in the investment casting technology. Depositing of layers causes increasing the total mould thickness. Therefore, it is important to determine the drying time of each deposited layer in order to prevent the mould cracking due to insufficient drying of layers and thus the weakening of the multilayer mould structure. Ultrasonic tests, Ceramic moulds, Aqueous binders
Fish oil-derived n-3 PUFA therapy increases muscle mass and function in healthy older adults.

BACKGROUND Age-associated declines in muscle mass and function are major risk factors for an impaired ability to carry out activities of daily living, falls, prolonged recovery time after hospitalization, and mortality in older adults. New strategies that can slow the age-related loss of muscle mass and function are needed to help older adults maintain adequate performance status to reduce these risks and maintain independence. OBJECTIVE We evaluated the efficacy of fish oil-derived n-3 (ω-3) PUFA therapy to slow the age-associated loss of muscle mass and function. DESIGN Sixty healthy 60-85-y-old men and women were randomly assigned to receive n-3 PUFA (n = 40) or corn oil (n = 20) therapy for 6 mo. Thigh muscle volume, handgrip strength, one-repetition maximum (1-RM) lower- and upper-body strength, and average power during isokinetic leg exercises were evaluated before and after treatment. RESULTS Forty-four subjects completed the study [29 subjects (73%) in the n-3 PUFA group; 15 subjects (75%) in the control group]. Compared with the control group, 6 mo of n-3 PUFA therapy increased thigh muscle volume (3.6%; 95% CI: 0.2%, 7.0%), handgrip strength (2.3 kg; 95% CI: 0.8, 3.7 kg), and 1-RM muscle strength (4.0%; 95% CI: 0.8%, 7.3%) (all P < 0.05) and tended to increase average isokinetic power (5.6%; 95% CI: -0.6%, 11.7%; P = 0.075). CONCLUSION Fish oil-derived n-3 PUFA therapy slows the normal decline in muscle mass and function in older adults and should be considered a therapeutic approach for preventing sarcopenia and maintaining physical independence in older adults. This study was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT01308957.
A New Unbiased Stochastic Derivative Estimator for Discontinuous Sample Performances with Structural Parameters

In this paper, we propose a new unbiased stochastic derivative estimator in a framework that can handle discontinuous sample performances with structural parameters. This work extends the three most popular unbiased stochastic derivative estimators: (1) infinitesimal perturbation analysis (IPA), (2) the likelihood ratio (LR) method, and (3) the weak derivative method, to a setting where they did not previously apply. Examples in probability constraints, control charts, and financial derivatives demonstrate the broad applicability of the proposed framework. The new estimator preserves the single-run efficiency of the classic IPA-LR estimators in applications, which is substantiated by numerical experiments. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2017. 1674.
Re-evaluation of the discriminatory power of DNA barcoding on some specimens of African Cyprinidae (subfamilies Cyprininae and Danioninae)

Abstract Specimen identification in the absence of diagnostic morphological characters (e.g., larvae) can be problematic even for experts. The goal of the present study was to assess the performance of COI in discriminating specimens of the fish family Cyprinidae in Africa, and to explore whether COI-phylogeny can be reliably used for phylogenetic comparative analysis. The main objective was to analyse a matrix of COI sequences for 315 specimens from 15 genera of African Cyprinidae using various distance-based identification methods alongside multiple tests of DNA barcode efficacy (barcode gap, species monophyly on NJ tree). Some morphological and biological characters were also mapped on a COI-phylogeny reconstructed using Maximum Parsimony. First, the results indicated the existence of barcode gaps, a discriminatory power of COI ranging from 79 % to 92 %, and that most nodes form well-supported monophyletic clades on an NJ tree. Second, it was found that some morphological and biological characters are clustered on the COI-phylogeny, and this indicates the reliability of these characters for taxonomic discrimination within the family. Put together, our results provide not only an additional support for the COI as a good barcode marker for the African Cyprinidae but it also indicate the utility of COI-based phylogenies for a wide spectrum of ecological questions related to African Cyprinidae.
The Impact of Capital Market Integration on Educational Choice and the Consequences for Economic Growth

This paper examines the impact of capital market integration on higher education and the link to economic growth. The analysis takes into account that participation in higher education is non-compulsory and depends on individual choice. Due to capital–skill complementarity, integration increases (reduces) the incentives to participate in higher education in capital-importing (-exporting) economies, all other things equal. From a national policy point of view, public education expenditure should increase after integration of similar economies in order to attract mobile capital. Using foreign direct investment as a measure of capital flows, we present empirical evidence which largely confirms our main hypothesis: an increase in net capital inflows in response to capital market integration raises participation in higher education. In addition, we show that the adjustment in educational attainment is an empirically relevant channel through which capital inflows foster economic growth.
Accurate estimation of influenza epidemics using Google search data via ARGO

Significance Big data generated from the Internet have great potential in tracking and predicting massive social activities. In this article, we focus on tracking influenza epidemics. We propose a model that utilizes publicly available Google search data to estimate current influenza-like illness activity level. Our model outperforms all available Google-search–based real-time tracking models for influenza epidemics at the national level of the United States, including Google Flu Trends. Our model is flexible, self-correcting, robust, and scalable, making it a potentially powerful tool that can be used for estimation and prediction at multiple temporal and spatial resolutions for other social events. Accurate real-time tracking of influenza outbreaks helps public health officials make timely and meaningful decisions that could save lives. We propose an influenza tracking model, ARGO (AutoRegression with GOogle search data), that uses publicly available online search data. In addition to having a rigorous statistical foundation, ARGO outperforms all previously available Google-search–based tracking models, including the latest version of Google Flu Trends, even though it uses only low-quality search data as input from publicly available Google Trends and Google Correlate websites. ARGO not only incorporates the seasonality in influenza epidemics but also captures changes in people’s online search behavior over time. ARGO is also flexible, self-correcting, robust, and scalable, making it a potentially powerful tool that can be used for real-time tracking of other social events at multiple temporal and spatial resolutions.
Phylogenetic mixture models for proteins

Standard protein substitution models use a single amino acid replacement rate matrix that summarizes the biological, chemical and physical properties of amino acids. However, site evolution is highly heterogeneous and depends on many factors: genetic code; solvent exposure; secondary and tertiary structure; protein function; etc. These impact the substitution pattern and, in most cases, a single replacement matrix is not enough to represent all the complexity of the evolutionary processes. This paper explores in maximum-likelihood framework phylogenetic mixture models that combine several amino acid replacement matrices to better fit protein evolution. We learn these mixture models from a large alignment database extracted from HSSP, and test the performance using independent alignments from TreeBase. We compare unsupervised learning approaches, where the site categories are unknown, to supervised ones, where in estimations we use the known category of each site, based on its exposure or its secondary structure. All our models are combined with gamma-distributed rates across sites. Results show that highly significant likelihood gains are obtained when using mixture models compared with the best available single replacement matrices. Mixtures of matrices also improve over mixtures of profiles in the manner of the CAT model. The unsupervised approach tends to be better than the supervised one, but it appears difficult to implement and highly sensitive to the starting values of the parameters, meaning that the supervised approach is still of interest for initialization and model comparison. Using an unsupervised model involving three matrices, the average AIC gain per site with TreeBase test alignments is 0.31, 0.49 and 0.61 compared with LG (named after Le & Gascuel 2008 Mol. Biol. Evol. 25, 1307–1320), WAG and JTT, respectively. This three-matrix model is significantly better than LG for 34 alignments (among 57), and significantly worse for 1 alignment only. Moreover, tree topologies inferred with our mixture models frequently differ from those obtained with single matrices, indicating that using these mixtures impacts not only the likelihood value but also the output tree. All our models and a PhyML implementation are available from http://atgc.lirmm. fr/mixtures.
Securing display path for security-sensitive applications on mobile devices

While smart devices based on ARM processor bring us a lot of convenience, they also become an attractive target of cyber-attacks. The threat is exaggerated as commodity OSes usually have a large code base and suffer from various software vulnerabilities. Nowadays, adversaries prefer to steal sensitive data by leaking the content of display output by a security-sensitive applications. A promising solution is to exploit the hardware visualization extensions provided by modern ARM processors to construct a secure display path between the applications and the display device. In this work, we present a scheme named SecDisplay for trusted display service, it protects sensitive data displayed from being stolen or tampered surreptitiously by a compromised OS. The TCB of SecDisplay mainly consists of a tiny hypervisor and a super light-weight rendering painter, and has only ~1400 lines of code. We implemented a prototype of SecDisplay and evaluated its performance overhead. The results show that SecDisplay only incurs an average drop of 3.4%.
Face verification using sparse representations

We propose a face verification framework using sparse representations that integrates two ways of employing sparsity. Given an image pair (A, B) and a dictionary D, for image A(B), we generate two sparse codes, one by using the original dictionary and the other by adding B(A) into D as an augmented dictionary. Then the correlation of the sparse codes of A and B, both under the original dictionary D, measuring how similar the pair is, is referred to as the similarity score. The dissimilarity of the sparse codes of A(B), respectively under D and D+B(A), is referred to as the dissimilarity score. We exploit multiple feature transforms to obtain several scores using these two measures and fuse them by simple averaging for the situation where no training set is available or by an SVM when a training set is given. We evaluate our algorithm on the LFW dataset, where it is shown to outperform state-of-the-art methods in the unsupervised setting by a large margin and delivers very comparable performance to methods in the image restricted setting despite its simplicity.
Evaluation of anxiolytic activity of ethanolic extracts from the leaves of Trichosanthes cucumerina L. in mice

The present study was undertaken to evaluate the anxiolytic activity of ethanolic extract of leaves of Trichosanthes cucumerina L. in mice. The anxiolytic activity was evaluated by Elevated plus maze, Y-maze, Hole-board, Actophotometer, and Marble-burying behavior models. The efficacy of the extract (200 and 400 mg/kg, p. o) was compared with the standard anxiolytic drugs Diazepam (2 mg/kg, p. o) and Fluoxetine(10mg/kg, p. o). The result showed that the extract significantly increased the number of entries and time spent in the open arm in the elevated plus maze. The results also showed that the extract significantly increased the number of head dipping and line crossing, decreased the numbers of visits to the three arms, locomotor score and number of marble-buried in Hole-board, Y-maze, Actophotometer and Marble-Burying Behavior Model respectively. Present study confirms that the extract showed significant anxiolytic activity at both dose levels which is comparable with standard anxiolytics drug Diazepam.
Novel Nondestructive Measurement of Dye Adsorption on Solid Titania Films for Its Sensitized Solar Cells

A new nondestructive quantitative method is developed to measure the adsorption of dyes in solid titania films for dye-sensitized solar cells. UV-vis spectroscopy study showed that the absorbance of dye in the solid film can be directly related to the absorbance measured by the typical destructive method used to quantify concentration. Concentrations of N-719 and N-749 dyes on solid titania films were successfully extracted using molar extinction coefficients of dye on solid titania films with value of 6916 and 6454 L·cmˉ1·molˉ1 respectively determined using the spectral peaks at 512 and 586 nm.