Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prion replication without host adaptation during interspecies transmissions

Significance To study mechanisms of interspecies prion transmission, we used transgenic mice that recapitulate natural disease susceptibilities. Predictably, prions from a particular species inefficiently caused disease in mice expressing prion proteins from different species. However, in contrast to the expected adaptation that allows efficient prion replication in the new host, we discovered a process in which pathogenic prions, despite causing disease on primary passage, failed to adapt for sustained propagation in the new host, instead preserving the strain and host range characteristics of the original prions. Our findings provide insights into how prions replicate during species transitions, help clarify unresolved epidemiological features of prion disorders, and have considerable bearing on future disease risk assessments. Adaptation of prions to new species is thought to reflect the capacity of the host-encoded cellular form of the prion protein (PrPC) to selectively propagate optimized prion conformations from larger ensembles generated in the species of origin. Here we describe an alternate replicative process, termed nonadaptive prion amplification (NAPA), in which dominant conformers bypass this requirement during particular interspecies transmissions. To model susceptibility of horses to prions, we produced transgenic (Tg) mice expressing cognate PrPC. Although disease transmission to only a subset of infected TgEq indicated a significant barrier to EqPrPC conversion, the resulting horse prions unexpectedly failed to cause disease upon further passage to TgEq. TgD expressing deer PrPC was similarly refractory to deer prions from diseased TgD infected with mink prions. In both cases, the resulting prions transmitted to mice expressing PrPC from the species of prion origin, demonstrating that transmission barrier eradication of the originating prions was ephemeral and adaptation superficial in TgEq and TgD. Horse prions produced in vitro by protein misfolding cyclic amplification of mouse prions using horse PrPC also failed to infect TgEq but retained tropism for wild-type mice. Concordant patterns of neuropathology and prion deposition in susceptible mice infected with NAPA prions and the corresponding prion of origin confirmed preservation of strain properties. The comparable responses of both prion types to guanidine hydrochloride denaturation indicated this occurs because NAPA precludes selection of novel prion conformations. Our findings provide insights into mechanisms regulating interspecies prion transmission and a framework to reconcile puzzling epidemiological features of certain prion disorders.
Augmented Reality for Exterior Construction Applications

Augmented reality (AR) constitutes a very promising new user interface concept for many applications. In this chapter, we pay particular attention to developing AR technology for exterior construction applications, augmenting video sequences from construction sites with information stored in models. Such augmentations can tremendously benefit several business processes common to many construction projects. We are focussing on two approaches to augment the reality of construction sites. The first one augments video sequences of large outdoor sceneries with detailed models of prestigious new architectures, such as TV towers and bridges. Since such video sequences are very complex, we currently pre-record the sequences and employ off-line, interactive techniques. The second approach operates on live video streams. To achieve robust real-time performance, we need to use simplified, “engineered” scenes. In particular, we place highly visible markers at precisely measured locations to aid the tracking process. In: Augmented Reality and Wearable Computers, W. Barfield und T. Caudell, eds. Lawrence Erlbaum Press, 2001. (Manuscript completed in 1998)
Investigations on Aluminium wire mesh, Banana Fiber and Glass Fiber Reinforced Hybrid Composites

Objectives: In the fiber metal laminates aluminium has been preferred choice when it comes to the selection of the type of metal to be used as reinforcement in FML, due to its easy of availability, favourable mix of mechanical characteristics and low cost. Among fibers, glass has been found out to be most reliable as it is cheaper than its counterparts, and at the same time does not compromise on its mechanical properties. Methods: The hand-layup process is employed to fabricate two types of composites: a normal GFRP and a GFRP hybrid. The hybrid, named GABGRP (glass-aluminium-banana-glassreinforced plastic) comprises of layers of both aluminium and banana fibers as reinforcements in a glass fiber-base. The aluminium in this study has been employed in two different forms: foil and wire mesh. The GABGRP has been fabricated, and subjected to material testing to find out aluminium in which form, aluminium is more suitable as a reinforcement. The fabricated materials are cut in accordance to ASTM standards and are subjected to various mechanical tests, namely tensile, flexural, impact and hardness tests. Findings: The investigation conducted on Glass-Aluminium Foil/Wire Mesh- Banana Fibre-Glass Hybrid Composites, it has been inferred that the GABGRP (with Al wire mesh) hybrid composite has the highest flexural strength among its counterparts. Also, the GABGRP (with Al wire mesh) hybrid composite has the highest tensile load capacity when compared with the other two composite types. GABGRP hybrid also has a higher toughness value than the standard GFRP. GABGRP (with Al wire mesh) also exhibits a lower hardness value, which shows that it is less brittle. Thus, it is inferred that the inclusion of banana fibers and aluminium wire mesh as reinforcements in GFRP hybrid composites influences its mechanical properties. Improvement/Applications: The inclusion of aluminium as wire mesh and banana fibers in GFRP that influences its mechanical properties, contributing towards a higher flexibility, ductility, impact and tensile properties.
A lactic acid-fermented oat gruel increases non-haem iron absorption from a phytate-rich meal in healthy women of childbearing age

Lactic acid-fermented foods have been shown to increase Fe absorption in human subjects, possibly by lowering pH, activation of phytases, and formation of soluble complexes of Fe and organic acids. We tested the effect of an oat gruel fermented with Lactobacillus plantarum 299v on non-haem Fe absorption from a low-Fe bioavailability meal compared with a pasteurised, fermented oat gruel and non-fermented oat gruels. In a cross-over trial twenty-four healthy women with a mean age of 25 (sd 4) years were served (A) fermented gruel, (B) pasteurised fermented gruel, (C) pH-adjusted non-fermented gruel, and (D) non-fermented gruel with added organic acids. The meals were extrinsically labelled with 55Fe or 59Fe and consumed on 4 consecutive days, for example, in the order ABBA or BAAB followed by CDDC or DCCD in a second period. Fe absorption was determined from isotope activities in blood samples. The fermented gruel with live L. plantarum 299v increased Fe absorption significantly (p<0·0001) compared with the pasteurised and non-fermented gruels. The lactic acid concentration in the fermented gruel was 19% higher than in the pasteurised gruel, but the Fe absorption was increased by 50%. In the gruel with organic acids, the lactic acid concentration was 52% lower than in the pasteurised gruel, with no difference in Fe absorption. The fermented gruel increased non-haem Fe absorption from a phytate-rich meal in young women, indicating a specific effect of live L. plantarum 299v and not only an effect of the organic acids.
Filtering the big data based on volume, variety and velocity by using Kalman filter recursive approach

For the past seven decades the term Big Data is known, but due to the emerging technology shift of this era, it is captivating a lot of attention from the researchers of mathematics, computing, telecommunication, information technology, data warehousing, and mining. As this generation is living in the age of technology where data is playing a vital role and especially the Big Data has lots of success stories, but at the same time it is becoming the biggest threat to network service provider, telecom industry, and homeland security. Every device such as smart phones, laptop, desktop, etc. connected with the network is contributing to add data to a Big Data pool by using different applications. Social media such as Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Apple, Google, Google+, Twitter, Flickr, etc. are few famous tools which are used to add redundant data. The question appears, is it mandatory to store and especially process all the data either useful or redundant? This research paper is focusing for filtering useful data from redundant data by using their parameters which are velocity, variety, and volume. In proposed architecture, Memcache DB (for velocity), Voldemort layers (for variety) and MapReduce (for volume) are linked with Hadoop to achieve filtered data. Kalman filter recursive approach is used to inject the data back into Hadoop Distributed File System to reduce processing cost of next iterations.
Classifying malware using convolutional gated neural network

Malware or Malicious Software, are an important threat to information technology society. Deep Neural Network has been recently achieving a great performance for the tasks of malware detection and classification. In this paper, we propose a convolutional gated recurrent neural network model that is capable of classifying malware to their respective families. The model is applied to a set of malware divided into 9 different families and that have been proposed during the Microsoft Malware Classification Challenge in 2015. The model shows an accuracy of 92.6% on the available dataset.
Employing Opportunistic Charging for Electric Taxicabs to Reduce Idle Time

For electric taxicabs, the idle time spent on cruising for passengers, seeking chargers, and charging is wasteful. Previous works can only save cruising time through better routing, or charger seeking and charging time through proper charger deployment, but not for both. With the advancement of wireless charging techniques, efficient opportunistic charging of electric vehicles at their parked positions becomes possible. This enables a taxicab to get charged while waiting for the next passenger. In this paper, we present an opportunistic wireless charger deployment scheme in a city, which both maximizes the taxicabs' opportunity of picking up passengers at the chargers and supports the taxicabs' continuous operability on roads, while minimizing the total deployment cost. We studied a metropolitan-scale taxicab dataset on several factors important for deploying wireless chargers and determining the numbers of the chargers in the regions: the number of passengers, the functionalities of buildings, and the frequency of passenger appearance in a region, and taxicab traffic flows in a city. Then, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem and find the solution. Our trace-driven experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our scheme over other representative methods in terms of reducing idle time and supporting the operability of the taxicabs.
Chronic effects of non‐weathered and weathered crude oil and dispersant associated with the Deepwater Horizon incident on development of larvae of the eastern oyster, Crassostrea virginica

The present study examined the effects of chronic exposure of eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) larvae to the water‐accommodated fractions of fresh and weathered oils collected from the Deepwater Horizon incident, with and without additions of the dispersant Corexit 9500A, as well as to solutions of Corexit alone. Both shell growth of larvae exposed to test materials for a period of 10 d and larval settlement after 28 d of exposure were the most sensitive endpoints, with the 10‐d growth endpoint being less variable among replicates. Growth and settlement endpoints were more sensitive than larval survival and normal development after 10 d and 28 d. Acute‐to‐chronic ratios calculated in the present study suggest that acute toxicities of oils and dispersant for oysters are not predictive of chronic effect levels for growth and settlement; therefore, chronic bioassays are necessary to assess these sublethal effects, in addition to standard 48‐h acute toxicity tests. Comparison of 10% effective concentration (EC10) values for chronic 10‐d growth and 28‐d settlement endpoints with concentrations of total polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and dipropylene glycol n‐butyl ether (a marker for Corexit) in seawater samples, collected during and after the Deepwater Horizon incident, indicated it was unlikely that elevated concentrations of water‐soluble fractions of oil and dispersant in the nearshore environment had significant adverse effects on the growth and settlement of eastern oyster larvae. Environ Toxicol Chem 2016;35:2029–2040. © 2016 SETAC
On the performance of a viscoelastic constitutive model for micro injection moulding simulations

The numerical simulation of the injection moulding process involving microstructures presents several chal- lenges, mainly due to the surface effects that dominate the flow behaviour at the microscale. In this paper a new approach, which employs weld lines as flow markers, is used to evaluate whether the numerical codes that are normally used to sim- ulate the conventional injection moulding process, are suitable to characterize the melt flow patterns in the filling of micro features. The Cross-WLF viscous model and the Giesekus viscoelastic model were evaluated using 3D models of a micro part implemented in two different numerical codes. A micro cavity was designed in order to compare the results of numer- ical simulations and experiments. While the viscous simulations were found to be inappropriate for multi-scale structures, the accuracy of micro filling predictions was significantly improved by implementing a viscoelastic material model.
Invisibility: A moving-object removal approach for dynamic scene modelling using RGB-D camera

Scene modelling is of great importance for robots in unknown environments. Existing Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (Visual SLAM) approaches are able to build impressive scene models using RGB-D cameras in static scenes. In dynamic scenes, however, moving objects can be recorded as spurious objects, which contaminates the resulting scene models. In order to build clear scene models, we propose a novel moving-object removal approach for scene modelling algorithms in this paper. Our approach does not rely on prior knowledge, such as appearance features or initial segmentation. In addition, the proposed approach does not require an initialization process, which is different from most background subtraction algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach is able to effectively remove moving objects and assist scene modelling algorithms to build clear models in dynamic scenes.
Incorporating Social Context and Domain Knowledge for Entity Recognition

Recognizing entity instances in documents according to a knowledge base is a fundamental problem in many data mining applications. The problem is extremely challenging for short documents in complex domains such as social media and biomedical domains. Large concept spaces and instance ambiguity are key issues that need to be addressed. Most of the documents are created in a social context by common authors via social interactions, such as reply and citations. Such social contexts are largely ignored in the instance-recognition literature. How can users' interactions help entity instance recognition? How can the social context be modeled so as to resolve the ambiguity of different instances? In this paper, we propose the SOCINST model to formalize the problem into a probabilistic model. Given a set of short documents (e.g., tweets or paper abstracts) posted by users who may connect with each other, SOCINST can automatically construct a context of subtopics for each instance, with each subtopic representing one possible meaning of the instance. The model is also able to incorporate social relationships between users to help build social context. We further incorporate domain knowledge into the model using a Dirichlet tree distribution. We evaluate the proposed model on three different genres of datasets: ICDM'12 Contest, Weibo, and I2B2. In ICDM'12 Contest, the proposed model clearly outperforms (+21.4%; $p l 1e-5 with t-test) all the top contestants. In Weibo and I2B2, our results also show that the recognition accuracy of SOCINST is up to 5.3-26.6% better than those of several alternative methods.
A detailed analysis of OpenMP runtime configurations for power constrained systems

Application level power budget allocation is one way to overcome the power constraint problem in future HPC systems. This technique mainly depends on finding an optimal number of compute nodes and power level for each node. However, utilizing that power at node level requires optimization of the underlying programming model. OpenMP is the defacto standard for intra-node parallelism. In this paper, we investigate the impact of OpenMP runtime environment on the performance of OpenMP code at the different power level. We studied 28 OpenMP parallel regions from five NAS Parallel Benchmark (NPB) applications. Based on the study we show that for a given power level, a suitable selection of OpenMP runtime parameters can improve the execution time and energy consumption of a parallel region up to 67% and 72%, respectively. We also show that these fine grain improvements resulted in upto 26% execution time and 38% energy consumption improvement for a given OpenMP application.
Model-based optimization of the energy efficiency of multi-threaded applications

Energy efficiency is considered to be a critical concern for modern hardware and a variety of hardware features have been developed to improve the energy balance for executing applications. This article focuses on the dynamic voltage frequency scaling (DVFS) technique, which is available for many platforms, including CPUs and GPUs. Analytical models for capturing the energy efficiency are considered and it is investigated whether such an analytical model is able to support an a priori selection of the operational frequency that leads to a near optimal energy consumption for the application code to be executed. Also the energy-delay product (EDP) is investigated, weighting the power against the square of execution time. The experimental evaluation is performed on the basis of the multi-threaded PARSEC benchmarks. We show that the operational frequency selected according to the analytical models leads to an energy consumption that is near the minimum energy consumption over all frequencies available.
Nano Molding Technology for Optical Storage Media with Large-Area Nano-Pattern

Nano hot or thermal embossing has many advantages of comparatively few process steps, simple operation, relatively low tooling cost and high replication accuracy for small features. However, because of its long processing time, it has been known as being less competitive than nano injection molding. In order to overcome the weakness of long processing time, the high speed nano hot embossing system has been developed and its characteristics were investigated. Nanopatterned stampers made of Ni and Si were fabricated by the laser mastering and electroforming process and the DRIE and LPCVD or thermal oxidation process respectively. In order to make the processing time shorter and get relatively higher aspect ratio nano/micro features, especially, the temperatures of the molds were controlled actively and precisely during the embossing process. Through various experiments, nano embossing parameters, such as temperature, pressure and processing time, are optimized and the high aspect ratio nano features could be obtained.
The effects of health facility access and quality on family planning decisions in urban Senegal

Abstract Research in developing countries is rarely focused on examining how supply side factors affect family planning decisions due to a lack of facility‐level data. When these data exist, analyses tend to focus on rural environments. In this paper, we study the effects that health facility access and quality have on contraceptive use and desired number of children for women in urban Senegal. Unlike related studies focusing on rural environments, we find no evidence that greater access to health facilities and pharmacies increases contraceptive use among urban women. However, we do find that contraceptive use among urban women is higher with greater facility quality. For example, we find that increasing the proportion of pharmacies employing multiple pharmacists from 0% to 50% would increase contraceptive use by 6.0 percentage points, and increasing the proportion of facilities with family planning guidelines/protocols from 50% to 100% would increase use by 2.1 percentage points.
Isolation and Genetic Characteristics of Human Genotype 1 Japanese Encephalitis Virus, China, 2009

Background Several studies have shown that the predominant genotype of Chinese Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) is evolving from genotype 3 to genotype 1. However, in recent years, almost all genotype 1 isolates were from mosquitoes, and genotype 1 has been less associated with human disease than genotype 3. This study reports the isolation of human genotype 1 JEV and its genetic characteristics to provide additional insights into human JE pathogens that are currently circulating in China. Methods and Results In 2009, 31 cerebrospinal fluid samples were collected from patients living in Yunnan and Shanxi provinces and were used to inoculate Aedes albopictus C6/36 cells for virus isolation. The JEV strains were identified using immunofluorescent assays and the reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction. Phylogenetic analyses based on the partial capsid/pre-membrane and full envelope (E) sequences were performed using Clustalx 1.8 software. Three JEV isolates were obtained from a 4-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy living in Yunnan and an 82-year-old woman in Shanxi. The boy had been immunized with one dose of JE live attenuated vaccine. New isolates were grouped into genotype 1. Amino acid sequence for the viral E protein indicated 95% to 100% identity with each other and with other JEV strains. When compared with a consensus sequence of E protein, two amino acid substitutions were found: SerE-123-Asn in the two Yunnan isolates and LysE-166-Arg in the Shanxi isolate. Conclusions Our findings indicate that the genotype 1 of JEV is causing human infections in China. Our observation of a previously vaccinated boy developing JE from genotype 1 virus infection also calls for more detailed studies, both in vitro and in vivo neutralization tests as well as active surveillance, to examine the possibility of a lack of complete protection conferred by the live attenuated JE vaccine against genotype 1 virus.
Interspecific Killing among Mammalian Carnivores

Interspecific killing among mammalian carnivores is common in nature and accounts for up to 68% of known mortalities in some species. Interactions may be symmetrical (both species kill each other) or asymmetrical (one species kills the other), and in some interactions adults of one species kill young but not adults of the other. There is a positive significant relationship between the body masses of solitary killer species and body masses of their victim species, and grouping species kill larger victims than solitary species. Interactions and consumption of the victim appear more common when food is scarce or disputed. In response to killers, victim species may alter their use of space, activity patterns, and form groups. Consequences of interspecific killing include population reduction or even extinction, and reduction and enhancement of prey populations, and may therefore have important implications for conservation and management of carnivores and their prey.