Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The complete chloroplast genome sequence of the mulberry Morus notabilis (Moreae)

Abstract The complete chloroplast genome of the mulberry Morus notabilis (Moreae) has been reconstructed from the whole-genome Illumina sequencing data. The circular genome is 158,680 bp in size, and comprises a pair of inverted repeat (IR) regions of 25,717 bp each, a large single-copy (LSC) region of 87,470 bp and a small single-copy (SSC) region of 19,776 bp. The total A+T content is 63.6%, while the corresponding values of the LSC, SSC and IR region are 65.9%, 70.7% and 57.1%, respectively. The chloroplast genome contains 129 genes, including 84 protein-coding genes (PCGs), eight ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes and 37 transfer RNA (tRNA) genes. The maximum likelihood (ML) phylogenetic analysis revealed that M. notabilis was more related to its congeners than to the others.
Protective effect of lipid microspheres 1 on myocardial injury following elective percutaneous coronary intervention in patients with angina pectoris: a pilot study

Background Prostaglandin E1 incorporated into lipid microspheres (lipo-PGE1) is effective in the treatment of peripheral vascular disorders and diabetic neuropathy. It is unknown whether it has protective effects in patients with angina pectoris undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). Objectives The goal of this pilot study was to investigate whether lipo-PGE1 has protective effects in patients with angina pectoris undergoing PCI. Methods A single-blinded, randomized controlled trial was conducted in 79 patients with stable or unstable angina pectoris. The control group received standard medical therapy, and the Lipo-PGE1 group (n = 40) received 20 &mgr;g/day of lipo-PGE1 intravenously, starting at least 48 h before PCI and continuing for 5 days. Cardiac troponin T (cTnT) and creatine kinase myocardial isoenzyme (CK-MB) were measured before lipo-PGE1 infusion and at 6, 12 and 24 h after PCI. Results The cTnT and CK-MB concentrations were lower in the lipo-PGE1 group than in the control group at 6 h (0.15 ± 0.33 vs. 0.43 ± 0.77; 2.87 ± 3.99 vs. 5.64 ± 6.27, respectively; P < 0.05), 12 h (0.20 ± 0.48 vs. 0.54 ± 0.85; 3.58 ± 5.22 vs. 7.45 ± 9.48; P < 0.05) and 24 h (0.18 ± 0.50 vs. 0.50 ± 0.75; 3.15 ± 4.50 vs. 6.16 ± 6.83; P < 0.05). The incidence of postprocedural myocardial injury, defined as an elevation of cTnT more than 0.1 ng/ml or CK-MB more than 5.0 ng/ml, was less in the PGE1 group than in the control group (30 vs. 54%; 13 vs. 31%, respectively; P < 0.05). Lipo-PGE1 was well tolerated and there were no serious adverse events or side-effects. Conclusions Lipo-PGE1 treatment appears to reduce myocardial injury following elective PCI in angina patients.
Developing Gonads and Lead Exposure

Reproductive toxicants can impair reproduction by acting on the development of the male and female. Reproductive toxicants can produce their adverse effects on reproductive axis by several direct and indirect mechanisms. There has been growing concern about human reproductive disruption by xenobiotics including drugs, occupational, and environmental exposures of toxicant. The present work is carried out to study the lead toxicity in experimental Swiss albino male and female mice. Lead acetate was given (640mg/kg/BW) to pregnant Swiss mice during gestation and lactation period. The results indicated that exposure of lead caused a significant alteration in development of gonads at different dose levels of lead acetate. Lead acetate alters the histology of developing testes as well as ovary. In present investigation it is observed that lead acetate given in high dose caused decreased body weight of developing pups in experimental groups as compared to control pups. Microscopic examination revealed that lead induced apparent damage and reduction in the number of seminiferous tubules and primordial germ cells. Studies conducted on females revealed mostly miscarriages, premature delivery and infant mortality. Lead suppresses the development of primordial follicles during foetal and neonatal life. Changes in the number of primordial, primary and secondary follicles were also observed. We can conclude from our findings that lead acetate administrated during gestation and lactation adversely affects developing testis as well as ovary of Swiss mice.
Passively Track WiFi Users With an Enhanced Particle Filter Using Power-Based Ranging

Passive positioning systems produce user location information for third-party providers of positioning services. In this paper, we provide a passive tracking system for WiFi signals with an enhanced range-only particle filter using fine-grained power. Our proposed particle filter, WVT-bootstrap particle filter, provides improved observation likelihood and is equipped with a single coordinated turn model to address the challenges in passive positioning. The anchor nodes for WiFi signal sniffing use software defined radio techniques to extract channel state information for multipath mitigation and a non-linear regression method is used for the path-loss model. Our tracking system produces measured positioning errors that, in the 80th percentile, are equal to or less than 2 m; this represents a 33% improvement over the traditional bootstrap particle filter. Additionally, it requires (0.12 s for 1000 particles) only half of the computation efforts as a multi-model particle filter.
Ring melanoma—a rare cause of refractory glaucoma

BACKGROUND Ring melanoma of the ciliary body and iris is extremely rare and often has adverse histology. This tumour may cause raised intraocular pressure. METHODS A review of four cases of ring melanomas with insidious presentations seen in the ocular oncology service over a 12 month period. RESULTS All four patients presented with unilateral anterior segment abnormalities and refractory glaucoma. The misdiagnoses of the causes of the glaucoma included angle recession from previous blunt trauma (patient 1); iridocorneal endothelial (ICE) syndrome supported by endothelial specular microscopy (patients 2 and 3); and melanocytoma on ciliary body biopsy (patient 4). Two patients were treated by several cyclodiode ciliary body ablation treatments and the other two underwent trabeculectomies and Molteno tubes. Two of the four patients have since died from their disease. CONCLUSION The ophthalmologist should re-evaluate the diagnosis in patients with anterior segment abnormalities and refractory ipsilateral glaucoma. Endothelial specular microscopy and biopsy of the suspicious lesion may give misleading reassurance. The potential presence of an anterior uveal melanoma must always be considered.
Novel acoustic features for automatic dialog-act tagging

This paper presents 57 new acoustic features for automatic dialog-act tagging. The features are intended to be richer than and complementary to the traditional cumulative statistics of intonation. Some of our novel contributions include feature normalization with respect to neighboring utterances, incorporation of periodicity and formant features, modeling of cognitive phenomena such as hesitations, and utterance-level aggregation of short-term acoustic effects. The proposed features are applied to 3-way dialog-act tagging and question detection using two databases (British-English call-center conversations and Switchboard), and compared with a popular cumulative-statistics baseline using logistic-regression models. Our features are found to be significantly better than and complementary to the baseline, on average, achieving an absolute performance gain of ~5-6%. Combined feature ranking reveals that about 75% of the top 20 features belong to the proposed feature set, and that the two corpora differ in their feature preferences despite similar overall performance.
Recent changes in Antarctic Sea Ice

In contrast to the Arctic, total sea ice extent (SIE) across the Southern Ocean has increased since the late 1970s, with the annual mean increasing at a rate of 186×103 km2 per decade (1.5% per decade; p<0.01) for 1979–2013. However, this overall increase masks larger regional variations, most notably an increase (decrease) over the Ross (Amundsen–Bellingshausen) Sea. Sea ice variability results from changes in atmospheric and oceanic conditions, although the former is thought to be more significant, since there is a high correlation between anomalies in the ice concentration and the near-surface wind field. The Southern Ocean SIE trend is dominated by the increase in the Ross Sea sector, where the SIE is significantly correlated with the depth of the Amundsen Sea Low (ASL), which has deepened since 1979. The depth of the ASL is influenced by a number of external factors, including tropical sea surface temperatures, but the low also has a large locally driven intrinsic variability, suggesting that SIE in these areas is especially variable. Many of the current generation of coupled climate models have difficulty in simulating sea ice. However, output from the better-performing IPCC CMIP5 models suggests that the recent increase in Antarctic SIE may be within the bounds of intrinsic/internal variability.
SECONDARY ELECTRON EMISSION OF CERAMICS USED IN THE CHANNEL OF SPT

In the frame of the development of a plasma thruster such as SPT for spacecraft, the ceramic material used as channel has to fit with specific properties such as mechanical, electrical or thermal properties. Among these properties, the secondary electron emission yield produced by impingement of electrons from the plasma those energy is of several tens of eV plays an important role in the thruster operations. The aim of this paper is to describe the experiment built by ONERA to measure secondary electron emission yield on materials and the experimental difficulties to measure it on insulators. The experiment is then used to study the secondary electron emission yield of ceramics at normal incidence and ambient temperature. Slight excursions in angle and temperature are also tested. These measurements have to be useful for thruster model developments where walls conductivity is not well determined [ 1] [ 2] and where sheath phenomena on the walls seem to be determinant for the knowledge of the behaviour of electrons in the channel [ 3].
High-Density Real-Time PCR-Based in Vivo Toxicogenomic Screen to Predict Organ-Specific Toxicity

Toxicogenomics, based on the temporal effects of drugs on gene expression, is able to predict toxic effects earlier than traditional technologies by analyzing changes in genomic biomarkers that could precede subsequent protein translation and initiation of histological organ damage. In the present study our objective was to extend in vivo toxicogenomic screening from analyzing one or a few tissues to multiple organs, including heart, kidney, brain, liver and spleen. Nanocapillary quantitative real-time PCR (QRT-PCR) was used in the study, due to its higher throughput, sensitivity and reproducibility, and larger dynamic range compared to DNA microarray technologies. Based on previous data, 56 gene markers were selected coding for proteins with different functions, such as proteins for acute phase response, inflammation, oxidative stress, metabolic processes, heat-shock response, cell cycle/apoptosis regulation and enzymes which are involved in detoxification. Some of the marker genes are specific to certain organs, and some of them are general indicators of toxicity in multiple organs. Utility of the nanocapillary QRT-PCR platform was demonstrated by screening different references, as well as discovery of drug-like compounds for their gene expression profiles in different organs of treated mice in an acute experiment. For each compound, 896 QRT-PCR were done: four organs were used from each of the treated four animals to monitor the relative expression of 56 genes. Based on expression data of the discovery gene set of toxicology biomarkers the cardio- and nephrotoxicity of doxorubicin and sulfasalazin, the hepato- and nephrotoxicity of rotenone, dihydrocoumarin and aniline, and the liver toxicity of 2,4-diaminotoluene could be confirmed. The acute heart and kidney toxicity of the active metabolite SN-38 from its less toxic prodrug, irinotecan could be differentiated, and two novel gene markers for hormone replacement therapy were identified, namely fabp4 and pparg, which were down-regulated by estradiol treatment.
An Image-Based System for Urban Navigation

We describe the prototype of a system intended to allow a userto navigate in an urban environment using a mobile telephone equipped wi th a camera. The system uses a database of views of building facades to det ermine the pose of a query view provided by the user. Our method is based o n a novel wide-baseline matching algorithm that can identify corres ponding building facades in two views despite significant changes of viewpoin t and lighting. We show that our system is capable of localising query views r eliably in a large part of Cambridge city centre.
Physiologic Performance Test Differences in Female Volleyball Athletes by Competition Level and Player Position

Abstract Schaal, M, Ransdell, LB, Simonson, SR, and Gao, Y. Physiologic performance test differences in female volleyball athletes by competition level and player position. J Strength Cond Res 27(7): 1841–1850, 2013—The purpose of this study was to examine physiologic performance test differences by competition level (high school and Division-I collegiate athletes) and player position (hitter, setter, defensive specialist) in 4 volleyball-related tests. A secondary purpose was to establish whether a 150-yd shuttle could be used as a field test to assess anaerobic capacity. Female participants from 4 varsity high school volleyball teams (n = 27) and 2 Division-I collegiate volleyball teams (n = 26) were recruited for the study. Participants completed 4 performance-based field tests (vertical jump, agility T-test, and 150- and 300-yd shuttle runs) after completing a standardized dynamic warm-up. A 2-way multivariate analysis of variance with Bonferroni post hoc adjustments (when appropriate) and effect sizes were used for the analyses. The most important findings of this study were that (a) college volleyball athletes were older, heavier, and taller than high school athletes; (b) high school athletes had performance deficiencies in vertical jump/lower-body power, agility, and anaerobic fitness; (c) lower-body power was the only statistically significant difference in the performance test measures by player position; and (d) the correlation between the 150- and 300-yd shuttle was moderate (r = 0.488). Female high school volleyball players may enhance their ability to play collegiate volleyball by improving their vertical jump, lower-body power, agility, and anaerobic fitness. Furthermore, all player positions should emphasize lower-body power conditioning. These physical test scores provide baseline performance scores that should help strength and conditioning coaches create programs that will address deficits in female volleyball player performance, especially as they transition from high school to college.
Complete mitochondrial genome recovered from the gut metagenome of overwintering monarch butterflies, Danaus plexippus (L.) (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae, Danainae)

Abstract We present a 15,314 bp mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) sequence from monarch butterflies overwintering in Mexico. The complete mitogenome was generated by next generation sequencing techniques and was reconstructed by iterative assembly of reads from a metagenomic study of pooled butterfly gut DNA. The mitogenome codes for 13 putative protein coding genes, 22 tRNA genes, the large and small rRNA genes, and contains the A + T-rich sequence corresponding to the control region. The consensus sequence presented here has a depth of coverage of 142-fold and only three putative single nucleotide polymorphisms could be detected. The recovered D. plexippus mitogenome represents the second analyzed for the subfamily Danainae and accordingly, the closest available sequenced mitogenome was found to be the one corresponding to Euploea mulciber (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae, Danainae).
Iterative filtering for semi-fragile self-recovery

In this paper we propose a novel scheme for semifragile self-recovery based on iterative filtering of randomly sampled image sections. The scheme exhibits very good robustness against both malicious tampering and lossy JPEG compression with only slight deterioration of the reconstruction quality with attack strength. We describe the operation of the proposed scheme and present the results of its experimental evaluation. We also compare our approach with two state-of-the-art alternatives described in the literature.
Automatic analysis of the intonation of a tone language. applying the momel algorithm to spontaneous standard Chinese (beijing)

This paper describes the application of the Momel algorithm to a corpus of spontaneous speech in Standard (Beijing) Chinese. A selection of utterances by four speakers was analysed automatically and the resynthesised utterances were evaluated subjectively with two categories of errors: lexical tone errors and intonation errors. The target points determining the pitch contours of the synthetic utterances were then corrected manually in order to obtain a set of acceptable utterances for the entire corpus. An application attempting to optimise windowsize for the Momel algorithm showed no overall improvement with respect to the manually corrected data. This annotated data will nevertheless constitute a useful yardstick for evaluating improvements to the automatic algorithm which is expected to be far more robust than data annotated for languages with no lexical tone.
Decreases in Community Viral Load Are Accompanied by Reductions in New HIV Infections in San Francisco

Background At the individual level, higher HIV viral load predicts sexual transmission risk. We evaluated San Francisco's community viral load (CVL) as a population level marker of HIV transmission risk. We hypothesized that the decrease in CVL in San Francisco from 2004–2008, corresponding with increased rates of HIV testing, antiretroviral therapy (ART) coverage and effectiveness, and population-level virologic suppression, would be associated with a reduction in new HIV infections. Methodology/Principal Findings We used San Francisco's HIV/AIDS surveillance system to examine the trends in CVL. Mean CVL was calculated as the mean of the most recent viral load of all reported HIV-positive individuals in a particular community. Total CVL was defined as the sum of the most recent viral loads of all HIV-positive individuals in a particular community. We used Poisson models with robust standard errors to assess the relationships between the mean and total CVL and the primary outcome: annual numbers of newly diagnosed HIV cases. Both mean and total CVL decreased from 2004–2008 and were accompanied by decreases in new HIV diagnoses from 798 (2004) to 434 (2008). The mean (p = 0.003) and total CVL (p = 0.002) were significantly associated with new HIV cases from 2004–2008. Conclusions/Significance Reductions in CVL are associated with decreased HIV infections. Results suggest that wide-scale ART could reduce HIV transmission at the population level. Because CVL is temporally upstream of new HIV infections, jurisdictions should consider adding CVL to routine HIV surveillance to track the epidemic, allocate resources, and to evaluate the effectiveness of HIV prevention and treatment efforts.
A Modified Water Fat Separation Algorithm Based on Region Growing

An efficient algorithm for water fat separation on low field MRI is presented in this paper. Based on the DIXON algorithm, in phase and opposed phase images are acquired by spin echo (SE) sequence. From these images the water only and fat only images can be extracted by the chemical shift principle . The algorithm is region growing based. The modification is proposed on how to process background noises. The pixels of background noises are push into an additional stack which has the lowest priority so as to get a more robust performance. Experiments on low field system show good results.
Priming of Syntactic Rules in Task-Oriented Dialogue and Spontaneous Conversation

Previous work provided corpus evidence for structural priming for specific syntactic constructions. The present paper extends these results by investigating priming effects involving arbitrary syntactic rules in spoken dialogue corpora. We demonstrate the existence of within- and between-speaker priming in both spontaneous conversation (the Switchboard corpus) and task-oriented dialogue (the Map Task corpus). We also find that between-speaker priming is stronger in the Map Task corpus. This supports the hypothesis that in task-oriented dialog, low-level priming is linked to higher-level alignment of situation models.
Characterization of new cellulose sansevieria ehrenbergii fibers for polymer composites

Natural cellulose fibers were newly identified from the sources of sansevieria ehrenbergii plant. These fibers were extracted using the mechanical decortication process. The hierarchical cell structure of the plant and fibers was analyzed using scanning electron microscope, optical microscope, Fourier transforms infrared, and X-ray diffraction. The density and diameter of the fibers were found to be approximately 0.887 g/cm3 and 10–250 μm, respectively. The various chemical compositions were analyzed and compared with other natural fibers. The thermal stability of the fiber was examined through thermogravimetric analysis/differential thermogravimetric analysis (DTG). The maximum peak temperature was obtained at 333.02 °C in DTG curve. The raw fibers exhibited a tensile strength of 50–585 MPa, an elongation at break of 2.8–21.7%, a Young’s modulus of 2.5–7.5 GPa, and a corrected compliances Young’s modulus of 2.5–7.8 GPa.
Assessment of the Impact of Joint Bays on the Ampacity of High-Voltage Cable Circuits

Improvements in the cost and availability of computational power in recent years has led to numerical techniques such as finite-element analysis (FEA) becoming viable for cable-rating calculations. This analysis has previously been completed for the case of directly buried and force-cooled cable circuits, but without direct consideration of the joint bay. This paper presents methods by which conductor temperature profiles within joint bays may be obtained through the use of FEA. Results are presented for a number of joint bay configurations common to the U.K. for naturally and force-cooled installations. Implications of the results on circuit-rating practice are discussed and the benefits of using tools, such as FEA, are considered versus other existing methods.
Nanoimprint lithography techniques: an introduction

The main nanoimprint lithography techniques are highlighted in this paper. In addition to details concerning the materials used and the basic processing techniques, some of the major recent developments are summarized. Critical issues are addressed and some ideas for improvement are given. The paper aims to give an introduction to the techniques and a survey of the actual status without going into the details of the specific techniques.
MultiSpace: enabling electronic document micro-mobility in table-centric, multi-device environments

Although electronic media has changed how people interact with documents, today's electronic documents and the environments in which they are used are still impoverished relative to traditional paper documents when used by groups of people and across multiple computing devices. Vertical interfaces (e.g., walls and monitors) afford a less democratic style of interaction than generally observed when people are working around a table. In this paper, we introduce MultiSpace, a research effort which explores the role of the table as a central hub to support ad hoc collaboration in a multidevice environment. The table centric approach offers new interaction techniques to provide egalitarian access and shared transport of data, supporting mobility and micromobility (Luff and Heath, 1998) of electronic content between tables and other devices. Our observations show how people use these techniques, and how tabletop technology can support and augment collaborative tasks.