Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Phenylalanine as a nitrogen source induces root growth and nitrogen-use efficiency in Populus × canescens

To investigate the physiological responses of poplars to amino acids as sole nitrogen (N) sources, Populus × canescens (Ait.) Smith plants were supplied with one of three nitrogen fertilizers (NH4NO3, phenylalanine (Phe) or the mixture of NH4NO3 and Phe) in sand culture. A larger root system, and decreased leaf size and CO2 assimilation rate was observed in Phe- versus NH4NO3-treated poplars. Consistently, a greater root biomass and a decreased shoot growth were detected in Phe-supplied poplars. Decreased enzymatic activities of nitrate reductase (NR), glutamate synthase (GOGAT) and glutamate dehydrogenase (GDH) and elevated activities of nitrite reductase (NiR), phenylalanine ammonia lyase (PAL), glutamine synthetase (GS) and asparagine synthase (AS) were found in Phe-treated roots. Accordingly, reduced concentrations of NH4+, NO3- and total N, and enhanced N-use efficiencies (NUEs) were detected in Phe-supplied poplars. Moreover, the transcript levels of putative Phe transporters ANT1 and ANT3 were upregulated, and the mRNA levels of NR, glutamine synthetase 2 (GS2), NADH-dependent glutamate synthase (NADH-GOGAT), GDH and asparagine synthetase 2 (ASN2) were downexpressed in Phe-treated roots and/or leaves. The 15N-labeled Phe was mainly allocated in the roots and only a small amount of 15N-Phe was translocated to poplar aerial parts. These results indicate that poplar roots can acquire Phe as an N source to support plant growth and that Phe-induced NUEs in the poplars are probably associated with NH4+ re-utilization after Phe deamination and the carbon bonus simultaneously obtained during Phe uptake.
News Habits Among Adolescents: The Influence of Family Communication on Adolescents’ News Media Use—Evidence From a Three-Wave Panel Study

Keeping up with what’s going on in the world of politics and current affairs through various news media is commonly seen as important for civic engagement and informed citizenship. Today, however, citizens face more opportunities than ever to select media content according to their personal preferences and interests—leading to what previous research has identified as a polarization between news-seekers and news-avoiders. Given heightened concerns regarding growing shares of news-avoiders in particular, this study analyzes the development, stability, and family influences on Swedish adolescents’ news habits over time. The findings, based on panel survey data among adolescents and their parents, show that (a) news habits are fairly stable at the individual level, (b) parents’ own news consumption is the most consistent predictor of adolescents’ development of news habits, and (c) these family effects are distinct from adolescents’ personal motivations for seeking out news.
Checking a Large Routine Report of a Conference on High Speed Automatic Calculating machines Universal Turing Machine

Trainable communication and journaling file systems have garnered great interest from both leading analysts and system administrators in the last several years. Here, we disprove the visualization of suffix trees [114, 114, 188, 62, 70, 179, 68, 95, 54, 70, 152, 152, 191, 59, 114, 70, 168, 148, 99, 58]. CopedReek, our new heuristic for the construction of context-free grammar, is the solution to all of these grand challenges.
Decomposition of M-ary CPM signals into PAM waveforms

It is widely known that minimum shift keying (MSK) may be seen as a PAM signaling scheme and that the same is true, albeit approximately, with MSK-like modulations. It is also known (perhaps not so widely) that any binary continuous phase-modulated (CPM) signal may be exactly decomposed into the sum of a few PAM waveforms. In this paper we show that this property extends to multilevel CPM signaling. Features of a PAM decomposition are discussed as a function of the alphabet size, the modulation index, and the frequency response of the system. It is found that, especially with signaling schemes with a long memory, the decomposition has so many terms that it becomes unmanageable. For these cases an approximation is proposed with a limited number of terms. >
DNMT3L promotes quiescence in postnatal spermatogonial progenitor cells

The ability of adult stem cells to reside in a quiescent state is crucial for preventing premature exhaustion of the stem cell pool. However, the intrinsic epigenetic factors that regulate spermatogonial stem cell quiescence are largely unknown. Here, we investigate in mice how DNA methyltransferase 3-like (DNMT3L), an epigenetic regulator important for interpreting chromatin context and facilitating de novo DNA methylation, sustains the long-term male germ cell pool. We demonstrated that stem cell-enriched THY1+ spermatogonial stem/progenitor cells (SPCs) constituted a DNMT3L-expressing population in postnatal testes. DNMT3L influenced the stability of promyelocytic leukemia zinc finger (PLZF), potentially by downregulating Cdk2/CDK2 expression, which sequestered CDK2-mediated PLZF degradation. Reduced PLZF in Dnmt3l KO THY1+ cells released its antagonist, Sal-like protein 4A (SALL4A), which is associated with overactivated ERK and AKT signaling cascades. Furthermore, DNMT3L was required to suppress the cell proliferation-promoting factor SALL4B in THY1+ SPCs and to prevent premature stem cell exhaustion. Our results indicate that DNMT3L is required to delicately balance the cycling and quiescence of SPCs. These findings reveal a novel role for DNMT3L in modulating postnatal SPC cell fate decisions.
A hybrid environment adaptation controller for a snake-like robot with online and autonomous learning ability

In this paper, we propose a two-modes autonomous controller for a snake-like robot to adapt to the environments with different friction coefficients. According to the cyclic 3-stages experiential learning theory, the controller integrates an open-form searching method and a closed-form searching method, which correspond to the two modes of the controller respectively. We introduce a mechanism to remember the already derived optimal relationship, thereby gradually approximating the optimal relationship for all environments. The controller can learn online so the approximation can be improved online and the controller will be also more and more accurate. The learning is also autonomous. After enough learning, the approximation will be very accurate so the optimum can be attained just by predicting rather than learning, thereby avoiding unnecessary leaning. Therefore, the controller is efficient. The accuracy and efficiency are validated in the simulations.
A delay-bound efficient path design algorithm for mobile sink in wireless sensor networks

Hotspot problem is one of the major hindrance in the long run functioning of the wireless sensor network. Sink mobility has strongly emerged as a potential solution to it. Here, mobile sink visits the proximity of sensor nodes to collect data from them. However, this results into a lengthy path which is undesirable in most of the applications bounded by some delay. In our work, we propose a rendezvous point(RP)-based delay bound path design for the mobile sink. In the proposed method, the target area is partitioned into hexagonal cells whose centers are considered as the potential positions of RPs. These potential positions are minimized on the basis of several network parameters to select minimum number of RPs to form the delay bound path. Extensive simulations were carried over the proposed algorithm to compare its results with some existing algorithm using several performance metrics like hop count, network lifetime and many more to prove its effectiveness.
A novel approach to the 2-D blind deconvolution problem in medical ultrasound

The finite frequency bandwidth of ultrasound transducers and the nonnegligible width of transmitted acoustic beams are the most significant factors that limit the resolution of medical ultrasound imaging. Consequently, in order to recover diagnostically important image details, obscured due to the resolution limitations, an image restoration procedure should be applied. The present study addresses the problem of ultrasound image restoration by means of the blind-deconvolution techniques. Given an acquired ultrasound image, algorithms of this kind perform either concurrent or successive estimation of the point-spread function (PSF) of the imaging system and the original image. A blind-deconvolution algorithm is proposed, in which the PSF is recovered as a preliminary stage of the restoration problem. As the accuracy of this estimation affects all the following stages of the image restoration, it is considered as the most fundamental and important problem. The contribution of the present study is twofold. First, it introduces a novel approach to the problem of estimating the PSF, which is based on a generalization of several fundamental concepts of the homomorphic deconvolution. It is shown that a useful estimate of the spectrum of the PSF can be obtained by applying a proper smoothing operator to both log-magnitude and phase of the spectra of acquired radio-frequency (RF) images. It is demonstrated that the proposed approach performs considerably better than the existing homomorphic (cepstrum-based) deconvolution methods. Second, the study shows that given a reliable estimate of the PSF, it is possible to deconvolve it out of the RF-image and obtain an estimate of the true tissue reflectivity function, which is relatively independent of the properties of the imaging system. The deconvolution was performed using the maximum a-posteriori (MAP) estimation framework for a number of statistical priors assumed for the reflectivity function. It is shown in a series of in vivo experiments that reconstructions based on the priors, which tend to emphasize the "sparseness" of the tissue structure, result in solutions of higher resolution and contrast.
Metadata for anomaly-based security protocol attack deduction

Anomaly-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) have been widely recognized for their potential to prevent and reduce damage to information systems. In order to build their profiles and to generate their requisite behavior observations, these systems rely on access to payload data, either in the network or on the host system. With the growing reliance on encryption technology, less and less payload data is available for analysis. In order to accomplish intrusion detection in an encrypted environment, a new data representation must emerge. We present a knowledge engineering approach to allow intrusion detection in an encrypted environment. Our approach relies on gathering and analyzing several forms of metadata relating to session activity of the principals involved and the protocols that they employ. We then apply statistical and pattern recognition methods to the metadata to distinguish between normal and abnormal activity and then to distinguish between legitimate and malicious behavior.
Entrepreneurial Orientation and Social Venture Creation in Nonprofit Organizations

Although behaving entrepreneurially has become increasingly important for many nonprofit organizations, research on entrepreneurial orientation (EO) lacks a clear understanding of the construct in the nonprofit context. This study examines how EO is shaped on the organizational level of a nonprofit organization and contributes to the creation of a social venture. With a qualitative research design, we explore the role of entrepreneurial elements manifested in the pre-start-up phase of social venture creation according to their importance for upstream and downstream processes. Our findings show how risk taking has a financial and a social dimension and we identify collaboration as a pivotal additional element for social EO along with proactiveness and innovativeness.
PODD: a portable diary data collection system

Activity diaries are a powerful data source for studying the time use of individuals and for creating awareness of individuals' daily activity patterns. The presented project is concerned with the development of an easily accessible method for collecting and analyzing diary data which will be applicable across a wide range of industrial, governmental, social science and medical domains. The PODD (POrtable Diary Data collection) is composed of a smartphone application for data registration, a web interface for user registration and an administration system for configuring the application according to the focus of the data collection.
Space-Efficient Block Storage Integrity

We present new methods to provide block-level integrity in encrypted storage systems, i.e., so that a client will detect the modification of data blocks by an untrusted storage server. We present cryptographic definitions for this setting, and develop solutions that change neither the block size nor the number of sectors accessed, an important consideration for modern storage systems. In order to achieve this, a trusted client component maintains state with which it can authenticate blocks returned by the storage server, and we explore techniques for minimizing the size of this state. We demonstrate a scheme that provably implements basic block integrity (informally, that any block accepted was previously written), that exhibits a tradeoff between the level of security and the additional client’s storage overhead, and that in empirical evaluations requires an average of only 0.01 bytes per 1024-byte block. We extend this to a scheme that implements integrity resistant to replay attacks (informally, that any block accepted was the last block written to that address) using only 1.82 bytes per block, on average, in our one-month long empirical
Free Fatty Acids Induce JNK-dependent Hepatocyte Lipoapoptosis*

Elevated serum free fatty acids (FFAs) and hepatocyte lipoapoptosis are features of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. However, the mechanism by which FFAs mediate lipoapoptosis is unclear. Because JNK activation is pivotal in both the metabolic syndrome accompanying non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and cellular apoptosis, we examined the role of JNK activation in FFA-induced lipoapoptosis. Multiple hepatocyte cell lines and primary mouse hepatocytes were treated in culture with monounsaturated fatty acids and saturated fatty acids. Despite equal cellular steatosis, apoptosis and JNK activation were greater during exposure to saturated versus monounsaturated FFAs. Inhibition of JNK, pharmacologically as well as genetically, reduced saturated FFA-mediated hepatocyte lipoapoptosis. Cell death was caspase-dependent and associated with mitochondrial membrane depolarization and cytochrome c release indicating activation of the mitochondrial pathway of apoptosis. JNK-dependent lipoapoptosis was associated with activation of Bax, a known mediator of mitochondrial dysfunction. As JNK can activate Bim, a BH3 domain-only protein capable of binding to and activating Bax, its role in lipoapoptosis was also examined. Small interfering RNA-targeted knock-down of Bim attenuated both Bax activation and cell death. Collectively the data indicate that saturated FFAs induce JNK-dependent hepatocyte lipoapoptosis by activating the proapoptotic Bcl-2 proteins Bim and Bax, which trigger the mitochondrial apoptotic pathway.
Precision surface-acoustic-wave (SAW) oscillators

The evolution of SAW oscillator technology over the past 17 years is described and a review of the current state of the art for high-performance SAW oscillators is presented. This review draws heavily upon the authors' own experience and efforts, which have focused upon the development of a wide variety of SAW oscillators in response to numerous high-performance military system requirements. <<ETX>>
BDD based synthesis technique for design of high-speed memristor based circuits

Recently, a passive device — memristor has received wide attention in nano-scale design due to its applications in the area of nanoelectronic memory design, neuromorphic computing and logic design. This passive element is non-volatile in nature and has dual properties of memory and resistor. In recent time, the application of this device in designing high speed logic circuits has now opened a new research domain in nano-scale design. This work presents an efficient design technique implementing logic functions using memristor. The proposed design methodology not only speed-up the response time of the circuits but can also deal with functions with larger input size (beyond 100 variables). Our entire design scheme is divided in two phases. In the first phase, we use Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) to represent input logic functions and in second phase, a technology mapping is performed that generates memristor based circuits corresponding to this BDD graphs. Comparative analysis with existing works is given and we find that our design steadily improves the average performance of circuits.
Reliable Probabilistic Veri cation Using

This paper describes and analyzes a probabilistic technique to reduce the memory requirement of the table of reached states maintained in veriication by explicit state enumeration. The memory savings of the new scheme come at the price of a certain probability that the search becomes incomplete. However, this probability can be made negligibly small by using typically 40 bits of memory per state. From this point of view, this new scheme improves substantially on Holzmann's bitstate hashing, which has a high probability of producing an incomplete search even when using close to 1000 bits per state. The proposed scheme has been implemented in the contexts of the SPIN and Mur' veriication systems. Experiments on sample protocols nicely match the predictions of the analysis. For large protocols, memory savings of two orders of magnitude are obtained. We also show how to eeciently combine the new scheme with state space caching, and we analyze bitstate hashing in order to compare it with the new scheme.
Taxonomic and Functional Differences between Microbial Communities in Qinghai Lake and Its Input Streams

Understanding microbial communities in terms of taxon and function is essential to decipher the biogeochemical cycling in aquatic ecosystems. Lakes and their input streams are highly linked. However, the differences between microbial assemblages in streams and lakes are still unclear. In this study, we conducted an intensive field sampling of microbial communities from lake water and stream biofilms in the Qinghai Lake watershed, the largest lake in China. We determined bacterial communities using high-throughput 16S rRNA gene sequencing and predicted functional profiles using PICRUSt to determine the taxonomic and functional differences between microbial communities in stream biofilms and lake water. The results showed that stream biofilms and lake water harbored distinct microbial communities. The microbial communities were different taxonomically and functionally between stream and lake. Moreover, streams biofilms had a microbial network with higher connectivity and modularity than lake water. Functional beta diversity was strongly correlated with taxonomic beta diversity in both the stream and lake microbial communities. Lake microbial assemblages displayed greater predicted metabolic potentials of many metabolism pathways while the microbial assemblages in stream biofilms were more abundant in xenobiotic biodegradation and metabolism and lipid metabolism. Furthermore, lake microbial assemblages had stronger predicted metabolic potentials in amino acid metabolism, carbon fixation, and photosynthesis while stream microbial assemblages were higher in carbohydrate metabolism, oxidative phosphorylation, and nitrogen metabolism. This study adds to our knowledge of stream-lake linkages from the functional and taxonomic composition of microbial assemblages.
Urinary type II collagen C-terminal peptide is associated with synovitis and predicts structural bone loss in very early inflammatory arthritis

Objectives In rheumatoid arthritis, high levels of the cartilage turnover biomarker C-terminal cross-linking telopeptide of type II collagen (CTX-II) predict an increased risk of radiological progression. In very early inflammatory arthritis erosions are uncommon, therefore CTX-II requires validation against early markers of inflammatory arthritis such as power Doppler ultrasound (PDUS) synovitis and bone mineral density (BMD) loss. Methods In 50 subjects with 12 weeks or less of inflammatory hand symptoms, urinary CTX-II and PDUS were performed at baseline and hand BMD at baseline and 12 months. CTX-II data were log transformed to a normal distribution. Associations between variables were examined using Pearson's r/Spearman's ρ correlations. Results The mean 12- month change in BMD was −0.0068 g/cm2 and the geometric mean for baseline CTX-II/creatinine was 245.89 ng/mmol. Log-transformed baseline CTX-II showed a substantive negative association with change in average BMD over 12 months, controlling for baseline BMD and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (r=−0.359, p=0.044). The median total PDUS score was 3.0 and baseline CTX-II was significantly associated with baseline total PDUS (Spearman's ρ=0.482, p=0.002). Conclusion Urinary CTX-II correlates with PDUS synovitis and hand BMD reduction very early in the course of inflammatory arthritis, suggesting that CTX-II has potential as a biomarker in very early inflammatory arthritis.
Sentiment analysis of twitter data

Social networks are the main resources to gather information about people's opinion and sentiments towards different topics as they spend hours daily on social media and share their opinion. In this technical paper, we show the application of sentimental analysis and how to connect to Twitter and run sentimental analysis queries. We run experiments on different queries from politics to humanity and show the interesting results. We realized that the neutral sentiments for tweets are significantly high which clearly shows the limitations of the current works.
Continuous measures of driving performance on an advanced office-based driving simulator can be used to predict simulator task failure in patients with obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome

Introduction Some patients with obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome are at higher risk of being involved in road traffic accidents. It has not been possible to identify this group from clinical and polysomnographic information or using simple simulators. We explore the possibility of identifying this group from variables generated in an advanced PC-based driving simulator. Methods All patients performed a 90 km motorway driving simulation. Two events were programmed to trigger evasive actions, one subtle and an alert driver should not crash, while for the other, even a fully alert driver might crash. Simulator parameters including standard deviation of lane position (SDLP) and reaction times at the veer event (VeerRT) were recorded. There were three possible outcomes: ‘fail’, ‘indeterminate’ and ‘pass’. An exploratory study identified the simulator parameters predicting a ‘fail’ by regression analysis and this was then validated prospectively. Results 72 patients were included in the exploratory phase and 133 patients in the validation phase. 65 (32%) patients completed the run without any incidents, 45 (22%) failed, 95 (46%) were indeterminate. Prediction models using SDLP and VeerRT could predict ‘fails’ with a sensitivity of 82% and specificity of 96%. The models were subsequently confirmed in the validation phase. Conclusions Using continuously measured variables it has been possible to identify, with a high degree of accuracy, a subset of patients with obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome who fail a simulated driving test. This has the potential to identify at-risk drivers and improve the reliability of a clinician's decision-making.