Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The UN Decade of Nutrition, the NOVA food classification and the trouble with ultra-processing

Abstract Given evident multiple threats to food systems and supplies, food security, human health and welfare, the living and physical world and the biosphere, the years 2016–2025 are now designated by the UN as the Decade of Nutrition, in support of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. For these initiatives to succeed, it is necessary to know which foods contribute to health and well-being, and which are unhealthy. The present commentary outlines the NOVA system of food classification based on the nature, extent and purpose of food processing. Evidence that NOVA effectively addresses the quality of diets and their impact on all forms of malnutrition, and also the sustainability of food systems, has now accumulated in a number of countries, as shown here. A singular feature of NOVA is its identification of ultra-processed food and drink products. These are not modified foods, but formulations mostly of cheap industrial sources of dietary energy and nutrients plus additives, using a series of processes (hence ‘ultra-processed’). All together, they are energy-dense, high in unhealthy types of fat, refined starches, free sugars and salt, and poor sources of protein, dietary fibre and micronutrients. Ultra-processed products are made to be hyper-palatable and attractive, with long shelf-life, and able to be consumed anywhere, any time. Their formulation, presentation and marketing often promote overconsumption. Studies based on NOVA show that ultra-processed products now dominate the food supplies of various high-income countries and are increasingly pervasive in lower-middle- and upper-middle-income countries. The evidence so far shows that displacement of minimally processed foods and freshly prepared dishes and meals by ultra-processed products is associated with unhealthy dietary nutrient profiles and several diet-related non-communicable diseases. Ultra-processed products are also troublesome from social, cultural, economic, political and environmental points of view. We conclude that the ever-increasing production and consumption of these products is a world crisis, to be confronted, checked and reversed as part of the work of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and its Decade of Nutrition.
Mutant Analysis in Arabidopsis Provides Insight into the Molecular Mode of Action of the Auxinic Herbicide Dicamba

Herbicides that mimic the natural auxin indole-3-acetic acid are widely used in weed control. One common auxin-like herbicide is dicamba, but despite its wide use, plant gene responses to dicamba have never been extensively studied. To further understand dicamba's mode of action, we utilized Arabidopsis auxin-insensitive mutants and compared their sensitivity to dicamba and the widely-studied auxinic herbicide 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D). The mutant axr4-2, which has disrupted auxin transport into cells, was resistant to 2,4-D but susceptible to dicamba. By comparing dicamba resistance in auxin signalling F-box receptor mutants (tir1-1, afb1, afb2, afb3, and afb5), only tir1-1 and afb5 were resistant to dicamba, and this resistance was additive in the double tir1-1/afb5 mutant. Interestingly, tir1-1 but not afb5 was resistant to 2,4-D. Whole genome analysis of dicamba-induced gene expression showed that 10 hours after application, dicamba stimulated many stress-responsive and signalling genes, including those involved in biosynthesis or signalling of auxin, ethylene, and abscisic acid (ABA), with TIR1 and AFB5 required for the dicamba-responsiveness of some genes. Research into dicamba-regulated gene expression and the selectivity of auxin receptors has provided molecular insight into dicamba-regulated signalling and could help in the development of novel herbicide resistance in crop plants.
Modeling Harmony with Skip-Grams

String-based (or viewpoint) models of tonal harmony often struggle with data sparsity in pattern discovery and prediction tasks, particularly when modeling composite events like triads and seventh chords, since the number of distinct n-note combinations in polyphonic textures is potentially enormous. To address this problem, this study examines the efficacy of skip-grams in music research, an alternative viewpoint method developed in corpus linguistics and natural language processing that includes sub-sequences of n events (or n-grams) in a frequency distribution if their constituent members occur within a certain number of skips. Using a corpus consisting of four datasets of Western classical music in symbolic form, we found that including skip-grams reduces data sparsity in n-gram distributions by (1) minimizing the proportion of n-grams with negligible counts, and (2) increasing the coverage of contiguous n-grams in a test corpus. What is more, skip-grams significantly outperformed contiguous n-grams in discovering conventional closing progressions (called cadences).
Low‐grade spindle cell proliferation in clear cell renal cell carcinoma is unlikely to be an initial step in sarcomatoid differentiation

Spindle cell proliferation within clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) is usually considered as a sarcomatoid differentiation. Low‐grade spindle cell proliferation (LG‐SCP) in ccRCC was first described in 2001. This phenomenon is not common and can pose diagnostic challenges, particularly in core biopsies. The aim of this study was to describe morphological, immunohistochemical and molecular characteristics of ccRCCs with LG‐SCP.
Relationship between Widening and Position of the Tunnels and Clinical Results of Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction to Knee Osteoarthritis: 30 Patients at a Minimum Follow-Up of 10 Years

Abstract To evaluate the relationship between tunnel position and widening and long-term clinical results in anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction, a retrospective cohort of 30 patients undergoing ACL reconstruction with double semitendinous plus double gracilis (SAC technique) with longer than 10-year follow-up was selected. CT scans in the first 3 months and at final follow-up was evaluated. Position, angle, and widening of tunnels including Nebelung criteria were recorded in all CT scans. Physical, KT-1000, and clinical evaluation were performed at final follow-up. Outcomes and knee arthritis severity were evaluated at final follow-up. Mean follow-up was 11.2 ± 1.2. At final follow-up, 85 and 57% of tibial and femoral tunnels, respectively, developed some degree of enlargement. Frontal tibial angle (mean) was 72°, sagittal tibial angle 63°, frontal femoral angle 47°, sagittal femoral angle 20°, and tunnels divergence angle 36°. Preoperatively, KT-1000 30L and Lachman test scores were 5.52 and 5.79 respectively. In the last follow-up, 30L and manual Lachman test scores were 0.97 and 1.13, respectively (p < 0.001). In IKDC scale, pivot shift and Jerk tests showed 83 and 84% grade A results, respectively (p < 0.0001). In Fairbank scale, 23% worsened one grade and 27% worsened more than one grade (p < 0.005). Tibial tunnels widened more than femoral tunnels and further dilatation was found between intermediate and final follow-up. Higher incidence of tibial tunnel widening was observed in patients with tunnel verticalization. Tibial tunnel dilation was associated with long-term degenerative changes but not with final knee instability.
Enhancement of electrode design for non-invasive stimulus application

Existing electrodes can be classified into two categories which are invasive and non-invasive electrodes. The non-invasive electrodes can be further classified into wet or dry electrodes. Most of the off-the-shelf electrodes are made from rigid substrates which have the high level of motion artifacts. To overcome this motion artifact, flexible electrodes have been slowly introduced in the market. Flexible electrodes can be made from various types of material such as the substrate. This paper presents a work on designing a new flexible dry electrodes using poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate and silver by means of dispenser printing technology. Polyester cotton fabric was selected as the substrate in this electrode designed. Results from the experiment show that the conductivity of the proposed flexible electrode is comparable with the conventional pre-gelled electrode when applied to an electrical stimulator device. Eight out of ten subjects under test described no difference in comfort between the proposed electrodes and pre-gelled electrodes.
NetworKit: A tool suite for large-scale complex network analysis

Abstract We introduce NetworKit, an open-source software package for analyzing the structure of large complex networks. Appropriate algorithmic solutions are required to handle increasingly common large graph data sets containing up to billions of connections. We describe the methodology applied to develop scalable solutions to network analysis problems, including techniques like parallelization, heuristics for computationally expensive problems, efficient data structures, and modular software architecture. Our goal for the software is to package results of our algorithm engineering efforts and put them into the hands of domain experts. NetworKit is implemented as a hybrid combining the kernels written in C++ with a Python frontend, enabling integration into the Python ecosystem of tested tools for data analysis and scientific computing. The package provides a wide range of functionality (including common and novel analytics algorithms and graph generators) and does so via a convenient interface. In an experimental comparison with related software, NetworKit shows the best performance on a range of typical analysis tasks.
Follicle Depletion Provides a Permissive Environment for Ovarian Carcinogenesis

ABSTRACT We modeled the etiology of postmenopausal biology on ovarian cancer risk using germ cell-deficient white-spotting variant (Wv) mice, incorporating oncogenic mutations. Ovarian cancer incidence is highest in peri- and postmenopausal women, and epidemiological studies have established the impact of reproductive factors on ovarian cancer risk. Menopause as a result of ovarian follicle depletion is thought to contribute to higher cancer risk. As a consequence of follicle depletion, female Wv mice develop ovarian tubular adenomas, a benign epithelial tumor corresponding to surface epithelial invaginations and papillomatosis frequently found in postmenopausal human ovaries. Lineage tracing using MISR2-Cre indicated that the tubular adenomas that developed in Wv mice were largely derived from the MISR2 lineage, which marked only a fraction of ovarian surface and oviduct epithelial cells in wild-type tissues. Deletion of p27, either heterozygous or homozygous, was able to convert the benign tubular adenomas into more proliferative tumors. Restricted deletion of p53 in Wv/Wv mice by either intrabursal injection of adenoviral Cre or inclusion of the MISR2-Cre transgene also resulted in augmented tumor growth. This finding suggests that follicle depletion provides a permissive ovarian environment for oncogenic transformation of epithelial cells, presenting a mechanism for the increased ovarian cancer risk in postmenopausal women.
Inter-VM Interference in Cloud Environments: A Survey

Cloud Computing paradigm has been a trend in the computational world. Thus, many service providers today are competing to enhance their features and attract more customers as they are offering them a bunch of services through a pay-asyou-go pricing model. However, despite their huge fame, cloud environments still suffer from some issues that are being studied by researchers from various perspectives. One of the controversial cloud issues nowadays is interference among virtual machines (VMs) sharing the same hardware platform called also physical machine (PM). This problem occurs due to contention on shared resources between co-hosted VMs which results in performance degradation. Resource contention happens when demand for shared resources exceeds the supply due to VMs cohosting. The co-hosting of VMs on the same PM, emerges from the ambition of server consolidation that cloud providers aim to reach in order to improve power efficiency and optimize resource utilization. Therefore, the key factor of successful server consolidation is to minimize performance interference among colocated VMs. In this paper, we are going to reveal the interference issue as well as its major cause, survey existing researchers' visions to detect and/or predict such issue and exhibit a comparative study between them. Then we will reveal some challenging points that require further consideration. Our comparative study may be helpful for people aiming to be involved in cloud environments research field, as it gathers different existing approaches dealing with performance interference detection and prediction in cloud environments.
Interactive Effects of Large- and Small-Scale Sources of Feral Honey-Bees for Sunflower in the Argentine Pampas

Pollinators for animal pollinated crops can be provided by natural and semi-natural habitats, ranging from large vegetation remnants to small areas of non-crop land in an otherwise highly modified landscape. It is unknown, however, how different small- and large-scale habitat patches interact as pollinator sources. In the intensively managed Argentine Pampas, we studied the additive and interactive effects of large expanses (up to 2200 ha) of natural habitat, represented by untilled isolated “sierras”, and narrow (3–7 m wide) strips of semi-natural habitat, represented by field margins, as pollinator sources for sunflower (Helianthus annus). We estimated visitation rates by feral honey-bees, Apis mellifera, and native flower visitors (as a group) at 1, 5, 25, 50 and 100 m from a field margin in 17 sunflower fields 0–10 km distant from the nearest sierra. Honey-bees dominated the pollinator assemblage accounting for >90% of all visits to sunflower inflorescences. Honey-bee visitation was strongly affected by proximity to the sierras decreasing by about 70% in the most isolated fields. There was also a decline in honey-bee visitation with distance from the field margin, which was apparent with increasing field isolation, but undetected in fields nearby large expanses of natural habitat. The probability of observing a native visitor decreased with isolation from the sierras, but in other respects visitation by flower visitors other than honey-bees was mostly unaffected by the habitat factors assessed in this study. Overall, we found strong hierarchical and interactive effects between the study large and small-scale pollinator sources. These results emphasize the importance of preserving natural habitats and managing actively field verges in the absence of large remnants of natural habitat for improving pollinator services.
Fundamental Mode Orthogonal Fluxgate Magnetometer Applicable for Measurements of DC and Low-Frequency Magnetic Fields

Compatibility of low noise characteristic and offset stability is essential for a magnetometer to be applicable for measurements of dc and low-frequency magnetic fields. Fundamental mode orthogonal fluxgate (FM-OFG) magnetometer has advantages in its compact design and low noise characteristic, whereas its disadvantage is the offset drift which is unacceptably large for such measurement. An effective technique called bias switching has been proposed to suppress and stabilize the offset of open-loop FM-OFG magnetometers, yet when it is adopted with a feedback configuration to obtain better linearity, it increases noises attributed to the convergence process. In this paper, we present a design of sensor driving electronics of FM-OFG magnetometers to solve this problem and achieve compatibility of low noise and stable offset characteristics with a feedback configuration. The efficacy of the design was verified through various performance evaluations.
On the Symmetric Componentwise Relative Backward Error for Linear Systems of Equations

We derive an upper bound on the symmetric componentwise relative backward error for symmetric linear systems of equations. Since the bound can be computed efficiently and, except for some artificial examples, seems to be of the same order of magnitude as the true symmetric componentwise backward error, we believe that it is suitable for practical use. Our results also provide new insight into the relationship between the symmetric and unsymmetric backward errors.
Where's the FEEB? The Effectiveness of Instruction Set Randomization

Instruction Set Randomization (ISR) has been proposed as a promising defense against code injection attacks. It defuses all standard code injection attacks since the attacker does not know the instruction set of the target machine. A motivated attacker, however, may be able to circumvent ISR by determining the randomization key. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of a remote attacker successfully determining an ISR key using an incremental attack. We introduce a strategy for attacking ISR-protected servers, develop and analyze two types of attack, and present a technique for packaging the worm with a miniature virtual machine that reduces the number of key bytes an attacker must acquire to 128. Our attacks can break enough key bytes to infect an ISR-protected server in under 7 minutes. Our results provide insights into properties necessary for ISR implementations to be secure.
Hybrid S-ALOHA/TDMA Protocol for LTE/LTE-A Networks with Coexistence of H2H and M2M Traffic

The machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is featured by tremendous number of devices, small data transmission, and large uplink to downlink traffic ratio. The massive access requests generated by M2M devices would result in the current medium access control (MAC) protocol in LTE/LTE-A networks suffering from physical random access channel (PRACH) overload, high signaling overhead, and resource underutilization. As such, fairness should be carefully considered when M2M traffic coexists with human-to-human (H2H) traffic. To tackle these problems, we propose an adaptive Slotted ALOHA (S-ALOHA) and time division multiple access (TDMA) hybrid protocol. In particular, the proposed hybrid protocol divides the reserved uplink resource blocks (RBs) in a transmission cycle into the S-ALOHA part for M2M traffic with small-size packets and the TDMA part for H2H traffic with large-size packets. Adaptive resource allocation and access class barring (ACB) are exploited and optimized to maximize the channel utility with fairness constraint. Moreover, an upper performance bound for the proposed hybrid protocol is provided by performing the system equilibrium analysis. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with pure S-ALOHA and pure TDMA protocol under a target fairness constraint of 0.9, our proposed hybrid protocol can improve the capacity by at least 9.44% when 1 2 : 1:1 λ λ = and by at least 20.53% when 1 2 : 10 :1 λ λ = , where 1 2 , λ λ are traffic arrival rates of M2M and H2H traffic, respectively.
Declining Responsiveness of Plasmodium falciparum Infections to Artemisinin-Based Combination Treatments on the Kenyan Coast

Background The emergence of artemisinin-resistant P. falciparum malaria in South-East Asia highlights the need for continued global surveillance of the efficacy of artemisinin-based combination therapies. Methods On the Kenyan coast we studied the treatment responses in 474 children 6–59 months old with uncomplicated P. falciparum malaria in a randomized controlled trial of dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine vs. artemether-lumefantrine from 2005 to 2008. (ISRCTN88705995) Results The proportion of patients with residual parasitemia on day 1 rose from 55% in 2005–2006 to 87% in 2007–2008 (odds ratio, 5.4, 95%CI, 2.7–11.1; P<0.001) and from 81% to 95% (OR, 4.1, 95%CI, 1.7–9.9; P = 0.002) in the DHA-PPQ and AM-LM groups, respectively. In parallel, Kaplan-Meier estimated risks of apparent recrudescent infection by day 84 increased from 7% to 14% (P = 0.1) and from 6% to 15% (P = 0.05) with DHA-PPQ and AM-LM, respectively. Coinciding with decreasing transmission in the study area, clinical tolerance to parasitemia (defined as absence of fever) declined between 2005–2006 and 2007–2008 (OR body temperature >37.5°C, 2.8, 1.9–4.1; P<0.001). Neither in vitro sensitivity of parasites to DHA nor levels of antibodies against parasite extract accounted for parasite clearance rates or changes thereof. Conclusions The significant, albeit small, decline through time of parasitological response rates to treatment with ACTs may be due to the emergence of parasites with reduced drug sensitivity, to the coincident reduction in population-level clinical immunity, or both. Maintaining the efficacy of artemisinin-based therapy in Africa would benefit from a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying reduced parasite clearance rates. Trial Registration Controlled-Trials.com ISRCTN88705995
Do Low-Mercury Terrestrial Resources Subsidize Low-Mercury Growth of Stream Fish? Differences between Species along a Productivity Gradient

Low productivity in aquatic ecosystems is associated with reduced individual growth of fish and increased concentrations of methylmercury (MeHg) in fish and their prey. However, many stream-dwelling fish species can use terrestrially-derived food resources, potentially subsidizing growth at low-productivity sites, and, because terrestrial resources have lower MeHg concentrations than aquatic resources, preventing an increase in diet-borne MeHg accumulation. We used a large-scale field study to evaluate relationships among terrestrial subsidy use, growth, and MeHg concentrations in two stream-dwelling fish species across an in-stream productivity gradient. We sampled young-of-the-year brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) and Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), potential competitors with similar foraging habits, from 20 study sites in streams in New Hampshire and Massachusetts that encompassed a wide range of aquatic prey biomass. Stable isotope analysis showed that brook trout used more terrestrial resources than Atlantic salmon. Over their first growing season, Atlantic salmon tended to grow larger than brook trout at sites with high aquatic prey biomass, but brook grew two-fold larger than Atlantic salmon at sites with low aquatic prey biomass. The MeHg concentrations of brook trout and Atlantic salmon were similar at sites with high aquatic prey biomass and the MeHg concentrations of both species increased at sites with low prey biomass and high MeHg in aquatic prey. However, brook trout had three-fold lower MeHg concentrations than Atlantic salmon at low-productivity, high-MeHg sites. These results suggest that differential use of terrestrial resource subsidies reversed the growth asymmetry between potential competitors across a productivity gradient and, for one species, moderated the effect of low in-stream productivity on MeHg accumulation.