Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards understanding of carbon stocks and stabilization in volcanic ash soils in natural Andean ecosystems of northern Ecuador

Volcanic ash soils contain very large stocks of soil organic matter (SOM) per unit area. Consequently, they constitute potential sources or sinks for the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Whether soils become a net carbon source or sink with climate and/or land‐use change depends on the stability of SOM against decomposition, which is influenced by stabilization mechanisms in the soil. To quantify organic carbon stocks and to clarify the importance of chemical and physical soil characteristics for carbon stabilization in volcanic ash soils, we applied selective extraction techniques, performed X‐ray diffraction analysis of the clay fraction and estimated pore‐size distribution of soils under natural upper montane forest and grassland (páramo) in the Ecuadorian Andes. Our results show that organic carbon stocks under both vegetation types are roughly twice as large as previously reported global averages for volcanic ash soils. SOM stabilization is suggested to be dominantly influenced by the following chemical and physical soil characteristics: (i) direct stabilization of SOM in organo‐metallic (Al‐humus) complexes, explaining at most 40% of carbon accumulation, (ii) indirect protection of SOM (notably aliphatic compounds) through low soil pH and toxic levels of Al, and probably also (iii) physical protection of SOM caused by a very large micro‐porosity. Moreover, in the case of the forest soils, inherent recalcitrance of OM itself was responsible for substantial accumulation in ectorganic horizons. Both vegetation types contributed to soil acidification, thus increasing SOM accumulation.
Machine Learning and Systems Biology Approaches to Characterize Dosage-Based Gene Dependencies in Cancer Cells

Mapping of cancer survivability factors allows for the identification of novel biological insights for drug targeting. Using genomic editing techniques, gene dependencies can be extracted in a high-throughput and quantitative manner. Dependencies have been predicted using machine learning techniques on –omics data, but the biological consequences of dependency predictor pairs has not been explored. In this work we devised a framework to explore gene dependency using an ensemble of machine learning methods, and our learned models captured meaningful biological information beyond just gene dependency prediction. We show that dosage-based dependent predictors (DDPs) primarily belonged to transcriptional regulation ontologies. We also found that anti-sense RNAs and long- noncoding RNA transcripts display DDPs. Network analyses revealed that SOX10, HLA-J, and ZEB2 act as a triad of network hubs in the dependent-predictor network. Collectively, we demonstrate the powerful combination of machine learning and systems biology approach can illuminate new insights in understanding gene dependency and guide novel targeting avenues.
Analysis of zero-reference-pressure EoS/GE models

An analysis of EoS/GE models, which are based on matching the EoS-derived expression for the excess Gibbs free energy GE with that from a GE model at zero pressure, is presented, with the focus on the most successful and widely used of these models, MHV2 and PSRK. It shows why zero-reference-pressure models do not reproduce exactly the GE models at zero pressure and the ensuing implications on the prediction of asymmetric systems. The development of EoS/GE models that reproduce exactly the GE model is discussed. However, such reproducibility at zero pressure is impossible for systems containing components with reduced temperatures higher than about 0.9. Therefore, extrapolation schemes that allow treatment of such systems are examined.
Mental Health and the Field Research Team

Abstract Due to the intellectual, physical, and emotional demands of field research, those doing this work need to strategies to monitor and maintain their own mental health before, during, and after a field season. Moreover, they should have a framework for supporting their colleagues. This review article will present a framework for assessing the mental health hazards and the reactions, both positive and negative, to fieldwork. First, it will use U.S. epidemiology to show that most field teams are at risk. Second, it will frame the field season both as a workplace and wilderness exposure event and discuss the elements of the field research environment that can be therapeutic for some but toxic for others. Third, it will discuss the psychological impacts of travel and reintegration as they are pertinent to the practice of archaeology. Research will be presented in order to guide evidence-informed policies for the field research team to improve the mental-health readiness and resiliency of the research team. Last, it will provide guidance on how to manage the anxiety caused by separating from social media platforms.
Proportion of Hospital Deaths Potentially Attributable to Nosocomial Infection

Abstract Objective: To determine the fraction of hospital deaths potentially associated with nosocomial infection (NI). Design: A matched (1:1) case-control study. Setting: An 800-bed, tertiary-care, teaching hospital. Patients: All patients older than 14 years who were admitted to the hospital between January 1, 1990, and January 1, 1991, were eligible. All 524 consecutive deaths that occurred in the hospital comprised the case group. For each case, a control patient was matched for primary admission diagnosis and admission date. Outcome Measures: The proportion of hospital deaths potentially associated with NI was estimated from the population attributable risk (PAR) adjusted for age, gender, service, severity of illness, length of stay, and quality of the medical record. Results: For stays longer than 48 hours, the PAR for all NIs was estimated to be 21.3% (95% confidence interval [CI95], 16.8%-30.5%). The greatest proportion of deaths potentially associated with NIs was observed in patients with only one infection (PAR, 15.0%; CI96, 10.9%-22.6%) and bacteremia or sepsis (PAR, 7.7%;CI95,4.6%-11.6%). Conclusions: NIs are associated with a large proportion of intrahospital deaths. This information may help clinicians and healthcare managers to assess the impact of programs for the prevention and control of NIs on intrahospital death.
Immobilized Metal Affinity Chromatography (IMAC) of Mushroom Tyrosinase

Partially purified and crude commercial mushroom (Agaricus bisporus) tyrosinase was subjected to immobilized metal ion affinity chromatography (IMAC) with Cu 2+ , Ni 2+ , Co 2+ , and Zn 2+ metal ions bound to iminodiacetic acid (IDA) agarose. Under high salt conditions (500 mM NaCl) tyrosinase was retained on all immobilized metal IDA resins. In contrast, under low salt conditions (10 mM NaCl) tyrosinase was adsorbed only onto Cu 2+ IDA agarose. Yields of recovered enzyme were high, and some of these IMAC resins removed contaminating proteins. The enzyme was also adsorbed onto Cu 2+ DEAE columns under low salt conditions but not under high salt conditions. Although Cu 2+ IDA columns have previously been used to purify polyphenol oxidases from a variety of plants sources, this is the first report of the use of other metal ions chelated to IDA to bind this enzyme, and it is the first report showing the effects of salt concentration on binding of this enzyme to IMAC resins.
Quality characteristics of Trabzon persimmon dried at several temperatures and pretreated by different methods

Although Trabzon persimmon (Diospyros kaki L.) is a beneficial fruit for both human health and industrial use, it is generally used seasonally, and inadequate attention has been given to its off-season use. This study was designed to determine the best drying method for optimizing the quality of dried Trabzon persimmon (Diospyros kaki 'Fuyu'). Samples treated with sodium metabisulfite prior to drying and dried at 65 °C had the highest L* value (P < 0.05). Rehydration value and ascorbic acid content of samples dried at 50 °C were the highest. Nevertheless, these samples had lower total phenolic content than samples dried at 65 °C and 90 °C. Samples treated with sodium metabisulfite before drying had the highest appearance score; however, these samples were the least liked and had the lowest flavor score. Control samples were the most popular samples in terms of flavor (P < 0.05). During storage, control group samples had the highest increase in total mesophilic aerobic bacteria, while samples treated with sodium metabisulfite prior to drying had the lowest increase in total mesophilic aerobic bacteria, owing largely to the antimicrobial effect of sodium metabisulfite. Although sodium metabisulfite treatment gave the best physical, chemical, and microbiological results, these dried persimmons were given the lowest sensory scores.
Analysis of 5-fluorouracil in saliva using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy

The ability of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) to measure the chemotherapy drug 5-fluorouracil in saliva is presented. A silver-doped sol–gel provided SERS and also some chemical selectivity. 5-Fluorouracil and physiological thiocyanate produced SERS, whereas large biochemicals, such as enzymes and proteins, did not, supporting the expectation that the larger molecules do not diffuse through the sol–gel to any appreciable extent. In addition, 5-fluorouracil samples of 2 µg ml−1 were easily measured, and an estimated limit of detection of 150 ng ml−1 in 5 min should provide sufficient sensitivity to perform pharmacokinetic studies and to monitor and regulate patient dosage. This would fill a critical need for this highly used drug, since genetic-based variations in its metabolism can range by as much as five-fold from one patient to another. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Effect of Physical Activity/Exercise Interventions on Immune Parameters, and In ammatory Markers for Proxy Conditions Among Adults Prone to COVID-19: A Systematic Review Protocol

Ebuka Miracle Anieto (  antebu001@myuct.ac.za ) University of Nigeria, Nsukka https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8160-9701 Veronica Ebere Ogbodo University College Hospital Ibadan Ijeoma Blessing Nwadilibe University of Cape Town Faculty of Health Sciences Omotoyosi Johnson Adu University College Hospital Ibadan Bouwien C.M. Smits-Engelsman University of Cape Town, Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Faculty of Health Sciences Jaleel Mohammed Rehabilitation Association for Hematopoetic Cell Transplant, UK Michael Ebe Kalu McMaster University School of Rehabilitation Sciences
The Application of AZOY Transparent Conductive Oxide Film in Multifilm-Coated Polycarbonate Optical Glasses

When glass or polycarbonate PC was used to fabricate optical glasses for hypermetropic, myopic, and presbyopic eyes, the average optical transmittance during the visible region 380–780 nm was 82 to 84%. The minimum average optical transmittance request of the optimal glasses is 95% during the visible region and 82–84% is too low for real use. Because of this, the multilayer antireflection coating ARC was developed and deposited to improve the transmittance ratio of the optical glasses. To protect the eyes from the harm of UV rays, transparent conducting oxide TCO films are combined with multi-ARC layers to form the antiradiant UV-ray layer. In the past, indium tin oxide ITO was the most extensively used material because ITO films yielded excellent electrical properties and optical transmittance characteristics in the visible region, except that ITO could be processed easily by physical deposition methods such as radio-frequency magnetron sputtering 1 and electron-beam E-beam evaporation. 2 However, TCO films are the key components in flat panel displays and thin-film solar cells. 3 The ever-increasing demand was caused by the large growth of flat panel displays and solar cell market, causing the price of ITO to rise quickly over the past years. This has caused the increased efforts to improve material properties and production processes for other TCO materials. Nonstoichiometric and doped films of oxides based on Sn, In, Cd, Cu, and Zn and their blends exhibit high transmittance and conductivity. Among the known TCO materials, the ZnO-based binary or ternary compounds have been extensively studied.
Synthesis of Maleic Anhydride in an Inert Membrane Reactor. Effect of Reactor Configuration

An inert membrane has been used to distribute oxygen to a fixed bed of VPO catalyst in the partial oxidation of butane to maleic anhydride. Two different reactor configurations have been used, namely, a standard inert membrane reactor (IMR), in which oxygen permeates inward from the shell side and the catalyst is packed on the tube side, and an outward flow inert membrane reactor (OFIMR), in which the catalyst bed is packed on the shell side and oxygen flows outwardly from the tube side. The radial variation of both the oxygen and hydrocarbon concentrations and of the temperature is different in the two types of reactors investigated, and as a consequence a considerably better performance is obtained for the OFIMR.
Multipole operators for an arbitrary number of spins

Basis states and operators composed of n, in general, different nuclear spins of integer or half‐integer values are explicitly constructed. Various coupling schemes are discussed, and transformations between them derived. Following this, a complete set of irreducible tensor operators T(k){V} is constructed which can be used as a basis for expanding operators which depend on n nuclear spins. It is further shown that decomposition of the tensor’s components T(k)q{V} into a sum of products of two irreducible tensor components involves transformation matrices between different coupling schemes. Various properties and commutation relations of the T(k)q{V}’s are given along with a discussion of their reduced matrix elements.
Lost in Translation

Bloodstream infection (BSI) remains the most important infectious complication of vascular access and is associated with prolonged hospital stay" and with greatly increased treatment costs' and attributable mortality. "' Prevention of intravascular device-related (IVDR) BSI is fundamental to the patient safety movement, especially for patients requiring long-term vascular access for chemotherapy, parenteral nutrition, or hemodialysis. This issue of the journal contains 5 articles on the subject of healthcare-associated BSI: Warren et al. discuss the formidable challenges in translation of evidence-based medicine to evidence-based practice for prevention of IVDR BSI; Braun et al. compare the effect of using differing methods to ascertain rates of healthcare-associated BSI; Maragakis et al. describe a very troubling increased incidence of BSI in association with a widely used commercial needleless connector; Menyhay and Maki report the results of a simulation study of the effectiveness of conventional alcohol preparation of needleless luer-activated valve connectors with 70% alcohol and the efficacy of a novel antiseptic-barrier cap; and Huang et al. assess the utility of 2 blood cultures for diagnosis of BSI caused by coagulase-negative staphylococci (CNS) in neonates.
Experimental and simulation study of in-cylinder strategies for regeneration of lean nitrogen oxide traps in a high-speed direct-injection diesel engine

The use of lean nitrogen oxide traps is an attractive solution for reducing the tailpipe emissions of nitrogen oxides in vehicles with diesel engines. During the operation, nitrogen oxides are stored on the surfaces of lean nitrogen oxide traps, and regeneration of lean nitrogen oxide traps is required for proper operation. In this paper, two in-cylinder combustion strategies for regeneration of lean nitrogen oxide traps were assessed for a high-speed direct-injection diesel engine. In particular, a delayed and extended main strategy and a premixed compression ignition strategy were studied through experiments and simulations. The experimental data were collected from a 1.5 l diesel engine to analyze its combustion, exhaust temperature, fuel consumption, and emission characteristics resulting from either the delayed and extended main strategy or the premixed compression ignition strategy. The results indicated that the premixed compression ignition strategy offered a better fuel economy and lower soot and nitrogen oxide emissions, while the delayed and extended main strategy offered a hotter exhaust temperature and higher production rates of reductant species. In addition, a one-dimensional numerical lean nitrogen oxide trap model was designed and validated to study the efficiency of the surface adsorbents on lean nitrogen oxide traps for each of these two strategies in terms of a reduction in the nitrogen oxide emissions. The simulation results revealed that both strategies can reach a lean nitrogen oxide trap efficiency rate of 100% when the exhaust gas recirculation rate was equal to 30% but that the lean nitrogen oxide trap efficiency rate drops when lower exhaust gas recirculation rates were applied. Overall, the results indicated that the premixed compression ignition strategy performed better than the delayed and extended main strategy in terms of the fuel economy and lower tailpipe emissions.
Part Aﬃnity Field based Activity Recognition

This report presents work and results on Activity Recognition using Part Aﬃnity Fields for real-time surveillance applications. Starting with a short introduction to the motivation, this report gives a detailed overview over the key idea of the pursued approach and explains the basic ideas. In addition a variety of experiments on various subjects are presented, like i) the impact of the number of input frames, ii) the impact of diﬀerent simple dimensionality reduction approaches, and iii) a comparison on how multi-class and binary problem formulation inﬂuence the performance.
Composition of the Essential Oil of Chuquiraga spinosa (R. et P.) D. Don

Air-dried leaves of Chuquiraga spinosa (R. et P.) D. Don (Asteraceae) gave by hydrodistillation a 0.2% yield of essential oil. The oil composition was analysed by GC and GC-MS; 70 components were identified. The oil contained more than 76% of oxygen-containing compounds. Carbonyl compounds were the most abundant components (36.1%) with p-methoxyacetophenone (8.6%) and p-hydroxyacetophenone (5.8%) as the main components of this group. β-Humulene (3.4%) ar-curcumene (2.8%) and cuparene (2.5%) were the main sesquiterpene hydrocarbons. Spathulenol (3.8%) was the principal oxygenated sesquiterpene. Apiol (9.8%) was the most abundant phenylpropanoid derivative.
Facial Emotion Recognition with Convolutional Neural Network Based Architecture

 Abstract — Neural networks are appealing for many applications since they are able to learn complex non-linear relationships between input and output data. As the number of neurons and layers in a neural network increase, it is possible to represent more complex relationships with automatically extracted features. Nowadays Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are widely used in Computer Vision problems such as; classification, object detection, segmentation image editing etc. In this work, Facial Emotion Recognition task is performed by proposed Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based DNN architecture using FER2013 Dataset. Moreover, the effects of different hyperparameters (activation function, kernel size, initializer, batch size and network size) are investigated and ablation study results for Pooling Layer, Dropout and Batch Normalization are presented.
A New Discretization Approach of Bat and K-Means

Bat algorithm is one of the optimization techniques that mimic the behavior of bat. Bat algorithm is a powerful algorithm in finding the optimum feature data collection. Classification is one of the data mining tasks that useful in knowledge representation. But, the high dimensional data become the issue in the classification that interrupt classification accuracy. From the literature, feature selection and discretization able to overcome the problem. Therefore, this study aims to show Bat algorithm is potential as a discretization approach and as a feature selection to improve classification accuracy. In this paper, a new hybrid Bat-K-Mean algorithm refer as hBA is proposed to convert continuous data into discrete data called as optimize discrete dataset. Then, Bat is used as feature selection to select the optimum feature from the optimized discrete dataset in order to reduce the dimension of data. The experiment is conducted by using k-Nearest Neighbor to evaluate the effectiveness of discretization and feature selection in classification by comparing with continuous dataset without feature selection, discrete dataset without feature selection, and continuous dataset without discretization and feature selection. Also, to show Bat is potential as a discretization approach and feature selection method. The experiments were carried out using a number of benchmark datasets from the UCI machine learning repository. The results show the classification accuracy is improved with the Bat-K-Means optimized discretization and Bat optimized feature selection.
Frozen hake fillets quality as related to texture and viscosity by mechanical methods

This work aimed to develop a textural quality classification function for frozen hake fillets using instrumental measurements. Frozen hake fillets were stored to provide a wide range of textures. Raw and cooked fillets were analyzed for texture using Kramer and Warner-Bratzler shear cells and a puncture device. Apparent viscosity, dimethylamine and protein solubility were also measured. Principal Component Analysis indicated three factors accounting for 86.5 % of the variance. Four clusters were found, ranging from excellent quality (low texture, high viscosity) to very poor (high texture, low viscosity). Parameters required for classification were viscosity, maximum force from Kramer and maximum force and energy from the puncture test.
Growth, SDH Activity and Microbiological Properties of Aubergine (Solanum melongena L.) crops Irrigated with Treated Wastewater from Casablanca city, Morocco

Aubergine cultivation experiments were carried out at the Ain Chock Faculty of Science of the Hassan 2 University in Casablanca, to study the effect of potable water (PW), waste water (WW) and treated wastewater (TW) on aubergine crop production and on physico-chemical properties, SDH activity and microbiological properties of aubergine fruits. The aubergine growth was not significantly affected by different treatments. K+, NO3-, lipid, protein and Vitamin C content were insignificant in plant irrigated with TW compared with PW. For the microbiological results, no bacterial colonies of Faecal Streptococcus, Vibrio cholerae or Salmonella were identified in all the fruits studied for any irrigation system and total coliforms and fecal coliforms were below to acceptable limits for plant. The results of SDH activity showed that leaves presented higher activity compared to fruits and roots. Treated wastewater can be a resource for agricultural irrigation.