Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Preparation, characterization and in vitro angiogenic capacity of cobalt substituted β-tricalcium phosphate ceramics

Divalent cobalt ions (Co2+) have been shown to possess the capacity to induce angiogenesis by activating hypoxia inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α) and subsequently inducing the production of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). However, there are few reports about Co-containing biomaterials for inducing in vitro angiogenesis. The aim of the present work was to prepare Co-containing β-tricalcium phosphate (Co-TCP) ceramics with different contents of calcium substituted by cobalt (0, 2, 5 mol%) and to investigate the effect of Co substitution on their physicochemical and biological properties. Co-TCP powders were synthesized by a chemistry precipitation method and Co-TCP ceramics were prepared by sintering the powder compacts. The effect of Co substitution on phase transition and the sintering property of the β-TCP ceramics was investigated. The proliferation and VEGF expression of human bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (HBMSCs) cultured with both powder extracts and ceramic discs of Co-TCP was further evaluated. The in vitro angiogenesis was evaluated by the tube-like structure formation of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) cultured on ECMatrix™ in the presence of powder extracts. The results showed that Co substitution suppressed the phase transition from β- to α-TCP. Both the powder extracts and ceramic discs of Co-TCP had generally good cytocompatibility to support HBMSC growth. Importantly, the incorporation of Co into β-TCP greatly stimulated VEGF expression of HBMSCs and Co-TCP showed a significant enhancement of network structure formation of HUVECs compared with pure TCP. Our results suggested that the incorporation of Co into bioceramics is a potential viable way to enhance angiogenic properties of biomaterials. Co-TCP bioceramics may be used for bone tissue regeneration with improved angiogenic capacity.
Complete mitochondrial genome of Aspergillus japonicus from the built environment and its phylogenetic analysis

Abstract The complete mitochondrial genome of the important black aspergilli species Aspergillus japonicus was determined using the next-generation sequencing technology. The circular mitogenome of A. japonicus YFCC 8801-W is 48,001 bp in length with a GC content of 27.1%, containing 14 protein-coding genes (PCGs), 4 ORFs, 24 transfer RNA (tRNA) genes and 2 ribosomal RNA (rns and rnl) genes. Phylogenetic analysis based on 14 PCGs showed that A. japonicus was clustered in the A. section Nigri clade of the genus Aspergillus (Aspergillaceae) and formed a separate clade with high credible support. This study provides valuable information for further exploration of mitochondrial evolution in the order Aspergillales.
Parasites and Pathogens: Effects On Host Hormones and Behavior

Dedication. Foreword. Preface. List of Contributors. Part I. Host-parasite hormonal interactions: New insights: how parasites and pathogens alter the endocrine physiology and development of insect hosts-- N.E. Beckage The life history and development of polyembryonic parasitoids-- M.R. Strand, M. Grbic Schistosome parasites induce physiological changes in their snail host by interfering with two regulatory systems, the internal defense system and the neuroendocrine system M. de Jong-Brink, R.M. Hoek, W. Lageweb, and A.B. Smit Infection with Echinostoma Paraensei (Digenea) induces parasite-reactive polypeptides in the hemolymph of the gastropod host biomphalaria glabrata-- C.M. Adema, L.A. Hertel, and E.S. Loker The growth hormone-like factor from plerocercoids of the tapeworm Spirometra mansonoides is a multifunctional protein-- C.K. Phares Peptides- an emerging force in host responses to parasitism-- I. Fairweather . Part II. Parasitism and reproduction: Testosterone and immunosuppression in vertebrates: implications for parasite-mediated sexual selection-- N. Hillgarth, J.C. Wingfield Host embryonic and larval castration as a strategy for the individual castrator and the species-- J.J. Brown and D. A. Reed The role of endocrinological versus nutritional influences in mediating reproductive changes in insect host and insect vectors-- H. Hurd and T. Webb . Section III. Parasites, pathogens, and host behavior: Behavioral abnormalities and disease caused by viral infections of the central nervous system-- C.G. Hatalaski and W. I. Lipkin Effects of hormones on behavioral defenses against parasites-- B.L. Hart How parasites alter the behavior of their insect hosts-- S.A. Adamo Parasites, fluctuating asymmetry, and sexual selection-- M. Polak Hormones an sex-specific traits: critical questions-- D. K. Hews, M.C. Moore Host behavior modification: an evolutinary perspective-- A.M. Kuris The ecology of parasites in a salt marsh ecosystem-- K.D. Lafferty. Index.
Focus Group Interview as a Means to Determine School Effectiveness Indicators

The growth of interest in school effectiveness has been striking and is gaining momentum. Similarly in Malaysia, school effectiveness has become a dominant theme in contemporary educational reform and development. Thus, the growing concern about educational reform has resulted in a wide variety of school effectiveness interventions, initiatives and strategies. Although school effectiveness has become the central focus in most schools, there is still a strong need to determine the constructs or dimensions that are suitable to measure school effectiveness in Malaysian secondary schools. In this study, a focus group interview consisting of eight selected excellent and senior school principals were conducted. The findings from the focus group interview indicated 5 indicators for school effectiveness which comprised academic performance, school programme, organizational effectiveness, learning environment and school achievement. The findings also indicated 15sub-indicators for school effectiveness consisting of curriculum, public exam, student assessment, academic programme, co-curriculum programme, student development, resource management, technology advancement, data and information management, teaching and learning, community relation, staff professional development,, award and recognition, innovation and niche area.
Morphological and phenological shifts in the Plantago lanceolata L. species as linked to climate change over the past 100 years

Abstract Herbarium collections have proven to be irreplaceable information base in recent studies directed towards revealing shifts in plants phenology and morphology caused by climate change. We examined eight parameters of morphological traits in the perennial herb species Plantago lanceolata L. collected in the wild between 1905 and 2019 and stored at the KW-herbarium (Kyiv, Ukraine) to find out if there were changes in plants’ organ sizes during the last 114 years. For this period, we also calculated 13 climatic parameters obtained from meteorological records from the State archive that gave us the opportunity to check if there are any relations between the climate change in Kyiv region and shifts in morphological parameters of plants. Our results have shown Plantago lanceolata leaf blades, petioles and spikes had become significantly longer with time, increasing 3.0 cm, 2.1 cm and 0.6 cm respectively. The Co-inertia analysis revealed that 34% of the morphological changes was attributed to climate change. The analysis also demonstrated that leaf length correlated more with raised temperatures when plants were in flower, while spike length depended on the temperatures during bud development. Received knowledge can be used to reveal rapid evolutionary processes of the Plantago species and predicting their further course for the construction of historical climate models based on the leaves traits.
Representation of Traffic Congestion Data for Urban Road Traffic Networks Based on Pooling Operations

In order to improve the efficiency of transportation networks, it is critical to forecast traffic congestion. Large-scale traffic congestion data have become available and accessible, yet they need to be properly represented in order to avoid overfitting, reduce the requirements of computational resources, and be utilized effectively by various methodologies and models. Inspired by pooling operations in deep learning, we propose a representation framework for traffic congestion data in urban road traffic networks. This framework consists of grid-based partition of urban road traffic networks and a pooling operation to reduce multiple values into an aggregated one. We also propose using a pooling operation to calculate the maximum value in each grid (MAV). Raw snapshots of traffic congestion maps are transformed and represented as a series of matrices which are used as inputs to a spatiotemporal congestion prediction network (STCN) to evaluate the effectiveness of representation when predicting traffic congestion. STCN combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and long short-term memory neural network (LSTMs) for their spatiotemporal capability. CNNs can extract spatial features and dependencies of traffic congestion between roads, and LSTMs can learn their temporal evolution patterns and correlations. An empirical experiment on an urban road traffic network shows that when incorporated into our proposed representation framework, MAV outperforms other pooling operations in the effectiveness of the representation of traffic congestion data for traffic congestion prediction, and that the framework is cost-efficient in terms of computational resources.
The role of adaptive evolution of phenotypic plasticity and historical population genetic processes in purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria L.) invasion in North America

10 Introduction 10 The Evolution of Increased Competitive Ability (EICA) 12 The Evolution of Phenotypic Plasticity 22 Local Adaptation 31 Allelopathy 34 Hybridization / Polyploidization 38 Synthesis of Mechanistic View on Invasiveness 40 Literature Cited 43 Chapter 3. Phenotypic plasticity of native vs. invasive purple loosestrife: a two-state multivariate approach 61 Abstract 6
Interpretable deep learning regression for breast density estimation on MRI

Breast density, which is the ratio between fibroglandular tissue (FGT) and total breast volume, can be assessed qualitatively by radiologists and quantitatively by computer algorithms. These algorithms often rely on segmentation of breast and FGT volume. In this study, we propose a method to directly assess breast density on MRI, and provide interpretations of these assessments. We assessed breast density in 506 patients with breast cancer using a regression convolutional neural network (CNN). The input for the CNN were slices of breast MRI of 128 × 128 voxels, and the output was a continuous density value between 0 (fatty breast) and 1 (dense breast). We used 350 patients to train the CNN, 75 for validation, and 81 for independent testing. We investigated why the CNN came to its predicted density using Deep SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). The density predicted by the CNN on the testing set was significantly correlated with the ground truth densities (N = 81 patients, Spearman's ρ = 0:86, P < 0:001). When inspecting what the CNN based its predictions on, we found that voxels in FGT commonly had positive SHAP-values, voxels in fatty tissue commonly had negative SHAP-values, and voxels in non-breast tissue commonly had SHAP-values near zero. This means that the prediction of density is based on the structures we expect it to be based on, namely FGT and fatty tissue. To conclude, we presented an interpretable deep learning regression method for breast density estimation on MRI with promising results.
Diagonalization-based parallel-in-time algorithms for parabolic PDE-constrained optimization problems

Solving parabolic PDE-constrained optimization problems requires to take into account the discrete time points all-at-once, which means that the computation procedure is often time-consuming. It is thus desirable to design robust and analyzable parallel-in-time (PinT) algorithms to handle this kind of coupled PDE systems with opposite evolution directions. To this end, for two representative model problems which are, respectively, the time-periodic PDEs and the initial-value PDEs, we propose a diagonalization-based approach that can reduce dramatically the computational time. The main idea lies in carefully handling the associated time discretization matrices that are denoted by Bper and Bini for the two problems. For the first problem, we diagonalize Bper directly and this results in a direct PinT algorithm (i.e., non-iterative). For the second problem, the main idea is to design a suitable approximation B̂per of Bini, which naturally results in a preconditioner of the discrete KKT system. This preconditioner can be used in a PinT pattern, and for both the Backward-Euler method and the trapezoidal rule the clustering of the eigenvalues and singular values of the preconditioned matrix is justified. Compared to existing preconditioners that are designed by approximating the Schur complement of the discrete KKT system, we show that the new preconditioner leads to much faster convergence for certain Krylov subspace solvers, e.g., the GMRES and BiCGStab methods. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the advantages of the proposed PinT algorithm.
Space-Domain Index Modulation for mmWave Cloud Radio Access Networks

In this paper, we investigate the uplink transmission strategy of a cloud radio access network (C-RAN) based millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication system and propose to use a space-domain index modulation (SDIM) scheme to improve the system reliability. The key idea of the proposed SDIM scheme is to enable the user (UE) to use different beam directions to carry part of information. We first introduce the SDIM scheme into C-RAN based mmWave communication system and model the signal design as an optimization problem. Then, two detection methods, namely the centralized detection and distributed detection, are proposed to demodulate the received signal. Moreover, we propose a power allocation algorithm to minimize the system symbol error rate (SER). Following this, by ignoring the side lobe of the UE, the condition which ensures the superiority performance of mmWave SDIM against the conventional communication scheme is derived. Finally, we model the position of the remote radio heads (RHHs) of the network as a homogeneous Poisson point process (PPP) and derive the probability that the proposed SDIM scheme outperforms the conventional communication scheme to evaluate its performance. Analytical and numerical results show that the proposed SDIM scheme can effectively enhance the system reliability.
Performance Evaluation of Incremental Sigma-Delta ADCs Based on their NTF

In this brief the performance of I-SD ADCs based on the spectral description is discussed. It is based on the modulator and the reconstruction filter and accounts for the applied reset. The definition of the overall noise transfer function (NTF) enables the analysis of the performance of I-SD ADCs in frequency domain and consequently makes it possible to explain the inherent behavior of this type of ADC including reconstruction filter and non-idealities. In the state of the art, the performance of an I-SD ADC is either obtained by simulations or predicted via time-domain considerations. However, these simulations can become time consuming and time-domain considerations neglect non-idealities, especially in the case of a CT modulator. Only recently, a general way to describe the NTF of DT and CT I-SD ADCs was introduced. This brief gives a detailed analysis of the NTF of I-SD ADCs and the impact of its properties on the resulting SQNR. It discusses the influence of common reconstruction filters and based on this analysis, it introduces as an example a modified CoI filter that allows to improve the ADC’s performance.
Crustacea subterranea aus Argentinien

Resumen En el curso de las investigaciones sobre la fauna de las aguas subterraneas limnicas de la Argentina, se encontraron en pocas muestras una sorprendente cantidad de especies de crustaceos. Una de las especies (Leptobathynella richerti) fue descubierta poco antes en Paraguay y 3 especies (Parastygocaris goerssi, P. andina e Ingolfiella uspallatae) ya han sido publicadas por el autor. Aqui se describen, se ilustran y se discuten 2 especies del genero Parabathynella, 1 Nitocrella y 12 Parastenocaris como nuevas para la ciencia. Se completa la descripcion de Leptobathynella richerti. Por falta de material, otras 5 especies aun no se han podido determinar. Por consiguiente, la fauna de las aguas subterraneas neotropicales prueba ser abun‐dante y representada por mudias especies tambien en la Argentina. Un analisis biogeo‐grafico del material aparecera en otra oportunidad con relaciones mas amplias. Las investigaciones seran continuadas.
Complete mitogenome of the noble volute Cymbiola nobilis from the Vietnamese Island of Phú Quốc

Abstract We sequenced the complete mitogenome of a specimen of Cymbiola nobilis (Neogastropoda, Volutidae) from Phú Quốc Island in Vietnam. The mitogenome of this predatory sea snail is 16,314-bp long and comprises the typical set of genes encoding 13 proteins, 2 rRNAs, and 22 tRNAs. It features a complex control region that contains two copies of an inverted repeat sequence separated by an AT-rich region, a characteristic previously observed in a few other gastropods. Phylogenetic analysis based on all protein-coding genes revealed that the Volutidae form a strongly supported clade.
Testing subspecies hypothesis with molecular markers and morphometrics in the Pacific white tern complex

To test the validity of subspecies designations of the white tern, genetic and morphological data were used to assess differences among four putative Pacific subspecies Gygis alba candida, Gygis alba rothschildi, Gygis alba pacifica, and Gygis alba microrhyncha. The origin(s) of a recent colonization of Oahu was also examined using molecular data. Samples were collected from 209 birds, representing island groups of the North and South Pacific. Culmen length and depth, longest and shortest rectrix lengths, and wing chord measurements from an earlier dataset were compared. Mitochondrial DNA variation suggests that there are no phylogenetically distinct species within the Pacific Ocean. The genetic and morphological similarity of G. a. candida and G. a. rothschildi warrants merging them into one subspecies (G. a. candida). Gygis alba microrhyncha and G. a. pacifica are distinctly smaller and larger than the other two subspecies, respectively, but are not completely diagnosable across the morphological characters examined. Although the Pacific subspecies do not exhibit reciprocal monophyly, there is significant genetic differentiation among the two South Pacific groups, G. a. microrhyncha, G. a. pacifica, and all other Pacific subspecies. This differentiation warrants treating these two South Pacific groups as separate management units, but not species or subspecies. Finally, the recently established population of white terns on Oahu shared haplotypes with all subspecies, suggesting multiple origins from populations across the Pacific and confirming contemporary gene flow. © 2009 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2009, 98, 586–595.
Hierarchical Long Short-Term Memory Network for Cyberattack Detection

With the continuous development of network technology, cyberattack detection mechanisms play a vital role in ensuring the security of computers and network systems. However, with the rapid growth of network traffic, traditional intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are far from being able to quickly and accurately identify complex and diverse network attacks, especially those related to low-frequency attacks. To enhance the overall security of the Internet, an IDS based on hierarchical long short-term memory (HLSTM) networks is proposed. With the introduction of HLSTM, the network can learn across multiple levels of temporal hierarchy over complex network traffic sequences. The system is evaluated on the well-known benchmark data set NSL-KDD for comparison with other existing methods. The experimental results demonstrate that compared with existing start-of-the-art methods, our system has better detection performance for different types of cyberattacks. In addition, the low-frequency network attack types have higher classification accuracy and a lower false detection rate.
Comparative Evaluation of Lifetime of Three-Level Inverters in Grid-Connected Photovoltaic Systems

The cost of the PV energy reduction is still required to increase the penetration level of PV systems in the energy market. The reliability of PV inverters is one of the important aspects to be enhanced in order to reduce the cost of PV energy, since it is closely related to the maintenance cost and the annual energy production. In this paper, the lifetime of NPC and T-type inverters, which are three-level inverter topologies that are widely used for PV systems, are comparatively evaluated with a 30 kW grid-connected PV system. It is performed by focusing on power devices since the power electronic components of both converters are the same except for the power devices. Therefore, this result can represent the comparison of the reliability performance of the NPC and T-type inverters. The power loss and temperature distributions of power devices are analyzed and their efficiencies are compared at different power levels with different switching frequencies. The lifetimes of the reliability-critical power devices in the NPC and T-type inverters are estimated, respectively with a one-year mission profile of the PV system, and the results are compared.
Effects of single nucleotide polymorphisms in leptin and pro-opiomelanocortin on peripheral eucocyte counts in beef cattle

Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) in leptin (LEP) and pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) have been associated with beef carcass quality and yield respectively. Both hormones also play a role in immune performance. Since both of these genes are pleiotrophic, it was important to determine whether selection based on these SNPs would negatively affect immune cell numbers. A SNP in each of these hormones was assessed for effects on immune cell counts and antibody titres in twenty-seven beef cattle herds (n = 556). A commercial rabies vaccine was administered to these animals. Prior to being vaccinated, the types of lymphocytes evaluated included B cells, gamma delta cells, regular and activated CD4 and CD8 cells and numbers of lymphocytes as well as baseline serum antibody titres. On day 21, antibody titres were measured and a booster vaccine was administered. Finally on day 42, antibody titres and lymphocyte types were again counted. Several cell types were significantly associated with the LEP genotype however, no consistent pattern of correlation was observed between LEP genotype (TT, CT or CC) and peripheral blood lymphocyte populations. The number of different lymphocytes significantly associated with LEP genotype increased from two on day 0 to four on day 42. Animals with CT and CC genotypes had significantly higher increased rabies antibody titres in the first 21 days after vaccination than those with TT genotypes. The POMC SNP also did not show a clear pattern of association between lymphocyte subtypes and genotype. There was no difference in response to the rabies vaccination associated with the POMC genotype. Our results suggested that selection at either of the SNPs examined in this research would not detrimentally impact immune function in beef cattle.