Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Structure and Membrane Topography of the Vibrio-Type Secretin Complex from the Type 2 Secretion System of Enteropathogenic <named-content content-type='genus-species'>Escherichia coli</named-content>

The -barrel assembly machinery (BAM) complex is the core machinery for the assembly of -barrel membrane proteins, and inhibition of BAM complex activity is lethal to bacteria. Discovery of integral membrane proteins that are key to pathogenesis and yet do not require assistance from the BAM complex raises the question of how these proteins assemble into bacterial outer membranes. Here, we address this question through a structural analysis of the type 2 secretion system (T2SS) secretin from enteropathogenic Escherichia coli O127:H6 strain E2348/69. Long -strands assemble into a barrel extending 17 Å through and beyond the outer membrane, adding insight to how these extensive -strands are assembled into the E. coli outer membrane. The substrate docking chamber of this secretin is shown to be sufficient to accommodate the substrate mucinase SteC. IMPORTANCE In order to cause disease, bacterial pathogens inhibit immune responses and induce pathology that will favor their replication and dissemination. In Gram-negative bacteria, these key attributes of pathogenesis depend on structures assembled into or onto the outer membrane. One of these is the T2SS. The Vibriotype T2SS mediates cholera toxin secretion in Vibrio cholerae, and in Escherichia coli O127:H6 strain E2348/69, the same machinery mediates secretion of the mucinases that enable the pathogen to penetrate intestinal mucus and thereby establish deadly infections.
Unsupervised Image-to-Image

Our generator architecture is based on CycleGAN [9] and CUT [8]. We only use ResNet-based [3] generator with 9 residual blocks for training. It contains 2 downsampling blocks, 9 residual blocks, and 2 upsampling blocks. Each downsampling and upsampling block follows two-stride convolution/deconvolution, normalization, ReLU. Each residual block contains convolution, normalization, ReLU, convolution, normalization, and residual connection. We define the first half of generatorsG and F as encoder which is represented as Genc and Fenc. The patch-based multi-layer PatchNCE loss is computed using features from four layers of the encoder (the first and second downsampling convolution, and the first and the fifth residual block). The patch sizes extracted from these four layers are 9×9, 15×15, 35×35, and 99×99 resolution respectively. Following CUT [8], for each layer’s features, we sample 256 random locations and apply the 2-layer MLP (projection head HX , HY ) to infer 256-dim final features.
Evaluation of soil carbon dynamics after forest cover change in CMIP6 land models using chronosequences

Land surface models are used to provide global estimates of soil organic carbon (SOC) changes after past and future change land use change (LUC), in particular re-/deforestation. To evaluate how well the models capture decadal-scale changes in SOC after LUC, we provide the first consistent comparison of simulated time series of LUC by six land models all of which participated in the coupled model intercomparison project phase 6 (CMIP6) with soil carbon chronosequences (SCCs). For this comparison we use SOC measurements of adjacent plots at four high-quality data sites in temperate and tropical regions. We find that initial SOC stocks differ among models due to different approaches to represent SOC. Models generally meet the direction of SOC change after reforestation of cropland but the amplitude and rate of changes vary strongly among them. The normalized root mean square errors of the multi model mean range from 0.5 to 0.8 across sites and 0.1–0.7 when excluding outliers. Further, models simulate SOC losses after deforestation for crop or grassland too slow due to the lack of crop harvest impacts in the models or an overestimation of the SOC recovery on grassland. The representation of management, especially nitrogen levels is important to capture drops in SOC after land abandonment for forest regrowth. Crop harvest and fire management are important to match SOC dynamics but more difficult to quantify as SCC rarely report on these events. Based on our findings, we identify strengths and propose potential improvements of the applied models in simulating SOC changes after LUC.
UAV Maneuvering Target Tracking based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Maneuvering target tracking means that UAV observes the target through sensors, follows the target and maintains the tracking range with the target. Aiming at the target tracking problem of UAV, we built UAV motion model and UAV tracking model based on reinforcement learning, and verified the feasibility and effectiveness of the method in the simulation environment.
Synthesis and Biological Properties of Thin-Film Materials on the Basis of SiO2–P2O5–СаO–Na2O System

Thin films for the SiO2–P2O5–CaO–Na2O system are synthesized using sol-gel method. Content of the oxides in the system is 52-18-20-10 wt. % correspondingly. Thin films were produced from film-forming solutions on the single-crystal silicon substrates (model substrate) by extraction at a velocity of 5 mm/s following by heat treatment at a temperature of 60-80 °С for 20 minutes and at a temperature of 600 °С for 1 hour. During the experiment it was established that film-forming solutions are usable only for 2 to 7 days from the moment of preparation. Using thermal and infra-red – spectroscopic analysis main stages of oxide system formation were retraced. On the surface of the material NaCl, CaCl2, H2PO4·H2O, Ca5(PO4)3Cl, and SiO2 phases are being registered. Presence of the significant amount of pores leads to the essential increase in the specific surface area, creating optimal conditions for the new bone tissue formation. Biological activity of the received material was evaluated in SBF environment. Ca and P content on the surface of the material increased twofold in two weeks. Such material interchanges calcium ions and phosphate ions with solution; silanol groups fix calcium ions, furthering the formation of the layer of amorphous calcium phosphates gradually crystallizing in hydroxyapatite, and other calcium phosphates. Presence of magnesium and sodium on the surface of the samples after their immersion into SBF solution indicates the settling of SBF solution components on the film surface.
Synthesis of neural network controllers for objects with non-linearity of the constraint type

The paper discusses the use of artificial neural networks of direct propagation to control objects with nonlinearities such as saturation and a rigid mechanical stop. The multilayer structure of a neural network is considered using the ReLU activation function and the Dropout layer, which allows working with the indicated nonlinearities. The possibility of training a neural network to control piecewise linear objects of a general type is demonstrated. Using the method of generalized inverse neurocontrol, a controller is synthesized that provides an acceptable quality of control in the presence of such nonlinearities. A specific example shows the possibility of creating a direct neuroemulator that repeats the dynamics of nonlinearities such as saturation and a rigid mechanical stop. The work of the neuroregulator in the examples is compared with the PID controller configured in Matlab. All theoretical conclusions are confirmed by numerical modeling of real technical systems with neural network control.
Evaluation of electromagnetic radiation shielding characteristics of facing building vaterials

The article presents the results of theoretical studies of the protective properties of composite facing materials based on a dielectric matrix with an electrically conductive non-magnetic filler in a wide frequency range of incident electromagnetic radiation. Expressions are got for the values of the transmission, reflection and absorption, and the electromagnetic radiation shielding efficiency calculated on their basis. The dependences of the permittivity and electrical conductivity of the composite on the volume fraction of the electrically conductive additive required for calculations were got based on the hypothesis of similarity, considering the nonzero conductivity of the dielectric matrix. Satisfactory agreement between the calculation results and the measured shielding characteristics of specimens of metal silicate materials based on calcium hydro silicates and copper powder was established. The results presented show the adequacy of the proposed calculation method and indicate that it can be used for preliminary estimates of the shielding characteristics when designing electromagnetic radiation shields based on composite facing materials.
Investigation of the feed resource for buffalo

Buffaloes make better use of coarse and inferior feed by converting them to biologically valuable animal production. They make very good use of the additional production of crop production, such as straw, sunflower cakes, sprouts and other. The aim is to study the physicochemical and fatty acid composition of the rations of buffalo of the Bulgarian mura breed in a church farm in Gigentsi village, Pernik District. The application of standard methods for the nutrition of buffaloes in separate periods pastured with succulent fodder, winter (indoor) with coarse fodder, through which the ruminants are provided with the necessary nutritional components, allows to obtain high quality milk as a basic raw material for the production of dairy products. The use of succulent fodder and the incorporation of root crops into the feed instead of the buffalo concentrate provides them with respect to linoleic and alphalinolenic fatty acids, which are substrates for the synthesis of CLA (anticancer action) in rumen of ruminants.
HybridTEE: secure and privacy-preserving mobile DNN execution using hybrid trusted execution environment

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been increasingly adopted in many mobile applications involving security/privacy sensitive data and inference models. Therefore, there is an urgent demand for security and privacy protection of DNN execution on mobile devices. Catering to this demand, hardware-based trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as ARM TrustZone, have recently been considered for secure mobile DNN execution. However, none of the existing attempts of running DNN in TrustZone have been successful due to the stringent resource and performance limitations posed by the mobile TEE. We develop HybridTEE , a novel hardware-based security framework to securely execute DNN in the resource-constrained local TEE (i.e., ARM TrustZone), by oﬄoading a part of the DNN model to a resource-rich remote TEE (i.e., Intel SGX). The key design of HybridTEE is two-fold. First, it strategically divides the DNN model into privacy-aware local (TrustZone) and remote (SGX) partitions by employing two privacy-oriented metrics based on object recognition and Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT). Second, it builds a trustworthy communication channel bridging TrustZone and SGX to enable secure oﬄoading of the DNN model between the two TEEs. Our evaluations based on a prototype implementation of HybridTEE and 4
“Pose-driven Feature Integration for Robust Human Action Recognition in Videos”

To analyze the effects of keypoint heatmaps and PAFs as inputs of the pose stream, we compare the top-1 and top-5 accuracy from pose-only models that take 1) the keypoint heatmaps, 2) the PAFs, and 3) both in Table 1. The table shows that taking both inputs achieves the best accuracy on Kinetics50 and Mimetics. The keypoint heatmaps provide the locations of each human body keypoint, which are useful in single person cases, but do not include sufficient information for differentiating each person in multiperson cases. On the other hand, the PAFs contain relationships between the keypoints from each person, which can provide information to differentiate each person in multiperson cases. We found that most of the videos in Mimetics contain a single person, which makes the heatmap-only model perform well on the action recognition. However, many videos in Kinetics contain multiple persons, and thus additional PAFs further improve the accuracy.
Dual-GAN: Joint BVP and Noise Modeling for Remote Physiological Measurement

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) based physiological measurement has great application values in health monitoring, emotion analysis, etc. Existing methods mainly focus on how to enhance or extract the very weak blood volume pulse (BVP) signals from face videos, but seldom explicitly model the noises that dominate face video content. Thus, they may suffer from poor generalization ability in unseen scenarios. This paper proposes a novel adversarial learning approach for rPPG based physiological measurement by using Dual Generative Adversarial Networks (Dual-GAN) to model the BVP predictor and noise distribution jointly. The BVP-GAN aims to learn a noise-resistant mapping from input to ground-truth BVP, and the Noise-GAN aims to learn the noise distribution. The two GANs can promote each other’s capability, leading to improved feature disentanglement between BVP and noises. Besides, a plug-and-play block named ROI alignment and fusion (ROI-AF) block is proposed to alleviate the inconsistencies between different ROIs and exploit informative features from a wider receptive field in terms of ROIs. In comparison to state-of-the-art methods, our approach achieves better performance in heart rate, heart rate variability, and respiration frequency estimation from face videos.
Mid-infrared prediction of beta-hydroxybutyrate, acetone, and citrate contents in milk

The authors acknowledge the financial support of the National Fund for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS, Brussels) through the CompoMilk project (grant 2.4604.11) as well as the support of Interreg IVB and the Service Public de Wallonie through the OptiMIR project. ► Citrate content can be predicted by mid-infrared spectrometry with good accuracy (RPDc > 3). ► Mid-infrared prediction of β-hydroxybutyrate and acetone contents can be used for screening.
Evaluation in a real environment of a trainable cough monitoring app for smartphones

This paper presents SmartCough, an M-health app for Android smartphones that monitors cough trends in patients with respiratory diseases. The app is designed to be battery-efficient, fast, and robust against noise. It relies on efficiently-implemented machine learning algorithms that have been validated in laboratory conditions. Since these conditions are rarely met in a real situation where the user carries the phone inside their pocket or bag, the app features a self-training module that allows easy adaptation to new environments. In this paper, we have evaluated the app with real patients in an outdoor setting to test the performance in real environments that are hostile to cough detection. Our results show that the average sensitivity obtained in laboratory conditions drops significantly (down to 60%) when the baseline configuration is employed. By activating the built-in self-training module, the median sensitivity raises to 85.87% after a small training step, with a bounded false positive rate. The achieved performance is analogous to the one obtained in laboratory conditions, making the app suitable for use in real life scenarios.
Physiological and biochemical affectations in vitroplants of sugarcane in response to hydric and saline stress

The agricultural production is negatively affected by biotic and abiotic stress, being responsible for great economic losses in the world. Sugarcane is the raw material for obtaining cane juice that is transformed into sucrose and the production of second generation ethanol. In the present study, the number of buds and leaves, the concentration of proline, chlorophyll a, b and total and the concentration of sugars in response to hydric and saline stress in two varieties of sugarcane in vitro were evaluated. Individualized buds of 5 cm in length of the MotzMex 91-207 and SP 71-6180 varieties of sugarcane were cultivated in vitro under water stress (PEG 6000) and saline (NaCl). The two varieties of sugar cane analyzed in vitro presented different responses to osmotic stress. The variety MotzMex 91-207 was better than the variety SP 71-6180 to respond to water stress with a greater accumulation of proline (82.34 mg g PS), did not present decrease in the chlorophyll a, b and total content and generated 20.8 buds per explant even under stress conditions. On the other hand, the response to salt stress with 50 mM NaCl in vitro was presented by the variety SP 71-6180, generating a greater accumulation of carbohydrates such as galactose, glucose and mannose.
Placental vascular remodeling in pregnant women with COVID-19

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 has been causing the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) that has so far resulted in over 180 million infections and nearly 4 million deaths. This respiratory virus uses angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 as a receptor to enter host cells, exhibiting a unique feature that affects various tissues in addition to the lungs. The present study reports that the placental arteries from women who gave birth to live full-term newborns while developing of COVID-19 during pregnancy exhibit severe vascular wall thickening and the occlusion of the vascular lumen. A morphometric analysis of the placental arteries stained with hematoxylin and eosin suggest a 2-fold increase in wall thickness and a 5-fold decrease in the lumen area. Immunohistochemistry with alpha-smooth muscle actin and Masson's trichrome staining showed that such placental vascular remodeling in COVID-19 is associated with smooth muscle proliferation and fibrosis. Placental vascular remodeling may represent a mechanism of the clinical problems associated with childbirth in COVID-19 patients.
1 Differential effects of DHA ‐ and EPA ‐ rich oils on 2 sleep in healthy young adults : A randomised 3 controlled trial

Emerging evidence suggests that adequate intake of omega‐3 polyunsaturated fatty acids 17 (n‐3 PUFAs), which include docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), may be 18 associated with better quality sleep. N‐3 PUFAs, which must be acquired from dietary sources, are 19 typically consumed at suboptimal levels in Western diets. Therefore, the current placebo controlled 20 double blind randomized trial investigated the effects of an oil rich in either DHA or EPA on sleep 21 quality in healthy adults habitually consuming low amounts of oily fish. Eighty‐four participants 22 aged 25–49 years completed the 26–week intervention trial. Compared to placebo, improvements in 23 actigraphy sleep efficiency (p = 0.030) and latency (p = 0.026) were observed following the DHA‐rich 24 oil. However, these participants also reported feeling less energetic compared to placebo (p = 0.041), 25 and less rested (p = 0.017) and there was a trend towards feeling less ready to perform (p = 0.075) 26 than those given EPA‐rich oil. A trend towards improved sleep efficiency was identified in the EPA‐ 27 rich group compared to placebo (p = 0.087), along with a significant decrease in both total time in 28 bed (p = 0.032) and total sleep time (p = 0.019) compared to DHA‐rich oil. No significant effects of 29 either treatment were identified for urinary excretion of the major melatonin metabolite 6‐ 30 sulfatoxymelatonin. This study is the first to demonstrate some positive effects of dietary 31 supplementation with n‐3 PUFAs in healthy adult normal sleepers, and provides novel evidence 32 showing the differential effects of n‐3 PUFA supplements rich in either DHA or EPA. Further 33 investigation into the mechanisms underpinning these observations including the effects of n‐3 34 PUFAs on sleep architecture are required. 35
Experiencing Virtual Reality in Retail: Extending the Acceptance Model for Vr Hardware Towards VR Experiences

VR glasses are an upcoming trend in retail. However, little is known about customer acceptance of VR experiences. The literature considers acceptance drivers for VR content and hardware separately, despite both elements affecting technology acceptance. This paper extends the existing VR hardware acceptance model by assessing VR content perception. In particular, the resulting VR experience acceptance model (VR-XAM) incorporates perceived informativeness and perceived playfulness into a structural equation model to predict attitude and usage intention towards VR glasses. The results show the outstanding role of utilitarian variables for VR glasses, suggesting that companies should first focus on informative and useful elements when implementing VR experiences into retail landscapes. Furthermore, the study stresses the importance of playfulness as the most important hedonic aspect of customer acceptance for VR in retail. Thus, the paper extends the understanding of technology acceptance and provides useful implications for the development of VR applications in retail.
CEO-CFO Compatibility and Audit Engagement Risk

Using similarity between CEO and CFO personalities as a proxy for their compatibility, we find that CEO-CFO similarity is negatively associated with audit fees after controlling for other determinants of audit fees from the prior literature. We also find that audit fees increase (decrease) when personality similarity decreases (increases) following turnover in the CEO-CFO team. Further, the effect of CEO-CFO personality similarity on audit fees is mediated by how long the CEO and CFO work together, although the direct effects of personality similarity remain strong. These results are consistent with auditors acting as if compatible CEO-CFO teams reduce engagement risk and, as a result, audit fees.
Genomic evidence of adaptive evolution in the reptilian SOCS gene family

The suppressor of the cytokine signaling (SOCS) family of proteins play an essential role in inhibiting cytokine receptor signaling by regulating immune signal pathways. Although SOCS gene functions have been examined extensively, no comprehensive study has been performed on this gene family’s molecular evolution in reptiles. In this study, we identified eight canonical SOCS genes using recently-published reptilian genomes. We used phylogenetic analysis to determine that the SOCS genes had highly conserved evolutionary dynamics that we classified into two types. We identified positive SOCS4 selection signals in whole reptile lineages and SOCS2 selection signals in the crocodilian lineage. Selective pressure analyses using the branch model and Z-test revealed that these genes were under different negative selection pressures compared to reptile lineages. We also concluded that the nature of selection pressure varies across different reptile lineages on SOCS3, and the crocodilian lineage has experienced rapid evolution. Our results may provide a theoretical foundation for further analyses of reptilian SOCS genes’ functional and molecular mechanisms, as well as their roles in reptile growth and development.