Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Research on Topological Structure of Wireless Sensor Network

Recent advances in processing, memory and wireless transmission technologies have made Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) possible.WSN consists of wireless sensor nodes that have small size, light weight and low cost, and is capable of detecting information of objectives precisely and then supplying these information for the users anywhere and anytime.In this paper, three network topologies - star, mesh and hybrid topology are compared with each other, and simulations are made for these network topologies.The results show that, for the general sensor network in which the distance between base station and sensor field is long and the density of sensor nodes is high, the hierarchical topology (one of hybrid topology) can not only save energy of network, but also extend network lifetime and improve the performance of entire network.
Indigo plant leaf extract inhibits the binding of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to angiotensin-converting enzyme 2

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) uses its S1 spike protein to bind to angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) on human cells in the first step of cell entry. Tryptanthrin, extracted from leaves of the indigo plant, Polygonum tinctorium, using d-limonene (17.3 µg/ml), is considered to inhibit ACE2-mediated cell entry of another type of coronavirus, HCoV-NL63. The current study examined whether this extract could inhibit the binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to ACE2. Binding was quantified as cell-bound fluorescence intensity in live cell cultures in which canine kidney MDCK cells overexpressing ACE2 were incubated with fluorescein-labeled S1 spike protein. When indigo extract, together with S1 protein, was added at 8,650x and 17,300x dilutions, fluorescence intensity decreased in a dose- and S1 extract-dependent manner, without affecting cell viability. When 4.0-nM tryptanthrin was added instead of the indigo extract, fluorescence intensity also decreased, but to a lesser degree than with indigo extract. Docking simulation analyses revealed that tryptanthrin readily bound to the receptor-binding domain of the S1 protein, and identified 2- and 7-amino acid sequences as the preferred binding sites. The indigo extract appeared to inhibit S1-ACE2 binding at high dilutions, and evidently contained other inhibitory elements as well as tryptanthrin. This extract may be useful for the prevention or treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
A Multi-Modular Approach for Sign Language and Speech Recognition for Deaf-Mute People

Deaf and Mute people cannot communicate efficiently to express their feelings to ordinary people. The common method these people use for communication is the sign language. But these sign languages are not very familiar to ordinary people. Therefore, effective communication between deaf and mute people and ordinary people is seriously affected. This paper presents the development of an Android mobile application to translate sign language into speech-language for ordinary people, and speech into text for deaf and mute people using Convolution Neural Network (CNN). The study focuses on vision-based Sign Language Recognition (SLR) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) mobile application. The main challenging tasks were audio classification and image classification. Therefore, CNN was used to train audio clips and images. Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) approach was used for ASR. The mobile application was developed by Python programming and Android Studio. After developing the application, testing was done for letters A and C, and these letters were identified with 95% accuracy.
IMPROVED SNR OF ECG SIGNAL WITH NEW WINDOW- FIR DIGITAL FILTERS

 Abstract— The electrocardiography(ECG) is an instrument ,which records the electrical activity of the heart . electrical signals from heart characterically precede the normal mechanical function and monitoring of these signals has great clinical significance . ECG provides valuable information about a wide range of cardiac disorders such as the presence of an inactive part(infraction) or an enlargement of the heart muscle. Abnormal patterns of ECG may be due to interference from power line which is easily recognizable since interfering voltage in the ECG would have frequency of 60 Hz. This interference due to stray effect of alternating current on the patient or because of alternating current fields produce in the patient cable. and white noise generated by ECG equipment and these artifacts which must be removed otherwise it will convey an incorrect information regarding the patients heart condition. The work in this paper is the design of FIR digital filters with new Window to remove the interferences or the artifacts and calculated SNR of noiseless ECG and compared with existing windowsThree filters are considered:Low pass, high pass and band reject filters. Each filter is used to filter the raw noisy ECG signal and results are observed and tabulated Index Terms—proposed window, Matlab, corrupting ECG signal.
Elementary Teachers’ Trust in Science and Scientists Throughout a COVID-19 SSI Unit

ABSTRACT Scientific knowledge is necessary to make informed decisions about many social issues, but some of the public is skeptical of science and scientific expertise. Teacher education programs are one way to address distrust in science in this generation and the next. Socioscientific issues (SSI) have been advocated as important for teaching about the nature of science, decision-making, and argumentation. This mixed methods case study sought to characterize 10 teachers’ trust in science and scientists in an online elementary science methods course for inservice and preservice teachers as they engaged in a COVID-19 inquiry unit. Data sources included Trust in Science and Scientist survey data gathered before and after the class and several course artifacts from a five-week COVID-19 SSI inquiry unit. Quantitatively, students demonstrated gains in their trust in science and scientists. Qualitatively, participants characterized their trust in science and scientists by attending to scientists’ credibility. Importantly, credibility perceptions were couched in participants’ perceptions of the nature of science, especially their understandings of empirical evidence, tentativeness, subjectivity, the nature of scientific models, and the sociocultural embeddedness of science. In the mixed methods analysis, participants were sorted by their quantitative trust profiles and showed different qualitative nature of science justifications for their trust and distrust. Participants’ trust in science and scientists were influenced by reading different sources about scientists during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the use of media literacy tools. Implications for future research and teacher education are explored.
Warmer Winters Increase the Breeding Success of the Goosander in the Pomeranian Lake District in Poland

Northern Hemisphere species generally respond to global warming by withdrawing from the southern margins of their distributions and shifting their breeding sites northwards. However, the situation regarding the breeding populations of Goosanders Mergus merganser merganser in Europe appears to be paradoxical: in many places, an increase in the breeding population and range extension have been documented. We studied the breeding biology of this species during the breeding seasons of 1987–1996. We show that the breeding success of a Goosander population breeding in Northern Poland was higher following winters when the ice cover disappeared earlier. There was a significant positive relationship between the disappearance of ice cover and the clutch initiation date, and the breeding success of early broods was higher. The overall mean clutch initiation date was 13 April ± 15 days (SD). The yearly means of clutch initiation dates varied from the beginning of April to the beginning of May. It seems likely that, among other factors, the Goosander's adaptability in terms of the timing of breeding may be partially responsible for the expansion of the species into new areas in the last 30 years.
Nanotubes from the Misfit Layered Compound (SmS)1.19TaS2: Atomic Structure, Charge Transfer, and Electrical Properties

Misfit layered compounds (MLCs) MX-TX2, where M, T = metal atoms and X = S, Se, or Te, and their nanotubes are of significant interest due to their rich chemistry and unique quasi-1D structure. In particular, LnX-TX2 (Ln = rare-earth atom) constitute a relatively large family of MLCs, from which nanotubes have been synthesized. The properties of MLCs can be tuned by the chemical and structural interplay between LnX and TX2 sublayers and alloying of each of the Ln, T, and X elements. In order to engineer them to gain desirable performance, a detailed understanding of their complex structure is indispensable. MLC nanotubes are a relative newcomer and offer new opportunities. In particular, like WS2 nanotubes before, the confinement of the free carriers in these quasi-1D nanostructures and their chiral nature offer intriguing physical behavior. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy in conjunction with a focused ion beam are engaged to study SmS-TaS2 nanotubes and their cross-sections at the atomic scale. The atomic resolution images distinctly reveal that Ta is in trigonal prismatic coordination with S atoms in a hexagonal structure. Furthermore, the position of the sulfur atoms in both the SmS and the TaS2 sublattices is revealed. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, electron energy loss spectroscopy, and X-ray absorption spectroscopy are carried out. These analyses conclude that charge transfer from the Sm to the Ta atoms leads to filling of the Ta 5dz2 level, which is confirmed by density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Transport measurements show that the nanotubes are semimetallic with resistivities in the range of 10–4 Ω·cm at room temperature, and magnetic susceptibility measurements show a superconducting transition at 4 K.
Microfluidic Rheometry and Particle Settling: Characterizing the Effect of Polymer Solution Elasticity

The efficient transport of solid particles using polymeric fluids is an important step in many industrial operations. Different viscoelastic fluids have been designed for this purpose, however, the effects of elasticity have not been fully integrated in examining the particle-carrying capacity of the fluids. In this work, two elastic fluid formulations were employed to experimentally clarify the effect of elasticity on the particle drag coefficient as a proxy model for measuring carrying capacity. Fluids were designed to have a constant shear viscosity within a specific range of shear rates, γ˙<50(1/s), while possessing distinct (longest) relaxation times to investigate the influence of elasticity. It is shown that for dilute polymeric solutions, microfluidic rheometry must be practiced to obtain a reliable relaxation time (as one of the measures of viscoelasticity), which is on the order of milliseconds. A calibrated experimental setup, furnished with two advanced particle velocity measurement techniques and spheres with different characteristics, was used to quantify the effect of elasticity on the drag coefficient. These experiments led to a unique dataset in moderate levels of Weissenberg numbers, 0<Wi<8.5. The data showed that there is a subtle reduction in the drag coefficient at low levels of elasticity (Wi<1), and a considerable enhancement at high levels of elasticity (Wi>1). The experimental results were then compared with direct numerical simulation predictions yielding R2=0.982. These evaluations endorse the numerically quantified behaviors for the drag coefficient to be used to compare the particle-carrying capacity of different polymeric fluids under different flow conditions.
Reduced-Precision Acceleration of Radio-Astronomical Imaging on Reconfigurable Hardware

Radio telescopes produce large volumes of data that need to be processed to obtain high-resolution sky images. This is a complex task that requires computing systems that provide both high performance and high energy efficiency. Hardware accelerators such as GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) can provide these two features and are thus an appealing option for this application. Most HPC (High-Performance Computing) systems operate in double precision (64-bit) or in single precision (32-bit), and radio-astronomical imaging is no exception. With reduced precision computing, smaller data types (e.g., 16-bit) are used to improve energy efficiency and throughput performance in noise-tolerant applications. We demonstrate that reduced precision can also be used to produce high-quality sky images. To this end, we analyze the gridding component (Image-Domain Gridding) of the widely-used WSClean imaging application. Gridding is typically one of the most time-consuming steps in the imaging process and, therefore, an excellent candidate for acceleration. We identify the minimum required exponent and mantissa bits for a custom floating-point data type. Then, we propose the first custom floating-point accelerator on a Xilinx Alveo U50 FPGA using High-Level Synthesis. Our reduced-precision implementation improves the throughput and energy efficiency of respectively <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.84\times$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2.03\times$ </tex-math></inline-formula> compared to the single-precision floating-point baseline on the same FPGA. Our solution is also <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2.12\times$ </tex-math></inline-formula> faster and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3.46\times$ </tex-math></inline-formula> more energy-efficient than an Intel i9 9900k CPU (Central Processing Unit) and manages to keep up in throughput with an AMD RX 550 GPU.
Principled clustering of functional signals reveals gradients in processing both within the anterior hippocampus and across its long axis

A particularly elusive puzzle concerning the hippocampus is how the structural differences along its long, anteroposterior axis might beget meaningful functional differences, particularly in terms of the granularity of information processing. One measure posits to quantify this granularity by calculating the average statistical independence of the BOLD signal across neighboring voxels, or inter-voxel similarity (IVS), and has shown the anterior hippocampus to process coarser-grained information than that in the posterior hippocampus. This model of the hippocampus, however, conflicts with a number of task-oriented findings, many of which have varied in their fMRI acquisition parameters and hippocampal parcellation methods. In order to reconcile these findings, we measured IVS across two separate resting-state fMRI acquisitions and compared the results across many of the most widely used parcellation methods in a large young-adult sample (Acquisition 1, N = 253; Acquisition 2, N = 183). Finding conflicting results across acquisitions and parcellations, we reasoned that a principled, data-driven approach to hippocampal parcellation is necessary. To this end, we implemented a group masked independent components analysis (mICA) to identify functional subunits of the hippocampus, most notably separating the anterior hippocampus into separate anterior-medial, anterior-lateral, and posteroanterior-lateral components. Measuring IVS across these components revealed a decrease in IVS along the medial-lateral axis of the anterior hippocampus but an increase from anterior to posterior. We conclude that representational granularity may not change linearly or unidirectionally across the hippocampus, and that moving the study of the hippocampus towards reproducibility requires grounding it in a functionally informed approach. Significance Statement Processing information along hierarchical scales of granularity is critical for many of the feats of cognition considered most human. Recently, the changes in structure, cortical connectivity, and apparent functional properties across parcels of the hippocampal long axis have been hypothesized to underlie this hierarchical gradient in information processing. We show here, however, that the choice of parcellation method itself drastically affects the perceived granularity across the hippocampus, and that a principled, functionally informed approach to parcellation reveals gradients both within the anterior hippocampus and in non-linear form across the long axis. These results point to the issue of parcellation as a critical one in the study of the hippocampus and reorient interpretation of existing results.
Challenges Experienced by Healthcare Workers on Maternal Tetanus Toxoid Vaccination in Kilimanjaro Region Tanzania

Background: Healthcare Workers (HCWs) are the first part of call for healthcare enquirers and have a key role in providing appropriate information and evidence-based healthcare recommendations to pregnant and postnatal mothers in order to ensure that they are well informed regarding maternal vaccinations. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that five doses are needed in order to acquire lifelong immunity against tetanus. A pregnant mother is considered to be more than 80% protected once she receives at least two doses of the vaccine. This study aimed to identify challenges experienced by the healthcare workers on maternal Tetanus Toxoid (TT) vaccination in Kilimanjaro region, Tanzania. Method: A qualitative approach comprising of In-Depth Interviews (IDIs) and focus group discussion (FGD) was conducted with 10 healthcare workers selected from 10 health facilities in remote villages of Hai district. The healthcare workers were selected purposively based on their availability and convenience; thematic analysis guided the data process. Results: Majority of the Healthcare workers were female, enrolled nurses with college education; their age ranged between 26-59 years with experience of work between 1 to 31 years. Main themes were extracted from the analysis namely: unreliable storage of vaccines, shortage of vaccines, shortage of healthcare workers, behavior of the healthcare workers and spousal influence on maternal vaccinations. Conclusion: The shortage and unreliable storage of TT vaccine has led to mothers missing their required doses, the spousal support and good mother-provider relationship is essential to ensure that the pregnant and post-natal mothers receive all the required doses. The regional and district health officials should ensure constant supply of TT vaccine with the recommended standards of vaccine storage facilities.
Interannual variability of sea level in the southern Indian Ocean: local vs. remote forcing mechanisms

Abstract. The subtropical southern Indian Ocean (SIO) has been described as one of the world's largest heat accumulators due to its remarkable warming during the past 2 decades. However, the relative contributions of remote (of Pacific origin) forcing and local wind forcing to the variability of heat content and sea level in the SIO have not been fully attributed. Here, we combine a general circulation model, an analytic linear reduced-gravity model, and observations to disentangle the spatial and temporal inputs of each forcing component on interannual to decadal timescales. A sensitivity experiment is conducted with artificially closed Indonesian straits to physically isolate the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean, intentionally removing the Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) influence on the Indian Ocean heat content and sea level variability. We show that the relative contribution of the signals originating in the equatorial Pacific vs. signals caused by local wind forcing to the interannual variability of sea level and heat content in the SIO is dependent on location within the basin (low latitude vs. midlatitude and western side vs. eastern side of the basin). The closure of the ITF in the numerical experiment reduces the amplitude of interannual-to-decadal sea level changes compared to the simulation with a realistic ITF. However, the spatial and temporal evolution of sea level patterns in the two simulations remain similar and correlated with El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). This suggests that these patterns are mostly determined by local wind forcing and oceanic processes, linked to ENSO via the “atmospheric bridge” effect. We conclude that local wind forcing is an important driver for the interannual changes of sea level, heat content, and meridional transports in the SIO subtropical gyre, while oceanic signals originating in the Pacific amplify locally forced signals.
NON-ITERATIVE IDENTIFICATION OF NON-PROPORTIONALLY DAMPED SYSTEM FROM AMBIENT VIBRATION MEASUREMENT AND ANALYSIS OF DYNAMIC PROPERTIES OF A LONG SPAN SUSPENSION BRIDGE

構造物の健全性や外力・荷重評価に, 使用状態においても計測可能な常時微動を利用することの利点は大きい. 本研究は著者らが以前開発した常時微動データに基づく構造逆解析法の問題点を解泱し, (1) モード同定においてノイズの判別が可能であり, (2) 多入力系を扱え, (3) 構造逆解析においては減衰に関する仮定や構造特性の事前推定そして反復計算を必要としない理論的手法を構築した. さらに, 実構造物の振動計測結果に適用する. 支承や伸縮装置による摩擦力と自励空気力を等価剛性・等価減衰として逆解析を行い, 以前試みた逆解析と比較の上, 本手法の有効性を示した.
TORC1, BORC, ARL-8 cycling, and kinesin-1 drive vesiculation of cell corpse phagolysosomes

The dynamics of phagolysosomes leading to cargo clearance are important to provide cells with metabolites and avoid auto-immune responses, but little is known about how phagolysosomes finally resolve cell corpses and cell debris. We previously discovered that polar body phagolysosomes tubulate into small vesicles to facilitate corpse clearance within 1.5 hours in C. elegans. Here, we show that vesiculation depends on activating TORC1 through amino acid release by the solute transporter SLC-36.1. Downstream of TORC1, BLOC-1-related complex (BORC) recruits the Arf-like GTPase ARL-8 to the phagolysosome for tubulation by kinesin-1. We find that disrupting the regulated GTP-GDP cycle of ARL-8 reduces tubulation, delays corpse clearance, and mislocalizes ARL-8 away from lysosomes. We also demonstrate that mammalian phagocytes use BORC to promote phagolysosomal degradation, confirming the conserved importance of this pathway. Finally, we show that HOPS is required for rapid degradation of the small phagolysosomal vesicles. Thus, by observing single phagolysosomes over time, we identified the molecular pathway regulating phagolysosome vesiculation that promotes efficient resolution.
Transverse Flux Machine—A Review

For applications with high torque demand, gearboxes are commonly used to convert torque and speed in order to receive higher specific values for torque and power. This causes additional losses, cost, inaccuracies, effort, and noise. Eliminating the need of a mechanical gear and the associated disadvantages, Transverse Flux Machines with their high torque density are a very promising alternative. Despite a high torque density and a high efficiency, these types of machines are not commonly used. Due to the complex structure, challenges with mechanical design, and modeling of the machine behavior arise. Additionally, there are high requirements for the inverter due to the low power factor. This paper provides an overview of the state of the art including the potentials and advantages but also the problems and hindrances of these types of machines. Relating to linear and rotary machines from research and industry, the machine is introduced with its history, application and classification. Further, the general technical aspects, the influence of materials for flux guidance, the methods of modeling, methods for a minimization of torque ripples, as well as methods for power factor improvement are presented.