Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of long term oral acrylamide administration on alpha naphthyl acetate esterase and acid phosphatase activities in the peripheral blood lymphocytes of rats

ABSTRACT Acrylamide is an important industrial chemical; it also is formed in starch-rich foodstuffs during baking, frying and roasting. Most acrylamide exposure occurs by ingestion of processed foods. We investigated possible immunotoxic effects of extended administration of low doses of acrylamide in rats. To do this, we measured alpha-naphthyl acetate esterase (ANAE) and acid phosphatase (ACP-ase) activities in peripheral blood lymphocytes. Male and female weanling Wistar rats were administered 2 or 5 mg acrylamide/kg/day in drinking water for 90 days. Peripheral blood was sampled at the end of the administration period. We found ANAE staining in eosinophils and T-lymphocytes, but not in monocytes, platelets, B-lymphocytes and neutrophils. ACP-ase was found in B-lymphocytes. We found a significant reduction of the ratio of ANAE:ACP-ase in lymphocytes of the experimental animals compared to controls. We found no statistically significant differences between the doses or sexes. We found that acrylamide ingested in processed foods might affect the immune system adversely by decreasing the population of mature T- and B-lymphocytes.
Dietary zerumbone, a sesquiterpene, ameliorates hepatotoxin‐mediated acute and chronic liver injury in mice

Acute liver injury (ALI) is a life‐threatening clinical syndrome. Long‐lasting liver injury can lead to chronic hepatic inflammation and fibrogenic responses. Zerumbone (ZER), the main constituent of rhizomes of Zingiber zerumbet Smith, has a variety of functions including anticancer activity. We investigated the role of ZER on the progression of hepatotoxin‐induced liver injury. Single or repeated injection of CCl4 was used to induce acute or chronic liver injury, respectively. Mice were orally administered with ZER (10, 50 mg/kg) during the experimental period. Histopathologic analysis and serum biochemical levels revealed that ZER had hepatoprotective activities against ALI. Similar effects of ZER on injured livers were confirmed by analyses of inflammation and apoptosis‐related genes. Western blot analysis showed that protein levels of apoptotic molecules were decreased, whereas antiapoptotic protein levels were conversely increased in injured livers treated with ZER. Furthermore, chronic liver injury and its associated fibrogenesis in mice were reduced by ZER treatment. These findings from our in vivo experiments further indicate that ZER could alleviate hepatocellular toxicity and inhibit activation of primary hepatic stellate cells. Our results suggest that ZER might have potential as a safe and prophylactic alternative to prevent acute and chronic liver injury.
Real-time volume data 3D display based on view frustum shear transformation and ray casting integral

Advanced volumetric data three-dimensional (3D) display can provide depth cues than conventional two-dimensional. Here, an algorithm of view frustum shear transformation and ray casting integral to realize real-time volume data 3D display is presented. It is compatible with the existing volume drawing pipeline and robust for other types of 3D displays. Experimental results demonstrate that the volume data is clearly represented, and real-time frame rate is more than 30 fps under the condition of subpixel-level at 4K (3840×2160) resolution. Besides, its performance does not rely on the viewpoint number and viewing angle, therefore, it is very suitable for 3D display of large viewing angles and dense viewpoints.
Laser-induced damage threshold by high pulse repetition rate ArF excimer laser radiation

In the semiconductor industry, optical projection lithography is employed for the production of microchips. In this process ultraviolet radiation has been used to exposure of photoresists on silicon wafers. Light sources with shorter wavelength are needed to shrink the chip size due to the diffraction limit. Pulsed excimer lasers have been used since the middle of 1990s instead of mercury lamps. At first KrF lasers (248-nm) were adopted, then ArF lasers (193-nm) have been applied to satisfy tighter leading edge device requirements. Now almost 5,000 excimer lasers for lithography tools are being operated at the world-wide semiconductor fab with stable, its availability up to 99.8%. The latest ArF excimer laser can pulse 15mJ to 20mJ energy with 6-kHz repetition rate, its typical module lifetime which can be replaced is several dozen Billion pulses. The module lifetime are expected to expand to reduce the downtime to replace. Also for precise micromachining applications, ArF hybrid laser consists of all-solid-state DUV light source as a seed laser and excimer laser as amplifier is been developed. The pulse width of this laser is typically sub-nanosecond and its high peak power is another concern for laser optics. Generally, the lifespan of optical elements has been growing to reach 100 Bpls, and its evaluation takes a very long time, typically several years. Comprehensive durability evaluation becomes more efficient by creating accelerated element tests [1]. As an alternative, accelerated lifetime testing with high fluence are helpful approach to screen and select the optics to satisfy the lifetime requirement. We have been developing the accelerated test system to determinate the laser-induced damage threshold of optical surfaces. In this paper, the test system and some results of field-approved optics with 20ns pulse duration will be explained.
Creating big time crystals with ultracold atoms

We investigate the size of discrete time crystals s (ratio of response period to driving period) that can be created for a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) bouncing resonantly on an oscillating mirror. We find that time crystals can be created with sizes in the range s ≈ 20–100 and that such big time crystals are easier to realize experimentally than a period-doubling (s=2) time crystal because they require either a larger drop height or a smaller number of bounces on the mirror. We also investigate the effects of having a realistic soft Gaussian potential mirror for the bouncing BEC, such as that produced by a repulsive light-sheet, which is found to make the experiment easier to implement than a hard-wall potential mirror. Finally, we discuss the choice of atomic system for creating time crystals based on a bouncing BEC and present an experimental protocol for realizing big time crystals. Such big time crystals provide a flexible platform for investigating a broad range of non-trivial condensed matter phenomena in the time domain.
Dilated convolutional neural network for hyperspectral image feature extraction and classification

In this paper, a dilated convolutional neural network is proposed for hyperspectral image classification. Compared with other methods, 2-dimension dilated convolution is used for the first time to extract and classify the spatial-spectral features in hyperspectral image processing fields. Firstly, 1-dimension convolution is extended to 2-dimension convolution for spatial-spectral features extraction. Secondly, a dilated convolutional structure is utilized to fuse the multi-scale information, which is used to extract the multi-scale information without loss of resolution. The experiments of University of Pavia were repeated with the method proposed in this paper, and some better results are obtained, which proved the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Ultrasensitive biosensing based on plasmonic nanostructures

Hafnium-doped zinc oxide (HZO) has been recently demonstrated to be implemented as a transparent conducting oxide (TCO) material in photovoltaic applications but its plasmonic properties are left untouched. In this work, we systematically investigate the plasmonic properties of gold nanoparticle (Au NP) arrays on thin HZO film, for different ratios of Hf dopants to Zinc oxide (ZnO) film. A localized surface plasmon resonant (LSPR) mode and two Bragg modes (due to the coupling of plasmon modes inside the film to array periodicity) are observed in the proposed structure. Resonant excitation of these modes produces large field enhancement at the surface of the NPs as well as Au NP/HZO film interface and was observed with FDTD simulations. The optimized plasmonic structure will be fabricated on quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) using laser interference lithography, based on the plasmonic resonant position and the SERS (surface enhanced Raman scattering) intensity, and it will be integrated to a microfluidic device in the configuration of the lab-on-a-chip concept for biosensing applications.
Automatic segmentation of macula in retinal flourescein angiography images

Retinal diseases are recurrent these days and there are many ways to scan the fundus of the eye in order to diagnose the disease. The most common type of retinal disease are Diabetic Maculopathy and Pediatric Malarial Retinopathy. Some previous studies showed that the leakage detected in retinal angiography can point to the existence of the disease. Hence, in this report, a saliency-based technique is proposed in order to detect the leakage regions in a fluorescein angiography. First, the image of a fundus is divided into intensity-based clusters of pixels using super pixels and then a saliency map is estimated. For each level of the super pixel, a compactness and intensity-based saliency cues are computed. An averaging operator is used to combine all the saliency maps obtained for each cue. Later, the final saliency map of each cue is combined using a multiplication operator to give an output of a single saliency map image. The leakage regions are finally segmented using thresholding and graph-cut segmentation techniques. It can be seen from the final result that compared to the previous techniques in leakage detection, the method proposed in this paper yields better results. The principle target of this paper is to make and approve programming to consequently segment leakage area in true clinical Fundus fluorescein angiography (FFA) images of subjects with diabetic macular edema (DME). Our segmentation strategy can reproducibly and precisely evaluate the area of leakage of clinical evaluation FA images and is compatible with master manual segmentation. Of an estimated 285 million individuals worldwide with diabetes mellitus, approximately one third have signs of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) and of these, a further one third of DR is vision-threatening DR, including DME.
Effect of Dietary Carbohydrate-to-Protein Ratio on Gut Microbiota in Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar)

Simple Summary Carbohydrates, in the form of energy reserve polysaccharides, are major food components that supply low-cost energy in farm animal feed formulation. Most of these compounds are obtained from plant ingredients (i.e., cereal grains). As the aquaculture industry moves towards formulating marine-derived ingredients free diets, the inclusion of plant ingredients is expected to continuously increase, and thus the amount of carbohydrates in aquafeed formulation will increase as well. Carnivorous fish, including salmonids, show a slow blood glucose clearance rate and suboptimal growth performance when fed rich carbohydrate meals. The role of gut microbial communities on carbohydrate utilization has been poorly explored in salmonids. Hence, we conducted an experiment to evaluate the effect of feeding a high carbohydrate diet to Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) on gut microbiota composition. Our results suggest increasing the level of digestible carbohydrate mostly affects low-abundance bacteria in favor of those capable of using carbohydrates as a major energy-yielding substrate. Further study for a better understanding of the role of gut microbiota in carbohydrate utilization in carnivorous fish is required. Abstract Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) is a carnivorous fish species whose productive performance tends to be suboptimal when fed low-cost carbohydrate rich meals. It is of interest to study the dynamics of gut microbiota communities in salmonids fed high carbohydrate diets since gut microbes are referred to as key players that influence the metabolism and physiology of the host. A study was conducted to determine the effect of feeding a high carbohydrate diet to Atlantic salmon in gut microbiota communities. A medium carbohydrate (15% wheat starch)/medium protein (MC/MP) diet or a high carbohydrate (30% wheat starch)/low protein (HC/LP) diet was fed to triplicate tanks (28 fish each) during four weeks. We conducted an in-depth characterization of the distal intestine digesta microbiota using high-throughput sequencing of the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene. Firmicutes, Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria were the major phyla determined in either experimental group. Phylum Planctomycetes, class Planctomycetia, order Planctomycetales and genus Lactococcus were significantly more abundant in fish fed the HC/LP diet compared with fish fed the MC/MP diet. Our study suggests feeding a carbohydrate rich meal to salmon exerts a low impact on the structure of gut microbial communities, affecting mostly low-abundance bacteria capable of metabolizing anaerobically carbohydrates as a major energy-yielding substrate.
Comet interceptor's EnVisS camera sky mapping function

Entire Visible Sky (EnVisS) is one of the payload proposed for the ESA selected F-Class mission Comet Interceptor. The main aim of the mission is the study of a dynamically new comet, or an interstellar object, entering the inner solar system. The EnVisS camera is designed to capture the entire sky in some visible wavelength bands while the spacecraft passes through the comet's tail environment. EnVisS optical head is composed of a fisheye lens with a field of view of 180° x 40° coupled with an imaging detector equipped with both band-pass and polarimetric filters. Very wide angle lens, as a fisheye, must be necessarily anamorphic, i. e. its focal length must change along the field of view, in order to fit a finite-size imaging detector. This anamorphic distortion is introduced by the optical designer, depending on the desired applications. Each possible distortion bring along different field of view mapping and this must be taken into account by the scientific/metrological user, because the plate scale is variable along the focal plane. To obtain useful scientific information from fisheye images (astrometry, flux calibration and brightness measurements), a precise determination of the mapping function has to be accurately determined. In this paper we describe the expected distortion map of the EnVisS camera.
Self-weighted locality discriminative feature selection

Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is one of the most popular methods for dimensionality reduction, and there have many different variants based on LDA. However, conventional LDA have some drawbacks: 1) The projection matrix offers the disadvantage of interpretability; 2) LDA assumes that every class data are drawn from Gaussian distribution which may not be applicable to many real-world data. Aiming to solve these problems, we propose a robust feature selection method, namely Self-weighted Locality Discriminative Feature Selection (SLD-FS), by combining row sparsity l2,1-norm regularization and self-weighted locality discriminant analysis strategy. Additionally, an effective iterative algorithm is developed to optimise this objective function, and the algorithm is proved to convergence. Extensive experiments conducted on various data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of SLD-FS when compared with some state-of-the-art supervised feature selection methods.
Corpus analysis without prior linguistic knowledge - unsupervised mining of phrases and subphrase structure

When looking at the structure of natural language, "phrases" and "words" are central notions. We consider the problem of identifying such "meaningful subparts" of language of any length and underlying composition principles in a completely corpus-based and language-independent way without using any kind of prior linguistic knowledge. Unsupervised methods for identifying "phrases", mining subphrase structure and finding words in a fully automated way are described. This can be considered as a step towards automatically computing a "general dictionary and grammar of the corpus". We hope that in the long run variants of our approach turn out to be useful for other kind of sequence data as well, such as, e.g., speech, genom sequences, or music annotation. Even if we are not primarily interested in immediate applications, results obtained for a variety of languages show that our methods are interesting for many practical tasks in text mining, terminology extraction and lexicography, search engine technology, and related fields.
Summer Savory (Satureja hortensis L.) Extract as Natural Feed Additive in Broilers: Effects on Growth, Plasma Constituents, Immune Response, and Ileal Microflora

Simple Summary The growth-promoting effect of many herbs and their extracts in poultry has been reported in literature. Therefore, the objective of this feeding trial was to determine the effect of different levels of summer savory (Satureja hortensis L.) extract in diet on broilers performance, immune response, hematology, and microbiota. Based on findings, dietary supplementation with summer savory extract, as natural feed additive, sustained growth traits and improved the feed efficiency and health status of broilers. Abstract This study investigated the effects of summer savory (Satureja hortensis L.) extract (SSE) on growth, plasma constituents, immune response, and gut microbiota of broiler chickens. A total of 300 day-old broiler chicks were randomly assigned to five dietary treatments containing five replicates of 12 birds each. The treatments consisted of a controldiet without feed additive and experimental diets supplemented with four levels of SSE (100, 200, 300, and 400 mg/kg, respectively). Results showed no significant effect of SSE supplementation on broiler body weight gain (p > 0.05), but feed conversion ratio was significantly (p < 0.05) improved when fed 400 mg/kg SSE compared to control. Most of the blood parameters and immune response criteria studied were improved (p < 0.05) by SSE supplementation. There was no dietary effect on Lactobacilli count (p > 0.05); conversely, Escherichia coli count was reduced and the Lactobacilli/E. coli ratio improved with SSE (p < 0.05). Based on our findings, it was concluded that supplementation of the diet with SSE up to 400 mg/kg sustained growth traits and improved the feed efficiency and health status of broilers. However, more research is needed on this subject in order to better understand the mode of action of the extract used.
Differential effects of depot medroxyprogesterone acetate administration on vaginal microbiome in Hispanic White and Black women

ABSTRACT The use of depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA), a 3-monthly injectable hormonal contraceptive, is associated with an increased risk of HIV acquisition possibly through alteration of the vaginal microbiome. In this longitudinal interventional study, we investigated the impact of DMPA administration on the vaginal microbiome in Hispanic White and Black women at the baseline (visit 1), 1 month (visit 2), and 3 months (visit 3) following DMPA treatment by using 16S rRNA gene sequencing. No significant changes in the vaginal microbiome were observed after DMPA treatment when Hispanic White and Black women were analysed as a combined group. However, DMPA treatment enriched total vaginosis-associated bacteria (VNAB) and Prevotella at visit 2, and simplified the correlational network in the vaginal microbiome in Black women, while increasing the network size in Hispanic White women. The microbiome in Black women became more diversified and contained more VNAB than Hispanic White women after DMPA treatment. While the Firmicutes to Bacteroidetes (F/B) ratio and Lactobacillus to Prevotella (L/P) ratio were comparable between Black and Hispanic White women at visit 1, both ratios were lower in Black women than in Hispanic White women at visit 2. In conclusion, DMPA treatment altered the community network and enriched VNAB in Black women but not in Hispanic White women. The Lactobacillus deficiency and enrichment of VNAB may contribute to the increased risk of HIV acquisition in Black women. Future studies on the impact of racial differences on the risk of HIV acquisition will offer insights into developing effective strategies for HIV prevention. Abbreviations: DMPA: depot medroxyprogesterone acetate; PCR: polymerase chain reaction; OTU: operational taxonomic unit; STI: sexually transmitted infections; VNAB: vaginosis-associated bacteria
Associations of various blood pressure parameters with functional outcomes after endovascular thrombectomy in acute ischaemic stroke

High blood pressure (BP) at presentation is associated with poor outcomes in acute ischaemic stroke, but serial BP measurements may better delineate the clinical implications of BP. The aim was to investigate the association between various BP parameters and functional outcomes in acute ischaemic stroke patients treated with endovascular thrombectomy (EVT).
Reconciling the concepts and measures of diversity, rarity and originality in ecology and evolution

The concept of biological diversity, or biodiversity, is at the core of evolutionary and ecological studies. Many indices of biodiversity have been developed in the last four decades, with species being one of the central units of these indices. However, evolutionary and ecological studies need a precise description of species' characteristics to best quantify inter‐species diversity, as species are not equivalent and exchangeable. One of the first concepts characterizing species in biodiversity studies was abundance‐based rarity. Abundance‐based rarity was then complemented by trait‐ and phylo‐based rarity, called species' trait‐based and phylogenetic originalities, respectively. Originality, which is a property of an individual species, represents a species' contribution to the overall diversity of a reference set of species. Originality can also be defined as the rarity of a species' characteristics such as the state of a functional trait, which is often assumed to be represented by the position of the species on a phylogenetic tree. We review and compare various approaches for measuring originality, rarity and diversity and demonstrate that (i) even if attempts to bridge these concepts do exist, only a few ecological and evolutionary studies have tried to combine them all in the past two decades; (ii) phylo‐ and trait‐based diversity indices can be written as a function of species rarity and originality measures in several ways; and (iii) there is a need for the joint use of these three types of indices to understand community assembly processes and species' roles in ecosystem functioning in order to protect biodiversity efficiently.