Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Response of Understory Bird Feeding Groups to Deforestation Gradient in a Tropical Rainforest of Cameroon

Birds are crucial in maintaining the balance of many ecosystems and provide various ecological services. Understanding their sensitivity to human disturbances should be prioritized in understudy areas for effective conservation practices. Using mist nets, this study characterized mostly understory bird communities (insectivorous, frugivorous, granivorous, and nectarivorous birds) in three habitat types (pristine forest, selectively logged forest, and young oil palm plantation) in the Talangaye rainforest, Southwest Cameroon. A total of 845 birds belonging to 27 families and 85 species were recorded in the three habitats after 294 h of mist netting. Overall, the mist-netted community was largely dominated by insectivores, followed by frugivores, nectarivores, granivores, and carnivores. Although mean species richness, abundance, and Simpson diversity index did not vary significantly among habitat types, mean species abundance and diversity index decreased in selectively logged forest and young oil palm plantation and species richness increased in both habitats. The species richness, abundance, and diversity index for insectivorous and frugivorous birds were lowest in the young oil palm plantations. For granivores, species richness and abundance increased following selective logging and the establishment of oil palm plantation. The highest mean species richness and diversity index in nectarivores were recorded in the young oil palm plantations. The study showed that selective logging and establishment of oil palm plantation had variable effects on the bird communities in the Talangaye rainforest. Also, the frugivorous birds appeared to be more sensitive to both types of disturbances, while the insectivores were more sensitive to habitat loss/conversion.
Topolins and Red Light Improve the Micropropagation Efficiency of Passion Fruit (Passiflora edulis Sims) ‘Tainung No. 1’

Passion fruit is a commercial crop of economic importance worldwide, with recent increases in demand for high-quality plants for commercial production. Plant tissue culture is widely used for the mass propagation of many commercial crops, however its application on passion fruit is challenged by the problem of low reproducibility, leaf chlorosis, and growth retardation resulted from in vitro culture. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of cytokinins and light quality on in vitro culture of nodal segments of passion fruit ‘Tainung No. 1’. Three aromatic cytokinins were tested in a modified MS basal medium. The bud proliferation rates of segments initiated on a media containing 1 mg·L−1 meta-topolin riboside (mTR) or benzyladenine (BA) were not significantly different at the same concentration. Buds cultured on medium supplemented with mTR grew and elongated for 4 weeks, while buds on a medium containing BA formed rosettes. After transfer to a medium without plant growth regulators (PGRs), shoots rooted spontaneously within 8 weeks. Furthermore, the effects of continuous propagation under a high proportion of red light affected the subsequent plant growth. Red LED induced an increase in the chlorophyll content (2.71 mg·g−1) compared with other light qualities (1.05–2.63 mg·g−1) and improved plantlet quality. Acclimated plants were grown in the field, and the flower morphology and fruit set were of commercial quality. Findings showed that replacing BA with mTR as the main cytokinin and using a high proportion of red light during the tissue culture induction period produced high-quality plantlets in 3 months. This system is economical and will be further developed for the commercial propagation of passion fruit vines in the future.
Hydrothermal Synthesis of Hydroxyapatite Assisted by Gemini Cationic Surfactant

Hydroxyapatite (HAp) has been synthesized by a hydrothermal treatment in the presence of a Gemini cationic surfactant. This process is a new strategy of synthesis and mainly consists of two parts, i.e., an ordinary hydrothermal treatment and a liquid-solid-solution reaction (LSS strategy). Crystalline HAp nanorods or nanogranules with length of 50-180 nm and width of 30-40 nm were produced by ordinary hydrothermal treatment. By contrary, HAp spheres with a 3D architecture were fabricated with Gemini cationic surfactant by LSS strategy. For Gemini cationic surfactant concentration of 0.05%, spherical HAp particles with an average diameter of 1.7 μm were obtained.
SARS-CoV19-2 Spike Protein Mutation Patterns: A Global Scenario

Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein sequences of over 19 countries from biological databases submitted around the globe was carried out with help of bioinformatics tools and structure prediction databases. Initial data analysis showed entry of virus into different geographic regions started in the month of January 2020. Meanwhile, alignment of spike protein sequences of SARS-CoV-2 isolates from China and other countries revealed a critical mutation of D614G. Surprisingly, mutation D614G was not seen in early samples submitted in the month of January but gradually it started appearing globally from the month of March 2020. However, the mutations of amino acids in the spike protein other than D614G exhibiting similar pI and altered polarity were found to be specific to geographical regions. Besides, prediction of homology model for interaction of spike protein showed predominant role of chain C of trimeric spike protein in adhering receptor binding domain (RBD) of human ACE2 receptor. Furthermore, the prediction of glycosylation points has revealed that there are about 20 N-glycosylation potential sites on spike protein. We believe that the information present here would not only help in thorough understanding of infectivity but also enhance the knowledge of the scientific community in developing prophylactics and/or therapeutics for SARS-CoV19-2 virus.
Measuring the Impact of Accurate Feature Selection on the Performance of RBM in Comparison to State of the Art Machine Learning Algorithms

The amassed growth in the size of data, caused by the advancement of technologies and the use of internet of things to collect and transmit data, resulted in the creation of large volumes of data and an increasing variety of data types that need to be processed at very high speeds so that we can extract meaningful information from these massive volumes of unstructured data. The process of mining this data is very challenging since a lot of the data suffers from the problem of high dimensionality. The quandary of high dimensionality represents a great challenge that can be controlled through the process of feature selection. Feature selection is a complex task with multiple layers of difficulty. To be able to grasp and realize the impediments associated with high dimensional data a more and in-depth understanding of feature selection is required. In this study, we examine the effect of appropriate feature selection during the classification process of anomaly network intrusion detection systems. We test its effect on the performance of Restricted Boltzmann Machines and compare its performance to conventional machine learning algorithms. We establish that when certain features that are representative of the model are to be selected the change in the accuracy was always less than 3% across all algorithms. This verifies that the accurate selection of the important features when building a model can have a significant impact on the accuracy level of the classifiers. We also confirmed in this study that the performance of the Restricted Boltzmann Machines can outperform or at least is comparable to other well-known machine learning algorithms. Extracting those important features can be very useful when trying to build a model with datasets with a lot of features.
Role-Based Graph Embeddings

Random walks are at the heart of many existing node embedding and network representation learning methods. However, such methods have many limitations that arise from the use of traditional random walks, e.g., the embeddings resulting from these methods capture proximity (communities) among the vertices as opposed to structural similarity (roles). Furthermore, the embeddings are unable to transfer to new nodes and graphs as they are tied to node identity. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Role2Vec framework based on the proposed notion of attributed random walks to learn structural role-based embeddings. Notably, the framework serves as a basis for generalizing any walk-based method. The Role2Vec framework enables these methods to be more widely applicable by learning inductive functions that capture the structural roles in the graph. Furthermore, the original methods are recovered as a special case of the framework when each vertex is mapped to its own function that uniquely identifies it. Finally, the Role2Vec framework is shown to be effective with an average AUC improvement of 17.8 percent for link prediction while requiring on average 853x less space than existing methods on a variety of graphs from different domains.
Estimating Ideal Points of Newspapers from Editorial Texts

Although measuring the ideal points of news media is essential for testing political communication theories based on spatial theory, prior methods of estimating ideal points of media outlets have various shortcomings, including high cost in terms of time and human resources and low applicability to different countries. We propose that unsupervised machine learning techniques for text data, specifically the combination of a text scaling method and latent topic modeling, can be applied to estimate ideal points of media outlets. We applied our proposed methods to editorial texts of ten national and regional newspapers in Japan, where prior approaches are not applicable because newspapers have never officially endorsed particular parties or candidates, and because high-quality training data for supervised learning are not available. Our two studies, one of which analyzed editorials on a single typically ideological topic while the other investigated all editorials published by the target papers in one year, confirmed the popular view of Japanese newspapers’ ideological slant, which validates the effectiveness of our proposed approach. We also illustrate that our methods allow scholars to investigate which issues are closely related to the respective ideological positions of media outlets. Furthermore, we use the estimated ideal points of newspapers to show that Japanese people partially tend to read ideologically like-minded newspapers and follow such newspapers’ Twitter accounts even though their slant is not explicit.
Spectroscopic evidence of successful in situ insertion of sol–gel silica in a poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) matrix

Silica-based (SiO2) poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB) nanocomposites were obtained via an in situ sol–gel route in three distinct particle concentrations (1, 5, and 7.5% by weight of PHB). The polymer hybrids formed were analyzed via wide-angle X-ray diffraction (WAXD), small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, and time-domain nuclear magnetic resonance relaxometry (TD-NMR). The SiO2 inorganic structure displayed surface fractal features at low concentration (1 wt%) and denser agglomerates at higher concentrations (5 and 7.5 wt%). FTIR and SAXS results confirmed the formation of the inorganic matrix amid the polymer chains with different levels of distribution and organization. WAXD and TD-NMR results suggested the SiO2 influence on the PHB crystallinity degree, which was reflected on the polymer’s molecular dynamics with a nonlinear dependence of particles concentration in the PHB matrix.
Caffeic acid as a preservative that extends shelf-life and maintains fruit quality of mulberries during cold storage

Fruits can be easily infected and damaged by microbes. Cold storage is a popular approach used to extend the shelf-life of fruits. In this paper, the effect of caffeic acid on physiological parameters and shelf-life of mulberries (Morus alba L.) stored for 21 days at 4°C was evaluated. The results showed that the shelf-life was significantly improved in the mulberries treated with the different concentrations of caffeic acid solution for 5 min (P < 0.05). Certain physiological parameters, like phenolics, anthocyanins, flavonoids and Vitamin C were also significantly increased (P < 0.05) in the treated mulberries. The results showed that the rotting rate and the weight loss ratio were 47.0 and 6.6% in the 0.20 g/L caffeic acid-treated fruits after storing for 21 days at 4°C, respectively. While these two parameters were 79.0 and 9.7% in the control. The malondialdehyde (MDA) content was significantly lower (P < 0.05) in the 0.20 g/L caffeic acid-treated mulberries than that in the samples treated with 0.00, 0.10, 0.25 and 0.30 g/L caffeic acid. Moreover, the 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical scavenging activities in the caffeic acid treated mulberries were significantly higher than those in the control (P < 0.05). Therefore, caffeic acid, as a preservative, is favorable for elongation of the shelf-life, maintenance of the quality and inhibition of fruit decay in mulberries. This study is greatly informative to mulberry growers and commercial sellers. Key words: Caffeic acid, mulberry fruits, cold storage, postharvest quality.
Growth and Quality of Genotype TSH1188 Cacao Tree Seedlings Produced under Different Seasons and Irrigation Depths

The low quality of seedlings can be caused by problems in the irrigation and nutrition of the seedlings in their early stage, thus compromising the success of the implantation of the crop. The aim of this work was to determine the optimal irrigation depth most suitable for the development of cacao tree seedlings genotype TSH1188, raised at different times of the year. To achieve this goal, a study was developed, at the Federal Institute of Espírito Santo Campus Itapina, about the effect of the application of six different daily irrigation depths (4, 6, 8, 10, 12 and 14 mm) on the growth and quality of seedlings of the cacao genotype TSH1188, produced in tubes, by evaluating the morphological characteristics of the seedlings and their relationship with the quality of the plant. Original Research Article Posse et al.; JEAI, 28(2): 1-17, 2018; Article no.JEAI. 44718 2 The study was conducted in a completely randomised design (CRD) at three different planting seasons notably in the Autumn with 36 plants per treatment, in the Winter with 20 plants per treatment and the spring using 20 plants per treatment. The results showed that regardless of the season, for all the variables studied, it was discovered that irrigation depths had impacts on the growth and quality of cacao seedlings, the best depths were 8 and 10mm d -1 as the seedlings proved to be the best in all characteristics evaluated. The irrigation depth of 8 mm d was the one that presented the best results for all the three seasons, in the production of cacao tree seedlings genotype TSH1188, i.e. ideal Dickson quality index, stem diameter, plant height and a number of leaves, which are characteristics used to identify quality seedlings.
Thin layer chromatography as a simple and quick in-process tool for qualitative and semi-quantitative determination of unentrapped drugs in liposomal formulations

Control of free or unentrapped drug is one of the key quality attributes for liposomal drug delivery systems. Conventional methodologies for estimating unentrapped drug in liposomal formulations require prior separation, which are time-consuming and complex. There is a need for a quick in-process analytical technique, which can enable monitoring of drug loading during various stages of product development and manufacturing. A novel simple and rapid TLC procedure was developed for evaluating entrapment efficiency in liposomal formulations. The method is based on differential radial migration of free and entrapped drug on silica gel TLC plates. The method can be employed either as a simple visual qualitative tool in the early screening studies or in a semi-quantitative mode for detection of free and unentrapped drugs. In case of doxorubicin hydrochloride, a deep-red coloured molecule, the method enabled free drug detection up to the levels as low as 2.5%. This method precluded the need of developing the plate further with the mobile phase. The method was used successfully in product development or as an in-process monitoring tool. The method’s potential for characterizing entrapment efficiency was evaluated for less intensely coloured or UV absorbing drug candidates such as amphotericin B liposome and curcumin liposome. The preliminary results post derivatization with ninhydrin reagent or visualization under UV light indicated applicability of technique in general for liposomal delivery systems of various other drugs. According to the best of the author’s knowledge, there has been no reports on the evaluation of drug entrapment using such TLC based technique so far.
The complete mitochondrial genome of the Emei black chicken (Gallus gallus) and its phylogenetic analyses

Abstract In this study, the complete mitochondrial genome of Emei black chicken (Gallus gallus) was obtained by using next generation sequencing method. The complete mitogenome sequence is 16,784 bp in length, containing 13 protein-coding genes, two ribosomal RNAs, 22 transfer RNA genes, and one control region. This work provides a valuable genetic resource of data for the Gallus gallus evolution study and contributes to the breeding improvement program of native chicken breeds.
Recent progress of two‐dimensional lead halide perovskite single crystals: Crystal growth, physical properties, and device applications

State Key Discipline Laboratory of Wide Band Gap Semiconductor Technology, Shaanxi Joint Key Laboratory of Graphene, Advanced Interdisciplinary Research Center for Flexible Electronics, School of Microelectronics, Xidian University, Xi'an, China Key Laboratory of Applied Surface and Colloid Chemistry, Ministry of Education, Shaanxi Key Laboratory for Advanced Energy Devices, Shaanxi Engineering Lab for Advanced Energy Technology, Institute for Advanced Energy Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an, China Dalian National Laboratory for Clean Energy, iChEM, Dalian National Laboratory for Clean Energy, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dalian, China
Virtual Simulation of Electric Bus Fleets for City Bus Transport Electrification Planning

City bus transport electrification has a strong potential of improving city air quality, reducing noise pollution and increasing passenger satisfaction. Since the city bus operation is rather deterministic and intermittent, the driving range- and charging-related concerns may be effectively overcome by means of fast charging at end stations and/or slow charging in depot. In order to support decision making processes, a simulation tool for planning of city bus transport electrification has been developed and it is presented in this paper. The tool is designed to use real/recorded driving cycles and techno-economic data, in order to calculate the optimal type and number of e-buses and chargers, and predict the total cost of ownership including investment and exploitation cost. The paper focuses on computationally efficient e-bus fleet simulation including powertrain control and charging management aspects, which is illustrated through main results of a pilot study of bus transport electrification planning for the city of Dubrovnik.
Genetic alterations in Adult T cell leukemia

iii Table of Figures and Tables . xi Chapter I: General Introduction . 1 HTLV-1 . 2 Virology . 3 Virus infection . 5 HTLV-1 encoding proteins . 6 p12. 8 p13. 8 p30. 9 Rex . 9 Tax . 9 Tax and viral transcription . 10 Tax and NF-B . 10 Tax and host gene transcription . 11 HBZ. 11 Epidemiology of HTLV-1 . 15 ATL related oncogenesis and pathogenesis . 18
Influence of oral melatonin administration on oxidative stress and intestinal microflora in rats exposed to cadmium

Bu calismanin amaci, kronik kadmiyuma maruz kalan ratlarda oral melatonin uygulamasinin, oksidatif stres ve bagirsak mikroflorasinda bulunan bazi mikroorganizmalar uzerine etkilerini arastirmaktir. Saglikli 32 yetiskin erkek albino Wistar rat, kontrol (C; n=8), kadmiyum (Cd; n=8), melatonin (Mlt, n=8), kadmiyum + melatonin (Cd + Mlt; n=8) olarak rastgele dort gruba ayrilmistir. Ratlara oral yolla Mlt (100 mg/kg), (Cd ve Cd + Mlt) haftada 5 kez (Mlt ve Cd + Mlt) ve CdCl2 (2 mg/gun) 3 kez olmak uzere 4 hafta boyunca uygulanmistir. Uygulamadan sonra serum total antioksidan seviyeleri (TAS), total oksidan (TOS) duzeyleri ile plazma ALT, AST, GGT, T.pro, Alb ve BUN degerleri olculmustur. Ayrica ince ve kalin bagirsak icerikleri ayri ayri aseptik olarak alinarak bagirsak florasinda Enterobacteriaceae, Lactococcus spp. ve Lactobacillus spp. sayimlari yapilmistir. Bulgu olarak, serum TOS duzeyleri Cd grubunda diger gruplara gore daha yuksek olarak tanimlanmistir (P <0,05). Cd grubunda ince bagirsak florasinda Lactococcus spp. sayisi C grubuna gore 0,63 log azalirken, Cd + Mlt grubunda 1,15 log artmistir. Sonuc olarak, Cd + Mlt selatinin Enterobacteriaceae uremesini baskilanmasi, Lactobacillus spp. /Lactococcus spp. oranini duzenlemesi ve Cd’a bagli gelisen oksidatif stresi azaltmasi nedeni ile intestinal mikroflora icin faydali olabilir.
Restorative Narrative of Covid-19 Patients as Health Campaign Message: A Content Analysis of Youtube Videos

This study discussed the restorative narrative message of the first-three recovered Covid-19 patients as well as the resulted public response related to the public health campaign about the Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia. The context of this research was the benefits of policy-making by the Indonesian government on the introduction of the first-three patients of Covid-19 to the public through a press conference. The research was conducted with qualitative and quantitative content analysis method. Qualitative analysis was to analyze restorative narrative messages carried out on the stories of the three patients on two YouTube videos taken from the accounts @tvOneNews and @CNNIndonesia. The narrative elaboration was explained according to the narrative functions delivered by Sharf & Vanderford and Sharf, Harter, Yamasaki & Haidet. Quantitative analysis was then carried out to find out the ten most common phrases of 7,381 comments on the sample videos to know the public response on restorative messages. The results of the narrative analysis showed that the stories told by three cured Covid-19 patients have meet the restorative narrative criteria and produced positive emotional responses from the public, so that the restorative narrative could be useful for public health campaigns.