Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigation of the influence of fluctuation in air hole radii and lattice constant on photonic crystal substrate for terahertz applications

Abstract. Recently, the use of carrier frequencies in the domain of wireless bearer has been enhanced to fulfill the data transmission need. The research activities are coordinated to wireless communication with high information rates and amended security. An idea of the slotted rectangular patch antenna that depends on the photonic crystal structure is offered for a wireless communication system. The proposed antenna is contrasted with the accustomed slotted antenna. In addition, the investigation of the designed antenna is performed with various radius values and lattice constant. The negligible return loss of −43.79 dB and voltage standing wave ratio of 1.1 are accomplished at 2-μm radius with the lattice constant of a = 5 μm at fr = 2.23 THz.
Abnormal Spontaneous Gamma Power Is Associated With Verbal Learning and Memory Dysfunction in Schizophrenia

Background Schizophrenia patients exhibit cognitive deficits across multiple domains, including verbal memory, working memory, and executive function, which substantially contribute to psychosocial disability. Gamma oscillations are associated with a wide range of cognitive operations, and are important for cortico-cortical transmission and the integration of information across neural networks. While previous reports have shown that schizophrenia patients have selective impairments in the ability to support gamma oscillations in response to 40-Hz auditory stimulation, it is unclear if patients show abnormalities in gamma power at rest, or whether resting-state activity in other frequency bands is associated with cognitive functioning in schizophrenia patients. Methods Resting-state electroencephalogram (EEG) was assessed over 3 min in 145 healthy comparison subjects and 157 schizophrenia patients. Single-word reading ability was measured via the reading subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test-3 (WRAT). Auditory attention and working memory were evaluated using Letter-Number Span and Letter-Number Sequencing. Executive function was assessed via perseverative responses on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). Verbal learning performance was measured using the California Verbal Learning Test second edition (CVLT-II). Results Schizophrenia patients showed normal levels of delta-band power but abnormally elevated EEG power in theta, alpha, beta, and gamma bands. An exploratory correlation analysis showed a significant negative correlation of gamma-band power and verbal learning performance in schizophrenia patients. Conclusions Patients with schizophrenia have abnormal resting-state EEG power across multiple frequency bands; gamma-band abnormalities were selectively and negatively associated with impairments in verbal learning. Resting-state gamma-band EEG power may be useful for understanding the pathophysiology of cognitive dysfunction and developing novel therapeutics in schizophrenia patients.
Improved Kalman Filtering-Based Information Fusion for Crack Monitoring Using Piezoelectric-Fiber Hybrid Sensor Network

Multifunctional sensor network has become a research focus in the field of structural health monitoring. To improve the reliability and stability of the diagnosis results, it is necessary to fuse heterogeneous signals under the interference of the external load and damage. In this paper, a piezoelectric-fiber hybrid sensor network is integrated to monitor the crack growth around the hole in the aviation aluminum plate. The effect of the load change on the signals of piezoelectric transducers (PZTs) and optical fiber sensors is analyzed. To improve the damage diagnosis result obtained by ultrasonic guided wave imaging diagnosis based on PZTs and strain damage identification based on distributed optical fiber sensor, a fusion strategy of heterogeneous signals based on a two-stage Kalman filtering algorithm is proposed. In the first stage, the features extracted from two types of sensors are fused at a specific time at the feature level, and then the location of the damage center is predicted. Then, the second fusion is to fuse the predicted damage location results at multiple specific times at the decision level. Crack growth monitoring experiments in hot spots of metallic material under bending moment loading is carried out to verify the feasibility of the proposed fusion method. The experimental results indicate that the fusion damage diagnosis results are more stable, moreover, the accuracy of damage location and quantification is improved than the single signal diagnosis results.
Potential Immunomodulatory Activity of a Selected Strain Bifidobacterium bifidum H3-R2 as Evidenced in vitro and in Immunosuppressed Mice

The microbiota is directly involved in the development and modulation of the intestinal immune system. In particular, members of the genus Bifidobacterium play a primary role in immune regulation. In the present study, Bifidobacterium bifidum H3-R2 was screened from 15 bifidobacterium strains by in vitro experiment, showing a positive tolerance to digestive tract conditions, adhesion ability to intestinal epithelial cells and a regulatory effect on immune cell activity. Immunostimulatory activity of B. bifidum H3-R2 was also elucidated in vivo in cytoxan (CTX)-treated mice. The results showed that the administration of B. bifidum H3-R2 ameliorated the CTX-induced bodyweight loss and imbalanced expression of inflammatory cytokines, enhanced the production of secretory immunoglobulin A (SIgA), and promoted splenic lymphocyte proliferation, natural killer (NK) cell activity and phagocytosis of macrophages in immunosuppressed mice. In addition, B. bifidum H3-R2 restored injured intestinal mucosal, and increased the villus length and crypt depth in CTX-treated mice. The results could be helpful for understanding the functions of B. bifidum H3-R2, supporting its potential as a novel probiotic for immunoregulation.
Polarimetric imaging for quality control in injection molding

Abstract. Quality control is a key requirement of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, especially in manufacturing. For high-value technical parts, the geometric and appearance quality need to be guaranteed. The control of the part, directly on the manufacturing line, can be achieved with noncontact sensors. Visible spectrum imaging is commonly used. However, more information could be obtained from broader spectrum imaging and from the degree of linear polarization of the light from the part. We investigate polarimetry. We have developed a simple polarimetric imaging system to verify whether linear polarization is capable of amplifying geometric and appearance defects. We evaluate the use of this polarimetric imager given the industrial constraints of injection molding. We compare the performances of different machine learning pipelines with hand-crafted feature extraction and deep transfer learning. With its industrial robustness, polarimetry could be a valuable addition to noncontact imagers for geometric and appearance quality control of plastic molded parts.
Wavelet features embedded convolutional neural network for multiscale ear recognition

Abstract. The ear has emerged as a new biometric trait to recognize humans from their profile faces. Stability over the years, noninvasive capturing process, expressionless images, and significant variation in shape among individuals make the ear a suitable choice when compared with other biometrics. Convolutional neural network (CNN)’s capability to learn and discriminate specific features irrespective of image variation makes it the most suitable choice for ear recognition in comparison to local geometrical feature extraction methods. The recognition performance affecting factors such as occlusion, image resolution, and head rotation during ear acquisition in an uncontrolled environment makes it a challenging task, and the use of spatial features only in CNN limits the recognition rate. We explored the various CNN configurations and propose the spectral–spatial feature-based CNN. An embedding algorithm is proposed to fuse multilevel spectral information from the image domain with spatial features extracted at each deep layer of the CNN network. The poor convergence problem of CNN is tackled by introducing batch normalization after every convolution. The analysis of the result shows that the proposed framework is superior among all CNN achieving 98.15% and 78.88% accuracy on the Annotated Web Ears with 1000 images and earVN1.0 with 28,412 images, respectively. In addition to fine-tuning and configuring the layers of CNN, the fusion of missing spectral features and spatial features can strengthen the CNN.
IMG-Net: inner-cross-modal attentional multigranular network for description-based person re-identification

Abstract. Given a natural language description, description-based person re-identification aims to retrieve images of the matched person from a large-scale visual database. Due to the existing modality heterogeneity, it is challenging to measure the cross-modal similarity between images and text descriptions. Many of the existing approaches usually utilize a deep-learning model to encode local and global fine-grained features with a strict uniform partition strategy. This breaks the part coherence, making it difficult to capture meaningful information from the within-part and semantic information among body parts. To address this issue, we proposed an inner-cross-modal attentional multigranular network (IMG-Net) to incorporate inner-modal self-attention and cross-modal hard-region attention with the fine-grained model for extracting the multigranular semantic information. Specifically, the inner-modal self-attention module is proposed to address the within-part consistency broken problem using both spatial-wise and channel-wise information. Following it is a multigranular feature extraction module, which is used to extract rich local and global visual and textual features with the help of group normalization (GN). Then a cross-modal hard-region attention module is proposed to obtain the local visual representation and phrase representation. Furthermore, a GN is used instead of batch normalization for the accurate batch statistics estimation. Comprehensive experiments with ablation analysis demonstrate that IMG-Net achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the CUHK-PEDES dataset and outperforms other previous methods significantly.
Distribution of Archaeal and Bacterial communities in a subtropical reservoir

Abstract Aim: Microbial communities play a central role in environmental process such as organic matter mineralization and the nutrient cycling process in aquatic ecosystems. Despite their ecological importance, variability of the structure of archaeal and bacterial communities in freshwater remains understudied. Methods In the present study we investigated the richness and density of archaea and bacteria in the water column and sediments of the Itupararanga Reservoir. We also evaluated the relationship between the communities and the biotic and abiotic characteristics. Samples were taken at five depths in the water column next to the dam and three depths next to the reservoir entrance. Results PCR-DGGE evaluation of the archaeal and bacterial communities showed that both were present in the water column, even in oxygenated conditions. Conclusions The density of the bacteria (qPCR) was greater than that of the archaea, a result of the higher metabolic plasticity of bacteria compared with archaea.
Experiments in EU Climate Governance: The Unfulfilled Potential of the Covenant of Mayors

Abstract Over the last decade, a growing body of academic literature has reflected on how and under which conditions experiments in global climate governance lead to broader changes in rules, norms, and practices helping to meet the challenge of climate change. Drawing on the assumptions of the scholarship on experimentalist governance architectures, this article analyzes the effectiveness of the Covenant of Mayors (CoM) as a comprehensive governance framework that enables the development and coordination of local policies for sustainable energy and climate through a range of joint instruments for recursive goal setting, monitoring, and benchmarking. Our findings illustrate the CoM’s significant potential in terms of both general political uptake and policy output, which could make of this program, if appropriately fine-tuned, a successful governance experiment contributing to building a more effective global climate regime.
Notropis suttkusi, a New Cyprinid from the Ouachita Uplands of Oklahoma and Arkansas, with Comments on the Status of Ozarkian Populations of N. rubellus

A new species of cyprinid, Notropis suttkusi, the rocky shiner, is described from tributaries of the Red River draining the Ouachita Uplands in Oklahoma and Arkansas. The geographic range of N. suttkusi extends from the Blue River in Oklahoma eastward to the Cossatot River in Arkansas. It is found primarily in the upper portions of these rivers, and prefers clear water flowing over gravel and rubble substrates. The rocky shiner is compared to populations of the rosyface shiner, Notropis rubellus, from the adjacent Ozark Uplands and east of the Mississippi River, from which it can be distinguished by its deeper and more robust body form; shorter snout and upper jaw; denser pigmentation on scales, lips, and gular region; finer tubercles on the snout; greater extent of lateral band; and more deeply decurved lateral line. A brief discussion of the confusing taxonomic history involving N. atherinoides, N. oligaspis, N. percobromus, and N. rubellus is presented.
Improved photometric acceptance testing in image feature extraction tasks

Abstract. Image correspondence is established by “matching” the feature descriptors of the interest points in the target image to that of the reference image. By acceptance testing, we refer to a postmatching hypothesis test used to screen out potential false matches—conventionally using descriptor test statistics. We propose a new acceptance testing strategy that does not rely on the descriptor test statistics exclusively. The contribution we bring is to demonstrate that, unlike feature matching, acceptance testing may incorporate additional photometric values of the scene to improve the recall rate. We show experimentally that the acceptance testing strategy that incorporates image feature detection statistics we refer to as detector response-ratio thresholding that are usually excluded from the feature descriptor vectors has a superior recall–precision performance compared to the state-of-the-art feature extraction techniques.
Sampling and validity

ABSTRACT Sampling strategies are directly related to external validity. The choices researchers make in selecting sampling frames and sampling participants need to be clearly articulated. Sampling choices can introduce a variety of biases into research findings that reduce the external validity of samples. This essay discusses the relationship between sampling and external validity and provides a brief overview of important sampling concepts including power, the central limit theorem, nonprobability sampling and probability sampling. Sampling related biases are overviewed in the context of communication research. Finally, strategies that researchers and the discipline as a whole might adopt to ameliorate validity concerns related to sampling are proposed.
Automatic calibration and simplified decoding pipeline for plenoptic camera

Abstract. Plenoptic cameras attract extensive attention these days for their unique information acquisition and postcapture processing capability. In prior work, the decoding pipeline of plenoptic cameras mainly consisted of calibration, aligning, slicing, and resampling. Besides, slicing and resampling are performed on a generated grid of projected centers. Such methods consist of a series of processing steps, and the errors from different steps are accumulated. We propose a simplified decoding pipeline for plenoptic cameras. We first propose a coarse-to-fine strategy to calibrate the microlens array accurately and automatically. Then, unlike prior work, we perform slicing and resampling using a nonregular grid of projected centers. Such a strategy avoids using aligning and excludes the dark regions among different microlenses from decoding. Experiments on published datasets and real-world scenes demonstrate the validation of the proposed method.
Microwave power imaging detector based on metamaterial absorber

Abstract. Our paper presents the design, fabrication, and characterization of metamaterial absorber-based microwave imaging detector that is operating in industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band. The results reveal that the structure has almost perfect absorption at 2.39 GHz in the simulation and 2.51 GHz in the experimental measurement. For energy-harvesting applications, Schottky diodes have been used and 11.8-mV dc voltage across a Schottky diode has been observed with 84.2% dc conversion efficiency in harvesting application. To show the different incident angle imaging, MATS-1000 antenna training kit is used, and different imaging pictures are given, which are obtained by MATLAB with the help of a microcontroller card. Both experimental and simulation study results verify that the microwave detector generates accurate images with negligible distortions. The innovative side of this study when it is compared with similar studies can be sorted as having more dc obtained voltage, incident angle characterization, and operation frequency. Simulated and measurement results show that the proposed structure can effectively be used in the imaging at ISM frequency band, which is the most common frequency band in wireless appliances.
Investigating the Role of Innate Inflammatory Pathways During Infection With Murine Coronavirus

Multicellular organisms are constantly exposed to microorganisms, such as viruses and bacteria, many of which are infectious pathogens. The immune system evolved to provide protection against these organisms, and includes numerous components to defend against a diverse, rapidly evolving pool of pathogens. The immune system is classically divided into two arms, the innate and adaptive systems. The time and metabolic cost of activating the T and B cell responses are considerable, and can also have deleterious side effects if the response is not properly controlled. Therefore, the adaptive immune system is carefully regulated so as to be activated only when necessary. The innate immune system serves to control most pathogens in a more rapid, less energetically expensive manner than the adaptive immune system, and to help regulate subsequent immune responses, guiding and controlling them in order to most efficiently clear pathogens with a minimum of pathological side effects. Among the first elements of the innate system that pathogens encounter are pattern recognition receptors, invariant receptors that detect conserved pathogen associated molecular patterns. Upon recognizing its binding ligand, a pattern recognition receptor will activate a signaling cascade that often triggers production and/or release of one or more pro- inflammatory cytokines. These in turn modulate additional elements of both the innate and adaptive immune responses, and are often critical lynchpins of host defense. Due to this central role in the immune system we investigated the roles of two distinct innate inflammatory pathways, the inflammasome and the MDA5-dependent portion of the type 1 interferon response, during infection with the murine coronavirus mouse hepatitis virus (MHV). Utilizing transgenic mice deficient in Caspase-1 and -11, which catalyze all inflammasome processing, the IL-1 receptor, the IL-18 receptor, or MDA5, we characterize the disease course and subsequent immune response following infection with MHV, a model murine coronavirus. We find that inflammasome signaling is protective during infection, and that much or all of this protection is mediated by IL-18 signaling driving production of interferon gamma by T cells. We also demonstrate that MDA5 signaling controls viral tropism and replication, and that in its absence the host immune response becomes over active, likely leading to lethal pathology. Overall, our studies help define how innate inflammatory pathways can have diverse influences on pathogenesis and the immune response.
Mega infrastructure projects as agents of change: new perspectives on ‘the global infrastructure gap’

Abstract This article seeks to highlight the need for the development of enhanced and adaptive strategic decision-making frameworks for mega infrastructure investment. The authors contend that contagious narratives about ‘the global infrastructure-gap’, and related estimates of more geographically-specific ‘infrastructure deficits’ are in danger of effectuating inapt outcomes if set against the multiple critical challenges of the 21st century and failing efforts at meeting global and local goals of sustainable development. They argue that as new knowledge and evidence emerges about the advances made and damage incurred by past mega infrastructure investments, and as prospects offered by new technological horizons evolve, it is timely to systematically scrutinise previous practice to ascertain what has been done well and what has not, and decide what should be done differently to deliver more sustainable outcomes. It is argued that research and development of this kind can significantly benefit from new scientific findings and technological innovations fast being brought into the public domain, informing more resilient investment approaches when accompanied by meaningful analyses of the sensitivities of key contextual forces that mould infrastructure development.
Localization of integrin heterodimer α9β1 on the surface of uterine endometrial stromal and epithelial cells in mice

ABSTRACT Previously, we reported that endometrial stromal (ES) and endometrial epithelial (EE) cells did not attach to tenascin C, indicating the absence of active integrin α9β1 on the surface of mouse ES and EE cells. However, that study used recombinant tenascin C without fibronectin (FN) type III repeats interacting with integrin heterodimers. Therefore, we re-evaluated the presence of integrin α9β1 actively functioning on the surface of mouse ES and EE cells using full-length native tenascin C with FN type III repeats. The functionality of integrin α9β1 was confirmed using attachment and antibody inhibition assays. Both mouse ES and EE cells showed significantly increased adhesion to native tenascin C, and functional blocking of integrin α9β1 significantly inhibited adhesion to native tenascin C. These results demonstrate that the integrin α9 and β1 subunits function as active heterodimers on the plasma membrane of mouse ES and EE cells, respectively.
Investigation of mode coupling in low and high NA step index plastic optical fibres using the Langevin equation

By employing the Langevin equation, we have examined a mode coupling in low and high NA step index plastic optical fibres. The numerical integration of the Langevin equation is based on the computer-simulated Langevin force. The solution matches the experimental data reported previously. We have shown that by solving the Langevin equation (stochastic differential equation) one can treat a mode coupling in multimode low and high NA step index plastic optical fibres, which is the result of fibre's intrinsic random perturbations.