Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Genetic Status of the Critically Endangered Hainan Gibbon (Nomascus hainanus): A Species Moving Toward Extinction

The Hainan gibbon (Nomascus hainanus), once widespread across Hainan, China, is now found only in the Bawangling National Nature Reserve. With a remaining population size of 33 individuals, it is the world’s rarest primate. Habitat loss and fragmentation are the primary drivers of Hainan gibbon population decline. In this study, we integrated data based on field investigations and genotype analyses of 10 microsatellite loci (from fecal samples) to assess genetic diversity in this Critically Endangered primate species. We found that the genetic diversity of the Hainan gibbon is extremely low, with 7 of 8 microsatellite loci exhibiting decreased diversity. Additional molecular analyses are consistent with field observations indicating that individuals in groups A, B, and C are closely related, the female–male sex ratios of the offspring deviates significantly from 1:1, and the world’s remaining Hainan gibbon population is expected to experience continued high levels of inbreeding in the future. Given extensive habitat loss (99.9% of its natural range has been deforested) and fragmentation, this rarest ape species faces impending extinction unless corrective measures are implemented immediately.
Modification of in situ Biofilm Formation on Titanium by a Hydroxyapatite Nanoparticle-Based Solution

Oral biofilms play an essential role on peri-implant disease development. Synthetic hydroxyapatite nanoparticles (nHAP) are a bioinspired material that has structural and functional similarities to dental enamel apatite and may provide preventive properties against biofilm formation. This study aimed to investigate the effects of an experimental nHAP solution on biofilm formation on polished and non-polished titanium under oral conditions. Five volunteers carried maxillary splints with non-polished and polished titanium and followed a 48 h rinsing protocol with the proposed nHAP solution, and with chlorhexidine 0.2% (CHX) and water, as controls. Samples were analyzed by fluorescence microscopy (FM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). FM showed a significant reduction of biofilms on polished samples treated with nHAP (p = 0.0485) compared with water, without differences between nHAP and CHX (p > 0.9999). Analyzing biofilm viability, polished samples rinsed with nHAP showed significantly fewer dead bacteria than CHX (p = 0.0079), but there was no significant difference in viability between polished samples rinsed with water and nHAP (p = 0.9268). A significantly higher biofilm coverage was observed on the non-polished surfaces compared to the polished surfaces when nHAP was applied (p = 0.0317). This difference between polished and non-polished surfaces was not significant when water (p = 0.1587) or CHX (p = 0.3413) rinsing were applied. SEM and TEM analysis supported the FM findings, that polished samples rinsed with nHAP presented fewer biofilm coverage compared to samples rinsed with water. In conclusion, the nHAP solution reduced the biofilm formation on polished Ti surfaces without altering bacterial viability, providing a novel approach for the management of biofilm formation on biomaterials.
Impact of Ringer’s Solution Challenge Stress to Immunostimulatory Experiment, Insights From Japanese Flounder

Ringer’s or phosphate buffer saline (PBS) solution buffer usually was used as dilution butter in intraperitoneal injection. Stress could activate immune response, inflammatory response and glycogen metabolic process. The impact of solution buffer as a stressor to immune system was ignored in immunostimulatory experiment. In this report, we tested the hypothesis that the innate immune response and glycogen metabolic process were altered when it were challenged with Ringer’s in Japanese flounder (Paralichthys olivaceus). RNA-seq was performed after challenge with Ringer’s at 8 h and 48 h. The data revealed that the expression profiles of blood, gill, and kidney were significantly changed. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified, and energy metabolic and immune-related genes were up-regulated or down-regulated obviously. GO and KEGG analyses showed that DEGs were mainly enriched in innate immune terms and pathways. Weighted gene co-expression networks analysis (WGCNA) also indicated the highest association module with stress. A total of 16 genes were detected in the gray module, which were immune-related and metabolic-related genes. These results provided fundamental information on intraperitoneal injection with solution buffer. It offered useful clues to further explore the functional mechanism of stress and immunity.
Surface enhanced Raman scattering in the near infrared using metal nanoshell substrates

A metal nanoshell is a composite nanoparticle consisting of a dielectric core coated by a thin metal shell; its peak plasmon resonance wavelength is determined by the ratio of the core diameter to the shell thickness. When p-mercaptoaniline (p-MA) is in solution with gold nanoshells that have their plasmon resonance near a 1.06 μm excitation source, significant surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is observed. The strongest Raman enhancements are obtained when enough gold is deposited on the silica cores to form a nearly complete metal shell. Correlations between transmission electron microscopy (TEM)-defined structure, ultraviolet (UV)-visible spectra, SERS signal strength, and electromagnetic theory show that the SERS signal is due to both the local enhancement of the dielectric field via the plasmon resonance of the nanostructure and to the localized regions of high field intensity provided by the nearly completed gold shell. Comparison with SERS enhancements on completed nanoshell structures indic.
Perennial Staple Crops: Yields, Distribution, and Nutrition in the Global Food System

Staple crops, which have large amounts of carbohydrates, proteins, and/or fats, provide the bulk of calories in people's diets. Perennial plants, which can be productive for many years without the need for replanting, can produce staple foods and environmental benefits, but their agronomic and nutritional properties haven't been considered synthetically in comparison to annual staples. Here we offer a framework to classify perennial staple crops according to their nutritional categories and cultivation status. We assemble literature to report on the yield potential of 51 perennial staple crops, only 15 of which are well-characterized in existing global datasets. We show the extent and distribution of perennial staple crop production in relation to annual crop types, calculate the carbon stocks they hold, and analyze their nutritional content for three macronutrients and nine micronutrients. We found that most perennial staple crops are regional crops (not globally traded) that grow in the subtropics to tropics. At least one perennial staple crop in each of the five nutritional categories has yields over 2.5 t/ha, in some cases considerably higher, competitive with and in many cases exceeding those of nutritionally comparable annual staples. Perennial staple crops only comprise ~4.5% of total cropland. They hold a modest ~11.4 GtC above and below ground, less than one third of the anthropogenic carbon-equivalent emissions for the year 2018, but more than the ~9 GtC held by the same amount of annual cropland. If linear growth in land under perennial staple production continues to 2040, and replaces only annual cropland, an additional ~0.95 GtC could be sequestered. Many perennial crops also had competitive macronutrient density and yield (per unit area) compared to annual staples; moreover, specific perennial staples are abundant in specific micronutrients, indicating that they can be a nutrient-dense part of diets, unlike the most ubiquitous annual staple crops (corn, wheat, rice) that do not appear in the top 85th percentile for any of the nine micronutrients analyzed. Transition of land and diets to perennial staple crops, if judiciously managed, can provide win-win solutions for both food production and ecosystems.
Investigation of the effect of metastable atoms on mode transition in argon inductive discharge via a hybrid model

By using an improved hybrid Monte Carlo/fluid model with the metastable solver and power deposition scheme, we investigate the dynamic characteristics of metastable atoms and their influences on plasma conditions during mode transition, and moreover explore its role in hysteresis by searching the nonlinear mechanism. The evolution behaviours of metastable atoms with power deposition at different pressures are traced. Besides, the effects of metastable atoms and multistep ionization on the variation of plasma parameters, e.g. electron density, temperature and energy distribution function, etc, during the transition are systematically examined. When cycling the inputted electrical parameters, coil current and voltages, hysteresis does not appear. The basic characteristic of plasma dynamics during mode transition is not significantly influenced by the presence of metastable atoms. Moreover, a linearly increasing slope of plasma density with the deposited power is observed and no evidence of nonlinear mechanisms is detected.
Fast Diffusion Sustains Plasma Membrane Accumulation of Phosphatase of Regenerating Liver-1

It has been proposed that the accumulation of farnesylated phosphatase of regenerating liver-1 (PRL-1) at the plasma membrane is mediated by static electrostatic interactions of a polybasic region with acidic membrane lipids and assisted by oligomerization. Nonetheless, localization at early and recycling endosomes suggests that the recycling compartment might also contribute to its plasma membrane accumulation. Here, we investigated in live cells the dynamics of PRL-1 fused to the green fluorescent protein (GFP-PRL-1). Blocking the secretory pathway and photobleaching techniques suggested that plasma membrane accumulation of PRL-1 was not sustained by recycling endosomes but by a dynamic exchange of diffusible protein pools. Consistent with this idea, fluorescence correlation spectroscopy in cells overexpressing wild type or monomeric mutants of GFP-PRL-1 measured cytosolic and membrane-diffusing pools of protein that were not dependent on oligomerization. Endogenous expression of GFP-PRL-1 by CRISPR/Cas9 genome edition confirmed the existence of fast diffusing cytosolic and membrane pools of protein. We propose that plasma membrane PRL-1 replenishment is independent of the recycling compartment and the oligomerization state and mainly driven by fast diffusion of the cytosolic pool.
The Human Microbiota in Endocrinology: Implications for Pathophysiology, Treatment, and Prognosis in Thyroid Diseases

The human microbiota is an integral component in the maintenance of health and of the immune system. Microbiome-wide association studies have found numerous diseases associated to dysbiosis. Studies are needed to move beyond correlations and begin to address causation. Autoimmune thyroid diseases (ATD) are one of the most common organ-specific autoimmune disorders with an increasing prevalence, higher than 5% worldwide. Most frequent manifestations of ATD are Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and Graves’ disease. The exact etiology of ATD remains unknown. Until now it is not clear whether bacterial infections can trigger ATD or modulate the efficacy of treatment and prognosis. The aim of our review is to characterize the microbiota and in ATD and to evaluate the impact of dysbiosis on treatment and prognosis. Moreover, variation of gut microbiome has been associated with thyroid cancer and benign nodules. Here we will characterize the microbioma in benign thyroid nodules, and papillary thyroid cancer to evaluate their implications in the pathophysiology and progression.
A Light-Weight Text Summarization System for Fast Access to Medical Evidence

As the volume of published medical research continues to grow rapidly, staying up-to-date with the best-available research evidence regarding specific topics is becoming an increasingly challenging problem for medical experts and researchers. The current COVID19 pandemic is a good example of a topic on which research evidence is rapidly evolving. Automatic query-focused text summarization approaches may help researchers to swiftly review research evidence by presenting salient and query-relevant information from newly-published articles in a condensed manner. Typical medical text summarization approaches require domain knowledge, and the performances of such systems rely on resource-heavy medical domain-specific knowledge sources and pre-processing methods (e.g., text classification) for deriving semantic information. Consequently, these systems are often difficult to speedily customize, extend, or deploy in low-resource settings, and they are often operationally slow. In this paper, we propose a fast and simple extractive summarization approach that can be easily deployed and run, and may thus aid medical experts and researchers obtain fast access to the latest research evidence. At runtime, our system utilizes similarity measurements derived from pre-trained medical domain-specific word embeddings in addition to simple features, rather than computationally-expensive pre-processing and resource-heavy knowledge bases. Automatic evaluation using ROUGE—a summary evaluation tool—on a public dataset for evidence-based medicine shows that our system's performance, despite the simple implementation, is statistically comparable with the state-of-the-art. Extrinsic manual evaluation based on recently-released COVID19 articles demonstrates that the summarizer performance is close to human agreement, which is generally low, for extractive summarization.
Non-surface Attached Bacterial Aggregates: A Ubiquitous Third Lifestyle

Bacteria are now generally believed to adopt two main lifestyles: planktonic individuals, or surface-attached biofilms. However, in recent years medical microbiologists started to stress that suspended bacterial aggregates are a major form of bacterial communities in chronic infection sites. Despite sharing many similarities with surface-attached biofilms and are thus generally defined as biofilm-like aggregates, these non-attached clumps of cells in vivo show much smaller sizes and different formation mechanisms. Furthermore, ex vivo clinical isolates were frequently reported to be less attached to abiotic surfaces when compared to standard type strains. While this third lifestyle is starting to draw heavy attention in clinical studies, it has a long history in natural and environmental sciences. For example, marine gel particles formed by bacteria attachment to phytoplankton exopolymers have been well documented in oceans; large river and lake snows loaded with bacterial aggregates are frequently found in freshwater systems; multispecies bacterial “flocs” have long been used in wastewater treatment. This review focuses on non-attached aggregates found in a variety of natural and clinical settings, as well as some recent technical developments facilitating aggregate research. The aim is to summarise the characteristics of different types of bacterial aggregates, bridging the knowledge gap, provoking new perspectives for researchers from different fields, and highlighting the importance of more research input in this third lifestyle of bacteria closely relevant to our daily life.
Identifying Explosive Epidemiological Cases with Unsupervised Machine Learning

UNSTRUCTURED An analysis of a combined dataset of Wave 1 and 2 cases, aligned at approximately Local Time Zero + 2 months with unsupervised machine learning methods such as Principal Component Analysis and deep autoencoder dimensionality reduction allows to clearly separate milder background cases from those with more rapid and aggressive onset of the epidemics. The analysis and findings of the study can be used in evaluation of possible epidemiological scenarios and as an effective modeling tool to design corrective and preventative measures to avoid developments with potentially heavy impact.
Isolation of Tumor Areas of Histological Images for Assessment of Quantitative Parameters

The research object are biomedical whole slide histological images of breast cancer. The aim of the work is to develop methods, algorithms and basic elements of a software for automatic search of tumor sites, adaptive assessment of the immunohistochemical markers expression and quantitative assessment of the analysis results. At this stage, we have analyzed difficulties of whole slide histological scans analysis. We have developed algorithms for background separation and color normalization. A search algorithm has been implemented for semi-automatic selection of tumor areas on whole slide histological images
A Two-step Approach in Expert Evaluation of Correctional Information Technologies for Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Consolidation and processing of the experts` knowledge in the correction of communication and social skills of students with autism spectrum disorder seem to be both an actual task, and a challenge. Being well-aware of special needs of each and every student, psychologists and medics, as well as all the participants of education of ASD students, when making a decision about which information technology to use, apply their experience with exact ASD student. Expert evaluation technique enables support in such decision making, and its result can be used as input information to optimization task, solving which will allow taking into account different constraints.
Fullerene Production in a Graphite Tubular Reactor

Abstract Effects of operational parameters on the production yield of fullerenes have been detailed by many researchers and up to 20% fullerene yields were attained at optimized pressure, current, and electrode gap. Many of the tests were carried out under static helium pressure and no reference was made to helium flow during the arcing process. It is, however, known that helium flow enhances the fullerene yield. In this study, a tubular graphite reactor was placed into a stainless steel chamber and the arc was generated inside the tubular reactor. Fresh helium was fed at one end of the tubular reactor and vacuum was applied to the other end. Changing the helium flow rate affected the residence time of the particles in the reactive zone. Fullerene yields were obtained to be as high as 32%, which is much above the literature stated values.
Development of a Genetic Method for Image Recognition in the Form of Radiographs

Modern medicine depends on technical advances in the field of medical instrumentation and the development of medical software. One of the most important tasks facing doctors is to determine the exact boundaries of tumors and other abnormal formations in the tissues of the human body. The paper considers the problems and methods of machine classification and image recognition in the form of radiographs, as well as the improvement of artificial neural networks, which are used to improve the quality and accuracy of detection of abnormal structures on chest radiographs. A modified genetic method for optimizing the model parameters on the basis of a convolutional neural network has been developed to solve the problem of recognizing diagnostically significant signs of pneumonia on an X-ray of the lungs. Practical use of the developed method will allow to reduce complexity, to increase reliability of search, to accelerate process of diagnosis of diseases and to reduce a part of errors and repeated inspections of patients.
Expression and Function Studies of CYC/TB1-Like Genes in the Asymmetric Flower Canna (Cannaceae, Zingiberales)

The asymmetric flower, lacking any plane of symmetry, is rare among angiosperms. Canna indica L. has conspicuously asymmetric flowers resulting from the presence of a half-fertile stamen, while the other androecial members develop as petaloid staminodes or abort early during development. The molecular basis of the asymmetric distribution of fertility and petaloidy in the androecial whorls remains unknown. Ontogenetic studies have shown that Canna flowers are borne on monochasial (cincinnus) partial florescences within a racemose inflorescence, with floral asymmetry likely corresponding to the inflorescence architecture. Given the hypothesized role of CYC/TB1 genes in establishing floral symmetry in response to the influence of the underlying inflorescence architecture, the spatiotemporal expression patterns of three Canna CYC/TB1 homologs (CiTBL1a, CiTBL1b-1, and CiTBL1b-2) were analyzed during inflorescence and floral development using RNA in situ hybridization and qRT-PCR. In the young inflorescence, both CiTBL1a and CiTBL1b-1 were found to be expressed in the bracts and at the base of the lateral florescence branches, whereas transcripts of CiTBL1b-2 were mainly detected in flower primordia and inflorescence primordia. During early flower development, expression of CiTBL1a and CiTBL1b-1 were both restricted to the developing sepals and petals. In later flower development, expression of CiTBL1a was reduced to a very low level while CiTBL1b-1 was detected with extremely high expression levels in the petaloid androecial structures including the petaloid staminodes, the labellum, and the petaloid appendage of the fertile stamen. In contrast, expression of CiTBL1b-2 was strongest in the fertile stamen throughout flower development, from early initiation of the stamen primordium to maturity of the ½ anther. Heterologous overexpression of CiTBL genes in Arabidopsis led to dwarf plants with smaller petals and fewer stamens, and altered the symmetry of mature flowers. These data provide evidence for the involvement of CYC/TB1 homologs in the development of the asymmetric Cannaceae flower.
Gender‐schematic processing: An extended replication of the Larsen and Seidman study

This study is an extended replication of the Larsen and Seidman study (1986) on the Bem Sex‐Role Inventory (BSRI) as a measurement instrument for gender‐schematic processing. Using a Dutch sample and the GRAS (Groninger Androgyny Scale)—a Dutch sex‐role inventory—responses to this inventory were factor‐analysed separately for sex‐typed and non‐sex‐typed groups. The extremity of response style on GRAS items and the degree of self‐indicated cross‐situational variability on GRAS items were used as additional indices for gender‐schematic processing. Similar to Larsen and Seidman's (1986) study, bipolar factors were found for the sex‐typed groups and unipolar factors for the non‐sex‐typed groups. Similar to a study conducted by Bem (1981) into differences among the sex‐types in their response latencies to the attributes of the BSRI, sex‐typed subjects showed more extremity of response style on attributes of the GRAS when making schema‐consistent judgements about themselves, and showed less extremity of response style when making schema‐inconsistent judgements about themselves. The data on cross‐situational variability were less equivocal. It is concluded that the degree of gender‐schematic processing in individuals can be well measured by means of a sex‐role inventory.
Americium and curium

The chemistry of americium and curium is discussed, and methods for producing these elements are reviewed. Americium shows reactions typical of a highly electropositive metal and is capable of existing in solution as a hydrated trivalent ion or as a doubly oxygenated (V)or (VI) ion. Tetravalent americium can exist in certain solid compounds but has never been found in acid solution because of its ability to oxidize water or undergo disproportionation The solution chemistry of the (V) and (VI) states of Am is complicated by the self-reduction of the ion concerned and has not been examined thoroughly. It has not been possible to attain any oxidation state of curium other than (III) in solution although a (IV) state can exist in the solid. The use of curium-244 (which has a 17.9 year half life) enabled certain new discoveries to be made in curium chemistry which probably never would have been possible with extremely active curium-242.