Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Diptera, or True Flies, of Illinois. I. Tabanidae

The tabanids, or horse flies and deer flies, are well known to dairy farmers and livestock producers as well as to campers, fishermen, and outdoor enthusiasts as annoying and pain-inflicting inhabitants of most wooded areas of Illinois. These large and persistent flies impart a painful bite and can occur in large enough numbers to make canoeing and hiking virtually impossible. The tabanid fauna of Illinois has never been studied, although several of the surrounding states have published various reports: Indiana (Burton 1975; Meyer & Sanders 1975), Wisconsin (Roberts & Dicke 1958), Iowa (Richards &: Knight 1967), Missouri (Andrews & Wingo 1975), Tennessee (Goodwin 1966), Michigan (Hays 1956), Ohio (Hine 1903), Minnesota (Philip 1931), and Arkansas (Schwardt 1936; Schwardt & Hall 1930). This study is intended to make available in brief form our present knowledge of the tabanids in the central United States, with keys for their determination, and the distribution of those species occurring in Illinois. No attempt is made to give detailed taxonomic descriptions of species. If needed, these can be found for most species in the papers of Brennan (1935) and Stone (1938). Philip (1954, 1955) has keys to all the North American Pangoniinae and Chrysopsinae known at that time. The most recent list of the North American species of Tabanidae is given by Philip (1965).
Changes in microbial flora and bacterial physiological group diversity in rhizosphere soil of transgenic Bt cotton

The environment release of transgenic plants may be accompanied by ecological effects including changes in plant-associated with micro flora. Transgenic cotton containing gene to produce the insecticidal toxin from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) has been widely planted. Most research on Bt cotton has focus on invasiveness, gene flow to indigenous organisms, development of resistance in target pests, and direct or indirect effects on non- target organisms and ecosystem. A few studies have been published to evaluate the ecological effects of Bt cotton on microbial flora. A field release of Bt cotton grown under normal agricultural practice was monitored for changes in total bacterial, actinomycetic and fungal populations in 2001 and 2002. Although there were difference in the colony-forming unites of culturable bacteria, actinomycetes and fungi of rhizosphere soil between Bt cotton and non-Bt cotton in different growing period and different years. The trend of annual differences was basically consistent at the same development stage of cotton. Few significant differences were observed and none of the differences were persistent in microbial population in rhizosphere soil between Bt cotton and non-Bt cotton at seedling and boll-opening stage. Total bacterial populations in rhizosphere soil of Bt cotton were significantly higher than that of non-Bt cotton at flower and boll stage. Total actinomycete populations in rhizosphere soil of Bt cotton differed minimally from that of non-Bt cotton at flower and boll stage. Total fungi populations in rhizosphere soil between Bt cotton and non-Bt cotton in 2001 were not consistent with that in 2002 at flower and boll stage. Total fungi populations in rhizosphere soil of Bt cotton were significantly higher than that of non-Bt cotton in 2001. On the contrary, total fungi populations in rhizosphere soil of Bt cotton were significantly lower in 2002. Diversity, composition and distribution of bacterial physiological groups in rhizosphere soil between Bt cotton and non-Bt cotton was analyzed with Simpson index, Shannon-Wiener index and evenness index at flower, boll and boll-opening stage in 2002. Although the total numbers of bacterial physiological groups in rhizosphere soil of Bt cotton were significantly higher than that of non-Bt cotton, Simpson index, Shannon-Wiener index and evenness index of bacterial physiological groups decreased in rhizosphere soil of Bt cotton, compared with non-Bt cotton. The results indicated that Bt cotton appeared to have effect on total bacteria and diversity of bacterial physiological groups. The effect of Bt crop on microbial communities of rhizosphere soil should be carried out before commercial release. However, these results should be considered as being preliminary, as only one Bt cotton variety and only total numbers of culturable rhizosphere microbes were evaluated. More studies on other Bt varieties and un-culturable microbes are necessary to confirm the effect of Bt cotton on biodiversity in soil.
Optimal Investment under Uncertainty

This paper examines the effect of output price uncertainty on the investment decision of a risk-neutral competitive firm which faces convex costs of adjustment. ' This issue has been analyzed by Richard Hartman (1972) and by Robert Pindyck (1982), but they reached dramatically different results. Hartman showed that with a linearly homogeneous production function, increased output price uncertainty leads the competitive firm to increase its investment. However, Pindyck found increased output price uncertainty leads to increased investment only if the marginal adjustment cost function is convex; but, if the marginal adjustment cost function is concave, then increased uncertainty will reduce the rate of investment. Pindyck argues that his results differ from Hartman's results because of a different stochastic specification of the price of output. In Hartman's discrete-time model, price is random in each period including the current period, whereas in Pindyck's continuous-time model, the current price is known but the future evolution of prices is stochastic. In this paper, I demonstrate that Hartman's results continue to hold using Pindyck's stochastic specification and that Pindyck's analysis applies to a socalled "target" rate of investment, which in general is not optimal. The model developed herein, which is a special case of Pindyck's model, is used because it can be solved explicitly, unlike Pindyck's more general model. Since Pindyck did not derive an expression for the optimal rate of investment, he used a phase diagram to determine the target capital stock. This target capital stock is determined by the intersection of a locus for which the rate of change of the capital stock is zero, and a locus for which the expected change in the rate of investment is zero. A problem with this stochastic phase diagram approach is that in general there is no reason for the firm to be on the locus with zero expected change in investment, even in the long run. Indeed, in the particular model in this paper, optimal behavior is such that the expected proportional rate of change of investment is (in general, a nonzero) constant over time.
IN VITRO PROPAGATION AND BIOCHEMICAL ANALYSIS OF FIELD ESTABLISHED WOOD APPLE (Aegle marmelos L.)

This paper describes an improved and rapid protocol for multiple shoot regeneration from nodal segments of wood apple (Aegle marmelos L.), a medicinal tree, cultured on Murashige and Skoog (1962) (MS) medium supplemented with various concentrations of auxins and cytokinins individually and in various combinations. BAP was found to be more effective than kinetin for shoot multiplication. Nodal explants responded most favorably at low BAP (2.0 mg/l) producing maximum number of shoots (8.0) and uniform shoots facilitating their simultaneous harvest for rooting. The medium supplemented with 2.0 mg/l BAP + 1.0 mg/l IAA was found to be most prolific combination of the treatments with regard to number and length of shoots. Creamish friable compact callus accompanying multiple shoots (8.0) was achieved from nodal segment on MS medium fortified with 2.0 mg/l BAP + 0.5 mg/l 2,4-D within 8 days of culture. The in vitro regenerated shoots were rooted best in half strength MS medium enriched with 1.0 mg/l IAA. The rooted plantlets were successfully established with 60% survival. Besides that the biochemical parameters, like chlorophyll, total sugars, reducing sugars and proteins were estimated in leaf tissue from both in vivo and in vitro raised plants in order to establish the sustainability of plants.
RNA Interference Technology and Neoplasm

RNA interference(RNAi) is the sequence-specific post-transcriptional gene silencing(PTGS) process mediated by double-stranded RNA(dsRNA) molecules.RNAi's most important feature is that itcan regulate gene expression and then regulate cell's various advanced life activities.RNAi technology can be used to explore the pathological mechanism for the neoplasm,and provide a radical new and effective way to cure neoplasm.This article eill review the RNAi technology and the applications in tumor.
Study on Antimicrobial Activity of Extracts from Lonicera japonica Thunb

[Objective] Antimicrobial activity of extract by water and alcohol from Lonicera japonica Thunb was investigated. [Method] Firstly,filter paper method was applied to detect inhibitory effect of the samples on tested strains,and then the minimal inhibitory concentration(MIC)and minimum bactericidal concentration(MBC)were obtained by micro dilution method. [Result] Water extract from Lonicera japonica Thunb inhibited Staphyloccocus aureus and Bacillus subtilis.MIC and MBC on Staphyloccocus aureus was 19.25% and 38.50% respectively,and MIC on Bacillus subtilis was 38.50%. Alcohol extract had some inhibition on Salmonella,Staphyloccocus aureus and Bacillus megaterium.MIC and MBC on Salmonella was 9.80% and 19.60% respectively,MIC and MBC on Staphyloccocus aureus was 19.60% and 39.20% respectively,and MIC on Bacillus megaterium was 19.60%. [Conclusion] Extract by water and alcohol from Lonicera japonica Thunb inhibited some of tested strains obviously.
A Comparative Study of the Relation between Heating Rates and Ambient Temperatures in Lacertid Lizards

It is well known that lizard species from thermally diverse areas differ in their use of thermoregulatory behaviors as a means of making short-term adjustments to differences in ambient conditions. In contrast, the extent of long-term adjustments in thermal physiology is poorly documented and still under debate. In this study we report a clear interspecific relationship between heating rates, measured under standardized laboratory conditions, and environmental temperatures within a small clade of lacertid lizards. Phylogenetically based ANCOVAs demonstrate that species with a northern or montane distribution warm at a faster mass-specific rate than do species from a southern (Mediterranean) climatic zone. Correlational analyses, using phylogenetically independent contrasts, confirm that continuous among-species variation in mass-specific heating rates is negatively related to clinal differences in environmental temperatures. A reduction of the time spent warming, associated with higher heating rates, should be especially advantageous for lizards from cool climates, which bask for large amounts of time. Thus, the observed relation between heating rates and climatic conditions could be a result of adaptive evolution. The behaviorally selected preferred temperatures were lower, but not significantly so, in the northern or montane species set; interspecific correlations with ambient temperatures were positive but not significant. However, the divergence of heating rates and the statistically nonsignificant difference in preferred temperatures have similar impacts on variation in the estimated amount of time spent heating. Thus, differences in both heating rate, a physiological trait, and preferred temperature, a behavioral characteristic, contribute equally to variation in heating times.
Construction of adenovirus vector containing hIL-12 gene and its effects on the proliferation and TGF-β expression of Hep3B cells

Objective:To construct a recombinant adenovirus expression vector carring human IL-12 gene,and investigate its effects on the proliferation and TGF-β expression of Hep3B cells.Methods:The gene of hIL-12 was amplified with PCR and the shuttle plasmid pAdTrack-IL-12 was constructed.The shuttle plasmid was transformed into Adeasier cell after linearization with Pme I for homologous recombination in E.coli BJ5183.After digested with Pac I,the recombinant vector was transfected into AD293 cells to package adenovirus pAd-IL-12.The expression of IL-12 was detected by RT-PCR and Western blot in human hepatoma cell Hep3B infected with pAd-IL-12 virus.The proliferation of Hep3B was evaluated by MTT,and the expression of TGF-β was detected with RT-PCR.Results:The recombinant adenovirus plasmid containing IL-12 was exactly constructed.Recombinant adenovirus pAd-IL-12 were successfully constructed which could infect Hep3B cell efficiently.In Hep3B infected with pAd-IL-12,high expressions of IL-12 mRNA and protein were confirmed by PCR and Western blot,and both of the proliferation and TGF-β expression of Hep3B were significantly reduced(both P0.05) compared with control group.Conclusions: The results demonstrate that recombinant adenovirus containing IL-12 were constructed successfully and IL-12 could suppress Hep3B proliferation with the decline of TGF-β gene,which provides a foundation for further study of IL-12 in tumor treatment.
On the ability to inhibit simple thoughts and actions: I. Stop-signal studies of decision and memory.

In six experiments, subjects made speeded category and rhyme judgments about pairs of words and were occasionally asked to inhibit their responses. At issue was whether thoughts stop when the corresponding actions are inhibited. The extent to which thoughts were completed was assessed from memory for the words presented in the orienting tasks. Experiments 1 and 2 suggested that thoughts were not inhibited with their corresponding actions: Memory for words whose responses were inhibited was not different from memory for words whose responses were not inhibited, and memory performance did not vary,with stop-signal delay (i.e., the time between the onset of the. word pair and the onset of the stop signal). The same results were obtained in Experiments 3 and 4, though subjects made an overt response to the stop signal (tone) when it occurred. In Experiments 5 and 6, the display changed when the stop signal sounded, and the data suggested that thoughts were inhibited with their actions: Memory for words whose responses were inhibited was much worse than memory for words whose responses were not inhibited, and memory performance improved substantially as stop-signal delay increased. It was concluded that simple thoughts run on to completion whether or not the corresponding action is inhibited, provided that the stimuli that drive the thoughts are not disrupted before the thoughts finish.
Towards Relative Normativity in International Law?

1. The purpose of this article is to examine, even at the risk of magnifying them somewhat for clarity, the potential dangers that some recent developments usually studied from other angles—the jus cogens theory, the distinction between international crimes and international delicts, the concept of a rule of general international law, the notion of obligation erga omnes—bring in their wake for the future of international law as a normative system intended to perform certain functions.
High-resolution characterization of herpes simplex virus type 1 transcripts encoding alkaline exonuclease and a 50,000-dalton protein tentatively identified as a capsid protein

Four partially overlapping mRNAs (1.9, 2.3, 3.9, and 4.5 kilobases [kb]) were located between 0.16 and 0.19 map units on the herpes simplex virus type 1 genome. Their direction of transcription was found to be from right to left. The 2.3-kb mRNA was found to be early (beta), whereas the others were late (beta gamma). Partial sequence analysis of the DNA encoding these genes indicated that the promoter for the 2.3-kb mRNA shares structural features with other early (beta) promoters. In vitro translation of hybrid-selected mRNA indicated that among the proteins these mRNAs encode are an 82,000-dalton (d) polypeptide reactive with a monoclonal antibody against herpes simplex virus type 2 alkaline exonuclease and a 50,000-d polypeptide weakly reactive with a polyclonal antibody made against the capsid protein VP19C. Further experiments suggested that the 2.3-kb mRNA encodes the 82,000-d polypeptide, whereas one (or both) of the larger mRNAs encodes the 50,000-d protein. A novel finding was that the 1.9-kb mRNA appears to share part of the translational reading frame for alkaline exonuclease, but any polypeptide it encodes does not react with the monoclonal antibody to this enzyme.
AdamP: Slowing Down the Slowdown for Momentum Optimizers on Scale-invariant Weights

Normalization techniques are a boon for modern deep learning. They let weights converge more quickly with often better generalization performances. It has been argued that the normalization-induced scale invariance among the weights provides an advantageous ground for gradient descent (GD) optimizers: the effective step sizes are automatically reduced over time, stabilizing the overall training procedure. It is often overlooked, however, that the additional introduction of momentum in GD optimizers results in a far more rapid reduction in effective step sizes for scale-invariant weights, a phenomenon that has not yet been studied and may have caused unwanted side effects in the current practice. This is a crucial issue because arguably the vast majority of modern deep neural networks consist of (1) momentum-based GD (e.g. SGD or Adam) and (2) scale-invariant parameters. In this paper, we verify that the widely-adopted combination of the two ingredients lead to the premature decay of effective step sizes and sub-optimal model performances. We propose a simple and effective remedy, SGDP and AdamP: get rid of the radial component, or the norm-increasing direction, at each optimizer step. Because of the scale invariance, this modification only alters the effective step sizes without changing the effective update directions, thus enjoying the original convergence properties of GD optimizers. Given the ubiquity of momentum GD and scale invariance in machine learning, we have evaluated our methods against the baselines on 13 benchmarks. They range from vision tasks like classification (e.g. ImageNet), retrieval (e.g. CUB and SOP), and detection (e.g. COCO) to language modelling (e.g. WikiText) and audio classification (e.g. DCASE) tasks. We verify that our solution brings about uniform gains in those benchmarks. Source code is available at this https URL.
Exploiting Style and Attention in Real-World Super-Resolution.

Real-world image super-resolution (SR) is a challenging image translation problem. Low-resolution (LR) images are often generated by various unknown transformations rather than by applying simple bilinear down-sampling on high-resolution (HR) images. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel pipeline which exploits style and attention mechanism in real-world SR. Our pipeline consists of a style Variational Autoencoder (styleVAE) and a SR network incorporated with attention mechanism. To get real-world-like low-quality images paired with the HR images, we design the styleVAE to transfer the complex nuisance factors in real-world LR images to the generated LR images. We also use mutual information estimation (MI) to get better style information. For our SR network, we firstly propose a global attention residual block to learn long-range dependencies in images. Then another local attention residual block is proposed to enforce the attention of SR network moving to local areas of images in which texture detail will be filled. It is worth noticing that styleVAE can be presented in a plug-and-play manner and thus can help to improve the generalization and robustness of our SR method as well as other SR methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses the state-of-the-art work, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Comparison of Theoretical and Experimental Level Values of the n = 2 Configurations in the Carbon Isoelectronic Sequence

Observed level intervals within and between the configurations 2s22p2, 2s2p3 and 2p4 of the carbon isoelectronic sequence are compared with the corresponding theoretical values derived from the tables of Cheng, Kim and Desclaux. The differences are expressed by fitted functions of Z which give the systematic correction to the theoretical values and smooth out the accidental errors in the experimental values. The results are summarized in tables of recommended level values for Z = 8-36 and recalculated wavelengths for Z = 9 - 28.
The threshold behaviour of epidemic models

We provide a method of constructing a sequence of general stochastic epidemics, indexed by the initial number of susceptibles N, from a time-homogeneous birth-and-death process. The construction is used to show strong convergence of the general stochastic epidemic to a birth-and-death process, over any finite time interval [0, t], and almost sure convergence of the total size of the general stochastic epidemic to that of a birth-and-death process. The latter result furnishes us with a new proof of the threshold theorem of Williams (1971). These methods are quite general and in the remainder of the paper we develop similar results for a wide variety of epidemics, including chain-binomial, host-vector and geographical spread models.
Reversal of the ‘reversed Robin Hood syndrome’ in severe intracranial stenosis after enhanced external counterpulsation therapy

A 59-years old Chinese woman presented with recurrent episodes of transient left hemiparesis for 1-month. Each episode lasted 5-10 minutes. She was on regular medications for hypertension and dyslipidemia. Her neurological examination was unremarkable. Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging revealed an old left posterior watershed infarct. However, MR angiography (Figure-1) revealed severe stenosis of both middle cerebral arteries (MCA).
The Serratia grimesii outer membrane vesicles‐associated grimelysin triggers bacterial invasion of eukaryotic cells

Serratia grimesii are facultative pathogenic bacteria that can penetrate a wide range of host cells and cause infection, especially in immunocompromised patients. Previously, we have found that bacterial metalloprotease grimelysin is a potential virulence determinant of S. grimesii invasion (E. S. Bozhokina et al., (2011). Cell Biology International, 35(2), 111–118). Protease is characterized as an actin‐hydrolyzing enzyme with a narrow specificity toward other cell proteins. It is not known, however, whether grimelysin is transported into eukaryotic cells. Here, we show, for the first time, that S. grimesii can generate outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) displayed specific proteolytic activity against actin, characteristic of grimelysin. The presence of grimelysin was also confirmed by the Western blot analysis of S. grimesii OMVs lysate. Furthermore, confocal microscopy analysis revealed that the S. grimesii grimelysin‐containing OMVs attached to the host cell membrane. Finally, pretreatment of HeLa cells with S. grimesii OMVs before the cells were infected with bacteria increased the bacterial penetration several times. These data strongly suggest that protease grimelysin promotes S. grimesii internalization by modifying bacterial and/or host molecule(s) when it is delivered as a component of OMVs.