Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Misbehaviour Detection using Network Topology and Route Information

We investigate the problem of detecting selsh and malicious nodes in a hybrid multi-hop network by the operator. The setup we consider consists of an ad-hoc multi-hop network which is connected to a central trusted authority (operator) through a base station. We assume a source routing protocol. All nodes periodically send information about their links (SECTOR [1] certicates) and successfully used pathes to the CA. We show through simulations that the CA is able to statistically detect selsh nodes. We furthermore show that n collaborating malicious nodes can attack O n victims.
Evaluating the Performance of Horizontal Subsurface Flow Constructed Wetlands Using Natural Zeolite (escott)

The objective of the present study was to assess the simultaneous removal of physiochemical parameters in moderate strength wastewater using a lab scale horizontal subsurface flow constructed wetland (HFCW) with natural zeolite as a substrate. In this study, high-density polyethylene tanks (0.36 m 2 ) were planted with phragmites australis and scirpus maritimus and received 0.012 m 3 /d to 0.08 m 3 /d of synthetic wastewater corresponding to a HLR of 0.035 to 0.243 m/d and a COD loading rate of 0.0148 kg COD (m 2 .d) -1 to 0.026 kg COD (m 2 .d) -1 . The HFCW was subjected to three hydraulic retention times (HRT) for 4, 3 and 2 days respectively. Averaged data reported coincided with the plant age (4 to 55 weeks) and covered the entire cold season and early part of the hot season. Based on the 55 weeks of operation, the HFCW unit with zeolite achieved significantly higher removal for COD (85 to 88%), TN (54 to 96%), NH 4 -N (50 to 99%) and TSS (91 to 96%) respectively at all HRT. This system was proved to be tolerant to high organic loadings and nutrients, suggesting these substrates as viable options for biological treatment of wastewater.
Influence of the α-Methoxy Group on the Reaction of Temocillin with Pseudomonas aeruginosa PBP3 and CTX-M-14 β-Lactamase

The prevalence of multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa has led to the reexamination of older “forgotten” drugs, such as temocillin, for their ability to combat resistant microbes. Temocillin is the 6-α-methoxy analogue of ticarcillin, a carboxypenicillin with well-characterized antipseudomonal properties. The α-methoxy modification confers resistance to serine β-lactamases, yet temocillin is ineffective against P. aeruginosa growth. ABSTRACT The prevalence of multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa has led to the reexamination of older “forgotten” drugs, such as temocillin, for their ability to combat resistant microbes. Temocillin is the 6-α-methoxy analogue of ticarcillin, a carboxypenicillin with well-characterized antipseudomonal properties. The α-methoxy modification confers resistance to serine β-lactamases, yet temocillin is ineffective against P. aeruginosa growth. The origins of temocillin’s inferior antibacterial properties against P. aeruginosa have remained relatively unexplored. Here, we analyze the reaction kinetics, protein stability, and binding conformations of temocillin and ticarcillin with penicillin-binding protein 3 (PBP3), an essential PBP in P. aeruginosa. We show that the 6-α-methoxy group perturbs the stability of the PBP3 acyl-enzyme, which manifests in an elevated off-rate constant (koff) in biochemical assays comparing temocillin with ticarcillin. Complex crystal structures with PBP3 reveal similar binding modes of the two drugs but with important differences. Most notably, the 6-α-methoxy group disrupts a high-quality hydrogen bond with a conserved residue important for ligand binding while also being inserted into a crowded active site, possibly destabilizing the active site and enabling water molecule from bulk solvent to access and cleave the acyl-enzyme bond. This hypothesis is supported by the observation that the acyl-enzyme complex of temocillin has reduced thermal stability compared with ticarcillin. Furthermore, we explore temocillin’s mechanism of β-lactamase inhibition with a high-resolution complex structure of CTX-M-14 class A serine β-lactamase. The results suggest that the α-methoxy group prevents hydrolysis by locking the compound into an unexpected conformation that impedes access of the catalytic water to the acyl-enzyme adduct.
Circulating Exosomal miRNA Profiles Predict the Occurrence and Recurrence of Hepatocellular Carcinoma in Patients with Direct-Acting Antiviral-Induced Sustained Viral Response

Direct-acting antiviral (DAA) therapy for chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection patients (CH) results in a sustained viral response (SVR) in over 95% of patients. However, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) occurs in 1–5% of patients who achieved an SVR after treatment with interferon. We attempted to develop a minimally invasive and highly reliable method of predicting the occurrence and recurrence of HCC in patients who achieved an SVR with DAA therapy. The exosomal miRNA expression patterns of 69 CH patients who underwent HCC curative treatment and 70 CH patients were assessed using microarray analysis. We identified a miRNA expression pattern characteristic of SVR-HCC by using machine learning. Twenty-five of 69 patients had HCC recurrence. The expression of four exosomal miRNAs predicted HCC recurrence with 85.3% accuracy. Fifteen of 70 patients had HCC occurrence. The expression of four exosomal miRNAs predicted the onset of HCC with 85.5% accuracy. The expression patterns of miR-4718, 642a-5p, 6826-3p, and 762 in exosomes were positively correlated with those in the liver, and downregulation of these miRNAs induced cell proliferation and prevented apoptosis in vitro. Aberrant expression of four miRNAs, which was used for prediction, was associated with HCC onset after HCV eradication. Expression patterns of exosomal miRNAs are a promising tool to predict SVR-HCC.
Finding a Mate? The Marital and Cohabitation Histories of Unwed Mothers

In this paper we use retrospective family life history data from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG95) to examine union formation processes among American women aged 15-44. We compare the marital histories of teen mothers with those of older unmarried mothers as well as women without nonmarital births. Our results (from estimated hazards models) indicate that a nonmarital birth is associated with significant reductions in the likelihood of being married at age 35. (EXCERPT)
Overexpression of zmm28 increases maize grain yield in the field

Significance In the approaching decades, food security will likely be more of an issue as there will be an increased demand for grain which will need to be met in an environmentally sustainable manner. To date, commercial transgenic maize has primarily targeted resistance to insects and herbicides. Here we describe a transgenic approach to improve the yield and yield stability of maize. We have demonstrated that increasing and extending the expression of a maize gene, zmm28, alters vegetative and reproductive growth parameters and significantly enhances yield in large-scale field trials conducted over multiple years. We conclude that alteration in expression of a native maize gene in maize can create a substantially positive change in a complex trait like grain yield. Increasing maize grain yield has been a major focus of both plant breeding and genetic engineering to meet the global demand for food, feed, and industrial uses. We report that increasing and extending expression of a maize MADS-box transcription factor gene, zmm28, under the control of a moderate-constitutive maize promoter, results in maize plants with increased plant growth, photosynthesis capacity, and nitrogen utilization. Molecular and biochemical characterization of zmm28 transgenic plants demonstrated that their enhanced agronomic traits are associated with elevated plant carbon assimilation, nitrogen utilization, and plant growth. Overall, these positive attributes are associated with a significant increase in grain yield relative to wild-type controls that is consistent across years, environments, and elite germplasm backgrounds.
Proline‐Rich Peptides with Improved Antimicrobial Activity against E. coli, K. pneumoniae, and A. baumannii

Proline‐rich antimicrobial peptides (PrAMPs) are promising agents to combat multi‐drug resistant pathogens due to a high antimicrobial activity, yet low cytotoxicity. A library of derivatives of the PrAMP Bac5(1–17) was synthesized and screened to identify which residues are relevant for its activity. In this way, we discovered that two central motifs ‐PIRXP‐ cannot be modified, while residues at N‐ and C‐ termini tolerated some variations. We found five Bac5(1–17) derivatives bearing 1–5 substitutions, with an increased number of arginine and/or tryptophan residues, exhibiting improved antimicrobial activity and broader spectrum of activity while retaining low cytotoxicity toward eukaryotic cells. Transcription/translation and bacterial membrane permeabilization assays showed that these new derivatives still retained the ability to strongly inhibit bacterial protein synthesis, but also acquired permeabilizing activity to different degrees. These new Bac5(1–17) derivatives therefore show a dual mode of action which could hinder the selection of bacterial resistance against these molecules.
Applying MILP/heuristic algorithms to automated job-shop scheduling problems in aircraft-part manufacturing

This work presents efficient algorithms based on Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) and heuristic strategies for complex job-shop scheduling problems raised in Automated Manufacturing Systems. The aim of this work is to find alternative a solution approach of production and transportation operations in a multi-product multi-stage production system that can be used to solve industrial-scale problems with a reasonable computational effort. The MILP model developed must take into account; heterogeneous recipes, single unit per stage, possible recycle flows, sequence-dependent free transferring times and load transfer movements in a single automated material-handling device. In addition, heuristic-based strategies are proposed to iteratively find and improve the solutions generated over time. These approaches were tested in different real-world problems arising in the surface-treatment process of metal components in the aircraft manufacturing industry.
A NEW APPROACH FOR THE MATHEMATICAL ALIGNMENT MACHINE TOOL-PATHS ON A FIVE-AXIS MACHINE AND ITS EFFECT ON SURFACE ROUGHNESS

This paper proposes a procedure to adapt the geometry of the toolpath to remove a constant thickness on a five-axis machine. The aim of this work is to contribute to the automation of prosthesis machining, mainly, in the preparation of polishing surface. The proposed method can deform and adapt a toolpath to respect the geometry of the manufactured surface. This method is based on three steps: alignment, deformation and smoothing toolpath. In the alignment step, a mapping is carried out between the measured surface of prostheses and the nominal toolpath using the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm. The aligned toolpath is deformed in two steps. The first step is the projection of aligned points on the measured surface (defined by STL file). In the second step, these points are offset by a value (a(p)) to obtain the required geometry. During the deformation step a meshed surface is used, reducing the smoothness of the deformed toolpath. Experimental tests on industrial prostheses are conducted to validate the effectiveness of this method. During these tests the effects of the smoothing methods on the surface quality of machined parts are presented.
A Comprehensive Review of Microfluidic Water Quality Monitoring Sensors

Water crisis is a global issue due to water contamination and extremely restricted sources of fresh water. Water contamination induces severe diseases which put human lives at risk. Hence, water quality monitoring has become a prime activity worldwide. The available monitoring procedures are inadequate as most of them require expensive instrumentation, longer processing time, tedious processes, and skilled lab technicians. Therefore, a portable, sensitive, and selective sensor with in situ and continuous water quality monitoring is the current necessity. In this context, microfluidics is the promising technology to fulfill this need due to its advantages such as faster reaction times, better process control, reduced waste generation, system compactness and parallelization, reduced cost, and disposability. This paper presents a review on the latest enhancements of microfluidic-based electrochemical and optical sensors for water quality monitoring and discusses the relative merits and shortcomings of the methods.
Optimal Communication-Distortion Tradeoff in Voting

In recent work, Mandal et al. [2019] study a novel framework for the winner selection problem in voting, in which a voting rule is seen as a combination of an elicitation rule and an aggregation rule. The elicitation rule asks voters to respond to a query based on their preferences over a set of alternatives, and the aggregation rule aggregates voter responses to return a winning alternative. They study the tradeoff between the communication complexity of a voting rule, which measures the number of bits of information each voter must send in response to its query, and its distortion, which measures the quality of the winning alternative in terms of utilitarian social welfare. They prove upper and lower bounds on the communication complexity required to achieve a desired level of distortion, but their bounds are not tight. Importantly, they also leave open the question whether the best randomized rule can significantly outperform the best deterministic rule. We settle this question in the affirmative. For a winner selection rule to achieve distortion d with m alternatives, we show that the communication complexity required is ~Θ (m/d) when using deterministic elicitation, and ~Θ (m/d3) when using randomized elicitation; both bounds are tight up to logarithmic factors. Our upper bound leverages recent advances in streaming algorithms. To establish our lower bound, we derive a new lower bound on a multi-party communication complexity problem. We then study the k-selection problem in voting, where the goal is to select a set of k alternatives. For a k-selection rule that achieves distortion d with m alternatives, we show that the best communication complexity is ~Θ (m/(kd)) when the rule uses deterministic elicitation and ~Θ (m/(kd3)) when the rule uses randomized elicitation. Our optimal bounds yield the non-trivial implication that the k-selection problem becomes strictly easier as k increases.
Development of a Teen-Informed Coding Tool to Measure the Power of Food Advertisements

The food-related information environment, comprised of food and beverage advertising within one’s surroundings, is a growing concern for adolescent health given that food marketing disproportionately targets adolescents. Despite strong public interest concerning the effects of food marketing on child health, there is limited evidence focused on outdoor food advertising in relation to teenage diets, food purchasing, and perceptions. Further, limited research has considered both the exposure to and influence of such advertisements. This study used a novel multi-method approach to identify and quantify the features of outdoor food and beverage advertisements that are most effective at drawing teenagers into retail food establishments. An environmental audit of outdoor advertisements and consultations with youth were used to: (1) identify teen-directed food marketing techniques; (2) validate and weigh the power of individual advertising elements; and, (3) develop a teen-informed coding tool to measure the power of food-related advertisements. Results indicate that marketing power is a function of the presence and size of teen-directed advertisement features, and the relative nature of each feature is an important consideration. This study offers a quantitative measurement tool for food environment research and urges policymakers to consider teen-directed marketing when creating healthy communities.
Sociocultural Attitudes towards Appearance, Self-Esteem and Symptoms of Body-Dysmorphic Disorders among Young Adults

Background: Beauty and an attractive body shape are particularly important during early adulthood, as both are related to greater mating success, positive social feedback, and higher self-esteem. The media may further influence common features of beauty. We tested whether higher body-dysmorphic disorder (BDD) scores were associated with sociocultural attitudes towards appearance. Additionally, we expected that a link between higher BDD scores and higher perceived media pressure would be mediated by lower self-esteem (SE). Method: 350 young Iranian adults (mean age: 24.17 years; 76.9% females) took part in the study. Participants completed questionnaires covering sociodemographic data, sociocultural attitudes towards appearances, and SE, while experts rated participants for symptoms of body dysmorphic disorders. Results: Higher BDD scores were associated with higher scores for sociocultural attitudes towards appearance, while SE was not associated with BDD or sociocultural attitudes towards appearance. Higher scores for sociocultural attitudes towards appearance and media pressure predicted higher BDD scores, while SE had no influence. Conclusion: Among young Iranian adults, sociocultural attitudes towards appearances and BDD scores, as rated by experts’, were related, while SE was not. The shared variance between symptoms of BDD and sociocultural attitudes towards appearance was low, suggesting that other factors such as mating and career concerns together with social feedback might be more important in explaining symptoms of body dysmorphic disorders.
Can Independent Directors Improve the Quality of Earnings? Evidence from Taiwan

This study investigated companies publicly listed in Taiwan from 2002 to 2010 to examine whether independent directors improve the quality of earnings and analyzed whether the control rights of a controlling shareholder mitigate the impact of independent directors on earnings quality. Empirical results showed that independent directors can improve the quality of earnings, and those hired because of mandatory appointments had a greater positive effect on earnings quality compared to directors who were voluntarily hired. In addition, we also found that the controlling share held by a controlling shareholder reduces the benefit of independent directors on earnings quality.
Effect of supplementation of L. plantarum and L.gv based probiotic milk powder on growth performances and nutrient utilization of Charles Foster rats

Effects of the supplementation of L. plantarum and L. casei based spray dried probiotic milk powder was investigated for growth performances, nutrient utilization and blood biochemistry including the cholesterol lowering effect in Charles Foster (CF) rats. Forty-eight male CF rats (21 day old) were divided into four groups and fed on basal diets supplemented with plane spray dried milk powder without any probiotic (control) and L. plantarum, L. casei and the mixed culture of L. plantarum and L. casei based spray dried probiotic milk powder, respectively in LP, LC and LPLC groups. Supplementation of diets with probiotic milk powder containing either the monoculture of L. plantarum or L. casei or their mixed culture improved growth, feed conversion ratio and nutrient utilization. Improved health performance was reflected in hemato-clinical chemistry including the hypocholesterolemic effect of the probiotic milk powder supplemented experimental rats. Although the improvement in growth, nutrient utilization and health of experimental rats was observed in all the three probiotic milk powder supplemented groups viz. LP, LC and LPLC; however these improvement was more in the L. plantarum or L. casei mixed culture supplemented group as compared to other two monoculture probiotic milk powder supplemented groups.
Monochromic radiation through light-emitting diode (LED) positively augments in vitro shoot regeneration in Orchid (Dendrobium sonia)

Monochromatic lights emitted by light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have generated great interest for efficient and controlled growth in vitro, especially of plants which are endangered or require specific intensity and wavelength of light. In the present study, we have evaluated the effect of monochromatic LEDs on in vitro morphogenesis: growth, proliferation of shoot cultures, and rooting of Dendrobium sonia. Different light sources viz. white LEDs (W), blue LEDs (B), yellow LEDs (Y) and red LEDs (R) were tested under photoperiod of 16 h of exposure and 8 h of dark. The frequency of morphogenesis depended on the wavelength of the applied monochromatic light. Higher wavelength monochromatic light (yellow light) was observed to induce higher shoot proliferation (98%), early PLB (protocorm-like bodies) formation, differentiation into green buds and shoot initiation as compared to red, blue and white light treatments. Yellow light also yielded higher number of shoots per explants (29 shoots/explant) than red, blue and white light treatments. The results suggest that the monochromatic light sources stimulate morphogenic effects on in vitro culture of Dendrobium sonia, and that yellow light treatment can be used to enhance the efficiency of micropropagation.
A review of the relationship between eating behavior, obesity and functional brain network organization

Abstract Obesity is a major public health issue affecting nearly 40% of American adults and is associated with increased mortality and elevated risk for a number of physical and psychological illnesses. Obesity is associated with impairments in executive functions such as decision making and inhibitory control, as well as in reward valuation, which is thought to contribute to difficulty sustaining healthy lifestyle behaviors, including adhering to a healthy diet. Growing evidence indicates that these impairments are accompanied by disruptions in functional brain networks, particularly those that support self-regulation, reward valuation, self-directed thinking and homeostatic control. Weight-related differences in task-evoked and resting-state connectivity have most frequently been noted in the executive control network (ECN), salience network (SN) and default mode network (DMN), with obesity generally being associated with weakened connectivity in the ECN and enhanced connectivity in the SN and DMN. Similar disruptions have been observed in the much smaller literature examining the relationship between diet and disordered eating behaviors on functional network organization. The purpose of this narrative review was to summarize what is currently known about how obesity and eating behavior relate to functional brain networks, describe common patterns and provide recommendations for future research based on the identified gaps in knowledge.