Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of the Lived Experiences of Older Adults Regarding Their Functional Activities in Ghana

Introduction: Research on disability largely draws on epidemiological data, often conducted in more developed countries. To date, there is little research related to older adults in Ghana, Africa. The purpose of this study was to strengthen understanding of how older adults in Ghana perform functional activities, referenced against the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (WHO-ICF) framework. Methods: Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) of semistructured interview data was employed as the methodological approach. Using purposive criterion sampling, 8 older adults admitted to Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Ghana, presenting with any identified health condition and/or frailty were recruited. Results: Analysis of interview data identified 5 interrelated themes: (1) feeling anxious, (2) feeling restricted, (3) understanding and admitting difficulty, (4) striving to be healthy and being productive, and (5) managing functional difficulty. These concerns were classified and related to the WHO-ICF, particularly the contextual factors. Discussion: This study examined in detail experiences of older adults performing functional activities. Our study highlights the relevance of the WHO-ICF framework for understanding the health needs of older adults, emphasizing the functional, social, and environmental factors influencing the functional status of older adults. The findings offer unique insight into the health needs of older adults, drawing attention to the implications for policy and care.
Physicochemical properties of starches from two different yam (Dioscorea opposita Thunb.) residues

The starches obtained from two different yam residues, which were treated with alkali(starch-A) or enzyme (starch-E), were studied and compared with yam starch isolated using ordinary method (starch-O) for morphological, crystalline pattern, thermal, and pasting properties. The results revealed that the amylose content of three starches ranged from 19.47 to 22.17%. The granule surfaces of starch-A and starch-E were as smooth as that of starch-O. The crystalline pattern of the three starches was a C-type. The transition temperatures (To, Tp and Tc) varied from 70.11 to 73.64, 79.23 to 81.74, and 84.30 to 86.65 oC, respectively. The starch-E showed the highest Δ Hgel, followed by the starch-A, while it was lowest for the starch-O. According to the viscosity measurement, starch-O had the lowest pasting temperature, highest peak viscosity and breakdown viscosity, which were contrary to those of starch-E.
Occurrence of Wolbachia in central European weevils: correlations with host systematics, ecology, and biology

We studied the occurrence of Wolbachia in relation to the systematics, ecology, and biology of 40 weevil species from central Europe. Identification of Wolbachia supergroups and phylogeny was performed on the basis of 16S rDNA, ftsZ, wsp, and hcpA sequences. Sixteen species (40%) were infected by Wolbachia. Six of these possess only supergroup A (15% of all studied species, 37.5% of the infected species), and four harbored only supergroup B (10 and 25%, respectively). Six species were infected by both supergroups A and B or their genomes harbored parts of these two supergroups (15 and 37.5%, respectively). No differences between Wolbachia supergroup frequencies were detected. There was almost no correlation between Wolbachia phylogeny and host systematics and phylogeny at the level of subfamily and tribe, because the representatives of both supergroups were detected in all the studied multi‐species tribes. Wolbachia strains were probably inherited from a common ancestor only in the case of the genus Strophosoma, where two of three analyzed species possessed bacteria which are genetically very close in all the studied genes. There was also only limited congruence between phylogenies obtained from the four studied genes. These results suggest horizontal transmission of Wolbachia strains between species and recombination events between different strains. A significant correlation was detected between infected and uninfected species in relation to mobility (flying species were 2× more frequently infected than non‐flying species), foraging (polyphagous species were 2.5× less frequently infected than mono‐ or oligophagous species), and reproductive mode (parthenogenetic weevils were infected nearly 2× as often as bisexuals). No differences were detected between mesophilous and xerothermophilous species, nor between those inhabiting open areas vs. arboreal species. However, these results might have been influenced by common ancestry among the studied weevils. Because weevils include many plant pests of economic importance, it is possible to use these data in developing alternative, biology‐based strategies for controlling them.
Image-Processing-Based Low-Cost Fault Detection Solution for End-of-Line ECUs in Automotive Manufacturing

The manufacturing industry is continuously researching and developing strategies and solutions to increase product quality and to decrease production time and costs. The approach is always targeting more automated, traceable, and supervised production, minimizing the impact of the human factor. In the automotive industry, the Electronic Control Unit (ECU) manufacturing ends with complex testing, the End-of-Line (EoL) products being afterwards sent to client companies. This paper proposes an image-processing-based low-cost fault detection (IP-LC-FD) solution for the EoL ECUs, aiming for high-quality and fast detection. The IP-LC-FD solution approaches the problem of determining, on the manufacturing line, the correct mounting of the pins in the locations of each connector of the ECU module, respectively, other defects as missing or extra pins, damaged clips, or surface cracks. The IP-LC-FD system is a hardware–software structure, based on Raspberry Pi microcomputers, Pi cameras, respectively, Python and OpenCV environments. This paper presents the two main stages of the research, the experimental model, and the prototype. The rapid integration into the production line represented an important goal, meaning the accomplishment of the specific hard acceptance requirements regarding both performance and functionality. The solution was implemented and tested as an experimental model and prototype in a real industrial environment, proving excellent results.
Capturing consumer preferences and interests in developing a state plant promotional program

Two separate studies using intercept survey methodology were conducted to define the components of a state plant promotional program—Pennsylvania Gardener Selects (PGS)—based on consumer preference and appeal. The first study, conducted 6 and 7 Mar. 2003 at the Philadelphia Flower Show in Philadelphia, Pa. , involved 243 Pennsylvanians. Objectives were to define current gardening-related shopping habits, sources of gardening information, motives and limitations for pursuing gardening, and history of purchasing other Pennsylvania products. Responses were analyzed using cluster analysis to identify consumer-gardener segments that would potentially purchase PGS plants. Three distinct consumer segments were generated: ''Novice Gardeners'' (consumers with limited experience in gardening), ''Casual Gardeners'' (consumers with limited confidence in their gardening knowledge), and ''Avid Gardeners'' (consumers who express great interest in gardening). ''Avid Gardeners'' exhibited a greater level of interest in purchasing plants evaluated for Pennsylvania (average response, 6.5; based on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is very unlikely and 7 is very likely), with 73% indicating that they had purchased Pennsylvania products; hence, they were a potential market for PGS plants. The second study, conducted 8 to 10 Mar. 2004 at the Philadelphia Flower Show involved 250 Pennsylvanians. Objectives for this study were to define consumer brand and product preferences, including container colors for the PGS program, plant tag style/color, and retail price (based on ascale of 1to 7, where 1is very unlikely to purchase and 7 is very likely to purchase), as well as brand attributes these consumers valued. Responses were analyzed using conjoint analysis. Participants awarded the highest utilities to the white container with a black-and-white PGS logo (0.1149), keystone- shaped tag with color image and PGS logo (0.1099), and a retail price of $1.98 (0.4751). Spearman's rho was used to identify relationships among existing and related brand attributes. Correlations between participants' response to brand attributes, including locally grown, ideal for local conditions, quality assurance, and independent testing program, as well as plant guarantee and publication with gardening tips, suggest that promotional materials should emphasize and include these qualities. Results from these studies indicate that there is interest in a state plant promotional program for Pennsylvania. To use resources wisely, consumers classified as ''Avid Gardeners'' would be the most appropriate to target first. To attract consumer attention and encourage purchasing at a retail outlet, containers and plant tags should have distinctive colors, and brand attributes and resulting consumer benefits should be emphasized on promotional materials.
Efficient cropping zones - decadal analysis for major crops in Tamil Nadu

An analytical study was done to identify the efficient cropping zones for important crops (rice, sorghum, blackgram, groundnut, cotton and sugarcane). Among the districts of Tamil Nadu, Tirunelveli and Kanyakumari were the most efficient cropping zones (MECZS) for rice. Similarly for groundnut, Chengalpet district was the MECZ. For sugarcane and blackgram no district was found to be the MECZ or efficient cropping zone (ECS). For cotton Coimbatore was the most potential area.
Homogenization of Fall-Run Chinook Salmon Gene Pools in the Central Valley of California, USA

Abstract We assessed the population genetic structure and temporal stability of genetic diversity from 1999 to 2001 in collections of fall-run Chinook salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha in California's Central Valley. Tests for genotypic differentiation at seven microsatellite loci revealed few significant pairwise comparisons between samples from five hatchery populations and eight naturally spawning populations throughout the Central Valley that were separated by 50–350 km. All collections were genetically homogeneous and failed to cluster with their nearest geographic neighbors. Likewise, evaluation of temporal change in genetic diversity revealed few changes over the 3 years of the study. Our results suggest that fall-run Chinook salmon throughout the Central Valley comprise a genetically homogeneous population that has lower among-population genetic diversity than fall-run Chinook salmon populations examined elsewhere over similar geographic scales. The lack of genetic distinction and the lack of tempor.
CoRNeA: A Pipeline to Decrypt the Inter-Protein Interfaces from Amino Acid Sequence Information

Decrypting the interface residues of the protein complexes provides insight into the functions of the proteins and, hence, the overall cellular machinery. Computational methods have been devised in the past to predict the interface residues using amino acid sequence information, but all these methods have been majorly applied to predict for prokaryotic protein complexes. Since the composition and rate of evolution of the primary sequence is different between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, it is important to develop a method specifically for eukaryotic complexes. Here, we report a new hybrid pipeline for predicting the protein-protein interaction interfaces in a pairwise manner from the amino acid sequence information of the interacting proteins. It is based on the framework of Co-evolution, machine learning (Random Forest), and Network Analysis named CoRNeA trained specifically on eukaryotic protein complexes. We use Co-evolution, physicochemical properties, and contact potential as major group of features to train the Random Forest classifier. We also incorporate the intra-contact information of the individual proteins to eliminate false positives from the predictions keeping in mind that the amino acid sequence of a protein also holds information for its own folding and not only the interface propensities. Our prediction on example datasets shows that CoRNeA not only enhances the prediction of true interface residues but also reduces false positive rates significantly.
Highly Reproducible Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering Detection of Alternariol Using Silver-Embedded Silica Nanoparticles

Alternariol (AOH) is a mycotoxin from fungi that has been found in processed foods due to its high thermal stability. To address the complexity and costs of conventional AOH detection methods, we propose an alternative based on surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) and specially designed nanoparticle substrate. Herein, silver-embedded silica (SiO2@Ag) nanoparticles with a highly reproducible SERS signal were successfully developed for detecting AOH. Silica nanoparticles (~145 nm) were used as a template to deposit silver nanoparticles (~17 nm), thereby generating SiO2@Ag. The SiO2@Ag nanoparticles showed a good linearity between SERS signal intensity and AOH concentrations from 16 to 1000 nM with a limit of detection of 4.83 nM. Additionally, the SERS signal of the SiO2@Ag nanoparticles was highly reproducible, with relative standard deviations of 2.33–5.95% in the AOH concentration range from 10 to 10,000 nM, demonstrating the reliability of the proposed SERS method.
Isolation and molecular characterization of a novel homogalacturonan galacturonosyl- transferase gene (GbGAUT1) from Gossypium barbadense

A novel gene, designated as GbGAUT1 (Gossypium barbadense homogalacturonan galacturonosyltransferase gene 1), was successfully cloned from G. barbadense (GenBank accession No. EF552432) by bioinformatics methods, RT-PCR and RACE. The open reading frame (ORF) was 1797 bp long and putatively encoded a polypeptide of 598 amino acids, with a predicted molecular mass of 69 kDa. GbGAUT1 could be considered as a homogalacturonan (HG) galacturonosyltransferase protein since the conserved GAUT1-related supperfamily motif had been found and it was clustered into GAUT-A group in the phylogenetic tree. Semi quantitative RT-PCR showed that GbGAUT1 preferentially expressed in the fiber secondary cell wall thickening, especially in the fibers of 35 day post anthesis (DPA). These results suggested that the novel cotton GbGAUT1 might play an important role in fiber development.
uBLEU: Uncertainty-Aware Automatic Evaluation Method for Open-Domain Dialogue Systems

Because open-domain dialogues allow diverse responses, basic reference-based metrics such as BLEU do not work well unless we prepare a massive reference set of high-quality responses for input utterances. To reduce this burden, a human-aided, uncertainty-aware metric, ΔBLEU, has been proposed; it embeds human judgment on the quality of reference outputs into the computation of multiple-reference BLEU. In this study, we instead propose a fully automatic, uncertainty-aware evaluation method for open-domain dialogue systems, υBLEU. This method first collects diverse reference responses from massive dialogue data and then annotates their quality judgments by using a neural network trained on automatically collected training data. Experimental results on massive Twitter data confirmed that υBLEU is comparable to ΔBLEU in terms of its correlation with human judgment and that the state of the art automatic evaluation method, RUBER, is improved by integrating υBLEU.
Using a word association task to investigate semantic depth in swedish-speaking children with developmental language disorder

Abstract We examined word associations in Swedish children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) compared to their typically developing (TD) peers. Furthermore, the study aimed to explore the dimensions of vocabulary knowledge (breadth, depth, and fluency) in these children. Fifty children (15 DLD and 35 TD) participated in the study, aged six to nine years. This age span is commonly associated with substantial lexical reorganisation, by some referred to as the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift. Fifty items from the Kent-Rosanoff list were used to elicit word associations (say the first word that comes to mind). Word associations were coded as paradigmatic (lion-tiger), syntagmatic (chair-sit), phonological (moon-poon), and other/no answer (foot-hello/bed- -). A semantic depth score (paradigmatic and syntagmatic associations) was calculated and analysed. The children with DLD showed significantly lower semantic depth scores than their TD peers, in line with previous research in English-speaking children. However, the vocabulary dimensions were uniformly affected for the DLD group, contradicting previous findings of semantic depth as a particular area of weakness in this group.
Implementation of MALDI Mass Spectrometry Imaging in Cancer Proteomics Research: Applications and Challenges

Studying the proteome–the entire set of proteins in cells, tissues, organs and body fluids—is of great relevance in cancer research, as differential forms of proteins are expressed in response to specific intrinsic and extrinsic signals. Discovering protein signatures/pathways responsible for cancer transformation may lead to a better understanding of tumor biology and to a more effective diagnosis, prognosis, recurrence and response to therapy. Moreover, proteins can act as a biomarker or potential drug targets. Hence, it is of major importance to implement proteomic, particularly mass spectrometric, approaches in cancer research, to provide new crucial insights into tumor biology. Recently, mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) approaches were implemented in cancer research, to provide individual molecular characteristics of each individual tumor while retaining molecular spatial distribution, essential in the context of personalized disease management and medicine.
Is Fluorescence Technology a Promising Tool for Detecting Infected Dentin in Deep Carious Lesions?

The purpose of this study was to determine if the degree of fluorescence detected by fluorescence-aided caries excavation (FACE) correlates with dentin bacterial microbiome diversity, as assessed by 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing, and with traditional tactile dentin caries assessment. Unidentified human teeth were obtained from a dental facility. The included teeth had a carious lesion two-thirds into the dentin, verified by radiography, and were red-fluorescing (RF) using FACE technology (SIROInspect; Sirona, Bensheim, Germany). Two independent examiners performed visual/tactile assessment of the lesions. RF sites were sampled with a sterile spoon excavator and dentin characteristics were evaluated. Once RF dentin was removed, a second sample of pink-fluorescing (PF) dentin was obtained. After excavation with a sterile round bur to nonfluorescing (NF) dentin, a third sample was collected with a slow-speed round bur. The samples were processed at the UNC (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) Microbiome Core Facility. Out of 134 extracted teeth collected, 21 fit the inclusion criteria, yielding 61 dentin samples. RF samples had the highest number of observed operational taxonomic units (n = 154), followed by PF (n = 109) and NF (n = 100). RF carious dentin was primarily “soft,” and NF dentin was assessed as “hard” 100% of the time by both examiners (rank correlation χ2: p < 0.001). However, approximately one-third of the tactile assessments of hard dentin still displayed some fluorescence, either pink or red. We concluded that the sampled fluorescing (RF and PF) and NF carious dentin layers displayed diverse bacterial taxa, and tactile assessments of soft, leathery, and hard corresponded with RF, PF, and NF.
Cyclic GMP-AMP synthase promotes the inflammatory and autophagy responses in Huntington disease

Significance Huntington disease (HD) is a genetic disorder caused by glutamine-expansion in the huntingtin (mHTT) protein, which affects motor, psychiatric, and cognitive function, but the mechanisms remain unclear. mHTT is known to induce DNA damage and affect autophagy, both associated with inflammatory responses, but what mediates all these were unknown. Here we report that cGAS, a DNA damage sensor, is highly upregulated in the striatum of a mouse model and HD human patient’s tissue. We found ribosomes, which make proteins, are robustly accumulated on the cGAS mRNA in HD cells. cGAS depletion decreases—and cGAS expression increases—both inflammatory and autophagy responses in HD striatal cells. Thus, cGAS is a therapeutic target for HD. Blocking cGAS will prevent/slow down HD symptoms. Huntington disease (HD) is caused by an expansion mutation of the N-terminal polyglutamine of huntingtin (mHTT). mHTT is ubiquitously present, but it induces noticeable damage to the brain’s striatum, thereby affecting motor, psychiatric, and cognitive functions. The striatal damage and progression of HD are associated with the inflammatory response; however, the underlying molecular mechanisms remain unclear. Here, we report that cGMP-AMP synthase (cGAS), a DNA sensor, is a critical regulator of inflammatory and autophagy responses in HD. Ribosome profiling revealed that the cGAS mRNA has high ribosome occupancy at exon 1 and codon-specific pauses at positions 171 (CCG) and 172 (CGT) in HD striatal cells. Moreover, the protein levels and activity of cGAS (based on the phosphorylated STING and phosphorylated TBK1 levels), and the expression and ribosome occupancy of cGAS-dependent inflammatory genes (Ccl5 and Cxcl10) are increased in HD striatum. Depletion of cGAS diminishes cGAS activity and decreases the expression of inflammatory genes while suppressing the up-regulation of autophagy in HD cells. In contrast, reinstating cGAS in cGAS-depleted HD cells activates cGAS activity and promotes inflammatory and autophagy responses. Ribosome profiling also revealed that LC3A and LC3B, the two major autophagy initiators, show altered ribosome occupancy in HD cells. We also detected the presence of numerous micronuclei, which are known to induce cGAS, in the cytoplasm of neurons derived from human HD embryonic stem cells. Collectively, our results indicate that cGAS is up-regulated in HD and mediates inflammatory and autophagy responses. Thus, targeting the cGAS pathway may offer therapeutic benefits in HD.