Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identification of microsatellite markers for a worldwide distributed, highly invasive ant species Tapinoma melanocephalum (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

Tapinoma melanocephalum is a worldwide distributed, highly invasive ant species. It lives in close association with human societies and its distribution is human-mediated in large measure. The geographical origin of this ant species is unknown, but its introduction in areas previously devoided of its presence can represent a threat to the native biota, act as an agricultural pest or as a pathogen vector. To investigate the genetic structure and phylogeography of this species we identified 12 new polymorphic microsatellite markers, and in addition, we tested and selected 12 ant-universal microsatellites polymorphic in T. melanocephalum. We genotyped 30 individuals from several islands of Micronesia and Papua-New Guinea. All 24 loci exhibited strong homozygosity excess (45-100%, mean = 86%), while the number of alleles per locus reached usual values (2-18, mean = 6.5), resulting in levels of expected heterozygosity much higher than observed. Based on several robust tests, we were able to exclude artefacts such as null alleles and allelic dropout as a possible cause of the observed pattern. Homozygosity excess might be a consequence of founder effect, bottleneck and/or inbreeding. As our sample population was composed of individuals from several distinct localities, the Wahlund effect might have contributed to the increased homozygosity as well. Despite the provisionally observed deviation from the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, the newly developed microsatellites will provide an effective tool for future genetic investigations of population structure as well as for the phylogeographic study of T. melanocephalum.
An efficient dual-supply design for low-power mobile systems

This paper overviews dual-supply design for low-power mobile systems in deep sub-micron technology. Various dual-supply design schemes were investigated for real world design in terms of power efficiency. The analysis showed that a dual-supply design applied to a clock network was more efficient than that applied to data-path logics. For example, the dual-supply clock network with clock-gating level converter can minimize the penalties of level conversion in terms of power, area, and performance. It can also achieve higher operating frequency due to the mitigated timing constraint on gated clocks. Frequency doubling readily derived from existing level converters can save more power by halving the clock frequency. Furthermore, the clock-gating level converter can enable a system to exploit pulse-based flip-flops without pulse generators, resulting in more power reduction.
Microvascular Dysfunction Following Multiwalled Carbon Nanotube Exposure Is Mediated by Thrombospondin-1 Receptor CD47

Pulmonary exposure to multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) disrupts peripheral microvascular function. Thrombospondin-1 (TSP-1) is highly expressed during lung injury and has been shown to alter microvascular reactivity. It is unclear exactly how TSP-1 exerts effects on vascular function, but we hypothesized that the TSP-1 receptor CD47 may mediate changes in vasodilation. Wildtype (WT) or CD47 knockout (CD47 KO) C57B6/J-background animals were exposed to 50 µg of MWCNT or saline control via pharyngeal aspiration. Twenty-four hours postexposure, intravital microscopy was performed to assess arteriolar dilation and venular leukocyte adhesion and rolling. To assess tissue redox status, electron paramagnetic resonance and NOx measurements were performed, while inflammatory biomarkers were measured via multiplex assay.Vasodilation was impaired in the WT + MWCNT group compared with control (57 ± 9 vs 90 ± 2% relaxation), while CD47 KO animals showed no impairment (108 ± 8% relaxation). Venular leukocyte adhesion and rolling increased by >2-fold, while the CD47 KO group showed no change. Application of the antioxidant apocynin rescued normal leukocyte activity in the WT + MWCNT group. Lung and plasma NOx were reduced in the WT + MWCNT group by 47% and 32%, respectively, while the CD47 KO groups were unchanged from control. Some inflammatory cytokines were increased in the CD47 + MWCNT group only. In conclusion, TSP-1 is an important ligand mediating MWCNT-induced microvascular dysfunction, and CD47 is a component of this dysregulation. CD47 activation likely disrupts nitric oxide (•NO) signaling and promotes leukocyte-endothelial interactions. Impaired •NO production, signaling, and bioavailability is linked to a variety of cardiovascular diseases in which TSP-1/CD47 may play an important role.
A Matrixed Speech-in-Noise Test to Discriminate Favorable Listening Conditions by Means of Intelligibility and Response Time Results.

Purpose The primary aim of this study was to develop and examine the potentials of a new speech-in-noise test in discriminating the favorable listening conditions targeted in the acoustical design of communication spaces. The test is based on the recognition and recall of disyllabic word sequences. A secondary aim was to compare the test with current speech-in-noise tests, assessing its benefits and limitations. Method Young adults (19-40 years old), self-reporting normal hearing, were presented with the newly developed Words Sequence Test (WST; 16 participants, Experiment 1) and with a consonant confusion test and a sentence recognition test (Experiment 2, 36 participants randomly assigned to the 2 tests). Participants performing the WST were presented with word sequences of different lengths (from 2 up to 6 words). Two listening conditions were selected: (a) no noise and no reverberation, and (b) reverberant, steady-state noise (Speech Transmission Index: 0.47). The tests were presented in a closed-set format; data on the number of words correctly recognized (speech intelligibility, IS) and the response times (RTs) were collected (onset RT, single words' RT). Results It was found that a sequence composed of 4 disyllabic words ensured both the full recognition score in quiet conditions and a significant decrease in IS results when noise and reverberation degraded the speech signal. RTs increased with the worsening of the listening conditions and the number of words of the sequence. The greatest onset RT variation was found when using a sequence of 4 words. In the comparison with current speech-in-noise tests, it was found that the WST maximized the IS difference between the selected listening conditions as well as the RT increase. Conclusions Overall, the results suggest that the new speech-in-noise test has good potentials in discriminating conditions with near-ceiling accuracy. As compared with current speech-in-noise tests, it appears that the WST with a 4-word sequence allows for a finer mapping of the acoustical design target conditions of public spaces through accuracy and onset RT data.
Dynamics of Electricity Consumers for Classifying Power Consumption Data Using PCA

This paper newly proposes a dynamics of an electricity consumer with the concept of principal component analysis, which collectively analyzes the power consumption data. The dynamics is proposed as a characteristic of consumer. It is applied various consumers of different five data sets. Through the results, the comparison of different power consumption data sets is performed. Furthermore, we discussed the applications of the consumer groups classified by dynamics.
Long Short Term Memory Based Models for Negation Handling in Tutorial Dialogues

Negation plays a significant role in spoken and written natural languages. Negation is used in language to deny something or to reverse the polarity or the sense of a statement. This paper presents a novel approach to automatically handling negation in tutorial dialogues using deep learning methods. In particular, we explored various Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models to automatically detect negation focus, scope and cue in tutorial dialogues collected from experiments with actual students interacting with the state-of-the-art intelligent tutoring system, DeepTutor. The results obtained are promising.
UNIST SAIL System for TAC 2017 Cold Start Slot Filling

We describes the UNIST SAIL Slot Filling System for TAC 2017 Cold Start Slot Filling (CSSF) task. Our system uses Pattern-based relation extraction (Distant supervision based model) and Convolutional Neural Network (Deep Learning based End-to-End model). The first model achieved 0.1474 on Average Precision (AP), the second model achieved 0.1352 on AP for TAC 2017 CSSF task.
Evaluation of marine zooplankton community structure through environmental DNA metabarcoding

Zooplankton dominate the abundance and biomass of multicellular animals in pelagic marine environments; however, traditional methods to characterize zooplankton communities are invasive and laborious. This study compares zooplankton taxonomic composition revealed through metabarcoding of the cytochrome oxidase I (COI) and 18S rRNA genes to traditional morphological identification by microscopy. Triplicates of three different sample types were collected from three coral reef sites in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary: (1) 1 L surface seawater samples prefiltered through 3 μm filters and subsequently collected on 0.22 μm filters for eDNA (PF‐eDNA); (2) 1 L surface seawater samples filtered on 0.22 μm pore‐size filters (environmental DNA; eDNA), and (3) zooplankton tissue samples from 64 μm, 200 μm, and 500 μm mesh size net tows. The zooplankton tissue samples were split, with half identified morphologically and tissue DNA (T‐DNA) extracted from the other half. The COI and 18S rRNA gene metabarcoding of PF‐eDNA, eDNA, and T‐DNA samples was performed using Illumina MiSeq. Of the families detected with COI and 18S rRNA gene metabarcoding, 40% and 32%, respectively, were also identified through morphological assessments. Significant differences in taxonomic composition were observed between PF‐DNA, eDNA, and T‐DNA with both genetic markers. PF‐eDNA resulted in detection of fewer taxa than the other two sample types; thus, prefiltering is not recommended. All dominant copepod taxa (> 5% of total abundance) were detected with eDNA, T‐DNA, and morphological assessments, demonstrating that eDNA metabarcoding is a promising technique for future biodiversity assessments of pelagic zooplankton in marine systems.
E-cadherin regulates proliferation of colorectal cancer stem cells through NANOG

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) possess a self-renewal ability and display tumorigenic potential in immunodeficient mice. Colorectal CSCs are thought to be a uniform population and no functionally distinct subpopulations have been identified. Because E-cadherin is an essential molecule for self-renewal of embryonic stem cells, we examined E-cadherin expression, which may play a role in maintaining the properties of CSCs, in EpCAMhigh/CD44+ colorectal CSCs from human primary colorectal cancers. We obtained 18 surgical specimens of human primary colorectal cancer. CD44, EpCAM, and E-cadherin expression were analyzed by fluorescence-activated cell sorting. Sorted EpCAMhigh/CD44+ colorectal CSCs were injected into immunodeficient mice to estimate the tumorigenic potential. Genetic profiles were analyzed by cDNA microarray. Notably, colorectal CSCs could be divided into two populations based on the E-cadherin expression status, and they exhibited different pathological characteristics. Compared to E-cadherin-negative colorectal CSCs, E-cadherin-positive (EC+) colorectal CSCs demonstrated higher tumor growth potential in vivo. EC+ colorectal CSCs revealed a higher expression of the pluripotency factor NANOG, which contributed to the higher tumor growth potential of EC+ colorectal CSCs through control of cyclin D1 expression. These findings are the first demonstration of functionally distinct subpopulations of colorectal CSCs in human clinical samples.
Nonlinear dynamo action in rotating convection and shear

Magnetic field amplification by the motion of an electrically conducting fluid is studied, using a rotating plane-layer geometry. The fluid flow is driven by convection, and by a moving bottom boundary, which leads to an Ekman layer localized at the base of the system. The system thus has the structure of an interface dynamo, with convection lying over a thin layer of shear. The combination of shear in the Ekman layer and convection above leads to amplification of seed magnetic fields. In kinematic regimes the magnetic field is mostly localized in sheets in the shear layer, but thin tongues are pulled out by the convection above and folded. The nonlinear saturation of these growing fields is studied at moderately high values of magnetic Reynolds number and Taylor number. It is found that the sheets of field tend to gain fine-scale structure when the dynamo saturates, breaking up into tubes, and the fluid flow shows complex time-dependence. Although the magnetic field lies predominantly within the highly sheared Ekman layer, this flow remains remarkably unchanged despite the action of Lorentz forces. Instead, the effect of the field is to suppress or modify the convection above. A simple alpha-omega dynamo model is set up, and gives some insights into the dynamo processes occurring in the full magnetohydrodynamic simulation.
D-Q axis voltage ripple minimization of vector control drive using Type-2 NFS controller

The voltage ripple is reduced by using conventional proportional integral (PI) controllers require additional filter, and also occurs tuning problem with these controllers. Due to the operating point changes in conventional PI controllers get a nonlinearity output. To overcome above problem, this paper presents Type-2 Neuro fuzzy system (T2NFS) to reduce the voltage ripple in the induction motor by using indirect vector control method. The T2NFS controller performance as compared with conventional proportional integral (PI) controller, voltage ripple reduced in the induction motor without any additional filter and tuning problem is eliminated. In this, the current reference values and original values of current are fed to the T2NFS based controllers and the controller is trained based on the obtained values. The performance of induction motor with indirect vector control method by using T2NFS controllers has been simulated at different operation regions and compared results with PI controllers. The results are experimentally verified with d-space 1104.
Detection and Filtering System for DNS Water Torture Attacks Relying Only on Domain Name Information

: Water torture attacks are a recently emerging type of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack on Domain Name System (DNS) servers. They generate a multitude of malicious queries with randomized, unique sub-domains. This paper proposes a detection method and a ﬁltering system for water torture attacks. The former is an enhancement of our previous e ﬀ ort so as to achieve packet-by-packet, on-the-ﬂy processing, and the latter is an application of our current method mainly for defending recursive servers. Our proposed method detects malicious queries by analyzing their subdomains with a na¨ıve Bayes classiﬁer. Considering large-scale applications, we focus on achieving high throughput as well as high accuracy. Experimental results indicate that our method can detect attacks with 98.16% accuracy and only a 1.55% false positive rate, and that our system can process up to 7.44Mpps of tra ﬃ c.
Uniform sampling procedure for constrained surrogate modeling of antenna structures

A procedure for uniform sampling in constrained domains is proposed. It is used to generate training data for construction of fast surrogate models of antenna structures with the region of interest defined by a set of reference designs optimized w.r. t. selected figures of interest. To set up the domain, the reference designs are triangulated and the resulting simplexes are extended in orthogonal directions. We demonstrate that the proposed technique provides significantly more uniform sample distribution than rudimentary random sampling, which leads to improved predictive power of the surrogate model. Our considerations are illustrated using a uniplanar dual-band dipole antenna.
An Equivalent Circuit Planar Magnetics Inductors Model vs air gap and Parameter Extraction Based on the Genetic Algorithm

The adjustment for the required inductance is quite straightforward by controlling the air gap of the magnetic core. The focal point basis is the dependence on air gap and the windings effects. An advanced magnetics planar inductor model is developed. The magnetic inductor remains a difficult device to model mainly, particularly when air gap are taken into account. A novel physically based analytical model is used to accurately simulate this planar magnetic inductor. The skin and proximity effects in metal lines of planar inductor are represented as the impedance of a ladder R-L networks. These R-L ladder parameters are determined by minimizing the errors function between experimental and simulation results using the genetic algorithm. During validation process, different type of magnetic core has been investigated. The planar inductor model results have been favorably evaluated by comparison and validation with practical measurements and to 3D finite element method simulations. It is found that simulation results and measurements data are in close agreement of the inductive and the parasitic effects.
A trust-aware group recommender system using particle swarn optimization

With the exponential growth of the online community activities, group recommender systems have become popular in recent years. However, making recommendations relevant to the common interests of a group is a challenging task due to the diversity of group members’ preferences. In this paper, we propose a novel Trust-aware Group Recommendation (TGR) approach to improve the performance of group recommendations. TGR uses a new group trust metric that is optimized by Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). This metric directly provides a set of neighbors for a group of users. The experimental results show that TGR can improve the accuracy and run-time performance of other group recommender systems.
A Compressed Sensing Algorithm using a Minimum Set of Valid Measurements

Due to the lack of existing compressed sensing based super resolution reconstruction, we establish a minimum set of valid measurement based compressed sensing algorithm. In order to reduce measurement redundancy, we construct local adaptive sparse dictionaries in wavelet domain to achieve a better sparse representation. We remove the cross correlation coefficients of the measurement matrix and dictionaries according to mutual coherence theory, and establish the minimum set of valid measurements to ensure signal reconstruction. Experimental results show that the proposed compressed sensing algorithm, restrained by the constructed minimum set of valid measurements, can reconstruct high-resolution, high-quality images with rich details by using the measurements which are much less than those of traditional compressed sensing.
Low-Level Light Therapy Protects Red Blood Cells Against Oxidative Stress and Hemolysis During Extracorporeal Circulation

Aim: An activation of non-specific inflammatory response, coagulation disorder, and blood morphotic elements damage are the main side effects of the extracorporeal circulation (ECC). Red-to-near-infrared radiation (R/NIR) is thought to be capable of stabilizing red blood cell (RBC) membrane through increasing its resistance to destructive factors. We focused on the development of a method using low-level light therapy (LLLT) in the spectral range of R/NIR which could reduce blood trauma caused by the heart-lung machine during surgery. Methods: R/NIR emitter was adjusted in terms of geometry and optics to ECC circuit. The method of extracorporeal blood photobiomodulation was tested during in vivo experiments in an animal, porcine model (1 h of ECC plus 23 h of animal observation). A total of 24 sows weighing 90–100 kg were divided into two equal groups: control one and LLLT. Blood samples were taken during the experiment to determine changes in blood morphology [RBC and white blood cell (WBC) counts, hemoglobin (Hgb)], indicators of hemolysis [plasma-free hemoglobin (PFHgb), serum bilirubin concentration, serum lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) activity], and oxidative stress markers [thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) concentration, total antioxidant capacity (TAC)]. Results: In the control group, a rapid systemic decrease in WBC count during ECC was accompanied by a significant increase in RBC membrane lipids peroxidation, while in the LLLT group the number of WBC and TBARS concentration both remained relatively constant, indicating limitation of the inflammatory process. These results were consistent with the change in the hemolysis markers like PFHgb, LDH, and serum bilirubin concentration, which were significantly reduced in LLLT group. No differences in TAC, RBC count, and Hgb concentration were detected. Conclusion: We presented the applicability of the LLLT with R/NIR radiation to blood trauma reduction during ECC.
Penicillium verruculosum Strain BS3 Produces Aurantioclavineand Rugulosuvine B Alkaloids

The present study describes rapid screening of Penicillium verruculosum strain BS3 (novel strain previously reported from this laboratory) for the production of secondary metabolites in potatodextrose agar and broth media. Metabolites were extracted from both mycelia (intracellular) and supernatant (extracellular). For intracellular secondary metabolites, the 5 days old mycelia were extracted in the solvent system containing methanol, dichloromethane and ethyl acetate (1:2:3 ratio, respectively) with 1% volume of formic acid; while the extracellular metabolites in the supernatant were extracted in ethyl acetate. The concentrated intraand extra-cellular extracts were pooled in methanol for analysis using liquid chromatograph/quardapole -time of flight/mass spectrometry (LC/Q-TOF/MS). Alkaloids such as aurantioclavine and rugulosuvine B were identified from the extract of P. verruculosum BS3, upon the database search of 465 secondary metabolites produced by various fungi. It indicates that P. verruculosum BS3 is a potent fungus capable of producing valuable leads for drugs such as aurantioclavine, an intermediate for the synthesis of fungal communesin and rugulosuvine B, an antitumor and antimicrobial agent.
A therapeutic role for selenoprotein T in reducing ischaemia/reperfusion injury in the heart?

In this issue of Acta Physiologica, Rocca and colleagues uncover a new role for selenoprotein T (SelT or SELENOT) as a potential modulator of cardiac damage, and highlight the ability of a SelT mimetic peptide to improve heart function following ischemia / reperfusion (I/R) injury. Selenium is an essential trace element which can be incorporated into proteins as a selenocysteine (Sec) residue. Selenoproteins are vital for maintaining the redox balance in cells, and play critical roles in cell survival and homeostasis. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.