Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Anti-Oxidant and hepatoprotective activities of ethanolic root extract of Bauhinia variegata Linn

To study the hepatoprotective activity of BVEE. In-vitro Antioxidant Studies was carried out by using Nitric oxide scavenging activity method and DPPH radical scavenging activity method. Albino wistar rats of either sex weighing 150-200g were divided into five groups. Liver injury was produced by CCL4 1 ml/kg/d dissolved in olive oil (1:1) orally. Silymarin (100mg/kg) orally was used as standard drug. Test groups received BVEE in the doses of 200,400 mg/kg/day orally along with CCl4. Treatment was given to all the groups daily for 5 days. The hepatoprotective effect of BVEE was evaluated by assessment of biochemical parameters AST, ALT, ALP and Level of total protein Histopathological examination of the liver was also done. BVEE (200mg/kg and 400 mg/kg) exhibited highly significant reduction (p
Evaluation of Anti-diabetic, Hepatoprotective and Antilipidemic Potentials of Syzygium aromaticum (Clove) on Albino Rats

Aims: The aim of this study was to evaluate the anti-diabetic, hepatorenoprotective and antilipidemic potentials of Syzygium aromaticum (clove) in albino rats. Study Design: This study is a non-randomized experimental study. Place and Duration of Study: Department of Medical Laboratory Technology, University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, between September, 2019 and December, 2019. Methodology: Thirty-five male Wister rats with weight between 145 to 150 g were randomly selected into seven groups of five rats each. The first group served as Negative control (group 1). The second group was the positive control (Diabetic group). The remaining five groups being the treatment groups (3-7). Diabetes was induced intraperitoneally with 65 mg/kg of streptozotocin (STZ) single dose. Group 3 Diabetic group treated with metformin (100 mg/kg); Group 4 Diabetic group treated with low dose clove (250 mg/kg). Group 5 Diabetic group treated with low dose clove and metformin; Group 6 Diabetic group treated with high dose clove (750 mg/kg), while Group 7 were Diabetic group treated with high dose clove (750 mg/kg) and metformin for six weeks. Blood samples were collected via cardiac puncture in appropriate EDTA, heparinized and sterile bottles Original Research Article Sammy et al.; JOCAMR, 11(1): 38-50, 2020; Article no.JOCAMR. 61685 39 for standard laboratory investigations of lipid profile, glucose, liver enzymes, urea and creatinine. Plasma lipid profile, liver enzymes, urea and creatinine were determined using enzymatic end point method under standard operating procedures. Statistical analysis was done using Graph Pad Prism Version 5.03 and p values less than 0.05 were considered statistically significant. Results: Results revealed that the STZ-induced diabetic group exhibited highly significant increase in activity of liver enzymes AST, ALT and ALP, increase in the levels of urea, creatinine, glucose and most lipid profile parameters as compared to the negative control group (p<0.001). Histopathological examination of liver and kidney tissues of diabetic rats indicated slight changes. However, their changes were overcame by clove treatment and the majority of the cells tend to be normal. Low dose clove group 5 (250 mg/kg) with metformin decreased the levels of the analytes most when compared to the levels of the positive control group. For glucose, group 5 gave a mean glucose level of 4.40 ± 1.08 mmo/l, significantly lower than the positive control group 39.67 ± 0.67, ALT group 5 gave a mean ALT level of 56.00 ± 7.11, which was significantly lower than the positive control group 205.70 ± 14.79, for urea group 5 gave a mean urea level of 4.25 ± 0.77 which was significantly lower the control group 23.80 ± 3.56 at p < 0.001, thereby yielding a better treatment result. Conclusion: In conclusion, low dose clove supplementation with metformin could be excellent adjuvant support in the therapy of diabetes mellitus and its complications.
Software update: Moving the R package sommer to multivariate mixed models for genome-assisted prediction

In the last decade the use of mixed models has become a pivotal part in the implementation of genome-assisted prediction in plant and animal breeding programs. Exploiting the use genetic correlation among traits through multivariate predictions has been proposed in recent years as a way to boost prediction accuracy and understand pleiotropy and other genetic and ecological phenomena better. Multiple mixed model solvers able to use relationship matrices or deal with marker-based incidence matrices have been released in the last years but multivariate versions are scarse. Such solvers have become quite popular in plant and animal breeding thanks to user-friendly platforms such as R. Among such software one of the most recent and popular is the sommer package. In this short communication we discuss the update of the package that is able to run multivariate mixed models with multiple random effects and different covariance structures at the level of random effects and trait-to-trait covariance along with other functionalities for genetic analysis and field trial analysis to enhance the genome-assisted prediction capabilities of researchers.
Noise pollution and housing markets: A spatial hedonic analysis for La Plata City

Several cities around the world are affected by high levels of noise pollution. In fact, noise pollution is one of the main problems affecting the quality of life in cities. In this sense, noise, understood as an environmental stressor, can cause significant health problems, including sleep and learning disorders, memory troubles, lack of motivation and increase in irritability and aggressiveness. This work analyzes the value that individuals place on living in quieter areas. Using hedonic price models, we obtained an accurate assessment of the marginal willingness to pay of individuals to reduce noise pollution. The main result highlight the relevance of this topic: a buyer is willing to pay around 1.9% less for each decibel of noise around the house. Such result is especially relevant in the design of noise mitigation policies, as it determines whether the benefits of the policies designed to reduce noise pollution exceed their implementation costs.
Dipsticks with Reflectometric Readout of an NIR Dye for Determination of Biogenic Amines

Electrospun nanofibers (ENFs) are remarkable analytical tools for quantitative analysis since they are inexpensive, easily produced in uniform homogenous mats, and provide a high surface area-to-volume ratio. Taking advantage of these characteristics, a near-infrared (NIR)-dye was doped as chemosensor into ENFs of about 500 nm in diameter electrospun into 50 µm thick mats on indium tin oxide (ITO) supports. The mats were made of cellulose acetate (CA) and used as a sensor layer on optical dipsticks for the determination of biogenic amines (BAs) in food. The ENFs contained the chromogenic amine-reactive chameleon dye S0378 which is green and turns blue upon formation of a dye-BA conjugate. This SN1-reaction of the S0378 dye with various BAs was monitored by reflectance measurements at 635 nm where the intrinsic absorption of biological material is low. The difference of the reflectance before and after the reaction is proportional to BA levels from 0.04–1 mM. The LODs are in the range from 0.03–0.09 mM, concentrations that can induce food poisoning but are not recognized by the human nose. The calibration plots of histamine, putrescine, spermidine, and tyramine are very similar and suggesting the use of the dipsticks to monitor the total sample BA content. Furthermore, the dipsticks are selective to primary amines (both mono- and diamines) and show low interference towards most nucleophiles. A minute interference of proteins in real samples can be overcome by appropriate sample pretreatment. Hence, the ageing of seafood samples could be monitored via their total BA content which rose up to 21.7 ± 3.2 µmol/g over six days of storage. This demonstrates that optically doped NFs represent viable sensor and transducer materials for food analysis with dipsticks.
An evolutionary analysis of franchise firms

Abstract This study uses an evolutionary perspective to examine the relationship between profit and growth. The evolutionary perspective argues that firm growth refers to the diffusion of fitter routines of the firm. In order to apply this evolutionary view, we investigate franchise data by using various regression techniques such as pooled OLS, fixed/random effects, dynamic GMM, and split-sample regressions. Overall, the empirical results support the positive relationship. Some more findings are: (i) the positive relationship is pronounced for the traditional measure rather than the “evolutionary” measure; (ii) the dynamic GMM regressions show that the positive effect of profit on growth is found only when using the evolutionary measure, which implies that the idea of evolutionary analysis fits well with the dynamic model. Also, the positive relationship is pronounced in small and young groups when using the evolutionary measure.
Characterization of Seasonal Difference of HULIS-C Sources from Water Soluble PM2.5 in Seoul, Korea: Probing Secondary Processes

ABSTRACT HUmic-LIke Substances (HULIS) consists of a significant fraction of water-soluble organic carbon (WSOC) and optically active brown carbon. Understanding seasonality in their abundance and sources is an important step to quantifying their impacts on air quality and climate. In this study, we characterized the seasonal variation of HULIS-C (the carbon component of HULIS) and identified primary and secondary sources contributing to HULIS-C at an urban site in Seoul, Korea by analyzing 131 PM2.5 samples collected over a year from October 2012 to September 2013. The HULIS-C in Seoul had an annual average of 2.0 µg m-3, and displayed a seasonality of highest abundance in the winter (2.7±1.3 µg m-3) and the lowest in the summer (1.7±0.8 µg m-3). Its fraction in WSOC reached up to 0.96 in the summer while remained relatively constant in the range of 0.4-0.6 in other seasons. Sources of HULIS-C were resolved using Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) and checked using inter-species relationships between HILIS-C and aerosol components. Specifically, secondary processes including aging and heterogeneous reaction (26%) contributes to the year-round background concentration of HULIS-C and fresh biomass burning (38%) and incomplete combustion (16%) were the major sources of underlying seasonal variation. We also found aging process in the secondary process had an important role in HULIS-C formation and was a dominant contributor in the summer while heterogenous reaction contributed considerably in other seasons. It implies that the different secondary processes in forming HULIS should be considered when the radiative forcing of brown carbon is estimated. Because these processes can lead the different physicochemical properties of HULIS in aerosols.
Preliminary Studies on Siderophore Production and Probiotic Effect of Bacteria Associated with the Guppy, Poecilia reticulata Peters, 1859

To study the possible use of probiotics in aquaculture, we evaluated the in vitro antagonism of antibacterial strains isolated from the guppy, Poecilia reticulata Peters, 1859 against the fish-pathogenic bacteria such as Aeromonas hydrophila , Vibrio cholerae , Flavobacterium , Acinetobacter and Alcaligenes . As iron is important in virulence and bacterial interactions, the effect of four isolates, namely, MBTU_PB1, MBTU_PB2, MBTU_PB3 and MBTU_PB4 was studied under iron-rich and iron-limited conditions which established the presence of a siderophore-based iron-sequestration mechanism in the isolates from guppy. All the four isolates produced siderophores in the presence of an iron-chelating compound, 2, 2’ dipyridyl. The ability to synthesize siderophores would undoubtedly be an advantage for survival, growth and pathogenicity of the isolates. All the investigated pathogenic strains displayed growth along each of the four selected strains under both iron-sufficient and iron-limited conditions. Both FeCl 3 and tetrazolium tests produced positive results for all the four selected strains indicating the presence of hydroxamate siderophores. On basis of quantitative assay, the isolate MBTU_PB2 produces maximum siderophore (2.71 mg . mL -1 ) followed by MBTU_PB3 (2.23 mg . mL -1 ), MBTU_PB4 (2.20 mg . mL -1 ) and MBTU_PB1 (1.26 mg . mL -1 ). These siderophore producing isolates could find potential applications, such as in the medical, fish farming and food microbiology industries.
A Universal Form of Power Law Relationships for River and Stream Channels

The description of the geomorphic characteristics in power law forms has been the subject of research, over the past 70 years, and has become the cornerstone of regime theory. However, just why power functions should represent such geomorphic relationships remains poorly understood. Hence, differences in the values of the regime exponents observed for different river systems remain largely unexplained. To address this issue, we derived generic forms of the power law relationships without postulating any power functions of the discharge. The theoretical approach accurately captures the systematic variations of the regime exponents shown by a number of large data sets from previous research. We also explain how frictional resistance is responsible for the systematic variability of regime exponents. Overall, our study provides a robust mechanism to describe the variations of the exponents, along with a deductive explanation of the power laws at the core of fluvial hydraulic geometry.
Quantification of genetic components of population differentiation in UK Biobank traits reveals signals of polygenic selection

The genetic architecture of most human complex traits is highly polygenic, motivating efforts to detect polygenic selection involving a large number of loci. In contrast to previous work relying on top GWAS loci, we developed a method that uses genome-wide association statistics and linkage disequilibrium patterns to estimate the genome-wide genetic component of population differentiation of a complex trait along a continuous gradient, enabling powerful inference of polygenic selection. We analyzed 43 UK Biobank traits and focused on PC1 and North-South and East-West birth coordinates across 337K unrelated British-ancestry samples, for which our method produced close to unbiased estimates of genetic components of population differentiation and high power to detect polygenic selection in simulations across different trait architectures. For PC1, we identified signals of polygenic selection for height (74.5±16.7% of 9.3% total correlation with PC1 attributable to genome-wide genetic effects; P = 8.4×10−6) and red hair pigmentation (95.9±24.7% of total correlation with PC1 attributable to genome-wide genetic effects; P = 1.1×10−4); the bulk of the signal remained when removing genome-wide significant loci, even though red hair pigmentation includes loci of large effect. We also detected polygenic selection for height, systolic blood pressure, BMI and basal metabolic rate along North-South birth coordinate, and height and systolic blood pressure along East-West birth coordinate. Our method detects polygenic selection in modern human populations with very subtle population structure and elucidates the relative contributions of genetic and non-genetic components of trait population differences.
PREDICTIVE PROCESSING OF IMPLICIT CAUSALITY IN A SECOND LANGUAGE

Abstract Implicit causality (IC) is a well-known phenomenon whereby certain verbs appear to create biases to remention either their subject or object in a causal dependent clause. This study investigated to what extent Korean learners of English made use of IC information for predictive processing at a discourse level, and whether L2 proficiency played a modulating role in this process. Results from a visual-world eye-tracking experiment showed early use of IC information in both L1 and L2 listeners, yet the effect was weaker and emerged later in the L2 group. None of three independent and intercorrelated proficiency measures modulated L2 listeners’ processing behavior. The findings suggest that L2 listeners are able to engage in prediction during real-time processing at a discourse level, although they did so to a more limited extent than native speakers in this study. We discuss these findings in light of similar evidence from other recent work.
Initiator Feeding Policies in Semi-Batch Free Radical Polymerization: A Monte Carlo Study

A Monte Carlo simulation algorithm is developed to visualize the impact of various initiator feeding policies on the kinetics of free radical polymerization. Three cases are studied: (1) general free radical polymerization using typical rate constants; (2) diffusion-controlled styrene free radical polymerization in a relatively small amount of solvent; and (3) methyl methacrylate free radical polymerization in solution. The number- and weight-average chain lengths, molecular weight distribution (MWD), and polymerization time were computed for each initiator feeding policy. The results show that a higher number of initiator shots throughout polymerization at a fixed amount of initiator significantly increases average molecular weight and broadens MWD. Similar results are also observed when most of the initiator is added at higher conversions. It is demonstrated that one can double the molecular weight of polystyrene and increase its dispersity by 50% through a four-shot instead of a single shot feeding policy. Similar behavior occurs in the case of methyl methacrylate, while the total time drops by about 5%. In addition, policies injecting initiator at high monomer conversions result in a higher unreacted initiator content in the final product. Lastly, simulation conversion-time profiles are in agreement with benchmark literature information for methyl methacrylate, which essentially validates the highly effective and flexible Monte Carlo algorithm developed in this work.
A Review of Polysaccharide-Zinc Oxide Nanocomposites as Safe Coating for Fruits Preservation

Safe coating formulated from biopolymer can be an alternative for better packaging for fruits. Among biopolymers used for safe coating, polysaccharides attracted more attention due to its biocompatibility and edibility. However, polysaccharide-based materials have weaknesses such as low water barrier and mechanical properties which result in lower capability on preserving the coated fruits. Hence, the incorporation of nanoparticles (NPs) such as zinc oxide (ZnO) is expected to increase the ability of polysaccharide-based coating for the enhancement of fruit shelf life. In this review paper, the basic information and the latest updates on the incorporation of ZnO NPs into the polysaccharide-based safe coating for fruit are presented. Various research has investigated polysaccharide-ZnO nanocomposite safe coating to prolong the shelf life of fruits. The polysaccharides used include chitosan, alginate, carrageenan, cellulose, and pectin. Overall, polysaccharide-ZnO nanocomposites can improve the shelf life of fruits by reducing weight loss, maintaining firmness, reducing the ripening process, reducing respiration, reducing the oxidation process, and inhibiting microbial growth. Finally, the challenges and potential of ZnO NPs as an active agent in the safe coating application are also discussed.
Diversity, natural habitats, ethnobotany and conservation of the flora of the Macta marches (North-West Algeria)

ABSTRACT A floristic, ethnobotanical and natural habitat study was carried out in the wetlands of the Macta marshes in northwest Algeria. The specimens obtained made it possible to identify 89 taxa of plants belonging to 32 botanical families dominated by the Amaranthaceae and Asteraceae. Analysis of the chorology of the plants has shown dominance of the Mediterranean element, but only 3 endemic taxa are recognized. Five of the taxa are considered rare and 4 are protected in Algeria; 5 have an IUCN status of minor consideration and Spergularia doumerguei P. Monnier has the status of vulnerable. Analysis of local plant communities has shown the existence of 6 plant groups within 3 types of natural habitats that have been mapped. The ethnobotanical study carried out on 100 inhabitants of the study area made it possible to recognize 73 useful plants of which 69 are used for medicinal purposes.
Adaptive habitat preferences in the Tawny Owl Strix aluco

ABSTRACT Capsule: Tawny Owls Strix aluco occupying nest boxes preferred habitats which were positively associated with the probability of nesting success. Aims: We aimed to determine whether or not: (1) Tawny Owls showed habitat preferences when occupying nest boxes; (2) nesting performance was related to the habitats around occupied nest boxes and (3) habitat availability had changed around available and occupied nest boxes between 1995–2004 and 2005–14. Methods: Tawny Owls were studied using nest boxes erected in a commercial forest. During nest boxes checks (724 cases), data on occupancy and nesting performance (88 cases) were recorded, and habitat within a 0.4 km radius around nest boxes was analysed. Results: Tawny Owls had preferences for clearings within forests, mature forests and grasslands but avoided young forests. We found a positive relationship between nesting success and abundance of clearings within the forest, and a negative relationship between nesting success and abundance of young forests. A change in habitat preferences over the two decades was evident, but habitat availabilities remained similar. Conclusions: Findings indicate adaptive habitat selection in Tawny Owls because preferred habitats were associated with higher fitness and this type of habitat became more frequently selected over time.
Brokers and Saboteurs: Actor Roles in Destination Innovation Network Development

ABSTRACT In many tourist destinations, innovation network development is complicated because relevant actors have divergent interests with respect to destination development. This article reports a longitudinal case study of a destination innovation network within a small tourist destination. The network in question formed in spite of fierce conflict between destination actors. The article illustrates how different network actor roles make innovation network development possible, and how other roles make it troublesome. The findings emphasise how the right mix, timing, and interplay of various actor roles is crucial for innovation network building in conflict-dominated tourist destinations.
Formal Verification of Bootstrapping Remote Secure Key Infrastructures (BRSKI) Protocol Using AVISPA

The last decade has seen signiﬁcant growth in the number of IoT devices. These devices can onboard the network and connect to each other. The process through which a new IoT device connects to the network and subsequently enables its services is called bootstrapping . A single entity connecting large numbers of new IoT devices to networks makes manual bootstrapping infeasible. It requires an automated system to enable a new device to be located and securely onboard the network. The Bootstrapping Remote Secure Key Infrastructure (BRSKI) protocol is one of the well-known protocols that provides a way for secure device onboarding. In this work, we present the ﬁrst formal security analysis of the BRSKI protocol using a veriﬁcation tool called AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications). AVISPA provides a formal security validation of any network protocol by building and analyzing the formal security models of that protocol’s operations