Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inquiries into the absence of extended globular clusters in the Milky Way galaxy

Thirteen stellar objects known as extended globular clusters were found in the Halo of the Andromeda Galaxy. Three of these extended clusters have quantitative properties which are subsequently used to determine whether clusters of extended size could survive in the orbits of the Milky Way Galaxy. The question of whether extended clusters could survive in the orbits of the Milky Way, is interesting to explore because Astronomers hypothesize that the existence of these rare objects is not restricted to M31. However, none have been found in the Milky Way to date; and it is the purpose of this report to begin to investigate whether this fact is indeed curious or whether there is a plausible explanation for why they are absent. Two major factors affecting the likelihood of extended clusters surviving in the Milky Way Galaxy were investigated; namely, Tidal effects on the extended clusters in the orbits of the Milky Way; and the comparative cluster distribution of both Galaxies. The resulting data reveal that the cluster distribution in M31 favors the existence of extended globular clusters more than that of the Milky Way Galaxy; and that tidal shredding would play a prominent role in removing most of the extended clusters from the Milky Way, if they were present in the first place; however, despite the latter, a small fraction of extended clusters could still survive despite the tidal forces present in these orbits.
Bose–Einstein condensate in a double-well potential: Feynman path integral variational approach

A Bose–Einstein condensate in a double-well potential is considered by using the Feynman path integral theory combined with a variational approach. The system consists of N interacting bosons confined in the double well which is taken as a harmonic potential with a Gaussian barrier. The calculation is carried out within the first cumulant approximation measured with respect to the harmonic action containing variational parameters. Assuming a separable expression for the trial action corresponds to the usual mean field approximation. Performing the variational calculations, we obtain analytical results for the ground state energy and its condensate wavefunction. Using a projection onto the odd contributions, the first excited state energy and condensate wavefunction are determined, too. We find very good agreement with a full numerical solution of the Gross–Pitaevskii equation over the full range of potential parameters.
Microwave emission from the coronae of late-type dwarf stars

We present VLA microwave observatios of 14 late-type dwarf and subgiant stars ad binary systems. In this extensive set of observations we detected four sources at 6 cm (chi/sup 1/ Ori, UV Cet, YY Gem, and Wolf 630AB) and found low upper limits for the remaining stars. The microwave luminosities of the nondetected F--K dwarfs are as small as 10/sup -2/ those of the dMe stars. The detected emission is slowly variable in all cases and is consistent with gyroresonant emission from thermal electrons spiralig in magnetic fields of about 300 gauss if the source sizes are as large as R/R/sub asterisk/roughly-equal3--4. This would correspond to magnetic fields that are probably in the range 10/sup 3/--10/sup 4/ gauss at the photospheric level. These photospheric field strengths are somewhat larger than have been observed so far in G--K dwarfs. An alternative mechanism is gyrosynchrotron emission from a relatively small number of electrons (only 10/sup -3/ the number of ambient electrons) with effective temperature, T/sub eff/>10/sup 8/ K. This mechanism is consistent with much smaller and presumably more realistic source sizes. Observations of YY gem dMle+dMle) at a number of phase are consistent with maximum but variable microwave flux at the samemore » phase as miximum plage and central meridian passage of a large starspot of the secondary star. If confirmed by subsequent observations, this provides the first direct evidence that the emission process is magnetic in character on dMe stars. « less
Cauchy problems for second order hyperbolic differential equations with constant coefficients

1. It is well known [1] that there is a one-to-one relation between solutions of the Darboux equation and the wave equation. The purpose of this paper is to show that some recent results in the fractional calculus can be used to obtain a similar connection between solutions of Darboux's equation and second order linear hyperbolic differential equations with constant coefficients.
New method for high performance multiply-accumulator design

This study presents a new method of 4-pipelined high-performance split multiply-accumulator (MAC) architecture, which is capable of supporting multiple precisions developed for media processors. To speed up the design further, a novel partial product compression circuit based on interleaved adders and a modified hybrid partial product reduction tree (PPRT) scheme are proposed. The MAC can perform 1-way 32-bit, 4-way 16-bit signed/unsigned multiply or multiply-accumulate operations and 2-way parallel multiply add (PMADD) operations at a high frequency of 1.25 GHz under worst-case conditions and 1.67 GHz under typical-case conditions, respectively. Compared with the MAC in 32-bit microprocessor without interlocked piped stages (MIPS), the proposed design shows a great advantage in speed. Moreover, an improvement of up to 32% in throughput is achieved. The MAC design has been fabricated with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) 90-nm CMOS standard cell technology and has passed a functional test.
Guidance, Navigation and Control for Autonomous Cooperative Docking of CubeSats

Is it possible to dock CubeSats in Low Earth Orbit? The challenges are mainly associated with the level of miniaturisation. A docking mechanism was designed, built and tested in the laboratory. Results show that a relative precision better than 1 cm and 2 degrees is required for the docking. The docking mechanism and metrology system, composed of a monocular camera and sets of lightemitting diodes, are contained within 0.5U volume and can thus be used on nano-satellites. The chaser and target satellites have a complete 3-axis attitude pointing capability and are equipped with available CubeSats attitude sensors and actuators. The chaser is further equipped with a 6 degrees of freedom low-thrust cold gas propulsion system. Different robust control schemes have been investigated and their stability and performance assessed. Non-linear Monte Carlo simulations have been performed to assess the Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) performance and fuel consumption. Results show that the proposed GNC is robust to the various sources of uncertainties and that a lateral accuracy better than 5 mm is obtained at docking. Furthermore, it is not affected by the loss of the star trackers or by illumination conditions and can thus take place on a variety of orbits.
Appreciation of an alternative: Dutch alumni look back on their science master, a work-based learning vs a research-oriented approach

Abstract The Science, Business and Policy Program (SBP) of the University of Groningen has been a work-based learning program for science master students since two decades. This program, a direct consequence of the Bologna declaration of education in Europe, has a distinctive position in European science curricula. Here, we use a web-based survey (N = 242), comparing alumni perceptions on the SBP program (N = 111) with a research oriented master (ROM, N = 131). Alumni from both programs predominantly had a content-driven motivation to choose for either the ROM or SBP format. For SBP alumni, this preference was also inspired by the master’s focus on society and a career outside academia. We assessed self-perceived learning outcomes using an extended version of the Science Student Skills Inventory. Both groups were positive about the academic level of their program. Scientific content knowledge and practical research skills were perceived as sufficient by both groups, although significantly higher in the ROM group. Both groups were equally positive about obtained skills in academic reasoning and would have preferred more disciplinary content knowledge. The SBP group perceived their skills on teamwork, multidisciplinary working, leadership, ethical thinking and project work to be significantly higher compared to ROM alumni. The SBP group felt significantly more prepared for a career outside academia and the ROM group for a career in academia. Relatively the ROM group missed career preparation. Both specific work-based learning and classical research approaches were seen as valid ways to obtain a high-quality, science master level, although for different career ambitions.
The Quiet-Sun Differential Emission Measure from Radio and UV Measurements

In the present work we combine UV and radio observations of the quiet Sun to determine the differential emission measure (DEM) of the average quiet solar atmosphere from the photosphere (5600 K) to the corona. UV line intensities have been used to constrain the DEM above 30,000 K, and the radio spectrum from 1.5 to 345 GHz has been used to extend the DEM determination down to 5600 K. Radio observations are shown to provide a much more reliable diagnostic tool for DEM determination than UV and EUV lines at T < 30,000 K. The resulting average quiet-Sun DEM that we found is in excellent agreement with curves from the literature for temperatures larger than 60,000 K, but is lower than previous determinations by more than 1 order of magnitude in the 10,000-30,000 K temperature range. The present work determines the DEM below 10,000 K for the first time, in a temperature region where UV and EUV lines cannot be used.
Energy resolution and transport properties of CdTe-Timepix-Assemblies

CdTe is a promising material for the detection of γ- and X-rays as 1 mm thick CdTe sensors offer an absorption efficiency that is higher than 50 {%} for photon energies up to 120 keV. Therefore 1mm thick CdTe from Acrorad has been flip-chipped as the sensor material on a Timepix readout-electronics ASIC at the Freiburg Materials Research Center (FMF). The transport properties of the CdTe material are investigated by determining the μτ-product of the charge carriers by illuminating the non-collecting electrode with alpha particles. The method commonly used to determine the μτ-product for non-pixelated devices was adapted for the Medipix pixelated readout-electronics. The position of the alpha particles on the pixel matrix provides spatial information, which was used to create a mapping of the μτ-product. The energy resolutions and the positions of the noise edge of two CdTe-Timepix assemblies, one with a pixel pitch of 110 x 110 μm2 and another one with a pixel pitch of 55 x 55 μm2 were investigated by performing a threshold scan of a 241Am source. A comparison of the energy spectra obtained with the two assemblies with different pixel pitches confirms the strong dependence of charge sharing on the energy spectra, as expected.
Prey selectivity of the fringed filefish Monacanthus ciliatus (Pisces: Monacanthidae): role of prey accessibility

Laboratory experiments were conducted to measure prey selectivity of the fringed filefish Monacanthus ciliatus. Prey included 3 species of gammarid amphipods: Elasmopus levis, Melita appendiculata (Melitidae), and Lembos unicornis (Aoridae). The relative vulnerability of these species to predation was determined to be a function of their frequency of encounter. L. unicornis, a strikingly pigmented species, was disproportlonately consumed by filefish when placed in experimental aquaria with equal numbers of either E. levis or M appendiculata. We suggest that this species was encountered more frequently and therefore was more accessible to predation owing to its unique pattern of pigmentation. Results of these experiments were consistent with field data on selectivity of M. c-iliatus.
Structure et diversité de la communauté de protistes de la lagune de Havre-aux-Maisons, Canada

v Table des matières . vii Liste des tableaux.xi Liste des figures.xiii Liste des abréviations et des sigles . xv Remerciements . xix Avant-­‐propos . xxi Chapitre 1 : Introduction générale . 1 1.1 Les lagunes côtières . 1 1.2 Les protistes.3 1.2.1 Diversité des protistes . 3 1.2.2 Structure de la communauté de protistes. 5 1.2.3 Méthodologie employée . 5 1.3 Mytilus edulis (L.) . 8 1.3. 1 Description de l’espèce. 8 1.3. 2 Les acides gras . 9 1.3. 3 Méthodologie employée . 9 1.4 Site d’étude. 10 1.5 Structure de la thèse . 10 Chapitre 2 : Wind drives microbial eukaryote communities in a temperate closed lagoon . 13 Résumé. 13 Abstract.15 2.1 Introduction.17 2.2 Materials and Methods . 18 2.2.1 Sample collection. 18 2.2.2 Sample processing . 19 2.2.3 DNA amplification and sequencing. 20 2.2. 4 Bioinformatics analysis . 20 2.2. 5 Environmental data, statistical and model analysis . 21 2.3 Results . 22 2.3. 1 Environmental conditions. 22 2.3. 2 Flow cytometry. 24
Segmentação de faces em imagens no infravermelho térmico

The aim of this teses is to present a method for the automatic segmentation of face images captured in the thermal infrared, allowing for a large range of face rotations and expressions. The motivation behind this effort is to enable better performance of face recognition methods in the thermal infrared images. The teses discusses 8 different proposed approaches and compares their performance against three other previously published methods. The proposed approaches are based on statistical modelling of pixel intensities and active contour application, although several other image processing operations are also performed. We also study the performance of the fusion of 3 of the approaches under different rules (majority vote, OR and AND fusions). Experiments were performed on a total of 893 test images from 4 public available databases. The obtained results improve on previous existing methods up to 31.2% for the first measure error (E1) and up to 39.0% for the second measure (E2), depending on the method and database. Regarding the computational time, our proposals improve up to 75.4% when compared with the other proposals.
Leveraging Ferroelectric Stochasticity and In-Memory Computing for DNN IP Obfuscation

With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely used in different domains, such as computer vision, healthcare, social media, and defense. The hardware-level architecture of a DNN can be built using an in-memory computing-based design, which is loaded with the weights of a well-trained DNN model. However, such hardware-based DNN systems are vulnerable to model stealing attacks where an attacker reverse-engineers (REs) and extracts the weights of the DNN model. In this work, we propose an energy-efficient defense technique that combines a ferroelectric field effect transistor (FeFET)-based reconfigurable physically unclonable function (PUF) with an in-memory FeFET XNOR to thwart model stealing attacks. We leverage the inherent stochasticity in the FE domains to build a PUF that helps to corrupt the neural network’s (NN) weights when an adversarial attack is detected. We showcase the efficacy of the proposed defense scheme by performing experiments on graph-NNs (GNNs), a particular type of DNN. The proposed defense scheme is a first of its kind that evaluates the security of GNNs. We investigate the effect of corrupting the weights on different layers of the GNN on the accuracy degradation of the graph classification application for two specific error models of corrupting the FeFET-based PUFs and five different bioinformatics datasets. We demonstrate that our approach successfully degrades the inference accuracy of the graph classification by corrupting any layer of the GNN after a small rewrite pulse.
Inhibition of Synaptic Glutamate Exocytosis and Prevention of Glutamate Neurotoxicity by Eupatilin from Artemisia argyi in the Rat Cortex

The inhibition of synaptic glutamate release to maintain glutamate homeostasis contributes to the alleviation of neuronal cell injury, and accumulating evidence suggests that natural products can repress glutamate levels and associated excitotoxicity. In this study, we investigated whether eupatilin, a constituent of Artemisia argyi, affected glutamate release in rat cortical nerve terminals (synaptosomes). Additionally, we evaluated the effect of eupatilin in an animal model of kainic acid (KA) excitotoxicity, particularly on the levels of glutamate and N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor subunits (GluN2A and GluN2B). We found that eupatilin decreased depolarization-evoked glutamate release from rat cortical synaptosomes and that this effect was accompanied by a reduction in cytosolic Ca2+ elevation, inhibition of P/Q-type Ca2+ channels, decreased synapsin I Ca2+-dependent phosphorylation and no detectable effect on the membrane potential. In a KA-induced glutamate excitotoxicity rat model, the administration of eupatilin before KA administration prevented neuronal cell degeneration, glutamate elevation, glutamate-generating enzyme glutaminase increase, excitatory amino acid transporter (EAAT) decrease, GluN2A protein decrease and GluN2B protein increase in the rat cortex. Taken together, the results suggest that eupatilin depresses glutamate exocytosis from cerebrocortical synaptosomes by decreasing P/Q-type Ca2+ channels and synapsin I phosphorylation and alleviates glutamate excitotoxicity caused by KA by preventing glutamatergic alterations in the rat cortex. Thus, this study suggests that eupatilin can be considered a potential therapeutic agent in the treatment of brain impairment associated with glutamate excitotoxicity.
Efficacy of essence oil supplementation to feeds on volatile fatty acid production

Objective. Determine the effect of some plant extract supplementation to Total Mixed Ration (TMR), concentrate and hay on volatile fatty acid (VFA) production at 8 and 24 hours (h) using in vitro gas production technique in cattle. Material and methods. Three fistulated Holstein dairy cows were used for rumen fluid collection for application of in vitro gas production technique. Four essence oils (T. vulgaris, O. vulgare, S. aromaticum, Z. officinale) were used as plant extracts. Results. Essence oil supplementations to the examined feed groups had significant effect only on C2/C3 VFA level at 8 h in all feed groups (p<0.05). C2/C3 VFA level at 8 h significantly increased in the groups with Oregano 25 ppm supplementation for TMR and concentrate and in the groups with Thymol 25 ppm supplementation for hay. C3 VFA level at 8 h significantly increased in the group that received Syzygium 200 ppm supplementation for hay. Different plant extracts supplemented to TMR, concentrate and hay significantly affected C2, C3, IC4, IC5, C5 and C2/C3 VFA levels at 24 h (p<0.05). Conclusions. The findings of the study indicate that moderate doses of plant extracts result in increased VFA levels in ruminants while higher doses demonstrate the opposite effect.
Seismic Full-Waveform Inversion Using Deep Learning Tools and Techniques

I demonstrate that the conventional seismic full-waveform inversion algorithm can be constructed as a recurrent neural network and so implemented using deep learning software such as TensorFlow. Applying another deep learning concept, the Adam optimizer with minibatches of data, produces quicker convergence toward the true wave speed model on a 2D dataset than Stochastic Gradient Descent and than the L-BFGS-B optimizer with the cost function and gradient computed using the entire training dataset. I also show that the cost function gradient calculation using reverse-mode automatic differentiation is the same as that used in the adjoint state method.
A family of coverage criteria based on patterns to the test of metaprograms

Although there are several techniques for the automatic generation of test data based on grammars, few studies have been proposed to improve the test data generated by applying semantic restrictions. In this sense, we intend to contribute in this direction for the particular case of testing metaprograms, programs that have other programs as input. Currently, the natural alternative to testing this kind of program is using the grammar-based testing. That testing technique can be applied relatively easily, but with high costs, related to the generation and execution of the test set, and low effectiveness. Many researches and tools dedicated to the development of metaprograms make heavy use of pattern matching for their implementation and specification. In this case, the patterns offer an interesting source of information for creating tests that are syntactically valid and also satisfy semantic constraints. Given the limitation of grammar-based testing and pattern information on the metaprograms, we identified an opportunity to contribute to the improvement of the testing process for these programs. Therefore, the goal of this work is to evaluate the use of pattern information for the testing of pattern-based metaprograms and thus contribute to their testing process. In order to systematize the software testing process, a family of coverage criteria based on patterns is proposed to test pattern-based metaprograms efficiently and systematically. Four pattern-based coverage criteria are proposed, they are based on classical input space partitioning combination criteria. Furthermore, a hierarchical relationship between the criteria is presented. Therefore, different levels of rigor can be required by choosing the appropriate criterion. The validation of these contributions is made using a case study and empirical validation. The case study presents a reference instantiation for the test design process applied to a type checker implemented as metaprogram based on patterns. The type checker is tested using a test set generated by the pattern-based coverage criteria, and the quality of this set is evaluated using the mutation technique. The results obtained are compared with those produced by a test set generated by the grammar-based criteria. The experimental studies indicate the effectiveness of the application of these patternbased criteria and a gain of cost-return in relation to the grammar-based coverage criteria.
Performance of silica aerogels modified with amino functional groups in PB(II) and CD(II) removal from aqueous solutions

Performance of silica aerogels modified with amino functional groups in PB(II) and CD(II) removal from aqueous solutions The adsorption behavior of Pb(II) and Cd(II) ions in aqueous solutions on silica aerogels modified with amino propyl triethoxysilane was investigated as a function of pH, contact time, adsorbate concentration and adsorbent dose. It was found that maximum adsorption of Pb(II) and Cd(II) ions occurs at pH 6.0 and pH 8.0, respectively. The optimum contact time to obtain equilibrium adsorption with the modified silica aerogel was experimentally found to be around 48h. Adsorption isotherms clearly indicated that the adsorption behavior of metals ions on the modified silica aerogels is fitted well with both the Langmuir and Freundlich isotherms. The maximum adsorption capacities of Pb(II) and Cd(II) on modified silica aerogel were found to be 45.45mg/g and 35.71mg/g, respectively. The results indicated that silica aerogels modified with amino functional groups can be used as an efficient adsorbent in the removal of metal ions such as Pb(II) and Cd(II) from aqueous solutions.