Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Method for Determining Body Weight Replacement Load during Squat Exercise in Weightlessness

One of the challenges for long duration space voyages is to maintain astronaut’s health. Studies on Astronauts in the Mir space station have confirmed a loss of 1-2% in bone mass density for each month. They are prone to lose as much as 20% of their bone strength in the lower body which includes pelvis, hip bone, legs and feet over a six month duration of space flight. Muscle loss of 10 to 20 % was observed during short missions and up to 50% loss in long duration missions when appropriate countermeasures were not prescribed. The primary objective of this research is to develop a systematic means of determining the appropriate body weight replacement load under various conditions in weightlessness so that similar bone and muscle forces would be experienced as in 1g squat. The study involved obtaining motion capture data from four female subjects while performing a body weight squat at the Human Systems and Simulations Laboratory (HSSL) at the University of Cincinnati. In the 1g environment, the normalized peak muscle forces are 14.3 N/kg in the gluteal muscle group, 5.6 N/kg in the hamstrings, 35.9 N/kg in the quadriceps and 32.4 N/kg in the calf muscle group. The normalized peak joint reaction loads are 35.6 N/kg at the hip joint, 46.4 N/kg at the knee joint, 95.5 N/kg at the ankle joint and 16.7 N/kg at the lumbar joint. It was performed by varying the external loads at the shoulders from 50% BW to 150% BW in 10% increments. A weighted least squares calculation was then performed to determine the best external load for comparable joint moments, muscle forces, and joint reaction loads. The values of the best body weight replacement load were found to be 71%, 84% and 76% for joint moments, muscle forces, and joint reaction loads, respectively.
The electric field system of an excitable cell

The specific microscopic origins of electromagnetic (EM) fields in excitable cell tissue have been underdetermined for a long time. A better understanding of the microscopic EM field origins directly facilitates an understanding of the origins of EEG and MEG signals, along with the role of EM coupling in cell excitability, developmental cues, regulatory processes underlying learning, and the general brain dynamics involved in all of these and of cognition generally. With the aim of isolating and describing the most plausible originating mechanism, the fundamental laws of electromagnetism, as applied to excitable cell tissue, were subjected to an extended review. A bridging form of the macroscopic EM volume conduction equations was constructed that was specially adapted to reveal the microscopic origins of the endogenous EM fields. The basis of the specialization was a focus on coherence between regions of transmembrane current activity expressed by a neuron during the passage of an action potential throughout its structure. A computational exploration of the equations, applied to a large, biologically realistic pyramidal cell, demonstrated that the coherent transmembrane current activity of spiking neurons can express a faint, unified, spatially extended, “line-of-sightactive” extra-neural EM field with complex structure and dynamics, all based on the operation of individual dipoles created by single ion channels, small ion channel aggregates, and large aggregates of the kind found in the synaptic cleft and elsewhere. The result is highly suggestive of an additional “line-of-sight” regulatory mechanism implemented as feedback delivered by EM coupling. This is consistent with recent empirical observations suggesting that this mechanism exists and operates in cortical tissue.
Narrow‐Band Screen‐Space Fluid Rendering

This paper presents a novel and practical screen‐space liquid rendering for particle‐based fluids for real‐time applications. Our rendering pipeline performs particle filtering only in a narrow‐band around the boundary particles to provide a smooth liquid surface with volumetric rendering effects. We also introduce a novel boundary detection method allowing the user to select particle layers from the liquid interface. The proposed approach is simple, fast, memory‐efficient, easy to code and it can be adapted straightforwardly in the standard screen‐space rendering methods, even in GPU architectures. We show through a set of experiments how the prior screen‐space techniques can be benefited and improved by our approach.
The Nutritious Supply Chain: Optimizing Humanitarian Food Aid

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) is the largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide, reaching around 80 million people with food assistance in 75 countries each year. To deal with the operational complexities inherent to its mandate, WFP has been developing tools to assist their decision makers with integrating the supply chain decisions across departments and functional areas. This paper describes a mixed integer linear programming model that simultaneously optimizes the food basket to be delivered, the sourcing plan, the routing plan, and the transfer modality of a long-term recovery operation for each month in a pre-defined time horizon. By connecting traditional supply chain elements to nutritional objectives, we made significant breakthroughs in the operational excellence of WFP's most complex operations, such as Iraq and Yemen. We show how we used optimization to reduce the operational costs in Iraq by 17%, while still supplying 98% of the nutritional targets. Additionally, we show how we are using optimization in Yemen to manage the scale-up of the existing operation from three to six million beneficiaries.
“The most relaxing song in the world”? A comparative study

The objectives of the current study were to obtain four physiological measures sensitive to stress and compare the nature of their decline after a stress task while listening to different sounds. Particular focus was placed on examining the ability of the song “Weightless”, which has been heralded as “the most relaxing song in the world,” to reduce acute stress as measured physiologically. A single-subjects design was deployed with 57 university students acting as participants. Outcome measures were skin conductance, heart rate, respiration rate, and respiration depth that were obtained during a 4-min rest period containing the sound conditions (silence, monaural beats [6 and 16 Hz], aircraft noise,“Weightless”) and referenced to a proceeding stress task. “Weightless” and the 6-Hz monaural beat had significantly lower mean skin conductance than the reference condition (silence), but no differences were noted for rate of decline or final asymptote. Furthermore, after 4 min, “Weightless” was associated with a 36.09% decrease in skin conductance level, favorable to that reported by the song’s creators. In terms of heart rate decline, “Weightless” was no more effective than any other of the sound conditions, while for respiration rate, it was significantly less effective than silence and the 6-Hz monaural beat. Overall, there was evidence that the song “Weightless” was an effective tool to reduce acute stress.
Emotion Recognizing by a Robotic Solution Initiative (EMOTIVE Project)

Background: Emotion recognition skills are predicted to be fundamental features in social robots. Since facial detection and recognition algorithms are compute-intensive operations, it needs to identify methods that can parallelize the algorithmic operations for large-scale information exchange in real time. The study aims were to identify if traditional machine learning algorithms could be used to assess every user emotions separately, to relate emotion recognizing in two robotic modalities: static or motion robot, and to evaluate the acceptability and usability of assistive robot from an end-user point of view. Methods: Twenty-seven hospital employees (M = 12; F = 15) were recruited to perform the experiment showing 60 positive, negative, or neutral images selected in the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) database. The experiment was performed with the Pepper robot. Concerning experimental phase with Pepper in active mode, a concordant mimicry was programmed based on types of images (positive, negative, and neutral). During the experimentation, the images were shown by a tablet on robot chest and a web interface lasting 7 s for each slide. For each image, the participants were asked to perform a subjective assessment of the perceived emotional experience using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM). After participants used robotic solution, Almere model questionnaire (AMQ) and system usability scale (SUS) were administered to assess acceptability, usability, and functionality of robotic solution. Analysis wasperformed on video recordings. The evaluation of three types of attitude (positive, negative, andneutral) wasperformed through two classification algorithms of machine learning: k-nearest neighbors (KNN) and random forest (RF). Results: According to the analysis of emotions performed on the recorded videos, RF algorithm performance wasbetter in terms of accuracy (mean ± sd = 0.98 ± 0.01) and execution time (mean ± sd = 5.73 ± 0.86 s) than KNN algorithm. By RF algorithm, all neutral, positive and negative attitudes had an equal and high precision (mean = 0.98) and F-measure (mean = 0.98). Most of the participants confirmed a high level of usability and acceptability of the robotic solution. Conclusions: RF algorithm performance was better in terms of accuracy and execution time than KNN algorithm. The robot was not a disturbing factor in the arousal of emotions.
Six emotional stages of organisational change: Conceptualisation and scale development

This research designs, implements and validates a five-point Likert-type scale to measure the six emotional stages of organisational change. The results propose a scale with only 31 items after analysing the responses of a total of 1,220 employees and submitting the developed scale to the validity recommended in the literature in five phases and four studies: item generation, scale purification, scale dimensionality, scale validation and nomological validity. Thus, our research extends the literature and provides the first tool to measure the six emotional stages of change. Through the understanding and use of our scale, future research will be able to identify potential counterproductive and conflicting behaviours generated in organisations when implementing change and associate them with each of the six emotional stages described in the literature. Organisational changes, when perceived as unfavourable, provoke emotional changes in most employees, giving rise to behaviours that can become barriers that are difficult to overcome. Our scale will allow us to continue to expand the literature in this field.
Power and frequency bandwidth improvement of piezoelectric energy harvesting devices using phase-shifted synchronous electric charge extraction interface circuit

This article presents a new way to control the synchronous electric charge extraction interface circuit, which was formerly developed to improve the performances of piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting devices. An analytical model for energy harvesting systems including this new technique, called phase-shift synchronous electric charge extraction, is proposed. This model is then used to study the properties of this new control scheme in the cases of low and high electromechanical coupling. Contrary to the synchronous electric charge extraction technique which exhibited significant improvements in terms of harvested power for piezoelectric devices with low electromechanical coupling, the phase-shift synchronous electric charge extraction technique shows capability to increase the harvested power up to the theoretical limit for piezoelectric devices with high electromechanical coupling. In addition, the presented theoretical results show that the frequency bandwidth of piezoelectric energy harvesting devices may be substantially increased.
A fault location method applied in power distribution systems based on k-NN classifiers parameterized using genetic algorithms and the reactance estimation

In this paper, a parameterization strategy of a k nearest neighbors (k-NN) based fault locator is described. This technique is complemented by a well validated location method based on the estimation of the fault impedance. This hybrid strategy is validated in a real power distribution feeder, having obtained acceptable results. Finally and as an important advantage of the here proponed methodology, it is remarkable the easy implementation process, considering real distribution feeders (more than 100 nodes).
Suppression Method of Optical Noises in Resonator-Integrated Optic Gyroscopes

Resonator-integrated optical gyroscopes have advantages such as all-solid-state, on-chip integration, miniaturized structure, and high precision. However, many factors deteriorate the performance and push it far from the shot-noise limited theoretical sensitivity. This paper reviews the mechanisms of various noises and their corresponding suppression methods in resonator-integrated optical gyroscopes, including the backscattering, the back-reflection, the polarization error, the Kerr effect, and the laser frequency noise. Several main noise suppression methods are comprehensively expounded through inductive comparison and reasonable collation. The new noise suppression technology and digital signal processing system are also addressed.
Functionalized chitosan nanoparticles for cutaneous delivery of a skin whitening agent: an approach to clinically augment the therapeutic efficacy for melasma treatment

Abstract The increase in the production of melanin level inside the skin prompts a patient-inconvenient skin color disorder namely; melasma. This arouses the need to develop efficacious treatment modalities, among which are topical nano-delivery systems. This study aimed to formulate functionalized chitosan nanoparticles (CSNPs) in gel form for enhanced topical delivery of alpha-arbutin as a skin whitening agent to treat melasma. Ionic gelation method was employed to prepare α-arbutin-CSNPs utilizing a 24 full factorial design followed by In vitro, Ex vivo and clinical evaluation of the nano-dispersions and their gel forms. Results revealed that the obtained CSNPs were in the nanometer range with positive zeta potential, high entrapment efficiency, good stability characteristics and exhibited sustained release of α-arbutin over 24 h. Ex vivo deposition of CSNPs proved their superiority in accumulating the drug in deep skin layers with no transdermal delivery. DSC and FTIR studies revealed the successful amorphization of α-arbutin into the nanoparticulate system with no interaction between the drug and the carrier system. The comparative split-face clinical study revealed that α-arbutin loaded CSNPs hydrogels showed better therapeutic efficacy compared to the free drug hydrogel in melasma patients, as displayed by the decrease in: modified melasma area and severity index (mMASI) scores, epidermal melanin particle size surface area (MPSA) and the number of epidermal monoclonal mouse anti–melanoma antigen recognized by T cells-1 (MART-1) positive cells which proved that the aforementioned system is a promising modality for melasma treatment.
Preparation, Microstructure and Thermal Conductivity of Plasma-Sprayed (Y0.8Gd0.2)3Al5O12 Coatings

Garnet-type rare earth aluminate compounds are one class of promising potential candidate materials for thermal barrier coatings (TBCs). In this paper, (Y0.8Gd0.2)3Al5O12 (GYAG) coatings are fabricated by air plasma spraying, with the microstructure, high-temperature phase stability, and thermal conductivity investigated. The results showed that the as-deposited GYAG coating was relatively dense, and contained garnet-type (Y0.8Gd0.2)3Al5O12 phase and a small amount of (Y,Gd)AlO3 and amorphous phases. The crystallized GYAG coating exhibited good phase stability from room temperature to 1450 °C. The coating had the lowest thermal conductivity of 1.17 W·m−1·K−1 at 800 °C, approximately 15% lower than that of the yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) coating. After heat treatment at 1100 °C, the coating became denser with some fine grain precipitation, and formed a number of transverse and longitudinal cracks.
Prevalence of Vitamin D Deficiency and Insufficiency in Kosovo Population

BACKGROUND: Vitamin D deficiency is a global health problem, but it is not known about its status in the Kosovo population. AIM: The purpose of this study is to determine the status of Vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency in our population. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Data collection was done from January 2020 to July 2021, during which period blood samples were collected. The sampling was done for 769 selected subjects and statistical data (frequency, mean values, and standard deviation) have been analyzed for 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] concentration. They were categorized by age group, gender, and level of 25(OH)D. The prevalence and percentage of Vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency in the study population were evaluated. RESULTS: The mean concentration of 25(OH)D in the serum of the study group was 18.3 ng/ml. The mean value was significantly lower for females when compared for that of males (17.89 and 19.58 ng/ml, respectively), with p < 0.0035, but there was no significant difference between age groups. The level of 25(OH)D less than 20 ng/ml was observed in 62% of the cases in our study population with a slight difference between female (63.6%) and male (57.2%) group. The age group of >60 had 25(OH)D deficiency in 62.3% of cases when compared to other age group categories. Vitamin D deficiency was present in 20.2% of cases; meanwhile, its insufficiency was present in 41.9% of cases. Vitamin D deficiency was observed in 21.1% of females and 17.1% of males, while 42.4% of females, respectively, and 40.1% of males had Vitamin D insufficiency. CONCLUSION: The mean values of 25(OH)D in the study population are relatively low, which corresponds to significant Vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency in all age groups, and which may also have serious implications for their overall health.
Burpee Interval Training Is Associated With a More Favorable Affective Valence and Psychological Response Than Traditional High Intensity Exercise

Acute psychological responses to physical activity may help explain long-term adherence to it. Thus, we compared acute psychological responses to different exercise protocols with identical durations. Eighteen moderately active young adults [Mage = 23, SD = 3 years; MVO2max (maximum oxygen consumption) = 42.8, SD = 4.3 mL·kg−1·min−1; MBMI (body mass index) = 24, SD = 2 kg·m−2] completed three low-volume exercise sessions in a crossover research design: (a) sprint interval training (SIT), (b) burpee interval training (BIT) requiring 10 × 5 second efforts with 35 seconds of passive recovery, and (c) a single bout of vigorous intensity continuous training (VICT) requiring 6 minutes and 5 seconds of running at ∼85% of peak heart rate (HRpeak). We assessed participants’ ratings of perceived exertion (RPE), affective valence, enjoyment, intention, preference, and self-reported recovery and wellness before, during, and after each session. BIT was associated with significantly greater enjoyment, preference, and exercise intention (at 5 × week) than VICT (p ≤ .05). SIT elicited greater RPE (M = 5.38, SD = 2.00) than both BIT (M = 2.88, SD = 1.23) and VICT (M = 3.55, SD = 1.38) (p ≤ .05), and we observed a higher increase in RPE over time with SIT versus BIT (p = .019). For affective valence, SIT (M = 0.55, SD = 2.12) elicited a more aversive response than both BIT (M = 2.55, SD = 1.09) and VICT (M = 1.94, SD = 1.51) (p ≤ .05), and there was a higher increase in this aversive response to SIT over time (p < .05). Forty-eight-hour postexercise session muscle soreness was significantly lower with VICT than with BIT (p = .03). Overall, BIT was associated with more positive psychological responses than SIT and VICT.
OFDM System Performance Evaluation under Different Fading Channels and Channel Coding using Matlab Simulink

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a form of Multicarrier Modulation (MCM) technique in which larger bandwidth is divided into parallel narrow bands each of which is modulated by different subcarriers. All the subcarriers are orthogonal to each other and hence it reduces the interference among various subcarriers. OFDM technique is an efficient modulation technique used in certain wired and wireless application. During transmission, the transmitted signal can travel from transmitter to receiver over multiple reflective paths in case of wireless communication system which results to multipath fading and produces variation in amplitude, phase and angle of the received signal. The signal which is transmitted from BTS (base transceiver station) may undergo multiple reflections from the buildings nearby, before reaching the mobile station. This paper discusses the performance of OFDM system using various fading channels and channel coding. The parameter which is known as Bit error rate (BER) is calculated for different fading channels (AWGN, Rayleigh and Rician) for different digital modulation (BPSK, QPSK and QAM) and Channel coding(linear/ Cyclic coding). The tool which is used to evaluate the BER parameter is Matlab Simulink.
Enhancement of Methane Catalysis Rates in Methylosinus trichosporium OB3b

Particulate methane monooxygenase (pMMO), a membrane-bound enzyme having three subunits (α, β, and γ) and copper-containing centers, is found in most of the methanotrophs that selectively catalyze the oxidation of methane into methanol. Active sites in the pMMO of Methylosinus trichosporium OB3b were determined by docking the modeled structure with ethylbenzene, toluene, 1,3-dibutadiene, and trichloroethylene. The docking energy between the modeled pMMO structure and ethylbenzene, toluene, 1,3-dibutadiene, and trichloroethylene was −5.2, −5.7, −4.2, and −3.8 kcal/mol, respectively, suggesting the existence of more than one active site within the monomeric subunits due to the presence of multiple binding sites within the pMMO monomer. The evaluation of tunnels and cavities of the active sites and the docking results showed that each active site is specific to the radius of the substrate. To increase the catalysis rates of methane in the pMMO of M. trichosporium OB3b, selected amino acid residues interacting at the binding site of ethylbenzene, toluene, 1,3-dibutadiene, and trichloroethylene were mutated. Based on screening the strain energy, docking energy, and physiochemical properties, five mutants were downselected, B:Leu31Ser, B:Phe96Gly, B:Phe92Thr, B:Trp106Ala, and B:Tyr110Phe, which showed the docking energy of −6.3, −6.7, −6.3, −6.5, and −6.5 kcal/mol, respectively, as compared to the wild type (−5.2 kcal/mol) with ethylbenzene. These results suggest that these five mutants would likely increase methane oxidation rates compared to wild-type pMMO.
Collision Avoidance System using State Dependent Riccati Equation Technique: An Experimental Robustness Evaluation

The capacity of a vehicle to avoid collisions is predominantly defined by the friction potential of the tyres. A robustness analysis of a Collision Avoidance System is executed by simulation and experiments for extreme changes in tyre friction. The collision avoidance controller which utilizes steering angle is based on the State Dependent Riccati Equation technique. This technique can consider nonlinearities and is fault tolerant by design. The controller has been extended with an estimation concept to obtain information of the road friction prior to execution of the steering action. The friction estimation concept is experimentally evaluated and the results show a reproducible reduction of the friction after entering a low friction road section. With a simulation study the control performance for varying conditions is elaborated, whereas experimental results are provided for extreme conditions of combined slip. The results demonstrate that the controller is capable to achieve collision avoidance for the variety of driving conditions with sufficient stability.