Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Isolation and Characterization of Bioactive Compounds from Medicinal Plants of Ethiopia- A Review

Some plants having the medicinal value in form of chemical substances that produce a definite physiological action on the human body are called phytochemicals. Since the ancient time these phytochemicals are used to cure the disease in herbal and homeopathic medicines. These are non-nutritive substances, have protective or disease preventive property. There arises a need and therefore to screen medicinal plants for bioactive compounds as a basis for further biomedical studies. With advances in phytochemical techniques, several active principles of many medicinal plants have been isolated and introduced as valuable drug in modern systems of medicine. The most important of these bioactive compounds are alkaloids, flavonoids, tannins and phenolic compounds [1]. These are the important raw materials for drug production [2]. Most plants contain several compounds with antimicrobial properties for protection against aggressor agents, especially microorganisms [3]. At present 32% of drugs are introduced in to international marker which are plant origin [4].
Energy-Efficient Peer-to-Peer Computation Offloading Based on Non-Causal CPU-State Information

Scavenging the idling computation resources at the enormous number of mobile devices can be realized by peer-to-peer (P2P) computation offloading, for provide a new platform for implementing mobile edge computing. This paper exploits non-causal helper's CPU-state information to design energy-efficient P2P computation offloading policies for scavenging spare computation resources at peer mobiles. Specifically, we consider a P2P computing system where a user offloads computation of input-data to a helper. The helper controls the offloading process for the objective of minimizing the user's energy consumption based on a predicted helper's CPU- idling profile that specifies the amount of available computation resource for computing. The problem for energy-efficient P2P computation offloading is formulated as two sub-problems: the slave problem corresponding to adaptive offloading and the master one to data partitioning. Given a fixed offloaded data size, the adaptive offloading aims at minimizing the energy consumption for offloading by controlling the offloading rate under the deadline and buffer constraints. By deriving the necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimal solution, we characterize the structures of the optimal policy. Furthermore, we show that the problem of optimal data partitioning for offloading and local computing at the user is convex, admitting a simple solution using the sub-gradient method.
Draft Heterogeneity of Muscle Activity during Sedentary Behavior

Replacing sitting by standing has been hypothesized to reduce the health risks of sitting with an assumption that muscles are passive during sitting and active during standing. Interventions have been more effective in overweight (OW) than normal weight (NW) but their muscle activities have not been quantified. This study compared quadriceps and hamstring muscle EMG activity between 57 NW (BMI 22.5 ± 1.5 kg/m 2 , female n = 36) and 27 OW (BMI 28.4 ± 2.9 kg/m 2 , female n = 8) subjects during non-fatiguing standing (15s, EMGstanding) and sitting (30min). EMG amplitude was normalized to EMGMVC measured during maximal isometric knee extension and flexion (%EMGMVC) and sitting muscle inactivity and bursts were determined using four thresholds (60% / 90%EMGstanding and 1% / 2%EMGMVC). Comparisons were adjusted for sex, age, knee extension strength and the individual threshold. Standing EMG amplitude was 36% higher in OW (1.9 ± 1.5 %EMGMVC) than NW (1.4 ± 1.4 %EMGMVC, P < 0.05). During sitting, muscles were inactive 89.8 ± 12.7% of the measurement time with 12.7 ± 14.2 bursts/min across all thresholds. On average 6% more activity was recorded in NW than in OW with three out of four threshold conditions (P < 0.05 for 60% / 90%EMGstanding and 1%EMGMVC). In conclusion, OW had higher muscle activity amplitude during standing, but more muscle inactivity during sitting with 3/4 of threshold conditions tested. Interventions should test whether the observed heterogeneity in muscle activity affects the potential to gain cardio-metabolic benefits from replacing sitting with standing.
Overview of recent advances in the generation of human neurons and neural stem cells through reprogramming and differentiation techniques

Stem cell research could have a significant near-term public health impact with applications in cell-replacement therapies (treatments are in development for over 50 diseases), disease modeling and drug discovery. Recent advances have been achieved in techniques for reprogramming somatic cells directly to neurons and neural stem cells, and in differentiating pluripotent cells to neurons and neural stem cells. Neurons and neural stem cells are of particular translational interest due to the lack of effective clinical therapies for neurodegenerative disease. This analysis reviews recent reprogramming and differentiation research advances that relate to human neuron and neural stem cell generation. While these emerging techniques are promising, some of the processes are relatively new, and the fidelity and functionality of generated neurons and neural stem cells in clinical application is yet to be confirmed.
Ultra-Wideband Ridged Half-Mode Folded Substrate-Integrated Waveguide Filters

In this letter, compact ultra-wideband filters are designed by employing a novel ridged half-mode folded substrate-integrated waveguide (RHMFSIW) and double-ridged half-mode SIW (DRHMSIW). The RHMFSIW is proposed by loading the half-mode folded substrate integrated waveguide with a ridge, where the ridge introduces additional capacitance hence leading to a lower cutoff frequency and a smaller size. Compact ultra-wideband filters are designed and fabricated based on the RHMFSIW. Another novel DRHMSIW is developed to implement the tight coupling required in the ultra-wideband filters. To improve the out-of-band rejection while keeping a small size, mixed coupling is employed in the ultra-wideband filter to generate transmission zeros. The proposed filters demonstrate the advantage of high selectivity, low loss, compact size, and easy integration with other electronic systems.
A 93% Peak Efficiency Fully-Integrated Multilevel Multistate Hybrid DC–DC Converter

The general structure of a multilevel multistate dc–dc converter is introduced, which is a hybrid between inductor-based (buck) converters and capacitor-based (switched capacitor) converters. The control of the new converter is hybrid between switched capacitor converters and buck converters, where the coarse tuning of the output voltage is achieved through the selection of an appropriate operating region similar to an SC converter, while fine tuning is achieved through the adjustment of a duty cycle value similar to a buck converter. A silicon implementation of a four-level four-state hybrid converter is presented as a specific example of the general hybrid converter structure. A new state interleaving technique was employed resulting in an increased effective switching frequency of the converter. Silicon measurements of the integrated four-level four-state converter on a 65-nm GF technology show that the converter can cover a wide range of output voltage values achieving a peak efficiency of 93% with a power density of 47 mW/mm2. The implemented converter attains a response time in the sub- ${\mu }\text{s}$ range with output voltage ripples below 50 mV.
Real-Time Subpixel Fast Bilateral Stereo

Stereo vision technique has been widely used in robotic systems to acquire 3-D information. In recent years, many researchers have applied bilateral filtering in stereo vision to adaptively aggregate the matching costs. This has greatly improved the accuracy of the estimated disparity maps. However, the process of filtering the whole cost volume is very time consuming and therefore the researchers have to resort to some powerful hardware for the real-time purpose. This paper presents the implementation of fast bilateral stereo on a state-of-the-art GPU. By highly exploiting the parallel computing architecture of the GPU, the fast bilateral stereo performs in real time when processing the Middlebury stereo datasets.
ADRENAL CORTEX IN PERIPUBERTAL AND ADULT FEMALE RATS AFTER NEONATAL TREATMENT WITH SRIH-14

Neonatal female rats (3-7 days old) were injected subcutaneously twice daily with 20 μg of SRIH-14/100g b.w. for five consecutive days. The animals were sacrificed in the peripubertal (38 days old) or adult (80 days old) periods of life. Control rats were treated in the same way with identical volumes of saline. SRIH-14 led to significant reduction (p 0.05) changes in the morphometric parameters of adult adrenal cortex after SRIH-14 treatment compared with control females. It can be concluded that subcutaneously applied SRIH-14 in the neonatal period inhibits growth of adrenal ZG cells in female rats only up to the peripubertal stage, while the adrenal gland cortex recovers before mature adulthood is reached.
Morphological diversity and relationships in the A-genome cottons, Gossypium arboreum and G. herbaceum

The Asiatic or A-genome cottons, Gossypium arboreum L. and G. herbaceum L. , are potentially important genetic resources for cotton breeding programs. The National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS) contains approximately 400 accessions of these species, but little information is available on the diversity within the collection or on characteristics of individual accessions. This investigation was initiated to provide a morphological description of each accession. These data were used to evaluate the range of diversity represented within the collection and to address the questions of species and race distinctions. Multivariate techniques were used to assess similarities among accession and to evaluate morphological diameters contributing to the variation in each species
Contribution POTASSIUM CHANNELS IN EPITHELIAL CELLS

The broad array of K channels in epithelial cells includes voltage-dependent (mainly outward) and Ca-activated channels, and K channels modulated by adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Voltagedependent K channels mediate Na/K absorption and secretion; typically, they are found in the basolateral membrane and exhibit burst activity. Ca-activated K (Ca/K) channels regulate activity by decreasing Ca influx via voltage-gated Ca channels. Ca/K channels exhibit conductances of 4-300 pS, and have a low open probability (< 10) at the level of the resting membrane potential. ATP-sensitive channels have been observed mainly in insulin-secreting pancreatic ß-cells and in the urinary tract, where the open state is rapidly closed by ATP. The channels are voltage-dependent, exhibit burst activity, and, in the case of the urinary-tract cells, are Ca dependent. Chemical compounds that selectively open or block K channels have been exploited to characterize channels found in different cells, but no opener or blocker has been found that specifically affects only one type of K channel. Specialized model systems and recombinant techniques have led to a general understanding of the structure of K channels, but many important details remain to be determined. Keywords—Potassium channels, Epithelial cells
CNN for historic handwritten document search

While character recognition for printed text and handwriting in restricted cases is well studied, collections of historic documents provide a number of additional challenges. These include the complexities of cursive script, limited training data, and degradation of the documents themselves. We present initial work in whole-word recognition on the Marsden document archive held by the Hocken Collections in Dunedin, New Zealand. Based on transcriptions, but no word or character localisation information, we show that CNNs are a promising avenue for document search in such collections.
Joint Relay and Antenna Selection for Cognitive Radio-Inspired Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

This paper investigates the joint relay and antenna selection strategy for amplify-and-forward (AF) cognitive radio-inspired non-orthogonal multiple access (CR-NOMA) systems. The outage performance is analyzed for the cooperative CR- NOMA networks over Nakagami-m fading channels. The exact expression for the outage probability is derived in closed-form as well as the asymptotic expression. Based on the analytical results, the impacts of relay numbers, antenna numbers and fading parameters on outage performance are clearly revealed. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that CR-NOMA can meet different users' quality of service (QoS) requirements and achieve superior outage performance over NOMA with fixed power allocation (F-NOMA). Compared with orthogonal multiple access (OMA) relaying networks, CR-NOMA can achieve a significant performance gain and user fairness.
Diversity, Threats and Conservation of Herpetofauna in and around the Eastern Sinharaja

The Eastern Sinharaja is a moist montane tropical forest that falls within the Rakwana mountain range and is 30km 2 in area. Eastern Sinharaja is the home for many threatened endemic herpetofauna where seven species of anuran amphibians three agamids, one species of gecko are known to be spot endemics where all of them are considered to be critically endangered. The eastern Sinharaja is confronting different degrees of threats due to human disturbances including deforestation and habitat destruction due to cardamom and tea cultivation, the land degradation as a result of Illegal gem mining, extraction of forest resources, illicit timber felling, collection of non-woody products, wild cardamom, medicinal plants and firewood, setting fire to the forest and grasslands and the excessive usage of pesticides in plantations. The relative abundances of the above mentioned endemic herpetofauna is significantly low. Therefore it is assumed that the population size of these species is extremely low. Having a small land area, where the primary forest vegetation is rapidly declining, the herpetofaual populations are facing an imminent threat. Therefore, immediate conservation actions are recommended. Specific attention must be paid over restoration of regarded areas with native fast growing forest species and establishment of habitat corridors to bridge the neighboring forest patches to yield space and resources to sustain the minimum viable populations. Establishment of a buffer is imperative to mediate the human impacts. The landowners must be encouraged to adopt agro-forestry practices instead of monocultures like tea/cardamom plantation, allowing establishment of small populations of herpatofauna in those agroforestry plots adjoining the reserve. DOI: 10.4038/suslj.v6i1. 1685 Sabaragamuwa University Journal , vol 6, no. 1, pp 3-12
Extracting descriptive motion information from crowd scenes

An important contribution that automated analysis tools can generate for management of pedestrians and crowd safety is the detection of conflicting large pedestrian flows: this kind of movement pattern, in fact, may lead to dangerous situations and potential threats to pedestrian's safety. For this reason, detecting dominant motion patterns and summarizing motion information from the scene are inevitable for crowd management. In this paper, we develop a framework that extracts motion information from the scene by generating point trajectories using particle advection approach. The trajectories obtained are then clustered by using unsupervised hierarchical clustering algorithm, where the similarity is measured by the Longest Common Sub-sequence (LCS) metric. The achieved motions patterns in the scene are summarized and represented by using color-coded arrows, where speeds of the different flows are encoded with colors, the width of an arrow represents the density (number of people belonging to a particular motion pattern) while the arrowhead represents the direction. This novel representation of crowded scene provides a clutter free visualization which helps the crowd managers in understanding the scene. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Zero training processing technique for P300-based brain-computer interface

In the past recognition of P300-based Brain Computer Interface (BCI), depends on the experience increased through adjustment or training sessions before usage by applying supervised training sets to construct the classification model. In this paper, a new technique has been introduced for BCI data that requires no earlier training. The fundamental rule of this unsupervised technique is that the trial with true activation signal inside every block must be distinctive from whatever remains of the trials inside that block. Consequently, a measure that is delicate to this difference can be utilized to settle on a choice taking into account a single block with no earlier training. In addition, different algorithms of aggregating data from many trials have been applied to extend communication speed and bit rate. Aggregation strategies include simple average, Principle Component Analysis (PCA) and Probabilistic Principle Component Analysis (PPCA). This new technique is applied to experimental data for P300-based BCI for both healthy and disabled subjects. By comparing our results to the classification output results of the same data utilizing the same processing techniques but with different classification method, it is found that the results by averaging the sample individual cases show that the proposed technique supported Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) with effective performance reaches 98.61%, while the other reached 95.83%.
A bird's eye view of two mimetic tropical butterflies: coloration matches predator's sensitivity

Unprofitable prey with conspicuous warning signals are often mimicked by other species, which then gain protection from predators. How closely two mimetic species resemble one another depends upon the visual perception of the signal receiver. However, most studies of mimetic coloration have been conducted using only the human visual system, which differs greatly from that of most animals. To better understand mimicry, we should study mimetic visual signals through the eyes of the intended receiver. Here, we use avian visual models to test predictions of putative Batesian mimicry in two Amazonian butterflies, Mimoides pausanias and Heliconius sara. We calculated Just Noticeable Differences (JNDs) and tetrahedral color volumes for 11 different patches: iridescent blue, yellow bars, red spots and black background. Several color patches were not visually discriminable for both avian visual systems (UV/VIS and V/VIS), and visual discrimination (i.e. degree of mimicry) of color patches depended upon the avian visual system. These two butterfly species are more mimetic when viewed by their likely avian predators, which have V/VIS vision. Therefore, this mimetic assemblage may have evolved to be more spectrally accurate in the non-UV wavelengths which their avian predators are able to see. However, while many color patches of the two species were modeled to be difficult to discriminate, most color patches were not perfect matches regardless of visual system, and several patches were very poor mimics. Through this study we demonstrate the importance of testing putative mimetic assemblages using known predator perceptual models and lay a foundation for behavioral studies to further test mimicry in H. sara and M. pausanius.
Framing Learning Conditions in Geography Excursions

The aim of this paper is to investigate and frame some learning conditions involved in the practice of geographical excursions. The empirical material from this study comes from several excursions made by students in human geography and an ethnometodological approach through participant observation is used. The study is informed by theories from human geography as basis for reflection and discussion. The results from this study show firstly that conditions for learning in excursions are conditioned by the particular method of learning.
Comparison of Control and Cooperation Frameworks for Blended Autonomy

Autonomous vehicles, e.g., cars, aircraft or ships, will need to accept some degree of human control for the coming years. Consequently, a method of controlling autonomous systems (ASs) that integrates control inputs from humans and machines is critical. We describe a framework for blended autonomy, in which humans and ASs interact with varying degrees of control to safely achieve a task. We empirically compare collaborative control tasks in which the human and AS have identical or conflicting objectives, under three main control frameworks: (1) leader-follower control (based on Stackelberg games); (2) blended control; and (3) switching control. We validate our results on a car steering control model, given communication delays, noise and different collaboration levels.
Performance Optimization by Nonparametric Histogram Estimation for Low Resolution in IMDD-OQAM-OFDM System

In this paper, for the first time, we propose a nonparametric histogram estimation (NPHE) scheme for the nonuniform quantization in intensity modulated direct detection with filter bank multicarrier signal to improve system performance. By combining the NPHE scheme and the common nonlinear programming method, the distribution of offset quadrature amplitude modulation based optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OQAM-OFDM) signal is accurately estimated and then it is used to achieve the optimal nonuniform quantization level. In this way, the low-level signal can achieve much more effective digitalizing bits, thereby significantly reducing the quantization noise. The numerical simulation and experiment with 10-Gb/s 16-order OQAM-OFDM signal over 20 km fiber are conducted to further verify the feasibility of our scheme. The results show that our scheme always outperforms the uniform quantization and Gaussian-like nonuniform schemes in terms of the signal to quantization noise ratio, error-vector-magnitudes, and bit error rate. Compared to the conventional method, our scheme also achieves received sensitivity improvement thereby improving the system power budget. So, it can support the low-bit resolution transmission in intensity modulated direct detection-based OQAM-OFDM system.