Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Alcohol Consumption on Food Choice Among College Students

Although the associations between the consumption of alcohol, unhealthy foods, and obesity are known, there is no consensus on the mechanisms involved. Previous research demonstrates that the type of foods available during the peak times for alcohol consumption differ from those available at other times. Advertisements targeting college students indicate an awareness of increased cravings for “junk foods” following alcohol consumption, however there is no previous research on how alcohol consumption affects actual dietary choices differentially by type of food, in comparison to non-alcohol related food consumption. The current study demonstrates that college students’ food cravings increase, consumption of fruits and vegetables is lower, and consumption of junk foods is higher with alcohol consumption than at other times. Respondents reported eating something that they were craving the majority (57%) of the time; however, on average they ate something healthier than what they were craving 27% of the time. These findings help to clarify the behavioral mechanisms underlying the relationship between alcohol consumption, unhealthy dietary behaviors, and obesity.
Targeting the p53-MDM2 and p53-MDMX interaction as a therapeutic strategy for anticancer treatment

50 % of all human cancers arise from the deregulation of the wt—p53 pathway, mostly through the activity of the p53 inhibitors MDM2 and MDMX. Hundreds of compounds that disrupt the p53-MDM2 and p53-MDMX interaction were analyzed by FP- and NMR-assays to determine their affinity. X-ray crystallography of the best binding compounds for MDM2 gave insights to the binding mode of these antagonists revealing also a novel 4-point-pharmacophore binding mode. Extensive fluorination scanning of one of the high affinity binding compounds confirms the importance of fluorine in drug research, improving the drug potency. All the results presented in this thesis are of remarkable importance in drug development.
Analysis of Ge-Si Heterojunction Nanowire Tunnel FET: Impact of Tunneling Window of Band-to-Band Tunneling Model

Tunnel FET (TFET) has potential applications in the next generation ultra-low power transistor to substitute the conventional FETs. It can offer very steep inverse subthreshold swing slope to maintain a low leakage current, thus it can be very essential for limiting power consumption in MOSFETs. The carriers in TFET transport from source to channel by the band-to-band tunneling (BTBT) mechanisms. To realize high saturation currents of TFET, it critically depends on the transmission probability, TWKB. In indirect semiconductor, such as Si and Ge, the BTBT model is very crucial for designing and predicting the device performance. In this paper, we employed the nonlocal BTBT model applied to three-dimensional Ge-Si heterojunction TFET with gate length 10 nm compare with Si TFET by including quantum effects simulation. The results show that the Ge-Si TFET outperforms Si TFET because of the lower bandgap and larger tunneling windows. BTBT generation rates of Ge-Si TFET are higher than Si TFET in the on-state condition. The highest BTBT generation rates are located in the source and channel junction and its peaks close to the gate dielectric. © The Author(s) 2017. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse of the work in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. [DOI: 10.1149/2.0371711jes] All rights reserved.
In Vitro Technique for Heavy Metal, Cobalt Tolerance in Aloe Vera Callus

In vitro tissue culture application in plant biotechnology is an efficient plant propagation tool in arising plants resistant to diverse a biotic stresses such as drought and salinity. In this investigation, the aim on the in vitro breeding process applied for plants resistant to heavy metal (HM) stress. The experiment included the following two sequent stages: (i) callus cells initiation, some of which are soma clonal variation with new characteristics, (ii) susceptibility of the callus to HMs as selective factor during multiplication to select variants with enhanced HM-resistance. Aloe callus was grown on media complemented with 0.5, 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 mg/l cobalt (Co) plus the control treatment. Cobalt accumulation level, mineral status, and callus growth were examined. Results indicate that the increase of Co concentration in medium had influenced callus growth giving the best growth 737 and 56.6 mg for fresh and dry weight respectively at 0.5 mg/l Co concentration, and that growth decreased with increase of Co concentration in medium. With concern to mineral status, cobalt had increased dramatically in callus cells with the increase of Co concentration treatment reaching 108.63ppm at 2.0 mg/l Cobalt, Fe ion concentration reached its highest level 1712.0ppm at 2.0mg/l Cobalt, Mn ions give the highest accumulation level 126.07 ppm at 1.0 mg/l cobalt. While potassium (K)and magnesium (Mg) decreased with increase of cobalt in callus medium recording their highest accumulation level 22244.0 and 492.47 respectively at plant control treatment. Na ions reached its highest level of accumulation 104.3 ppm at 0.5 mg/l cobalt concentration and decreased with the increase of cobalt concentration in the medium.
Trend in Fine Sulfate Concentrations and the Associated Secondary Formation Processes at an Urban Site in North China

There has been a significant decline in SO2, the main precursor of sulfate, in North China over the past decade due to strict sulfur removal measures, whereas the amount of photochemical oxidants such as ozone has continued to increase in this region. In this study, we examined temporal variation in the concentrations of fine sulfate in urban Ji’nan in North China from 2008 till 2015. Over this period, the sulfate concentration decreased by –3.86 ± 2.50 µg m–3 yr–1 (–10.0% yr–1), which is slower that the rate of decrease for SO2 during the same period (–11.6% yr–1). Nevertheless, the sulfur oxidation ratio and the concentrations of ozone and calcium (an indicator of dust particles) increased over this period. An analysis of the seasonal and diurnal variations in sulfate and the related parameters in 2015 indicated that the ambient sulfate concentration was largely influenced by the amount of SO2, atmospheric oxidants, aerosol loading, and meteorological conditions. A detailed investigation of the production of sulfate in eight case studies found that the observed sulfate production rate was in the range of 1.1–10.8 µg m–3 h–1. Numerical calculations revealed that SO2 oxidation by OH and H2O2 was a major contributor to sulfate production during the daytime in warm seasons. At all times of the day in cold seasons and at nighttime in warm seasons, the heterogeneous SO2 reaction on aerosol surfaces contributed 30.1%–65.7% of the sulfate production. The increasing amount of ozone and dust particles in this region, which are associated with photochemical pollution and urban dust emissions, are responsible for the slower decrease in sulfate concentration. Therefore, photochemical smog and urban dust should receive adequate attention in order to mitigate the sulfate pollution.
Investigating Emerging Security Threats in Clouds and Data Centers

Data centers have been growing rapidly in recent years to meet the surging demand of cloud services. However, the expanding scale of a data center also brings new security threats. This dissertation studies emerging security issues in clouds and data centers from different aspects, including low-level cooling infrastructures and different virtualization techniques such as container and virtual machine (VM). We first unveil a new vulnerability called reduced cooling redundancy that might be exploited to launch thermal attacks, resulting in severely worsened thermal conditions in a data center. Such a vulnerability is caused by the wide adoption of aggressive cooling energy saving policies. We conduct thermal measurements and uncover effective thermal attack vectors at the server, rack, and data center levels. We also present damage assessments of thermal attacks. Our results demonstrate that thermal attacks can negatively impact the thermal conditions and reliability of victim servers, significantly raise the cooling cost, and even lead to cooling failures. Finally, we propose effective defenses to mitigate thermal attacks. We then perform a systematic study to understand the security implications of the information leakage in multi-tenancy container cloud services. Due to the incomplete implementation of system resource isolation mechanisms in the Linux kernel, a spectrum of system-wide host information is exposed to the containers, including host-system state information and individual process execution information. By exploiting such leaked host information, malicious adversaries can easily launch advanced attacks that can seriously affect the reliability of cloud services. Additionally, we discuss the root causes of the containers’ information leakage and propose a two-stage defense approach. The experimental results show that our defense is effective and incurs trivial performance overhead. Finally, we investigate security issues in the existing VM live migration approaches, especially the post-copy approach. While the entire live migration process relies upon reliable TCP connectivity for the transfer of the VM state, we demonstrate that the loss of TCP reliability leads to VM live migration failure. By intentionally aborting the TCP connection, attackers can cause unrecoverable memory inconsistency for post-copy, significantly increase service downtime, and degrade the running VM’s performance. From the offensive side, we present detailed techniques to reset the migration connection under heavy networking traffic. From the defensive side, we also propose effective protection to secure the live migration procedure.
Engineering of inhalation aerosols combining theophylline and budesonide

i Acknowledgements/ Dedications . iii List of Figures . viii List of Tables . x List of Equations. xii Chapter 1 : Introduction . 1 1.1 Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) . 1 1.2 Treatment of COPD . 3 1.2.1 Methylxanthines . 3 1.2.2 Selective beta2 (β2) agonists . 4 1.2.3 Anticholinergics bronchodilators . 4 1.2.4 Corticosteroids . 5 1.3 Inhalation aerosols . 5 1.3. 1 Inhalation devices . 6 1.3. 2 Formulation of pulmonary drugs: particle engineering . 8 1.3. 2.1 Milling . 9 1.3. 2.2 Spray drying . 12 1.3. 2.3 Spray freeze drying . 13 1.3. 2.4 Supercritical fluid crystallization. 14 1.3. 2.5 Sonocrystallization . 16 1.5 Combination particles for pulmonary delivery. 18 1.4 Combination therapy of theophylline with corticosteroids for COPD . 22 1.4. 1 Combination inhalation in COPD treatment . 23 1.6 Aim and scope of the thesis . 24 Chapter 2 : Materials and Methodologies . 25 2.
ANALYZING THE PERFORMANCE IMPACT OF PARALLEL LATENCY IN THE PIPELINE

This work introduces a concept coined overlap latency which is shown to severely limit performance in several types of benchmarks. This overlap latency is only completely removed when both branch mispredictions and cache misses are removed in tandem, rather than improved in isolation. Since most current research investigates improvements to branch predictions or cache behavior and not both proposed techniques are not able to unlock this extra performance gain. To demonstrate this concept benchmarks are evaluated using four configurations: baseline which uses current state-of-the-art branch prediction and cache prefetching, perfect-bp which emulates perfect branch prediction direction, perfect-cache which emulates a perfect L1 data cache, and perfect which combines perfect-bp and perfect-cache. In addition, detailed analysis on select benchmarks is conducted to show the cause of overlap latency as well as the effect this has on an out-of-order execution CPU. Benchmarks were found to have the potential for up to an additional 229% IPC compared to that expected based on individual performance gain from branch prediction and cache.
Inhalation of Nicotine-containing Electronic Cigarette Vapor Exacerbates the Features of COPD in βENaC-overexpressing Mice.

Background Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is currently listed as the 3rd leading cause of death in the United States. COPD is marked by limitations in expiratory airflow, emphysematous destruction of the lungs, bronchitis, and chronic inflammation of the lung tissue. With the emerging prevalence in usage of electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), the impact of ENDS on the development of lung diseases such as COPD requires further attention. Previous studies have shown that β-epithelial Na+ channel (βENaC)- overexpressing mice have multiple emphysematous phenotypes, such as mucus accumulation and chronic inflammation. This study was aimed to elucidate the effects of e-cigarettes, a type of ENDS, on the development of COPD. Methods We hypothesized that acute repetitive usage of ENDS will exacerbate the features of COPD including mucus production, inflammation, and fibrosis, ultimately leading to lung injury. Twenty βENaC mice (10 mice per group) underwent whole body ENDS or sham air exposure for 2 hours daily over 10 days. Bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid and lung tissues were collected to assess for inflammation, fibrosis, mucus accumulation, and alveolar damage. Results and Discussion Our data showed that ENDS exposure significantly increased the alveolar size as compared with the control. We also found that level of inflammatory cytokines, such as CCL2, IL-13, and IL-10, were elevated in animals exposed to ENDS compared with control. Moreover, we observed ENDS exposure caused mucus accumulation, alveolar destruction, and fibrosis in the bronchioles of the βENaC mice. Additionally, ENDS exposure promoted apoptosis in pulmonary endothelial cell and epithelial cells. Conclusion Our data suggest that nicotine-containing e-cigarettes exacerbates features of COPD involving abnormal lung inflammation, mucus accumulation and apoptosis in βEnaC mice.
Study on Adsorption of Inorganic-organic Hybrid Polymers and Flocculation of Oil Sands Tailings

Two inorganic-organic hybrid polymers, Al(OH)3-polyacrylamide (Al-PAM) and Fe(OH)3-polyacrylamide (Fe-PAM) were synthesized and used in flocculating model tailings (5 wt% kaolin suspensions) and laboratory extraction tailings. For comparison, a commercial anionic flocculant, partially hydrolyzed polyacrylamide or Magnafloc 1011 (MF 1011), was also examined. Moreover, a fundamental understanding on flocculation dynamics of model and laboratory extraction tailings by different polymers as well as adsorption kinetics of these polymers on different surfaces was established using focused beam reflectance measurement (FBRM) and quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation (QCMD), respectively. For model tailings, Al-PAM, Fe-PAM and MF 1011 exhibited excellent flocculation efficiency, but MF 1011 was found to be sensitive to overdosing. For laboratory extraction tailings, hybrid polymers showed better flocculation performance than MF 1011. Adsorption measurement of polymers by QCM-D indicated that Fe-PAM adsorbed more significantly on bitumen than Al-PAM. Thus, with the presence of bitumen, Fe-PAM could be a better flocculant than AlPAM in the treatment of oil sands tailings.
A U-Net based multi-scale feature extraction for liver tumour segmentation in CT images

A new method for automatic liver tumour segmentation from computed tomography (CT) scans based on deep neural network is presented. Two cascaded deep convolu-tional neural networks are used to segment the CT image of the abdominal cavity. The first U-net is used for coarse segmentation to obtain the approximate position of the liver and tumour. Using this as a prediction the original image is cropped to reduce its size in order to increase the segmentation accuracy. The second modified U-net is employed for accurate segmentation of the actual liver tumours. Residual modules and dense connections are added to U-net to help the network train faster while pro-ducing more accurate results. In addition, multi-dimensional information fusion is introduced to make the network more comprehensive in restoring information. The Liver Tumour Segmentation (LiTs) dataset is used to evaluate the relative segmenta-tion performance obtaining an average dice score of 0.665 based our method.
Diplomasi Digital Sebagai Dampak Pandemi Global Covid-19: Studi Kasus Diplomasi Indonesia Di Perserikatan Bangsa-Bangsa (Pbb)

The background of this article is the existence of a global pandemic COVID-19 which has an impact in various fields. This article seeks to explore the impact of the COVID-19 global pandemic on information and communications technology (ICT) in the form of digital diplomacy. Exploration is carried out by investigating the case of Indonesian diplomacy at the United Nations (UN) in March, April, and May 2020. The main concept in this article is digital diplomacy. This concept illustrates the use of ICT as a means of diplomacy for state actors and changes at the policy and institutional levels. This article found various digital diplomacy activities from the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Indonesia to the United Nations in New York, United States during the global pandemic COVID-19. These activities include: 1) coordination with Indonesia's Embassy and Consulate General in the United States to protect Indonesian citizens; 2) participation in UN Security Council virtual meeting to discuss international peace and security issues; and 3) participation in other UN bodies virtual meetings to discuss international development issues. This article argues that the impact of the COVID-19 global pandemic in the field of ICT is reflected in Indonesia's digital diplomacy at the United Nations. The global pandemic COVID-19 changed the means and tools used by Indonesian diplomats to gather information, negotiations, and responses on international issues. Even so, Indonesian diplomacy at the UN continues to run optimally.
New distribution record of the Malabar Tree Toad, Pedostibes tuberculosus Gunther 1875 (Amphibia: Anura: Bufonidae)

C O N S E R V A T I O N A L E R T  World’s Mammals in Crisis . 220  More Than Mammals . 223  The “Dow Jones Index” of Biodiversity . 225
Impact of App-Delivered Mindfulness Meditation on Functional Connectivity, Mental Health, and Sleep Disturbances Among Physician Assistant Students: Randomized, Wait-list Controlled Pilot Study

Background Health care provider and trainee burnout results in substantial national and institutional costs and profound social effects. Identifying effective solutions and interventions to cultivate resilience among health care trainees is critical. Although less is known about the mental health needs of physician assistants (PAs) or PA students, accumulating research indicates that they experience similarly alarming rates of burnout, depression, and emotional exhaustion. Mobile app–delivered mindfulness meditation may be an effective part of salubrious programming to bolster long-term resilience and health among PA students. Objective This study aims to examine the impact of app-delivered mindfulness meditation on self-reported mental health symptoms among PA students. A secondary aim is to investigate changes in brain connectivity to identify neurobiological changes related to changes in mental health symptoms. Methods We recruited PA students enrolled in their third semester of PA school and used a longitudinal, randomized, wait-list–controlled design. Participants randomized to the mindfulness group were provided 1-year subscriptions to the 10% Happier app, a consumer-based meditation app, and asked to practice every day for 8 weeks. Before randomization and again after completion of the 8-week program, all participants completed resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging as well as self-report assessments of burnout, depression, anxiety, and sleep impairment. App use was acquired as a measure of mindfulness practice time. Results PA students randomized to the mindfulness group reported improvements in sleep impairment compared with those randomized to the wait-list control group (ηp2=0.42; P=.01). Sleep impairment decreased significantly in the mindfulness group (19% reduction; P=.006) but not in the control group (1% reduction; P=.71). There were no other significant changes in mental health for those randomized to app-delivered mindfulness. Across all students, changes in sleep impairment were associated with increased resting-state functional connectivity between the medial prefrontal cortex (a component of the default mode network) and the superior temporal gyrus, as well as between areas important for working memory. Changes in connectivity predicted categorical conversion from impaired to nonimpaired sleep in the mindfulness group. Conclusions This pilot study is the first to examine app-based mindfulness for PA students’ mental health and investigate the impact of mindfulness on PA students’ brain function. These findings suggest that app-delivered mindfulness may be an effective tool to improve sleep dysfunction and that it may be an important part of the programming necessary to reduce the epidemic of suffering among health profession trainees.
A new record of the Myristica Swamp Treefrog, Mercurana myristicapalustris (Anura: Rhacophoridae), from the Vazhachal Reserve Forest, Kerala, India

C O N S E R V A T I O N A L E R T  World’s Mammals in Crisis . 220  More Than Mammals . 223  The “Dow Jones Index” of Biodiversity . 225
Flood damage estimation - A review of urban stage-damage curves and loss functions

The estimation of damages is integral to the formulation of flood policy. For the assessment of flood losses this requires the use of stage? amage curves for di~fere~t classes of buildings. A review is presented ofthe methods used to construct these. The use of synthetic techniques IS stresse~ and attentton glv~n to actual and potential losses and to the susceptibillty of buildings to failure in response to floodwater depth and velocity. Recommendatlom, are presented for the construction and use of stage-damage curves for residential and commercial buildings in South Africa.
An Application Deployment Approach for City IoT Applications in Resource-constrained Edge Computing Environments

With the development and utilization of more and more city Internet of Things (IoT) applications with high resource requirements, how to reduce the consumption of energy, processor resources and bandwidth resources in resource-constrained edge clouds while ensuring the execution delay of these applications is an urgent problem to be solved. Therefore, an optimal energy-bandwidth tradeoff deployment approach for city IoT application is proposed for resource-constrained edge clouds. In this approach, the city IoT applications are first divided into multiple collaborative tasks and offload to edge clouds. Secondly, a joint optimization model including energy consumption, resource wastage, resource load imbalance and bandwidth resource consumption is established for the task offloading scheme. Thirdly, the city IoT application deployment problem is optimized under the constraints of resource and execution delay. Finally, a comprehensive simulation test is conducted to analyze the deployment approaches from the aspects of performance and effectiveness. The experimental results show that our deployment approach is superior to other related approaches.