Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Micromachined Planar Supercapacitor with Interdigital Buckypaper Electrodes

In this work, a flexible micro-supercapacitor with interdigital planar buckypaper electrodes is presented. A simple fabrication process involving vacuum filtration method and SU-8 molding techniques is proposed to fabricate in-plane interdigital buckypaper electrodes on a membrane filter substrate. The proposed process exhibits excellent flexibility for future integration of the micro-supercapacitors (micro-SC) with other electronic components. The device’s maximum specific capacitance measured using cyclic voltammetry was 107.27 mF/cm2 at a scan rate of 20 mV/s. The electrochemical stability was investigated by measuring the performance of charge-discharge at different discharge rates. Devices with different buckypaper electrode thicknesses were also fabricated and measured. The specific capacitance of the proposed device increased linearly with the buckypaper electrode thickness. The measured leakage current was approximately 9.95 µA after 3600 s. The device exhibited high cycle stability, with 96.59% specific capacitance retention after 1000 cycles. A Nyquist plot of the micro-SC was also obtained by measuring the impedances with frequencies from 1 Hz to 50 kHz; it indicated that the equivalent series resistance value was approximately 18 Ω.
Divided loyalties: Perceptions of disloyalty underpin bias toward dually-identified minority-group members.

Majority-group members often hold negative attitudes toward minority-group members who identify with both the majority and their minority group. Integrating perspectives from social identity theory and acculturation research with a coalitional psychology framework, we show that an underlying mechanism for such bias is the perception that dual identifiers are disloyal to the majority group. In Study 1, majority-group participants in the U.S. questioned the loyalty of a dually identified Arab immigrant more than one who identified solely with the (American) majority group, especially under intergroup threat, which in turn predicted less favorable feelings toward the immigrant. Study 2 conceptually replicated the effect of the identity manipulation and the mediating influence of perceived loyalty on judgments about an immigrant being allowed to enlist in the U.S. military. Study 3, partially replicated the findings in Poland, focusing on Russian immigrants as targets. In Study 4, which independently manipulated both the identity expressed by immigrants and their loyalty, a dually identified immigrant whose loyalty to the majority group was portrayed as high was not judged as less qualified than an immigrant who identified only with the majority group for jobs with the potential to inflict damage on the majority group. Study 5, replicated and extended the previous studies in the context of fans of allied or rival soccer teams in Germany, revealing the moderating role of existing group relations on the hypothesized loyalty processes. In summary, coalitionally driven perceptions of (dis)loyalty appear to undergird bias toward minority-group members who hold dual identifications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).
Presence of Infected Gr-1intCD11bhiCD11cint Monocytic Myeloid Derived Suppressor Cells Subverts T Cell Response and Is Associated With Impaired Dendritic Cell Function in Mycobacterium avium-Infected Mice

Myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSC) are immature myeloid cells with immunomodulatory function. To study the mechanism by which MDSC affect antimicrobial immunity, we infected mice with two M. avium strains of differential virulence, highly virulent Mycobacterium avium subsp. avium strain 25291 (MAA) and low virulent Mycobacterium avium subsp. hominissuis strain 104 (MAH). Intraperitoneal infection with MAA, but not MAH, caused severe disease and massive splenic infiltration of monocytic MDSC (M-MDSC; Gr-1intCD11bhiCD11cint) expressing inducible NO synthase (Nos2) and bearing high numbers of mycobacteria. Depletion experiments demonstrated that M-MDSC were essential for disease progression. NO production by M-MDSC influenced antigen-uptake and processing by dendritic cells and proliferation of CD4+ T cells. M-MDSC were also induced in MAA-infected mice lacking Nos2. In these mice CD4+ T cell expansion and control of infection were restored. However, T cell inhibition was only partially relieved and arginase (Arg) 1-expressing M-MDSC were accumulated. Likewise, inhibition of Arg1 also partially rescued T cell proliferation. Thus, mycobacterial virulence results in the induction of M-MDSC that block the T cell response in a Nos2- and Arg1-dependent manner.
Ontogeny and taxonomy of the hadrosaur (Dinosauria, Ornithopoda) remains from Basturs Poble bonebed (late early Maastrichtian, Tremp Syncline, Spain)

The lower Maastrichtian site of Basturs Poble (southern Pyrenees, Spain) is the first hadrosaur bonebed reported from Europe. It is an accumulation of disarticulated lambeosaurine skeletal elements, possibly belonging to Pararhabdodon isonensis. The sample shows high intraspecific morphological variability among many skeletal elements, suggesting the need for caution in choosing characters for phylogenetic analyses. Juvenile to adult individuals are represented in the sample, while hatchling remains are absent. Bone histology reveals that juveniles are over-represented and that the youngest individuals represented by tibia specimens were two years old. Adult individuals, with tibiae 550–600 mm long, were 14–15 years old when they died. However, individual variation in tibia length at skeletal maturity occurs within the sample, so individual maturity cannot be assumed on the basis of bone size alone. The Basturs Poble bonebed occurs within the upper part of the C31r magnetochron. Thus, lambeosaurine hadrosaurids were already present and abundant in the Ibero-Armorica Island at the end of the early Maastrichtian and P. isonensis spans the upper part of the lower Maastrichtian to the upper part of the upper Maastrichtian (upper part of C31r-lower part of C29r).
Subliminal messages exert long-term effects on decision-making

Abstract Subliminal manipulation is often considered harmless because its effects typically decay within a second. So far, subliminal long-term effects on behavior were only observed in studies which repeatedly presented highly familiar information such as single words. These studies suggest that subliminal messages are only slowly stored and might not be stored at all if they provide novel, unfamiliar information. We speculated that subliminal messages might affect delayed decision-making especially if messages contain several pieces of novel information that must be relationally bound in long-term memory. Relational binding engages the hippocampal memory system, which can rapidly encode and durably store novel relations. Here, we hypothesized that subliminally presented stimulus pairs would be relationally processed influencing the direction of delayed conscious decisions. In experiment 1, subliminal face–occupation pairs affected conscious decisions about the income of these individuals almost half an hour later. In experiment 2, subliminal presentation of vocabulary of a foreign language enabled participants to later decide whether these foreign words are presented with correct or incorrect translations. Subliminal influence did not significantly decay if probed after 25 versus 15 min. This is unprecedented evidence of the longevity and impact of subliminal messages on conscious, rational decision-making.
Coloring graphs with no induced five‐vertex path or gem

For a graph G , let χ(G) and ω(G) , respectively, denote the chromatic number and clique number of G . We give an explicit structural description of ( P5 , gem)‐free graphs, and show that every such graph G satisfies χ(G)≤⌈5ω(G)4⌉ . Moreover, this bound is best possible. Here a gem is the graph that consists of an induced four‐vertex path plus a vertex which is adjacent to all the vertices of that path.
Is it the Taste or the Buzz? Alexithymia, Caffeine, and Emotional Eating

Abstract Background: Alexithymia, a relatively stable personality trait characterized by difficulties identifying and describing feelings and externally oriented thinking, has been linked to both substance use disorders and eating disorders. In nonclinical samples, alexithymia is associated with heavier consumption of alcohol and caffeine. Both are psychoactive drugs, but unlike most drugs they are typically consumed in the context of palatable and calorie-rich products. Objectives: Given the association of alexithymia with disordered eating, the present study evaluated the hypothesis that heavier consumption of caffeine by those with high levels of alexithymia may be motivated by the palatable and caloric aspects of common caffeine products rather than by drug-seeking. Methods: There were 224 participants aged 17–63 years who completed instruments assessing demographics, alexithymia, emotional eating, caffeine consumption, alcohol consumption, negative moods, and reward sensitivity. Results: As predicted, alexithymia was positively related to emotional eating as well as consumption of caffeine and alcohol, and alexithymia was a significant predictor of caffeine intake in regression models. However, there was no indication of mediation by emotional eating. Conclusions: Alexithymia is characterized by deficient emotion regulation and negative moods, hence use of drugs and/or foods to regulate emotions, combined with poor interoceptive awareness, may account for excessive consumption of drugs or foods as alternative emotion regulation strategies in those with high levels of this trait.
Adverse event reporting in clinical trials in Parkinson's Disease: Time for change

Four decades ago, in response to erratic practices in clinical trials, Karch and Lasagna proposed a process for standardizing the reporting of “adverse drug reactions. ” Their goal was to promote the generation of safety data that could be reliably used to understand a drug’s safety profile. Their advice was adopted and incorporated into an assessment of the frequency and severity of adverse events (AEs) during the course of a clinical trial and the likelihood that the AE was related to the study intervention. These data dramatically improved the ability of prescribers to assess the risk/ benefit of new pharmacologic agents. However, one aspect of AEs that is not routinely reported in publications or in regulatory labeling is the duration and temporal profile of the event. Because AEs may be transient, simply reporting the frequency of AEs without considering duration may be misleading. Although most clinical trials capture detailed AE reporting that includes time of onset, duration, and severity of the event, the primary publications and regulatory labeling typically focus on frequency and do not specifically describe the temporal profile of the AE. This issue has been highlighted recently in an editorial piece on clinical research in oncology that briefly discussed the benefits that could be gained by including duration in AE reporting. Despite recommendations from the CONSORT Group more than 10 years ago, reporting information regarding the temporal pattern of AEs is often neglected.
Begging to differ: scrubwren nestlings beg to alarm calls and vocalize when parents are absent

Abstract Nestling birds face a dilemma: they can increase parental provisioning by begging more intensively, but by doing so may also increase their risk of predation. Nestlings could deal with this dilemma by reducing begging intensity after parents have warned them of a nearby predator. We therefore tested experimentally whether nestling scrubwrens, Sericornis frontalis, increase begging intensity with hunger but reduce it after adult alarm calls. Single 5- and 8-day-old nestlings were temporarily taken into the laboratory for playback experiments. Over a 90-min period of food deprivation we simulated parental visits every 10 min by playing back adult feeding calls. Hungrier nestlings begged louder and longer to simulated parental visits, but contrary to expectation did not beg less if they had previously heard playback of alarm calls, and even begged to the alarm calls themselves. The results were similar for both ‘mobbing’ and ‘flee’ alarm calls. Nestlings also gave distinctive calls in the 10-min interval between simulated parental visits, and the number of these calls increased with hunger and after playback of alarm calls. We suggest that nestlings acquire the ability to respond appropriately to alarm calls late in the nestling period and that therefore parents might be selected to avoid alarm calling when defending young nestlings.Copyright 2003 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd on behalf of The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
Nutrition support for treating cancer-associated weight loss: an update

Purpose of review Patients with cancer present high risk for involuntary body weight loss and reduced food intake, which, contributing to progressive tissue wasting and affecting the nutritional status, are often under-estimated in the clinical practice. In this article, we aimed at focusing on cancer-associated weight loss and investigating recent evidences on the indications of nutritional interventions to treat this condition. Recent findings During the last few years, increased emphasis has been addressed on the mechanisms underlying body weight loss in cancer that can be induced by either cancer metabolism and inflammation, either several side-effects of the anticancer treatments. This led to consider clinical parameters, such as BMI, body weight change and food intake, and their modification overtime, in predicting patient's overall survival. In this light, nutritional support has to be considered to maintain or restore nutritional status, improve tolerance to oncological therapies, and ameliorate physical performance and quality of life. Summary Increased awareness on weight loss in cancer patients and on cancer cachexia is needed to carry out a nutritional assessment at an early stage of cancer journey and to establish its management and nutritional support to obtain advantages in terms of treatment tolerance and clinical outcomes.
GEMS: A Fully Integrated PETSc-Based Solver for Coupled Cardiac Electromechanics and Bidomain Simulations

Cardiac contraction is coordinated by a wave of electrical excitation which propagates through the heart. Combined modeling of electrical and mechanical function of the heart provides the most comprehensive description of cardiac function and is one of the latest trends in cardiac research. The effective numerical modeling of cardiac electromechanics remains a challenge, due to the stiffness of the electrical equations and the global coupling in the mechanical problem. Here we present a short review of the inherent assumptions made when deriving the electromechanical equations, including a general representation for deformation-dependent conduction tensors obeying orthotropic symmetry, and then present an implicit-explicit time-stepping approach that is tailored to solving the cardiac mono- or bidomain equations coupled to electromechanics of the cardiac wall. Our approach allows to find numerical solutions of the electromechanics equations using stable and higher order time integration. Our methods are implemented in a monolithic finite element code GEMS (Ghent Electromechanics Solver) using the PETSc library that is inherently parallelized for use on high-performance computing infrastructure. We tested GEMS on standard benchmark computations and discuss further development of our software.
DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTERIZED SYSTEMS FOR AUTOMATED CHROMOSOME ANALYSIS: CURRENT STATUS AND FUTURE PROSPECTS

Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) is an important pattern recognition application in the field of medical sciences. Such systems assist (not replaces) doctors in the interpretation of medical image. Computerized system for automated chromosome analysis is amongst popular CAD systems which have attracted the attention of numerous researchers, making it a thrust area for further investigations. In last 25 years, extensiveinvestigations have been contributed to designAutomated Karyotyping Systems (AKS). This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the developments and current trends in the field of AKS. The survey details the overall advancements in AKS since its origin and presents an effective review of pre-processing and image enhancement techniques, segmentation methods, feature extraction algorithms and the classifiers used in AKS. Few unaddressed issues and challenges that have comparatively received meagre attention are discussed highlighting the future prospects of AKS and providing pointers to the further research.
Lack of parasite-mediated sexual selection in a ladybird/sexually transmitted disease system

Despite the clear potential of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) to affect host mating behaviour via both host and parasite evolution, there have been few explicit tests of the relationships between STDs and sexual behaviour in animals. We investigated the effect of infection on host sexual behaviour within an invertebrate system. Coccipolipus hippodamiae is a sexually transmitted ectoparasite of Adalia bipunctata, the two-spot ladybird. The parasite feeds on host haemolymph, develops rapidly, and is deleterious to A. bipunctata hosts of both sexes. We examined whether infection affected mating success, and whether males or females showed any preferences with respect to infection status. We observed field mating rates of infected and uninfected ladybirds and carried out controlled laboratory experiments. We did not detect any negative effects of parasite infection on host mating vigour, nor any evidence for the existence of a host mating preference based on infection status. In addition, there was no evidence of parasite-induced changes in behaviour, such as increased promiscuity, which would increase transmission opportunities for the parasite. In summary, contrary to a body of speculation, there was no evidence of any connection between infection and mating rate, in either sex. We discuss possible explanations for these findings.
Computer-Generated Stylistic Compositions with Long-Term Repetitive and Phrasal Structure

This article describes and evaluates an algorithm called Racchmaninof-Jun2015, referred to hereafter as Racchmaninof, which generates passages of music in a specifiable style. For generating all four parts of a Bach hymn (one of two target styles evaluated as part of a listening study – the other being Chopin mazurkas), we found that only five out of 25 participants performed significantly better than chance at distinguishing Racchmaninof’s output from original human compositions. These participants had a mean of 8.56 years of formal musical training and mode “daily/weekly” regularity of playing an instrument or singing. In the context of relatively high levels of musical expertise, this difficulty of distinguishing Racchmaninof’s output from original human compositions underlines the promise of our approach. Current trends and issues in the area of automatic stylistic composition are introduced and discussed and we consider the potential for applying our algorithm to additional composers and/or genres of music.
Sensory noise increases metacognitive efficiency

Visual metacognition is the ability to employ confidence ratings in order to predict the accuracy of ones decisions about visual stimuli. Despite years of research, it is still unclear how visual metacognitive efficiency can be manipulated. Here we show that a hierarchical model of confidence generation makes a counterintuitive prediction: Higher sensory noise should increase metacognitive efficiency. The reason is that sensory noise has a large negative influence on the decision (where it is the only corrupting influence) but a smaller negative influence on confidence (where it is one of two corrupting influences; the other one being metacognitive noise). To test this prediction, we used a perceptual learning paradigm to decrease the amount of sensory noise. In Experiment 1, seven days of training led to significant decrease in noise as well as a corresponding decrease in metacognitive efficiency. Experiment 2 showed the same effect in a brief 97-trial learning for each of two different tasks. Finally, in Experiment 3, we experimentally manipulated stimulus contrast to increase sensory noise and observed a corresponding increase in metacognitive efficiency. Our findings demonstrate the existence of a robust positive relationship between sensory noise and metacognitive efficiency. These results could not be captured by a standard model in which decision and confidence judgments are made based on the same underlying information. Thus, our study provides a novel way to directly manipulate metacognitive efficiency and suggests the existence of metacognitive noise that corrupts confidence but not the perceptual decision.
Low-Tube-Voltage CT Urography Using Low-Concentration-Iodine Contrast Media and Iterative Reconstruction: A Multi-Institutional Randomized Controlled Trial for Comparison with Conventional CT Urography

Objective To compare the image quality of low-tube-voltage and low-iodine-concentration-contrast-medium (LVLC) computed tomography urography (CTU) with iterative reconstruction (IR) with that of conventional CTU. Materials and Methods This prospective, multi-institutional, randomized controlled trial was performed at 16 hospitals using CT scanners from various vendors. Patients were randomly assigned to the following groups: 1) the LVLC-CTU (80 kVp and 240 mgI/mL) with IR group and 2) the conventional CTU (120 kVp and 350 mgI/mL) with filtered-back projection group. The overall diagnostic acceptability, sharpness, and noise were assessed. Additionally, the mean attenuation, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), and figure of merit (FOM) in the urinary tract were evaluated. Results The study included 299 patients (LVLC-CTU group: 150 patients; conventional CTU group: 149 patients). The LVLC-CTU group had a significantly lower effective radiation dose (5.73 ± 4.04 vs. 8.43 ± 4.38 mSv) compared to the conventional CTU group. LVLC-CTU showed at least standard diagnostic acceptability (score ≥ 3), but it was non-inferior when compared to conventional CTU. The mean attenuation value, mean SNR, CNR, and FOM in all pre-defined segments of the urinary tract were significantly higher in the LVLC-CTU group than in the conventional CTU group. Conclusion The diagnostic acceptability and quantitative image quality of LVLC-CTU with IR are not inferior to those of conventional CTU. Additionally, LVLC-CTU with IR is beneficial because both radiation exposure and total iodine load are reduced.
Genetic relatedness, coalitions and social behaviour of white-nosed coatis,
 Nasua narica
 


Abstract The white-nosed coati, Nasua narica , lives in large social groups, called bands, and displays a variety of complex cooperative behaviours. These behavioural patterns, such as coalition support, may influence the ability of an individual to gain access to limited resources and have attracted theoretical attention because they may be maintained by reciprocal altruism. To better understand the mechanisms influencing cooperation, coalition dynamics and time individuals spend away from the band, the relationship between kinship and specific social behaviours was assessed. The genetic relationships of individuals from six coati bands were estimated by measuring the similarity of multilocus DNA fingerprints. Results showed that coati bands primarily consist of highly related individuals. The variance in relatedness was high, however, and four bands contained some individuals that were unrelated to other band members. Males who monopolized access to band females during the breeding season did not sire most offspring. Unrelated individuals spent more time away from the group than did band members with close relatives in the band. Moreover, unrelated individuals received more aggression from band members and received less coalition support than did individuals with close relatives in the band.