Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Copper oxide nanoparticles alter cellular morphology via disturbing the actin cytoskeleton dynamics in Arabidopsis roots

Abstract Copper oxide nanoparticles (CuO NPs) have severe nano-toxic effects on organisms. Limited data is available on influence of CuO NPs on plant cells. Here, the molecular mechanisms involved in the toxicity of CuO NPs are studied. Exposure to CuO NPs significantly increased copper content in roots (0.062–0.325 mg/g FW), but CuO NPs translocation rates from root to shoot were low (1.1–2.8%). Presented data were significant at p < 0.05 compared to control. CuO NPs inhibited longitudinal growth and promoted transverse growth in root tip cells. However, CuO NPs did not affect the leaf cells, implying that the transfer ability of CuO NPs was weak, and toxicity mainly affected roots. CuO NPs can conjugate with actin protein. The actin cytoskeleton experienced reorganization in the presence of CuO NPs. The longitudinal filamentous actin (F-actin) decreased, and the transverse F-actin increased. CuO NPs inhibited actin polymerization and promoted depolymerization. The behavior of individual F-actin was at steady state with time-lapse under CuO NPs treatment by time-lapse reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy. The growth rate of actin filaments was weakened by CuO NPs. CuO NPs disturbed the subcellular localization of PINs and the gradient of auxin distribution in root tips in an actin-dependent manner. In conclusion, CuO NPs conjugated with actin and disturbed F-actin dynamics, triggering abnormal cell growth in the root tip, and findings provide theoretical basis for further study nano-toxicity in plants.
Cross‐cultural adaptation and psychometric validation of the Patient Scar Assessment Questionnaire to the Spanish language in head and neck surgery

External appearance is the main aesthetic outcome in patients who undergo surgical procedures. Scars located in exposed areas, such as the neck and face, are important for patients. There are at least eight instruments that are used to evaluate postoperative scars, but few fulfil standard methodological conditions. The Patient Scar Assessment Questionnaire (PSAQ) was designed and validated using psychometric methodology. However, this scale has not been translated or validated in the Spanish language. The aim of this study was to undergo a cross‐cultural adaptation and psychometric validation of the PSAQ scale to the Spanish language in patients who underwent head and neck surgery. We followed The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) guidelines for the translation and validation of health‐related scales. Forward and back translations were made by independent translators. We included adult patients who underwent thyroidectomy, parathyroidectomy, parotidectomy, and neck dissection. For the psychometric validation, we used a principal axis exploratory factor analysis with oblimin rotation. A reliability test involving Cronbachs alpha and the item‐total correlation was performed and for the convergent/concurrent validity, we selected the Spanish version of the Vancouver Scar Scale. A total of 180 patients were recruited. Factor analysis showed a five‐factor solution. Cronbachs alpha for the subscales was >0.7. The comparison between the PSAQ appearance subscale and the VSS demonstrated a high correlation (rho = − 0.89). In a sample of 62 patients, the test‐retest evaluation showed high correlation (0.74‐0.99). Our study supports the Spanish version of the PSAQ as a valid, reliable, and reproducible tool to assess the perception and impact of neck scars in Spanish‐speaking patients who undergo head and neck surgery.
The Effect of Caffeine on the Velocity of Half-Squat Exercise during the Menstrual Cycle: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Recent literature confirms the ergogenic effect of acute caffeine intake to increase muscle strength and power in men. However, the information about the effect of caffeine on muscle performance in women is uncertain and it is unknown whether its ergogenicity is similar during the menstrual cycle. The goal of this investigation was to assess the effect of acute caffeine intake on mean and peak velocity of half-squat exercise during three different phases of the menstrual cycle. Thirteen trained eumenorrheic athletes (age = 31 ± 6 years; body mass = 58.6 ± 7.8 kg) participated in a double-blind, crossover and randomized experimental trial. In the early follicular (EFP), late follicular (LFP) and mid luteal phases (MLP), participants either ingested a placebo (cellulose) or 3 mg/kg/bm of caffeine in an opaque and unidentifiable capsule. In each trial, participants performed a half-squat exercise at maximal velocity with loads equivalent to 20%, 40% 60% and 80% of one repetition maximum (1RM). In each load, mean and peak velocity were measured during the concentric phase of the exercise using a rotatory encoder. In comparison to the placebo, a two-way ANOVA showed that the ingestion of 3 mg/kg/bm of caffeine increased mean velocity at 60% 1RM in EFP (Δ = 1.4 ± 2.7%, p = 0.04; ES: 0.2 ± 0.2) and LFP (Δ = 5.0 ± 10.4%, p = 0.04; ES: 0.3 ± 0.4). No other statistical differences were found for the caffeine-placebo comparison for mean velocity, but caffeine induced an ergogenic effect of small magnitude in all of the menstrual cycle phases. These results suggest that the acute intake of 3 mg/kg/bm of caffeine induces a small effect to increase movement velocity during resistance exercise in eumenorrheic female athletes. The positive effect of caffeine was of similar magnitude in all the three phases of the menstrual cycle.
Long term denudation rates and relief development: numerical modelling and data constraints

This report contains a review of my research activities since obtaining my Ph.D. degree, first at the Research School of Earth Sciences of the Australian National University (1995-1997), and since 1998 at the Laboratoire de Geodynamique des Chaines Alpines of the Universite Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France. It also presents the research perspectives I would like to develop in the coming years. In the first part of this report I present my Curriculum Vitae and concisely introduce the research themes I have developed over the last years, as well as my activities in advising research students and teaching. This part, written in French, also contains a list of publications and seminars. The second part contains a review of the relationships between tectonics, erosion, and long-term relief development. After a general introduction, I summarize my personal contribution to this research area, which concerns both the development and use of numerical surface process models to study relief development, and using thermochronological data in order to constrain rates of denudation and relief change. Finally, in the third part of this report I outline my research perspectives for the coming years, which revolve around the further development and testing of numerical surface process models as well as developing new thermochronological databases that better permit to constrain relief development.
Recovery from mechanical degradation of graphene by defect enlargement

The extraordinary properties of graphene have made it an elite candidate for a broad range of emerging applications since its discovery. However, the introduction of structural defects during graphene production often compromises the theoretically predicted performance of graphene-based technologies to a great extent. In this study, a counterintuitive defect enlargement strategy to recover from defect-induced mechanical degradation is explored, of which the realization may lead to an enhanced operating efficiency and manufacturing feasibility. Our molecular-dynamics simulation results show that the enlargement of a preexisting defect to an elliptical shape can potentially recover from the mechanical degradation that the very defect has caused. For a defective graphene sheet having a failure strain of 48% of the pristine graphene sheet, enlarging the defect can enhance the failure strain up to 80% of the pristine graphene sheet. The mechanism of degradation recovery lies in a reduced change in curvature during deformation, which is further solidified by theoretical quantification and stress-field analysis. This theory can also predict and pinpoint the location of the initiation of the fracture—where the curvature changes most significantly during the deformation. In addition, the influence of an elliptical defect on the mechanical properties of a graphene sheet is systematically studied, which is not well understood today. Finally, the degradation recovery potential of defect of various sizes is examined, showing that the initial defect that can create the highest degree of geometric asymmetry has the best potential for degradation recovery. This study investigates the recovery from defect-induced mechanical degradation and the influence of elliptical defects on the mechanical properties of a graphene sheet, which widens our understanding of the possibility of fine-tuning mechanical properties via defect engineering and has the potential to improve materials for emerging technologies such as supercapacitor devices.
A Survey of Underwater Wireless Communication Technologies

The increasing exploitation of natural resources under water, particularly in the sea, has ignited the development of many technological advances in the domains of environmental monitoring, oil and gas exploration, warfare, among others. In all these domains, underwater wireless communications play an important role, where the technologies available rely on radio-frequency, optical, and acoustic transmissions. This paper surveys key features inherent to these communication technologies, putting into perspective their technical aspects, current research challenges, and to-be-explored potential. In the end we list several technical challenges that are addressed with the aid of signal processing tools.
AN INVESTIGATION OF THE CONTRIBUTION OF RENEWABLE AND NON-RENEWABLE ENERGY CONSUMPTION TO ECONOMIC GROWTH IN OIC COUNTRIES

Modeling the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in developing economies has been a very active area of research. In recent years, renewable energy resources have increased their shares in electricity generation in the majority of countries due to environmental and security of supply concerns. This study considers the simultaneous use of renewable and non-renewable energy consumption to investigate the longrun relationship between two types of energy consumption and economic growth. It makes a comparison between renewable and non-renewable energy sources in order to determine which type of energy consumption is more important for economic growth processes in OIC countries within a multivariate panel data framework over the period 1990-2010. In addition to renewable and non-renewable energy consumption measures, the model includes the measures of the real gross capital formation and the labor force. The results of the unit root test indicate that all series are non-stationary in level and integrated of order one. Afterwards, the panel co-integration test results indicate that there are the co-integrating relationships between real GDP, renewable energy consumption, non-renewable energy consumption, real gross fixed capital formation, and the labor force. The results of the Dynamic OLS (DOLS) estimator indicate that renewable and nonrenewable energy consumption have a positive and significant effect on GDP but the impact of non-renewable energy is more than renewable energy. Also, the impact of real gross fixed capital and the labor force on economic growth is positive and statistically significant.
Early Monsoon Time Local Flow Characteristics over the Hetauda Valley and its Implications

The early monsoon time atmospheric transport processes over the Hetauda valley, the closest low-land that accommodates the third largest industrial district of Nepal, has been studied with the application of Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Modeling System initialized with NCEP meteorological and USGS terrain elevation and land-use data. The study reveals that the mixing layer over the Hetauda valley may evolve as much as 3 km above the surface during the afternoon time. The near surface atmosphere of the valley appears very weakly stratified even in the early morning time indicating that prevailing meteorology over the valley favors efficient dispersion of air pollutants. The study also reveals that the daytime upslope winds over the Hetauda valley and associated northern mountains effectively intrude into the Kathmandu valley enhancing the southwesterly and northwesterly wind system of the valley. Intrusion of local flows appears to be accompanied with the excitation of mountain waves and plain-to-plateau wind. Formation of lowlevel rotors over the Hetauda valley, excitation of mountain waves and the strong downdrafts over the southwestern part of the Kathmandu valley may put aircrafts into high risk. The pattern of local flow fields strongly suggest that the increase emissions over the Hetauda valley can have significant help to further deteriorate the already unhealthy air of Kathmandu. Journal of Institute of Science and Technology, 2014, 19(2): 109-117
INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY FOR INTELLIGENT AND INTEGRATED CONTROL IN BUILDINGS : CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS AND FUTURE RESEARCH

In a near future, buildings and equipments immerged in their environment will communicate and provide information on their status ubiquitously. ICT (Information & Communication Technology) is recognised as the key for achieving such a vision. This is why the French Building Research Centre (CSTB) is currently working on an open framework for data collection and processing installed in any built environment. The research framework is called CSTBox framework. This is an internal research work aiming to develop technical and validation tools for building-related domains such as energy efficiency, ambient-assisted living and internal air quality assessment up to now. In parallel, a European R&D technology roadmap initiative called the REEB coordination action has identified all potential ICT contributions to the energy efficiency of buildings mainly via improvement in integrated design, intelligent control, user awareness and decision support to various stakeholders throughout the whole life of buildings. It has also identified energy management and trading. This paper presents a combination of the CSTBox framework and the REEB coordination action for future ICT-empowered smart buildings. The CSTBox framework offers throughout its existing components a holistic way to supervise the building by automatically analysing information coming from all connected devices, from the Internet or from energy service providers. This combination can then be used to efficiently advice the control of HVAC (heating & cooling), lighting, and hot water systems by optimizing energy production, storage and consumption devices inside the building via that same framework according to the users’ needs and wishes to fulfil the REEB identified issues.
Effect of Extension Contact on Rice Productivity in Some Selected Sites of Gazipur District

The impact of extension contact is examined with a view to evaluating the agriculture extension in Bangladesh. It is found that the impact of extension contact is stronger for the comparatively near villages to upazila headquarters. This effect is weaker for those villages, which are comparatively away from upazila headquarters. Evident shows that the influence of extension contact is strongly positive and significant in the upazila where people are mostly involved in agricultural works. The results show that the impact of extension contact, which is one of the basic tenet of agricultural extension, as found in the yield of rice in the whole survey area, is strongly positive and significant. Some determinants of extension contact are also examined. Findings revealed that education of farmers, size of farm families, number of earners of farm families, irrigation and villages which are nearer to the upazila headquarters are key determinants for a household participation in extension contact. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.3329/bjar.v36i4. 11762 Bangladesh J. Agril. Res. 36(4): 723-732, December 2011
The Stability of Sustainable Development Path and Institutions: Evidence from Genuine Savings Indicators

This paper investigates institutional factors affecting the performance of genuine savings (GS), which is often used in assessing sustainable development, adopting a model of autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity in mean. We pay particular attention to the contribution of institutions to decrease the volaticility level of the GS path. Using GS data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, and institutional data in the International Country Risk Guide, the estimation results show that there are two ways, through which institutions affecting GS performance. First, the high quality of the institutions enhance GS level directly. Second, the high quality of institutions enhance the GS level via stabilizing the volatiligy of the GS path. Considering both effect in their totality, institutional improvement plays an important role in realizing a sustainable development path.
Clinical Knowledge Graph Embeddings with Hierarchical Structure for Thyroid Treatment Recommendation

Thyroid knowledge graph constructed from EMRs contains abundant knowledge about patients. By applying representation learning model, the entities could be represented as embeddings for treatment recommendation, application of link prediction. However, the traditional representation learnings are limited in the field of thyroid disease: (1) clinical entities are different in magnitude and meanings (2) treatment entities are divided into two categories(operation and medicine). Thus, this paper proposed a framework apply to thyroid treatment recommendation with cold start based on TransD and network embedding with hierarchical structure, which are utilized respectively to solve the above problems. Finally, it provides the recommendation lists according to the ranking probabilities outputted by a binary classifier trained on the learned embeddings of the patients and treatments. Experiment compared with different components proved the applicability of the proposed framework.
The Dilemma of Financial Liberalization: State Autonomy and Societal Demands

Under what conditions do governments shift their capital control policies toward liberalization? Under what conditions do societal supporters influence that liberalization? We postulate the following: (1) The desire to maintain state autonomy leads all governments to prefer capital controls to their liberalization, but strong governments, regardless of partisanship, are more able to act on that preference and more likely to maintain controls longer than weak governments. (2) Strong partisan governments are influenced toward liberalization if their core societal constituency increasingly supports it-skilled labor for the left government, multinational corporations (MNCs) and commercial banks for the right government. (3) Skilled labor, MNCs, and banks may also influence capital decontrol, regardless of whether its political party is in power, if the group has broad national significance and captures government policy making. Our theory extends beyond existing pluralist and statist explanations. In an empirical test of 17 OECD countries over 22 years, the evidence largely supports our theoretical expectations.
Zinc tolerance of freshwater diatoms isolated from sites with zinc pollution; and pH effect on zinc toxicity

The aim with this study was to observe the zinc (Zn), tolerance for different strains isolated from sites with Zn pollution and to observe if lower pH decreases the Zn toxicity. Another aim was to see if malformations could be an indicator for Zn pollution. Zn is found naturally in the bedrock, sediment and waterbodies. Mining is one activity which had led to high values of Zn > 60 mg Zn l⁻¹ in some areas in Sweden. Today diatoms are used as indicators for organic pollution, the amount of nutrients and also for the pH condition. Due to problem with high values of metals, the diatom indicator has been developed further to also involve detection of metal pollution. Zn can affect diatoms growth rate, photosynthesis, cell division as well as their silica transport and thereby leading to malformed diatoms. In this study Zn toxicity was observed as decrease in number of cells, degree of malformations and as a decrease in the photosystem II efficiency. The hypotheses for the study are the following: the tested strains isolated from polluted sites would have higher tolerance to Zn than diatoms isolated from non- polluted sites, Zn would be less toxic in pH 5 compared to pH 7 and malformations could indicate Zn pollution. The observed results confirmed the hypothesis regarding the tested strains having higher tolerance towards Zn than diatoms from non- polluted sites, by the approximated EC ₅₀ values of 0,91; 1,35 and 2,27 mg Zn l⁻¹ respectively. However, the observed results for the hypothesis regarding the lower pH decreasing the Zn toxicity, were contradictory. The hypothesis was verified by higher EC ₅₀ values for the cell growth and fluorescence in pH 5 than in pH 7 for the short term experiments. Whereas the hypothesis was rejected by a higher degree of malformation in pH 5 than in pH 7 and by a higher cell growth in pH 7 than in pH 5 in the long term experiment. The different results regarding the pH effect on Zn toxicity might be explained by the different exposure times, probably the low pH is causing more stress to the cells pre-grown in pH 7 than it relieves the Zn toxicity. The long term experiment displayed significant more malformations in the higher Zn concentrations in comparison to the controls under both pH 5 and 7, and verified that malformations could detect high Zn concentrations and indicate Zn pollution.
Convergence of Discrete Laplace-Beltrami Operators Over Surfaces

Keywords--Laplace-Beltrami operator, Surface triangulation, Convergence. 1. I N T R O D U C T I O N Laplace-Beltrami operator, abbreviated as LB operator in this paper, is a generalization of the Laplacian from flat spaces to manifolds. LB operator plays a central role in many areas, such as image processing (see [1-4]), signal processing (see [5,6]), surface processing (see [7-12]), and the s tudy of geometric partial differential equations (PDE) (see [1,3,13,14]). For instance, the mathematical formulation of the mean curvature flow, surface diffusion flow (see [14]) and Willmore flow (see [15]), etc., involves the firstand second-order LB operators. In solving numerically PDE, which involves the Laplacian, a s tandard technique is to approximate the operator by a finite divided difference operator. Likewise, the LB operator needs to be discretized in solving the geometric PDEs numerically. However, due to the complexity and the diversity of the discretized surfaces, the discretization of LB operator is not as simple as the Laplacian over the flat surface. In the literature, several discretizations of LB operator over surfaces have been proposed and used. However, to the best of author 's knowledge, none of these discretizations has been proved to be convergent as the size of surface mesh goes to zero. The convergence of the discrete LB operators is the foundation for the convergence of some numerical simulation process of P D E which involves the LB operator. The aim of this paper is to Support in part by NSFC Grants 10241004, 10371130 and National Innovation Fund 1770900, Chinese Academy of Sciences. 01898-1221/04/$ see front matter © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Typeset by ~4. ~S-TEX doi: 10.1016/j.camwa. 2004.05. 001