Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor Reduces Long-Term Mortality in Patients With Coronary Artery Disease and Chronic Kidney Disease

Objectives Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a risk factor for coronary artery disease (CAD). We examined the effects of circulating brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) on long-term mortality in patients with CAD and CKD. Materials and Methods We enrolled patients with established CAD in the present study. Serum BDNF and estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) were assessed after overnight fasting. All-cause mortality served as the primary endpoint. Results All 348 enrolled patients were divided into four groups according to their median BDNF level and CKD status, defined according to eGFR <60 mL/min/1.73 m2. Forty-five patients reached the primary endpoint during the median follow-up time of 6.0 years. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis indicated that the group with low BDNF and CKD had a significantly higher mortality rate than the other three groups (log-rank test p < 0.001). Compared to the high BDNF without CKD group, the low BDNF with CKD group had a hazard ratio (HR) of 3.186 [95% confidence interval (CI): 1.482–6.846] for all-cause mortality according to the multivariable Cox proportional hazard regression analysis after adjusting for age and urine albumin-creatinine ratio (p = 0.003). Furthermore, there was a significantly interactive effect between BDNF and CKD status on the risk of the primary endpoint (odds ratio = 6.413, 95% CI: 1.497–27.47 in the multivariable logistic regression model and HR = 3.640, 95% CI: 1.006–13.173 in the Cox regression model). Conclusion We observed a synergistic effect between low serum BDNF levels and CKD on the prediction of all-cause mortality in patients with CAD.
Phenotypic, Anatomical, and Diel Variation in Sugar Concentration Linked to Cell Wall Invertases in Common Bean Pod Racemes under Water Restriction

The common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) pod wall is essential for seed formation and to protect seeds. To address the effect of water restriction on sugar metabolism in fruits differing in sink strength under light–dark cycles, we used plants of cv. OTI at 100% field capacity (FC) and at 50% FC over 10 days at the beginning of pod filling. Water restriction intensified the symptoms of leaf senescence. However, pods maintained a green color for several days longer than leaves did. In addition, the functionality of pods of the same raceme was anatomically demonstrated, and no differences were observed between water regimes. The glucose and starch concentrations were lower than those of sucrose, independent of pod wall size. Remarkably, the fructose concentration decreased only under water restriction. The cell wall invertase activity was twofold higher in the walls of small pods than in those of large ones in both water regimes; similar differences were not evident for cytosolic or vacuolar invertase. Using bioinformatics tools, six sequences of invertase genes were identified in the P. vulgaris genome. The PvINVCW4 protein sequence contains substitutions for conserved residues in the sucrose-binding site, while qPCR showed that transcript levels were induced in the walls of small pods under stress. The findings support a promising strategy for addressing sink strength under water restriction.
Assessing the Hydrodynamic and Economic Impacts of Biofouling on the Hull of Surface Vessels Using Numerical Methods

TITLE: Assessing the Hydrodynamic and Economic Impacts of Biofouling on the Hull of Surface Vessels Using Numerical Methods AUTHOR: Letchi Evrard Quentin Anoman MAJOR ADVISOR: Prasanta K. Sahoo, Ph.D. Marine fouling on the hull of surface vessels is a topic of increasing importance in the maritime field for its environmental and financial impacts. Recent research developments have introduced mathematical models dealing with the frictional resistance associated with fouling, thus enabling to single out their impact on ship hydrodynamics. Herein, two implementations of these models are presented. The first implementation used Computational Fluid Dynamics to assess the additional drag induced by fouling for a specific ship model. With the software STAR CCM+, Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equations have been used to model turbulence, wall laws parameters have been adapted to suit a Colebrooktype engineering roughness function, and a hybrid wall treatment captures the flow near the wall. Full details of the simulation set-up are given. The second implementation used turbulent flow similarity scaling laws in a MATLAB code to predict the added resistance of ships due to biofouling and the associated costs. With flexibility in mind, the code has been designed to account for the singularity of each context based on at least one in-situ observation of the fouling condition. Through a hypothetical, yet realistic scenario, it is shown that iii it enables proactive management by indicating when the cumulative penalty of fouling is no longer tolerable from a financial standpoint. The results of both implementations were validated against experimental data found in the literature. Prediction of the additional drag caused by fouling on a frigate showed excellent agreement of both methods.
Familial and Social Security for the Rural Elderly: A Study of Shatoil Village in Naogaon District

In this study, efforts have been made to explore familial and social security for the rural elderly in Naogaon district. The main objective of this study was to learn about the familial and social security they enjoyed in the study area. The social survey method has been employed for data collection in this research. The research area of this study was the Shatoil village of Naogaon district in Bangladesh. Purposive sampling has been used in this research work. The sample size was 100. The findings of the study show that the highest number of the respondents lived in nuclear families. A majority of them were illiterate and poor with an average income of less than 50,000 Taka per year. Most of them could not avail good health services for treatment owing to poverty. Their socio-economic condition was not satisfactory. Familial security was strong. The social security they received in terms of old age allowance was not sufficient. Only 12 percent of the elderly received a monthly allowance. About half of the remaining respondents informed that they did not get any old age allowance because of corruption. Member and Chairman want 3000-4000 taka as a bribe for creating an old age allowance card. None of the widows received widowhood allowance. The government should ensure the access and extend of financial help such as old age allowance, widowhood allowance, and health insurance for the welfare of deprived elderly.
Comparison among plaque assay, tissue culture infectious dose (TCID50) and real-time RT-PCR for SARS-CoV-2 variants quantification

Background and Objectives: SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOC) and interest (VOI) pose a significant threat to public health because the rapid change in the SARS-CoV-2 genome can alter viral phenotypes such as virulence, transmissibility and the ability to evade the host response. Hence, SARS-CoV-2 quantification techniques are essential for timely diagnosis and follow-up. Besides, they are vital to understanding viral pathogenesis, antiviral evaluation, and vaccine development. Materials and Methods: Five isolates of SARS-CoV-2: D614G strain (B.1), three VOC (Alpha, Gamma and Delta), and one VOI (Mu) were used to compare three techniques for viral quantification, plaque assay, median tissue culture infectious dose (TCID50) and real-time RT-PCR. Results: Plaque assay showed viral titers between 0.15 ± 0.01×107 and 1.95 ± 0.09×107 PFU/mL while viral titer by TCID50 assay was between 0.71 ± 0.01×106 to 4.94 ± 0.80×106 TCID50/mL for the five SARS-CoV-2 isolates. The PFU/mL titer obtained by plaque and the calculated from TCID50 assays differed by 0.61 log10, 0.59 log10, 0.59 log10 and 0.96 log10 for Alfa, Gamma, Delta, and Mu variants (p≤0.0007), respectively. No differences were observed for the D614G strain. Real-time PCR assay exhibited titers ranging from 0.39 ± 0.001×108 to 3.38 ± 0.04×108 RNA copies/μL for all variants. The relation between PFU/mL and RNA copies/mL was 1:29800 for D614G strain, 1:11700 for Alpha, 1:8930 for Gamma, 1:12500 for Delta, and 1:2950 for Mu. Conclusion: TCID50 assay was comparable to plaque assay for D614G but not for others SARS-CoV-2 variants. Our data demonstrated a correlation among PFU/mL and E gene RNA copies/μL, units of measure commonly used to quantify the viral load in diagnostic and research fields. The results suggest that the proportion of infectious virions in vitro changes depending on the SARS-CoV-2 variant, being Mu, the variant reaching a higher viral titer with fewer viral copies.
EFFECTS OF DIFFERENT NITROGEN SOURCES ON TURF QUALITY AND PLANTS GROWTH OF SOME WARM-SEASON TURFGRASSES

This research was conducted to determine the effects of different nitrogen sources and rates on some warm-season turfgrasses under Mediterranean-type climate conditions in 2017-2018. The experimental design was a split-split plot with design with three replicates; turfgrass species as the main plot, nitrogen sources as the subplots, and nitrogen doses as the sub subplots. The main plots consist of four nitrogen sources: two slow-release fertilizers, one organomineral fertilizer, and one sewage sludge. Subplots consist of three warm-season turfgrass species; zoysiagrass (Zoysia japonica Steud.), hybrid Bermudagrass (Cynodon transvaalensis x Cynodon dactylon), seashore paspalum (Paspalum vaginatum Sw.), and one cool-season turfgrass species, tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea Schreb.). The nitrogen doses were as follows; 0.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 g m-2. Turf color and quality were evaluated visually monthly. Also, clipping weight is determined. According to the result, slow-release and organomineral fertilizers can be assessable as N sources that will meet the nutritional needs of the turfgrasses. Zoysiagrass and seashore paspalum showed almost equivalent scores and gave sufficiently dark turf color and quality. Turfgrass should be fertilized at least with 3.0 g m−2 N to provide acceptable turf color and quality.
Association of Gestational Vitamin E Status With Pre-eclampsia: A Retrospective, Multicenter Cohort Study

Introduction Pre-eclampsia is the second leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide. The controversy for the association of vitamin E with pre-eclampsia has raged unabated for two decades. We aimed to determine the association of vitamin E level in the first trimester and the gestational change with pre-eclampsia. Materials and Methods A retrospective cohort study was conducted among singleton pregnant women aged 15–49 years at 137 hospitals in China. Serum vitamin E concentrations in the first trimester and at pre-eclampsia assessment time were uniformly quantified in a laboratory by high performance liquid chromatography. Logistic regression models with restricted cubic splines were performed to reveal a non-linear association of vitamin E concentrations in the first trimester and the gestational change with pre-eclampsia. Results We included 73 317 participants (47.8% aged 25–29 years) and 2.28% were diagnosed with pre-eclampsia. Higher risk was observed in those with lower concentration in the first trimester and greater gestational decrease, with a range from 0.81 to 80.60%. A non-linear L-shaped association was observed between vitamin E concentrations in the first trimester and pre-eclampsia, suggesting a threshold at 7.3 mg/L and a ceiling effect: the risk saw a steep rise when the concentrations in the first trimester were < 7.3 mg/L but was relatively flat beyond the inflection point. Sharply increased pre-eclampsia risk was also found in those with gestational vitamin E decrease after accounting for the baseline status in the first trimester. However, gestational vitamin E increase was associated with decreased pre-eclampsia risk when the baseline concentrations were < 7.3 mg/L but did not confer additional benefits when it was above the threshold. Conclusion We demonstrated alarmingly high pre-eclampsia risk in women with vitamin E concentrations of < 7.3 mg/L in the first trimester and gestational vitamin E decrease. These findings underscore the need to supplement vitamin E among pregnant women with low baseline status.
Properties of high entropy borides synthesized via microwave-induced plasma

Microwave-induced plasma was used to anneal precursor powders containing five metal oxides with carbon and boron carbide as reducing agents, resulting in high entropy boride ceramics. Measurements of hardness, phase structure, and oxidation resistance were investigated. Plasma annealing for 45 min in the range of 1500–2000 °C led to the formation of predominantly single-phase (Hf, Zr, Ti, Ta, Mo)B2 or (Hf, Zr, Nb, Ta, Mo)B2 hexagonal structures characteristic of high entropy borides. Oxidation resistance for these borides was improved by as much as a factor of ten when compared to conventional commercial diborides. Vickers and nanoindentation hardness measurements show the indentation size effect and were found to be as much as 50% higher than that reported for the same high entropy boride configuration made by other methods, with average values reaching up to 38 GPa (for the highest Vickers load of 200 gf). Density functional theory calculations with a partial occupation method showed that (Hf, Zr, Ti, Ta, Mo)B2 has a higher hardness but a lower entropy forming ability compared to (Hf, Zr, Nb, Ta, Mo)B2, which agrees with the experiments. Overall, these results indicate the strong potential of using microwave-induced plasma as a novel approach for synthesizing high entropy borides.
Adaptive hybrid activation function for deep neural networks

The adaptive hybrid activation function (AHAF) is proposed that combines the properties of the rectifier units and the squashing functions. The proposed function can be used as a drop-in replacement for ReLU, SiL and Swish activations for deep neural networks and can evolve to one of such functions during the training. The effectiveness of the function was evaluated on the image classification task using the Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. The evaluation shows that the neural networks with AHAF activations achieve better classification accuracy comparing to their base implementations that use ReLU and SiL. A double-stage parameter tuning process for training the neural networks with AHAF is proposed. The proposed approach is sufficiently simple from the implementation standpoint and provides high performance for the neural network training process.
Community Conversations: Stakeholder-Identified Research Priorities to Foster Community Participation for Individuals With Intellectual and Developmental Disability

To identify future research priorities and meaningful outcomes focused on community-level interventions for children and youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities and families, a group underrepresented in research, we established a diverse patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) community. We focused on engaging regionally and nationally-diverse stakeholders—individuals, families, healthcare professionals, community, and policy experts—in research development activities that would build partnerships and research capacity. This community of stakeholders also represented the matrix of systems, services, and programs that people frequent in their communities (e.g., cultural arts, worship, sports and recreation, and transportation). We present the engagement process and methods for including individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities as stakeholders in research planning and processes. The results of planning, completing, and evaluating three face-to-face research capacity-building meetings and their subsequent stakeholder engagement activities include: (1) individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families clearly expressed a desire to be included and to feel good about their participation in community settings, (2) many of our stakeholders wanted action and change to happen in their communities now, and often did not realize or understand that research takes time, (3) organizations expressed a need for mentoring related to best practices for access and inclusive programming. Overarching issues around societal inclusion, equal opportunities, and life chances for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families were front and center across communities and multi-stakeholder groups, and achieving change remains valued and a high priority.
How to Best Develop and Deliver Generic Long-Term Condition Rehabilitation Programmes in Rural Settings: An Integrative Review

People living rurally frequently experience health disparities especially if living with a long-term condition (LTC) or multi-morbidity. Self-management support is a key component of LTC management and commonly included in rehabilitation programmes to enhance ability to self-manage health and encourage physical activity. Such programmes are however often condition focussed and despite evidence for their effectiveness, are not always feasible to deliver in rural settings. Generic programmes are arguably more optimal in the rural context and delivery can be face to face or remotely (via telehealth). The aim of this explorative integrative review was to collate and present international evidence for development, delivery, integration, and support of community-based, generic LTC group rehabilitation programmes delivered rurally in person, or remotely using telehealth. Electronic databases were systematically searched using MeSH terms and keywords. For inclusion, articles were screened for relevance to the aim, and practical information pertaining to the aim were extracted, charted, and organized deductively into themes of Development, Delivery, Integration, and Support. Within each theme, data were synthesized inductively into categories (Theory, Context, Interpersonal aspects, and Technology and Programme aspects). Fifty-five studies were included. Five studies contributed information about community based programmes delivered via the internet. Development was the only theme populated by information from all categories. The theme of Support was only populated with information from one category. Our review has drawn together a large body of diverse work. It has focused on finding practical information pertaining to the best ways to develop, deliver, integrate, and support a community-based generic rehabilitation programme for people living with long-term health conditions, delivered rurally and/or potentially via the internet. Practical suggestions were thematically organized into categories of theory, context, interpersonal aspects, and technology and programme aspects. While the findings of this review might appear simple and self-evident, they are perhaps difficult to enact in practice.
A Multichannel CNN-GRU Model for Human Activity Recognition

Human activity recognition (HAR) is one of the important research areas in pervasive computing. Among HAR, sensor-based activity recognition refers to acquiring a high-level knowledge about human activities from readings of many low-level sensors. In recent years, although the existing methods of deep learning (DL) have been widely used for sensor-based HAR with some good performance, they still face such challenges as feature extraction and characterization, continuous action segmentation in dealing with time series problems. In this study, a multichannel fusion model is proposed with the idea of dividing. In this proposed architecture, a multichannel convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to enhance the ability to extract features at different scales, and then the fused features are fed into the gated recurrent unit (GRU) for feature labeling and enhanced feature representation, through the learning of temporal relationships. Finally, the multichannel CNN-GRU model is designed using global average pooling (GAP) to connect the feature maps with the final classification. The model performance was conducted on three benchmark datasets of WISDM, UCI-HAR, and PAMAP2 with the accuracy of 96.41%, 96.67%, and 96.25% respectively. The results show that the proposed model demonstrates better activity detection capability than some of the reported results.
Spin splitting of the conduction band by exchange interaction in the valence band through a 
k·p
 interband process in ferromagnetic semiconductors

The momentum-dependent spin splitting in the conduction band couples orbital motion to spin and enables electrical control of spin. Currently, this control relies on the relativistic spin-orbit interaction (SOI), which limits useful materials to those containing heavy elements. Recently, Naka et al. [Nat. Commun. 10 , 4305 (2019)] have found a momentum-dependent spin splitting originating from the exchange interaction, which is expected to extend spintronic materials to those without heavy elements. In this paper, we propose a mechanism of the exchange-induced orbital-spin coupling by extending the k · p theory. As an example, we consider an n -type ferromagnetic semiconductor (nFMS) of T d point group symmetry with the p - d exchange interaction between an electron in the valence band and the spin of a magnetic ion and evaluate the spin splitting in the conduction band of (cid:2) 6 irreducible representation from the eight-band k · p Hamiltonian. We ﬁnd that the lowest-order spin splitting in bulk is of the second order of momentum, which results in a nonzero splitting at k x = k y = 0 in a quantum well with a nonzero quantized momentum k z . An estimation shows that the p - d exchange interaction is the dominant origin of the conduction-band spin splitting in InFeAs nFMS. We also calculate the intrinsic anomalous Hall conductivity of bulk InFeAs generated by the p - d exchange, which provides both the coupling of orbital motion to spin and that of spin to nFMS magnetization. We ﬁnd that the p - d exchange-induced Hall conductivity exhibits an accelerated increase with Fe density, in contrast to that produced by the s - d exchange and the Dresselhaus SOI. This ﬁnding suggests that the extended k · p mechanism of orbital-spin coupling is expected to help ﬁnd remarkable phenomena and useful applications in a wide variety of materials and structures. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.105. 235203
Effects of climate variability on local communities living in and around Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda

This paper explores the effects of climate variability on local communities living within and around Queen Elizabeth National Park (QENP), their coping mechanisms, and challenges encountered. Data was collected from 250 respondents through questionnaires administered to small holder farmers, salt miners, and fisher folks, as well as in-depth interviews and focus group discussions (FGDs) held with selected households in Katunguru, Lake Katwe, Kasenyi, and Kahokya parishes in and around the park. The results indicated that climate variability affects all households through long dry spells (drought), increased intensity of rain and occurrence of water related diseases. This resulted in decline in economic output in the context of reduced food availability, household incomes, and poor health of the household members. The results further showed that although diversification of livelihood activities was uniform, the coping mechanisms were heterogeneous across the three economic sectors. While the agricultural households engaged in agricultural intensification, fisher folks changed their fishing technologies, and salt miners drained their flooded saltpans. According to the findings of this study, the effects of climate variability were widespread across all households in and around the park. The study recommends that rural households be supported in a variety of activities in order to build capacity.