Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bartonella Endocarditis in Spain: Case Reports of 21 Cases

Blood culture negative endocarditis (BCNE) is frequent in infective endocarditis (IE). One of the causes of BCNE is fastidious microorganisms, such as Bartonella spp. The aim of this study was to describe the epidemiologic, clinical characteristics, management and outcomes of patients with Bartonella IE from the “Spanish Collaboration on Endocarditis-Grupo de Apoyo al Manejo de la Endocarditis infecciosa en España (GAMES)”cohort. Here we presented 21 cases of Bartonella IE. This represents 0.3% of a total of 5590 cases and 2% of the BCNE from the GAMES cohort. 62% were due to Bartonella henselae and 38% to Bartonella quintana. Cardiac failure was the main presenting form (61.5% in B. hensalae, 87.5% in B. quintana IE) and the aortic valve was affected in 85% of the cases (76% in B. henselae, 100% in B. quintana IE). Typical signs such as fever were recorded in less than 40% of patients. Echocardiography showed vegetations in 92% and 100% of the patients with B. henselae and B. quintana, respectively. Culture was positive only in one patient and the remaining were diagnosed by serology and PCR. PCR was the most useful tool allowing for diagnosis in 16 patients (100% of the studied valves). Serology, at titers recommended by guidelines, only coincided with PCR in 52.4%. Antimicrobial therapy, in different combinations, was used in all cases. Surgery was performed in 76% of the patients. No in-hospital mortality was observed. One-year mortality was 9.4%. This article remarks the importance for investigating the presence of Bartonella infection as causative agent in all BCNE since the diagnosis needs specific microbiological tools and patients could benefit of a specific treatment.
From Triboelectric Nanogenerator to Polymer-Based Biosensor: A Review

Nowadays, self-powered wearable biosensors that are based on triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) are playing an important role in the continuous efforts towards the miniaturization, energy saving, and intelligence of healthcare devices and Internets of Things (IoTs). In this review, we cover the remarkable developments in TENG−based biosensors developed from various polymer materials and their functionalities, with a focus on wearable and implantable self-powered sensors for health monitoring and therapeutic devices. The functions of TENGs as power sources for third-party biosensors are also discussed, and their applications in a number of related fields are concisely illustrated. Finally, we conclude the review with a discussion of the challenges and problems of leveraging TENG−based intelligent biosensors.
Empathy and ageism among college students in non-medical institutions: the mediating role of empathy

ABSTRACT Understanding college students’ level of ageism is important for older adults’ social inclusion and recruiting future workforce. This study extends the understanding of ageism among students of health- and non-health-oriented majors and the factors associated with students’ attitudes. 246 students participated in this survey study and were measured their levels of empathy and ageism. The study found different levels of ageism and empathy among students in a general college setting. Empathy is a strong predictor for ageism when controlling for all other predictors. Path analysis revealed a moderate to strong mediating effect through empathy toward ageism. Future implications suggest that gerontological coursework should focus on more than physical and psychological curriculum design to include additional societal and sentimental understanding of the older population. Empathy should become an essential target to improve when aiming to reduce ageism among college students.
Transverse Seismic Behavior Studies of a Medium Span Cable-Stayed Bridge Model with Two Concrete Towers

Due to lack of investigation on nonlinear seismic behavior of cable-stayed bridges under strong earthquake excitation, the concrete towers, as the main gravity-carrying component, are usually required to remain nearly elastic. However, in order to achieve this high seismic performance objective, the reinforcement ratio of the tower legs and the tower struts need to be greatly increased in addition to its static loading requirement. To study the potential plastic region and possible failure mode of the cable-stayed bridge, a 1/20-scale full bridge model from a typical medium span concrete cable-stayed bridge was designed, constructed and tested on 4 linear shake tables using a site specific artificial wave in the transverse direction. Test results showed that the damage characteristics of the bridge model were as follows: (1) the severe damage was observed at the upper strut, with several steel bars fractured at both ends; (2) the repairable damage was observed at tower legs at the bottom and the middle part, with concrete cover spalling and exposure of steel bars; (3) the minimal damage was observed at the lower strut and the both sides of the side bents, with only slightly concrete spalling; and (4) no damage was observed at the auxiliary bents, the superstructure and the cables. Numerical results and test results were further compared and showed good agreement in low amplitudes of excitations. The test also proved that the bridge system was stable in flexural failure of upper struts, and had the negligible residual displacement subjected to high amplitudes of excitations.
The Influence of Maximum Squatting Strength on Jump and Sprint Performance: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of 492 Youth Soccer Players

This study aims to analyze the influence of relative strength performance, determined by parallel back squats (REL SQ), on 30 m sprinting (LS) and on jumping performance (squat [SJ], countermovement [CMJ]) in a large sample (n = 492) of elite youth soccer players. The soccer players were divided into subgroups based on their strength performance: strength level 1 (0.0–0.5 REL SQ), strength level 2 (>0.5–1.0 REL SQ), strength level 3 (>1.0 to 1.5 REL SQ), strength level 4 (>1.5 to 2.0 REL SQ), and strength level 5 (>2.0 REL SQ). The results of this study show that REL SQ explains 45–53% (r = |0.67–0.73|) of the variance of SJ, CMJ, and LS for the total sample. Strength levels 2–4 showed similar coefficients of correlation in jumping performance (r = |0.42–0.55|) and strength levels 2 and 3 in sprint performance (r = |0.41|). The respective extreme strength levels showed lower coefficients of correlation with the sprinting and jumping performance variables (r = |0.11–0.29|). No coefficients could be calculated for strength level 5 because no athlete achieved an appropriate strength level (>2.0 REL SQ). The data from this study show a clear influence of REL SQ on sprint and jump performance, even in a large sample.
Walrasian Equilibrium-Based Pricing Mechanism for Health-Data Crowdsensing Under Information Asymmetry

While prior studies have designed incentive mechanisms to attract the public to share their collected data, they tend to ignore information asymmetry between data requesters and collectors. In reality, the sensing costs information (time cost, battery drainage, bandwidth occupation of mobile devices, and so on) is the private information of collectors, which is unknown by the data requester. In this article, we model the strategic interactions between health-data requester and collectors using a bilevel optimization model. Considering that the crowdsensing market is open and the participants are equal, we propose a Walrasian equilibrium-based pricing mechanism to coordinate the interest conflicts between health-data requesters and collectors. Specifically, based on the exchange economic theory, we transform the bilevel optimization problem into a social welfare maximization problem with the constraint condition that the balance between supply and demand, and dual decomposition is then employed to divide the social welfare maximization problem into a set of subproblems that can be solved by health-data requesters and collectors. We prove that the optimal task price is equal to the marginal utility generated by the collector’s health data. To avoid obtaining the collector’s private information, a distributed iterative algorithm is then designed to obtain the optimal task pricing strategy. Furthermore, we conduct computational experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed pricing mechanism and analyze the effects of intrinsic rewards, sensing costs on optimal task prices, and collectors’ health-data supplies.
Summary of OEM Idling Recommendations from Vehicle Owner's Manuals

The project upon which this report is based was conceived in 2012 during discussions between the East Tennessee Clean Fuels Coalition (ETCleanFuels) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) who both noted that a detailed summary of idling recommendations for a wide variety of engines and vehicles were not available in the literature. The two organizations agreed that ETCleanFuels would develop a first-of-its-kind collection of idling recommendations from the owner’s manuals of modern production vehicles. Vehicle engine idling, a subject that has long been debated, is largely shrouded in misinformation. The justifications for idling seem to be many: driver comfort, waiting in lines, and talking on cell phones to name a few. Assuredly, a great number of people idle because of the myths and misinformation surrounding this issue. This report addresses these myths by turning to statements taken directly from the automobile and engine manufacturers themselves.
Immuno-Haematological Abnormalities of HIV-Infected Patients Before and After Initiation of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy in the Antiretroviral Therapy Clinics of Six Health Facilities at Dessie Town, Northeast Ethiopia

Background In people living with the human immunodeficiency virus, haematological abnormalities have been linked to an increased risk of disease progression and mortality. Hematological parameters may have a positive or negative impact on antiretroviral therapy. The aim of this study was to assess the immuno-haematological abnormalities of HIV-infected patients before and after the initiation of highly active antiretroviral therapy in the antiretroviral therapy clinics of six health facilities in Dessie, Northeast Ethiopia. Methods A facility-based cross-sectional study was conducted from April to May 30, 2021, at the antiretroviral therapy clinics of six health facilities in Dessie Town. A total of 378 HIV-infected patients taking highly active antiretroviral treatment for at least 6 months by using a consecutive sampling technique were included. A well-organized questionnaire was used to collect socio-demographic and clinical information. Immune-haematological parameters were tested using a Mindray BS-300 hematology analyzer and a BD FACS count CD4 analyzer. Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS version 25 statistical software. Statistical significance was defined as a P-value of 0.05 with a 95% confidence interval. Results Leukopenia was found in 26.7% and 16.5%, neutropenia in 16.5% and 9.4%, lymphopenia in 20% and 3.1%, and thrombocytopenia in 25.9% and 7.1% of HIV patients before and after HAART initiation, respectively. There was a significant difference in total white blood cell, absolute neutrophil, red blood cell, hemoglobin value, mean cell volume, mean cell haemoglobin, mean cell haemoglobin concentration, red cell distribution width, platelet and CD4+ T cell counts in HIV patients before and after the initiation of HAART with P < 0.05. Conclusion and Recommendation Anemia, leukopenia, neutropenia, lymphopenia, and thrombocytopenia were the most common haematological abnormalities found in this study before and after HAART initiation. The prevalence of thrombocytopenia, immunosuppression, and viral load was reduced considerably after starting HAART.
Expression and Role of Vitellogenin Genes in Ovarian Development of Zeugodacus cucurbitae

Simple Summary Vitellogenin (Vg) is the precursor of the yolk protein gene, which is crucial for insect reproduction. In this study, we identified four Vg genes in Zeugodacus cucurbitae (Coquillett). Their molecular characteristics and expression patterns were analyzed. The four genes are mainly expressed in the fat body tissue of adult female melon flies, and their expression is regulated by the juvenile hormone and ecdysone. Nutritional stress significantly down-regulated their expression, indicating that nutrition-dependent vitellogenic development occurs during ovarian development. RNAi-mediated inhibition of the expression of the four genes resulted in significantly delayed ovarian development in Z. cucurbitae. The results indicate that the four genes play an important role in the development of ovaries in Z. cucurbitae. Abstract Vitellogenin (Vg) genes encode the major egg yolk protein precursor in arthropods. In this study, four Vgs were identified in Zeugodacus cucurbitae (Coquillett). Sequence analysis showed that four ZcVgs had the conserved Vg domain. Phylogenetic analysis indicated that four ZcVgs were homologous to the Vgs of Tephritidae insects. The temporal and spatial expression patterns of ZcVgs were analyzed by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR), and the four ZcVgs showed high expression levels in female adults, especially in the fat body. The expression of ZcVg1 and ZcVg3 was down-regulated by a low dosage (0.5 μg) of 20-hydroxyecdysone (20E), and ZcVg2, ZcVg3, and ZcVg4 were up-regulated by a high dosage (1.0 and 2.0 μg) of 20E. The expression of ZcVg1 and ZcVg2 was up-regulated by 5 μg of juvenile hormone (JH), while all of the ZcVgs were down-regulated by a low and high dosage of JH. Expression of ZcVgs was down-regulated after 24 h of starvation and recovered to normal after nutritional supplementation. After micro-injection of the gene-specific double-stranded RNA, the ZcVgs’ expression was significantly suppressed, and ovarian development was delayed in Z. cucurbitae females. The results indicate that RNA interference of reproduction-related genes is a potential pest control method that works by manipulating female fertility.
A Global and Sector-Based Comparison of OCT Angiography and Visual Field Defects in Glaucoma

Purpose To evaluate the correlation of optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) and spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) with visual field for global and sector-based indices among glaucoma and glaucoma-suspected eyes. Patients and Methods. This is a retrospective study, and in total, 48 glaucoma eyes and 31 glaucoma suspect eyes were included. The correlation between visual field parameters and radial peripapillary capillary (RPC) vessel density via OCTA was compared to the correlation with retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness via SD-OCT. The RPC vessel density and RNFL thickness were divided into eight sectors, which included the temporal upper, temporal lower, superotemporal, inferotemporal, superonasal, inferonasal, nasal upper, and nasal lower sectors. Pearson correlations with 95% confidence intervals were calculated with resampling, and correlations were compared with a Fisher Z transformation. Results Both RPC vessel density (R = 0.63, 95% CI [0.24, 0.86]) and RNFL thickness (R = 0.49, 95% CI [0.23, 0.69]) were correlated with the mean deviation when comparing global indices of glaucoma patients. In glaucoma suspects, the correlations between the mean deviation and RPC vessel density (R = 0.21, 95% CI [−0.05, 0.49]) and RNFL thickness (R = 0.01, 95% CI [−0.35, 0.39]) were not significant. Glaucoma eyes had the highest correlation between the mean sensitivity and RPC vessel density and RNFL thickness for the superotemporal, superonasal, temporal upper, and inferotemporal sectors. Conclusion Across a diverse population and heterogeneous glaucoma types, RPC vessel density measurements correlate with global and sector-wise visual field indices similar to RNFL thickness.
The term structure of uncovered interest parity in emerging markets

ABSTRACT This note examines uncovered interest parity (UIP) at both short and longer horizons in emerging markets. In part due to currency market intervention, the duration of risk premium shocks, and more easily verified medium term trends, the UIP term structure in these economies may differ from that in advanced economies. Analysing ten major emerging markets between 2000 and 2020, the evidence indicates that the validity of UIP increases with the investment horizon, corroborating a similar finding for advanced economies.
Comprehensive Evaluation of Ecological Environmental Quality in Small-Scale Coal Mining Subsidence Area Based on Hierarchical Structure—A Case Study of Shendong Coalfield in Western China

Aiming at the problem that the current research is not suitable for the evaluation of the surface ecological environmental quality in a small-scale coal mining subsidence area, a model combining the hierarchical method and the weighted method was constructed to realize the comprehensive evaluation of the surface ecological environmental quality in a small-scale subsidence area. The results showed that the change in the water and soil environment caused by coal mining subsidence was the main factor affecting the quality of the ecological environment in the subsidence area; the evaluation results in the control area and uniform subsidence area were of grade III, which was at the “general” level, and the evaluation results in the non-uniform subsidence area were of grade VI, which was at the “poor” level. Coal mining subsidence has a great impact on the quality of ecological environment in a non-uniform subsidence area.
A Molecular Insight into the Role of Antioxidants in Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Diseases

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) defines fat accumulation in the liver, and it is commonly associated with metabolic syndromes like diabetes and obesity. Progressive NAFLD leads to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and ultimately causes cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma, and NASH is currently a frequent cause of liver transplantation. Oxidative stress is often contributed to the progression of NAFLD, and hence, antioxidants such as silymarin, silybin, or silibinin, pentoxifylline, resveratrol, and vitamins A, C, and E are used in clinical trials against NAFLD. Silymarin induces the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor α (PPARα), a fatty acid sensor, which promotes the transcription of genes that are required for the enzymes involved in lipid oxidation in hepatocytes. Silybin inhibits sterol regulatory element-binding protein 1 and carbohydrate response element-binding protein to downregulate the expression of genes responsible for de novo lipogenesis by activating AMP-activated protein kinase phosphorylation. Pentoxifylline inhibits TNF-α expression and endoplasmic reticulum stress-mediated inflammatory nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) activation. Thus, it prevents NAFLD to NASH progression. Resveratrol inhibits methylation at Nrf-2 promoters and NF-κB activity via SIRT1 activation in NAFLD conditions. However, clinically, resveratrol has not shown promising beneficial effects. Vitamin C is beneficial in NAFLD patients. Vitamin E is not effectively regressing hepatic fibrosis. Hence, its combination with antifibrotic agents is used as an adjuvant to produce a synergistic antifibrotic effect. However, to date, none of these antioxidants have been used as a definite therapeutic agent in NAFLD patients. Further, these antioxidants should be studied in NAFLD patients with larger populations and multiple endpoints in the future.
Adaptive Memory-Enhanced Time Delay Reservoir and its Memristive Implementation

Time Delay Reservoir (TDR) is a hardware-friendly machine learning approach from two perspectives. First, it can prevent the connection overhead of neural networks with increasing neurons. Second, through its dynamic system representation, TDR can also be implemented in hardware by different systems. However, it performs poorly on tasks that involve long-term dependency. In this work, we first introduce a higher-order delay unit, which is capable of accumulating and transferring the long history states in an adaptive manner to further enhance the reservoir memory. Particle Swarm Optimisation is applied to optimize the enhanced degree of memory adaptivity. Our experiments demonstrate its superiority both for short- and long-term memory datasets over seven existing approaches. In light of the hardware-friendly feature of TDR, we further propose a memristive implementation of our adaptive memory-enhanced TDR, where a dynamic memristor and the memristor-based delay element are applied to construct the reservoir. Through circuit simulation, the feasibility of our proposed memristive implementation is verified. The comparisons with different hardware reservoirs show that our proposed memristive implementation is effective both for short- and long-term memory datasets, while exhibiting benefits in terms of smaller circuit area and lower power consumption compared with traditional hardware reservoirs.
Chipless RFID tags and sensors: a review on time-domain techniques

In the past few years Radio Frequency Identification ( RFID ) has grown to be one of the most popular technologies in the area of identification systems. Following a brief survey of RFID systems, this paper provides a technical review of work undertaken in the field of time-domain chipless RFID tags and sensors. This paper aims not only to address the chipless tags which use Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) concept for data encoding but also for the use of Ultra-Wideband Impulse-Radar (UWB-IR) as a time-domain measurement technique. The penultimate section intends to focus on time-domain reading setups and finally, a brief comparison between this method and other chipless techniques is provided.
Molecular dynamics study of fatigue behavior of nickel single-crystal under cyclic shear deformation and hyper-gravity condition

Dynamic mechanical properties play an essential role in governing the intrinsic fatigue behavior of superalloys. In this work, [001](010), [110](−110), and [101](010) pre-existing center cracks model of nickel single crystals under increasing cyclic shear deformations were studied by molecular dynamics simulations. More importantly, we introduced three hyper-gravity forces, i.e. 3 × 1012 g, 4 × 1012 g, and 5 × 1012 g, during the fatigue deformation to simulate the high-speed rotation of the blade. The stress intensity factor for the first dislocation nucleation indicates that the critical stress is strongly dependent on the hyper-gravity intensities and temperatures. The fatigue life decreased rapidly with the elevated hyper-gravity strength. Moreover, the [001](010) crack propagation shows a brittle-to-ductile transition at temperatures below 300 K and is suppressed at high temperatures. The crack length in the relation to hyper-gravity intensities is discussed and shows anisotropy along the direction of hyper-gravity. No crack propagation is observed in [110](−110) and [101](010) central crack models.