Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bioarchaeology of Neolithic Çatalhöyük reveals fundamental transitions in health, mobility, and lifestyle in early farmers

Significance Bioarchaeological investigation of human remains from Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey, contributes to a growing body of data documenting population dynamics, health, and lifestyle of early farmers in Holocene settings in the Near East and globally. The extensive archaeological context of foodways, material culture, housing, environment, ecology, population structure and size, social interaction, and community living informs interpretation of the bioarchaeological record representing nearly 1,200 continuous years of community life. This record presents biological outcomes and comprehensive understanding of the challenges associated with dependence on domesticated plants and animals, the labor involved in acquiring food and other resources, impacts of settled community life on health and well-being, and evolving lifeways to the present day. The transition from a human diet based exclusively on wild plants and animals to one involving dependence on domesticated plants and animals beginning 10,000 to 11,000 y ago in Southwest Asia set into motion a series of profound health, lifestyle, social, and economic changes affecting human populations throughout most of the world. However, the social, cultural, behavioral, and other factors surrounding health and lifestyle associated with the foraging-to-farming transition are vague, owing to an incomplete or poorly understood contextual archaeological record of living conditions. Bioarchaeological investigation of the extraordinary record of human remains and their context from Neolithic Çatalhöyük (7100–5950 cal BCE), a massive archaeological site in south-central Anatolia (Turkey), provides important perspectives on population dynamics, health outcomes, behavioral adaptations, interpersonal conflict, and a record of community resilience over the life of this single early farming settlement having the attributes of a protocity. Study of Çatalhöyük human biology reveals increasing costs to members of the settlement, including elevated exposure to disease and labor demands in response to community dependence on and production of domesticated plant carbohydrates, growing population size and density fueled by elevated fertility, and increasing stresses due to heightened workload and greater mobility required for caprine herding and other resource acquisition activities over the nearly 12 centuries of settlement occupation. These changes in life conditions foreshadow developments that would take place worldwide over the millennia following the abandonment of Neolithic Çatalhöyük, including health challenges, adaptive patterns, physical activity, and emerging social behaviors involving interpersonal violence.
Learning about health promotion through behavior change: a novel qualitative study of physiotherapy students incorporating applied intervention and reflection

ABSTRACT Introduction and Aim: A broader definition of health, and an increase in lifestyle-related health conditions, have necessitated a change in physiotherapy practice. As a result, what entry-level students learn about health and wellbeing for 21st century needs is receiving more attention. The aim of this study was to explore what entry-level physiotherapy students learned experientially about health promotion and behavior change by working with a peer to reciprocally prescribe and receive a six-week health promotion program. Method: Thematic analysis of an assessment task that students submitted as part of their enrolment in a second-year physiotherapy subject. Results: Analysis revealed three themes: 1) physiotherapist’s contribution to the health and wellbeing of others; 2) needing to understand determinants of health to collaboratively facilitate behavior change; and 3) benefits of experiential activities to learn about professional/personal roles. Discussion: Students demonstrated understanding of the complexity and challenges associated with being a practitioner. The assessment task gave students an authentic learning experience to navigate factors such as establishing personal interests, negotiating goals, and addressing motivation. Furthermore, it highlighted that opportunities may exist for students to participate in, and learn from, practice-relevant situations outside of clinical placements.
Measures for evaluation of prognostic improvement under multivariate normality for nested and nonnested models

When comparing performances of two risk prediction models, several metrics exist to quantify prognostic improvement, including the change in the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve, the Integrated Discrimination Improvement, the Net Reclassification Index at event rate, the change in Standardized Net Benefit, the change in Brier score, and the change in scaled Brier score. We explore the behavior and interrelationships between these metrics under multivariate normality in nested and nonnested model comparisons. We demonstrate that, within the framework of linear discriminant analysis, all six statistics are functions of squared Mahalanobis distance, a robust metric that properly measures discrimination by quantifying the separation between the risk scores of events and nonevents. These relationships are important for overall interpretability and clinical usefulness. Through simulation, we demonstrate that the performance of the theoretical estimators under normality is comparable or superior to empirical estimation methods typically used by investigators. In particular, the theoretical estimators for the Net Reclassification Index and the change in Standardized Net Benefit exhibit less variability in their estimates as compared to their empirically estimated counterparts. Finally, we explore how these metrics behave with potentially nonnormal data by applying these methods in a practical example based on the sex‐specific cardiovascular disease risk models from the Framingham Heart Study. Our findings aim to give greater insight into the behavior of these measures and the connections existing among them and to provide additional estimation methods with less variability for the Net Reclassification Index and the change in Standardized Net Benefit.
Species richness and density of seabirds in Isla del Coco bays, Costa Rica, related to the occurrence of breeding colonies

Seabirds are an ecologically diverse group that inhabits all seas and oceans (Parsons et al. 2008). In a recent global assessment, Croxall et al. (2012) reported ~350 seabird species, of which 28% are threatened globally, 5% are critically endangered and 10% are near threatened, thus rendering seabirds among the groups of birds most threatened. Oceanic islands, which provide roosting and breeding sites for many endemic and migrant seabird species, are particularly vulnerable to anthropogenic impacts (Coulson 2001). In addition, waters around these islands are often important feeding grounds for resident and visiting populations, e.g. Hawaii (Harrison et al. 1983) and Galápagos (Mills 1998). Therefore, oceanic islands contribute greatly to global biodiversity and require special attention in terms of conservation (Lara-Lara et al. 2008).
Improved Time Responses of PI & FL Controlled SEPIC Converter based Series Resonant Inverter fed Induction Heating System

This work deals with the Power Factor Corrected Single-Ended Primary Inductor Converter (PFC-SEPIC) based voltage fed closed loop full bridge series resonant induction heating system for household induction heating applications. The output voltage of the front end PFC-SEPIC converter fed series resonant inverter governs the controllers, which may be PI controller or Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC). The analysis and comparison of time responses are presented in this paper. The PFC-SEPIC converter is used to improve the output power and the THD of source side current are compared for PI and FLC controllers. PFC-SEPIC converter maintains improved current and voltage at unity power factor through the input mains. The SEPIC converter based Voltage Fed Full Bridge Series Resonant Inverter (VFFBSRI) converts the voltage at a frequency of 10 kHz to a level suitable for household induction heating. A 1 kW SEPIC converter based VFFBSRI with RLC load is designed and simulated using MATLAB/ Simulink and hardware is fabricated.
Minimal Byzantine Fault Tolerance

This paper presents two Byzantine fault-tolerant state machine replication (BFT) algorithms that are minimal in several senses. First, they require only 2 f + 1 replicas, instead of the usual 3 f +1. Second, the trusted service in which this reduction of replicas is based is arguably minimal: it provides an interface with a single function and is composed only by a counter and a signature generation primitive. Third, in nice executions the two algorithms run in the minimum number of communication steps for non-speculative and speculative algorithms, respectively 4 and 3 steps. The paper is also the first to present BFT algorithms with 2 f + 1 replicas that require a trusted service implementable using commercial off-the-shelf trusted hardware: this service can be implemented with the Trusted Platform Module currently available as a chip in the mainboard of many commodity PCs.
Automatic Identification of Locative Expressions from Informal Text

Informal place descriptions that are rich in locative expressions can be found in various contexts. The ability to extract locative expressions from such informal place descriptions is at the centre of improving the quality of services, such as interpreting geographical queries and emergency calls. While much attention has been focused on the identification of formal place references (e.g., Rathmines Road) from natural language, people tend to make heavy use of informal place references (e.g., my bedroom). This research addresses the problem by developing a model that is able to automatically identify locative expressions from informal text. Moreover, we study and discover insights of what aspects are helpful in the identification task. Utilising an existing manually annotated corpus, we re-annotate locative expressions and use them as the gold standard. Having the gold standard ready, we take a machine learning approach to the identification task with well-reasoned features based on observation and intuition. Further, we study the impacts of various feature setups on the performance of the model and provide analyses of experiment results. With the best performing feature setup, the model is able to achieve significant increase in performance over the baseline systems.
Development of Capsular Fibrosis Beneath the Liver Surface in Humans and Mice

Glisson's capsule is the connective tissue present in the portal triad as well as beneath the liver surface. Little is known about how Glisson's capsule changes its structure in capsular fibrosis (CF), which is characterized by fibrogenesis beneath the liver surface. In this study, we found that the human liver surface exhibits multilayered capsular fibroblasts and that the bile duct is present beneath the mesothelium, whereas capsular fibroblasts are scarce and no bile ducts are present beneath the mouse liver surface. Patients with cirrhosis caused by alcohol abuse or hepatitis C virus infection show development of massive CF. To examine the effect of alcohol on CF in mice, we first injected chlorhexidine gluconate (CG) intraperitoneally and then fed alcohol for 1 month. The CG injection induces CF consisting of myofibroblasts beneath the mesothelium. One month after CG injection, the fibrotic area returns to the normal structure. In contrast, additional alcohol feeding sustains the presence of myofibroblasts in CF. Cell lineage tracing revealed that mesothelial cells give rise to myofibroblasts in CF, but these myofibroblasts disappear 1 month after recovery with or without alcohol feeding. Capsular fibroblasts isolated from the mouse liver spontaneously differentiated into myofibroblasts and their differentiation was induced by transforming growth factor beta 1 (TGF‐β1) or acetaldehyde in culture. In alcohol‐fed mice, infiltrating CD11b+Ly‐6CLow/– monocytes had reduced mRNA expression of matrix metalloproteinase 13 and matrix metalloproteinase 9 and increased expression of tissue inhibitor of matrix metalloproteinase 1, Tgfb1, and interleukin‐10 during resolution of CF. Conclusion: The present study revealed that the structure of Glisson's capsule is different between human and mouse livers and that alcohol impairs the resolution of CF by changing the phenotype of Ly‐6CLow/– monocytes.
Phylogeography of Y-chromosome haplogroup Q1a1a-M120, a paternal lineage connecting populations in Siberia and East Asia

Abstract Background: Previous studies have suggested that the human Y-chromosome haplogroup Q1a1a-M120, a widespread paternal lineage in East Asian populations, originated in South Siberia. However, much uncertainty remains regarding the origin, diversification, and expansion of this paternal lineage. Aim: To explore the origin and diffusion of paternal Q-M120 lineages in East Asia. Subjects and methods: The authors generated 26 new Y chromosome sequences of Q-M120 males and co-analysed 45 Y chromosome sequences of this haplogroup. A highly-revised phylogenetic tree of haplogroup Q-M120 with age estimates was reconstructed. Additionally, a comprehensive phylogeographic analysis of this lineage was performed including 15,007 samples from 440 populations in eastern Eurasia. Results: An ancient connection of this lineage with populations in Siberia was revealed. However, this paternal lineage experienced an in-situ expansion between 5000 and 3000 years ago in northwestern China. Ancient populations with high frequencies of Q-M120 were involved in the formation of ancient Huaxia populations before 2000 years ago; this haplogroup eventually became one of the founding paternal lineages of modern Han populations. Conclusion: This study provides a clear pattern of the origin and diffusion process of haplogroup Q1a1a-M120, as well as the role of this paternal lineage during the formation of ancient Huaxia populations and modern Han populations.
Bovine Milk Oligosaccharides with Sialyllactose Improves Cognition in Preterm Pigs

Optimal nutrition is important after preterm birth to facilitate normal brain development. Human milk is rich in sialic acid and preterm infants may benefit from supplementing formula with sialyllactose to support neurodevelopment. Using pigs as models, we hypothesized that sialyllactose supplementation improves brain development after preterm birth. Pigs (of either sex) were delivered by cesarean section at 90% gestation and fed a milk diet supplemented with either an oligosaccharide-enriched whey with sialyllactose (n = 20) or lactose (n = 20) for 19 days. Cognitive performance was tested in a spatial T-maze. Brains were collected for ex vivo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), gene expression, and sialic acid measurements. For reference, term piglets (n = 14) were artificially reared under identical conditions and compared with vaginally born piglets naturally reared by the sow (n = 12). A higher proportion of sialyllactose supplemented preterm pigs reached the T-maze learning criteria relative to control preterm pigs (p < 0.05), and approximated the cognition level of term reference pigs (p < 0.01). Furthermore, supplemented pigs had upregulated genes related to sialic acid metabolism, myelination, and ganglioside biosynthesis in hippocampus. Sialyllactose supplementation did not lead to higher levels of sialic acid in the hippocampus or change MRI endpoints. Contrary, these parameters were strongly influenced by postconceptional age and postnatal rearing conditions. In conclusion, oligosaccharide-enriched whey with sialyllactose improved spatial cognition, with effects on hippocampal genes related to sialic acid metabolism, myelination, and ganglioside biosynthesis in preterm pigs. Dietary sialic acid enrichment may improve brain development in infants.
Integration of Two SEPIC Converters and aSingle Phase Bidirectional Inverter Using MPPTAlgorithms

In this paper, the integration operation of two SEPIC converters and a single phase bidirectional inverter is presented. The proposed MPPT algorithm used is hill climbing algorithm. The duty cycle can be perturbed according to the hill climbing algorithm and which is given as the gate input to the SEPIC converter. The bidirectional inverter is required for the purpose of power flow control between dc bus and ac grid. The simulation results for the input/output voltages and comparison with conventional perturbation and observation method is showed in this paper. The MATLAB/Simulink software package is used in this paper to establish a model of photovoltaic system with MPPT function
Ocelot Leopardus pardalis in Belize: the impact of trap spacing and distance moved on density estimates

Abstract We used remote cameras to obtain information on an elusive species and to examine the effects of different camera trapping methodologies on abundance estimates. We determined activity pattern, trail use, trap success, and density of ocelot Leopardus pardalis in seven camera-trap surveys across two habitat types in western Belize: tropical broad-leaf rainforest and tropical pine forest. Ocelots in the rainforest were active mostly at night, in particular immediately after sunset, and they travelled on low-use roads (especially in the wet season) and high-use roads (especially in the dry season) more than established and newly cut trails. Trap success was relatively high in the rainforest (2.11–6.20 captures per 100 trap nights) and low in the pine forest (0.13–0.15 captures per 100 trap nights). Camera trapping combined with mark-recapture statistics gave densities of 25.82–25.88 per 100 km2 in the broad-leaf versus 2.31–3.80 per 100 km2 in the pine forest. Density estimates increased when animals repeatedly captured at the same camera (zero-distance moved animals) were included in the buffer size analysis. Density estimates were significantly negatively correlated with distance between cameras. We provide information on ocelot population status from an unstudied portion of its range and advise that camera trap methodologies be standardized to permit comparisons across sites.
Aβ(M1–40) and Wild-Type Aβ40 Self-Assemble into Oligomers with Distinct Quaternary Structures

Amyloid-β oligomers (AβOs) self-assemble into polymorphic species with diverse biological activities that are implicated causally to Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Synaptotoxicity of AβO species is dependent on their quaternary structure, however, low-abundance and environmental sensitivity of AβOs in vivo have impeded a thorough assessment of structure–function relationships. We developed a simple biochemical assay to quantify the relative abundance and morphology of cross-linked AβOs. We compared oligomers derived from synthetic Aβ40 (wild-type (WT) Aβ40) and a recombinant source, called Aβ(M1–40). Both peptides assemble into oligomers with common sizes and morphology, however, the predominant quaternary structures of Aβ(M1–40) oligomeric states were more diverse in terms of dispersity and morphology. We identified self-assembly conditions that stabilize high-molecular weight oligomers of Aβ(M1–40) with apparent molecular weights greater than 36 kDa. Given that mixtures of AβOs derived from both peptides have been shown to be potent neurotoxins that disrupt long-term potentiation, we anticipate that the diverse quaternary structures reported for Aβ(M1–40) oligomers using the assays reported here will facilitate research efforts aimed at isolating and identifying common toxic species that contribute to synaptic dysfunction.
Self-Organized Inorganic-Organic Hybrids Induced by Silylating Agents with Phyllosilicate-Like Structure and the Influence of the Adsorption of Cations

Two analogous inorganic-organic hybrids with a phyllosilicate-like structure SILMgl and SILMg2, containing 3-aminopropyl- and N-propylethylenediaminetrimethoxysilane were synthesized through a sol-gel process. These hybrids adsorbed divalent cations of cobalt, nickel, copper, and zinc from aqueous solution to give the effectiveness of adsorption capacities in the sequence Cu2+ > Zn2+ > Ni2+ > Co2+. SILMgl has a higher capacity of adsorption than SILMg2. Elemental analysis, X-ray diffractometry, thermal analysis, infrared and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopies, and energy dispersive system microscopy characterized all hybrids. The proposed adsorption mechanism involves dissolution of the precursor matrix, formation of a phyllosilicate around the adsorbed ion, and a complexation of the cation by the amino-pendant groups in the interlayer. These new phyllosilicates are more crystalline than the original hybrids. The adsorption of Co2+ increases the interlayer distance to maximum values of 1.81 and 2.24 Å for SILMg1 and SILMg2, respectively. Thermal analysis data showed a decrease of thermal stability with cation adsorption. Si-O-Si groups were detected by infrared spectroscopy in all hybrids and a band at 1384 cm1 was assigned to the nitrate counter anion, which indicates the participation of this ion in the sphere of coordination of the interlayer complexes. The photomicrographs obtained by scanning electron microscopy showed the organized distribution of the sheet structure for these synthesized phyllosilicates.
Autonomous sound recording outperforms human observation for sampling birds: a systematic map and user guide.

Autonomous sound recording techniques have gained considerable traction in the last decade, but the question remains whether they can replace human observation surveys to sample sonant animals. For birds in particular, survey methods have been tested extensively using point counts and sound recording surveys. Here, we review the latest evidence for this taxon within the frame of a systematic map. We compare sampling effectiveness of these two survey methods, the output variables they produce, and their practicality. When assessed against the standard of point counts, autonomous sound recording prove to be a powerful tool that samples at least just as many species. This technology can monitor birds in an exhaustive, standardized and verifiable way. Moreover, sound recorders give access to entire soundscapes from which new data types can be derived (vocal activity, acoustic indices…). Variables such as abundance, density, occupancy, or species richness can be obtained to yield data sets that are comparable to and compatible with point counts. Finally, autonomous sound recorders allow investigations at high temporal and spatial resolution and coverage, which are more cost-effective and cannot be achieved by human observations alone, even though small-scale studies might be more cost-effective when carried out with point counts. Sound recorders can be deployed in many places, they are more scalable and reliable, making them the better choice for bird surveys in an increasingly data-driven time. We provide an overview of currently available recorders and discuss their specifications to guide future study designs. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.