Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SW—Soil and Water: Construction of an Artificial Perched Watertable, Part 2: Soil Cavity Production by Air pressure

Abstract By constructing an artificial perched watertable which is a horizontal and cylindrical soil cavity with a diameter of 3 m and a height of 0·3 m, at a depth of about 0·8 m from the soil surface in the fields, it was envisaged that the runoff caused in the summer could preferably be held in this layer and, hence, the excess moisture loss could be prevented. The water in the artificial soil cavity could be used as capillary water for plants germinating in the spring. The soil failure experiments by the injection of high-pressure air were conducted to form the artificial perched watertable. In this paper, the size of the underground soil cavity produced by the high-pressure air was determined. The gas energy and gas pressure required for the proper size of the soil cavity were also evaluated. The results show that the energy required for soil-cavity production significantly increased with the larger radius of the soil cavity, the energy of the soil-cavity production being 100 kJ for a cavity radius of 1 m compared with 1000 kJ for a cavity radius of 2 m. When the design point of the soil-cavity radius is 1·5 m (the diameter of the soil cavity is 3·0 m), the required energy is about 300 kJ. The height of the underground soil cavity produced by the high-pressure air injection was always 0·3 m regardless of the working depth of the injector. The radius of the soil cavity produced was 1·5 m on average when the working depth of the injector was more than 0·6 m. When a soil cavity is produced at a depth of 0·8 m in the field of the meadow soil or planosol in China, the tensile strength of 20 kPa is more than the earth pressure of 14 kPa and hence, the air pressure in the charge tank should be at least more than 20 kPa.
Omega-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty Acid Biomarkers and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes, Cardiovascular Disease, Cancer, and Mortality: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Background: Considerable attention has focused on omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) role in protect against the development of cardiometabolic diseases, which has led to dietary recommendations to increase omega-3 fatty acid intake.Methods: MEDLINE, EMBASE, ISI Web of Science, Cochrane Library, and reference lists were searched for articles from inception to May 2020. Random-effects model was used to estimate the pooled relative risk (RR) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the association of omega-3 PUFAs, including α-linoleic acid (ALA), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), docosapentaenoic acid (DPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), with risk of developing type 2 diabetes (T2D), cardiovascular disease (CVD), including coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke, cancer, and mortality.Results: 66 prospective studies comprised of 211,600 participants were identified. Individual omega-3 PUFAs showed divergent associations with the study outcomes of interest. An inverse association with risk of T2D was observed comparing extreme categories of ALA concentration (RR,0.91;95%CI,0.83-0.99), but not for the marine-origin omega-3 fatty acids biomarkers. The marine-origin omega-3 fatty acids biomarkers, but not ALA, were significantly associated with lower risks of total CVD, CHD, and overall mortality, with RRs ranging from 0.70 for DHA-CHD association to 0.85 for EPA-CHD association. Lower risk of colorectal cancer was observed at higher levels of DPA (RR,0.76;95%CI:0.59-0.98) and DHA (RR,0.80;95%CI:0.65-0.99). In dose-response analyses, inverse linear associations were observed between EPA, DPA, and DHA biomarkers and CVD or CHD risk, except for DHA-CVD association which showed a nonlinearity association.Conclusion: Higher concentrations of marine-derived omega-3 PUFA biomarkers were associated with a significantly reduced risk of total CVD, CHD, certain types of cancer, and total mortality. Levels of ALA were inversely with a lower risk of T2D but not CVD-related outcomes. These data support the dietary recommendations advocating the role of omega-3 PUFAs in maintaining an overall lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease and premature deaths.
Sea urchin microbiomes vary with habitat and resource availability

Sea urchins are key grazers in coastal seas, where they can survive a variety of conditions and diets, enhancing their ecological impact on kelp forests and other ecosystems. Using 16S rRNA gene sequencing, we characterized bacterial communities associated with guts of the two dominant sea urchin species in southern California, the red urchin Mesocentrotus franciscanus, and the purple urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus. Our results show that the two urchin species have distinct gut microbiomes that vary with habitat. The taxonomic composition of their microbiomes suggests that they may facilitate digestion of food and be a source of nutrition themselves. These results highlight the role of microbiomes within macroorganisms as an extended ecological trait, and suggest that microbes may be crucial to resource use and partitioning in co‐occurring species.
Nitrogen‐Loads to Streams: Importance of Bypass Flow and Nitrate Removal Processes

N‐loads from subsurface, drains, and groundwater‐fed surface (bypass) flows via two riparian zones (crop field and wetland) to a second order stream were investigated by sampling of shallow and deep groundwater on both sides and monthly measurements of bypass flows from springs, drains, and stream including water quality (nitrate). A push‐pull test in the crop field gave a first‐order denitrification rate (0.23 day–1). Reactive transport modeling evaluated observations of water chemistry and denitrification processes in the groundwater below the crop field showing that nitrate was completely removed by denitrification with pyrite in the aquifer (model rates of 0.6–2.5 mmol NO3 L−1 yr−1). A drain in the crop field routed ∼10% (bypass) of the regional groundwater inflow to the stream. Buffer efficiency was high at 90%. The wetland on the other side of the stream hosts several locations of nitrate‐rich bypass flow from springs, predominantly through a non‐maintained drainage system of drainpipes and ditches with bypass flow accounting for 59% of the regional flow input. Nitrate was completely removed in groundwater by denitrification with dissolved organic matter in shallow groundwater. The regional inflow and N load to the wetland is amongst the highest recorded and data shows that the N load to the stream is very high. The buffer efficiency ranged from 45% to 83% depending on if all bypass flows contributed to the stream or only the two with visible outflow. A conceptual model for nitrate removal efficiency as a function of Damköhler number and percent bypass flow is proposed.
A sequential quadratic Hamiltonian scheme to compute optimal relaxed controls

A new sequential quadratic Hamiltonian method for computing optimal relaxed controls for a class of optimal control problems governed by ordinary differential equations is presented. This iterative approach is based on the characterisation of optimal controls by means of the Pontryagin maximum principle in the framework of Young measures, and it belongs to the family of successive approximations schemes. The ability of the proposed optimisation framework to solve problems with regular and relaxed controls, including cases with oscillations and concentration effects, is demonstrated by results of numerical experiments. In all cases, the sequential quadratic Hamiltonian scheme appears robust and efficient, in agreement with convergence results of the theoretical investigation presented in this paper.
Can Dietary Pomegranate Peels Reduce Stress Responses Associated with Group Mixing of Holstein Beef Calves

The study investigated whether dietary CPE (concentrated pomegranate peel extract) may mitigate the negative effects associated with group mixing prior to marketing and enhance beef meat quality. Twenty-two bull calves were reared in triplets and divided to control (n = 9) and CPE-treated (n = 13) groups. CPE was supplemented during eight months of rearing, and calves were mixed 34 d prior to marketing to control and treatment groups. Calves were monitored for weight gain, rumination, activity, metabolic and oxidative stress responses. Finally, meat quality traits were examined. The results find that pre-mixing activity (P < 0.0001), non-esterifies fatty acids (P = 0.02) and plasma testosterone (P = 0.005) levels were higher in the treatment group. Following mixing, activity (P < 0.0001) and plasma anti-oxidative capacity (P = 0.05) increased in the treatment compared to the control group. In spite of the above, dietary supplementation of CPE didn't reveal improvement of meat quality parameters by means of meat pH and shelf life. It indicated that improved serum anti-oxidant capacity in the CPE calves was not sufficient to prevent the mixing effects on meat quality. A combined CPE concentration and mixing management should be examined in order to reduce mixing related effects on meat quality.
Deposition pattern of drying droplets

The drying of liquid droplets is a common daily life phenomenon that has long held a special interest in scientific research. When the droplet includes nonvolatile solutes, the evaporation of the solvent induces rich deposition patterns of solutes on the substrate. Understanding the formation mechanism of these patterns has important ramifications for technical applications, ranging from coating to inkjet printing to disease detection. This topical review addresses the development of physical understanding of tailoring the specific ring-like deposition patterns of drying droplets. We start with a brief introduction of the experimental techniques that are developed to control these patterns of sessile droplets. We then summarize the development of the corresponding theory. Particular attention herein is focused on advances and issues related to applying the Onsager variational principle (OVP) theory to the study of the deposition patterns of drying droplets. The main obstacle to conventional theory is the requirement of complex numerical solutions, but fortunately there has been recent groundbreaking progress due to the OVP theory. The advantage of the OVP theory is that it can be used as an approximation tool to reduce the high-order conventional hydrodynamic equations to first-order evolution equations, facilitating the analysis of soft matter dynamic problems. As such, OVP theory is now well poised to become a theory of choice for predicting deposition patterns of drying droplets.
Design formulas for liquid crystal phase shifter based on microstrip transmission line

Closed‐form analytical formulas are presented to calculate a figure of merit (FoM) of a liquid crystal (LC) phase shifter (PS) based on microstrip transmission line (MS TL). New expressions are derived to account for anisotropic loss of LC and loss in the superstrate. Although approximate, the presented framework provides a useful insight into the effect of numerous design parameters of the LC PS, such as geometric dimensions of TL or complex permittivity of LC and the superstrate. Comparison with the full‐wave numerical analysis of Maxwell's equations showed good agreement in the calculated effective permittivity, dielectric and conductor losses and the FoM for operating frequencies up to 12 to 15 GHz. Furthermore, reasonable quantitative agreement for the FoM is maintained for geometries of interest even at millimeter wave frequencies, up to 30 GHz.
Life Prediction Model of Mineral Admixture Cement Based-Materials under Early Age CO2-Erosion

Most of the existing models of structural life prediction in early carbonized environment are based on accelerated erosion after standard 28 days of cement-based materials, while cement-based materials in actual engineering are often exposed to air too early. These result in large predictions of the life expectancy of mineral-admixture cement-based materials under early CO2-erosion and affecting the safe use of structures. To this end, different types of mineral doped cement-based material test pieces are formed, and early CO2-erosion experimental tests are carried out. On the basis of the analysis of the existing model, the influence coefficient of CO2-erosion of the mineral admixture Km is introduced, the relevant function is given, and the life prediction model of the mineral admixture cement-based material under the early CO2-erosion is established and the model parameters are determined by using the particle group algorithm (PSO). It has good engineering applicability and guiding significance.
Comparative Analysis of Convolutional Neural Networks Applied in the Detection of Pneumonia Through X-Ray Images of Children

Pneumonia is one of the most common medical problems in clinical practice and is the leading fatal infectious disease worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, pneumonia kills about 2 million children under the age of 5 and is constantly estimated to be the leading cause of infant mortality, killing more children than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined. A key element in the diagnosis is radiographic data, as chest x-rays are routinely obtained as a standard of care and can aid to differentiate the types of pneumonia. However, a rapid radiological interpretation of images is not always available, particularly in places with few resources, where childhood pneumonia has the highest incidence and mortality rates. As an alternative, the application of deep learning techniques for the classification of medical images has grown considerably in recent years. This study presents five implementations of convolutional neural networks (CNNs): ResNet50, VGG-16, InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2, and ResNeXt50. To support the diagnosis of the disease, these CNNs were applied to solve the classification problem of medical radiographs from people with pneumonia. InceptionResNetV2 obtained the best recall and precision results for the Normal and Pneumonia classes, 93.95% and 97.52% respectively. ResNeXt50 achieved the best precision and f1-score results for the Normal class (94.62% and 94.25% respectively) and the recall and f1-score results for the Pneumonia class (97.80% and 97.65%, respectively).
Immunomodulation as a Potent COVID-19 Pharmacotherapy: Past, Present and Future

Abstract In the first year of its appearance, the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has affected more than 150 million individuals and killed 3 million people worldwide. The pandemic has also triggered numerous global initiatives to tackle the newly emerging disease, including the development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and the attempt to discover potential pharmacological therapies. Nonetheless, despite the success of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development, COVID-19 therapy remains challenging. Several repurposed drugs that were documented to be useful in small clinical trials have been shown to be ineffective in larger studies. Additionally, the pathophysiology of SARS-CoV-2 infection displayed the predominance of hyperinflammation and immune dysregulation in inducing multiorgan damage. Therefore, the potential benefits of both immune modulation and suppression in COVID-19 have been extensively discussed. Here, we reviewed the roles of immunomodulation as potential COVID-19 pharmacological modalities based on the existing data and proposed several new immunologic targets to be tested in the foreseeable future.
Time Series for Forecasting Stock Market Prices Based on Sentiment Analysis of Social Media

This paper attempts to find a relation between the public perception of a company and its stock value price. Since social media is a very powerful tool used by a lot of people to voice their opinions on the performance of a company, it is a good source of information about the public sentiment. Previous studies have shown that the overall public sentiment collected from sites like Twitter do have a relation to the market price of a company over a period of time. The goal is to build on their research to improve the accuracy of predictions and determine if the public perception surrounding a company is a driving factor of its stock growth.
Adaptive and nonadaptive plasticity in changing environments: Implications for sexual species with different life history strategies

Abstract Populations adapt to novel environmental conditions by genetic changes or phenotypic plasticity. Plastic responses are generally faster and can buffer fitness losses under variable conditions. Plasticity is typically modeled as random noise and linear reaction norms that assume simple one‐to‐one genotype–phenotype maps and no limits to the phenotypic response. Most studies on plasticity have focused on its effect on population viability. However, it is not clear, whether the advantage of plasticity depends solely on environmental fluctuations or also on the genetic and demographic properties (life histories) of populations. Here we present an individual‐based model and study the relative importance of adaptive and nonadaptive plasticity for populations of sexual species with different life histories experiencing directional stochastic climate change. Environmental fluctuations were simulated using differentially autocorrelated climatic stochasticity or noise color, and scenarios of directional climate change. Nonadaptive plasticity was simulated as a random environmental effect on trait development, while adaptive plasticity as a linear, saturating, or sinusoidal reaction norm. The last two imposed limits to the plastic response and emphasized flexible interactions of the genotype with the environment. Interestingly, this assumption led to (a) smaller phenotypic than genotypic variance in the population (many‐to‐one genotype–phenotype map) and the coexistence of polymorphisms, and (b) the maintenance of higher genetic variation—compared to linear reaction norms and genetic determinism—even when the population was exposed to a constant environment for several generations. Limits to plasticity led to genetic accommodation, when costs were negligible, and to the appearance of cryptic variation when limits were exceeded. We found that adaptive plasticity promoted population persistence under red environmental noise and was particularly important for life histories with low fecundity. Populations producing more offspring could cope with environmental fluctuations solely by genetic changes or random plasticity, unless environmental change was too fast.
Discussion of Kallus and Mo, Qi, and Liu: New Objectives for Policy Learning

One of the key contributions that the causal inference literature has brought is a focus on clearly defined estimands. This focus has led to a real shift in the statistical approach (see, e.g., Daniel, De Stavola, and Vansteelandt 2016). The traditional approach of initiating a statistical analysis with model fitting, hoping that the model’s parameters can help answer the scientific question, is increasingly being questioned and abandoned. Many traditional statistical parameters are indeed difficult to interpret and therefore difficult to connect to the scientific question at hand: they can be too mathematically complex (cf. odds ratios), suffer non-collapsibility (Greenland, Robins, and Pearl 1999), or even be affected by a built-in selection bias (Hernan and Robins 2010). The typical causal inference approach is to first translate the scientific question at hand into a well-defined estimand before seeing how models can be used to estimate it. This is a welcome change of focus, but one that is not entirely without danger. First, the causal question that we aim to address may sometimes be too ambitious given what the observed data can tell us (Vansteelandt 2017). Ongoing work in our group on policy learning of the optimal time to start renal replacement therapy in critically ill patients with acute kidney injury shows that many simple, interpretable policies are just too remote from current clinical practice; inferring what the expected outcome would be if such policy were adopted, then becomes an overly ambitious undertaking. The data analysis will often flag this, for example, via extreme standard errors and/or inverse probability weights. But the warnings it sends, are also frequently ignored (cf. the common use of weight truncation). Second, while the traditional clinical trial design and epidemiologic study design focus on well-defined study populations, this tends to be much less the case in the analysis of electronic health records, for instance, where the studied population is often fairly broad. This can make the appeal of typical causal inference estimands somewhat deceptive as their magnitude may be quite sensitive to the choice of study population, a choice
Transcriptomic Analysis of Seasonal Gene Expression and Regulation during Xylem Development in “Shanxin” Hybrid Poplar (Populus davidiana × Populus bolleana)

Xylem development is a key process for wood formation in woody plants. To study the molecular regulatory mechanisms related to xylem development in hybrid poplar P. davidiana × P. bolleana, transcriptome analyses were conducted on developing xylem at six different growth stages within a single growing season. Xylem development and differentially expressed genes in the six time points were selected for a regulatory analysis. Xylem development was observed in stem sections at different growth stages, which showed that xylem development extended from the middle of April to early August and included cell expansion and secondary cell wall biosynthesis. An RNA-seq analysis of six samples with three replicates was performed. After transcriptome assembly and annotation, the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified, and a Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analysis, Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis and expression analysis of the DEGs were performed on each sample. On average, we obtained >20 million clean reads per sample, which were assembled into 84,733 nonredundant transcripts, of which there were 17,603 unigenes with lengths >1 kb. There were 14,890 genes that were differentially expressed among the six stages. The upregulated DEGs were enriched in GO terms related to cell wall biosynthesis between S1 vs. S2 or S3 vs. S4 and, in GO terms, related to phytohormones in the S1 vs. S2 or S4 vs. S5 comparisons. The downregulated DEGs were enriched in GO terms related to cell wall biosynthesis between S4 vs. S5 or S5 vs. S6 and, in GO terms, related to hormones between S1 vs. S2 or S2 vs. S3. The KEGG pathways in the DEGs related to “phenylpropanoid biosynthesis”, “plant hormone signal transduction” and “starch and sucrose metabolism” were significantly enriched among the different stages. The DEGs related to cell expansion, polysaccharide metabolism and synthesis, lignin synthesis, transcription factors and hormones were identified. The identification of genes involved in the regulation of xylem development will increase our understanding of the molecular regulation of wood formation in trees and, also, offers potential targets for genetic manipulation to improve the properties of wood.