Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Species-Specific Proteins in the Oviducts of Snail Sibling Species: Proteotranscriptomic Study of Littorina fabalis and L. obtusata

Simple Summary Genitalia and reproduction-associated proteins are often species-specific and might evolve rapidly. The situation in which the morphology of the reproductive system is the only difference between two or several closely related species has been reported on multiple occasions. Nevertheless, the reasons for such rapid divergence of the reproductive system is still poorly investigated. To shed some light on the issue, we performed a transcriptomic and proteomic comparison of pallial oviducts from the two sibling species of gastropods Littorina obtusata and L. fabalis. The main identified differences were associated with three functional groups of genes: transposable elements, which enhance genome variation and promote the evolution of new genes, receptor proteins potentially involved in friend or foe recognition, and various enzymes. We hypothesize that these functional groups reflect both the mechanism (transposable elements) and the directions (friend or foe recognition and reproductive physiology) of the rapid evolution of the reproductive system. Abstract Genus Littorina subgenus Neritrema (Mollusca, Caenogastropoda) includes the “obtusata” group of closely related species (Littorina obtusata and L. fabalis). The anatomy of the adult reproductive system (pallial oviduct) is the only reliable feature used for species identification in females of these species. Reproductive system anatomy and reproduction-associated proteins often diverge between sibling species. Despite being of high evolutionary interest, the molecular basis of this divergence remains poorly understood. We performed proteotranscriptomic comparison of oviducts of L. obtusata and L. fabalis by RNA-seq on Illumina HiSeq 2500 and two-dimensional protein electrophoresis (2D DIGE) with MS/MS identification of the species-specific proteins. The interspecies differences in the oviduct were associated with (1) metabolic proteins reflecting overall physiological differences between L. obtusata and L. fabalis, (2) receptor proteins, and (3) transcripts related to transposable elements (TEs). Various receptors identified may recognize a wide variety of ligands from pathogen-associated molecular patterns to specific carbohydrates on the sperm surface. Therefore, these may participate in immune defense as well as in sperm storage and regulation. Species-specificity of multiple TE sequences (coding for reverse transcriptase and ribonuclease H) may indicate the important role of these genomic elements in the Littorina species divergence, which has not been reported previously.
Ultrasound Promoted Synthesis of 2-Amino-4-H-Pyranoquinolines Using Sulphated Tin Oxide as a Catalyst

Abstract A new and operationally modest one-step C-C and C-O bond construction reaction is developed under sonochemical method. The reaction is achieved with easily accessible 8-hydroxy quinoline as starting material in the presence of sulfated tin oxide (SO4 −2/SnO2) catalyst. The ultrasonic irradiation with heterogeneous catalyst has been established to be a useful technique for the multicomponent synthesis of target compounds. Graphical Abstract
Field Uniformity Assessment of a Reverberation Chamber for a Large-Scale Animal Study

An exposure system was designed and implemented for the purpose of joint large-scale animal experiments conducted in Korea and Japan using a reverberation chamber (RC) in both countries. Prior to the start of the animal experiments, the parameters S21, electric field (E-field) uniformity, and Q factor were evaluated to confirm the performance of the developed chambers. The E-field uniformity, which is the most important performance factor of an RC, was evaluated at 900 MHz on 150 measurement values taken at 150 points in a loaded chamber with 80 live rats and in an empty chamber. The conditions of the loaded chamber with the rats are almost the same as the actual experimental environment and in which the rats, watering systems, animal bedding, cages, and cage racks were included. Two mean body weights of 330 and 470 g for the 80 rats were considered. The E-field uniformity was within the mean ± 1.0 dB and mean ± 2.3 dB under the empty and the rat-loaded conditions, respectively.
Multi-layered hybrid perovskites templated with carbazole derivatives: optical properties, enhanced moisture stability and solar cell characteristics

Research into 2D layered hybrid perovskites is on the rise due to the enhanced stability of these materials compared to 3D hybrid perovskites. Recently, interest towards the use of functional organic cations for these materials is increasing. However, a vast amount of the parameter space remains unexplored in multi-layered (n > 1) hybrid perovskites for solar cell applications. Here, we incorporate carbazole derivatives as a proof of concept towards the use of tailored functional molecules in multi-layered perovskites. Films of low-n carbazole containing perovskites show high photoconductivity half-lifetimes. Higher-n (〈n〉 = 40) multi-layered perovskite films possess charge carrier diffusion lengths comparable to MAPI thin films. Solar cells containing these materials have comparable efficiencies to our MAPI and phenethylammonium (PEA)-containing multi-layered perovskite reference devices. Moisture stability tests were performed both at the material and device levels. In comparison to MAPI and PEA-based materials and solar cells, the addition of a small percentage of the carbazole derivative to the perovskite material significantly enhances the moisture stability.
One-Step Procedure for Direct Purification of Pediocin-Like Bacteriocins and Cationic Antimicrobial Peptides from Complex Culture Medium on an Analytical, Semipreparative, and Preparative Scale. A New Type of Liquid Chromatography—Colloidal High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (CHPLC)

A simple time- and labor-saving one-step procedure suitable for analytical-, semipreparative-, and preparative-scale preparation of bacteriocins and other cationic antibacterial peptides (for example as lysozyme) has been developed. Suspensions of bacterial cells, other colloidal- and fast-particle materials, and dissolved anionic molecules passed through the column; however, cationic bacteriocins were separated by chromatography. The purity of the target substance at more than 97% was achieved by the judgment of spectral, chromatographic, and antimicrobial activity. A many-fold concentration increase was achieved for bacteriocins, lysozyme, and bacitracin (a commercial antibiotic) in comparison with the starting solutions (see the text below). In the experiments, homemade cation-exchange columns have been used. The columns have been prepared by the grafting of glass fibers with a diameter of 0.2 μm. In this paper, applications of a new type of liquid chromatography—colloidal high-performance liquid chromatography (CHPLC)—were demonstrated.
The membrane fouling simulator: development, application, and early-warning of biofouling in RO treatment

The authors would like to thank King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) for funding support during the preparation of this manuscript. Szilard S. Bucs, Sjack van Agtmaal, Mike Johns, Einar Fridjonnson, Sarah Creber are thanked for their contribution to the studies.
Pseudolikelihood Reranking with Masked Language Models

We rerank with scores from pretrained masked language models like BERT to improve ASR and NMT performance. These log-pseudolikelihood scores (LPLs) can outperform large, autoregressive language models (GPT-2) in out-of-the-box scoring. RoBERTa reduces WER by up to 30% relative on an end-to-end LibriSpeech system and adds up to +1.7 BLEU on state-of-the-art baselines for TED Talks low-resource pairs, with further gains from domain adaptation. In the multilingual setting, a single XLM can be used to rerank translation outputs in multiple languages. The numerical and qualitative properties of LPL scores suggest that LPLs capture sentence fluency better than autoregressive scores. Finally, we finetune BERT to estimate sentence LPLs without masking, enabling scoring in a single, non-recurrent inference pass.
Review and Comparison of Integrated Inductive-Based Hybrid Step-Up DC-DC Converter under CCM

Two recent step-up DC-DC converter topologies: dual-path step-up converter (DPUC) and KY converter (KYC), are theoretically analyzed and compared with the conventional boost converter (CBC), in terms of inductor current ripple, efficiency, output voltage ripple, and load transient response performances in this paper. Simulation results are provided to verify the theoretical analysis, in which the CBC obtains the highest power efficiency under heavy load condition, but the largest output voltage ripple and slowest load transient response. DPUC has fair power efficiency, output voltage ripple and load transient response. KYC has the highest power efficiency under light load condition as well as the smallest output voltage ripple and fastest load transient response.
Accelerate service live migration in resource-limited edge computing systems

Service live migration in edge computing systems, which means migrating running services from one edge node to another with negligible cost of time, is becoming one of the cornerstones for various edge management tasks, such as task offloading, fault handling, load balancing and maintaining service continuity against users' mobility. However, due to the limited network bandwidth and computing resources, it is much more challenging to design and implement service live migration within an edge computing system. To overcome this challenge, we present an optimized flow to accelerate migration. Improvements are made from software, system and architecture aspects, which are expected to drastically reduce migration overheads and improve system efficiency.
Complete genome sequence of Lactobacillus amylovorus 1394N20, a potential probiotic strain, isolated from a Hanwoo calf

Abstract Lactobacillus amylovorus are known to exist in the intestinal flora of healthy cattle or pigs. The L. amylovorus strain 1394N20 was isolated from the feces of the Hanwoo calf (Bos taurus coreanae). The genome of strain 1394N20 consists of a single circular chromosome (2,176,326 bp) with overall guanine + cytosine content of 37.8 mol%. Moreover, 2,281 protein-coding sequences, 15 rRNAs, and 65 tRNAs genes were identified in the chromosome based on the results of annotation. The bacterium has a gene encoding endoglucanase, an enzyme that hydrolyzes the 1,4-β-D-glycosidic linkages in cellulose, hemicellulose, lichenin, and cereal β-D-glucans. Genomic sequencing of L. amylovorus strain 1394N20 reveals the immense potential of the strain as a probiotic with nutrient digestibility.
Task Offloading and Resources Allocation based on Fairness in Edge Computing

Task offloading has been a hot topic in the field of edge computing. Resources fairness of edge computing servers which is the destination of task offloading directly impacts life of server and the process quality of task. In this paper, we propose a subtask-virtual machine mapping model (subtask-VM mapping model) to complete task offloading from the terminals to the servers. Considering the reasonable allocation of server resources, we also propose stack-based cache mechanism (SCM) to ensure the fairness of server resources allocation. We transform the problem of mapping model solution into the problem of optimal matching in the bipartite graph, and verify the performance of our algorithm by contrast experiment. In particular, the fair performance of our algorithm for server-side is over 84%.
Intensity and Structural Changes of Numerically Simulated Typhoon Faxai (1915) before Landfall

A numerical simulation of Typhoon Faxai (1915), which made landfall with a central pressure of 960 hPa in the Kanto region of Japan, was conducted using a nonhydrostatic numerical model with a 1-km grid spacing. Faxai sustained a symmetric structure until the landfall and caused severe damage due to strong winds. The simulation successfully simulated the realistic track and intensity of Faxai for 48 h around landfall. The simulated intensity was strong until the time of landfall, and the spatial size of the vortex was small. The structure of the simulated Faxai, identified as having an axisymmetric flow field and eyewall, was similar to that of a well-developed tropical cyclone (TC) in the tropics. Around the TC center, the surface latent heat flux was over 300 W m −2 until landfall, and the vertical wind shear was less than 9 m s −1 between the 1.5- and 12.0-km altitudes, which is relatively weak at midlatitudes. The maximum potential intensity (MPI) was calculated using environmental parameters around the simulated TC. The simulated and best track TC intensities exceeded the MPI for approximately 12 h before landfall, that is, the TC was in a superintense state. The superintensity was mainly caused by the presence of supergradient wind, which, in turn, resulted from the strong intensity and axisymmetric structure of the typhoon. The simulated TC satisfies the assumptions for the formulation of the MPI during the quasi-steady state, except for the gradient wind balance, implying that the structure of a TC is similar to that of a developed TC in the tropics. The present analyses suggest that the strong intensity of Faxai results from favorable environmental conditions and vortex structure.
Asynchronous Multi-Hypothesis Tracking of Features with Event Cameras

With the emergence of event cameras, increasing research effort has been focusing on processing the asynchronous stream of events. With each event encoding a discrete intensity change at a particular pixel, uniquely time-stamped with high accuracy, this sensing information is so fundamentally different to the data provided by traditional frame-based cameras that most of the well-established vision algorithms are not applicable. Inspired by the need of effective event-based tracking, this paper addresses the tracking of generic patch features relying solely on events, while exploiting their asynchronicity and high-temporal resolution. The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in event-based feature tracking on well-established event camera datasets, retrieving longer and more accurate feature tracks at higher a frequency. Considering tracking as an optimization problem of matching the current view to a feature template, the proposed method implements a simple and efficient technique that only requires the evaluation of a discrete set of tracking hypotheses.
Existence of Stack Overflow Vulnerabilities in Well-known Open Source Projects

A stack overflow occurs when a program or process tries to store more data in a buffer (or stack) than it was intended to hold. If the affected program is running with special privileges or accepts data from untrusted network hosts (e.g. a web-server), then it is a potential security vulnerability. Overflowing a stack, an attacker can corrupt the stack in such a way as to inject executable code into the running program and take control of the process. This is one of the easiest and more reliable methods for attackers to gain unauthorized access to a computer. In this paper, we show that how stack overflow occurs and many open source projects, such as - Linux, Git, PHP, etc. contain such code portions in which it is possible to overflow the stacks as well as inject malicious script to harm the normal execution of the processes. In addition, this paper raises a concern to avoid writing such codes those are potentially sources for stack overflow attack.
STUDY ON FOOD SATETY BY TESTING RESIDUES IN FRESH MILK, WATER AND FEED

Milk is one of the animal products, as a source of nutrients for people and has a good price. However, recently residues in fresh milk have been widely reported, especially antibiotic residues. The purpose of this study is to detect residues of oxytetracycline and penicillin antibiotics in fresh milk. Samples were fresh milk (11), water (1) and concentrate feed (3)' Fresh milk of 11 samples were taken from group and individual farmers. The qualitative test of antibiotic residues against oxytetracycline and penicillin was carried out by bioassay according to Indonesian National Standards (SNI). Data was analyzed descriptively. The results showed that the sesitivity of oxytetracycline residue test was I prg I ml and that of penicillin residue was 0.01 ru I ml. Seven percent of samples (1/15) contained oxyetracycline residues in milk of group farmers. Thirry-three percent of the samples (5/15) "ortuirr.d penicillin residues in both group and individual milk samples. Feed and water did not contain antibiotic residues.
Adsorptive Removal of Methylene Blue and Crystal Violet onto Micro-Mesoporous Zr3O/Activated Carbon Composite: A Joint Experimental and Statistical Modeling Considerations

Zirconium oxide/activated carbon (Zr3O/AC) composite was synthesized to remove methylene blue (MB) and crystal violet (CV) from the aqueous medium. The Zr3O/AC sample was characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray analyses (EDS), Raman spectroscopy (RS), BET surface area, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). XRD profiles confirmed the successful synthesis of the zirconium oxide/activated carbon composite. SEM images showed multideveloped walls with irregular particle size with channel arrays. The nitrogen physisorption combines I and IV types with a calculated BET surface area of 1095 m2/g. Raman spectrum illustrated a disorder of both crystalline structure and the graphitic structure. The adsorption was better fitted to the pseudo-second-order (PSO) kinetic model. Langmuir model fitted better the experimental results of MB adsorption, whereas the CV was better consistent with the Freundlich model. The obtained results suggested that the MB and CV adsorption might be influenced by the mass transfer that involves multiple diffusion steps. The maximum adsorption capacities are 208.33 and 204.12 mg/g for MB and CV, respectively. The MB and CV removal mechanisms were proposed, and statistical optimization was performed using central composite design combined with the response surface methodology.
The Effect of Feeding Restriction on the Microbiota and Metabolome Response in Late-Phase Laying Hens

Simple Summary Feeding restriction (FR) is essential to reduce excessive fat deposits caused by overfeeding in hens and to ensure their reasonable nutritional requirements for egg production. Effective FR is particularly crucial for raising hens in the late phase of laying; because hens require lower energy at this stage, overfeeding reduces their feed efficiency and increase feed costs. The gut microbiota is involved in various metabolic pathways of laying hens, including in late-phase age. Thus, changes in feeding interventions can alter the presence of gut microorganisms and the structure of the microbial community, resulting in altered metabolic regulation. In this study, we investigate the microbiota and metabolome responses of late-phase laying hens under FR. Our results provide data to access the profile of the cecal bacteria community, their relevance to cecal and serum metabolites, and their FR biosynthetic pathways related to host nutritional requirements and intestinal nutrient availability. Moreover, understanding the principles of host-microbial interaction is essential for developing cost-effective strategies to improve laying hens’ production. Abstract This study investigated cecal bacterial community profile, cecal and serum metabolites, and its biosynthesis pathway in late-phase laying hens during 6 weeks feeding restriction (FR), using 16S rDNA as gene sequencing and non-targeted LC-MS/MS as metabolomics approach. We used three groups (ad libitum, FR20, and FR40). FR can reduce excessive fat in late-phase laying hens, while egg production rate is not affected, except for the FR40 group. In phylum level, FR20 had more population of Bacteriodetes and Firmicutes amongst groups. The same result is at genus level, FR20 were higher of the predominant genus (Bacteroides and Rikenellaceae_RC9_gut_group). Both of FR20 and FR40 reduced Proteobacteria as potential pathogenic bacteria. Non-targeted metabolomic analysis revealed that FR20 modified 20 metabolites in cecal and 10 metabolites in serum of laying hens, whereas 48 cecal metabolites and 31 serum metabolites has revealed in FR40. KEGG assay showed FR20 and FR40 upregulated lipid, carbohydrate, amino acid, nucleic acid pathway, and FR40 modified steroid metabolism in cecal analysis. In serum, only FR40 modified lipid, amino acid pathway, and carbohydrate biosynthesis were shown. This study showed that FR during late-phase laying hens altered the microbiome composition, modified metabolites profile and biosynthesis of the cecal as well as serum.
A Proposal for Subjective Evaluation Method in Small Sample using Visual Analog Scale

Research on impression evaluation such as painting, music, and design is widely implemented in the field of psychology / affective engineering. However, the style of the questionnaire is stepwise in the most case. Numerical values obtained from these questionnaires are treated as interval measures in many cases for convenience but should be handled as an ordinal scale in a strict sense. We propose a Visual Analog Scale (VAS) which marks one point on a straight line as an evaluation value, not a stepwise style. It became possible to perform statistical analysis to comprehend the overall tendency even in a subjective evaluation experiment of a small sample. The feature is to visualize the experimental results by overlaying a box-and-whisker plot and a univariate scatter plot. We conducted an impression evaluation experiment on a representational painting and an abstract painting for the same group of subjects. The number of adjective pairs is 15, and the number of subjects is 30. The box-and-whisker plots can intuitively understand the distribution and trend of the whole. Furthermore, we compare two paintings using hierarchical clustering and could see common clusters. Also, we show box-whisker charts in which the data is pseudo-converted into five stages and clarify the difference between VAS and LS.
Evaluation of Gallic Acid-Coated Gold Nanoparticles as an Anti-Aging Ingredient

Hyperglycemic environment-induced oxidative stress-mediated matrix metalloproteinase-1 (MMP-1) plays a crucial role in the degradation of the extracellular matrix (ECM), which might contribute to premature skin aging. Synthesized, environmentally friendly gallic acid-coated gold nanoparticles (GA–AuNPs) have been evaluated as an anti-aging antioxidant. Their microstructure was characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), which showed that GA–AuNPs are spherical when prepared at pH 11. Dynamic light scattering (DLS) analysis revealed that the average hydrodynamic diameter of a GA–AuNP is approximately 40 nm and with a zeta potential of −49.63 ± 2.11 mV. Additionally, the present data showed that GA–AuNPs have a superior ability to inhibit high glucose-mediated MMP-1-elicited type I collagen degradation in dermal fibroblast cells. Collectively, our data indicated that high-glucose-mediated ROS production was reduced upon cell treatment with GA–AuNPs, which blocked p38 MAPK/ERK-mediated c-Jun, c-Fos, ATF-2 phosphorylation, and the phosphorylation of NFκB, leading to the down-regulation of MMP-1 mRNA and protein expression in high glucose-treated cells. Our findings suggest that GA-AuNPs have a superior ability to inhibit high-glucose-mediated MMP-1-elicited ECM degradation, which highlights its potential as an anti-aging ingredient.