Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Block freeze concentration intensification by means of vacuum and microwave pulses

Block freeze concentration has gained interest as a separation technology since it is simpler than the suspension process. However, it has not been implemented at an industrial level because its separation efficiency is lower than that of the traditional freeze concentration process. Therefore, numerous assisting techniques are being studied around the world to overcome this deficiency. In this paper, the combination of microwave heating and vacuum separation is being studied and compared with convection heating and gravity separation. Separation efficiency was measured using the cumulative concentration factor (CumCI) and the area under the curve defined by yield (Y) as a function of the thawed fraction (f). It has been observed that all treatments that used vacuum as separation method showed a higher efficiency than those in similar processing conditions that used gravity as the separation method. Regarding the effect of microwave pulses, it has been observed that pulses below 2.4 kJ increased the separation efficiency when combined with the hydrodynamic effect generated by the vacuum pulses
Investigation of trace amine receptors in the cardiovascular systems

Trace amines (TAs), including p-phenylethylamine (p-PEA), tyramine and octopamine are structurally and functionally related to biogenic amines such as catecholamines and serotonin and to amphetamines. They are present in trace levels in the nervous system and in chocolate, cheese and wine. TAs are usually regarded as indirectly-acting sympathomimetic amines (ISAs) exerting vasoconstriction via a-adrenoceptors. However, they also stimulate trace amine-associated receptors (TAARs), of which only TAAR1 and TAAR4 are sensitive to TAs. The aim of the thesis was to examine whether vasoconstriction by TAs in blood vessels is via ISA or TA mechanisms. TAs caused concentration-related and endothelium-independent contractions in rat isolated aortic rings in the presence of prazosin (ai-adrenoceptor antagonist), cocaine (catecholamine uptake inhibitor), ICI-118,551-adrenoceptor antagonist) and pargyline (MAO A and B inhibitor). The persistent and inhibitor-independent contractions suggest that mechanisms other than ISA and a- and p- adrenoceptor stimulation are involved, possibly TAARs. Differences in the profile of vasoconstrictor activities to a range of TAs were identified in rat and guinea-pig aorta, suggesting species variations in receptor distribution. Tyramine was identified as a partial agonist in isolated rat aorta and an antagonist of other TAs in this tissue. Finally, the presence of TAAR1 mRNA and protein was demonstrated for the first time in rat aorta by RT-PCR and Western blotting, respectively. Most information about TAs relates to studies which have been done on the brain, or cloned receptors expressed in transfected cells. This study of different TAs and structurally related derivatives in aortic tissues has expanded the knowledge of the vasoconstrictor effects of TAs in isolated tissues. The molecular biological confirmation of the presence of TAAR1 and the pharmacological findings regarding the effects of TAs in rat aortic rings might explain their hypertensive effects and their role in coronary heart disease and migraine headache.
A unique carbazole–coumarin fused two-photon platform: development of a robust two-photon fluorescent probe for imaging carbon monoxide in living tissues

Two-photon fluorescent probes are favorable as powerful molecular tools for studies in biology and medicine. To construct two-photon fluorescent probes, it is necessary to have suitable two-photon fluorescent platforms. Herein, we present the rational design, synthesis, and spectral properties of carbazole–coumarin (CC) derivatives, a unique family of two-photon fluorescent dyes. Significantly, the action cross-sections of CC are tunable by modifications at the 4′-position of the coumarin moiety, implying that CC could be exploited as a novel platform to design two-photon fluorescent probes. Carbon monoxide (CO) plays an important role in many physiological and pathological processes. Although the tracking of CO in living cells has been previously reported, the detection of CO in much thicker biosamples, for instance, living tissues, has not been realized. It is known that two-photon fluorescent probes are favorable for monitoring biomolecules in living tissues. Thus, based on the unique CC platform, we rationally engineered CC–CO as the first two-photon fluorescent CO probe, and we further demonstrated that CC–CO could monitor the changes of CO levels not only in living cells but also in living tissues for the first time, demonstrating the value of our two-photon fluorescent CO probe. The CC platform is complementary to the current two-photon fluorescent platforms and it may be used to develop a wide variety of two-photon fluorescent probes. In addition, we expect that CC–CO and its next generation analogues may be useful for unraveling the functions of CO in complicated living systems.
Effect of Acid Treatment on Volumetric Swelling Ratios of Coals

To remove Ca2+ ions, six low rank coals and one coking coal were treated with 0.1 and l.0 N HC1 for 24 h. IR spectra and proximate analysis of the lignites indicated that only slight structural changes had occurred during acid treatment. The swelling ratios of parent and acid-treated coal samples showed that removal of Ca2+ resulted in an increase in the swelling ratios. Higher swelling ratios were obtained with acid-washed coal samples. While the highest swelling ratios of the parent lignites were obtained in ethylenediamine, those of acid-treated samples were obtained in pyridine and dimethylformamide.
Elemental composition of mantle tissue granules in Hyridella depressa (Unionida) from the Hawkesbury-Nepean River system, Australia: inferences from catchment chemistry

The Australian freshwater mussel Hyridella depressa sequesters elements in calcium phosphate (CaP) granules that form extensive aggregations in its tissues. Elements contained in these granules were determined by X-ray microanalysis of river and lake mussels from the Hawkesbury–Nepean River system, New South Wales. Granules in freeze-substituted mantle tissue were analysed to determine the variation in element profiles in granules among mussels and among sites. For the common elements Ca, P, Fe, Mg and Mn, granule composition reflected catchment lithology and site trophic status and indicated exogenous input. These were most important for differentiation among lake sites and also indicated differences between lake and river mussels. Site differences seen with some common elements in granules from lake mussels correlated with differences in water chemistry. Trace elements, particularly Al, Cu, Zn and Pb, were also important in lake and river site differentiation. The granules play a major role in element dynamics in freshwater mussel tissues and provide a focal structure for direct analysis of element accumulation by these bivalves. The results indicate that characterization of element content of granules in mussel populations would provide valuable insights into animal–element interactions in freshwater systems for ecological and ecotoxicological investigations.
Equilibrium: A Teaching/Learning Activity

In September 1998, Wilson described a useful classroom activity for the study of chemical equilibrium that others have since praised and refined (1–4). I would like to suggest a modification whereby students use classroom clickers to remotely submit answers that can be immediately counted and displayed on a computer. The illustrative power of the activity is not only preserved, but augmented, and time can be saved since there is less to hand out and organize. All that is needed beside the clickers is a coin or die for each student to randomly dictate individual outcomes. The details of the activity are as follows:
Polysaccharide-Modified Poly(Ether Sulfone) Hollow Fibers as Solid Supports for Affinity Adsorption: Equilibrium Adsorption Study

Poly(ether sulfone) hollow fibers modified with various polysaccharides were used to immobilize Cibacron Blue 3GA for affinity adsorption. Characterization of modified hollow fibers with respect to their activation using ethylene glycol diglycidyl ether, conjugation with polysaccharides, and immobilization with Cibacron Blue 3GA indicates that the surface modification was successfully achieved. This work also studied the adsorption behavior of lysozyme onto immobilized Cibacron Blue 3GA using the polysaccharide-modified fibers as solid supports. The optimal adsorption capacity was observed from the hollow fibers conjugated with hydroxyethyl cellulose or dextran derivative and with high density of immobilized Cibacron Blue 3GA. Moreover, the effect of temperature on lysozyme adsorption was investigated. The results show that the lysozyme-ligand binding on the polysaccharide-modified hollow fibers tends to be endothermic.
INVESTIGATION OF CHEMICAL COMPONENTS VARIATION IN MAXING SHIGAN DECOCTION BY HPLC-DAD

Many efficacious herbal prescriptions were used to cure a variety of diseases, each herb contains different components that generate their distinctive efficacy. Maxing Shigan decoction is such an example. Its chemical components were complicated, which couldn't be analyzed by the simple qualitative and quantitative method. So, the similarity and difference of chemical components in Maxing Shigan decoction, single herbs, and disassembled prescriptions were investigated by high-performance liquid chromatography diode array detector (HPLC–DAD) combined with chemometrics methods, which include smoothing and filtering, ordinary manual linear deduction, adaptive iteratively reweighted penalized least squares (airPLS), heuristic evolving latent projections (HELP), and alternative moving window factor analysis (AMWFA). These methods possess practical value in ordinary laboratory when facing complicated components analysis. All resolved pure peaks, including ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, methylephedrine, amygdalin, liquiritin, glycyrrhizic acid, and benzoic acid in the Maxing Shigan decoction, were determined. The dissolved ratios of seven bioactive constituents and other major mutative constituents among Maxing Shigan decoction and other disassembled prescriptions were comprehensively investigated and compared. The comparative results of chemical compositions can help us better understand the chemical composition variation of Maxing Shigan decoction due to the cooking process.
Experimental Studies of CO2 Capturing from the Flue Gases

CO2 emissions from combustion flue gases have turned into a major factor in global warming. Post-combustion carbon capture (PCC) from industrial utility flue gases by reactive absorption can substantially reduce the emissions of the greenhouse gas CO2. To test a new solvent (AIT600) for this purpose, a small pilot plant was used. This paper presents the results of studies on chemical methods of absorbing CO2 from flue gases with the new solvent, and evaluates the effects of operating conditions on CO2 absorption efficiency. CO2 removal rate of the AIT600 solvent was higher in comparison to the conventional monoethanolamine (MEA) solvent. The optimized temperature of the absorber column was 60 °C for CO2 absorption in this pilot plant. The overall absorption rate (Φ) and the volumetric overall mass transfer coefficient (KGaV) were also investigated.
Gaia Pulsars and Where to Find Them in EDR3

The Early Gaia Data Release 3 (EDR3) provides precise astrometry for nearly 1.5 billion sources across the entire sky. A few tens of these are associated with neutron stars in the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds. Here, we report on a search for EDR3 counterparts to known rotation-powered pulsars using the method outlined in Antoniadis. A cross-correlation between EDR3 and the ATNF pulsar catalog identifies 41 close astrometric pairs (≲05 at the reference epoch of the pulsar position). Twenty six of these are related to previously known optical counterparts, while the rest are candidate pairs that require further follow-up. Highlights include the Crab Pulsar (PSR B0531+21), for which EDR3 yields a distance of 2.08−0.45+0.78 kpc (or 2.00−0.38+0.56 kpc taking into account the dispersion-measure prior; errors indicate 95% confidence limits) and PSR 1638−4608, a pulsar thus-far considered to be isolated that lies within 0056 of a Gaia source.
Low-Scaling GW with Benchmark Accuracy and Application to Phosphorene Nanosheets.

GW is an accurate method for computing electron addition and removal energies of molecules and solids. In a conventional GW implementation, however, its computational cost is O(N4) in the system size N, which prohibits its application to many systems of interest. We present a low-scaling GW algorithm with notably improved accuracy compared to our previous algorithm [J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2018, 9, 306-312]. This is demonstrated for frontier orbitals using the GW100 benchmark set, for which our algorithm yields a mean absolute deviation of only 6 meV with respect to canonical implementations. We show that also excitations of deep valence, semicore, and unbound states match conventional schemes within 0.1 eV. The high accuracy is achieved by using minimax grids with 30 grid points and the resolution of the identity with the truncated Coulomb metric. We apply the low-scaling GW algorithm with improved accuracy to phosphorene nanosheets of increasing size. We find that their fundamental gap is strongly size-dependent varying from 4.0 eV (1.8 nm × 1.3 nm, 88 atoms) to 2.4 eV (6.9 nm × 4.8 nm, 990 atoms) at the evGW0@PBE level.
Application of gold nanoparticles of different concentrations to improve the therapeutic potential of autologous conditioned serum: potential implications for equine regenerative medicine

The aim of this work was to evaluate the effect of different concentrations of gold nanoparticles (AuNPS) on equine platelet morphology, ultrastructure as well as secretion of bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP-2), vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), gelsolin (GSN), and tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α). The gold nanoparticles, with an average diameter of 20 nm, were incubated with whole anticoagulated blood at 1%, 5%, and 10% w/v for 24 hours. We showed that the application of gold nanoparticles at all the tested concentrations led to platelet activation; however, 5% of AuNPS resulted in the secretion of elevated levels of GSN and VEGF, while the concentration of TNF-α was the lowest. The data indicate that this method may be considered a promising tool for improving the currently used in clinical practice commercially available autologous conditioned serum (ACS) isolation systems for the treatment of equine osteoarthritis.
OpenHoldem: An Open Toolkit for Large-Scale Imperfect-Information Game Research

Owning to the unremitting efforts by a few institutes, significant progress has recently been made in designing superhuman AIs in No-limit Texas Hold'em (NLTH), the primary testbed for large-scale imperfect-information game research. However, it remains challenging for new researchers to study this problem since there are no standard benchmarks for comparing with existing methods, which seriously hinders further developments in this research area. In this work, we present OpenHoldem, an integrated toolkit for large-scale imperfect-information game research using NLTH. OpenHoldem makes three main contributions to this research direction: 1) a standardized evaluation protocol for thoroughly evaluating different NLTH AIs, 2) three publicly available strong baselines for NLTH AI, and 3) an online testing platform with easy-to-use APIs for public NLTH AI evaluation. We have released OpenHoldem at this http URL, hoping it facilitates further studies on the unsolved theoretical and computational issues in this area and cultivate crucial research problems like opponent modeling, large-scale equilibrium-finding, and human-computer interactive learning.
The Zeno and anti-Zeno effects: studying modified decay rates for spin-boson models with both strong and weak system-environment couplings

In this paper, we look into what happens to a quantum system under repeated measurements if system evolution is removed before each measurement is performed. Beginning with investigating a single two-level system coupled to two independent baths of harmonic oscillators, we move to replacing it with a large collection of such systems, thereby invoking the large spin-boson model. Whereas each of our two-level systems interacts strongly with one of the aforementioned baths, it interacts weakly with the other. A polaron transformation is used to make it possible for the problem in the strong coupling regime to be treated with perturbation theory. We find that the case involving a single two-level system exhibits qualitative and quantitative differences from the case involving a collection of them; however, the general effects of strong and weak couplings turn out to be the same as those in the presence of system evolution, something which allows us to establish that system evolution has no practical bearing on any of these effects.
Conformally invariant differential operators on Heisenberg groups and minimal representations.

For a simple real Lie group $G$ with Heisenberg parabolic subgroup $P$, we study the corresponding degenerate principal series representations. For a certain induction parameter the kernel of the conformally invariant system of second order differential operators constructed by Barchini, Kable and Zierau is a subrepresentation which turns out to be the minimal representation. To study this subrepresentation, we take the Heisenberg Fourier transform in the non-compact picture and show that it yields a new realization of the minimal representation on a space of $L^2$-functions. The Lie algebra action is given by differential operators of order $\leq3$ and we find explicit formulas for the lowest $K$-type. These $L^2$-models were previously known for the groups $\operatorname{SO}(n,n)$, $E_{6(6)}$, $E_{7(7)}$ and $E_{8(8)}$ by Kazhdan and Savin, for the group $G_{2(2)}$ by Gelfand, for the group $\widetilde{\operatorname{SL}}(3,\mathbb{R})$ by Torasso, and for $\widetilde{\operatorname{SO}}(4,3)$ by Sabourin. Our new approach provides a uniform and systematic treatment of these cases and also gives new $L^2$-models for $E_{6(2)}$, $E_{7(-5)}$ and $E_{8(-24)}$ for which the minimal representation is a continuation of the quaternionic discrete series, and for the groups $\widetilde{\operatorname{SO}}(p,q)$ with either $p\geq q=3$ or $p,q\geq4$ and $p+q$ even.
Data-Driven System Identification of Linear Quantum Systems Coupled to Time-Varying Coherent Inputs

In this paper, we develop a system identification algorithm to identify a model for unknown linear quantum systems driven by time-varying coherent states, based on empirical single-shot continuous homodyne measurement data of the system’s output. The proposed algorithm identifies a model that satisfies the physical realizability conditions for linear quantum systems, challenging constraints not encountered in classical (non-quantum) linear system identification. Numerical examples on a multiple-input multiple-output optical cavity model are presented to illustrate an application of the identification algorithm.
WITCHER : Detecting Crash Consistency Bugs in Non-volatile Memory Programs

The advent of non-volatile main memory (NVM) enables the development of crash-consistent software without paying storage stack overhead. However, building a correct crash-consistent program remains very challenging in the presence of a volatile cache. This paper presents WITCHER, a crash consistency bug detector for NVM software, that is (1) scalable -- does not suffer from test space explosion, (2) automatic -- does not require manual source code annotations, and (3) precise -- does not produce false positives. WITCHER first infers a set of "likely invariants" that are believed to be true to be crash consistent by analyzing source codes and NVM access traces. WITCHER automatically composes NVM images that simulate those potentially inconsistent (crashing) states violating the likely invariants. Then WITCHER performs "output equivalence checking" by comparing the output of program executions with and without a simulated crash. It validates if a likely invariant violation under test is a true crash consistency bug. Evaluation with ten persistent data structures, two real-world servers, and five example codes in Intel's PMDK library shows that WITCHER outperforms state-of-the-art tools. WITCHER discovers 37 (32 new) crash consistency bugs, which were all confirmed.
Fundamentals of Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy

Introduction to Infrared Spectroscopy Terms and Definitions The Properties of Light What Is an Infrared Spectrum? What Are Infrared Spectra Used For? The Advantages and Disadvantages of Infrared Spectroscopy The Advantages and Disadvantages of FTIR The Advantages of FTIRs The Disadvantage of FTIR FTIR: The Rest of the Story How an FTIR Works Interferometers and Interferograms How Many Scans Should Be Used? How an Interferogram Becomes a Spectrum Scanning Advice Instrumental Resolution What Determines Resolution in an FTIR Scan? What Resolution Should Be Used? FTIR Trading Rules FTIR Hardware Interferometers Infrared Sources Beamsplitters Infrared Detectors The Laser Testing Instrument Quality and Troubleshooting Proper Use of Spectral Processing The Rules of Spectral Processing Spectral Subtraction Subtraction Artifacts Baseline Correction Smoothing Spectral Derivatives Deconvolution Guidance, Precautions, and Limitations Spectral Library Searching The Search Process Interpreting Library Search Results Analysis of Mixtures: Subtract and Search Again Preparing Samples Properly Transmission Sampling Overview Windows, Cells, and Materials for Transmission Analysis Transmission Analysis of Solids and Powders KBr Pellets Mulls Transmission Analysis of Polymers The Cast Film Method The Heat and Pressure Method Transmission Analysis of Liquids Capillary Thin Films Sealed Liquid Cells Transmission Analysis of Gases and Vapors Reflectance Analysis Different Types of Reflectance Advantages and Disadvantages of Reflectance Sampling Specular Reflectance Diffuse Reflectance (DRIFTS) Abrasive Sampling Attenuated Total Reflectance (ATR) Depth of Penetration Applications of ATR Liquids Semi-Solids Polymers Powders ATR: Advantages and Disadvantages FTIR Sample Preparation: Overview and Recommendations Quantitative Infrared Spectroscopy Terms and Definitions Beer's Law Calibration and Prediction with Beer's Law Calibration Prediction An Experimental Protocol for Single Component Analyses Measuring Absorbances Properly Peak Areas versus Peak Heights Dealing with Overlapped Peaks Avoiding Experimental Errors Infrared Microscopy Hyphenated Infrared Techniques Infrared Microscopy Instrumentation Sample Preparation Applications Infrared Mapping and Imaging Glossary Index