Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Is Quercus virgiliana a distinct morphological and genetic entity among European white oaks

The existence of Quercus virgiliana Ten. is a subject of debate among botanists and silviculturists. It was considered a distinct species, sometimes as an intraspecific taxonomic unit of Q. pubescens L. , or was not even recognized as a taxon or infrataxon. This disagreement with regard to the taxonomic classification is explained by the morphological similarities between Q. virgiliana and Q. pubescens, with a small overlap between particular leaf and fruit traits. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the macromorphological fruit and leaf descriptors in Romanian populations of pubescent oaks. We wanted to find which traits discriminate between the 2 taxa. By using 7 microsatellite markers, we checked whether the 2 taxa have different genetic structures. A total of 918 individuals were sampled for morphological analyses from 20 stands across Romania. The length of cupula peduncle showed the highest discriminating power, but also leaf characters such as abaxial laminar pubescence, lamina length, sinus width, and length of lamina at largest width helped to discriminate between the 2 taxa. The analysis performed at 7 microsatellite loci revealed very little genetic differentiation between Q. pubescens and Q. virgiliana . Different genetic assignment tests provided no support for 2 genetic entities in our sample. This could be explained by the restricted number of loci used. However, the morphological differences found in this study suggest that Q. virgiliana is an intraspecific taxonomic unit of Q. pubescens rather than a distinct species.
Lithium enrichment in the Galaxy: A study using the GALAH and Gaia surveys

Abstract Here, we explore the enrichment of Lithium in the Galaxy using a large sample of stars common among large spectroscopic surveys such as the GALAH and astrometric survey by the Gaia satellite. For this study we used about 60,000 low mass (M⩽ 2M⊙) dwarfs from the GALAH survey. Further, we discuss Li enrichment among giant stars based on a sample of 52,000 low mass giants, of which 335 are Li-rich with A(Li) ⩾ 1.80 ± 0.14 dex, culled from the GALAH survey. These low mass giants appears to be one of the promising source of Li enrichment in the Galaxy as their atmospheric Li can be added to the ISM through mass loss.
Genetic variability of Canadian elite cultivars of summer turnip rape (Brassica rapa L.) revealed by simple sequence repeat markers

Canadian public oilseed breeding programs have played a leading role in the development of canola-quality Brassica rapa oilseed cultivars, but the genetic variability of the cultivars developed over the past 60 yr is poorly understood. Simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers were applied to assess the genetic variability of 294 plants representing one landrace introduced from Poland ca. 1940 and nine Canadian elite B. rapa cultivars released by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada since 1964. Application of 18 SSR primer pairs detected 27 likely loci on five or more linkage groups and 123 polymorphic alleles. The allelic frequencies ranged from 0.003 to 0.997 and averaged 0.262. The estimates of mean heterozygosity for these cultivars ranged from 0.126 to 0.197 and averaged 0.165. Significant decreases of SSR alleles and average dissimilarities were observed over the 60 yr of breeding effort. The proportion of total SSR variation residing among the cultivars was 10.4%; between high vs. low erucic acid cultivars .
The dynamics in the inner kpc of the lenticular galaxy IC 676

Abstract Lenticular galaxies play an important part in the morphology classes. Their detailed study provides important information with regard to the formation and evolution of the different morphological types of galaxies. Here we investigated a barred lenticular galaxy IC 676, which has double nuclei in its inner kpc region. Based on the integral-field spectroscopy data, we presented the dynamics in the central region of IC 676, and tried to explore the nature and formation of its double nuclei.
Research on the Use of Digital Tools by STEM Students at the University of Rijeka

The use of digital tools for learning has the potential to positively affect student motivation. While exploring the extent of use of digital tools for learning by STEM students at the University of Rijeka, it was observed that the current level of use is not at the expected level. Obtained research results have shown that surveyed STEM students are currently not encouraged nor intrinsically motivated enough to explore the possibilities of using freely available digital tools for learning. With the aim of influencing student motivation, we propose building an evaluation system in STEM education based on the principles of Educational Recommender System.
Seven decades of monitoring the aquatic bug fauna of Lake Balaton (Heteroptera: Nepomorpha)

Detailed faunistic data originating from four sampling series of aquatic Heteroptera (Nepomorpha) in the Lake Balaton (the largest shallow lake of Central Europe) between 1928 and 2002 were analysed. A comparative analysis confirmed that the aquatic bug fauna of this great lake can be established with suitable accuracy if it is sampled by different but devoted collectors. So far 26 species of aquatic bugs have been reported from here. The fauna changed considerably during the seven decades. Species lists of the four basins of the lake established during the four sampling periods show characteristic differences. Not only the frequency of four Micronecta species (Micronecta griseola, M. pusilla, M. scholzi, M. minutissima) changed characteristically but there has been a distinct change in the ratio of rare species too. Rare species were present in significantly higher proportion in the period 1928–1930 than in any of the later samplings between 1984 and 2002. All these changes run parallel with the direction of anthropogenic influences.
Effect of the gas percentage on the thickness of the galactic discs during minor mergers using hydrodynamical simulations

Abstract We study the minor mergers of galaxies using simulations. For this we use GADGET2 code. We present results of simulations of minor mergers of disc galaxies of mass ratio 1:10. These simulations consist of collisionless as well as hydrodynamical runs including a gaseous component in the galactic disc of primary galaxy. Our goal is to establish the characteristics of discs obtained after the merger.We observe that the primary galaxy discs are not destroyed after the merger. We take different initial conditions for the primary galaxy varying the gas percentage in disc from 0–40 percentage and study the thickness of the disc after the merger. We generally observe that the thickness of the disc increases after the merger for any gas percentage. We also observe that as the gas percentage increases in the disc of initial primary galaxy, the increase in the thickness keeps decreasing.
Computational Modelling of Metacognition in Emotion Regulation

Computational metacognition is an AI paradigm that enables an agent to inspect and modify its own reasoning. This paper describes work-in-progress research on metacognition for emotion regulation in simulated agents. We are using example scenarios where negative emotions interfere with the agent’s goal. The agent should override these emotions using reappraisal as a regulation strategy. Our initial work has identiﬁed the following challenges: (a) for general and robust recognition of the “involuntary” nature of emotions, the agent needs to develop a model of its own volition; (b) to implement reap-praisal, metacognition needs to initiate new reasoning strategies so that the emotion-causing situation can be evaluated more positively; (c) to enhance robustness and adaptability, the architecture needs distributed and parallel processes within the deliberative and metacognitive layers.
Routing into parallel collision channels

We study a Medium Access game modeled as a splittable atomic routing game in a parallel link topology. Each player has to decide how to split her traffic among the links. We take the expected loss probability of a player as her cost and consider various loss scenarios: 1) the M/M/1/1 queue in which an arrival that finds another packet in service is lost, 2) Losses occur as in 1, except that if arrival occurs when another packet is served, then both are lost. We furthermore assume that the packet in service is aborted if there was a collision. 3) Like 2, but the packet in service is not aborted. We study the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium under these three types of losses.
Analysis the Dynamics of SIHR Model: Covid-19 Case in Djibouti

The COVID-19 epidemic is an emerging infectious disease of the viral zoonosis type caused by the corona-virus strain SARS-CoV-2, is classified as a human-to-human communicable disease and is currently a pandemic worldwide. In this paper, we propose conceptual mathematical models the epidemic dynamics of four compartments. We have collected data from the Djibouti health ministry. We define the positivity, boundedness of solutions and basic reproduction number. Then, we study local and global stability and bifurcation analysis of equilibrium to examine its epidemiological relevance. Finally, we analyze the fit of the data in comparison with the result of our mathematical results, to validate the model and estimating the important model parameters and prediction about the disease, we consider the real cases of Djibouti from 23th March to 10th June, 2020.
ANTIMICROBIAL, ANTIOXIDANT AND CYTOTOXIC PROPERTIES OF STREPTOMYCES SP. (ERINLG-01) ISOLATED FROM SOUTHERN WESTERN GHATS

Objective: Streptomyces sp. is one of the most important antibiotic producing Gram positive bacteria. The aim of this study was to assess the antimicrobial, antioxidant and cytotoxic effects (against A549 lung adenocarcinoma cancer cell line) of ethyl acetate extract of Streptomyces sp. from the soil sample of Doddabetta forest, Nilgiris, Western Ghats of Tamil Nadu. Methods: Isolation of Streptomyces was performed by serial dilution plate technique. The strain was grown in MNGA medium to study the morphology and biochemical characteristics. Streptomyces sp. (ERINLG-01) was screened for its antimicrobial activity against pathogenic bacteria and fungi. The strain was subjected to 16S rRNA analysis and was identified as Streptomyces sp. (ERINLG-01). The nucleotide sequence of the 16S rRNA gene of the isolate exhibited close similarity with other Streptomyces sp. and has been submitted to Genbank. The antibacterial substances were extracted using ethyl acetate from MNGA medium. Antioxidant and cytotoxic effect were also studied. Results: Streptomyces sp. ERINLG-01 was isolated from the soil sample of the Doddabetta forest, Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu, India. Seven RAPD primers were tested against the DNA extracted from the Streptomyces sp. ; four of them (OPA2, OPA9, OPN15 and OPA20) gave clear and scorable profiles. The ethyl acetate extract showed antimicrobial activity against six Gram negative, five Gram positive bacteria and three fungi. The zones of inhibitions were: 16 mm against B. subtilis, S. epidermidis and M. pachydermatis, 15 mm against E. aerogenes and C. albicans. The minimum inhibitory concentration values of ethyl acetate extract were: 125 µg/mL against B. subtilis, 250 µg/mL against S. epidermidis, M. pachydermatis, E. aerogenes and C. albicans. The radical scavenging activity was maximum at 1000 µg/mL (76.11%). Cupric Ion Reducing Antioxidant Capacity of ethyl acetate extract was dependent on the concentration. Ferric reducing antioxidant power assay of ethyl acetate extract showed (1.358 ± 0.04 mM Fe (II)/g) two-fold higher value compared to the standard. Ethyl acetate extract showed 82.4% cytotoxic activity in vitro against A549 lung adenocarcinoma cancer cell line at a dose of 1000 µg/mL with IC50 value of 600 µg/mL. The results showed that the ethyl acetate extract of Streptomyces sp. ERINLG-01 could be probed further in drug discovery programme.
Poor Outcome of Intestinal Ischemic Manifestations of COVID-19

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The ADAPT System Description for the STAPLE 2020 English-to-Portuguese Translation Task

This paper describes the ADAPT Centre’s submission to STAPLE (Simultaneous Translation and Paraphrase for Language Education) 2020, a shared task of the 4th Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT), for the English-to-Portuguese translation task. In this shared task, the participants were asked to produce high-coverage sets of plausible translations given English prompts (input source sentences). We present our English-to-Portuguese machine translation (MT) models that were built applying various strategies, e.g. data and sentence selection, monolingual MT for generating alternative translations, and combining multiple n-best translations. Our experiments show that adding the aforementioned techniques to the baseline yields an excellent performance in the English-to-Portuguese translation task.
Automatic summarization of medical conversations, a review

ion et pour l’analyse du dialogue. Nous décrivons aussi les utilisation du Traitement Automatique des Langues dans le domaine médical. A BSTRACT Conversational analysis plays an important role in the development of simulation devices for the training of health professionals (doctors, nurses). Our goal is to develop an original automatic synthesis method for medical conversations between a patient and a healthcare professional, based on recent advances in summarization using convolutional and recurrent neural networks. The proposed method must be adapted to the specific problems related to the synthesis of dialogues. This article presents a review of the different methods for extractive and abstractive summarization, and for dialogue analysis. We also describe the use of Natural Language Processing in the medical field.
Genetic diversity in red pine: evidence for low genic heterozygosity

Starch gel electrophoresis was used to survey for genetically determined enzyme mobility differences among 297 megagametophytes of red pine (Pinusresinosa Ait.) from five widely separated geographical sources. Consistent and reproducible enzyme banding patterns were observed with five of the seven isozyme systems assayed. No variation in band mobility was observed in any of these systems. This result stands in contrast with those reported from surveys of allozyme variation in other coniferous species but is consistent with the low degree of genetic variation observed in red pine for higher levels of genetic organization. It is concluded that red pine is genetically depauperate.Possible explanations for restricted genetic diversity are discussed. The most plausible explanation suggests that red pine was at sometime, possibly during the Pleistocene, reduced to a small refugial population and has yet to reestablish equilibrium heterozygosity.
Human prefoldin modulates co-transcriptional pre-mRNA splicing

Prefoldin is a heterohexameric complex conserved from archaea to humans that plays a cochaperone role during the cotranslational folding of actin and tubulin monomers. Additional functions of prefoldin in the cell nucleus have been described, including a positive contribution to transcription elongation and chromatin dynamics in yeast. Here we show that prefoldin depletion provoked transcriptional alterations across the genome of human cells. Severe pre-mRNA splicing defects were also detected, particularly under serum stimulation conditions. We found a significant impairment of co-transcriptional splicing during transcription elongation, which explains why the expression of long genes with a high number of introns was affected the most. We detected prefoldin binding to the gene body of transcribed genes and found that its absence caused significant decrease in the levels of Ser2 phosphorylation of the RNA polymerase II carboxy-terminal domain. Moreover, lack of prefoldin reduced the association of the splicing factor U2AF65 with chromatin, an association that is known to be dependent on Ser2 phosphorylation. Altogether the reported results indicate that human prefoldin is able to modulate gene expression by influencing phosphorylation of elongating RNA polymerase II, and thereby regulating co-transcriptional splicing efficiency. Significance Statement Prefoldin is a protein complex conserved from archaea to humans. It is known that human prefoldin facilitates folding of cytoskeleton monomers in the cytoplasm, but its role in the cell nucleus is unclear. We found prefoldin bound to chromatin in transcribed genes and detected accumulation of unspliced pre-mRNA precursors when prefoldin was depleted, particularly in serum-activated cells. We also found that lack of prefoldin decreases the levels of a phosphorylated form of RNA polymerase II that is the best-known marker of transcription elongation. This defect, in turn, impairs recruitment of the splicing factor U2AF65, provoking the uncoupling of pre-mRNA splicing from transcription. These results show that prefoldin is, in addition to a cytoplasmic chaperone, a modulator of co-transcriptional pre-mRNA processing.
OPTIMIZING NEST SURVIVAL AND FEMALE SURVIVAL: CONSEQUENCES OF NEST SITE SELECTION FOR CANADA GEESE

Abstract We examined the relationship between attributes of nest sites used by Canada Geese (Branta canadensis) in the Copper River Delta, Alaska, and patterns in nest and female survival. We aimed to determine whether nest site attributes related to nest and female survival differed and whether nest site attributes related to nest survival changed within and among years. Nest site attributes that we examined included vegetation at and surrounding the nest, as well as associations with other nesting birds. Optimal nest site characteristics were different depending on whether nest survival or female survival was examined. Prior to 25 May, the odds of daily survival for nests in tall shrubs and on islands were 2.92 and 2.26 times greater, respectively, than for nests in short shrub sites. Bald Eagles (Halieaeetus leucocephalus) are the major predator during the early breeding season and their behavior was likely important in determining this pattern. After 25 May, when eagle predation is limited due to the availability of alternative prey, no differences in nest survival among the nest site types were found. In addition, nest survival was positively related to the density of other Canada Goose nests near the nest site. Although the number of detected mortalities for females was relatively low, a clear pattern was found, with mortality three times more likely at nest sites dominated by high shrub density within 50 m than at open sites dominated by low shrub density. The negative relationship of nest concealment and adult survival is consistent with that found in other studies of ground-nesting birds. Physical barriers that limited access to nest sites by predators and sites that allowed for early detection of predators were important characteristics of nest site quality for Canada Geese and nest site quality shifted within seasons, likely as a result of shifting predator-prey interactions.
Aquatic Invertebrate Community Trends and Water Quality at Homestead National Monument of America, Nebraska, 1996–2012

To address concerns about water quality in Cub Creek, Homestead National Monument of America (HOME), Nebraska, the National Park Service began monitoring aquatic invertebrates annually beginning in 1996. Invertebrates were collected using Hester-Dendy multiplate samplers placed at two sampling sites on Cub Creek. Water quality parameters measured in the creek included temperature, dissolved oxygen, specific conductance, pH, turbidity, nitrate-nitrogen, total phosphorus, and fecal coliform bacteria (Escherichia coli). Most water quality measurements met state standards and were generally consistent and typical for streams of this size in the region, but phosphorus concentrations, turbidity, and fecal coliform bacteria levels greatly exceeded acceptable levels. Similarly, summary data for invertebrate community metrics, including low taxa richness, diversity and evenness, low Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, Trichoptera (EPT) richness, and high Hilsenhoff Biotic Index (HBI) suggest that Cub Creek is not fully biologically supporting. However, invertebrate metrics generally did not exceed control chart limits based on historical data collected from 1996–2004, showing that since 2005 the metrics have not deviated significantly from their historical baseline. Additionally, Mann-Kendall trend test for each metric for the period 1996–2012 did not show significant trends (P ≥0.05) thus further indicating that stream integrity has not diminished beyond that when monitoring first began. Impacts to water quality in Cub Creek originate upstream of the monument boundaries, making mitigation difficult. Protecting and managing in-stream habitat and riparian zone integrity will aid in maintaining the integrity of Cub Creek flowing through the monument.
CFTR deficiency causes cardiac dysplasia during zebrafish embryogenesis and is associated with dilated cardiomyopathy

Mutations in the CFTR gene cause cystic fibrosis (CF) with myocardial dysfunction. However, it remains unknown whether CF-related heart disease is a secondary effect of pulmonary disease, or an intrinsic primary defect in the heart. Here, we used zebrafish, which lack lung tissue, to investigate the role of CFTR in cardiogenesis. Our findings demonstrated that the loss of CFTR impairs cardiac development from the cardiac progenitor stage, resulting in cardiac looping defects, a dilated atrium, pericardial edema, and a decrease in heart rate. Furthermore, we found that cardiac development was perturbed in wild-type embryos treated with a gating-specific CFTR channel inhibitor, CFTRinh-172, at the blastula stage of development, but not at later stages. Gene expression analysis of blastulas indicated that transcript levels, including mRNAs associated with cardiovascular diseases, were significantly altered in embryos derived from cftr mutants relative to controls. To evaluate the role of CFTR in human heart failure, we performed a genetic association study on individuals with dilated cardiomyopathy and found that the I556V mutation in CFTR, which causes a channel defect, was associated with the disease. Similar to other well-studied channel-defective CFTR mutants, CFTR I556V mRNA failed to restore cardiac dysplasia in mutant embryos. The present study revealed an important role for the CFTR ion channel in regulating cardiac development during early embryogenesis, supporting the hypothesis that CF-related heart disease results from an intrinsic primary defect in the heart.