Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Photodynamic Action of Rose Bengal Silica Nanoparticle Complex on Breast and Oral Cancer Cell Lines

Rose Bengal, an anionic photosensitizer was conjugated to organically modified silica nanoparticles having 3‐amino propyl groups by electrostatic or covalent interaction. The drug‐nanoparticle complexes were characterized by FTIR, light scattering and zeta potential measurements. Significant changes were observed in the spectroscopic properties of the drug when it is conjugated with nanoparticles. The toxicity of the free drug and drug‐nanoparticle complex was studied against oral (4451) and breast (MCF‐7) cancer cell lines. Both complexes with nanoparticles were more phototoxic than free Rose Bengal, with the covalent complex being the more effective. Studies carried out on cellular uptake, photostability and singlet oxygen generation suggest that enhanced phototoxicity is primarily due to the enhanced uptake of the drug‐nanoparticle complex.
Dynamic Reconfigurable Component for Cloud Computing Resources

In recent years a new concept of IT organization emerged, the Cloud Computing. With This new concept, the resources are dynamically scalable, virtualized and provided to users as a service on the Internet. It is primarily intended to meet the demands of users and allow them access to virtually unlimited resources. This model motivates many academic institutions and non-academics as well to develop open-source solutions to improve performance. Among these techniques, dynamic reconfiguration of cloud resources has to take an interest. In this paper an approach for optimization resources is presented, based on dynamic reconfiguration techniques. In fact, a Dynamic Reconfigurable Component (DRC) is proposed to be added to the cloud system, that optimize the use of cloud resources and enable dynamic resource allocation. Then, the implementation of this DRC component is provided.
A Preliminary Study of Lexical Choices by Academic Disciplines in Student Writing

The tools of statistical natural language processing have the potential to reveal interesting insights on the use of language. Though we often try to be deliberate in our use of language, it is not often clear exactly why it is that we make the linguistic choices that we do. At times, patterns of usage may emerge that could potentially be linked to the language we have been exposed to in our communities. This study attempts to explore this issue by highlighting common and distinctive patterns of usage within academic disciplines characterised by papers written by students in a research university. This paper outlines the corpus and the methods that we employ to tease these structures apart.
Balancing Simulation Speed and Accuracy for Grid-connected Photovoltaic Power Systems

This paper develops efficient algorithms for balancing simulation accuracy and speed in time-domain simulation of high-frequency power electronic converters. Time-domain simulation requires careful selection of step size and solvers for numerical accuracy and stability. To achieve an optimal balance between simulation accuracy and speed, a Discrete Network Model is proposed by splitting the system into multiple sub-networks and building equivalent models for individual components with decoupling between stages. This significantly improves simulation efficiency while accurately capturing switching rip-ples. A case study in MATLAB/Simulink verifies the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method for simulating a three-phase grid-connected photovoltaic system by comparing it to conventional methods.
Eye size variation reflects habitat and daily activity patterns in colubrid snakes

The functioning of the vertebrate eye depends on its absolute size, which is presumably adapted to specific needs. Eye size variation in lidless and spectacled colubrid snakes was investigated, including 839 specimens belonging to 49 genera, 66 species and subspecies. Variations of adult eye diameters (EDs) in both absolute and relative terms between species were correlated with parameters reflecting behavioral ecology. In absolute terms, eye of arboreal species was larger than in terrestrial and semiaquatic species. For diurnal species, EDs of terrestrial species do not differ from semiaquatic species; for nocturnal species the ED of terrestrial species is larger than fossorial species but not different from semiaquatic species. In relative terms, ED did not differ significantly by habitat for diurnal species. Although the ED of terrestrial species is larger than fossorial species there were no differences for nocturnal species between semiaquatic and fossorial snakes. In contrast to other vertebrates studied to date, colubrid EDs in absolute and relative terms are larger in diurnal than in nocturnal species. These observations suggest that among colubrid snakes, eye size variation reflects adaptation to specific habitats, foraging strategies and daily activities, independently of phylogeny. J. Morphol. 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children (MASC): factor structure, reliability, and validity.

OBJECTIVE To describe the history, factor structure, reliability, and validity of the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children (MASC). METHOD In two separate school-based population studies, principal-components factor analysis was used, first, to test a theory-driven factor structure, and second, to develop an empirically derived factor structure for the MASC. In a separate study using a clinical population, test-retest reliability at 3 weeks and 3 months, interrater concordance, and convergent and divergent validity were examined. RESULTS The final version of the MASC consists of 39 items distributed across four major factors, three of which can be parsed into two subfactors each. Main and subfactors include (1) physical symptoms (tense/restless and somatic/autonomic), (2) social anxiety (humiliation/rejection and public performance fears), (3) harm avoidance (perfectionism and anxious coping), and (4) separation anxiety. The MASC factor structure, which presumably reflects the in the vivo structure of pediatric anxiety symptoms, is invariant across gender and age and shows excellent internal reliability. As expected, females show greater anxiety on all factors and subfactors than males. Three-week and 3-month test-retest reliability was satisfactory to excellent. Parent-child agreement was poor to fair. Concordance was greatest for easily observable symptom clusters and for mother-child over father-child or father-mother pairs. Shared variance with scales sampling symptom domains of interest was highest for anxiety, intermediate for depression, and lowest for externalizing symptoms, indicating adequate convergent and divergent validity. CONCLUSION The MASC is a promising self-report scale for assessing anxiety in children and adolescents.
Dachshund : Digging for and Securing Against ( Non-) Blinded Constants in JIT Code

Modern browsers such as Chrome and Edge deploy constant blinding to remove attacker-controlled constants from the JIT-compiled code. Without such a defense, attackers can encode arbitrary shellcode in constants that get compiled to executable code. In this paper, we review the security and completeness of current constant blinding implementations. We develop DACHSHUND, a fuzzing-driven framework to find userspecified constants in JIT-compiled code. DACHSHUND reveals several cases in which JIT compilers of modern browsers fail to blind constants, ranging from constants passed as function parameters to blinded constants that second-stage code optimizers revert to a non-protected form. To tackle this problem, we then propose a JavaScript rewriting mechanism that removes all constants from JavaScript code. We prototype this crossbrowser methodology as part of a Web proxy and show that it can successfully remove all constants from JavaScript code.
Influence of phase transformation on the torsional and bending properties of nickel-titanium rotary endodontic instruments.

AIM To investigate the relationship between the functional properties and the phase transformation of nickel-titanium endodontic instruments. METHODOLOGY Five types of rotary nickel-titanium endodontic instruments with a 0.30 mm diameter tip (EndoWave, HERO 642, K3, ProFile.06, and ProTaper) were selected to investigate torsional and bending properties, and phase transformation behaviour. A torsional test was performed according to ISO publication 3630-1, and maximum torque and angular deflection at fracture were measured. Bending load of the instruments was measured in a cantilever-bending test at 37 degrees C with the maximum deflection of 4.0 mm. A stainless steel K-file was used for reference. Phase transformation behaviour was measured by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). From the DSC curve, transformation temperatures were calculated. Data were analysed by anova and the Tukey-Kramer's test. RESULTS The maximum torsional torque values of HERO, K3 and ProTaper were significantly higher (P < 0.05) than those of EndoWave, ProFile and K-file. The K-files had the lowest torque value. Angular deflection at fracture was significantly higher (P < 0.05) for K-files than that for any nickel-titanium instrument. The bending load values of HERO and K3 were significantly higher (P < 0.05) than those of EndoWave, ProFile, ProTaper and K-file. The K-files had the lowest load value, although residual deflection remained. The transformation temperatures of HERO and K3 were significantly lower (P < 0.05) than those of EndoWave, ProFile and ProTaper. CONCLUSIONS The functional properties of nickel-titanium endodontic instruments, especially their flexible bending load level, were closely related to the transformation behaviour of the alloys.
A three‐dimensional measurement approach for the morphology of the femoral head

The hip joint is one of the most frequent sites of osteoarthritis. Advances in diagnosis and clinical treatment have progressed dramatically in the last few decades; however, there are limitations associated with the lack of reliable measures for quantifying hip joint morphology. Current diagnostic measures of the hip are performed with pre‐determined measures, typically lengths and angles, on 2D radiographic planes. The current measurement techniques do not utilize the inherent 3D nature of CT and MR imaging and do not necessarily quantify the relevant clinical pathologies. A valid and reliable measurement modality that measures the surface geometry of the femoral head is necessary for early diagnosis and treatment of hip disease. The purpose of this study was to establish a method to quantify femoral head morphology using a three‐dimensional model. A novel measurement approach was applied to 45 cadaveric femurs (23 right; 22 left; nine female, 17 male) and their digitally reconstructed 3D CT models. The mean difference between the cadaveric and digital measures was −2.04 mm with 95% confidence limits (CI) of 13.67 mm and −17.75 mm, respectively. The digital measurement approach was found to have excellent intraobserver reliability (ICC = 0.99, CI 0.98–0.99) and interobserver reliability (ICC = 0.98, CI 0.93–0.99). This valid and reliable novel digital measurement approach enables quantification of the 3D surface geometry of the femoral head and is able to measure individual variations and potentially detect abnormalities. This method may be used to assist future studies to establish valid diagnostic measurements for femoral head and head–neck junction pathologies.
Continuous digit recognition in mobile environment

This paper deals with the recognition of digits uttered in continuous manner in mobile environment (i.e uttering a telephonic data like phone number). In mobile environment, the major issues are background noise, coding and channel impairments. Most of the existing works deal only with the recognition of noisy speech, but in this paper, we have explored about the recognition of speech under noisy coded condition, and it is shown that the performance of recognition is improved by spectral processing techniques. Finally, in this paper, we have shown that speech coding does not significantly affect on the performance of digit recognition. Also, we have compared the results of spectral methods used here for preprocessing, and concluded that Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) [1] method produces better result than spectral subtraction method [2].
Barley starch, structure and properties

Starch is a naturally occurring substance in most plants and is used as energy storage. It is a component that mainly consists of amylose and amylopectin. Together they build a complex pattern which gives starch its specific properties. The proportion of amylose and amylopectin varies in different plants but generally starch consists of 25 % amylose and 75 % amylopectin. There have been discoveries of barley varieties containing 100 % amylopectin called “waxy starches” or “waxy barley” as well as varieties that have a high content of amylose, around 70 % and these are called “amylotypes”. Amylopectin as well as amylose consists of α-1, 4 linkage between α-ᴅ-glucose. The great difference between them is the degree of branching. In amylopectin, 4 to 5 % of the glycosidic bonds are α-1, -6 bonds. The average chain length is shorter than in amylose, but with more branching it is a larger molecule. With the different branching the molecule forms an intricate structure. The chains of amylopectin are believed to be organized in clusters which bind to each other with the assistance of a certain type of chains. In this study six different barley varieties were investigated according to starch structure and properties. In order to fully characterize these samples, several different methods were used in a combination. Gel Permeation Chromatography was performed to separate the amylose from the amylopectin, and then the collected fractions were analysed with the Phenol-Sulphuric acid method. The properties of the samples were examined with RapidViscoAnalyser that measures the viscosity during a temperature increase and decrease with continuous stirring. The chain length distribution of amylopectin and its φ, β-limit dextrins were studied with High Performance Anion Exchange Chromatography - Pulsed Amperometric Detection. The amylose content varied between 0.6 % and 48 % in the different starches. The RVA demonstrated that the more amylose and fibres the samples contained the higher final viscosity. The High Performance Anion Exchange Chromatography - Pulsed Amperometric Detection showed no clear indication of difference between the samples and to establish the whole structure of these six barley varieties and their properties more research is necessary.
A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF EDGE DETECTION TECHNIQUES APPLIED TO BATTLEFIELD IMAGERIES

Edge detection finds its use in numerous applications such as feature extraction, diagnosis in medical imaging and computer vision. Number of techniques are being used for filtering out the less relevant information from the images while preserving the basic structural properties. In this paper a comparative study of Sobel, Laplacian of Gaussian, Canny, Gabor Wavelets, Structured Forests and Morphological Fuzzy Logic techniques for edge detection has been carried out qualitatively with a motive to identify the best technique using battlefield images. Index terms Edge detection, Sobel, Laplacian of Gaussian, Canny, Gabor wavelets, Structured forests, Morphological Fuzzy.
An Investigation of the Effects of the Core Protein Telomerase Reverse Transcriptase on Wnt Signaling in Breast Cancer Cells

ABSTRACT Telomerase canonically maintains telomeres, but recent reports have suggested that the core protein mammalian telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) component, together with the chromatin remodeling factor BRG1 and β-catenin, may also bind to and promote expression of Wnt target genes. However, this proposed noncanonical role of TERT in Wnt signaling has been controversial. Here, we investigated the effects of human TERT (hTERT) on Wnt signaling in human breast cancer lines and HeLa cells. We failed to find evidence for physical association of hTERT with BRG1 or β-catenin; instead, we present evidence that anti-FLAG antibody cross-reactivity properties may explain the previously reported interaction of hTERT with β-catenin. Furthermore, altering hTERT levels in four different breast cancer cell lines caused minimal and discordant effects on Wnt target and Wnt pathway gene expression. Although hTERT's role in Wnt signaling was addressed only indirectly, no significant representation of Wnt target genes was detected in chromatin immunoprecipitation-sequencing (ChIP-seq) and chromatin isolation by RNA purification and sequencing (ChIRP-seq) loci cooccupied in HeLa S3 cells by both BRG1 and hTR. In summary, our evidence fails to support the idea of a biologically consistent hTERT interaction with the Wnt pathway in human breast cancer cells, and any detectable influence of hTERT depended on cell type and experimental system.
Doppler lidar sensor for precision navigation in GPS-deprived environment

Landing mission concepts that are being developed for exploration of solar system bodies are increasingly ambitious in their implementations and objectives. Most of these missions require accurate position and velocity data during their descent phase in order to ensure safe, soft landing at the pre-designated sites. Data from the vehicle’s Inertial Measurement Unit will not be sufficient due to significant drift error after extended travel time in space. Therefore, an onboard sensor is required to provide the necessary data for landing in the GPS-deprived environment of space. For this reason, NASA Langley Research Center has been developing an advanced Doppler lidar sensor capable of providing accurate and reliable data suitable for operation in the highly constrained environment of space. The Doppler lidar transmits three laser beams in different directions toward the ground. The signal from each beam provides the platform velocity and range to the ground along the laser line-of-sight (LOS). The six LOS measurements are then combined in order to determine the three components of the vehicle velocity vector, and to accurately measure altitude and attitude angles relative to the local ground. These measurements are used by an autonomous Guidance, Navigation, and Control system to accurately navigate the vehicle from a few kilometers above the ground to the designated location and to execute a gentle touchdown. A prototype version of our lidar sensor has been completed for a closed-loop demonstration onboard a rocket-powered terrestrial free-flyer vehicle.
Vital Conversations with Family in the Nursing Home: Preparation for End-Stage Dementia Care

Family members of persons with advanced dementia may be asked to make complex treatment decisions without having adequate knowledge regarding the risks and benefits. This 6-month, prospective, randomized trial tested the effect of an intervention consisting of a face-to-face, structured conversation about end-of-life care options with family members of nursing home residents with advanced dementia. A comparison group received only social contact via telephone. Structured conversations between a palliative care team and intervention group family members included goals of care and how best to achieve those goals, and provision of psychosocial support. Psychosocial support was also provided via telephone at three 2-month intervals. Family members participated in three telephone interviews: baseline, 3, and 6 months. Specific advance directives for persons with dementia were extracted from medical records. Results showed that intervention families had higher satisfaction with care than comparison families at the 6-month time point, and they were more likely to have decided on medical options listed in residents' advance directives (Do Not Resuscitate, Intubate, Hospitalize) over time. Study findings reinforce the need for increased education and support for families around issues of end-of-life care decisions for advanced dementia.
Pyramid vector coding for high quality audio compression

The target of this work is the high quality audio coding at low bit rate. It is shown how pyramid vector coding (PVC) can conveniently replace the classical Huffman coding technique in audio compression systems, providing also an advantage in the bit allocation procedure. The compression performances can be further improved by fixing an upper limit value to the vector components.
A refinement process for top-down mixed-signal designs thanks to SystemC-AMS

Since the emergence of Systems on Chip (SoC), designing is more challenging, especially when the system integrates analog and digital parts. Codesigning is now a necessity to simulate and validate successfully a complex SoC. This paper describes a refinement process for top-down analog and mixed-signal designs. The most abstracted levels are required to have a coherent codesign at the system level, but they are still missing in the current analog design-flows. The refinement steps from the high level down to the hardware implementation levels are described in the SystemC framework and illustrated by an example that exploits the cosimulation capabilities of SystemC-AMS.
Moving Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay to the Point-of-Care Dry- Reagent Strip Biosensors

In this work, we described a point-of-care (POC) dry-reagent strip biosensor (DRSB) based on enzyme tracers and portable strip reader for simple, low-cost and sensitive assay of protein detection in minutes. Horseradish Peroxidase (HRP) and Rabbit IgG (R-IgG) were used as a model system for the demonstration of the proof-of-concept. The sandwich-type immunoreactions were performed on the DRSB and the HRP tracers were captured on the test zone of the biosensor. The excess of HRP tracers were captured on the control zone of the biosensor through the immobilized secondary antibody. Subsequent enzymatic reaction in the presence of the substrate produced insoluble enzymatic products, which deposited on both test and control zones of the DRSB and formed two characteristics blue bands. While qualitative tests are realized by observing the color change of the test zone, quantitative data are obtained by recording the intensities of the test zone with a portable “strip reader”. The quantitative response of the optimized DRSB over the range of 0.1-50 ng mL -1 IgG in association with a 10-min assay time is obtained, and the limit of detection is estimated to be 0.05 ng/mL, which is ten times lower than that of the gold nanoparticle (GNP)-based DRSB. The enzyme-based DRSB was used to detect Carcinoembryonic Antigen (CEA) biomarker in human plasma successfully. Such enzyme-based DRSB offers a simple and fast tool for point-of-care protein assay and a potential substituent for the traditional Enzyme-linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA).