Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Trophic Dynamics of the Boreal Forests of the Kluane Region

The trophic dynamics of the Yukon boreal forest have been under investigation at the Kluane Lake Research Station since 1973. We monitored and conducted experiments on the major species in this ecosystem, except the large mammals (for logistic reasons). The central problem has been to determine the causes of the 9 – 10 year cycle of snowshoe hares, and to achieve this we carried out several large-scale experiments manipulating food supplies, predator pressure, and soil nutrient availability to test hypotheses that food, predation, or habitat quality regulate populations. The hare cycle is driven top-down by predators, and most hares die because they are killed by predators. Predators also cause stress in female hares, and the stress response seems to be responsible for the loss of reproductive potential in the decline and low phases of the hare cycle. Many of the specialist predators and some herbivores in this ecosystem fluctuate with the hare cycle. Arctic ground squirrels do, but red squirrels do not, being linked closely to white spruce seed masting years. Small rodents fluctuate in numbers in two patterns. Red-backed voles and four species of Microtus voles have a 3 – 4 year cycle that seems to be driven by food supplies and social behaviour. Deer mice, in contrast, have fluctuated dramatically in the 38 years we have monitored them, but not cyclically. White spruce seed production varies with temperature and rainfall, but was not affected by adding nutrients in fertilizer. Global warming and reduced hare browsing in the last 20 years have helped to increase the abundance of shrubs in these forests. It will be challenging to predict how this system will change as climatic warming proceeds, because even closely related species in the same trophic level respond differently to perturbations. We recommend continued monitoring of the major species in these boreal forests.
Epidemiological and laboratory investigations of outbreaks of diarrhoea in rural South India: implications for control of disease

Two epidemics of acute, watery diarrhoea in villages in North Arcot district, India, were investigated. The attack rates were 10·03 and 15·53 per 100 population, the median duration was 5 days and enteric pathogens were present in 56·8% and 60·3% of specimens from the two villages, but no predominant pathogen was identified. Examination of stools from a 20% age-stratified random sample of the population of one of the villages after the epidemic found 22·9% of asymptomatic subjects excreted bacterial enteric pathogens. Despite the high background of enteric pathogen carriage, the isolation rates for shigellae, enteropathogenic Escherichia coli and Shiga-toxin producing E. coli were significantly higher (P < 0·001, P < 0·02, P < 0·05) during the epidemic. The epidemics may have been caused by faecal contamination of well water following rain. Point-of-use techniques for water disinfection may be most effective for preventing such outbreaks, but further research into the development of appropriate technology is required.
Reproductive changes in a cyclic population of snowshoe hares

Reproductive output was estimated for a cyclic population of snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus )i n the Kluane Lake region of the southwest Yukon Territory. Data collected by five researchers were collated over 8 years (1989-1996). Pregnant hares were captured and held in cages until they gave birth so that reproductive characteristics could be measured. Pregnancy rate, litter size, and neonate size fluctuated significantly throughout the cycle, changes occurring about 2 years before corresponding changes in density. Pregnancy rates were nearly 100% early in the breed- ing season, but declined up to 20% in the last gestation periods of the year. The number of litters produced in a breed - ing season varied between two (decline phase) and four (low, early increase phase). Litter size varied among years as well as among litters within a year, larger litters being born later in the breeding season. The body mass and size of newborn hares varied by 5-33% among years. The combined changes in pregnancy rate and litter size resulted in a cyclic change in total reproductive output ranging from a low of 6.9 young per female during the decline phase to a maximum of 18.9 during the second year of the low and early increase phases.
Weyl solitons in three-dimensional optical lattices

Weyl fermions are massless chiral quasiparticles existing in materials known as Weyl semimetals. Topological surface states, associated with the unusual electronic structure in the Weyl semimetals, have been recently demonstrated in linear systems. Ultracold atomic gases, featuring laser-assisted tunneling in three-dimensional optical lattices, can be used for the emulation of Weyl semimetals, including nonlinear effects induced by the collisional nonlinearity of atomic Bose-Einstein condensates. We demonstrate that this setting gives rise to topological states in the form of Weyl solitons at the surface of the underlying optical lattice. These nonlinear modes, being exceptionally robust, bifurcate from linear states for a given quasi-momentum. The Weyl solitons may be used to design an efficient control scheme for topologically-protected unidirectional propagation of excitations in light-matter-interaction physics. After the recently introduced Majorana and Dirac solitons, the Weyl solitons proposed in this work constitute the third (and the last) member in this family of topological solitons.
In vitro antagonistic potential of Streptomyces sp. AM-S1 against plant and human pathogens

In the present investigation, a total number of 132 different actinomycetes strains were isolated from the humus soil samples. Out of 132 isolates, 52 showed inhibitory activity against the fungal pathogen Rhizoctonia solani. Among the antagonists, the isolate designated as AM-S1 exhibited maximum inhibitory activity against the test pathogen R. solani (41 mm). Further, the light microscopic observations of the co-cultures showed severe structural alterations in the mycelia of R. solani near the zone of inhibition. The isolate AM-S1 was identified as Streptomyces sp. by morphological and 16S rDNA sequence analysis. The color of the aerial and substrate mycelia produced by the Streptomyces sp. AM-S1 varied with different media. The isolate Streptomyces sp. AM-S1 also effectively inhibited the growth of various plant and human pathogens. Further works are needed on optimization of this strain’s antagonistic activity, isolation and characterization of the antimicrobial metabolite.
Histological investigation of the effect of soybean (Glycine max) extracts on the collagen layer and estrogen receptors in the skin of female rats

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of soybean extracts obtained using different extraction methods on the skin of female rats. METHOD: A total of 64 female Sprague-Dawley rats were divided into 8 equal groups. Various extracts were administered to the female rats by oral gavage for one month. The groups comprised carboxymethyl cellulose-free control, carboxymethyl cellulose-plus control, 100-mg/kg n-hexane extract, 200-mg/kg n-hexane extract, 100-mg/kg ethyl acetate extract, 200-mg/kg ethyl acetate extract, 100-mg/kg ethanol extract and 200-mg/kg ethanol extract groups. The thickness of the collagen layer and the number of estrogen receptor-positive cells were evaluated. RESULTS: All the extract-treated groups showed a statistically significant decrease in the number of estrogen receptor-positive cells compared with the control groups. Regarding the thickness of the collagen layer, only the 200-mg/kg ethyl acetate extract-treated group showed a significant increase compared with the control groups (p<0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Our data suggest that oral intake of three different total soybean extracts might have positive estrogenic effects on the skin and that only a high-dose ethyl acetate extract can increase the expression of collagen, which may prove to be beneficial for postmenopausal facial skin.
Cramér‐von Mises statistics for discrete distributions with unknown parameters

Choulakian, Lockhart & Stephens (1994) proposed Cramér‐von Mises statistics for testing fit to a fully specified discrete distribution. The authors give slightly modified definitions for these statistics and determine their asymptotic behaviour in the case when unknown parameters in the distribution must be estimated from the sample data. They also present two examples of applications.
Sex‐specific mitonuclear epistasis and the evolution of mitochondrial bioenergetics, ageing, and life history in seed beetles

The role of mitochondrial DNA for the evolution of life‐history traits remains debated. We examined mitonuclear effects on the activity of the multisubunit complex of the electron transport chain (ETC) involved in oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) across lines of the seed beetle Acanthoscelides obtectus selected for a short (E) or a long (L) life for more than >160 generations. We constructed and phenotyped mitonuclear introgression lines, which allowed us to assess the independent effects of the evolutionary history of the nuclear and the mitochondrial genome. The nuclear genome was responsible for the largest share of divergence seen in ageing. However, the mitochondrial genome also had sizeable effects, which were sex‐specific and expressed primarily as epistatic interactions with the nuclear genome. The effects of mitonuclear disruption were largely consistent with mitonuclear coadaptation. Variation in ETC activity explained a large proportion of variance in ageing and life‐history traits and this multivariate relationship differed somewhat between the sexes. In conclusion, mitonuclear epistasis has played an important role in the laboratory evolution of ETC complex activity, ageing, and life histories and these are closely associated. The mitonuclear architecture of evolved differences in life‐history traits and mitochondrial bioenergetics was sex‐specific.
RAPID PROTOTYPING OF MULTIMEDIA ANALYSIS SYSTEMS

This paper describes a hardware/software framework and approach for fast integration and testing of complex real-time multimedia analysis algorithms. It enables the rapid assessment of combinations of multimedia analysis algorithms, in order to determine their usefulness in future consumer storage products. The framework described here consists of a set of networked personal computers, running a variety of multimedia analysis algorithms and a multi-media database. The database stores both multimedia content and metadata – as generated by multimedia content analysis algorithms – and maintains links between the two. The full hardware/software solution functions as a test-bed for new, advanced content analysis algorithms; new algorithms are easily plugged-in into any of the networked PCs, while outdated algorithms are simply removed. Once a selected consumer system configuration has passed important user-tests, a more dedicated embedded consumer product implementation is derived in a straightforward way from the framework.
Next-Generation Sequencing Sheds Light on the Natural History of Hepatitis C Infection in Patients Who Fail Treatment

High rates of sexually transmitted infection and reinfection with hepatitis C virus (HCV) have recently been reported in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)‐infected men who have sex with men and reinfection has also been described in monoinfected injecting drug users. The diagnosis of reinfection has traditionally been based on direct Sanger sequencing of samples pre‐ and posttreatment, but not on more sensitive deep sequencing techniques. We studied viral quasispecies dynamics in patients who failed standard of care therapy in a high‐risk HIV‐infected cohort of patients with early HCV infection to determine whether treatment failure was associated with reinfection or recrudescence of preexisting infection. Paired sequences (pre‐ and posttreatment) were analyzed. The HCV E2 hypervariable region‐1 was amplified using nested reverse‐transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT‐PCR) with indexed genotype‐specific primers and the same products were sequenced using both Sanger and 454 pyrosequencing approaches. Of 99 HIV‐infected patients with acute HCV treated with 24‐48 weeks of pegylated interferon alpha and ribavirin, 15 failed to achieve a sustained virological response (six relapsed, six had a null response, and three had a partial response). Using direct sequencing, 10/15 patients (66%) had evidence of a previously undetected strain posttreatment; in many studies, this is interpreted as reinfection. However, pyrosequencing revealed that 15/15 (100%) of patients had evidence of persisting infection; 6/15 (40%) patients had evidence of a previously undetected variant present in the posttreatment sample in addition to a variant that was detected at baseline. This could represent superinfection or a limitation of the sensitivity of pyrosequencing. Conclusion: In this high‐risk group, the emergence of new viral strains following treatment failure is most commonly associated with emerging dominance of preexisting minority variants rather than reinfection. Superinfection may occur in this cohort but reinfection is overestimated by Sanger sequencing. (Hepatology 2015;61:88–97)
Enhancing network robustness via shielding

We consider shielding critical links to guarantee network connectivity under geographical and general failure models. We develop a mixed integer linear program (MILP) to obtain the minimum cost shielding to guarantee the connectivity of a single SD pair under a general failure model, and exploit geometric properties to decompose the shielding problem under a geographical failure model. We extend our MILP formulation to guarantee the connectivity of the entire network, and use Benders decomposition to significantly reduce the running time by exploiting its partial separable structure. We also apply simulated annealing to solve larger network problems to obtain near-optimal solutions in much shorter time. Finally, we extend the algorithms to guarantee partial network connectivity, and observe significant reduction in shielding cost, especially when the failure region is small. For example, when the failure region radius is 60 miles, we observe as much as 75% reduction in shielding cost by relaxing the connectivity requirement to 95% on a major US infrastructure network.
Pickering Particles Prepared from Food Waste

In this paper, we demonstrate the functionality and functionalisation of waste particles as an emulsifier for oil-in-water (o/w) and water-in-oil (w/o) emulsions. Ground coffee waste was chosen as a candidate waste material due to its naturally high content of lignin, a chemical component imparting emulsifying ability. The waste coffee particles readily stabilised o/w emulsions and following hydrothermal treatment adapted from the bioenergy field they also stabilised w/o emulsions. The hydrothermal treatment relocated the lignin component of the cell walls within the coffee particles onto the particle surface thereby increasing the surface hydrophobicity of the particles as demonstrated by an emulsion assay. Emulsion droplet sizes were comparable to those found in processed foods in the case of hydrophilic waste coffee particles stabilizing o/w emulsions. These emulsions were stable against coalescence for at least 12 weeks, flocculated but stable against coalescence in shear and stable to pasteurisation conditions (10 min at 80 °C). Emulsion droplet size was also insensitive to pH of the aqueous phase during preparation (pH 3–pH 9). Stable against coalescence, the water droplets in w/o emulsions prepared with hydrothermally treated waste coffee particles were considerably larger and microscopic examination showed evidence of arrested coalescence indicative of particle jamming at the surface of the emulsion droplets. Refinement of the hydrothermal treatment and broadening out to other lignin-rich plant or plant based food waste material are promising routes to bring closer the development of commercially relevant lignin based food Pickering particles applicable to emulsion based processed foods ranging from fat continuous spreads and fillings to salad dressings.
Complementary and Alternative Medicines and Patients With Breast Cancer: A Case of Mortality and Systematic Review of Patterns of Use in Patients With Breast Cancer

Background: The use of complementary and alternative medicines (CAMs) is common among women being treated for breast cancer. A recent mortality associated with CAM at our center precipitated a systematic review of the Cochrane, EMBASE, and PubMed databases to identify English manuscripts including “CAM” and “breast cancer. ” Methods: Papers included for review were selected based on predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. The primary outcome was the use of CAM by women with breast cancer. Secondary outcomes included timing of use along disease trajectory, attitudes toward CAM by allopathic practitioners, and patient disclosure of CAM use to treating allopathic physicians. Results: Of 701 titles identified by the search strategy, 36 met the inclusion criteria. The weighted average proportion of women with breast cancer who use CAM was 40% (standard deviation: 18%). The diagnosis of breast cancer also prompts the initiation or increase of CAM use. However, up to 84% of patients do not disclose the use of CAM to their allopathic practitioners. Conclusions: Although CAM is often dismissed as a harmless addition to allopathic therapy, significant complications and interactions can occur. Our review and the dramatic case example provided highlight the need for physicians to educate themselves regarding CAM and to engage with their patients regarding its use.
Influence of Ion Etching in Low Pressure Arc Discharge in Plasma on Duplex Coat Adhesion Produced by Gas Nitriding and PA-PVD-Arc Processes

The aim of this study was duplex process parameters optimization where the main attention connect ion etching process of nitriding layer. The range of our works: experiments contain ion etching generated by using Cr, Ti, V, and TiAl electrodes, optimization of gas nitriding and PA-PVD-Arc processes, SEM investigation of nitrided surface after ion etching, hardness and tribological investigation, and adhesion and corrosion investigation. Duplex layer obtained by gas nitriding and PA-PVD-Arc processes may be used to improve mechanical, tribological, and anticorrosion properties of tools, dies, and machine parts. Application of this technology is for large and middle enterprises which produce tools and special machine elements.
Pests in Poultry, Poultry Product‐Borne Infection and Future Precautions

Consumption of poultry and poultry products is growing rapidly in both developing and developed countries as a result of increasing demand for foods rich in proteins, a world population of over 7 billion, and increased concern about the role of red meat in health and nutrition. This has led to an integration of the poultry industry to achieve enhanced productivity through economies of scale. However, simple mistakes in management in a huge integrated commercial poultry production can have substantial adverse impacts due to a number of pests such as arthropods and rodents associated with foodborne infections. A large number of microorganisms that cause infection in humans or both human and poultry flocks are transmitted to poultry by these pests. However, concerns about pesticide residues are discouraging the use of these agents in poultry industries, thus increasing the reliance on bio-security practices to control infestations. Free range and pasture-flock poultry are popular, but the pasture-flock poultry and poultry products pose potentially higher microbial risks to a large population due to longer production cycle and easy access for pests and other animals. In this chapter, we focus on poultry pests involved in the transmission of microbial pathogens to poultry flocks which result in an increased risk of foodborne infections in humans, loss of food quality, and greater risks for poultry industries. Pests in Poultry, Poultry Product-Borne Infection and Future Precautions
An Integrated Health Management and Prognostic Technology for Composite Airframe Structures

Next generation technology of integrated health management systems for air-transportation structures will combine different single SHM methods to an overall system with multiple abilities considering different stages of damage initiation and propagation. The fundamental configuration of the proposed SHM technique will involve the idea of an integrated passive/active monitoring and diagnostic system extended by numerical modules for lifetime prediction. The overall system is capable of providing real-time load monitoring and damage estimation on a global structure level as well as precise damage diagnostics on a local level. This robust diagnostic technique provides quantifiable damage location and size estimation that account for the uncertainties induced by the environments or the system itself continuously during flight. Additionally, efficient prediction and prognostic methods are integrated with monitoring and diagnostic outputs to provide real time estimation of possible damage scenarios, residual strength, and remaining useful life of the damaged structure. From this result information is gained which allow appropriate preventative actions on the monitored structure. To achieve those objectives, a built-in sensor/actuator network is employed and numerical simulation methods of damage estimation and propagation are developed and applied. The goal of this work is to integrate all these single techniques and subsystems into an integrated structural health management system for composite airframe structures. The system design, data exchange between the different subsystems, and the performance of each module is presented. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Non-pharmacological interventions for agitation in dementia: systematic review of randomised controlled trials.

BACKGROUND Agitation in dementia is common, persistent and distressing and can lead to care breakdown. Medication is often ineffective and harmful. AIMS To systematically review randomised controlled trial evidence regarding non-pharmacological interventions. Method We reviewed 33 studies fitting predetermined criteria, assessed their validity and calculated standardised effect sizes (SES). RESULTS Person-centred care, communication skills training and adapted dementia care mapping decreased symptomatic and severe agitation in care homes immediately (SES range 0.3-1.8) and for up to 6 months afterwards (SES range 0.2-2.2). Activities and music therapy by protocol (SES range 0.5-0.6) decreased overall agitation and sensory intervention decreased clinically significant agitation immediately. Aromatherapy and light therapy did not demonstrate efficacy. CONCLUSIONS There are evidence-based strategies for care homes. Future interventions should focus on consistent and long-term implementation through staff training. Further research is needed for people living in their own homes.