Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fundamental Evolutionary Limits in Ecological Traits Drive Drosophila Species Distributions

Adaptive Limits Species adapt to a changing environment as a result of selection acting on current genetic variation. However, the degree of variation underlying traits that can respond to selection is unclear. Kellermann et al. (p. 1244; see the Perspective by Merilä) investigated the degree of genetic variation available to fruit flies for cold and desiccation tolerance. Species from the tropics tended to have low variability for these traits, while flies from more temperate climates showed higher levels of variation. However, overall genetic variability did not differ, suggesting that the tropical species lacked the alleles that confer tolerance to these environmental extremes and restrict their potential range. The evolutionary potential of key traits may be restricted by limited genetic variation. Species that are habitat specialists make up much of biodiversity, but the evolutionary factors that limit their distributions have rarely been considered. We show that in Drosophila, narrow and wide ranges of desiccation and cold resistance are closely associated with the distributions of specialist and generalist species, respectively. Furthermore, our data show that narrowly distributed tropical species consistently have low means and low genetic variation for these traits as compared with those of widely distributed species after phylogenetic correction. These results are unrelated to levels of neutral variation. Thus, specialist species may simply lack genetic variation in key traits, limiting their ability to adapt to conditions beyond their current range. We predict that such species are likely to be constrained in their evolutionary responses to future climate changes.
Implications of Water Use and Water Scarcity Footprint for Sustainable Rice Cultivation

Rice cultivation is a vital economic sector of many countries in Asia, including Thailand, with the well-being of people relying significantly on selling rice commodities. Water-intensive rice cultivation is facing the challenge of water scarcity. The study assessed the volumetric freshwater use and water scarcity footprint of the major and second rice cultivation systems in the Chao Phraya, Tha Chin, Mun, and Chi watersheds of Thailand. The results revealed that a wide range of freshwater use, i.e., 0.9–3.0 m3/kg of major rice and 0.9–2.3 m3/kg of second rice, and a high water use of rice was found among the watersheds in the northeastern region, like the Mun and Chi watersheds. However, the water scarcity footprint results showed that the second rice cultivation in watersheds, like in Chao Phraya and Tha Chin in the central region, need to be focused for improving the irrigation water use efficiency. The alternate wetting and drying (AWD) method was found to be a promising approach for substituting the pre-germinated seed broadcasting system to enhance the water use efficiency of second rice cultivation in the central region. Recommendations vis-a-vis the use of the water stress index as a tool for agricultural zoning policy were also discussed.
An Efficient Moving Target Detection Algorithm Based on Sparsity-Aware Spectrum Estimation

In this paper, an efficient direct data domain space-time adaptive processing (STAP) algorithm for moving targets detection is proposed, which is achieved based on the distinct spectrum features of clutter and target signals in the angle-Doppler domain. To reduce the computational complexity, the high-resolution angle-Doppler spectrum is obtained by finding the sparsest coefficients in the angle domain using the reduced-dimension data within each Doppler bin. Moreover, we will then present a knowledge-aided block-size detection algorithm that can discriminate between the moving targets and the clutter based on the extracted spectrum features. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method are validated through both numerical simulations and raw data processing results.
Is There a Role for Decompression Alone for Treating Symptomatic Degenerative Lumbar Spondylolisthesis?: A Systematic Review

Background Context:A posterior decompression with an instrumented fusion is one of the most common surgical procedures performed for treating symptomatic spinal stenosis associated with degenerative spondylolisthesis (DS). However, some patients may benefit from a decompression alone, avoiding complications related to instrumentation and fusion. Objective:To identify the characteristics of patients with symptomatic DS who may be successfully treated with an isolated decompression. Study Design:A systematic literature review of studies including patients who underwent decompression without instrumentation for treatment of DS. Methods:A systematic review of the Medline database was performed. Retrospective and prospective studies of patients with DS who underwent a decompression were included, as well as studies comparing decompression with instrumented decompression. All the articles were classified according to their level of evidence. Results:Thirteen studies met all inclusion and exclusion criteria. We identified several characteristics that may be associated with a less favorable outcome after a decompression alone: a facet angle >50 degrees, a disk space of >6.5 mm, presence of low back pain rather than lower extremity symptoms, presence of hypermobility in the listhetic level on dynamic radiographs (>1.25 to 2 mm), and resection of the posterior elements. The majority of the studies comparing decompression alone to decompression and instrumented fusion included in our review suggested similar clinical outcomes with both procedures; however, with long-term follow-up, fusion may provide better outcomes. Decompression with a noninstrumented fusion is also a good alternative to improve symptoms in selected patients, potentially decreasing the risk of reoperation compared with an instrumented fusion. Conclusions:Satisfactory clinical outcome can be achieved with an isolated decompression in selected patients, avoiding the additional risks and costs of instrumentation and spinal fusion. Noninstrumented fusion is also an interesting alternative to instrumented fusion for well-selected patients to decrease complications related to instrumentation.
Diagnosis and Assessment of Trachoma

SUMMARY Trachoma is caused by Chlamydia trachomatis. Clinical grading with the WHO simplified system can be highly repeatable provided graders are adequately trained and standardized. At the community level, rapid assessments are useful for confirming the absence of trachoma but do not determine the magnitude of the problem in communities where trachoma is present. New rapid assessment protocols incorporating techniques for obtaining representative population samples (without census preparation) may give better estimates of the prevalence of clinical trachoma. Clinical findings do not necessarily indicate the presence or absence of C. trachomatis infection, particularly as disease prevalence falls. The prevalence of ocular C. trachomatis infection (at the community level) is important because it is infection that is targeted when antibiotics are distributed in trachoma control campaigns. Methods to estimate infection prevalence are required. While culture is a sensitive test for the presence of viable organisms and nucleic acid amplification tests are sensitive and specific tools for the presence of chlamydial nucleic acids, the commercial assays presently available are all too expensive, too complex, or too unreliable for use in national programs. There is an urgent need for a rapid, reliable test for C. trachomatis to assist in measuring progress towards the elimination of trachoma.
Overexpression of human truncated peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha induces apoptosis in HL-1 cardiomyocytes.

AIMS Our goal was to analyse whether truncated peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha (PPARalpha) overexpression induces apoptosis of cardiomyocytes. METHODS AND RESULTS We constructed a recombinant vector of human truncated PPARalpha and a mammalian expression vector to transfect PPARalpha into a line of murine cardiomyocytes designated HL-1. Four hallmarks of apoptosis were measured in these transfected cells: depolarization of mitochondrial membrane, activation of caspase-3, phosphatidylserine (PS) externalization, and DNA fragmentation. Co-transfection with human cyclic adenosine monophosphate response element-binding protein (CREB) and human CREB binding protein (CBP) and analysis of apoptosis regulatory proteins, Bcl-2 and Bax, were also performed in truncated PPARalpha-transfected cells to determine the potential mechanisms by which truncated PPARalpha may influence apoptosis. Progressive depolarization of mitochondrial membrane, activation of caspase-3, PS externalization, DNA fragmentation, and cell death were observed in HL-1 cells upon increasing levels of transfected truncated PPARalpha. The expression of the antiapoptotic protein Bcl-2 decreased in transfected HL-1 cardiomyocytes, whereas no changes in the proapoptotic protein Bax were observed in these cells. Overexpression of CREB plus CBP abolished the inhibitory effect of truncated PPARalpha on Bcl-2 protein. CONCLUSION These results demonstrate that human truncated PPARalpha overexpression induces apoptosis in HL-1 cardiomyocytes. In addition, our findings suggest that truncated PPARalpha may induce cardiomyocyte apoptosis through the inhibition of the antiapoptotic protein, Bcl-2. It is proposed that competition with CREB for coactivators like CBP could be involved in this inhibitory effect.
Evaluating the Interestingness of Characteristic Rules

Knowledge Discovery Systems can be used to generate classification rules describing data from databases. Typically, only a small fraction of the rules generated may actually be of interest. Measures of rule interestingness allow us to filter out less interesting rules. Classification rules may be discriminant (e → h) or characteristic (h → e), where e is evidence, and h is an hypothesis. For discriminant rules, e distinguishes h from ⇁h. For characteristic rules, e summarizes one or more properties common to all instances of h. Both rule types can contribute insight into the data under analysis. In this paper, we first expand on the rule interestingness measure principles proposed by Piatetsky-Shapiro (1991) and by Major and Mangano (1993) by adding a principle which, unlike the others, considers the difference between discriminant and characteristic rules. We establish experimentally that the three popular interestingness measures for discriminant rules found in the literature do not fully serve their purpose when applied to characteristic rules. To our knowledge, no interestingness measures for characteristic rules have been published. We propose IC++, an interestingness measure for characteristic rules based on necessity and sufficiency (Duda, Gaschnig, & Hart 1981). IC++ obeys each of the rule interestingness principles, unlike the other measures studied. If a given characteristic rule is found to be uninteresting by IC++, three additional measures, which we present, can be used to derive other useful information regarding h and e.
Spin Torque and Spin-Dependent Transport in Nanoscale Devices

Author(s): Chen, Jen-Ru | Advisor(s): Krivorotov, Ilya N | Abstract: Spin Hall effect in a heavy metal (HM) generates a pure spin current flowing perpendicular to an applied electric charge current. When injected into a ferromagnet (FM), this pure spin current can act as negative magnetic damping thereby exciting self-oscillations of magnetization. In a simple HM/FM bilayer geometry, the current-driven self-oscillations of magnetization result in a microwave voltage generation due to anisotropic magneto-resistance (AMR) of the FM. Since AMR in thin films of typical FM materials such as Permalloy (Py) is relatively small, the output microwave signal generated by the HM/FM bilayer spin Hall oscillators (SHOs) is typically limited to ~ 0.1 nW. In this thesis, a new type of SHO by replacing FM layer with spin valve multilayers. In this type of devices, the microwave power generation relies on current-in-plane (CIP) giant magneto-resistance (GMR) instead of AMR. Since the magnitude GMR typically exceeds that of AMR, this new type of SHO can generate significantly higher power than the AMR-based SHOs. The maximum microwave power generated by the device exceeds 1 nW, which is over an order of magnitude higher than that in HM/FM bilayer SHO nanowire devices.Spin Transfer Torque Random Access Memory (STT-RAM) is a promising non-volatile memory technology that offers scalable area, fast operation, and low power consumption advantages over traditional SRAM, DRAM, and flash memories. Performance of the STT-RAM sensitively depends on magnetic anisotropy and properties of the magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs), which is the most essential part in STT-RAM. We present here the results on the effect of ionizing radiation on perpendicular-anisotropy MTJs (PMTJs). These samples were exposed to both gamma radiation and a mix of gamma and thermal neutron, using the TRIGA reactor. The studies were on TMR, the electrical transport measurements taken on the MTJ nanopillars, both before and after the irradiation. Our results match the previous study\cite{Jander2012}, in which no explicit changes on TMR curves of MTJs after the gamma and neutron irradiation. We also investigated the radiation effect on current switching TMR loop of PMTJs that no one reported before. To be confirmed robustness of MTJs statistically, more than 150 devices were investigated in this study.Non-local lateral devices have been extensively employed for studies of spin-dependent transport in a wide range of non-magnetic (NM) metals and semiconductors. In these devices, pure spin currents in non-magnetic channel materials can be generated and their propagation and decay can be electrically detected. We have successfully observed a non-local spin valve signal in a topological insulator (TI) channel material Sb$_2$Te$_3$. The characteristic property of TI, spin-momentum locking (SML), was identified. The spins of the TI Dirac surface state lies in-plane, and is locked at right angles to the electrons' momentum.
Functional neuro-imaging as a pre-surgical tool in epilepsy

Functional neuro-imaging techniques are helpful in the pre-surgical evaluation of epilepsy for localization of the epileptogenic zone as ancillary tools to electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or when other localization techniques are normal, non-concordant or discordant. Positron emission tomography (PET) and ictal single photon emission computed tomography (ictal SPECT) imaging are traditional tests that have been reported to have good sensitivity and specificity although the results are better with more expertise as is true for any technique. More recently magnetoencephalogram/magnetic source imaging (MEG/MSI), diffusion tensor imaging and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have been used in localization and functional mapping during the pre-surgical work-up of epilepsy. Newer techniques such as fMRI-EEG, functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging and near infra-red spectroscopy, magnetic resonance spectroscopy and magneto nanoparticles hold promise for further development that could then be applied in the work-up of epilepsy surgery. In this manuscript, we review these techniques and their current position in the pre-surgical evaluation of epilepsy.
Early Age Thermal Conditioning Improves Broiler Chick's Response to Acute Heat Stress at Marketing Age

Problem statement: Acute heat stress at marketing age especially in b roiler chickens raised in open houses with reduced means of heat exchange leads to economic losses. The objective of this study was to determine beneficial effects of early age thermal conditioning in reducing adverse effect s of acute heat stress and decrease losses. Approach: Ninety one day-old broiler chicks were randomly assigned to one of three treatments (n = 30): (1) c ontrol (normally raised), (2) early age thermal conditioning (exposed to temperature of 40±1°C for 24 h at 5th day of age, then raised as control chicks) and (3) chronic stress (exposed to 33±2°C f rom day one till 6 weeks of age). At 42nd day of age, all chicks were subjected to acute heat stress of 39±2°C for 2 h. Blood samples were collected from all groups before and after exposure to acute heat stress. Results: Blood pH increased in both controls and thermally-conditioned chicks after exp osure to acute heat stress coinciding with significant decrease in blood carbon dioxide pressu re (pCo 2) in controls only. Blood potassium level decreased in controls, while in thermally-condition ed or chronically-stressed no significant changes were observed. Blood sodium level showed a trend to ward decreased levels in controls while a trend toward increased levels was observed in both therma lly-conditioned and chronically-stressed birds. Importantly, significant reductions were observed i n total erythrocyte count and hemoglobin level in chronically-stressed birds as compared to other gro ups before and after acute stress exposure. Hetrophil/lymphocyte ratio increased in both contro ls and thermally-conditioned chicks after acute heat exposure, but not in chronically-stressed bird s. Conclusion: When exposed to acute heat stress at marketing age, chicks subjected to early age therma l conditioning responded very similar to birds adapted to chronic heat stress indicating a protect ive role of early age thermal conditioning.
The polishing pad

To maintain high dimensional stability upon moisture absorption or absorption, and also an object to provide a large polishing pad and a method of producing the polishing rate. Further, the present invention is to provide a method of manufacturing a semiconductor device using the polishing pad for the purpose. The present invention provides a polishing pad having a polishing layer made of a polyurethane foam having fine bubbles, wherein the polyurethane foam comprises: (1) an isocyanate monomer, a high molecular weight polyol α, and an isocyanate terminated prepolymer containing a low-molecular-weight polyol A, (2) it relates to a polishing pad which is characterized in that it comprises a large amount of screen diisocyanate with a number average molecular weight isocyanate-terminated prepolymer containing a polyethylene glycol of 200 ~ 1000 B, and (3) a reaction cured product of a chain extender. Polishing pad of polyurethane foam, an isocyanate monomer, a prepolymer, a polyol, a chain extender
Effects of Etidocaine Administered Epidurally on Changes in Somatosensory Evoked Potentials after Dermatomal Stimulation

The effect of lumbar epidural anesthesia with similar volumes (approximately 20 ml) of 1% and 1.5% etidocaine on early (<0.5 seconds) somatosensory evoked potentials (SEPs) to electrical stimulation of the S1, L1 and T10 dermatomes was examined in two groups of ten patients in a randomized, double-blind study. Level of analgesia to pinprick was T7.7 ± 0.9 in the 1% group and T6.6 ± 0.6 in the 1.5% group and all patients had total motor block. Despite similar analgesia to pinprick, SEP amplitude was more reduced in the 1.5% group, in which SEPs were abolished in all patients at the L1 level.
Dealing with the Coupled Evolution of Metamodels and Model-to-text Transformations

In Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) the modification of a metamodel typically can invalidate many different sorts of artifacts. In order to mitigate the pragmatic consequences of such problem, several coupled evolution techniques have been introduced over the last few years mainly focussing on restoring the validity of models, transformations, and editors. However, none of the proposed techniques addressed the coupled evolution of metamodels and template-based code generators, which has been largely neglected despite the relevance of such systems. In an attempt to fill the gap, this paper presents an approach for the coupled evolution of Acceleo-based templating including the OCL embedded in its notation. The approach has been implemented and illustrated by means of a running example.
Metformin: Multi-faceted protection against cancer

The biguanide metformin, a widely used drug for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, may exert cancer chemopreventive effects by suppressing the transformative and hyperproliferative processes that initiate carcinogenesis. Metformin's molecular targets in cancer cells (e.g., mTOR, HER2) are similar to those currently being used for directed cancer therapy. However, metformin is nontoxic and might be extremely useful for enhancing treatment efficacy of mechanism-based and biologically targeted drugs. Here, we first revisit the epidemiological, preclinical, and clinical evidence from the last 5 years showing that metformin is a promising candidate for oncology therapeutics. Second, the anticancer effects of metformin by both direct (insulin-independent) and indirect (insulin-dependent) mechanisms are discussed in terms of metformin-targeted processes and the ontogenesis of cancer stem cells (CSC), including Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) and microRNAs-regulated dedifferentiation of CSCs. Finally, we present preliminary evidence that metformin may regulate cellular senescence, an innate safeguard against cellular immortalization. There are two main lines of evidence that suggest that metformin's primary target is the immortalizing step during tumorigenesis. First, metformin activates intracellular DNA damage response checkpoints. Second, metformin attenuates the anti-senescence effects of the ATP-generating glycolytic metabotype-the Warburg effect-, which is required for self-renewal and proliferation of CSCs. If metformin therapy presents an intrinsic barrier against tumorigenesis by lowering the threshold for stress-induced senescence, metformin therapeutic strategies may be pivotal for therapeutic intervention for cancer. Current and future clinical trials will elucidate whether metformin has the potential to be used in preventive and treatment settings as an adjuvant to current cancer therapeutics.
Translating HTNs to PDDL: A Small Amount of Domain Knowledge Can Go a Long Way

We show how to translate HTN domain descriptions (if they satisfy certain restrictions) into PDDL so that they can be used by classical planners. We provide correctness results for our translation algorithm, and show that it runs in linear time and space. We also show that even small and incomplete amounts of HTN knowledge, when translated into PDDL using our algorithm, can greatly improve a classical planner's performance. In experiments on several thousand randomly generated problems in three different planning domains, such knowledge speeded up the well-known Fast-Forward planner by several orders of magnitude, and enabled it to solve much larger problems than it could otherwise solve.
Preparation and Evaluation of Calcium Sulfate/Collagen Composite Pellets

Calcium sulfate/type I collagen composite pellets were prepared by a feasible route of casting method. The as-prepared composite pellets were characterized and the results showed that the collagen fibrils acted as bridges to connect the adjacent calcium sulfate grains, especially when there was a high mass loading of collagen, which effectively depressed the rapid degradation of the pellets and improved compressive strength, and the optimal strength reached 17.2 MPa with 6 mg/mL collagen solution. The MC3T3-E1 cells could be well attached and spread on the surface of the composite pellets. Moreover, it is found that the collagen be released through pellets degradation further promoted the cells proliferation.