Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Leaves in the Dark See the Light

It is not only animals that suffer from sunburn. Plants exposed to excess sunlight suffer photodamage caused by the production of oxygen free radicals, eventually resulting in a shutdown in photosynthesis. Karpinski et al . now report that plants have developed a sophisticated systemic messenger system in which signals produced in leaves exposed to high light intensities travel to distant parts of the plant (that have not been exposed to bright light) and switch on expression of protective antioxidant genes. In their Perspective, Foyer and Noctor discuss the putative identity of the systemic messenger molecule.
Delicate Balance of Bleeding and Thrombosis in End-Stage Liver Disease and Liver Transplantation

Liver transplantation in cirrhotic patients is accompanied by severe bleeding. Indeed, the first 100 recipients of liver allografts transplanted by Thomas E. Starzl died mainly by uncontrolled bleeding. Since then, much progress has been made as to the understanding of the pathophysiology and the treatment of hemostatic disorders in cirrhotic patients. The aim of this review is to provide a state-of-the-art overview on recent developments and treatment options for hemostatic disorder in cirrhotic patients. Patients with end-stage-liver disease (ESLD) do not suffer only from procoagulant deficiency; there is also a lack of natural anticoagulants (i.e. proteins C and S) and profibrinolytics. Conventional laboratory methods such as the determination of the international normalized ratio or the activated partial thromboplastin time cannot predict bleeding complications in these patients. Progressive diagnostic techniques reveal that cirrhotic patients have the same capacity to produce thrombin like healthy volunteers. Moreover, cirrhotic patients - and particularly those with primary biliary cirrhosis or primary sclerosing cholangitis - are at a higher risk for developing thrombosis as compared with healthy controls. Hemostatic alterations are common in cirrhotic patients; they involve both the pro- and the anticoagulant pathways. However, this is a very delicate balance, which may be shifted to either of these pathways by different treatments thereby causing bleeding or thrombosis, respectively.
Orthostatic hypotension in elderly persons during passive standing: a comparison with young persons.

BACKGROUND The present study was aimed at clarifying the mechanism of orthostatic hypotension (OH) that occurs in elderly persons and at investigating assisting methods to prevent OH by evaluating changes in autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity and cerebral circulation of elderly persons when engaged in passive standing. METHODS Eight elderly volunteers and 9 young volunteers gave informed consent to participate in the study. Two experimental conditions were established: (i) "active standing," in which the subjects stood on their own with guidance from an assistant, and (ii) "passive standing," in which the subjects were placed in a standing position completely by an assistant. ANS was determined before and after standing by measuring the heart rate variability. The reaction of the ANS was evaluated on the basis of low-frequency power (LF: 0.05--0.15 Hz) and high-frequency power (HF: 0.15--0.4 Hz), which were separated from the R-R interval data by power spectral analysis using the fast Fourier transformation. Cerebral perfusion was measured over the right frontal region using a near-infrared spectroscopy cerebral oxygen monitor. RESULTS The main findings were: (i) Transient decreases in blood pressure occurred immediately after standing in both the young and elderly subjects. (ii) The LF:HF ratio increased significantly ( p <.05) immediately after active standing in the young subjects, whereas this ratio increased in the elderly subjects after some delay. (iii) The LF:HF ratio increased significantly ( p <.01) immediately after passive standing in the young subjects, whereas this ratio decreased significantly ( p <.05) in the elderly subjects. (iv) In the elderly subjects, the total hemoglobin (HbT) and oxyhemoglobin showed the greatest decrease during the 15-second period after standing. The maximum changes in the HbT with passive standing differed significantly ( p <.01) from those observed during active standing. CONCLUSIONS Our findings emphasize the need to devise bioengineered means that allow elderly persons to exert themselves, to maintain or improve muscle contractility and ANS function, while providing minimum assistance for standing.
Interpreting English Pitch Contours in Context

This paper presents a model of how pitch contours influence the illocutionary and perlocutionary effects of utterances in conversation. Our account is grounded in several insights from the prior literature. Our distinctive contribution is to replace earlier informal claims about the implicatures arising from intonation with logical derivations: we validate inferences in the SDRT framework that resolve the partial meaning we associate with a pitch contour to different specific interpretations in different contexts.
Securing Email

Email is the most ubiquitous and interoperable form of online communication today. However, email was not conceived with strong security guarantees, and the ensuing security enhancements are, by contrast, lacking in both ubiquity and interoperability. This state of affairs motivates our work. Our contributions include: (1) a systematization of secure email approaches taken by industry, academia, and independent developers; (2) an evaluation framework for proposed or deployed email security enhancements and a measurement of their security, deployability, and usability; (3) a stakeholder analysis and informed discussion of the current state of secure email; and (4) a research agenda highlighting open problems judged to be useful in pursuing secure email.
Assessment of the SMAP Passive Soil Moisture Product

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite mission was launched on January 31, 2015. The observatory was developed to provide global mapping of high-resolution soil moisture and freeze-thaw state every two to three days using an L-band (active) radar and an L-band (passive) radiometer. After an irrecoverable hardware failure of the radar on July 7, 2015, the radiometer-only soil moisture product became the only operational soil moisture product for SMAP. The product provides soil moisture estimates posted on a 36 km Earth-fixed grid produced using brightness temperature observations from descending passes. Within months after the commissioning of the SMAP radiometer, the product was assessed to have attained preliminary (beta) science quality, and data were released to the public for evaluation in September 2015. The product is available from the NASA Distributed Active Archive Center at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. This paper provides a summary of the Level 2 Passive Soil Moisture Product (L2_SM_P) and its validation against in situ ground measurements collected from different data sources. Initial in situ comparisons conducted between March 31, 2015 and October 26, 2015, at a limited number of core validation sites (CVSs) and several hundred sparse network points, indicate that the V-pol Single Channel Algorithm (SCA-V) currently delivers the best performance among algorithms considered for L2_SM_P, based on several metrics. The accuracy of the soil moisture retrievals averaged over the CVSs was 0.038 m3/m3 unbiased root-mean-square difference (ubRMSD), which approaches the SMAP mission requirement of 0.040 m3/m3.
Non-Intrusive Load Disaggregation Using Graph Signal Processing

With the large-scale roll-out of smart metering worldwide, there is a growing need to account for the individual contribution of appliances to the load demand. In this paper, we design a graph signal processing (GSP)-based approach for non-intrusive appliance load monitoring (NILM), i.e., disaggregation of total energy consumption down to individual appliances used. Leveraging piecewise smoothness of the power load signal, two GSP-based NILM approaches are proposed. The first approach, based on total graph variation minimization, searches for a smooth graph signal under known label constraints. The second approach uses the total graph variation minimizer as a starting point for further refinement via simulated annealing. The proposed GSP-based NILM approach aims to address the large training overhead and associated complexity of conventional graph-based methods through a novel event-based graph approach. Simulation results using two datasets of real house measurements demonstrate the competitive performance of the GSP-based approaches with respect to traditionally used hidden Markov model-based and decision tree-based approaches.
Predictive Image Regression for Longitudinal Studies with Missing Data

In this paper, we propose a predictive regression model for longitudinal images with missing data based on large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping (LDDMM) and deep neural networks. Instead of directly predicting image scans, our model predicts a vector momentum sequence associated with a baseline image. This momentum sequence parameterizes the original image sequence in the LDDMM framework and lies in the tangent space of the baseline image, which is Euclidean. A recurrent network with long term-short memory (LSTM) units encodes the time-varying changes in the vector-momentum sequence, and a convolutional neural network (CNN) encodes the baseline image of the vector momenta. Features extracted by the LSTM and CNN are fed into a decoder network to reconstruct the vector momentum sequence, which is used for the image sequence prediction by deforming the baseline image with LDDMM shooting. To handle the missing images at some time points, we adopt a binary mask to ignore their reconstructions in the loss calculation. We evaluate our model on synthetically generated images and the brain MRIs from the OASIS dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the promising predictions of the spatiotemporal changes in both datasets, irrespective of large or subtle changes in longitudinal image sequences.
Light Quality–Dependent Nuclear Import of the Plant Photoreceptors Phytochrome A and B

The phytochrome (phy) family of plant photoreceptors controls various aspects of photomorphogenesis. Overexpression of rice phyA–green fluorescent protein (GFP) and tobacco phyB–GFP fusion proteins in tobacco results in functional photoreceptors. phyA–GFP and phyB–GFP are localized in the cytosol of dark-adapted plants. In our experiments, red light treatment led to nuclear translocation of phyA–GFP and phyB–GFP, albeit with different kinetics. Red light–induced nuclear import of phyB–GFP, but not that of phyA–GFP, was inhibited by far-red light. Far-red light alone only induced nuclear translocation of phyA–GFP. These observations indicate that nuclear import of phyA–GFP is controlled by a very low fluence response, whereas translocation of phyB–GFP is regulated by a low fluence response of phytochrome. Thus, light-regulated nucleocytoplasmic partitioning of phyA and phyB is a major step in phytochrome signaling.
Water, Sanitation and Diarrhoeal Diseases in Nouakchott (Mauritania): Analysing the Determinant of Urban Health Inequalities

The lowest access to water and sanitation services in the city of Nouakchott leads to several practices and behaviours that create a social-ecological system which increasing risk of waterborne diseases transmission like diarrhoea. Using environmental, socio-economic and epidemiologic indicators from national statistic services, this study aims to assess the impact of Nouakchott’s social-ecological system on diarrhoeal diseases with particular emphasize on vulnerability to environmental health risks according to water and sanitation status. The results showed that respectively 25.6% and 69.8% of households had access to improved water sources and latrines with a large variability according to municipalities. The diarrhoeal morbidity (12.8%) was higher in dense urban areas where the lack of water supply and sanitation facilities affected mainly poor households (20.8% of the population). However, diarrhoeal risk is spatially variable in accordance to environmental sanitation disparities with a rate rising from 9.1% in municipalities with high level of improved water and latrines to 19.1% in communities with a lower level of ecosystem services. The correlation analysis between socio-economic, environmental and epidemiological variables reveals significant associations. Thus, the dynamic of social-ecological system demonstrated that environmental factors linked to unimproved drinking Water sources and sanitation services were the main driver of diarrhoeal diseases transmission in some municipalities. The reality of the linkage between health risks due to diarrhoea and urban environmental conditions addresses the issues of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Health and Wellbeing and Water and Sanitation services in Mauritania context.
Phosphorylation regulates the water channel activity of the seed‐specific aquaporin alpha‐TIP.

The vacuolar membrane protein alpha‐TIP is a seed‐specific protein of the Major Intrinsic Protein family. Expression of alpha‐TIP in Xenopus oocytes conferred a 4‐ to 8‐fold increase in the osmotic water permeability (Pf) of the oocyte plasma membrane, showing that alpha‐TIP forms water channels and is thus a new aquaporin. alpha‐TIP has three putative phosphorylation sites on the cytoplasmic side of the membrane (Ser7, Ser23 and Ser99), one of which (Ser7) has been shown to be phosphorylated. We present several lines of evidence that the activity of this aquaporin is regulated by phosphorylation. First, mutation of the putative phosphorylation sites in alpha‐TIP (Ser7Ala, Ser23Ala and Ser99Ala) reduced the apparent water transport activity of alpha‐TIP in oocytes, suggesting that phosphorylation of alpha‐TIP occurs in the oocytes and participates in the control of water channel activity. Second, exposure of oocytes to the cAMP agonists 8‐bromoadenosine 3′,5′‐cyclic monophosphate, forskolin and 3‐isobutyl‐1‐methylxanthine, which stimulate endogenous protein kinase A (PKA), increased the water transport activity of alpha‐TIP by 80‐100% after 60 min. That the protein can be phosphorylated by PKA was demonstrated by phosphorylating alpha‐TIP in isolated oocyte membranes with the bovine PKA catalytic subunit. Third, the integrity of the three sites at positions 7, 23 and 99 was necessary for the cAMP‐dependent increase in the Pf of oocytes expressing alpha‐TIP, as well as for in vitro phosphorylation of alpha‐TIP. These findings demonstrate that the alpha‐TIP water channel can be modulated via phosphorylation of Ser7, Ser23 and Ser99. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
High-frequency LC3L resonant DC-DC converter for automotive LED driver applications

This paper presents a high-frequency zero-voltage switching (ZVS) resonant converter using a novel LC3L resonant tank. The converter behaves like a current source, with its dc output current independent of the output voltage. This property is favorable for LED driver applications, including automotive lighting. Furthermore, the converter exhibits minimal circulating current over its output voltage range. To reduce radio frequency interference, the converter is designed to operate at switching frequency above the AM frequency band. Experimental results are given for a 2 MHz LC3L converter prototype operating over an output voltage range of 3 V to 50 V while supplying a constant 0.5 A output current to a string of 1-to-15 LEDs. Using Silicon MOSFETs, the prototype achieves a peak efficiency of 89.5%, and maintains greater than 85% efficiency across a wide output voltage range.
Tumour-and treatment-related colostomy rates following mitomycin C or cisplatin chemoradiation with or without maintenance chemotherapy in squamous cell carcinoma of the anus in the ACT II trial †

Tumourand treatment-related colostomy rates following mitomycin C or cisplatin chemoradiation with or without maintenance chemotherapy in squamous cell carcinoma of the anus in the ACT II trial† R. Glynne-Jones1*, L. Kadalayil2, H. M. Meadows2, D. Cunningham3, L. Samuel4, J. I. Geh5, C. Lowdell6, R. James7, S. Beare2, R. Begum2, J. A. Ledermann2 & D. Sebag-Montefiore8 on behalf of the ACT II Study Group Department of Medical Oncology, Mount Vernon Centre for Cancer Treatment, Northwood; Cancer Research UK and University College London Cancer Trials Centre, London; Royal Marsden Hospital, London; Department of Clinical Oncology, Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, Aberdeen; Department of Oncology, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham; Department of Oncology, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London; The Kent Cancer Centre, Tonbridge, Maidstone; University of Leeds, St James’s Institute of Oncology, Leeds, UK
Human Action Recognition by Learning Spatio-Temporal Features With Deep Neural Networks

Human action recognition is one of the fundamental challenges in robotics systems. In this paper, we propose one lightweight action recognition architecture based on deep neural networks just using RGB data. The proposed architecture consists of convolution neural network (CNN), long short-term memory (LSTM) units, and temporal-wise attention model. First, the CNN is used to extract spatial features to distinguish objects from the background with both local and semantic characteristics. Second, two kinds of LSTM networks are performed on the spatial feature maps of different CNN layers (pooling layer and fully-connected layer) to extract temporal motion features. Then, one temporal-wise attention model is designed after the LSTM to learn which parts in which frames are more important. Lastly, a joint optimization module is designed to explore intrinsic relations between two kinds of LSTM features. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.
Metabolic Syndrome Prevalence by Race/Ethnicity and Sex in the United States, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 1988–2012

Introduction Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of cardiometabolic risk factors associated with increased risk of multiple chronic diseases, including cancer and cardiovascular disease. The objectives of this study were to estimate the prevalence of metabolic syndrome overall, by race and sex, and to assess trends in prevalence from 1988 through 2012. Methods We analyzed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) for 1988 through 2012. We defined metabolic syndrome as the presence of at least 3 of these components: elevated waist circumference, elevated triglycerides, reduced high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, high blood pressure, and elevated fasting blood glucose. Data were analyzed for 3 periods: 1988–1994, 1999–2006, and 2007–2012. Results Among US adults aged 18 years or older, the prevalence of metabolic syndrome rose by more than 35% from 1988–1994 to 2007–2012, increasing from 25.3% to 34.2%. During 2007–2012, non-Hispanic black men were less likely than non-Hispanic white men to have metabolic syndrome (odds ratio [OR], 0.77; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.66–0.89). However, non-Hispanic black women were more likely than non-Hispanic white women to have metabolic syndrome (OR, 1.20; 95% CI, 1.02–1.40). Low education level (OR, 1.56; 95% CI, 1.32–1.84) and advanced age (OR, 1.73; 95% CI, 1.67–1.80) were independently associated with increased likelihood of metabolic syndrome during 2007–2012. Conclusion Metabolic syndrome prevalence increased from 1988 to 2012 for every sociodemographic group; by 2012, more than a third of all US adults met the definition and criteria for metabolic syndrome agreed to jointly by several international organizations.
The nutritive value of rumen micro-organisms in ruminants

1. Four experiments were carried out to identify and quantify the limiting amino acids (AA) in rumen microbial protein (RMP). 2. A method was developed which involved first, an assessment of the efficiency of utilization of absorbed AA-nitrogen (U) of RMP, defined as the retention of AA-N from RMP absorbed from the small intestine, and second, addition of a mixture of AA similar to the absorbed AA profile in a quantity defined by the U of RMP and equal to (1 – U)/U. Third, it involved removal of each AA in turn and measurement of the resultant N retention. Using this approach it was possible to calculate both the order and extent of AA limitations in RMP. 3. Apart from methionine which was found to be the most limiting AA, only lysine, arginine and histidine reduced N retention when omitted, and accordingly only these AA were limiting in RMP. 4. The method is discussed in detail and the amount of supplementary AA required to utilize RMP fully is calculated.
Analysis of neurological mutants with inherited retinal degeneration. Friedenwald lecture.

A first light reflecting surface is formed at either the back side of a hub section of a transparent pointer or an hole formed in a transparent dial board and a second light reflecting surface is formed on a front side of the hub section of the pointer. Light rays transmitting entirely within the dial board in a direction parallel to the longer dimensions of the dial board are reflected toward the second light reflecting surface by the first light reflecting surface and then reflected toward the pointing section of the pointer by the second light reflecting surface to illuminate the pointer.
IGZO/TiO2 Composited Film as a Photoelectrode With Reduced Graphene Oxide/Pt Counter Electrode for a Dye-Sensitized Solar Cell

In this study, titanium dioxide (TiO<sub>2</sub>) colloid was deposited on the fluorine-doped tin oxide substrate by a spin coating method and blade coating method. The characteristics of indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) are uniform porous structure, lower reverse recombination, high optical transparency, and good mobility. Composite of an IGZO/TiO<sub>2</sub> film was fabricated by sputtering IGZO on the TiO<sub>2</sub> film to form a photoelectrode. The reduced graphene oxide (rGO) has high electrocatalysis activity and excellent electron conduction. Besides, the rGO can be applied to the counter electrode of a dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC). The IGZO/TiO<sub>2</sub> photoelectrode with a platinum (Pt) counter electrode exhibited optimal photovoltaic conversion efficiency (<italic> η</italic>), and <italic>η</italic> increased 21% compared with a pure TiO<sub>2</sub> photoelectrode. <italic>η</italic> of the IGZO/TiO<sub>2</sub> photoelectrode and rGO/Pt counter electrode exhibited optimal efficiency, which was comparable with a TiO<sub>2</sub> photoelectrode with the Pt counter electrode under the same condition. In our research, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy was used to analyze the interface resistance between internal components, which could confirm recombination of electrons and electrical conductivity. The rGO/Pt counter electrode demonstrated low resistance between electrolyte and counter electrode, whose resistance was similar to the pure Pt counter electrode.
Extracting Connectomic Profiles from Group Resting State fMRI Data using Dictionary Learning

Introduction Functional networks of human brain derived from resting state fMRI (rsfMRI) data have drawn increasing interest in both research and clinical applications. Although there are multiple studies on the generation of functional networks [1, 2], quantitative characterization of connectomic profiles for distinct functional regions has been rare in literature, likely due to difficulty imposed by the well-recognized anatomical variability across individuals. This abstract presents our recent effort towards connectomic profile characterization for distinct cortical regions, taking into account anatomical variability.