Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Edible Halophytes with Functional Properties: In Vitro Protein Digestibility and Bioaccessibility and Intestinal Absorption of Minerals and Trace Elements from Australian Indigenous Halophytes

Halophytes are considered emerging functional foods as they are high in protein, minerals, and trace elements, although studies investigating halophyte digestibility, bioaccessibility, and intestinal absorption are limited. Therefore, this study investigated the in vitro protein digestibility, bioaccessibility and intestinal absorption of minerals and trace elements in saltbush and samphire, two important Australian indigenous halophytes. The total amino acid contents of samphire and saltbush were 42.5 and 87.3 mg/g DW, and even though saltbush had a higher total protein content overall, the in vitro digestibility of samphire protein was higher than the saltbush protein. The in vitro bioaccessibility of Mg, Fe, and Zn was higher in freeze-dried halophyte powder compared to the halophyte test food, suggesting that the food matrix has a significant impact on mineral and trace element bioaccessibility. However, the samphire test food digesta had the highest intestinal Fe absorption rate, whereas the saltbush digesta exhibited the lowest (37.7 vs. 8.9 ng/mL ferritin). The present study provides crucial data about the digestive “fate” of halophyte protein, minerals, and trace elements and increases the understanding of these underutilized indigenous edible plants as future functional foods.
They know more than we do, yet we appreciate them less than they deserve: Decoding local ontologies in heritage interpretation and preservation in Southern Tanzania

ABSTRACT Many of the heritage sites researchers work on are reported to them by local people. Sometimes local people spend their meagre resources to protect such sites before researchers and heritage practitioners know about and visit them. Despite these roles, their (local people) skillsets and knowledge about the sites, including materials therein, are often ignored. A few researchers who value the contributions of local people give them temporary casual jobs mostly related to camp management. This paper draws examples from southern Tanzania to present the roles of local knowledge and epistemologies in heritage research and illustrate strategies to incorporate such local knowledge into research enterprises. The paper also discusses integrating and balancing what local people know with what researchers learn from those sites to co-produce well-balanced knowledge. We contend that integrating local people's interpretation of the sites and material culture in research outcomes is as important as conducting research at those sites.
Sustainable circular cities? Analysing urban circular economy policies in Amsterdam, Glasgow, and Copenhagen

ABSTRACT Cities play a central role in the circular economy (CE) as they are important centres of production and consumption, responsible for 80% of global GDP. European cities are particularly important due to their position of power in the global economy as major markets, and places of industrial and social innovation. Yet urban CE policies and discourses remain poorly researched and understood. This paper addresses this research gap by analysing and comparing the CE policies and discourses in different European cities to draw critical insights and recommendations. It does so by first reviewing academic literature on urban CE policies to develop a new conceptual framework to analyse CE discourses and policies. This framework is then used to analyse and compare the CE policies of three European cities: Glasgow, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen. Results show that technocentric approaches to CE are dominant in the three cities. Moreover, they have very limited social justice policies for a fair distribution of the costs and benefits of a CE transition. Key policy recommendations to address these shortcomings are thus proposed. The insights brought about by this paper are valuable for both practitioners and academics seeking to improve urban CE policies.
Cooperative Path Following Control of a Team of Quadrotor-Slung-Load Systems Under Disturbances

In this paper, we address the challenging problem of path-following control for a group of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$</tex-math></inline-formula> Quadrotor-Slung-Load Systems (QSLSs) subject to time-varying disturbances. A single QSLS consists of a quadrotor vehicle and a load attached to the vehicle's center of mass via a cable. We propose a distributed path coordination framework that generates <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$</tex-math></inline-formula> desired paths for the <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$</tex-math></inline-formula> loads while maintaining a fixed inter-load formation pattern. Furthermore, we introduce a robust controller for each of the <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$</tex-math></inline-formula> quadrotors to drive the respective load along the assigned path. The path-following controller is designed to ensure that the quadrotor thrust remains bounded with respect to position and velocity tracking errors. We present a series of simulation and experimental results to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and demonstrate its performance.
Optimal control of steer‐braking systems: Non‐existence of minimizing trajectories

In this paper, we investigate an optimal control problem in which the objective is to decelerate a simplified vehicle model, subject to input constraints, from a given initial velocity down to zero by minimizing a quadratic cost functional. The problem is of interest because, although it involves apparently simple drift‐less dynamics, a minimizing trajectory does not exist over the admissible input trajectories. This problem is motivated by a minimum‐time problem for a fairly complex car vehicle model on a race track. Numerical computations run on the car trajectory optimization problem provide evidence of convergence issues and of an apparently unmotivated ripple in the steer angle. Characterizing this ripple behavior is important to fully understand and exploit minimizing vehicle trajectories. We are able to isolate the key features of this chattering behavior in a very simple dynamics/objective setting. We show that the cost functional has an infimum, but an admissible minimizing input trajectory does not exist. We also show that the infimum can be arbitrarily approximated by bang‐bang inputs with a sufficiently large number of switches. We reproduce this phenomenon in numerical computations and characterize it by means of non‐existence of admissible minimizing trajectories. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
I am not the info desk for Islam and Arabs: the racialization of Islam and boundaries of citizenship

ABSTRACT By bridging the discussions on critical race and critical citizenship studies, this paper asks how the racialization of Islam shapes the lived citizenship of minorities in the Finnish context. The study focuses on a group of Finnish citizens and residents who have backgrounds in southwest Asia. The 26 people in this group were asked questions about their lived experiences of citizenship and the role of religion in their experiences. The results indicate that regardless of the participants’ religious identifications as Muslims or non-Muslims, their belonging was challenged through the mechanism of racialized gaze that framed them as strangers who do not fit into the epistemic community of whiteness. The study introduces the terms selective secularism and labour of explaining to reflect upon the mechanism through which the racialized gaze operates in everyday encounters. At times, some research participants resisted and contested the racialized gaze.
Characterizing cosmic neutrino sources – a measurement of the energy spectrum and flavor composition of the cosmic neutrino flux observed with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a km-sized neutrino telescope located at the geographical South Pole. The telescope consists of an array of more than 5,000 photosensors, embedded deep in the glacial ice, that record the Cherenkov radiation emitted by secondary particles created in neutrino interactions. Its primary purpose is the detection of high-energy cosmic neutrinos. Such neutrinos are expected to be produced in interactions of high-energy cosmic rays with ambient matter or photons close to their acceleration sites. With their unique properties, neutrinos may help to identify these sites, and probe the acceleration process. In 2013, the IceCube Collaboration has reported the first evidence for a flux of high-energy cosmic neutrinos. While the origin of the flux remains unknown so far, the properties of its sources can be constrained by measuring its energy spectrum and its composition of electron, muon, and tau neutrinos (designated as “flavor composition”). The present work constitutes the first comprehensive analysis of IceCube data with respect to these principal characteristics of the flux. Several data sets that were originally collected for separate studies were assembled and simultaneously studied in a combined analysis. Experimentally observed distributions of reconstructed energy, zenith angle and particle signature were fitted with model distributions for the background of atmospheric muons and neutrinos and for the cosmic neutrino flux. The combination of models that describes the data best was determined with a maximum-likelihood estimator. Assuming the cosmic neutrino flux to be isotropic and to consist of equal flavors at Earth, the all-flavor spectrum is well described by a power law with normalization (6.7 −1.2) × 10−18 GeV−1 s−1 sr−1 cm−2 at 100 TeV and spectral index −2.50 ± 0.09 for neutrino energies between 25 TeV and 2.8 PeV. A spectral index of −2, an often-quoted benchmark value, is disfavored with a significance of 3.8 standard deviations. The flavor composition is compatible with that expected for standard neutrino production processes at the sources. However, a scenario in which only electron neutrinos are produced, e.g. in the decay of
Is the New Injury Severity Score (NISS) a better outcome predictor than the Injury Severity Score (ISS) in patients with musculoskeletal injuries: A retrospective analysis?

Purpose: The Injury Severity Score (ISS) is used to predict outcome after trauma. However, it is criticised because of flaws in its calculation of injury severity. The New Injury Severity Score (NISS) was proposed as an alternative. However, studies are conflicted on which is better. We compared both scales in predicting surgery, multiple surgeries, preoperative blood transfusion, hospital stay length and mortality in patients with orthopaedic injuries. Method: A retrospective cohort study that used the hospital's trauma database. Patients’ data were extracted, and the outcome parameters noted. The ISS and NISS were calculated for each patient. The patients were dichotomised into discrepant and non-discrepant if both scores are different or the same, respectively. A receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve was generated for each outcome parameter, and the area under the curve (AUC) compared between the two scoring systems. Results: Four hundred and forty-seven (447) patients participated in this study. The participants’ average age was 34.78 years (SD = 18.67), mean ISS score was 8.5 (SD = 5.9), while the average NISS was 9.4 (SD = 6.6). The NISS exceeded the ISS (discrepant) in 82 subjects (18.3%), while both scores are the same (non-discrepant) in 365 subjects (81.7%). The NISS outperformed the ISS in predicting multiple surgeries and hospital stay length, while the ISS better predicts mortality rate. Both performed similarly for predicting surgical intervention and blood transfusion. Conclusion: Both scores performed similarly and there is insufficient evidence to replace ISS with NISS.
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.

This is the classic work upon which modern-day game theory is based. What began more than sixty years ago as a modest proposal that a mathematician and an economist write a short paper together blossomed, in 1944, when Princeton University Press published "Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. " In it, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern conceived a groundbreaking mathematical theory of economic and social organization, based on a theory of games of strategy. Not only would this revolutionize economics, but the entirely new field of scientific inquiry it yielded--game theory--has since been widely used to analyze a host of real-world phenomena from arms races to optimal policy choices of presidential candidates, from vaccination policy to major league baseball salary negotiations. And it is today established throughout both the social sciences and a wide range of other sciences.
Perfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) Affect Inflammation in Lung Cells and Tissues

Adverse lung outcomes from exposure to per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are known; however, the mechanism of action is poorly understood. To explore this, human bronchial epithelial cells were grown and exposed to varied concentrations of short-chain (perfluorobutanoic acid, perflurobutane sulfonic acid and GenX) or long-chain (PFOA and perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS)) PFAS, alone or in a mixture to identify cytotoxic concentrations. Non-cytotoxic concentrations of PFAS from this experiment were selected to assess NLRP3 inflammasome activation and priming. We found that PFOA and PFOS alone or in a mixture primed and activated the inflammasome compared with vehicle control. Atomic force microscopy showed that PFOA but not PFOS significantly altered the membrane properties of cells. RNA sequencing was performed on the lungs of mice that had consumed PFOA in drinking water for 14 weeks. Wild type (WT), PPARα knock-out (KO) and humanized PPARα (KI) were exposed to PFOA. We found that multiple inflammation- and immune-related genes were affected. Taken together, our study demonstrated that PFAS exposure could alter lung biology in a significant manner and may contribute to asthma/airway hyper-responsiveness.
Interfacial Layer Engineering in Sub-5-nm HZO: Enabling Low-Temperature Process, Low-Voltage Operation, and High Robustness

For low-voltage reliable operation of ferroelectric devices, the scaling of Hf<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$_{{1}-{x}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>ZrxO2 (HZO) thickness (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${t}_{\text {HZO}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) is important. Despite the importance of scaling, ferroelectricity degradation and increased process thermal budget hinder progress. In this work, we propose the use of an interfacial layer (IL) to mitigate these scaling issues and validate its effectiveness in thin <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${t}_{\text {HZO}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. Our findings demonstrate that IL can activate ferroelectricity below the critical temperature of ferroelectric HZO. Moreover, we report <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> polarization improvement, reduced operation voltage from 1.5 to 1.2 V, and substantially improved endurance with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$>$ </tex-math></inline-formula>10 years of reliability, all based on experimental results. We believe this systematic work offers a simple yet efficient route toward HZO scaling in ferroelectric devices.
The Molecular Mechanism of GhbHLH121 in Response to Iron Deficiency in Cotton Seedlings

Iron deficiency caused by high pH of saline–alkali soil is a major source of abiotic stress affecting plant growth. However, the molecular mechanism underlying the iron deficiency response in cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) is poorly understood. In this study, we investigated the impacts of iron deficiency at the cotton seedling stage and elucidated the corresponding molecular regulation network, which centered on a hub gene GhbHLH121. Iron deficiency induced the expression of genes with roles in the response to iron deficiency, especially GhbHLH121. The suppression of GhbHLH121 with virus-induced gene silence technology reduced seedlings’ tolerance to iron deficiency, with low photosynthetic efficiency and severe damage to the structure of the chloroplast. Contrarily, ectopic expression of GhbHLH121 in Arabidopsis enhanced tolerance to iron deficiency. Further analysis of protein/protein interactions revealed that GhbHLH121 can interact with GhbHLH IVc and GhPYE. In addition, GhbHLH121 can directly activate the expression of GhbHLH38, GhFIT, and GhPYE independent of GhbHLH IVc. All told, GhbHLH121 is a positive regulator of the response to iron deficiency in cotton, directly regulating iron uptake as the upstream gene of GhFIT. Our results provide insight into the complex network of the iron deficiency response in cotton.
Edge and Skeleton Guidance Network for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images

The salient object detection of optical remote sensing images (ORSI-SOD) is an important research direction in ORSI processing, which has achieved promising results in the last few years. Many recent works heavily rely on feature learning of regions for the improvement of the detection accuracy, while neglecting the concrete role of edge and skeleton information in the calculation. In this work, we propose a two-stage edge and skeleton guidance network (ESGNet) for ORSI-SOD in a coarse-to-fine way, and further demonstrate that the fused features of edge and skeleton are essential for ORSI-SOD. In the first stage, we construct the spatial graph attention (SGA) module for saliency features to generate an initial saliency map, and apply the spatial self-optimization (SSO) to enhance edge and skeleton features. The multi-level interactive fusion (MIF) module is used for the adequate integration of edge and skeleton features into saliency features. In the second stage, with the aim to accomplish better prediction of salient object localization and shape, the feature enhancement integration operation is introduced to recover object details from the learned edge and skeleton features. Extensive experiments on three public ORSI-SOD datasets demonstrate that our ESGNet achieves competitive performance with the state-of-the-art methods and also confirms the importance of edge and skeleton information for ORSI-SOD. Meanwhile, generalizability experiments on natural image datasets show that our method is competent for many types of SOD tasks. The code and results of our method are available at https://github.com/aoao0206/ESGNet.
Efficient Electrocatalysts for Hydrogen Evolution Reaction Using Heteroatom-Doped MXene Nanosheet

It is crucial to develop a low-cost hybrid electrocatalysts for hydrogen production. Due to their layered structure and strong electrical conductivity, MXene-based materials have been lately used more and more in energy storage devices. Herein, heteroatom- (boron and sulfur-) doped MXene (B, S-Ti3C2Tx) nanosheets are developed as efficient electrocatalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). The synthesized B, S-Ti3C2Tx has a large surface area and exhibits excellent electrocatalytic activity in acidic media. The prepared B, S-2-Ti3C2Tx catalyst exhibits a low overpotential of −110 mV vs. reversible hydrogen electrode for the HER and a low Tafel slope of ∼54 mV dec−1. Furthermore, B, S-2-Ti3C2Tx shows a double-layer capacitance of 1.05 mF/cm2 and maintains a steady catalytic activity for the HER for over 1000 cycles.
Health Literacy Among University Students in Shaanxi Province of China: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background An adequate level of health literacy will help university students to better respond to public health emergencies and reduce unintended harm caused by public health events. The objective of this study was to assess the health literacy levels of students from Universities of Shaanxi province of China, in order to provide a basis for the development of health literacy promotion plan for university students. Methods An online cross-sectional questionnaire survey was conducted at five universities in Shaanxi Province of China on the Wen-Juan-Xing online platform. A purposive sampling method was used to 1578 students via self-administered questionnaire. Comparisons of means were made using the t-test and ANOVA, and comparisons of ratios or composition ratios were made using the χ2 test. Results The mean score for health literacy was (105.33±10.14) out of 135, and the mean scores for the three dimensions of health knowledge, attitudes and practices were (36.093±4.192), (34.178±4.227) and (35.059±4.515) respectively. Of the total sample, 39.2% were classified as sufficient in health literacy. Female students had higher health literacy level than male students (t=4.064, p=0.044), lower grade students scored higher than higher grade (F=3.194, p=0.013), students from urban cities scored higher than those who came from rural areas (t=16.376, p<0.001), and university students with health education experience scored higher than those without (t=24.389, p<0.001). Conclusion University students’ health literacy is closely related to their gender, grades, family location and health education experience.
Semantic Segmentation-Based Wafer Map Mixed-Type Defect Pattern Recognition

Recent research applying deep learning to the field of defect pattern recognition in wafer maps has greatly accelerated the process of defect detection. However, when different defects are mixed on the same wafer, the mixed type is very complex, and it is still difficult to recognize the defect pattern. In this article, we propose a new framework to segment different defect patterns on the wafer map by using a semantic segmentation approach. This method works well on single and known and unknown mixed types. First, we extract the defects from the single-defect wafer map of the MixedWM38 dataset to generate single-defect pixel-level labels. Then, a mixed defect pattern dataset suitable for semantic segmentation is generated using single-defect wafer maps and single-defect pixel-level labels. The average accuracy of the test set on our synthetic dataset reaches over 97%, and using the trained model for testing on MixedWM38, we can get an average accuracy of 95.8%.
Search for hard lags with intra‐night optical observations of BL Lacertae

It is generally believed that the high energy end of synchrotron emission, generated by the most energetic tail of relativistic electrons in the jets, account for the X-ray emission of high-energy peaked BL Lac objects (HBLs) and the optical emission of intermediate-energy peaked BL Lac objects (IBLs). It is thus expected that both should show similar variability characteristics. One of the important variability parameters is the inter-band time lag which probes the acceleration and cooling of relativistic particles responsible for the emission. The switches between soft and hard lags have been detected in the intra-day X-ray variability of a few HBLs, which is not the case for the intra-day optical variability of IBLs yet. We present the results of our intra-night optical observations for BL Lacertae, aiming at searching for hard lags of its optical variations, performed with the 80 cm telescope in fourteen nights of 2010 September-November. Intra-night changes of ∼0.2 mag were detected in most of nights. The intra-night variability amplitude tends to become larger from red to blue wavelength, and the optical spectrum hardens with increasing brightness. The intra-night variations correlate between different wavebands, but we did not find significant time lags, either soft or hard. Nevertheless, on November 2, the B band variations showed a sign of lagging the R band ones by 317±214 s. The claim of this hard lag is strongly limited by the photometric precision and time resolution. Therefore, the switches between soft and hard lags of IBLs in the optical bands needs further demonstration with more higher quality observations. (© 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)