Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On-Chip Integration of Orthogonal Subsystems Enabled by Broadband Twist at 220–325 GHz

In this article, we report for the first time on a low-loss compact platform that enables the integration of H- and E-plane rectangular waveguide subsystems enabled by 90° polarization rotation of rectangular waveguide sections on a silicon-micromachined chip. The proposed platform offers unprecedented design flexibility for a 2.5D fabrication technology such as silicon micromachining, since orthogonal waveguide device sections with full design freedom in H-plane geometries can be cofabricated with sections with full design freedom in E-plane geometries, enabled by novel, integrated waveguide twists optimized for 2.5D fabrication. The platform is developed for use in broadband millimeter- and submillimeter-wave waveguide circuits and prototypes are implemented in the 220–325-GHz band. A prototype chip demonstrating the platform, implemented by bonding three stacked silicon chips, is fabricated. The measured results of the twist prototype exhibit a very low insertion loss of less than 0.2 dB and a return loss of 20 dB or better in most of the 220–325-GHz band. An integrated eighth-degree lowpass waveguide filter with axial ports having a cut-off frequency of 280 GHz is codesigned with the twist transition and fabricated on the platform to demonstrate its application. The filter shows 0.4-dB measured insertion loss and has a measured return loss in the passband of better than 14 dB.
The Cultivation Modality and Barrier Maturity Modulate the Toxicity of Industrial Zinc Oxide and Titanium Dioxide Nanoparticles on Nasal, Buccal, Bronchial, and Alveolar Mucosa Cell-Derived Barrier Models

As common industrial by-products, airborne engineered nanomaterials are considered important environmental toxins to monitor due to their potential health risks to humans and animals. The main uptake routes of airborne nanoparticles are nasal and/or oral inhalation, which are known to enable the transfer of nanomaterials into the bloodstream resulting in the rapid distribution throughout the human body. Consequently, mucosal barriers present in the nose, buccal, and lung have been identified and intensively studied as the key tissue barrier to nanoparticle translocation. Despite decades of research, surprisingly little is known about the differences among various mucosa tissue types to tolerate nanoparticle exposures. One limitation in comparing nanotoxicological data sets can be linked to a lack of harmonization and standardization of cell-based assays, where (a) different cultivation conditions such as an air-liquid interface or submerged cultures, (b) varying barrier maturity, and (c) diverse media substitutes have been used. The current comparative nanotoxicological study, therefore, aims at analyzing the toxic effects of nanomaterials on four human mucosa barrier models including nasal (RPMI2650), buccal (TR146), alveolar (A549), and bronchial (Calu-3) mucosal cell lines to better understand the modulating effects of tissue maturity, cultivation conditions, and tissue type using standard transwell cultivations at liquid-liquid and air-liquid interfaces. Overall, cell size, confluency, tight junction localization, and cell viability as well as barrier formation using 50% and 100% confluency was monitored using trans-epithelial-electrical resistance (TEER) measurements and resazurin-based Presto Blue assays of immature (e.g., 5 days) and mature (e.g., 22 days) cultures in the presence and absence of corticosteroids such as hydrocortisone. Results of our study show that cellular viability in response to increasing nanoparticle exposure scenarios is highly compound and cell-type specific (TR146 6 ± 0.7% at 2 mM ZnO (ZnO) vs. ~90% at 2 mM TiO2 (TiO2) for 24 h; Calu3 93.9 ± 4.21% at 2 mM ZnO vs. ~100% at 2 mM TiO2). Nanoparticle-induced cytotoxic effects under air-liquid cultivation conditions declined in RPMI2650, A549, TR146, and Calu-3 cells (~0.7 to ~0.2-fold), with increasing 50 to 100% barrier maturity under the influence of ZnO (2 mM). Cell viability in early and late mucosa barriers where hardly influenced by TiO2 as well as most cell types did not fall below 77% viability when added to Individual ALI cultures. Fully maturated bronchial mucosal cell barrier models cultivated under ALI conditions showed less tolerance to acute ZnO nanoparticle exposures (~50% remaining viability at 2 mM ZnO for 24 h) than the similarly treated but more robust nasal (~74%), buccal (~73%), and alveolar (~82%) cell-based models.
Bayesian Analysis of Tweedie Compound Poisson Partial Linear Mixed Models with Nonignorable Missing Response and Covariates

Under the Bayesian framework, this study proposes a Tweedie compound Poisson partial linear mixed model on the basis of Bayesian P-spline approximation to nonparametric function for longitudinal semicontinuous data in the presence of nonignorable missing covariates and responses. The logistic regression model is simultaneously used to specify the missing response and covariate mechanisms. A hybrid algorithm combining the Gibbs sampler and the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm is employed to produce the joint Bayesian estimates of unknown parameters and random effects as well as nonparametric function. Several simulation studies and a real example relating to the osteoarthritis initiative data are presented to illustrate the proposed methodologies.
Coupling of substructures for dynamic analyses.

A method for treating a complex structure as an assemblage of distinct regions, or substructures, is presented. Using basic mass and stiffness matrices for the substructures, together with conditions of geometrical compatibility along substructure boundaries, the method employs two forms of generalized coordinates. Boundary generalized coordinates give displacements and rotations of points along substructure boundaries and are related to the displacement modes of the substructures known as "constraint modes. " All constraint modes are generated by matrix operations from substructure input data. Substructure normal-mode generalized coordinates are related to free vibration modes of the substructures relative to completely restrained boundaries. The definition of substructure modes and the requirement of compatibility along substructure boundaries lead to coordinate transformation matrices that are employed in obtaining system mass and stiffness matrices from the mass and stiffness matrices of the substructures. Provision is made, through a RayleighRitz procedure, for reducing the total number of degrees of freedom of a structure while retaining accurate description of its dynamic behavior. Substructure boundaries may have any degree of redundancy. An example is presented giving a free vibration analysis of a structure having a highly indeterminate substructure boundary.
Smartphone Inertial Measurement Unit Data Features for Analyzing Driver Driving Behavior

Driving behavior is an important aspect of maintaining and sustaining safe transport on the roads. It also directly affects fuel consumption, traffic flow, public health, and air pollution along with psychology and personal mental health. For advanced driver assistance systems (ADASs) and autonomous vehicles, predicting driver behavior helps to facilitate interaction between ADAS and the human driver. Consequently, driver behavior prediction has emerged as an important research topic and has been investigated largely during the past few years. Often, the investigations are based on simulators and controlled environments. Driving behavior can be inferred using control actions, visual monitoring, and inertial measurement unit (IMU) data. This study leverages the IMU data recorded using a smartphone placed inside the vehicle. The dataset contains the accelerometer and gyroscope data recorded from the real traffic environment. Extensive experiments are performed regarding the use of a different set of features, the combination of original and derived features, and binary versus multiclass classification problems; a total of six scenarios are considered. Results reveal that “timestamp” is the most important feature and using it with accelerometer and gyroscope features can lead to a 100% accuracy for driver behavior prediction. Without using the “timestamp” feature, the number of wrong predictions for “slow” and “normal” classes is high due to the feature space overlap. Although derived features can help elevate the performance of the models, the models show inferior performance to that of using the “timestamp” feature. Deep learning models tend to show poor performance than machine learning models where random forest and extreme gradient boosting machines show a 100% accuracy for multiclass classification.
Rollin’ papers: Newspaper coverage of cannabis legalization in Canada

With Canada becoming the first G20 country to legalize the recreational use of cannabis, there has been increasing interest in the emergence of this new marketplace. Newspaper framing helps to shape public opinion on legalization and news sources play a role in determining how the public perceives the use of cannabis. This research analyzes how mainstream newspapers reported on the legalization of recreational cannabis in Canada in the years before and after legalization (between 2016 and 2019). Using a content analysis of 1,390 cannabis-related articles, 11 dominant reporting themes are identified. Over time, there was a shift from negative and sensationalist cannabis news coverage toward more balanced and progressive framing. The findings identify the influence of editorial political stance on thematic coverage.
Recent Advances in the Synthesis of Borinic Acid Derivatives

Borinic acids [R2B(OH)] and their chelate derivatives are a subclass of organoborane compounds used in cross-coupling reactions, catalysis, medicinal chemistry, polymer or optoelectronics materials. In this paper, we review the recent advances in the synthesis of diarylborinic acids and their four-coordinated analogs. The main strategies to build up borinic acids rely either on the addition of organometallic reagents to boranes (B(OR)3, BX3, aminoborane, arylboronic esters) or the reaction of triarylboranes with a ligand (diol, amino alcohol, etc.). After general practical considerations of borinic acids, an overview of the main synthetic methods, their scope and limitations is provided. We also discuss some mechanistic aspects.
Interstitial lung disease associated with inflammatory myositis: Autoantibodies, clinical phenotypes, and progressive fibrosis

Progressive pulmonary fibrosis is generally diagnosed when interstitial lung disease progression occurs in the absence of any other cause, and a subset of patients with myositis and associated interstitial lung disease may develop progressive pulmonary fibrosis. Numerous autoantibodies (e.g., against tRNA-synthetase, MDA5, Ro52) increase the risk of this clinical feature in myositis and we speculate that serum biomarkers, sought using the most sensitive laboratory techniques available (i.e., immunoprecipitation) may predict pulmonary involvement and allow the early identification of progressive pulmonary fibrosis. We herein provide a narrative review of the literature and also present original data on pulmonary fibrosis in a cohort of patients with myositis and serum anti-Ro52 with interstitial lung disease. Our results fit into the previous evidence and support the association between anti-Ro52 and signs of pulmonary fibrosis in patients with inflammatory myositis. We believe that the combination of available and real-life data has significant clinical relevance as a paradigm of serum autoantibodies that prove useful in determining precision medicine in rare connective tissue diseases.
Decoupled motion planning of a mobile manipulator for precision agriculture

Abstract Thanks to recent developments in service robotics technologies, precision agriculture (PA) is becoming an increasingly prominent research field, and several studies were made to present and outline how the use of mobile robotic systems can help and improve farm production. In this paper, the integration of a custom-designed mobile base with a commercial robotic arm is presented, showing the functionality and features of the overall system for crop monitoring and sampling. To this aim, the motion planning problem is addressed, developing a tailored algorithm based on the so-called manipulability index, that treats the base and robotic arm mobility as two independent degrees of motion; also developing an open source closed-form inverse kinematics algorithm for the kinematically redundant manipulator. The presented methods and sub-system, even though strictly related to a specific mobile manipulator system, can be adapted not only to PA applications where a mobile manipulator is involved but also to the wider field of assistive robotics.
Optimal Components Selection for a DAB Model of CHB Converter

This article proposes a sizing procedure for the cascaded H-bridge (CHB) converters integrating the battery energy storage system at the submodule level through a dual active bridge (DAB) converter. The suggested methodology considers different parameters, such as the adopted modulation strategies and the topology of the DAB converter employed. Three possible DAB configurations are considered: the one using only full-bridges (for both sides), the one using only half-bridges (for both sides), and a mixed configuration using a half-bridge on one side and a full-bridge on the other side. After determining the system parameters, the solution capable of reaching the required efficiency target at the minimum cost is obtained. The cost analysis and the efficiency evaluation are carried out considering a dataset containing almost 1000 semiconductor devices whose datasheets have been taken from the manufacturers’ websites. The procedure has been developed in the framework of a collaboration with NHOA Energy and its effectiveness is demonstrated by sizing a 1-MW CHB converter combined with energy storage systems at 11 kV.
Surface Brightness Fluctuations in NGC 5128 From Wide-Field Photographic Plates

Deep R- and B-band photographic plates of NGC 5128, obtained under photometric conditions at the f/3.3 prime focus of the AAT 3.9 m telescope, clearly show surface brightness fluctuations from the luminous, stellar population. The variance of these fluctuations has been used by Tonry and collaborators to determine distances to nearby galaxies. However, certain discrepancies have arisen with independent primary calibrators over comparable distance scales. We exploit the distinct statistical properties of photographic plates when compared with CCDs to provide an independent analysis of the luminosity fluctuations. We demonstrate that the threshold and saturation levels of a detector skew the statistics at both extremes
Motor cortex transcranial magnetic stimulation to reduce intractable postherpetic neuralgia with poor response to other threapies: Report of two cases

BACKGROUND Postherpetic neuralgia (PHN) is a typical neuropathic pain condition that appears in the lesioned skin regions following the healing of shingles. The pain condition tends to persist, which is often accompanied by negative emotions (e.g., anxiety and depression) and substantially reduces the quality of life. In addition to analgesia (e.g., pregabalin and gabapentin), nerve radiofrequency technology is an effective treatment for intractable PHN. However, there is still a significant portion of patients who do not benefit from this treatment. As a non-invasive form of brain stimulation, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) targeting the motor cortex is able to reduce neuropathic pain with grade A evidence. CASE SUMMARY Here we report two cases in which motor cortex rTMS was used to treat intractable PHN that did not respond to initial drug and radiofrequency therapies. Moreover, we specifically investigated rTMS efficacy at 3 mo following treatment. CONCLUSION Motor cortex rTMS can treat intractable PHN that did not respond to initial drug and radiofrequency therapies.
An Intelligent System for Trading Signal of Cryptocurrency Based on Market Tweets Sentiments

The purpose of this study is to examine the efficacy of an online stock trading platform in enhancing the financial literacy of those with limited financial knowledge. To this end, an intelligent system is proposed which utilizes social media sentiment analysis, price tracker systems, and machine learning techniques to generate cryptocurrency trading signals. The system includes a live price visualization component for displaying cryptocurrency price data and a prediction function that provides both short-term and long-term trading signals based on the sentiment score of the previous day’s cryptocurrency tweets. Additionally, a method for refining the sentiment model result is outlined. The results illustrate that it is feasible to incorporate the Tweets sentiment of cryptocurrencies into the system for generating reliable trading signals.
Strict forest protection: A meaningful contribution to Climate-Smart Forestry? An evaluation of temporal trends in the carbon balance of unmanaged forests in Germany

The role of unmanaged forests is discussed controversially in the context of climate change. One of the key questions is, whether they can contribute to the mitigation of climate change as a carbon sink and storage. However, carbon dynamics of forests after the cessation of management are not well understood. We analyzed a set of 64 forest sites, covering wide gradients of time since abandonment (0–68 years) and stand age (65–261 years) in even-aged, unmanaged beech forests. Five sites that were unmanaged for >100 years complemented the main dataset. We compiled site-specific carbon balances, distinguishing six carbon-compartments: Carbon in aboveground living and dead biomass, carbon in belowground living and dead biomass, and carbon in the organic layer and the mineral topsoil (0–30 cm). We found positive effects of increasing TSA on the carbon stock in living biomass and aboveground dead biomass for up to 50 years after management ceased. The average increase of the total carbon stock over 50 years of TSA was ≈ 80 Mg C ha–1. The effect of stand age on aboveground living biomass showed a convex relation. Aboveground dead biomass increased logistically with TSA, while belowground dead biomass decreased. On average, the five sites unmanaged for >100 years held lower total carbon stocks compared to the observed biomass peak around 50 years of TSA. However, they contained considerably higher amounts of deadwood. Carbon in the mineral soil did neither change with TSA nor with stand age and was driven by pH. Carbon stocks in newly unmanaged forests increased almost linearly for approximately 50 years after cessation of management. Subsequently, a stabilization or medium-term decrease in carbon stock was observed, likely due to the initiating transition from even-aged to multi-aged structures. We conclude that, besides their value for biodiversity and ecosystem functions, the potential of naturally developing forests as a medium-term carbon sink and long-term stable carbon storage should be considered as a valuable contribution to Climate-Smart Forestry.
Place Still Matters: Social Vulnerabilities, Place-Level Disadvantage, and Food Insecurity during COVID-19

COVID-19 variants continue to create public health danger impacting mortality and morbidity across the United States. The spillover effects of COVID-19 on the economy and social institutions pose a significant threat to broader wellbeing, including the food security of millions across the country. We aim to explore whether the context of place matters above and beyond individual and social vulnerabilities for food insecurity. To do so, we employ a multi-level framework using data from a survey of over 10,000 U.S. adults from March 2020 with American Community Survey (ACS) and John Hopkins COVID Dashboard county-level data. We find nearly two in five respondents were food insecure by March of 2020 with disparities across race, nativity, the presence of children in the home, unemployment, and age. Furthermore, we note that individuals living in more disadvantaged communities were more likely to report food insecurity above and beyond individual and social vulnerabilities. Overall, food insecurity is driven by complex, multi-level dynamics that remain a pressing public health concern for the current—but also future—public health crisis.
The relationship between gut microbiota and neonatal pathologic jaundice: A pilot case-control study

Background and objective Neonatal jaundice is a common clinical disease in neonates. Pathologic jaundice is more harmful to neonates. There are a few studies on the biomarkers of pathologic jaundice and the correlation between gut microbiota and clinical indices. Therefore, we aimed to reveal the characteristics of gut microbiota in pathologic jaundice, provide potential biomarkers for the diagnosis of pathologic jaundice, and find the correlation between gut microbiota and clinical indices. Methods Fourteen neonates with physiologic jaundice were recruited into a control group (Group A). Additionally, 14 neonates with pathologic jaundice were recruited into a case group (Group B). The microbial communities were analyzed using 16S rDNA sequencing. LEfSe and the differences in the relative abundance of gut microbiota were used to identify different bacteria among the two groups. The ROC curve was used to assess effective biomarkers for pathologic jaundice. Spearman’s rank-sum correlation coefficient was used to evaluate the correlation between gut microbiota and clinical indices. Results There were no differences in the total richness or diversity of gut microbiota between the two groups. At the phylum and genus levels, compared with the control group, Bacteroidetes (p = 0.002) and Braydrhizobium (p = 0.01) were significantly higher, while Actinobacteria (p = 0.003) and Bidfldobacterium (p = 0.016) were significantly lower in the case group. Bacteroidetes were valuable in differentiating pathologic jaundice from physiologic jaundice by the ROC curve, and the area under the ROC curve (AUC) value was 0.839 [95%CI (0.648–0.995)]. In the case group, Bacteroidetes were negatively associated with total bilirubin (TBIL) (p < 0.05). In the control group, Bacteroidetes were positively associated with TBIL (p < 0.05). Conclusion Bacteroidetes could be used as biomarkers to identify pathologic jaundice and Bacteroidetes are positively associated with bilirubin levels.