Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessing the Potential of Milk-Based Encapsulation Matrix for Improved Bio-Accessibility of Probiotics

Milk and sodium alginate beads (SA) as encapsulation materials can improve the viability of Lacticaseibacillus acidophilus LAC5. The present study focused on interactive structural optimization of milk and SA-based beads for improved survival of L. acidophilus LAC5 in cheddar cheese. L. acidophilus was microencapsulated using varying concentrations of milk and SA, e.g., T0 (Milk/SA 0:0), T1 (Milk/SA 1/1:1), T2 (Milk/SA 1/2:1), T3 (Milk/SA 1/1:1.5), T4 (Milk/SA1/2:1.5), T5 (Milk/SA 1/1:2.0) and T6 (Milk/SA 1/2:2.0). Free and encapsulated L. acidophilus were compared for their survival in gastroenteric conditions. Structural and spectral analysis was performed using scanning electron microscope (SEM) and Fourier transform infrared spectrometry (FTIR). The free and encapsulated probiotics were incorporated into cheddar cheese. Organic acids were quantified using HPLC. The combination of SA and milk significantly (p < 0.05) improved the survival of L. acidophilus as compared to free cells. The increase in polymer concentration improved the structure of beads and the survival of probiotics. However, the release profile of beads decreased with the increase in polymer concentration. FTIR showed the presence of milk and SA in the beads. Better storage stability (108 CFU/mL) was observed for T6 in all the treatments as compared to free cells. The addition of encapsulated cells improved the sensory characteristics of cheese. This may help the local food industry to utilize native probiotic strains to be incorporated into probiotic foods with improved bio-accessibility.
Shapley Supercluster Survey: mapping the filamentary network connecting the clusters

We have mapped the structure and connectivity of the Shapley supercluster core and its surroundings as traced by its member galaxies. To achieve this, we have carried out a new redshift survey of galaxies across a 21 square degree region (17×17 Mpc2) of the Shapley supercluster containing 11 rich clusters, all lying at z ~ 0.048. This survey aims to provide full spectroscopic coverage of galaxies for the Shapley Supercluster Survey (ShaSS), a multiwavelength survey based on high-quality optical ugri and near-infrared K-band imaging acquired with the 2.6-m VST and 4.1-m VISTA telescopes. Targets were selected from the VST images as having i < 18.0 and WISE/W1 < 15.5 mag, and the observations were carried out with the AAOmega spectrograph on the 3.9-m Anglo-Australian Telescope. We present here redshift measurements for 4027 galaxies, of which 957 belong to the Shapley Supercluster. Including existing measurements, there are now reliable redshifts for 95 per cent of galaxies within the survey's magnitude limits over the 21 deg2 region. This has enabled us to: (i) obtain a detailed map of the galaxy number density across the whole region; (ii) identify new groups and cluster substructures; (iii) establish the existence of a stream of galaxies connecting A3559 to the supercluster core.We provide updated central redshifts and velocity dispersions of the 11 clusters, confirming that they all lie within 1300 km s-1 of the central cluster Abell 3558. These 11 systems are all inter-connected and lie within a coherent sheet of galaxies that fills the entire survey region without gaps. Clear velocity caustics extend right to the survey boundary, indicating that the entire structure is gravitationally bound and in the process of collapse.
Logic-based Composition of Business Process Models

Process Mining is a family of techniques that exploit data collected from process execution to analyze and improve process efficiency, quality, and security. Over the years, many modeling languages have been proposed for process model specification, with different expressiveness, features, and computational properties. We propose a new logic-based declarative formalism, called Constraint Formulae, to compose process specifications, expressed in heterogeneous process modeling languages, without altering their original semantics. We formalize common process mining tasks for Constraint Formulae, study their computational properties, and provide an implementation in Answer Set Programming.
The mixing of polarizations in the acoustic excitations of an isotropic random medium

An approximate solution of the Dyson equation related to a stochastic Helmholtz equation, describing acoustic dynamics of an isotropic random medium with spatial fluctuating elastic constants in the three-dimensional space, is given in the framework of the Random Media Theory. The wavevector-dependence of the self-energy is maintained, thus allowing a description of the acoustic dynamics at wavelengths comparable with the size of heterogeneity domains. This in turn permits to quantitatively describe the mixing of longitudinal and transverse dynamics induced by the medium elastic heterogeneity and occurring at such wavelengths. A functional analysis aimed to attest the mathematical coherence and to define the region of validity in the frequency-wavevector plane of the proposed approximate solution is presented, with particular emphasis dedicated to the case of disorder characterized by an exponential decay covariance function.
Ureteral Stricture Outcomes Using Small Ureteral Access Sheath During Retrograde Intrarenal Surgery

Objective: This study evaluated ureteral injury and long-term stricture progression after the smallest ureteral access sheath (UAS) application during retrograde intrarenal surgery. Materials and Methods: A total of 154 patients who had undergone retrograde intrarenal surgery procedures and applied a 9.5/11.5-F UAS for kidney stones between September 2016 and March 2019 were prospectively included, and intraoperative, postoperative, and late complications were evaluated. Ureteral injuries were visualized using flexible and semi-rigid ureterorenoscopy, and ureteral stricture was assessed by computed tomographic urography at one-year controls. Results: 56% (n=86) of the patients were males, and %45 (n=68) the mean age was 47±15 years, stone size was 17.1±8 mm, operative time was 56±23 minutes, 80% had ureter wall injury, and 39% and 41% had grade 0 and grade 1 lesions, respectively. Minor complications were developed in 3%, and major complications were seen in 2% of cases. The ureteral stricture was not observed in 1 st -year controls. Conclusion: The routine application of 9.5/11.5-F UAS is safe to use in flexible ureteroscopy without any long-term adverse effects.
A Tiny Object Detection Approach for Maize Cleaning Operations

Real-time and accurate awareness of the grain situation proves beneficial for making targeted and dynamic adjustments to cleaning parameters and strategies, leading to efficient and effective removal of impurities with minimal losses. In this study, harvested maize was employed as the raw material, and a specialized object detection network focused on impurity-containing maize images was developed to determine the types and distribution of impurities during the cleaning operations. On the basis of the classic contribution Faster Region Convolutional Neural Network, EfficientNetB7 was introduced as the backbone of the feature learning network and a cross-stage feature integration mechanism was embedded to obtain the global features that contained multi-scale mappings. The spatial information and semantic descriptions of feature matrices from different hierarchies could be fused through continuous convolution and upsampling operations. At the same time, taking into account the geometric properties of the objects to be detected and combining the images’ resolution, the adaptive region proposal network (ARPN) was designed and utilized to generate candidate boxes with appropriate sizes for the detectors, which was beneficial to the capture and localization of tiny objects. The effectiveness of the proposed tiny object detection model and each improved component were validated through ablation experiments on the constructed RGB impurity-containing image datasets.
The Comparison with Commercial Antioxidants, Effects on Colour, and Sensory Properties of Green Tea Powder in Butter

Oxidation is one of the most important factors limiting shelf life and is a major deterioration process affecting both the sensory and nutritional quality of food. The high oxidation stability of lipids, which can be improved by the addition of antioxidants, is important for health protection, food quality, and economic reasons. In recent years, research on plant-derived antioxidants for use in human health and food has steadily increased. The aim of this study was to compare the antioxidant effects of green tea powder (GTP) in butter with those of commercial antioxidants (BHA, BHT, α-tocopherol, and Trolox). In addition, the effects on colour, sensory, gross physicochemical properties, and β-carotene content were investigated in butter. After the separation of butter into five pieces, the first part was chosen as the control sample without GTP; the second part has 100 mg/kg of BHT added to it; and the third, fourth, and fifth parts had 1, 2, and 3% of GTP added in the samples. They were stored at 4 ± 1 °C. Analysis was performed at intervals of 15 days. According to the iron reduction, CUPRAC and FRAP methods were performed, and parallel results were observed. Using the radical elimination methods (ABTS, DPPH•, and DMPD•+), IC50 values were calculated for the samples. According to the IC50 values, the GTP-containing samples were good antioxidants. The total phenolic andf β-carotene contents increased as the GTP addition increased. The addition of GTP had an antioxidant capacity equal to or higher than that of the BHT-added sample. For the production of a sensory-pleasing, greenish-coloured, new functional butter, the 1% GTP addition showed the most positive results.
LFLDNet: Lightweight Fingerprint Liveness Detection Based on ResNet and Transformer

With the rapid development of fingerprint recognition systems, fingerprint liveness detection is gradually becoming regarded as the main countermeasure to protect the fingerprint identification system from spoofing attacks. Convolutional neural networks have shown great potential in fingerprint liveness detection. However, the generalization ability of the deep network model for unknown materials, and the computational complexity of the network, need to be further improved. A new lightweight fingerprint liveness detection network is here proposed to distinguish fake fingerprints from real ones. The method includes mainly foreground extraction, fingerprint image blocking, style transfer based on CycleGan and an improved ResNet with multi-head self-attention mechanism. The proposed method can effectively extract ROI and obtain the end-to-end data structure, which increases the amount of data. For false fingerprints generated from unknown materials, the use of CycleGan network improves the model generalization ability. The introduction of Transformer with MHSA in the improved ResNet improves detection performance and reduces computing overhead. Experiments on the LivDet2011, LivDet2013 and LivDet2015 datasets showed that the proposed method achieves good results. For example, on the LivDet2015 dataset, our methods achieved an average classification error of 1.72 across all sensors, while significantly reducing network parameters, and the overall parameter number was only 0.83 M. At the same time, the experiment on small-area fingerprints yielded an accuracy of 95.27%.
Methodology to set up nozzle-to-substrate gap for high resolution electrohydrodynamic jet printing

Several efforts have been made for the prediction of jet diameter in electrohydrodynamic jet printing; however, not much attention has been paid to the jet length, which is the distance from the cone apex to the location where the jet is unstable and is broken into atomized droplets. In this study, we measured both the cone length and the jet length using a high-speed camera, and measured the line pattern width with an optical microscope to investigate the effects of cone length and jet length on the pattern quality. Measurements were carried out with variations in nozzle diameter, flow rate, and applied voltage. The pattern width was theoretically predicted for the case when the nozzle-to-substrate distance was more than the cone length, and smaller than the summation of the cone and jet lengths (which is the case when there is no jet breakup).
The international platform of registered systematic review and meta-analysis protocols (INPLASY) at 3 years: an analysis of 4,658 registered protocols on inplasy.com, platform features, and website statistics

Background INPLASY® is an international platform for registering systematic reviews and meta-analysis protocols that was launched in March 2020. INPLASY® provides an online database in which the protocols are maintained as permanent public records and can be accessed on its website (www.inplasy.com). Methods We described the database features and registered information of all records published since the launch of the registry on March 31, 2023. Additionally, we analyzed the website statistics dataset to explore user experience and promote data transparency. Results Four thousand six hundred fifty-eight records were registered in INPLASY®, and more than 94% of the protocols were published within 24 h. Most of the submissions were from China, followed by Portugal, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brazil. The INPLASY® website received 386,395 page views from 64,568 visitors during the first three years. The accesses were obtained from 170 countries. Most of the accesses were from China, followed by the US, the UK, and Portugal. The review status “completed and published” was observed in 898 protocols, and these studies were published in 372 different scientific peer-reviewed journals. The features of INPLASY® include the following: (i) INPLASY® identifier, a unique protocol number; (ii) the digital object identifier (DOI) number, the URL of the protocol linked to a specific DOI; (iii) ORCID update, INPLASY® automatically updates authors' ORCID page, including their protocol; and (iv) search tools, the protocols are freely accessible on www.inplasy. com. Conclusions INPLASY® has several practical and useful features that should be considered when planning the registration of a systematic review protocol. Furthermore, the sharp increase in the number of protocols registered in INPLASY® in the first three years and the database statistics demonstrate that INPLASY® has become an important source of systematic review protocols. Therefore, authors should access INPLASY® before planning a future review study to avoid unintended duplication of efforts and to obtain timely registration.
Interactome of Arabidopsis ATG5 Suggests Functions beyond Autophagy

Autophagy is a catabolic pathway capable of degrading cellular components ranging from individual molecules to organelles. Autophagy helps cells cope with stress by removing superfluous or hazardous material. In a previous work, we demonstrated that transcriptional upregulation of two autophagy-related genes, ATG5 and ATG7, in Arabidopsis thaliana positively affected agronomically important traits: biomass, seed yield, tolerance to pathogens and oxidative stress. Although the occurrence of these traits correlated with enhanced autophagic activity, it is possible that autophagy-independent roles of ATG5 and ATG7 also contributed to the phenotypes. In this study, we employed affinity purification and LC-MS/MS to identify the interactome of wild-type ATG5 and its autophagy-inactive substitution mutant, ATG5K128R Here we present the first interactome of plant ATG5, encompassing not only known autophagy regulators but also stress-response factors, components of the ubiquitin-proteasome system, proteins involved in endomembrane trafficking, and potential partners of the nuclear fraction of ATG5. Furthermore, we discovered post-translational modifications, such as phosphorylation and acetylation present on ATG5 complex components that are likely to play regulatory functions. These results strongly indicate that plant ATG5 complex proteins have roles beyond autophagy itself, opening avenues for further investigations on the complex roles of autophagy in plant growth and stress responses.
Staphylococcus aureus phagocytosis is affected by senescence

Senescent cells accumulate in multicellular animals with aging, resulting in organ or tissue dysfunction. These alterations increase the incidence of a variety of illnesses, including infectious diseases, and, in certain instances, its severity. In search of a rationale for this phenomenon, we focused on the endophagocytic pathway in senescent cells. We first described the endocytic vesicle populations at different stages of maturation using confocal microscopy. There was an increase in the number of vacuoles per cell, which was partially explained by an increase in cell size. No changes in vesicle maturation or degradation capacities were determined by microscopy or Western blot assays. Also, we studied the internalization of various endophagocytic cargoes in senescent cells and observed only a decrease in the intracellular recovery of bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus. Afterwards, we studied the intracellular traffic of S. aureus, and observed no differences in the infection between control and senescent cells. In addition we quantified the recovery of bacteria from control and senescent cells infected in the presence of several inhibitors of endophagosomal maturation, and no changes were observed. These results suggest that bacterial internalization is affected in senescent cells. Indeed, we confirmed this hypothesis by determining minor bacterial adherence and internalization by confocal microscopy. Furthermore, it is important to highlight that we found very similar results with cells from aged animals, specifically BMDMs. This alteration in senescent cells enlightens the diminished bacterial clearance and may be a factor that increases the propensity to suffer severe infectious conditions in the elderly.
Metabolic Syndrome and Its Components Have a Different Presentation and Impact as Cardiovascular Risk Factors in Psoriatic and Rheumatoid Arthritis

Patients with chronic inflammatory arthritis have a higher cardiovascular (CV) risk than the general population. Traditional CV risk factors are clearly implicated, while the impact of metabolic syndrome (MetS) is less defined. The aim of this study was to compare MetS prevalence and impact on the CV risk in psoriatic arthritis (PsA) versus rheumatoid arthritis (RA). A retrospective analysis of real-world data of PsA and RA patients referred to a rheumatology clinic was conducted. The following data were extracted and compared: demographic data; clinical data; presence of traditional CV risk factors and MetS. Univariate and multivariate models were used to compare the impact of MetS and its components in patients with PsA versus RA. Overall, 170 patients were included (PsA: 78; RA; 92). The two groups differed significantly in mean age, disease duration, and presence of MetS, while other variables were comparable. Univariate and multivariate analysis identified distinct predictors of MetS in PsA (hypertension) and RA (dyslipidemia). The history of CV events was similar in the two groups. Predictors of CV events were MetS and most of its components in PsA, while dyslipidemia was the strongest predictor in RA. These associations were stronger in PsA than in RA. In conclusion, the impact of MetS and its components is different in PsA and RA. The association of these risk factors with CV events is stronger in PsA than in RA. This suggests the implication of different mechanisms, which may require distinct strategies for the prevention of CV events in PsA and RA.
Empirical Sample Size Guidelines for Use of Latent Difference Score Mediation

Mediation models are commonly used to identify the mechanisms through which one variable influences another. Among longitudinal mediation methods, latent difference score mediation stands out due to its unique ability to capture nonlinear change over time. However, there is limited information regarding sample size demands to achieve adequate power with this method, resulting in few applications of latent difference score mediation. To address this limitation, the current study presents empirically supported sample size guidelines for 10 common latent difference score mediation structural models and 9 unique population models. The results of this study offer researchers with a set of representative sample estimates that may be used when designing studies or seeking funding.
Vector bilinear autoregressive time series model and its superiority over its linear autoregressive counterpart

In this research, a vector bilinear autoregressive time series model was proposed and used to model three revenue series ( X 1 , X 2 , X 3 ) . The “orders” of the three series were identified on the basis of the distribution of autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation functions and were used to construct the vector bilinear models. The estimates obtained from the bilinear fits were compared graphically with those obtained from fitting linear (autoregressive) models. Residual variance and Box-Ljung Q statistic comparisons were also made. The result showed that vector bilinear autoregressive (BIVAR) models provide better estimates than the long embraced linear models. Keywords: Linear time series, Autoregressive process, Autocorrelation function, Partial autocorrelation function, Vector time series and bilinear vector process
A Positive Type DVCC-Based Universal Biquad

: This paper presents a current-mode universal biquad employing only positive type DVCCs (differential voltage current conveyors). The circuit enables LP (low-pass), BP (band-pass), HP (high-pass), BS (band-stop) and AP (all-pass) responses by the selection and addition of the input and output currents without any component matching constraints. Moreover the circuit parameters ω 0 and Q can be set orthogonally adjusting the circuit components. A design example is given together with simulation results by PSPICE.
Authority Allocation Strategy for Shared Steering Control Considering Human-Machine Mutual Trust Level

Human-machine mutual trust has become one of the important factors restricting steer-by-wire vehicles due to the removal of mechanical connections. To this end, this article proposes a hierarchical shared steering control framework based on the human-machine mutual trust evaluation. The upper level of the framework aims to evaluate the human-machine mutual trust level. The driver's trust level in the machine is evaluated by the human-machine steering difference. And the machine's trust level in the driver is evaluated by driver skills. The lower level is to dynamically optimize the authority allocation considering varying human-machine mutual trust states. The fuzzy method is adopted to calculate the reference value of the human-machine authority based on the mutual trust level. Through minimizing the lateral acceleration and tracking error, the fuzzy rule database for the authority reference level is further tuned offline. Furthermore, to improve the smoothness of authority transfer and path tracking, the model prediction control is used to optimize the human-machine authority levels online. The proposed authority allocation strategy is verified with the driver-in-the-loop test bench. The results show the effectiveness of improving driving performance under different human-machine mutual trust levels.