Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Williamsia muralis bacteraemia in a patient with Fanconi anaemia after haematopoietic cell transplantation

Introduction. Williamsia muralis is an environmental bacterium first detected in 1999. Infections with W. muralis isolated have been reported in two elderly patients, and were associated with the surgical intervention of artificial objects. We present a case of bacteraemia caused by W. muralis following haematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT). Case presentation. A 10-year-old Japanese boy presented with fever and the swelling of the left cheek 8 days after HCT for the treatment of Fanconi anaemia. Gram-positive, rod-shaped bacteria were isolated from the blood cultures after 5 days incubation. 16S rRNA sequencing, but not mass spectrometry, identified a strain of W. muralis (1 414 bp, %ID 100 %). The phlegmon did not respond to antimicrobial therapy, but remitted with defervescence after a successful engraftment with teicoplanin and meropenem therapy on day 16 after HCT. The patient experienced recurrence of the bacteraemia, leading to central venous catheter (CVC) line removal. The same strain of W. muralis was isolated from the cultured tip of the CVC. To our knowledge, this is the first reported case of W. muralis bacteraemia and was complicated by CVC infection after HCT. Conclusion. W. muralis bacteraemia developed in an immunocompromised child. Introduction of artificial objects into the body raises a risk of rare infection with slowly growing environmental bacteria.
Multivariate Pattern Analysis of EEG Reveals Neural Mechanism of Naturalistic Target Processing in Attentional Blink

The human brain has inherent limitations in consciously processing visual information. When individuals monitor a rapid sequence of images for detecting two targets, they often miss the second target (T2) if it appears within a short time frame of 200-500ms after the first target (T1), a phenomenon known as the attentional blink (AB). The neural mechanism behind AB remains unclear, largely due to the use of simplistic visual items such as letters and digits in conventional AB experiments, which differ significantly from naturalistic vision. This study employed advanced multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) of human EEG data to explore the neural representations associated with target processing within a naturalistic paradigm under conditions where AB does or does not occur. Our MVPA analysis successfully decoded the identity of target images from EEG data. Moreover, in the AB condition, characterized by a limited time between targets, T1 processing coincided with T2 processing, resulting in the suppression of late representational markers of both T1 and T2. Conversely, in the condition with longer inter-target interval, neural representations endured for a longer duration. These findings suggest that the attentional blink can be attributed to the suppression of neural representations in the later stages of target processing. Significance Statement Within a naturalistic paradigm, we investigated the phenomenon known as attentional blink, where individuals struggle to identify a second target in a rapid sequence when the first target precedes it too closely. Attentional blink is purported to reflect an apparent bottleneck in the attention system’s ability to rapidly redirect attentional resources; however, the mechanism underlying this phenomenon remains hotly debated. Our findings reveal that during a rapid presentation of natural images, a short temporal gap between targets results in reduced neural representations of targets and the occurrence of attentional blink. Conversely, when a greater temporal gap exists between targets, neural representations are preserved. This study provides valuable insights into how the human brain perceives the ever-changing visual world around us.
Landscape response to late Pleistocene climate change in NW Argentina: Sediment flux modulated by basin geometry and connectivity

Fluvial fill terraces preserve sedimentary archives of landscape responses to climate change, typically over millennial timescales. In the Humahuaca Basin of NW Argentina (Eastern Cordillera, southern Central Andes), our 29 new optically stimulated luminescence ages of late Pleistocene fill terrace sediments demonstrate that the timing of past river aggradation occurred over different intervals on the western and eastern sides of the valley, despite their similar bedrock lithology, mean slopes, and precipitation. In the west, aggradation coincided with periods of increasing precipitation, while in the east, aggradation coincided with decreasing precipitation or more variable conditions. Erosion rates and grain size dependencies in our cosmogenic 10Be analyses of modern and fill terrace sediments reveal an increased importance of landsliding compared to today on the west side during aggradation, but of similar importance during aggradation on the east side. Differences in the timing of aggradation and the 10Be data likely result from differences in valley geometry, which causes sediment to be temporarily stored in perched basins on the east side. It appears as if periods of increasing precipitation triggered landslides throughout the region, which induced aggradation in the west, but blockage of the narrow bedrock gorges downstream from the perched basins in the east. As such, basin geometry and fluvial connectivity appear to strongly influence the timing of sediment movement through the system. For larger basins that integrate subbasins with differing geometries or degrees of connectivity (like Humahuaca), sedimentary responses to climate forcing are likely attenuated.
NG - Journal of Social Development

Knowledge has been marked as one of the key differentiators in establishing a sustainable competitive advantage in an increasingly competitive market place. Knowledge management is a paradigm that has developed from this, in order to ensure that organisations are aware of the benefits and challenges of managing organisational knowledge. With rapid advancement of technology systems have been developed to manage knowledge and are now known as knowledge management systems. The exploratory research aimed to determine what knowledge management systems are being used by logistics service providers, the influence and impact on knowledge retention and if a relationship exists between knowledge management systems and innovation. The research identified that enterprise wide knowledge management systems are being used but, knowledge retention strategies required more attention and that, a correlation exists between collaborative KMS and innovation strategies however further research is needed on a longitudinal scale and including qualitative research methodology. The study therefore, looks at these issues in some depth.
Preparation of microfluidic chips by electroplating and used for microdroplet study

Microfluidic chips have been widely used in chemical industry and biological monitoring. The application of microfluidic chips in biological analysis, chemical synthesis, clinical detection and other fields not only makes the chemical reaction system small and highly integrated, but also reduces the sample consumption. At present, the traditional microchannel machining methods, such as laser etching and injection molding, have many disadvantages such as complicated process, high technical requirements, high cost and long cycle. In this paper, a new method of microstructure and microchannel in microfluidic chips based on electroplating technology is proposed based on traditional methods, and the microdroplet experiment was carried out.
Alone Together : Compositional Reasoning and Inference for Weak Isolation • 1 : 3

Serializability is a well-understood correctness criterion that simplies reasoning about the behavior of concurrent transactions by ensuring they are isolated from each other while they execute. However, enforcing serializable isolation comes at a steep cost in performance because it necessarily restricts opportunities to exploit concurrency even when such opportunities would not violate application-specic invariants. As a result, database systems in practice support, and oen encourage, developers to implement transactions using weaker alternatives. ese alternatives break the strong isolation guarantees oered by serializablity to permit greater concurrency. Unfortunately, the semantics of weak isolation is poorly understood, and usually explained only informally in terms of low-level implementation artifacts. Consequently, verifying high-level correctness properties in such environments remains a challenging problem. To address this issue, we present a novel program logic that enables compositional reasoning about the behavior of concurrently executing weakly-isolated transactions. Recognizing that the proof burden necessary to use this logic may dissuade application developers, we also describe an inference procedure based on this foundation that ascertains the weakest isolation level that still guarantees the safety of high-level consistency invariants associated with such transactions. e key to eective inference is the observation that weakly-isolated transactions can be viewed as functional (monadic) computations over an abstract database state, allowing us to treat their operations as state transformers over the database. is interpretation enables automated verication using o-the-shelf SMT solvers. Our development is parametric over a transaction’s specic isolation semantics, allowing it to be applicable over a range of weak isolation mechanisms. Case studies and experiments on real-world applications (wrien in an embedded DSL in OCaml) demonstrate the utility of our approach, and provide strong evidence that automated verication of weakly-isolated transactions can be placed on the same formal footing as their strongly-isolated serializable counterparts.
Estudios preliminares sobre comunidades de briofitas en troncos en descomposición en el bosque subtropical lluvioso de Puerto Rico

The bryophyte communities growing on decaying logs in the subtropical wet forests of Puerto Rico are described. Logs were classified according to presence or absence of bark and wood texture. Logs with bark are dominated by members of the Lejeuneaceae and Calymperaceae. In softwood logs, Taxithelium planum and Isopterygium tenerum were abundant. It is suggested in a preliminary manner that due to low fluctuation of water content in heavily decayed logs, hygromorphic bryophytes are favored.
Understanding complex Earth systems: volatile metabolites as microbial ecosystem proxies and student conceptual model development of coastal eutrophication

Understanding Complex Earth Systems: Volatile Metabolites as Microbial Ecosystem Proxies and Student Conceptual Model Development of Coastal Eutrophication. (May 2007) Karen Sue McNeal, B.S., Eckerd College; M.S., Texas A&M University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Bruce E. Herbert Understanding complex Earth systems is challenging for scientists and students alike, because of the characteristics (e.g. bifurcations, self-organization, chaotic response) that are associated with these systems. This research integrates two research strands which contribute to the scientific and pedagogical understanding of complex Earth systems. In the first strand, a method that characterizes volatile organic compounds (VOCs) as ecological proxies of soil microbial ecosystems was validated. Unlike other measures of microbial community structure (e.g. Biolog and FAME), VOCs are advantageous because they are non-destructive and can provide temporal and spatial data. Additionally they are rich sources of information that describe the microbial metabolism, community structure, and organic carbon substrates utilized by soil microorganisms. Statistical results indicate that the detected and identified VOCs were significant (ρ < 0.05) indicators of microbial community composition shift in soil
Comparing archival policies for Blue Waters

This paper introduces two new tape archival policies that can improve tape archive performance in certain regimes, compared to the classical RAIT (Redundant Array of Independent Tapes) policy. The first policy, PARALLEL, still requires as many parallel tape drives as RAIT but pre-computes large data stripes that are written contiguously on tapes to increase write/read performance. The second policy, VERTICAL, writes contiguous data into a single tape, while updating error correcting information on the fly and delaying its archival until enough data has been archived. This second approach reduces the number of tape drives used for every user request to one. The performance of the three RAIT, PARALLEL and VE RTICAL policies is assessed through extensive simulations, using a hardware configuration and a distribution of I/O requests similar to these expected on the Blue Waters system. These simulations show that VERTICAL is the most suitable policy for small files, whereas PARALLEL must be used for files larger than 1 GB. We also demonstrate that RAIT never outperforms both proposed policies, and that a heterogeneous policies mixing VERTICAL and PARALLEL performs 10 times better than any other policy.
Characterization of a new anellovirus species infecting an ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) in Brazil

Abstract A complete genome of the first anellovirus infecting the wild felid Leopardus pardalis (ocelot) and a partial genome were assembled and annotated through high-throughput sequencing protocols followed by Sanger sequencing validation. The full-length virus obtained comprises 2,003 bp, while the partial genome comprises 1,224 bp. Phylogenetic analysis grouped these two sequences in two distinct clusters related to previously described Felidae anelloviruses. The ORF1 of the partial genome was identified as a new species provisionally called Torque teno ocelot virus, with 53.6% identity with its sister lineage. The complete genome was inferred as a new representative of the Torque teno felid virus 3 species, with 73.28% identity to the closest reference. This study expands known virus diversity and the host span of anelloviruses.
Integration and Unit Testing of Software Energy Consumption

The study of software energy consumption is gaining more importance due to the increasing use of portable devices that run on batteries. Moreover, there is a growing trend in the value of the carbon footprint of computational energy, which rises environmental and social concerns. Energy consumption can be viewed as a part of software performance testing. A key problem in performance testing in general, and energy consumption in particular, is finding expected values for test cases, known also as the oracle problem. These values are hard to find or estimate. In this article, we present an approach for energy testing that uses method's size, complexity, and dependency for estimating method's energy consumption (unit testing). The estimation of energy consumption of a test case depends on the accumulative energy consumed by the methods executed in the test case. The cost of the proposed approach is low as it does not require generating extra test cases as well as it can be performed when the software functionality is validated.
The functional evolution of collembolan Ubx on the regulation of abdominal appendage formation

Folsomia candida is a tiny soil-living arthropod belonging to the Collembola, which represents one of the basal hexapods and serves as an outgroup lineage to Insecta. It possesses three abdominal appendages: the ventral tube located in the first abdominal segment (A1), the retinaculum in A3 and the furca in A4, which are morphologically distinctive to the thorax limbs. Collembolan Ubx and AbdA are responsible for specifying their abdominal appendages; however, they are unable to repress the expression of the appendage marker gene Dll. To date, the genes involved in appendage formation during collembolan embryogenesis and the mechanisms by which Ubx and AbdA regulate Dll transcription and subsequently regulate appendage development remain unknown. In this study, we analysed the developmental transcriptomes of F. candida and identified 36 candidate genes that may be involved in appendage formation, including Ubx (FcUbx). Furthermore, via electrophoretic mobility shift assays and dual luciferase assays, we found that the binding and repression capacity of FcUbx on Drosophila Dll resembles those of the longest isoform of Drosophila Ubx (DmUbx_Ib), while the regulatory mechanism of the C-terminus of FcUbx on Dll repression is similar to that of crustacean Artemia franciscana Ubx (AfUbx), demonstrating that the function of collembolan Ubx is intermediate between that of Insecta and Crustacea. Overall, our study provides novel insights into appendage formation and reconstruction of the functional evolutionary trajectory of Ubx on abdominal appendages from crustaceans to insects.
Monthly Reservoir Inflow Forecasting in Thailand: a Comparison of Ann-Based and Historical Analouge-Based Methods

1Student Member of JSCE, M. Eng., Ph.D. Research Student, Department of Civil Engineering, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology (2-12-1 O-okayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, 152-8552) 2Member of JSCE, Ph.D., Researcher, Department of Civil Engineering, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology (2-12-1 O-okayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, 152-8552) 3Member of JSCE, Ph.D., JSPS Research Fellow, Department of Civil Engineering, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology (2-12-1 O-okayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, 152-8552) 4Member of JSCE, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology (2-12-1 O-okayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, 152-8552)
Comparison and summary of Faster R-CNN, YOLOv3 and YOLOv5 applied in vehicle detection

Nowadays, computer vision and machine learning are widely applied in vehicle detection. The technique of object detection is also of necessity in this realm. However, due to the large variety of models in object detection, it is important to find the most specifically suitable model for detecting vehicles in many situations. In this paper, we focus on comparing and summarizing Faster R-CNN, YOLOv3 and YOLOv5 applied in vehicle detection. We would introduce the models in relative detail and design an experiment to verify the models’ performances. The methodology for the experiment is to train the three models using the same dataset of vehicles, compare the different attributes of these results and find the most suitable application scenario for vehicle detection for each model.
Tracer-based metabolomics for profiling nitric oxide metabolites in a 3D microvessel-on-a-chip model

Endothelial dysfunction is a common denominator in cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) associated with diabetes, hypertension, obesity, renal failure or hypercholesterolemia. In these disease states, circulating adverse metabolic or hemostatic risk factors drive the progression of inflammation, thrombosis, platelet activation and atherosclerosis. A hallmark of endothelial dysfunction is the reduced bioavailability of nitric oxide (NO), a signaling molecule essential for vascular homeostasis. Numerous studies have focused on NO synthesis by endothelial cells (ECs) using in vitro cultures to understand the pathophysiology of endothelial dysfunction. A limitation of these studies is that the expression of the NO-generating enzyme, endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), in physiological conditions is modulated by the exposure of the ECs to laminar shear stress, a stimulus that is clearly lacking in most two-dimensional (2D) cultures. Here we developed a tracer-based metabolomics approach to measure NO-specific metabolites with mass spectrometry (MS) and show the impact of unidirectional fluid flow on metabolic parameters associated with NO synthesis using 2D and three-dimensional (3D) platforms. Specifically, we tracked the conversion of stable-isotope labeled NO substrate L-Arginine to L-Citrulline and L-Ornithine to determine eNOS activity. We demonstrated that when human coronary artery endothelial cells (HCAECs) cultured in media containing 13C6,15N4-L-Arginine treated with eNOS stimulator – vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), eNOS inhibitor – L-NAME and arginase inhibitor - S-(2- boronoethyl)-L-cysteine (BEC), their downstream metabolites - 13C6,15N3 L-Citrulline and 13C5,15N2 L- Ornithine showed clear responses as measured using Ultra-performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS). In this study, we also assessed the NO metabolic status of a static 2D culture, a 3D microvessel model with bidirectional flow, and our 3D model with unidirectional fluid flow generated by a microfluidic pump. Compared to 2D culture, our 3D model showed significant effects in the control and microvessels exposed to VEGF when Citrulline/Ornithine ratio was analyzed. The obtained result indicates that the 2D static culture mimics more endothelial dysfunction status. Our detection method and 3D model with a unidirectional fluid flow provides a more representative physiological environment that exhibits perfect model to study endothelial dysfunction.
Auditory associative word learning in adults: the effects of musical experience and stimulus ordering

Evidence for sequential associative word learning in the auditory domain has been identified in infants, but adults have proven to have difficulties in this type of word learning. To investigate the role of auditory expertise and auditory stimuli salience in the association of auditory objects and their labels, we tested in the first experiment auditorily-trained musicians versus athletes as a high-level control group and in the second experiment stimulus ordering, contrasting object-label versus label-object presentation. Learning was evaluated from electrophysiological (EEG) recordings during training and subsequent testing phases, as well as accuracy-judgement responses during test. Results revealed for musicians a late positive component in the EEG during testing, neither N400 nor behavioral effects were found at test, while athletes did not show any effect of learning. Moreover, the object-label-ordering group only exhibited emerging association effects during training, while the label-object-ordering group showed an EEG effect during test as well as above chance accuracy-judgement scores. Thus, our results suggest an advantage of musical expertise and more salient label-object-ordering in auditory associative word learning in adults. Implications with respect to developmental differences in auditory word learning are discussed.