Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A microchondrule‐bearing micrometeorite and comparison with microchondrules in CM chondrites

We report the discovery of a partially altered microchondrule within a fine‐grained micrometeorite. This object is circular, <10 μm in diameter, and has a cryptocrystalline texture, internal zonation, and a thin S‐bearing rim. These features imply a period of post‐accretion parent body aqueous alteration, in which the former glassy igneous texture was subject to hydration and phyllosilicate formation as well as leaching of fluid‐mobile elements. We compare this microchondrule to three microchondrules found in two CM chondrites: Elephant Moraine (EET) 96029 and Murchison. In all instances, their formation appears closely linked to the late stages of chondrule formation, chondrule recycling, and fine‐grained rim accretion. Likewise, they share cryptocrystalline textures and evidence of mild aqueous alteration and thus similar histories. We also investigate the host micrometeorite's petrology, which includes an unusually Cr‐rich mineralogy, containing both Mn‐chromite spinel and low‐Fe‐Cr‐rich (LICE) anhydrous silicates. Because these two refractory phases cannot form together in a single geochemical reservoir under equilibrium condensation, this micrometeorite's accretionary history requires a complex timeline with formation via nonequilibrium batch crystallization or accumulation of materials from large radial distances. In contrast, the bulk composition of this micrometeorite and its internal textures are consistent with a hydrated carbonaceous chondrite source. This micrometeorite is interpreted as a fragment of fine‐grained rim material that once surrounded a larger parent chondrule and was derived from a primitive carbonaceous parent body; either a CM chondrite or Jupiter family comet.
Response of Methanogenic Microbial Communities to Desiccation Stress in Flooded and Rain-Fed Paddy Soil from Thailand

Rice paddies in central Thailand are flooded either by irrigation (irrigated rice) or by rain (rain-fed rice). The paddy soils and their microbial communities thus experience permanent or arbitrary submergence, respectively. Since methane production depends on anaerobic conditions, we hypothesized that structure and function of the methanogenic microbial communities are different in irrigated and rain-fed paddies and react differently upon desiccation stress. We determined rates and relative proportions of hydrogenotrophic and aceticlastic methanogenesis before and after short-term drying of soil samples from replicate fields. The methanogenic pathway was determined by analyzing concentrations and δ13C of organic carbon and of CH4 and CO2 produced in the presence and absence of methyl fluoride, an inhibitor of aceticlastic methanogenesis. We also determined the abundance (qPCR) of genes and transcripts of bacterial 16S rRNA, archaeal 16S rRNA and methanogenic mcrA (coding for a subunit of the methyl coenzyme M reductase) and the composition of these microbial communities by T-RFLP fingerprinting and/or Illumina deep sequencing. The abundances of genes and transcripts were similar in irrigated and rain-fed paddy soil. They also did not change much upon desiccation and rewetting, except the transcripts of mcrA, which increased by more than two orders of magnitude. In parallel, rates of CH4 production also increased, in rain-fed soil more than in irrigated soil. The contribution of hydrogenotrophic methanogenesis increased in rain-fed soil and became similar to that in irrigated soil. However, the relative microbial community composition on higher taxonomic levels was similar between irrigated and rain-fed soil. On the other hand, desiccation and subsequent anaerobic reincubation resulted in systematic changes in the composition of microbial communities for both Archaea and Bacteria. It is noteworthy that differences in the community composition were mostly detected on the level of operational taxonomic units (OTUs; 97% sequence similarity). The treatments resulted in change of the relative abundance of several archaeal OTUs. Some OTUs of Methanobacterium, Methanosaeta, Methanosarcina, Methanocella and Methanomassiliicoccus increased, while some of Methanolinea and Methanosaeta decreased. Bacterial OTUs within Firmicutes, Cyanobacteria, Planctomycetes and Deltaproteobacteria increased, while OTUs within other proteobacterial classes decreased.
Optimal Remanufacturing and Pricing Strategies Under Name-Your-Own-Price Auctions and Stochastic Demand

In this paper, we study recycling, remanufacturing, and pricing strategies of a manufacturer in a closed-loop supply chain. Different from traditional list-price transaction, a name-your-own-price auction is introduced into the recycling process where consumers offer a bid for their own used items and the manufacturer decides whether to accept the bid. We first analyze the consumers’ behavior and find that their bids increase with the dealing cost. Next, we build a newsvendor framework to investigate the manufacturer’s optimal manufacturing with pricing strategies and find that the stocking factor influences the recycling quantity and manufacturing policy. Moreover, we find that a larger salvage value motivates the manufacturer to set a higher stocking factor and thus recycle more as well as manufacture new products. We further investigate the effect of the demand uncertain level and the dealing cost on the system.
NADPH Oxidases: Functions and Pathologies in the Vasculature

Reactive oxygen species are ubiquitous signaling molecules in biological systems. Four members of the NADPH oxidase (Nox) enzyme family are important sources of reactive oxygen species in the vasculature: Nox1, Nox2, Nox4, and Nox5. Signaling cascades triggered by stresses, hormones, vasoactive agents, and cytokines control the expression and activity of these enzymes and of their regulatory subunits, among which p22phox, p47phox, Noxa1, and p67phox are present in blood vessels. Vascular Nox enzymes are also regulated by Rac, ClC-3, Poldip2, and protein disulfide isomerase. Multiple Nox subtypes, simultaneously present in different subcellular compartments, produce specific amounts of superoxide, some of which is rapidly converted to hydrogen peroxide. The identity and location of these reactive oxygen species, and of the enzymes that degrade them, determine their downstream signaling pathways. Nox enzymes participate in a broad array of cellular functions, including differentiation, fibrosis, growth, proliferation, apoptosis, cytoskeletal regulation, migration, and contraction. They are involved in vascular pathologies such as hypertension, restenosis, inflammation, atherosclerosis, and diabetes. As our understanding of the regulation of these oxidases progresses, so will our ability to alter their functions and associated pathologies.
An overview of QoS capabilities in infiniband, advanced switching interconnect, and ethernet

A recent trend in interconnection network technologies is the inclusion of various mechanisms to support a variety of quality of service (QoS) concepts. This has been necessitated by an increasing number of application areas that require some level of performance guarantees from the network for parts of its traffic. In this article we describe and compare the capabilities and support for the QoS of three of the most important interconnection network technology standards of today. Equalities between the technologies are explained and differences are clarified.
Enhancing covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy through fitness inheritance

Evolution strategy (ES) has shown to be effective in many search and optimization problems. In particular, the ES with covariance matrix adaptation (CMAES) achieves great successes and is viewed as a state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithm for complex numerical optimization. The CMAES models the population by a multivariate normal distribution, which requires a considerable amount of fitness evaluation results and thus degrades its efficiency. This paper proposes using fitness inheritance to reduce the computational cost at fitness evaluation. More specifically, the proposed FI-CMAES adopts fitness inheritance to approximate the fitness of offspring. The survivors are selected according to the approximated fitness; thereafter, the survival offspring are evaluated by the original fitness function. By this way, several original fitness evaluations on offspring can be saved. Experiments examine the effectiveness and efficiency of FI-CMAES on the CEC2014 test suite. The results show that FI-CMAES can outperform CMAES in terms of solution quality and convergence speed.
Electronic Communications of the EASST Volume 63 ( 2014 ) Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Software Clones ( IWSC 2014 ) Clone Detection in Matlab Stateflow Models

Matlab Simulink is one of the leading tools for model based software development in the automotive industry. One extension to Simulink is Stateflow, which allows the user to embed Statecharts as components in a Simulink Model. These state machines contain nested states, an action language that describes events, guards, conditions and actions and complex transitions. As Stateflow has become increasingly important in Simulink models for the automotive sector, we extend previous work on clone detection of Simulink models to Stateflow components.
CHRONIC OBSTRUCTIVE PULMONARY DISEASE Readmission rates and life threatening events in COPD survivors treated with non-invasive ventilation for acute hypercapnic respiratory failure

Background: Non-invasive ventilation (NIV) has been shown to reduce intubation and in-hospital mortality in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and acute hypercapnic respiratory failure (AHRF). However, little information exists on the outcomes following discharge. A study was undertaken to examine the rates of readmission, recurrent AHRF, and death following discharge and the risk factors associated with them. Methods: A cohort of COPD patients with AHRF who survived after treatment with NIV in a respiratory high dependency unit was prospectively followed from July 2001 to October 2002. The times to readmission, first recurrent AHRF, and death were recorded and analysed against potential risk factors collected during the index admission. Results: One hundred and ten patients (87 men) of mean (SD) age 73.2 (7.6) years survived AHRF after NIV during the study period. One year after discharge 79.9% had been readmitted, 63.3% had another life threatening event, and 49.1% had died. Survivors spent a median of 12% of the subsequent year in hospital. The number of days in hospital in the previous year (p = 0.016) and a low Katz score (p = 0.018) predicted early readmission; home oxygen use (p = 0.002), APACHE II score (p = 0.006), and a lower body mass index (p = 0.041) predicted early recurrent AHRF or death; the MRC dyspnoea score (p,0.001) predicted early death. Conclusions: COPD patients with AHRF who survive following treatment with NIV have a high risk of readmission and life threatening events. Further studies are urgently needed to devise strategies to reduce readmission and life threatening events in this group of patients.
Association of Histologic Chorioamnionitis, Increased Levels of Cord Blood Cytokines, and Intracerebral Hemorrhage in Preterm Neonates

The objective of this study was to investigate in a prospectie study whether histological chorioamnionitis (ChA) is a risk factor predisposing for intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), and whether ICH is associated with a systemic fetal inflammation in preterm neonates with a gestational age <32 weeks. 106 neonates were studied; 20 (18.9%) suffered from ICH. ChA occurred significantly more often in neonates with ICH compared to neonates without ICH (70.0 vs. 36.0%, p = 0.006). Neonates with ICH had significantly higher median levels of proinflammatory cytokines (IL-1β, IL-6 and IL-8) compared to neonates without ICH (p < 0.001 for all comparisons). We conclude that the development of ICH in preterm infants is associated with both ChA and high levels of proinflammatory cytokines at birth.
COBRA, an Arabidopsis Extracellular Glycosyl-Phosphatidyl Inositol-Anchored Protein, Specifically Controls Highly Anisotropic Expansion through Its Involvement in Cellulose Microfibril Orientationw⃞

The orientation of cell expansion is a process at the heart of plant morphogenesis. Cellulose microfibrils are the primary anisotropic material in the cell wall and thus are likely to be the main determinant of the orientation of cell expansion. COBRA (COB) has been identified previously as a potential regulator of cellulose biogenesis. In this study, characterization of a null allele, cob-4, establishes the key role of COB in controlling anisotropic expansion in most developing organs. Quantitative polarized-light and field-emission scanning electron microscopy reveal that loss of anisotropic expansion in cob mutants is accompanied by disorganization of the orientation of cellulose microfibrils and subsequent reduction of crystalline cellulose. Analyses of the conditional cob-1 allele suggested that COB is primarily implicated in microfibril deposition during rapid elongation. Immunodetection analysis in elongating root cells revealed that, in agreement with its substitution by a glycosylphosphatidylinositol anchor, COB was polarly targeted to both the plasma membrane and the longitudinal cell walls and was distributed in a banding pattern perpendicular to the longitudinal axis via a microtubule-dependent mechanism. Our observations suggest that COB, through its involvement in cellulose microfibril orientation, is an essential factor in highly anisotropic expansion during plant morphogenesis.
A Doubly-Rooted Stem-and-Cycle Ejection Chain Algorithm for Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problems

Ejection chain methods, which include the classical Lin-Kernighan (LK) procedure and the Stem-and-Cycle (S&C) reference structure, have been the source of the current leading algorithms for large scale symmetric traveling salesman problems (STSP). Although these methods proved highly effective in generating large neighborhoods for symmetric instances, their potential application to the asymmetric setting of the problem (ATSP) introduces new challenges that require special consideration. This paper extends our studies on the single-rooted S&C with its generalized doubly-rooted (DR) reference structure that has special advantages for the ATSP. Computational experiments on a standard testbed exhibits superior performance for the DR neighborhood over its LK counterpart, revealing that a straightforward implementation of a DR ejection chain algorithm outperforms the best local search algorithms and obtains solutions comparable to those obtained by the current most advanced iterative local search algorithms specially designed for the ATSP, while requiring dramatically smaller computation time.
Towards variation-aware system-level power estimation of DRAMs: An empirical approach

DRAM vendors provide pessimistic current measures in memory datasheets to account for worst-case impact of process variations and to improve their production yield, leading to unrealistic power consumption estimates. In this paper, we first demonstrate the possible effects of process variations on DRAM performance and power consumption by performing Monte-Carlo simulations on a detailed DRAM cross-section. We then propose a methodology to empirically determine the actual impact for any given DRAM memory by assessing its performance characteristics during the DRAM calibration phase at system boot-time, thereby enabling its optimal use at run-time. We further employ our analysis on Micron's 2Gb DDR3-1600-x16 memory and show considerable over-estimation in the datasheet measures and the energy estimates (up to 28%), by using realistic current measures for a set of MediaBench applications.
A general method for small signal stability analysis

This paper presents a new general method for computing the different specific power system small signal stability conditions. The conditions include the points of minimum and maximum damping of oscillations, saddle node and Hopf bifurcations, and load flow feasibility boundaries. All these characteristic points are located by optimizing an eigenvalue objective function along the rays specified in the space of system parameters. The set of constraints consists of the load flow equations, and requirements applied to the dynamic state matrix eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Solutions of the optimization problem correspond to specific points of interest mentioned above. So, the proposed general method gives a comprehensive characterization of the power system small signal stability properties. The specific point obtained depends upon the initial guess of variables and numerical methods used to solve the constrained optimization problem. The technique is tested by analyzing the small signal stability properties for well-known example systems.
Coral reefs in a changing world: climate change and land-based pollution issues and conservation strategies

Japan provides an ideal setting to examine these changes, because it covers a wide latitudinal range, stretching from subtropical to temperate areas, and latitudinal limits of coral reefs and coral distributions are observed around the Japanese islands. Seas around Japan showed significant sea surface temperature (SST) rises in winter, which is critical for corals to survive at the latitudinal limits of their distribution. In addition, some islands have significant amount of sediment discharge through rivers as a result of extensive land development. So land-based pollution issues can be examined.
Muscle glycogen and metabolic regulation

Muscle glycogen is an important fuel for contracting skeletal muscle during prolonged strenuous exercise, and glycogen depletion has been implicated in muscle fatigue. It is also apparent that glycogen availability can exert important effects on a range of metabolic and cellular processes. These processes include carbohydrate, fat and protein metabolism during exercise, post-exercise glycogen resynthesis, excitation–contraction coupling, insulin action and gene transcription. For example, low muscle glycogen is associated with reduced muscle glycogenolysis, increased glucose and NEFA uptake and protein degradation, accelerated glycogen resynthesis, impaired excitation–contraction coupling, enhanced insulin action and potentiation of the exercise-induced increases in transcription of metabolic genes. Future studies should identify the mechanisms underlying, and the functional importance of, the association between glycogen availability and these processes.
Quality Measures for Academic Libraries and Information Services : Two Implementation Initiatives – Mixed-model CAF-BSC-AHP and PAQ-SIBi-USP

The purpose of this article is to describe briefly two quality evaluation models for academic libraries: the Portuguese investigation proposes an action model to measure the performance of the libraries of the Universidade do Porto (UP). This tool is justified by the CAF – Common Assessment Framework (an auto-evaluation tool based on the European Foundation Quality Management Excellence Model), the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP); the PAQ – Quality of Products and Services Evaluation Program of the SIBi/USP, based on the Model SERVQUAL, is an assessment research implemented in the academic libraries of the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), in Brazil. The proposal has been presented as being viable and necessary for the management of the libraries of the SIBi/USP.
Abnormalities in intracellular calcium regulation and contractile function in myocardium from dogs with pacing-induced heart failure.

24 d of rapid ventricular pacing induced dilated cardiomyopathy with both systolic and diastolic dysfunction in conscious, chronically instrumented dogs. We studied mechanical properties and intracellular calcium (Ca2+i) transients of trabeculae carneae isolated from 15 control dogs (n = 32) and 11 dogs with pacing-induced cardiac failure (n = 26). Muscles were stretched to maximum length at 30 degrees C and stimulated at 0.33 Hz; a subset (n = 17 control, n = 17 myopathic) was loaded with the [Ca2+]i indicator aequorin. Peak tension was depressed in the myopathic muscles, even in the presence of maximally effective (i.e., 16 mM) [Ca2+] in the perfusate. However, peak [Ca2+]i was similar (0.80 +/- 0.13 vs. 0.71 +/- 0.05 microM; [Ca2+]o = 2.5 mM), suggesting that a decrease in Cai2+ availability was not responsible for the decreased contractility. The time for decline from the peak of the Cai2+ transient was prolonged in the myopathic group, which correlated with prolongation of isometric contraction and relaxation. However, similar end-diastolic [Ca2+]i was achieved in both groups (0.29 +/- 0.05 vs. 0.31 +/- 0.02 microM), indicating that Cai2+ homeostasis can be maintained in myopathic hearts. The inotropic response of the myopathic muscles to milrinone was depressed compared with the controls. However, when cAMP production was stimulated by pretreatment with forskolin, the response of the myopathic muscles to milrinone was improved. Our findings provide direct evidence that abnormal [Ca2+]i handling is an important cause of contractile dysfunction in dogs with pacing-induced heart failure and suggest that deficient production of cAMP may be an important cause of these changes in excitation-contraction coupling.
Study of DTC torque ripple reduction based on SVPWM

A new control method of induction motor is proposed in this paper to reduce the pulsation of motor torque and magnetic flux linkage, which, as a great disadvantage, exists in the direct torque control system. According to the conclusion, the required voltage vector is provided which can be composed by space voltage vector pulse width modulation. Simulation results show that it effectively solves the problem of torque ripple and flux ripple
Performance evaluation of MPTCP under heterogeneous channel characteristics

By improvements of ICT (Information and Communications Technologies), a lot of advanced high speed communication standards such as 3G (3rd generation mobile telecommunications), LTE (Long Term Evolution) and High speed WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) have been developed. Recently, most devices destined for consumer use, equip more than one communication interface based on the above high speed communication standards. For exploiting the advantages of devices employing multiple communication interfaces, several transport protocols using simultaneously multiple communication channels for one transmission purpose have been proposed. However, there are few number of evaluations relating to such multi-path transport protocols. In this paper, for clarifying the characteristics of multi-path transport protocols, we will report the evaluation results of MPTPC under heterogeneous communication characteristics.
Emergent properties of composite semiflexible biopolymer networks

The semiflexible polymers filamentous actin (F-actin) and intermediate filaments (IF) both form complex networks within the cell, and together are key determinants of cellular stiffness. While the mechanics of F-actin networks together with stiff microtubules have been characterized, the interplay between F-actin and IF networks is largely unknown, necessitating the study of composite networks using mixtures of semiflexible biopolymers. We employ bulk rheology in a simplified in vitro system to uncover the fundamental mechanical interactions between networks of the 2 semiflexible polymers, F-actin and vimentin IF. Surprisingly, co-polymerization of actin and vimentin can produce composite networks either stronger or weaker than pure F-actin networks. We show that this effect occurs through steric constraints imposed by IF on F-actin during network formation and filament crosslinking, highlighting novel emergent behavior in composite semiflexible networks.