Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling on piezoelectric energy harvesting from pavements under traffic loads

Piezoelectric energy harvesting from deformation in pavements caused by moving vehicles is investigated in this work. The behavior of pavement is described by a plate resting on a Winkler foundation. Two types of moving distributed loads are considered: single-wheel load and four-wheel load. The loads and the displacement of the pavement are expanded with trigonometric series. Two explicit solutions for the dynamic response of the pavement are then obtained using the Fourier transform and Cauchy’s residue theorem. The voltage and power outputs of a piezoceramic transducer embedded in the pavement are then obtained by the direct piezoelectric effect. Finally, a comprehensive numerical study is conducted to show the effect of the Winkler modulus, the velocity of moving load, the position of moving load, and the position of transducer on the voltage and power outputs. Numerical results show that, compared with a previously studied beam model, the plate model is more suitable for predicting the harvested energy from pavements over soft subgrade.
Victims of Infanticide and Conspecific Bite Wounding in a Female-Dominant Primate: A Long-Term Study

The aggression animals receive from conspecifics varies between individuals across their lifetime. As poignantly evidenced by infanticide, for example, aggression can have dramatic fitness consequences. Nevertheless, we understand little about the sources of variation in received aggression, particularly in females. Using a female-dominant species renowned for aggressivity in both sexes, we tested for potential social, demographic, and genetic patterns in the frequency with which animals were wounded by conspecifics. Our study included 243 captive, ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta), followed from infancy to adulthood over a 35-year time span. We extracted injury, social, and life-history information from colony records and calculated neutral heterozygosity for a subset of animals, as an estimate of genetic diversity. Focusing on victims rather than aggressors, we used General Linear Models to explain bite-wound patterns at different life stages. In infancy, maternal age best predicted wounds received, as infants born to young mothers were the most frequent infanticide victims. In adulthood, sex best predicted wounds received, as males were three times more likely than females to be seriously injured. No relation emerged between wounds received and the other variables studied. Beyond the generally expected costs of adult male intrasexual aggression, we suggest possible additive costs associated with female-dominant societies – those suffered by young mothers engaged in aggressive disputes and those suffered by adult males aggressively targeted by both sexes. We propose that infanticide in lemurs may be a costly by-product of aggressively mediated, female social dominance. Accordingly, the benefits of female behavioral ‘masculinization’ accrued to females through priority of access to resources, may be partially offset by early costs in reproductive success. Understanding the factors that influence lifetime patterns of conspecific wounding is critical to evaluating the fitness costs associated with social living; however, these costs may vary substantially between societies.
Visual versus auditory Simon effect: A behavioural and physiological investigation

This study investigated whether the visual and auditory Simon effects could be accounted for by the same mechanism. In a single experiment, we performed a detailed comparison of the visual and the auditory Simon effects arising in behavioural responses and in pupil dilation, a psychophysiological measure considered as a marker of the cognitive effort induced by conflict processing. To address our question, we performed sequential and distributional analyses on both reaction times and pupil dilation. Results confirmed that the mechanisms underlying the visual and auditory Simon effects are functionally equivalent in terms of the interaction between unconditional and conditional response processes. The two modalities, however, differ with respect to the strength of their activation and inhibition. Importantly, pupillary data mirrored the pattern observed in behavioural data for both tasks, adding physiological evidence to the current literature on the processing of visual and auditory information in a conflict task.
Cosmesis after early stage breast cancer treatment with surgery and radiation therapy: experience of patients treated in a Chilean radiotherapy centre

Aim To analyse the overall cosmetic outcome according to patient self-assessment in relation to the fractionation received. Materials and methods A questionnaire, drawn up on the basis of subjective rating scales of cosmesis and of acute and late toxicity RTOG/EORTC, EORTC QLQ-C30 (v3) and LENT SOMA, was applied to patients with early-stage breast cancer who received radiotherapy with tangential fields between June 2014 and July 2015. Self-perception of cosmesis, changes in the treated breast, pain and fractionation used (hypofractionation (HF) 42.56 Gy in 16 fractions or conventional fractionation (CF) 50 Gy in 25 fractions) were evaluated. Results Three hundred and fifty-two questionnaires were obtained. The median age was 58 years. 45% of patients reported ‘excellent’ cosmesis, 53% ‘good’, and 2% ‘poor’ cosmesis. Cosmesis was considered ‘excellent/good’ by 98% of patients. No statistically significant difference was found in overall cosmesis according to fractionation received (p = 0.6). The most frequent alteration was ‘difference between both breasts’ (77%), and 48% reported change in normal breast colour. Fifteen percent of patients who are younger than 58 years reported a change of normal breast colour affecting cosmesis compared to 9% of patients older than 58 years (p = 0.04). Complications affecting breast cosmesis were reported by 9% of patients with stages I-II compared with 2% with cancer in situ (DCIS) (p = 0.04); 14% in stages I-II referred colour change affecting cosmesis compared to 6% of those with DCIS (p = 0.03). Ninety-four percent of patients stated that they would accept treatment again. Conclusions No difference in cosmetic results was found between HF and CF in our patients. Great satisfaction regarding cosmetic outcome of cancer treatment was reported, given by 98% of excellent/good cosmesis, and 94% of patients who would receive treatment again.
MLtuner: System Support for Automatic Machine Learning Tuning

MLtuner automatically tunes settings for training tunables (such as the learning rate, the momentum, the mini-batch size, and the data staleness bound) that have a significant impact on large-scale machine learning (ML) performance. Traditionally, these tunables are set manually, which is unsurprisingly error-prone and difficult to do without extensive domain knowledge. MLtuner uses efficient snapshotting, branching, and optimization-guided online trial-and-error to find good initial settings as well as to re-tune settings during execution. Experiments show that MLtuner can robustly find and re-tune tunable settings for a variety of ML applications, including image classification (for 3 models and 2 datasets), video classification, and matrix factorization. Compared to state-of-the-art ML auto-tuning approaches, MLtuner is more robust for large problems and over an order of magnitude faster.
GUIDELINES FOR THE PRESERVATION OF RAW MILK BY USE OF THE LACTOPEROXIDASE SYSTEM

Milk is an easily perishable raw material. Contaminating bacteria may multiply rapidly and render it unsuitable for processing and/or unfit for human consumption. Bacterial growth can be retarded by refrigeration, thereby slowing down the rate of deterioration. Under certain conditions refrigeration may not be feasible due to economical and/ or technical reasons. Difficulties in applying refrigeration are specially a problem for certain areas in countries setting up or expanding their milk production. In these situations, it would be beneficial to have access to a method, other than refrigeration, for retarding bacterial growth in raw milk during collection and transportation to the dairy processing plant. In 1967 the FAO/WHO Expert Panel on Milk Quality concluded that the use of hydrogen peroxide might be an acceptable alternative in the early stages of development of an organized dairy industry, provided that certain conditions were complied with. However, this method has not achieved any general acceptance as it has several drawbacks, most important of which is the difficulty of controlling its use: it may be misused to disguise milk of basic hygienic quality produced under poor hygienic conditions. The toxicological aspects of the use of relatively high concentrations of hydrogen peroxide in milk have also been questioned. A chemical method for preserving milk would still be of great advantage in certain situations. The search for such a method has therefore continued. Interest has recently been focused on the indigenous antibacterial systems in milk to determine if these could be applied practically to preserve raw milk. During the last decade, basic and applied research has demonstrated that one of these systems, the lactoperoxidase/thiocyanate/ hydrogen peroxide system (LP-system) can be used successfully for this purpose.
Phenome‐wide association studies: a new method for functional genomics in humans

In experimental physiological research, a common study design for examining the functional role of a gene or a genetic variant is to introduce that genetic variant into a model organism (such as yeast or mouse) and then to search for phenotypic consequences. The development of DNA biobanks linked to dense phenotypic information enables such an experiment to be applied to human subjects in the form of a phenome‐wide association study (PheWAS). The PheWAS paradigm takes advantage of a curated medical phenome, often derived from electronic health records, to search for associations between ‘input functions’ and phenotypes in an unbiased fashion. The most commonly studied input function to date has been single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), but other inputs, such as sets of SNPs or a disease or drug exposure, are now being explored to probe the genetic and phenotypic architecture of human traits. Potential outcomes of these approaches include defining subsets of complex diseases (that can then be targeted by specific therapies) and drug repurposing.
On Achieving Maximum Secure Throughput Using Network Coding against Wiretap Attack

In recent years network coding has attracted significant attention in telecommunication. The benefits of network coding to a communication network include the increased throughput as well as secure data transmission. The purpose of this work is to design secure linear network coding against wiretap attack. The problem is to maximize the transmission data rate of multiple unicast streams between a pair of source and destination nodes, under the condition of satisfying the weakly secure requirements. Different from most existing research on network coding that designs the network coding scheme based on a given network topology, we will consider the integrated network topology design and network coding design. Such an integrated approach has not been reported by other researchers. In this paper, we formally introduce the problem, prove the problem is computational intractable, and then develop efficient heuristic algorithms. We first try to find the transmission topology that is suitable for network coding. Based on the topology, we design linear network coding scheme that is weakly secure. We conduct simulations to show that the proposed algorithms can achieve good performance.
Identification of an Additional Minor Pilin Essential for Piliation in the Archaeon Methanococcus maripaludis

Methanococcus maripaludis is an archaeon with two studied surface appendages, archaella and type IV-like pili. Previously, the major structural pilin was identified as MMP1685 and three additional proteins were designated as minor pilins (EpdA, EpdB and EpdC). All of the proteins are likely processed by the pilin-specific prepilin peptidase EppA. Six other genes were identified earlier as likely encoding pilin proteins processed also by EppA. In this study, each of the six genes (mmp0528, mmp0600, mmp0601, mmp0709, mmp0903 and mmp1283) was deleted and the mutants examined by electron microscopy to determine their essentiality for pili formation. While mRNA transcripts of all genes were detected by RT-PCR, only the deletion of mmp1283 led to nonpiliated cells. This strain could be complemented back to a piliated state by supplying a wildtype copy of the mmp1283 gene in trans. This study adds to the complexity of the type IV pili system in M. maripaludis and raises questions about the functions of the remaining five pilin-like genes and whether M. maripaludis under other growth conditions may be able to assemble additional pili-like structures.
MRTF transcription and Ezrin-dependent plasma membrane blebbing are required for entotic invasion

Entosis is a nonapoptotic form of cell death initiated by actomyosin-dependent homotypic cell-in-cell invasion that can be observed in malignant exudates during tumor progression. We previously demonstrated formin-mediated actin dynamics at the rear of the invading cell as well as nonapoptotic plasma membrane (PM) blebbing in this cellular motile process. Although the contractile actin cortex involved in bleb-driven motility is well characterized, a role for transcriptional regulation in this process has not been studied. Here, we explore the impact of the actin-controlled MRTF–SRF (myocardin-related transcription factor–serum response factor) pathway for sustained PM blebbing and entotic invasion. We find that cortical blebbing is tightly coupled to MRTF nuclear shuttling to promote the SRF transcriptional activity required for entosis. Furthermore, PM blebbing triggered SRF-mediated up-regulation of the metastasis-associated ERM protein Ezrin. Notably, Ezrin is sufficient and important to sustain bleb dynamics for cell-in-cell invasion when SRF is suppressed. Our results highlight the critical role of the actin-regulated MRTF transcriptional pathway for bleb-associated invasive motility, such as during entosis.
Food allergy trends at the crossing among socio-economics, history and geography

Purpose of review The epidemiology of food allergy did inspire theories on the reasons for the recent surge of the disease. We offer here a reasoned review on the relationships between the trajectories of human development and the trend of the food allergy epidemics. Recent findings The exponential trend of the frequency of food allergy paralleled the explosive acceleration of the human development over the last few decades. Dietary factors have been indicated as responsible for these trends and targeted for potential preventive strategies. Other socio-economic factors have been related to this evolution: solar exposure, climate changes, structure of societies, reproductive choices and societal inequalities. Summary The epidemiologic associations of food allergy suggest different causal theories. Future prevention strategies may be predicated not only on dietary interventions, but on wider programmes aimed to restore a human ecology promoting food tolerance.
PDGFRα+ pericryptal stromal cells are the critical source of Wnts and RSPO3 for murine intestinal stem cells in vivo

Significance Tissue stem cells in vivo reside in highly structured niches that provide signals for proliferation and differentiation. Understanding the role of the niche requires identifying the key cell types that provide these regulators. In the intestine, R-spondins and Wnts are essential regulators of the stem-cell niche. Here we identify subepithelial myofibroblasts of the PDGF receptor α lineage as the specific stromal cell type that secretes these ligands. These data demonstrate the close interaction between epithelial stem cells and the underlying regulatory stroma niche and provide insights into both normal homeostasis and tissue recovery after injury. Wnts and R-spondins (RSPOs) support intestinal homeostasis by regulating crypt cell proliferation and differentiation. Ex vivo, Wnts secreted by Paneth cells in organoids can regulate the proliferation and differentiation of Lgr5-expressing intestinal stem cells. However, in vivo, Paneth cell and indeed all epithelial Wnt production is completely dispensable, and the cellular source of Wnts and RSPOs that maintain the intestinal stem-cell niche is not known. Here we investigated both the source and the functional role of stromal Wnts and RSPO3 in regulation of intestinal homeostasis. RSPO3 is highly expressed in pericryptal myofibroblasts in the lamina propria and is several orders of magnitude more potent than RSPO1 in stimulating both Wnt/β-catenin signaling and organoid growth. Stromal Rspo3 ablation ex vivo resulted in markedly decreased organoid growth that was rescued by exogenous RSPO3 protein. Pdgf receptor alpha (PdgfRα) is known to be expressed in pericryptal myofibroblasts. We therefore evaluated if PdgfRα identified the key stromal niche cells. In vivo, Porcn excision in PdgfRα+ cells blocked intestinal crypt formation, demonstrating that Wnt production in the stroma is both necessary and sufficient to support the intestinal stem-cell niche. Mice with Rspo3 excision in the PdgfRα+ cells had decreased intestinal crypt Wnt/β-catenin signaling and Paneth cell differentiation and were hypersensitive when stressed with dextran sodium sulfate. The data support a model of the intestinal stem-cell niche regulated by both Wnts and RSPO3 supplied predominantly by stromal pericryptal myofibroblasts marked by PdgfRα.
Impact of Homologous Resistance Mutations from Pathogenic Yeast on Saccharomyces cerevisiae Lanosterol 14α-Demethylase

ABSTRACT Fungal infections frequently affect immunodeficient individuals and are estimated to kill 1.35 million people per annum. Azole antifungals target the membrane-bound cytochrome P450 monooxygenase lanosterol 14α-demethylase (CYP51; Erg11p). Mutations in CYP51 can render the widely used triazole drugs less effective. The Candida albicans CYP51 mutation G464S and the double mutation Y132F G464S (Y140F and G464S by Saccharomyces cerevisiae numbering) as well as the CYP51A G54E/R/W mutations of Aspergillus fumigatus (G73E/R/W by S. cerevisiae numbering) have been reproduced in a recombinant C-terminal hexahistidine-tagged version of S. cerevisiae CYP51 (ScErg11p6×His). Phenotypes and X-ray crystal structures were determined for the mutant enzymes. Liquid microdilution assays showed that the G464S mutation in ScErg11p6×His conferred no difference in the susceptibility of yeast to triazole drugs but in combination with the Y140F mutation gave a 4-fold reduction in susceptibility to the short-tailed triazole fluconazole. The ScErg11p6×His Y140F G464S mutant was unstable during purification and was not crystallized. The ScErg11p6×His G73E/R/W mutations conferred increased susceptibly to all triazoles tested in liquid microdilution assays. High-resolution X-ray crystal structures reveal two different conformations of the ligand itraconazole, including a previously unseen conformation, as well as interactions between the tail of this triazole and the E/W73 residue. This study shows that S. cerevisiae CYP51 adequately represents some but not all mutations in CYP51s of pathogenic fungi. Insight into the molecular mechanisms of resistance mutations in CYP51 will assist the development of inhibitors that will overcome antifungal resistance.
Flow in thin polymer films: molecular structure, initial conditions, and boundary conditions

Surface tension driven flow is studied in films of viscous polymer liquid by monitoring the spreading of droplets or the capillary levelling of films with excess surface area. The research presented in this thesis is focused on three major themes where molecular details are important to flow: molecular anisotropy, interfacial friction, and the initial state of the film. The effect of molecular anisotropy is studied by examining the dynamics of partially wetting diblock copolymer droplets using optical microscopy. The shape of the droplets is measured as they evolve towards equilibrium. In this system, it is found that energy is dissipated at the base of the droplets. This is consistent with a reduced interfacial friction at the liquid-substrate interface. Flow dynamics are also found to depend on the symmetry of the initial film thickness profile. Thickness perturbations with different degrees of symmetry were created in an initially flat film using focused laser spike annealing. The films were allowed to flow under the driving force of surface tension, and using atomic force microscopy, the film thickness profile was measured as a function of time. We find the depth of the perturbations decreases as a power law in time, with a power law exponent that depends on the symmetry of the thickness perturbation. The role of interfacial effects are explored by studying the flow in a film with zero interfacial friction: a freely-suspended film. Flow is measured in films with no interfacial friction using a technique which creates a film with a sharp step in the initial thickness profile. The excess surface area at the edge of the step drives flow, and information about the dynamics of the fluid is obtained by measuring the width of the step over time with atomic force microscopy. We observe flow that is consistent with plug flow: where the velocity of the fluid in the plane of the film is constant along the direction perpendicular to the film. Finally, freely-suspended films provide a model system to study the nucleation and growth of pores in a membrane. By purposefully creating pores of different initial size, the critical radius for nucleation is measured as a function of the membrane thickness. The experimental results agree with a simple model in which the free energy cost at the perimeter of a pore is determined by the excess surface area due to the curved interface of the pore edge.
PI‐RADSv2: How we do it

Much criticism has been leveled at screening for prostate cancer using prostate‐specific antigen (PSA) testing, yet there is no suitable replacement to improve the detection of clinically significant cancer (CSC). Prostate multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) combined with mpMRI‐guided biopsies is one possible solution, as it reduces detection of low‐grade disease and increases detection of CSC. However, mpMRI is critically limited by lack of standardization across institutions and low interobserver agreement. The Prostate Imaging Reporting and Diagnostic System version 2 (PI‐RADSv2) aims to address these concerns. We discuss the clinical and technical considerations for implementing PI‐RADSv2, how we have adapted to PI‐RADSv2, and review current research. While PI‐RADSv2 represents a major step forward for standardizing prostate mpMRI, it does not provide a level of standardization that is routine with clinical blood tests and reader reproducibility remains an issue. Future research should seek to further improve quality assurance of mpMRI building on the important contributions of PI‐RADSv2.