Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enzymes in “Green” Synthetic Chemistry: Laccase and Lipase

Enzymes play an important role in numerous natural processes and are increasingly being utilized as environmentally friendly substitutes and alternatives to many common catalysts. Their essential advantages are high catalytic efficiency, substrate specificity, minimal formation of byproducts, and low energy demand. All of these benefits make enzymes highly desirable targets of academic research and industrial development. This review has the modest aim of briefly overviewing the classification, mechanism of action, basic kinetics and reaction condition effects that are common across all six enzyme classes. Special attention is devoted to immobilization strategies as the main tools to improve the resistance to environmental stress factors (temperature, pH and solvents) and prolong the catalytic lifecycle of these biocatalysts. The advantages and drawbacks of methods such as macromolecular crosslinking, solid scaffold carriers, entrapment, and surface modification (covalent and physical) are discussed and illustrated using numerous examples. Among the hundreds and possibly thousands of known and recently discovered enzymes, hydrolases and oxidoreductases are distinguished by their relative availability, stability, and wide use in synthetic applications, which include pharmaceutics, food and beverage treatments, environmental clean-up, and polymerizations. Two representatives of those groups—laccase (an oxidoreductase) and lipase (a hydrolase)—are discussed at length, including their structure, catalytic mechanism, and diverse usage. Objective representation of the current status and emerging trends are provided in the main conclusions.
A Prospective Study on the Progression, Recurrence, and Regression of Cervical Lesions: Assessing Various Screening Approaches

(1) Background: The prediction of cervical lesion evolution is a challenge for clinicians. This prospective study aimed to determine and compare the predictive accuracy of cytology, HPV genotyping, and p16/Ki67 dual staining alone or in combination with personal risk factors in the prediction of progression, regression, or persistence of cervical lesions in human papillomavirus (HPV)-infected patients; (2) Methods: This prospective study included HPV-positive patients with or without cervical lesions who underwent follow-up in a private clinic. We calculated the predictive performance of individual tests (cervical cytology, HPV genotyping, CINtecPlus results, and clinical risk factors) or their combination in the prediction of cervical lesion progression, regression, and persistence; (3) Results: The highest predictive performance for the progression of cervical lesions was achieved by a model comprising a Pap smear suggestive of high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion (HSIL), the presence of 16/18 HPV strains, a positive p16/Ki67 dual staining result along with the presence of at least three clinical risk factors, which had a sensitivity (Se) of 74.42%, a specificity of 97.92%, an area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) of 0.961, and an accuracy of 90.65%. The prediction of cervical lesion regression or persistence was modest when using individual or combined tests; (4) Conclusions: Multiple testing or new biomarkers should be used to improve HPV-positive patient surveillance, especially for cervical lesion regression or persistence prediction.
The Holocene expansion of grassland in northern Europe reconstructed from molluscan assemblages

From the synthesis of the malacological data collected from 12 sites in the large flood‐plain of the Seine basin, three main environmental stages have been reconstructed. During the first half of the Holocene, forest environments are prevalent (Seine 1). As early as c. 6.5 cal. ka BP, the first evidence of woodland clearance is observed (Seine 2) and, from c. 3.4 cal. ka BP, the lowlands were largely cleared of trees and are dominated by grassland (Seine 3). This three‐stage development of environmental conditions is consistent with the environmental developments reconstructed from molluscan successions in England, Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Our results highlight anthropogenic disturbance as the key factor in the openness of the Holocene landscape and pinpoint the period between c. 3.6 and c. 2.8 cal. ka BP as a transitional phase of this large‐scale environmental change.
Understanding the Role of Climate Characteristics in Drought Propagation

In this study, we use numerical experiments with a simple water balance model to understand the roles of key climate characteristics in hydrologic drought propagation and the consequence of human responses to drought events under different climates. The experiments use climate inputs from a range of places with a hypothetical catchment of fixed properties to study drought propagation under different climates. Three drought propagation mechanisms are identified that produce hydrologic droughts with differing characteristics. The first mechanism involves seasonal groundwater recharge cycles, which persist during low rainfall periods, resulting in shorter hydrologic droughts compared to meteorological droughts. The second is characterized by seasonal groundwater recharge cycles that are suppressed during low rainfall periods, resulting in longer hydrologic droughts than meteorological droughts. The third is exemplified by a lack of seasonality in groundwater recharge and a strong control of precipitation over groundwater recharge, resulting in hydrologic droughts of similar duration as meteorological droughts. The roles of seasonality, climate aridity, and timing of precipitation in producing these different drought propagation mechanisms are studied. The timing of precipitation is found to have the most significant impact. Furthermore, modeling experiments are performed to understand the role of climate in the interaction between short and long time‐scale human activities in response to droughts and the effect of the common practice of groundwater pumping during drought events on long‐term groundwater depletion. Interestingly, climates with high interannual variability of precipitation are found to be associated with less groundwater depletion than the climates with low interannual variability.
Achieving Forward Progress Guarantee in Small Hardware Transactions

Hardware-transactional-memory (HTM) manages to pique interest from academia and industry alike because of its potential to ease concurrent-programming without compromising on performance. It offers a simple “all-or-nothing” idea to the programmer, making a piece of code appear atomic in hardware. Despite this and many elegant HTM implementations in research, only best-effort HTM is available commercially. Best-effort HTM lacks forward progress guarantee making it harder for the programmer to create a concurrent scalable fallback path. This has made HTM's adaptability limited. With a scope to support a myriad of applications, HTMs do a trade off between design and verification complexity vs forward progress guarantee. In this letter, we argue that limiting the scope of applications helps HTM attain guaranteed forward progress. We support lock-free programs by using HTM as multi-word-atomics and demonstrate strategic design choices to achieve lock-freedom completely in hardware. We use lfbench, a lock-free micro-benchmark-suite, and Arm's best-effort HTM (ARM_TME) on the gem5 simulator, as our base. We demonstrate the performance tradeoffs between design choices of a deferral-based, NACK-based, and NACK-with-backoff approaches. We show that NACK-with-backoff performs better than the others without compromising scalability for both read- and write-intensive applications.
No End in Sight; Assessing the Impact of Internet Gaming Disorder on Digital Eye Strain Symptoms and Academic Success

Background: Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) has been associated with symptoms of Digital Eye Strain (DES) and poor academic performance among adolescent students. The purpose of this study is to assess whether a student’s achievement of a specific academic goal within a short period of time can be directly predicted by symptoms of IGD and DES. Methods: This is a cross-sectional survey of 140 high school graduates who received an examination of visual acuity as a pre-requisite for entering the written admission examinations of law enforcement and military academies. The students completed the Digital Eye Strain Questionnaire (DESQ) and the Ten-Item Internet Gaming Disorder Test (IGDT-10) and stated their own evaluation of their chances for success. They were contacted following their admission examinations, and their success or failure to be admitted was recorded. Results: The students with IGD symptomatology were more likely to present with symptoms of DES. They were also more pessimistic about their chances of success in the subsequent written admission examinations; none succeeded, while the rest of the students recorded an expected rate of success. A combination of IGD and complaints related to the prolonged fixation of the upper body in a specific viewing position was the best predictor variable set for future success in admission examinations. Conclusions: IGD is associated with a failure to achieve academic success. Combining a factor for physical discomfort during prolonged sessions of gaming with the typical criteria for IGD may expand the predictive validity of the construct of gaming disorder.
Research Progress of Extracellular Vesicles-Loaded Microneedle Technology

Microneedles (MNs), renowned for their painless and minimally invasive qualities, exhibit significant potential for facilitating effective drug delivery, vaccination, and targeted sample extraction. Extracellular vesicles (EVs), serving as cargo for MNs, are naturally occurring nanovesicles secreted by cells and characterized by novel biomarkers, low immunogenicity, and cell-source-specific traits. MNs prove instrumental in extracting EVs from the sample fluid, thereby facilitating a promising diagnostic and prognostic tool. To harness the therapeutic potential of EVs in tissue repair, MNs with sustained delivery of EVs leverage micron-sized channels to enhance targeted site concentration, demonstrating efficacy in treating various diseases, such as Achillea tendinopathy, hair loss, spinal cord injury, and diabetic ulcers. EV-loaded MNs emerge as a promising platform for repair applications of skin, cardiac, tendon, hair, and spinal cord tissues. This review commences with an overview of MNs, subsequently delving into the role of EVs as cargo for MNs. The paper then synthesizes the latest advancements in the use of EV-loaded MNs for tissue regenerative repair, extending to research progress in extracting EVs from MNs for disease diagnosis and prognostic evaluations. It aims to offer valuable insights and forecast future research trajectories with the hope of inspiring innovative ideas among researchers in this field.
Modeling the daytime energy balance of the topside ionosphere at middle latitudes

Recently reported measurements from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) indicate that the O+ temperature in the topside ionosphere is dependent on the fractional H+ density. This finding indicates that the mass‐dependent energy exchange rate between O+ and H+ plays an important role in the thermal balance of the topside ionosphere. In this study we utilize the SAMI2 model to retrieve both TH+ and TO+ and verify the previously observed dependence of ion temperature on ion composition. The model shows that in the topside at middle latitudes when a single ion is dominant, O+ or H+ is heated by electron collisions and cooled by conduction as expected. However, in the intervening altitude region where both O+ and H+ are present, O+ is heated by collisions with H+ and cooled by conduction, while H+ is heated by collisions with electrons and cooled by collisions with O+.
A Novel Deep Learning Architecture for Agriculture Land Cover and Land Use Classification from Remote Sensing Images Based on Network-Level Fusion of Self-Attention Architecture

AI-driven precision agriculture applications can benefit from the large data source that remote sensing (RS) provides, as it can gather agricultural monitoring data at various scales throughout the year. Numerous advantages for sustainable agricultural applications, including yield prediction, crop monitoring, and climate change adaptation, can be obtained from RS and artificial intelligence. In this work, we proposed a fully automated optimized self-attention fused convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for land use and land cover classification using RS data. A new contrast enhancement equation has been proposed and utilized in the proposed architecture for the data augmentation. After that, a fused self-attention CNN architecture was proposed. The proposed architecture initially consists of two custom models named IBNR-65 and Densenet-64. Both models have been designed based on the inverted bottleneck residual mechanism and dense blocks. After that, both models were fused using a depth-wise concatenation and append a self-attention layer for deep features extraction. After that, we trained the model and performed classification using neural network (NN) classifiers. The results obtained from the NN classifiers are insufficient; therefore, we implemented a Bayesian optimization and fine-tuned the hyperparameters of NN. In addition, we proposed a quantum hippopotamus optimization algorithm for the best feature selection. The selected features are finally classified using fine-tuned NN classifiers and obtained improved accuracy of 98.20, 89.50, and 91.70%, and the highest precision rate is 98.23, recall is 98.20, and F1-score is 98.21, respectively, for SIRI-WHU, EuroSAT, and NWPU datasets. Moreover, a detailed ablation study was conducted, and the performance was compared with SOTA. The proposed architecture shows improved accuracy, sensitivity, precision, and computational time performance.
Indigenous and local communities and protected areas : towards equity and enhanced conservation (Arabic version)

Conventional approaches to managing protected areas have often seen people and nature as separate entities. They preclude human communities from using natural resources and assume that their concerns are incompatible with conservation. Protected area approaches and models that see conservation as compatible with human communities are explored. The main themes are co-managed protected areas and community conserved areas. Practical guidance is offered, drawing on recent experience, reflections and advice developed at the local, national, regional and international level.
Assessment of miRNA-10b Expression Levels as a Potential Precursor to Metastasis in Localized and Locally Advanced/Metastatic Breast Cancer among Iraqi Patients

Breast cancer (BC) stands as the most prevalent form of carcinoma among women, ranking as the second leading cause of cancer-related mortality in the female population. The objective of this study is to assess the expression of miR-10b and determine its diagnostic and prognostic significance in breast cancer patients across various disease stages. The investigation was carried out in Baghdad at the Oncology Teaching Hospital within Baghdad Medical City and the Oncology Unit at Al-Yarmouk Teaching Hospital. A total of 150 samples were included and divided into two groups: the blood group consisting of 90 samples (including control subjects, localized BC patients, and those with metastatic and locally advanced BC) and the tissue group comprising 60 samples (representing both benign and malignant BC cases). The study spanned from March 2022 to January 2023, with patients' ages ranging from 24 to 75 years. The primary focus of this investigation was to identify the gene expression of miRNA-10b in all sample types. This was achieved by measuring gene expression levels and normalizing them to the level of a housekeeping gene (U6), and quantification was carried out considering the ΔCt value and the fold change method (2−ΔΔCt). The results revealed an upregulated fold expression of miRNA-10b, particularly in locally advanced and metastatic BC, where the expression was significantly higher compared to the other groups, with a fold expression of 1.770 ± 0.1070. In localized breast cancer, the fold expression was 1.624 ± 0.064, and in malignant tissue, it measured 1.546 ± 0.06754, all relative to apparently healthy control subjects. In summary, our research provides compelling evidence supporting the classification of miRNA-10b as an oncogenic factor in BC. The central involvement of miRNA-10b in the tumorigenic processes of BC highlights its reference for developing novel targeted therapeutic interventions and detection biomarkers for BC treatment. Notably, elevated expression of miRNA-10b was observed in BC tissues, correlating with an unfavorable distant metastasis-free survival outcome.
On the political roles of freshwater science in studying dam and weir removal policies: a critical physical geography approach.

Over the last decade, dam and weir removal has been promoted to improve continuity along many river systems. However, such policies raise many socioecological issues such as social acceptability, integration of different river uses, and real impacts on river ecosystems. In this article, we illustrate how critical physical geography can help connect sociopolitical issues with biophysical processes. Our analysis is based on case studies located in different geographic contexts but in any case, a detailed understanding of biological or hydromorphological processes emphasises different social and political issues related to dam and weir removal. For example, riparian vegetation is usually ignored in dam-removal studies (unlike fish or macroinvertebrates) and its response to dam removal raises the issue of how different nonhuman actors are represented (or not) in the debate and weighed in the decision. An accurate understanding of sediment dynamics can also address the sociopolitical process because it identifies effective measures for reaching an objective such as the restoration of sediment fluxes. In our case studies, this understanding demonstrates that removal can be technically possible but ineffective or insufficient. From a sociopolitical perspective, this can increase the number of stakeholders (with diverse power relationships) that need to be included in the debate. We conclude that the diversity of sociopolitical issues associated with dam and weir removal is partially connected to the nature of biophysical processes and patterns and that neither aspect can be analysed separately.
Antioxidant and yield responses of wheat and clover in intercropping system to late season water deficit induced by partial root-zone irrigation regime

A field experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect of planting pattern and irrigation system on antioxidant responses of wheat and Persian clover. The experiment was carried out as a two-factor factorial with three replications. The first factor was irrigation system (conventional and partial root-zone irrigation) and the second was planting pattern (sole wheat, sole Persian clover, alternate-row intercropping and within-row intercropping). The results indicated that RWC of wheat and clover leaves decreased with lowering water supply. Both crops had higher RWC in intercropping compared to the sole cropping. Before irrigation, wheat and clover had lower proline in intercropping systems (15% and 9% lower for wheat and clover, respectively) compared to the sole cropping. SOD activity in wheat and Persian clover increased in partial root zone irrigation compared to conventional irrigation system. Under partial root-zone irrigation, SOD of wheat and Persian clover was increased up to 10% and 46% compare to the conventional irrigation. The MDA content of wheat and Persian clover leaves under partial root-zone irrigation was more than that of conventional irrigation. Regarding MDA content, wheat experienced a higher stress under the sole cropping compared to intercropping system. The highest activity of POD was recorded in Persian clover under partial root zone irrigation system which was 20% more than that of wheat. Partial root-zone irrigation reduced the grain yield of wheat and Persian clover down to 27% and 36%, respectively, compared to conventional irrigation. Land equivalent ratio of intercropping in partial root-zone irrigation was significantly (P≤0.01) more than that of conventional irrigation, suggesting that intercropping reduced the negative effect of lower water supply. Generally, partial root-zone irrigation induced higher antioxidant activity of wheat and Persian clover. However, partial root-zone irrigation may have a good potential for reducing water consumption in intercropping systems.
EMPIRICAL TESTING OF FAMA-FRENCH ASSET PRICING MODEL IN INDONESIA STOCK EXCHANGE DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC

The volatility of the Indonesian Stock Exchange (BEI) increased significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic period. In this period return predictability and price volatility in the stock index experienced a single structural break. There is concern among investors and academics that the asset pricing approach model that has been empirically accepted so far is unable to explain the return or excess return of an asset or investment during the Covid-19 pandemic period. This research tests the significance of the size (market capitalization), profitability, value (book-to-market), investment, and market risk premium (Rm-Rf) factors on the excess return of stock portfolios on the Indonesian Stock Exchange during the Covid-19 pandemic period. Existing studies show that the Covid-19 pandemic has affected investor sentiment, causing investors to panic and be pessimistic about their investments. In addition, there were deviations from the efficient market hypothesis during several pandemic periods in several countries so that stock prices did not fully reflect the available information. After testing, it was found that the factors size (market capitalization), profitability, value (book-to-market), investment, and market risk premium (Rm-Rf) did not have a significant influence on the excess return of stock portfolios on the Indonesia Stock Exchange during the period Covid-19 pandemic.
Prevalence and structural protein encoding gene sequence (VP) of porcine parvovirus 2 (PPV2) in slaughtered pigs in Central provinces of Vietnam

Porcine parvovirus (PPV) is a DNA virus and causative agent of several reproductive problems in sows. This study was conducted to determine the prevalence and analyze the DNA sequence of structural protein encoding gene (VP) of PPV2 genotype in pigs. A total of 146 samples (lung and blood samples) were collected from slaughtered pigs of seven provinces in Central Vietnam during 2018-2019. The overall prevalence of PPV2 was 56.2% (82/146). PPV2 positive rate in each province ranged from 37.5% for Quang Nam to 100% for Quang Binh, with the exception of Da Nang, where no PPV2 positive samples were detected. Nearly complete PPV2-VP gene sequences of three strains were identified with the length of 2,493 nucleotides and deposited in GenBank with accession numbers of OL913365-OL913367. Four nucleotide substitutions were detected in Vietnamese PPV2 isolates and were not observed in PPV2 reference strains. Multiple alignment and comparison of nucleotide and deduced amino acid sequences showed the high similarity within Vietnamese PPV2 strains (95.6-96.5% and 94.7-96.9%, respectively). The PPV2 strains from this study clustered together with the "primitive" PPV2 strains from Myanmar, and strains from China in a main clade in the phylogenetic tree (Cluster A). This is the first report on the prevalence of PPV2 genotype and its VP gene sequence in pigs in Vietnam. This also provides the valuable information on the molecular evolution of locally circulating PPV2 and contributes to the control of PPV-induced SMEDI syndrome in sows, especially in the central provinces of Vietnam.