Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
European Framework for the Diffusion of Biogas Uses: Emerging Technologies, Acceptance, Incentive Strategies, and Institutional-Regulatory Support

Biogas will constitute a significant fraction of future power supply, since it is expected to contribute a large share of the EU renewable energy targets. Biogas, once produced, can be combusted in traditional boilers to provide heat, or to generate electricity. It can be used for the production of chemical compounds, or fed into a pipeline. This review paper will briefly analyze the current most promising emerging biogas technologies in the perspective of their potential uses, environmental benefits, and public acceptance; draw a picture of current conditions on the adoption of a biogas road map in the several EU Member States; analyze incentive and support policy implementation status and gaps; discuss non-technological barriers; and summarize proposed solutions to widen this energy’s use.
Bim contributes to phenethyl isothiocyanate‐induced apoptosis in breast cancer cells

Phenethyl isothiocyanate (PEITC) is a highly promising cancer chemopreventive constituent of cruciferous vegetables (e.g., watercress) with in vivo efficacy in experimental rodent cancer models. Research thus far implicates apoptosis induction in cancer chemopreventive response to PEITC, but the mechanism of proapoptotic effect is not fully understood. The present study demonstrates that p53 upregulated modulator of apoptosis (PUMA)‐independent apoptosis by PEITC is mediated by B‐cell lymphoma 2 interacting mediator of cell death (Bim). Exposure of a cell line (BRI‐JM04) derived from spontaneously developing mammary tumor of a MMTV‐neu transgenic mouse to pharmacological concentrations of PEITC resulted in decreased cell viability coupled with apoptosis induction, characterized by release of histone‐associated DNA fragments into the cytosol and cleavage of poly‐(ADP‐ribose)‐polymerase and procaspase‐3. The PEITC‐induced apoptosis in BRI‐JM04 cells was associated with up‐regulation of Bak, PUMA, and Bim (long and short forms of Bim), increased S65 phosphorylation of BimEL (extra‐long form), and down‐regulation of Bcl‐xL and Bcl‐2. On the other hand, a non‐tumorigenic human mammary epithelial cell line (MCF‐10A) was significantly more resistant to PEITC‐induced apoptosis compared with BRI‐JM04 despite induction of Bax and PUMA due to concomitant overexpression of anti‐apoptotic proteins, including Bcl‐xL, Bcl‐2, and Mcl‐1. Wild‐type HCT‐116 cells and its isogenic PUMA knockout variant exhibited comparable sensitivity to PEITC‐induced apoptosis. On the other hand, small interfering RNA knockdown of Bim protein imparted partial but statistically significant protection against PEITC‐induced apoptosis in BRI‐JM04, MCF‐7, and MDA‐MB‐231 cells. In conclusion, the present study provides novel insight into the mechanism of PEITC‐induced apoptosis involving Bim. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Highly Sensitive Centrality Dependence of Elliptic Flow -- A Novel Signature of the Phase Transition in QCD

Elliptic flow of the hot, dense system which has been created in nucleus-nucleus collisions develops as a response to the initial azimuthal asymmetry of the reaction region. Here it is suggested that the magnitude of this response shows a highly sensitive dependence on the centrality of collisions for which the system passes through a first-order or rapid transition between quark-gluon plasma and hadronic matter. We have studied the system Pb(158A GeV) on Pb employing a recent version of the transport theoretical approach relativistic quantum molecular dynamics and find the conjecture confirmed. The novel phase transition signature may be observable in present and forthcoming experiments at CERN-SPS and at RHIC, the BNL collider. {copyright} {ital 1999} {ital The American Physical Society}
Timing, Clocks, and Dynamical Systems

Theoretical and experimental issues for our understanding of the timing of motor acts are reviewed, contrasting stochastic and dynamic timing models. It is argued that the theory of dynamical systems and, in particular, of limit cycle attractors, provides a unified framework within which these issues can be appreciated. The strength of stochastic timing models in the domain of absolute timing is contrasted with the strength of dynamic timing models in the domain of relative timing, the unification of the two domains being currently under way. It is further argued that accounts of timing must examine the interrelation between timing and other levels of processing involved in movement generation, in particular, the representation of spatial aspects of movement and the control of movement. The emergence of discrete event structure in timing skills is discussed from a dynamical systems perspective. Finally, the understanding of the timing structure of discrete movement is raised as a further challenge for future work.
Costs of Clock-Environment Misalignment in Individual Cyanobacterial Cells

Circadian rhythms are endogenously generated daily oscillations in physiology found in all kingdoms of life. Experimental studies have shown that the fitness of Synechococcus elongatus, a photosynthetic microorganism, is severely affected in non-24h environments. However, it has been difficult to study the effects of clock-environment mismatch on cellular physiology because such measurements require the precise determination of both clock state and growth rates in the same cell. Here, we designed a microscopy platform that allows us to expose cyanobacterial cells to pulses of light and dark while quantitatively measuring their growth, division rate, and circadian clock state over many days. Our measurements reveal that decreased fitness can result from a catastrophic growth arrest caused by unexpected darkness in a small subset of cells with incorrect clock times corresponding to the subjective morning. We find that the clock generates rhythms in the instantaneous growth rate of the cell, and that time of darkness vulnerability coincides with the time of most rapid growth. Thus, the clock mediates a fundamental trade-off between growth and starvation tolerance in cycling environments. By measuring the response of the circadian rhythm to dark pulses of varying lengths, we constrain a mathematical model of a population’s fitness under arbitrary light/dark schedules. This model predicts that the circadian clock is only advantageous in highly regular cycling environments with frequencies sufficiently close to the natural frequency of the clock.
POSSIBILITIES FOR CONSERVING NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT THROUGH THE USE OF RECYCLED WASTE AGGREGATES AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR NATURAL AGGREGATES IN CEMENTITIOUS COMPOSITES

The conservation of the environment and the protection of natural resources are urgent and current challenges. The objective of this experimental investigation was to evaluate the potential use of aggregates derived from recycled glass waste, blast furnace slag, recycled brick waste aggregates and recycled electronic waste aggregates (textolite) as replacements for natural aggregates in cement-based composites. The experimental tests aimed to investigate how the replacement of natural aggregates with recycled waste aggregates affects various physico-mechanical parameters, including density, compressive strength, flexural strength, abrasion resistance and capillary water absorption. This investigation also included detailed microstructural analysis using optical microscopy, SEM, EDX and XRD techniques. The aim of the research was to explore the potential for soil conservation by reducing the amount of waste to be disposed of, and at the same time to conserve natural resources by identifying alternatives using recycled materials, thereby contributing to the implementation of the circular economy concept. The results of the research confirmed this potential; however, depending on the nature of the recycled aggregates, there are influences on the physico-mechanical performance of the cement composite that can be seen at the microstructural level.
Erosion threshold of saturated natural cohesive sediments: Modeling and experiments

Predicting the erosion resistance of saturated natural sediments requires taking into account cohesion, which results from interactions between clay particles. The current paper describes a combined experimental and theoretical examination of the threshold conditions for a mixture of clays and sands. Erosion threshold measured values are larger than those predicted from noncohesive models. Beyond the usual dependence on grain size, a significant correlation between erosion threshold and porosity measurements is confirmed for heterogenous mixtures of grains with particle Reynolds number lower than 5, for pH values in the range of 6–8, and under freshwater conditions. A model of the erosion criterion is proposed. First, a cohesion force between two spherical particles is introduced into the usual erosion criterion. This reveals a specific function of the cohesion force, called cohesion function. The force we consider is the long‐range van der Waals interaction. Then, multiple interactions between one particle and those surrounding it are counted and modeled on the basis of both the coordination number and the porosity. Finally, the overall erosion threshold for the sediment bed is inferred from the average of the multiple interactions over the grain size distribution. The model highlights that cohesion comes from clay particles (about 2 10−6 m) and can affect the entire grain size range (from clays to sands) by means of coordination. The model relevance is assessed by comparison with experimental thresholds obtained from resuspension campaigns. The results show that the proposed cohesion model offers good agreement with experimental data.
Deep Learning for Assessment of Oral Reading Fluency

—Reading fluency assessment is a critical component of literacy programmes, serving to guide and monitor early education interventions. Given the resource intensive nature of the exercise when conducted by teachers, the development of automatic tools that can operate on audio recordings of oral reading is attractive as an objective and highly scalable solution. Multiple complex aspects such as accuracy, rate and expressiveness underlie human judgements of reading fluency. In this work, we investigate end-to-end modeling on a training dataset of children’s audio recordings of story texts labeled by human experts. The pre-trained wav2vec2.0 model is adopted due its potential to alleviate the challenges from the limited amount of labeled data. We report the performance of a number of system variations on the relevant measures, and also probe the learned embeddings for lexical and acoustic-prosodic features known to be important to the perception of reading fluency.
MCST: Anomaly detection using feature stability for packet-level traffic

In this paper, we present a statistical analysis of six traffic features based on entropy and distinct feature number at the packet level, and we find that, although these traffic features are unstable and show seasonal patterns like traffic volume for a long period, they are stable and consistent with Gaussian distribution in a short time period. However, this equilibrium property will be violated by some anomalies. Based on this observation, we propose a Multi-dimensional Clustering method for Short-time scale Traffic(MCST) to classify abnormal and normal traffic. We compare our new method to the well known wavelet technique. The detection result on synthetic anomaly traffic shows MCST can better detect the low-rate attacks than wavelet-based method, and detection result on real traffic demonstrates that MCST can detect more anomalies with low false alarm rate.
The design and implementation of typed scheme

When scripts in untyped languages grow into large programs, maintaining them becomes difficult. A lack of types in typical scripting languages means that programmers must (re)discover critical pieces of design information every time they wish to change a program. This analysis step both slows down the maintenance process and may even introduce mistakes due to the violation of undiscovered invariants. This paper presents Typed Scheme, an explicitly typed extension of an untyped scripting language. Its type system is based on the novel notion of occurrence typing, which we formalize and mechanically prove sound. The implementation of Typed Scheme additionally borrows elements from a range of approaches, including recursive types, true unions and subtyping, plus polymorphism combined with a modicum of local inference. Initial experiments with the implementation suggest that Typed Scheme naturally accommodates the programming style of the underlying scripting language, at least for the first few thousand lines of ported code.
Slicing the Onion: Anonymous Routing Without PKI

Recent years have witnessed many proposals for anony- mous routing in overlay peer-to-peer networks. The proposed protocols either expose the receiver and the message content, or require the overlay nodes to have public-private key pairs, with the public keys known to ev- eryone. In practice, however, key distribution and management are well- known difficult problems and have crippled any widespread deployment of anonymous routing. This paper uses a combination of information slicing and source routing to provide anonymous communication in a way similar to Onion Routing but without a public key infrastructure.
Estimations of climate sensitivity based on top-of-atmosphere radiation imbalance

Abstract. Large climate feedback uncertainties limit the accuracy in predicting the response of the Earth's climate to the increase of CO2 concentration within the atmosphere. This study explores a potential to reduce uncertainties in climate sensitivity estimations using energy balance analysis, especially top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation imbalance. The time-scales studied generally cover from decade to century, that is, middle-range climate sensitivity is considered, which is directly related to the climate issue caused by atmospheric CO2 change. The significant difference between current analysis and previous energy balance models is that the current study targets at the boundary condition problem instead of solving the initial condition problem. Additionally, climate system memory and deep ocean heat transport are considered. The climate feedbacks are obtained based on the constraints of the TOA radiation imbalance and surface temperature measurements of the present climate. In this study, the TOA imbalance value of 0.85 W/m2 is used. Note that this imbalance value has large uncertainties. Based on this value, a positive climate feedback with a feedback coefficient ranging from −1.3 to −1.0 W/m2/K is found. The range of feedback coefficient is determined by climate system memory. The longer the memory, the stronger the positive feedback. The estimated time constant of the climate is large (70~120 years) mainly owing to the deep ocean heat transport, implying that the system may be not in an equilibrium state under the external forcing during the industrial era. For the doubled-CO2 climate (or 3.7 W/m2 forcing), the estimated global warming would be 3.1 K if the current estimate of 0.85 W/m2 TOA net radiative heating could be confirmed. With accurate long-term measurements of TOA radiation, the analysis method suggested by this study provides a great potential in the estimations of middle-range climate sensitivity.
The inﬂuence of understanding and having choice on children’s prosocial behavior

Humans are remarkable moral evaluators. However, between infancy and the preschool-age, children move from merely evaluating the world in terms of moral (“good”/“bad”) terms to acting upon it in meaningful (prosocial and antisocial) ways. We argue that childrens developing understanding and experience of choice and agency has profound behavioral consequences for this development in prosocial behavior. During the preschool age, children begin to explicitly reﬂect on their own actions and alternative actions (i
Activity Profile of Defense Related Enzymes in Pearl Millet Against Downy Mildew ( Sclerospora graminicola)

The activity profile of defense related enzymes viz., peroxidase, polyphenol oxidase, catalase, βββββ -1, 3 glucanase and phenylalanine ammonia-lase (PAL) with and without inoculation of pathogen Sclerospora graminicola (Sacc.) were evaluated in downy mildew resistant and susceptible parents and the crosses (RxS, SxR, RxR) of the pearl millet. The activity of all these enzymes significantly increased post inoculation of the seedlings suggesting induction of the defense response. The level of induction in these enzymes was significantly higher in resistant parent and also in crosses involving resistant genotype as a male parent. The pattern of inheritance as observed in the present investigation is indicative of a dominant mode of inheritance. When the data was analyzed and compared with the field data of downy mildew incidence it was also noticed that SxR crosses recorded comparatively low incidence of downy mildew.
Autophagy Activated by Bluetongue Virus Infection Plays a Positive Role in Its Replication

Bluetongue virus (BTV) is an important pathogen of wild and domestic ruminants. Despite extensive study in recent decades, the interplay between BTV and host cells is not clearly understood. Autophagy as a cellular adaptive response plays a part in many viral infections. In our study, we found that BTV1 infection triggers the complete autophagic process in host cells, as demonstrated by the appearance of obvious double-membrane autophagosome-like vesicles, GFP-LC3 dots accumulation, the conversion of LC3-I to LC3-II and increased levels of autophagic flux in BSR cells (baby hamster kidney cell clones) and primary lamb lingual epithelial cells upon BTV1 infection. Moreover, the results of a UV-inactivated BTV1 infection assay suggested that the induction of autophagy was dependent on BTV1 replication. Therefore, we investigated the role of autophagy in BTV1 replication. The inhibition of autophagy by pharmacological inhibitors (3-MA, CQ) and RNA interference (siBeclin1) significantly decreased viral protein synthesis and virus yields. In contrast, treating BSR cells with rapamycin, an inducer of autophagy, promoted viral protein expression and the production of infectious BTV1. These findings lead us to conclude that autophagy is activated by BTV1 and contributes to its replication, and provide novel insights into BTV-host interactions.
Why Not Grab a Free Lunch? Mining Large Corpora for Parallel Sentences to Improve Translation Modeling

It is well known that the output quality of statistical machine translation (SMT) systems increases with more training data. To obtain more parallel text for translation modeling, researchers have turned to the web to mine parallel sentences, but most previous approaches have avoided the difficult problem of pairwise similarity on cross-lingual documents and instead rely on heuristics. In contrast, we confront this challenge head on using the MapReduce framework. On a modest cluster, our scalable end-to-end processing pipeline was able to automatically gather 5.8m parallel sentence pairs from English and German Wikipedia. Augmenting existing bitext with these data yielded significant improvements over a state-of-the-art baseline (2.39 BLEU points in the best case).
SULZBERGER ON ALLERGY AND IMMUNOLOGY: THE YOUNG LION RETURNS TO NEW YORK

In the late 192O's, Sulzberger returned to New York from his (raining abroad into a seething intellectual ferment of allergists and immunologists struggling with the rapidly unfolding concept of allergy and hypersensitivity. The young lion was ready—^with an enormous intellect, a mind as sharp as a prosector's knife and a tongue to match, and the special advantage of training with the pioneer geniuses of dermatologic allergy, Joseph ladassohn and Bruno Bloch. These were tuniLiltuous times and his writings and the discussions afterward reflected the excitement and confusion that existed. What follows is a historical review of his publications in scientific journals on the subjects of allergy and immunology. In it, I wish to illuminate and assess Sulzberger's unique role in the marriage of allergy to dermatology and the evolution of their offspring, the subspecialty of immunodermntology. Of his 134 papers published before 1944, 99 were devoted to various aspects of allergy and immunology. They contain the essence of his famous book, Dermatologic Allergy, published in 1940. To simplify the discussion I have divided the paper into 4 major topics, (1) atopic dermatitis, (2) allergy of infection, (3) clinical contact dermatitis and (4) experimental contact dermatitis with some minor
The C-terminal Domain Is the Primary Determinant of Histone H1 Binding to Chromatin in Vivo*

We have used a combination of kinetic measurements and targeted mutations to show that the C-terminal domain is required for high-affinity binding of histone H1 to chromatin, and phosphorylations can disrupt binding by affecting the secondary structure of the C terminus. By measuring the fluorescence recovery after photo-bleaching profiles of green fluorescent protein-histone H1 proteins in living cells, we find that the deletion of the N terminus only modestly reduces binding affinity. Deletion of the C terminus, however, almost completely eliminates histone H1.1 binding. Specific mutations of the C-terminal domain identified Thr-152 and Ser-183 as novel regulatory switches that control the binding of histone H1.1 in vivo. It is remarkable that the single amino acid substitution of Thr-152 with glutamic acid was almost as effective as the truncation of the C terminus to amino acid 151 in destabilizing histone H1.1 binding in vivo. We found that modifications to the C terminus can affect histone H1 binding dramatically but have little or no influence on the charge distribution or the overall net charge of this domain. A comparison of individual point mutations and deletion mutants, when reviewed collectively, cannot be reconciled with simple charge-dependent mechanisms of C-terminal domain function of linker histones.
Semantic Medical Web: A Hyponym Based Entailment Rules Formedical Web Page Classification

Lack of large semantic variability patterns is a major obstacle to progress in semantic inferencefor medical data available online. Prominent inference knowledge representation includes entailment rules. Large-scale inference based knowledge systems have initiatedwork on automatic paraphrase and entailment rules acquisition. This work identifiesHypernym of medical terms and clubs them with entailment rule acquisition. A hyponym word tree in the document is created and used with the dependency tree. Features extraction is achieved through weighted TF-IDF where word weight is computed based on hyponyms present in a radix tree. The proposed system was evaluated using k-Nearest neighbour (kNN) algorithm with good results.
Low complexity time-domain channel and delay spread estimation for OFDM systems

A low complexity time-domain channel estimation scheme for OFDM systems is presented. It uses a training symbol (preamble) to estimate the channel impulse response (CIR) in the presence of timing synchronization errors. Its computational complexity is much lower than that of the popular MMSE technique and this can be further reduced if there is prior knowledge of the channel delay spread. Consequently, channel delay spread estimation is also addressed by using threshold setting on the optimized CIR. Computer simulations show that the proposed scheme achieves near-ideal accuracy in quasi-static channels.