Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews a Neural Circuit Encoding Sexual Preference in Humans

Sexual preference determines mate choice for reproduction and hence guarantees conservation of species in mammals. Despite this fundamental role in human behavior, current knowledge on its target-specific neurofunctional substrate is based on lesion studies and therefore limited. We used meta-analytic remodeling of neuroimaging data from 364 human subjects with diverse sexual interests during sexual stimulation to quantify neural regions associated with sexual preference manipulations. We found that sexual preference is encoded by four phylogenetically old, subcortical brain structures. More specifically , sexual preference is controlled by the anterior and preoptic area of the hypothalamus, the anterior and mediodorsal thalamus, the septal area, and the perirhinal parahippocampus including the dentate gyrus. In contrast, sexual non-preference is regulated by the substantia innominata. We anticipate the identification of a core neural circuit for sexual preferences to be a starting point for further sophisticated investigations into the neural principles of sexual behavior and particularly of its aberrations.
Temporal and Spatial Variations of Finfish Bycatch of Cutlassfish Trawl in Bushehr and Hormozgan Marine Waters, the Northern Persian Gulf

The spatial and temporal variations of finfish bycatch assemblage cutlassfish trawl were compared in two fishing areas (Hormozgan and Bushehr). Data were collected on board of commercial vessels in the fishing grounds of Trichiurus lepturus in Bushehr and Hormozgan marine waters between early May 2010 to late November, 2010. There was a significant difference in the bycatch assemblages between Bushehr and Hormozgan fishing grounds. SIMPER showed that six species contributed as much as 65% of the biomass of the bycatch assemblages between two fishing areas as follows: Nemipterus japonicus (30.5%), Ilisha melastoma (12.5%), Saurida tumbil (8.5%), Argyrops spinifer (6%), Dasyatis bennetti (4.5%) and Arius thalassinus (4%). Differences appeared for the temporal structures of bycatch assemblage in fishing grounds of Bushehr. SIMPER also showed eight species contributed to as much as 69.3% of the dissimilarity of the biomass of the bycatch assemblages between fishing seasons. These species were S. tumbil (17.3%), I. melastoma (16.3%), N. japonicus (13.3%), Carangoides malabaricus (17.2%), Rachycentron canadun (6.3%), Upeneus sundaicus (3.5%) D. bennetti (3.5%) and Epinephelus coioides (3.2%).
3D models related to the publication: A heavyweight early whale pushes the boundaries of vertebrate morphology

The present 3D Dataset contains the 3D models analyzed in Bianucci et al. 2023, A heavyweight early whale pushes the boundaries of vertebrate morphology, Nature. These include bones of the holotype of new species Perucetus colossus (MUSM 3248), as well as the articulated skeleton of Cynthiacetus peruvianus (holotype, MNHN.F.PRU10). The latter was used to estimate the total skeleton volume of P. colossus .
Electrophysiological and Behavioral Responses of Batocera horsfieldi Hope to Volatiles from Pistacia chinensis Bunge

Simple Summary Batocera horsfieldi Hope (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) has a wide host range, attacking nearly 100 tree species, and has become a devastating native forestry pest in China. Studies of various phytophagous insect attractants have shown that plant volatiles can be used as effective bait while minimizing the cost and labor of manual control. In this study, we searched for key plant-derived volatile attractants for B. horsfieldi by extracting and evaluating volatile components of host plants using beetle electrophysiological responses and Y-tube behavioral experiments. We provide a theoretical framework for the green control of the beetle. Abstract Following infestation by phytophagous insects, changes in the composition and relative proportion of volatile components emitted by plants may be observed. Some phytophagous insects can accurately identify these compounds to locate suitable host plants. We investigated whether herbivore-induced plant volatiles (HIPVs) generated by herbivory on Pistacia chinensis Bunge (Sapindales: Aceraceae) might be semiochemicals for the host location of Batocera horsfieldi Hope (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae). We performed two-choice bioassays (indoor darkroom, inside cages) on plants damaged by adult feeding and intact control plants. Volatiles from these plants were then collected and identified, and the response of adult antennae to these compounds was tested via electroantennography (EAG). The behavioral responses of B. horsfieldi to these compounds were finally assessed using a Y-tube olfactometer. Host plant choice tests show that B. horsfieldi prefers feeding-damaged P. chinensis over healthy trees. In total, 15 compounds were collected from healthy and feeding-damaged P. chinensis, 10 of which were shared in both healthy and feeding-damaged P. chinensis, among which there were significant differences in the quantities of five terpenes, including α-pinene, β-pinene, α-phellandrene, D-limonene, and β-ocimene. In EAG assays, the antennae of B. horsfieldi adults responded strongly to (Z)-3-hexen-1-ol, β-ocimene, 3-carene, γ-terpinene, D-limonene, myrcene, and α-phellandrene. The antennae of B. horsfieldi adults responded in a dose–response manner to these compounds. Y-tube behavioral experiments showed that four compounds attracted mated females ((Z)-3-hexen-1-ol, β-ocimene, 3-carene, and α-phellandrene), two compounds ((Z)-3-hexen-1-ol and α-phellandrene) attracted males, and adults of both sexes avoided D-limonene. Feeding bioassays showed that (Z)-3-hexen-1-ol and β-ocimene could promote the feeding of B. horsfieldi and that D-limonene inhibited this response. These results could provide a theoretical basis for developing attractants or repellents for B. horsfieldi.
EFFECT OF HUMAN FACTORS ON OCCURRENCE OF FLOOD AND TORRENT EVENTS IN BATMAN, SOUTHEASTERN TURKEY

The purpose of this study is to emphasize the effect of human factors on the occurrence, frequency and incidence rate of floods experienced in Batman, SE Turkey. Batman is a mediumsized industrial city which has de veloped rapidly due to its petroleum reserves. It became a province in 1990. Rapid population growth due to labor migration and migrations from rural areas has resulted in unplanned development of the city. Important problems have come about as a result of this rapid and unplanned development, including an increase in the frequency and incidence rate of flood and torrent events. 22 out of 39 districts in the city were variously affected by the flood and torrent events experienced in the autumn of 2006. In this regard, Batman city is a high risk area with respect to hydrography. Improper construction practices, illegal housing and unplanned urbanization are also effective on the escalation of flood and torrent events, sometimes to catastrophic levels, which occur in Batman due to the physicalgeographical characteristics of the Basin of Iluh Creek. In order to reveal the effect of these factors, observations were made in the city and household interview surveys were conducted in the districts affected by the flood event. The results of the observations and surveys suggest that human actions are directly effective on the catastrophic escalation of flood and torrent events in Batman city, affecting broad areas and thus causing great loss of life and property.
Design and Implementation of Integrated Circuits Using Open Source Tools and SKY130 Free PDK

The paper presents recent initiatives in the field of open source tools as well as open source PDKs. We also describe in details our three designs: (1) a fully digital IP core for an air coupled ultrasonic wavefront reconstruction, (2) a mixed signal circuit for smart image processing, (3) three-level flying capacitor DC-DC buck converter for high-efficiency energy power sources in CubeSat applications. All ideas were developed using open source tools, a SKY130 free PDK and taped-out under the new alliance between Google and Skywater, where anyone can access a free silicon, in SKY130 and GF180 nodes, under open source license agreement. Our work also describes some upcoming opportunities related to integrated circuits development under the open source paradigm.
Design and application of an environmental attitudes scale in primary education / Diseño y aplicación de una escala de actitudes hacia el medio ambiente en educación primaria

Abstract This research designs and applies an environmental attitudes scale for primary education. The pilot study, developed initially, describes the process used when designing a scale comprising 20 items applied to a sample of 49 children aged 10 to 12. In a second study, this instrument is then applied to a sample of 225 pupils from different locations around Spain. The definitive scale was made up of a total of 14 items, displaying acceptable reliability and pointing to the existence of a two-dimensional structure, labelling these two dimensions eco-affinity and eco-knowledge, respectively. An inverse significant correlation was observed between age and the dimension of eco-knowledge. No significant differences were found in the pro-environmental profile of the pupils with regard to residential environment, although such differences were noted in the dimension of eco-affinity with regard to gender, and for eco-knowledge with regard to reported behaviour of separating out waste for recycling. This paper discusses some of the implications for environmental education.
EngagedScholarship@CSU EngagedScholarship@CSU

Considerable experimental evidence indicates that the primary, nonmotile cilium is a mechanosensory organelle in several epithelial cell types. As the relationship between cellular responses and nature and magnitude of applied forces is not well understood, we have investigated the effects of exposure of monolayers of renal collecting duct chief cells to orbital shaking and quantiﬁed the forces incident on cilia. An exposure of 24 h of these cells to orbital shaking resulted in a decrease of amiloride-sensitive sodium current by ; 60% and ciliary length by ; 30%. The sensitivity of the sodium current to shaking was dependent on intact cilia. The drag force on cilia due to induced ﬂuid ﬂow during orbital shaking was estimated at maximally 5.2 3
Timing, slip rate, displacement and cooling history of the Mykonos detachment footwall, Cyclades, Greece, and implications for the opening of the Aegean Sea basin

We constrain the slip and cooling history of the Mykonos detachment footwall using thermochronometry. A U–Pb zircon age of 13.5 ± 0.3 Ma dates intrusion of the Mykonos monzogranite. 40Ar/39Ar hornblende and biotite ages from the monzogranite are 12.7 ± 0.6 Ma and 10.9 ± 0.6 Ma, whereas zircon and apatite fission-track ages range from 13 ± 0.8 Ma to 10.7 ± 0.8 Ma and 12.5 ± 2.2 Ma to 10.5 ± 1.8 Ma. (U–Th)/He ages range from 13.6 ± 0.6 Ma to 9.0 ± 0.7 Ma for zircon and 11.1 ± 0.5 Ma to 8.9 ± 0.4 Ma for apatite. The ages in part overlap within 2σ errors and together with the long apatite fission-track lengths (>14 μm) support rapid cooling at rates >100 °C Ma−1. The low-temperature thermochronometric ages decrease east-northeastwards in the direction of hanging-wall transport on the Mykonos detachment. Age–distance relationships show that the Mykonos detachment slipped at an average rate of 6.0 +9.2/−2.4 km Ma−1 causing c. 30 km of offset and c. 12 km of exhumation. This result indicates that Miocene low-angle normal faulting was not important for the exhumation of the Cycladic blueschist unit. The opening of the Aegean Sea basin in the Miocene was controlled by a few large-magnitude low-angle normal faults.
Basaltic magmatism and the geodynamics of the East African Rift System

Abstract The major and trace element and radiogenic isotope compositions of basalts from throughout the East African rift system are reviewed in the context of constraints from previous geophysical studies. The data indicate the presence of two mantle plumes, the East African and Afar plumes, which dynamically support the East African and Ethiopian plateaus. Rifting across the plateaus is accompanied by the generation of large volumes of basaltic magma and associated evolved derivatives. Relatively few mafic magmas have an unambiguous Afar mantle plume signature, notably the MgO-rich picrites and ankaramites from the 29–31 Ma Ethiopian traps, and the most recent basalts (<5 Ma) from Afar. The Eocene Amaro basalts from southern Ethiopia also have a plume source but their lower source temperatures and isotopic characteristics are distinct from those of Afar. The remaining basalts from the Ethiopian rift, and throughout the Kenya and Western rifts, have a lithospheric source region as reflected in both radiogenic isotope and trace element characteristics. The Amaro basalts are suggested as the first manifestations of magmatism from the East African plume; subsequent magmatic activity being represented by progressively younger episodes further south through Turkana, Kenya and into Northern. Tanzania, as the African plate migrated north. Despite their clear lithospheric characteristics, U-series data on geologically recent basalts from the axis of the Kenya rift show that they were generated in a dynamic melting regime. Melting is effected when lithospheric mantle heats up and becomes incorporated into the convecting mantle, hence leading to greater degrees of lithospheric thinning than are indicated by extension across individual rift basins.
5. COMPOSITION AND PROVENANCE OF TURBIDITE SAND AND HEMIPELAGIC MUD IN NORTHWESTERN CASCADIA BASIN 1

Sequences of late Pliocene to Holocene sediment lap onto juvenile igneous crust within 20 km of the Juan de Fuca Ridge in northwestern Cascadia Basin, Pacific Ocean. The detrital modes of turbidite sands do not vary significantly within or among sites drilled during Leg 168 of the Ocean Drilling Program. Average values of total quartz, total feldspar, and unstable lithic fragments are Q = 35, F = 35, and L = 30. Average values of monocrystalline quartz, plagioclase, and K-feldspar are Q m = 46, P = 49, and K = 5, and the average detrital modes of polycrystalline quartz, volcanic-rock fragments, and sedimentary-rock plus metamorphic-rock fragments are Q p = 16, L v = 43, and L sm = 41. Likely source areas include the Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island; sediment transport was focused primarily through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Juan de Fuca Channel, Vancouver Valley, and Nitinat Valley. Relative abundance of clay minerals (<2-µm-size fraction) fluctuate erratically with depth, stratigraphic age, and sediment type (mud vs. turbidite matrix). Mineral abundance in mud samples are 0%–35% smectite (mean = 8%), 18%–59% illite (mean = 40%), and 29%–78% chlorite + kaolinite (mean = 52%). We attribute the relatively low content of smectite to rapid mechanical weathering of polymictic source terrains, with little or no input of volcanic detritus from the Columbia River. The scatter in clay mineralogy probably was caused by converging of surface currents, turbidity currents, and near-bottom nepheloid clouds from several directions, as well as subtle changes in glacial vs. interglacial weathering products.
Opportunity Costs Surrounding Exercise and Dietary Behaviors: Quantifying Trade-offs Between Commuting Time and Health-Related Activities

An emerging literature empirically connects obesity with urban sprawl, with an increasing interest in identifying causal pathways. I focus on the built environment's effect on agents' constraints, and hypothesize that households’ spatial isolation increases requisite travel time which limits leisure time available as inputs to health production. I analyze cross-sectional data from the American Time Use Survey (2003-2008) to quantify decreases in health-related activity participation due to commuting and labor time. I examine the data for associations between commute length and time spent in exercising, food preparation, eating, and sleeping behaviors. I augment the data with activity strenuousness scores to test whether physically-draining commutes induce lower-intensity activity substitutions. I find small but highly significant associations consistent with the conjecture that commuting time cost impacts health-promoting behaviors. Each minute spent commuting is associated with a 0.0257 minute exercise time reduction, a 0.0387 minute food preparation time reduction, and a 0.2205 minute sleep time reduction. I find trade-offs due to commuting often exceed trade-offs due to labor time on a per-minute basis. Longer commutes are also associated with an increased likelihood of non-grocery food purchases and substitution into lower intensity exercise activities. Recognizing self-selection bias, I also utilize daily metropolitan traffic accidents as instruments which exogenously influence commute length on that day.
Attention Erasing and Instance Sampling for Weakly Supervised Object Detection

Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) trains detectors by only weak labels, aiming to save the burden of expensive bounding box-level annotations. Most previous efforts formulate WSOD as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem, which is prone to detect discriminative object parts and miss object instances. This article proposes an attention erasing and instance sampling (AE-IS) approach to alleviate the above problems. Concretely, we first apply an attention erasing (AE) scheme to the WSOD model to hide the most discriminative region for capturing the integral extent of the object. Then, we employ an intersection-over-union (IoU)-balanced sampling component toward mining more object instances. Moreover, an instance reweighted loss (IRL) is designed to learn a larger portion of object instances, thereby further enhancing the performance of the object detector. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the baseline approach by great margins and achieves competitive performance with the state-of-the-art algorithms on the NWPU VHR-10.v2 (72.0% mAP, 76.1% CorLoc) and DIOR (29.1% mAP, 55.9% CorLoc) datasets. The source code will be available at https://github.com/XuanX/AE-IS.
Finding the Best Techniques for Predicting Term Deposit Subscriptions (Case Study UCI Machine Learning Dataset)

Knowing a lot about attributes, such as bank client data, marketing campaigns, social and economic context, and so on, is necessary to predict which bank customers are likely to sign up for time deposits. The direct marketing campaigns dataset for the bank institution was made available by the UCI machine learning repository. This dataset had previously been used in studies to forecast customers who would sign up for time deposits, but the outcomes of the two studies were different. The purpose of this study is to determine which machine learning methods are most effective for predicting customers who will sign up for time deposits. In this study, researchers used machine learning methods like random forests, K-nearest neighbors, decision trees, naive bayes, logistic regression, SVM, and XGBoost to uncover the truth. Results showed that XGBoost had the highest accuracy (91.73%), followed by the DT classifier (88.79%), LR classifier (91.2%), NB classifier (84.78%), KNN classifier (90.6%), SVM (89.6%), and XGBoost (91.44%).
Equivalent linear earthquake site characterization of layered soil deposits at Shakardarra and Muzaffarabad

The research work relates with the study of site characterization of layered soils. A linear approach is introduced that predicts response of soils against input motions. The equivalent linear damping ratio and normalized shear modulus for different soils are used to test the adequacy of response analysis. For this, two different sites Shakardarra (SHD) and Muzaffarabad (MUZ) on the basis of deposition histories and intensities are selected. Based on the available borehole logs, velocity profiles and geotechnical data of CPT and SPT test the response models are prepared. The equivalent linear site response analysis program (EERA) has been used for this purpose. Two input strong motions of 0.07 g and 0.17 g of vertical component are introduced as input. The soil profiles are prepared using available set of data by neglecting the effect of water depth. The sites were test for maximum eight iterations and maximum fundamental frequency of 50 Hz for MUZ site and 100 Hz for SHD site is used to analyze the amplification ratio and response spectra against input motion (Inside and outcrop). Site amplification of 1.12-2.36 (clayey sand), 4.13-16.04 (sandy gravel), 1.13-7.15 (dry sand) and 1.24-5.87, is predicted by EERA at (SHD) site for acceleration of 0.17g and 0.007g respectively. While at Muzaffarabad (MUZ) site amplification of 12.189 (gravel, sand and silty clay) for acceleration of 0.17g and 2.224 (gravel, sand and silty clay) is predicted by EERA for acceleration of 0.07g. The results are beneficial for both the researchers and engineers alike.
Free-form Conversation with Human and Symbolic Avatars in Mixed Reality

The integration of large language models and mixed reality technologies has enabled users to engage in free-form conversations with virtual agents across different “realities”. However, if and how the agent’s visual representation, especially when combined with mixed reality environments, will affect the conversation content or user experience is not yet fully understood. In this work, we design and conduct a user study involving two types of visual representations (a human avatar and a symbolic avatar) and two mixed reality environments (virtual reality and augmented reality), facilitating a free-form conversation experience with GPT-3 powered agents. We found evidence that the use of virtual or augmented realities can influence conversation content. Users chatting with avatars in virtual reality made significantly more references to the location or the space, suggesting they tended to perceive conversations as occurring in the agent’s space, whereas the physical AR environment was perhaps more perceived as the user’s space. Conversations with the human avatar improve user recall of the conversation, even though there is no evidence of increased information extracted during the conversation. These observations and our analysis of post-study questionnaires suggest that human avatars can positively impact user memory and experience. We hope our findings and the open-source implementation will help facilitate future research on free-form conversational agents in mixed reality.