Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Numerical modeling of the inception, morphology and radio signals of sprites produced by lightning discharges with positive and negative polarity

Sprites are large-scale mesospheric gas discharges produced by intense cloud-toground lightning discharges in the underlying thunderstorms. These luminous discharges often exhibit a brief descending high-altitude diffuse glow in the shape of a pancake with diameters up to ∼80 km near ∼75 km altitude, referred to as a sprite halo, and develop into fine-structured filaments with diameters up to several hundred meters in the altitude range of ∼40 to ∼90 km, commonly referred to as sprite streamers. Since the first video documentation, sprites have attracted extensive research interest in the last two decades, primarily due to their potential as natural resources for the study of streamer physics, their great impact on the chemistry in the upper atmosphere, and their ability to perturb the subionospheric radio signals. However, up to date, the inception mechanism of sprite streamers, the origin of different sprite morphology, the lightning polarity asymmetry in producing sprites, and the characteristics of the electromagnetic radiation from sprites remain outstanding issues to be resolved. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the above-mentioned outstanding issues through numerical modeling of sprite halos and sprite streamers using a previously introduced plasma fluid model and some newly developed models and simulation techniques. The first outstanding issue that is addressed by this dissertation is the inception mechanism of sprite streamers. Although the streamer nature of sprites has been explained theoretically and confirmed experimentally, how these filamentary plasmas are initiated in the lower ionosphere has not yet been well understood, as many spatial and temporal features of sprites in their initial stage cannot be explained by the modeling studies in the existing literature. To better understand the initiation of sprite streamers, a plasma fluid model, an improved avalanche-to-streamer transition criterion, and a ‘two-step’ technique are used to numerically simulate the initiation of sprite streamers from electron density inhomogeneities during the development of a sprite halo. The reported modeling results suggest an original
Response of crop yields to climate trends since 1980 in China

We used improved datasets on both climate and crop production to investigate climate trends during the crop growing period and their impacts on yields of major crops (rice, wheat, maize and soybean) in China by county, during 1980-2008. We found clear regional climate trends during this period, particularly for temperature. Such trends have had measurable impacts on crop yields, with a distinct spatial pattern. For the entire country, the planting area-weighted average showed that climate trends from 1980-2008 reduced wheat, maize and soybean yields by 1.27, 1.73 and 0.41%, respectively, while increasing rice yields by 0.56%. As a result, climate trends as a whole reduced wheat and maize production by 3.60 x 10(5) t and 1.53 x 10(6) t, respectively, and increased rice and soybean production by 7.44 x 10(4) t and 4.16 x 10(3) t, respectively. Estimates of climate impacts are smaller than previous estimates that used different scales, datasets and methods. The particular crops and regions that have been most affected and should be priorities for adaptation are maize and wheat in arid and semi-arid areas of northern and northeast China, where droughts induced by increases in temperature and solar radiation could limit the benefits of improved thermal conditions. Climate warming decreases crop yields by accelerating crop development rate, and thus reducing crop growth duration and yield accumulation, and by increasing temperature extremes and heat stress.
Tropical deforestation and climate change

This article reviews the physical links between tropical rain forests and the atmos phere, and considers the results of studies which address the climatic impacts of deforestation. Tropical deforestation is widely believed to influence local, regional and possibly global cli mates. Although the relationship between deforestation and climate change is complex, there is a growing consensus that deforestation leads to warmer, drier climates. The consensus is based on experimental studies at the microscale and modelling studies at the global scale, sup plemented by a small number of observational studies at the local and regional scale. However, none of the local and regional studies examine both deforestation and climate change in a rigorous manner, or consider the results in the context of synoptic-scale phenomena. Conse quently, there is considerable uncertainty associated with the local and regional impacts of deforestation on the climate.
Semantic Face Segmentation Using Convolutional Neural Networks With a Supervised Attention Module

A self-attention module is often used in image segmentation tasks such as facial part segmentation. Because the self-attention module weights the features at each position using the weighted sum of features at all positions obtained by the middle layer of a convolutional neural network (CNN), the target regions for the segmentation might not be weighted sufficiently. The purpose of this study was to develop a semantic segmentation method for facial parts using a CNN with a supervised attention module that focuses on facial part enhancement. To improve the segmentation accuracy of the facial parts, we propose a new supervised attention module that can enhance features corresponding to pixels with the same class labels on input images and then incorporated it into the CNN. In this study, ResNet-FCN with skip connections was used as the baseline CNN model, and the CelebA Mask-HQ dataset was used for the network training and evaluation of the network. The mean intersection over union (IoU) and Dice index for the proposed network were greater than those for ResNet-FCN, SegNet, and PSPNet without the self-attention module, non-local neural networks with the traditional self-attention module, Segformer, and U-Segformer-Hyper with a Transformer. The proposed network achieved a high mean IoU and Dice index, and hence will be useful for segmenting facial parts.
Surface energy budget changes over Central Australia during the early 21st century drought

Satellite observations are used to investigate surface energy budget variability over central Australia during the early 21st century drought. Over a large expanse of open shrubland and savanna, surface albedo exhibits a multiyear increase of 0.06 during the drought followed by a sharp decline of 0.08 after heavy rainfall in 2010 broke the drought. The surface albedo variations are associated with increased normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) during wet years before and after the drought and decreased NDVI during drought years. During the worst drought years (2002–2009), the surface albedo increase is most pronounced in the shortwave infrared region (wavelengths between 1 and 3 µm), implying soil moisture content variability is the likely cause of the albedo changes. At interannual timescales, surface albedo variability is associated with near‐surface soil moisture, controlled by episodic precipitation events, whereas the multiyear increase in surface albedo is more closely linked with decreases in soil moisture in deeper surface layers. In addition to a higher surface albedo and lower soil moisture content during the drought, the observations show less evaporation, enhanced reflected shortwave radiation, increased upward emission of thermal infrared radiation, lower downwelling longwave (LW) radiation, reduced net total downward radiation, and higher sensible heating compared with the rainy period following the drought. Upward emission of thermal infrared radiation decreases sharply after the drought with increased surface evaporation. However, the surface energy budget changes during the worst drought years show a stronger relationship between upward emission of thermal radiation and reflected shortwave flux. During this period, evaporative fraction is extremely low and surface albedo is steadily increasing. In such extreme conditions, the surface albedo appears to modulate surface upward LW radiation, preventing it from getting too high. The change in upward LW radiation thus represents a negative feedback as it offsets further decreases in surface net radiation.
Temperature-Dependent Selection of Reaction Pathways, Reactive Species, and Products during Postsynthetic Selenization of Copper Sulfide Nanoparticles

Rational design of elaborate, multicomponent nanomaterials is important for the development of many technologies such as optoelectronic devices, photocatalysts, and ion batteries. Combination of metal chalcogenides with different anions, such as in CdS/CdSe structures, is particularly effective for creating heterojunctions with valence band offsets. Seeded growth, often coupled with cation exchange, is commonly used to create various core/shell, dot-in-rod, or multipod geometries. To augment this library of multichalcogenide structures with new geometries, we have developed a method for postsynthetic transformation of copper sulfide nanorods into several different classes of nanoheterostructures containing both copper sulfide and copper selenide. Two distinct temperature-dependent pathways allow us to select from several outcomes—rectangular, faceted Cu2–xS/Cu2–xSe core/shell structures, nanorhombuses with a Cu2–xS core, and triangular deposits of Cu2–xSe or Cu2–x(S,Se) solid solutions. These different outcomes arise due to the evolution of the molecular components in solution. At lower temperatures, slow Cu2–xS dissolution leads to concerted morphology change and Cu2–xSe deposition, while Se-anion exchange dominates at higher temperatures. We present detailed characterization of these Cu2–xS–Cu2–xSe nanoheterostructures by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), powder X-ray diffraction, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, and scanning TEM–energy-dispersive spectroscopy. Furthermore, we correlate the selenium species present in solution with the roles they play in the temperature dependence of nanoheterostructure formation by comparing the outcomes of the established reaction conditions to use of didecyl diselenide as a transformation precursor.
The Kinetics of Carrier Trap Parameters in Na8Al6Si6O24(Cl,S)2 Hackmanite

Tenebrescence has been reported to have a high potential for personal ultraviolet (UV) detection. Color changes can detect UV doses and can also be used as visual sensors for X-rays. Hackmanite is known to exhibit tenebrescence. This study investigated the kinetics of electron-trapping levels contributing to the luminescence of Na8Al6Si6O24(Cl,S)2 hackmanite using thermoluminescence. The glow curves were measured at a heating rate of 5 K/s on hackmanite irradiated with X-rays. The physical parameters of the electron-trapping levels were evaluated by analyzing them using the deconvolution, peak shape, and initial rise methods. The Na8Al6Si6O24(Cl,S)2 hackmanite had at least five trapping levels, with activation energies of 0.78, 1.12, 1.86, 1.26, and 1.18 eV and corresponding peak trap lifetimes of 3.59, 2.71, 1.47, 3.34, and 3.91 s, respectively. The estimated migration time was 15.0 s.
Effects of Traffic and Road Contextual Language on Survey Design: A Comparison of Two Emotional Intelligence Scales

Research has found that emotional intelligence (EI) can predict dangerous driving behaviors. However, EI measures have not been explicitly designed for driving and there exists a need to develop an EI scale to better measure drivers’ EI relevant to driving situations. The objective of this study was to evaluate how adapting survey language to the driving context effected the predictive power of driver EI on dangerous driving. Two surveys were conducted, where the baseline survey used the original survey language and the second rephrased every question to provide driving specific context. The two EI scales used in both surveys were the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQue) and Genos EI. Correlation and regression analyses revealed that TEIQue, compared to Genos, has a stronger ability to assess drivers’ EI and predict dangerous behaviors. Changing language to the traffic context significantly improved model fit between driving behaviors and TEIQue, but not Genos.
CoI2A: Collaborative Inter-domain and Intra-domain Alignments for Multisource Domain Adaptation

In the remote sensing information interpretation tasks, compared with collecting lots of high-quality image labels for the target domain, a large amount of labeled remote sensing data from multiple source domains are generally available without any extra cost. In this article, our work focuses on how to exploit the rich knowledge obtained from multiple source domains to guide the interpretation of the target scene, and we propose a novel framework called collaborative interdomain and intradomain alignments for multisource domain adaptation (MDA), namely CoI $^{2}\text{A}$ , in which interdomain and intradomain alignments are well collaborated to reduce the distribution divergence across sources and target. To reduce the discrepancy across sources, the intersource alignment is proposed to map multiple sources into a unified representation space. In addition, the cross-domain attention is introduced to enforce the intraclass compactness of the target. Interdomain alignment aligns each source with target domain separately with the help of cross-domain attention. As for the intradomain alignment, the multihead attentive representations of the target obtained by cross-domain attention are correlated into a unified one. The experimental results obtained from different scene classification tasks demonstrate the superiority of our model.
Thermal Preconditioning Alters the Stability of Hump-Snout Whitefish (Coregonus fluviatilis) and Its Hybrid Form, Showing Potential for Aquaculture

Simple Summary Temperature fluctuations can affect the overall stability of the biomolecules involved in biological processes in ectothermic species, which can alter the overall plasticity of the species and is manifested in their accelerated cellular aging. The aim of this work was to evaluate the effects of thermal pre-adaptation/preconditioning on whitefish forms, which holds potential for aquaculture, particularly on their stress tolerance and stress-induced senescence with the use of key cellular and molecular biomarkers: the volume of functionally active mitochondria, telomerase activity, and telomere length. We concluded that thermal preconditioning appears to be highly effective in preventing telomere attrition in cold-water whitefish, and may play a preventive role in the development of stress-resistant aquaculture. The proposed biomarkers could be used at earlier stages of ontogeny as indicators of juvenile fish’s well-being and plasticity in aquaculture or the natural environment due to climate change. Abstract One of the little-studied ways that climate warming or temperature increases in aquaculture could affect aquatic animals is through accelerated aging. This study is dedicated to understanding the principles of molecular and cellular aging in the target tissues of juvenile whitefishes (Yenisei hump-snout whitefish and its hybrid) under the influence of acute heat stress (up to 26 °C), and the effects of thermal preconditioning as pre-adaptation. Non-adapted stressed hump-snout whitefish showed a higher induction threshold for functionally active mitochondria in the blood and a decrease in telomerase activity in the liver after heat shock exposure as a long-term compensatory response to prevent telomere shortening. However, we observed heat-induced telomere shortening in non-adapted hybrids, which can be explained by a decrease in mitochondrial membrane stability and a gradual increase in energy demand, leading to a decrease in protective telomerase activity. The pre-adapted groups of hump-snout whitefish and hybrids showed a long-term or delayed response of telomerase activity to heat shock, which served as a therapeutic mechanism against telomere shortening. We concluded that the telomerase and telomere responses to thermal stress demonstrate plasticity of tolerance limits and greater stability in hump-snout whitefish compared with hybrids.
Engaging with Indigenous Australia - exploring the conditions for effective relationships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities

What we know • Without genuine engagement of Indigenous people it will be difficult to meet the targets of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). • The United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples calls on states to obtain free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous people through their representative institutions before adopting legislative or administrative measures that would affect them; it provides an international framework of best practice for engagement. • Engagement requires a relationship built on trust and integrity: it is a sustained relationship between groups of people working towards shared goals; on the spectrum of engagement, a high level of participation works better than lower levels (such as consultation) where problems are complex. • Compared with the experience in similar developed settler countries, Indigenous engagement in Australia is not based on a comprehensive legal framework or treaty that enshrines certain rights for First People, or gives First People significant levels of control: experience overseas also emphasises the importance of investing in Indigenous governance capacity and related resources. • Recent government efforts to improve coordination and whole-of-government working for engagement indicate that a need remains for: – greater flexibility in funding arrangements – approaches towards accountability systems and capacity development that reflect a whole-of-government approach – greater coordination of and authority for senior local staff – shifts in bureaucratic cultures to support collaboration. Engaging successfully with Indigenous communities requires: • an appreciation of—and the cultural competency to respond to—Indigenous history, cultures and contemporary social dynamics and to the diversity of Indigenous communities; valuing the cultural skills and knowledge of community organisations and Indigenous people • clarity about the purpose and the relevant scale for engagement, which may call for multi-layered processes: engagement needs to relate to Indigenous concepts of wellbeing • long-term relationships of trust, respect and honesty as well as accessible, ongoing communication and information • effective governance and capacity within both the Indigenous community and governments themselves • appropriate time frames (including for deliberation and responsive funding, where applicable). • Engagement involves Indigenous agency and decision making, a deliberative and negotiated process, not just information giving or consultation, and it starts early in the program or project development. • Engagement is based on Indigenous aspirations and priorities, within an Indigenous framework, process, context and time frame; that is, it is an Indigenous-driven process with government as facilitator/enabler within a framework of Indigenous self …
Biodegradability Assessment of Prickly Pear Waste–Polymer Fibers under Soil Composting

Nowadays, solving the problems associated with environmental pollution is of special interest. Therefore, in this work, the morphology and thermal and mechanical properties of extruded fibers based on polylactic acid (PLA) and poly(butylene adipate-co-terephthalate) (PBAT) added to prickly pear flour (PPF) under composting for 3 and 6 months were evaluated. The highest weight loss percentage (92 ± 7%) was obtained after 6-month degradation of the PLA/PBAT/PPF/CO/AA blend, in which PPF, canola oil (CO), and adipic acid (AA) were added. Optical and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) revealed structural changes in the fibers as composting time increased. The main changes in the absorption bands observed by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) were related to the decrease in -C=O (1740 cm−1) and -C-O (1100 cm−1) groups and at 1269 cm−1, associated with hemicellulose in the blends with PPF. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) showed an increase in the cold crystallization and melting point with degradation time, being more evident in the fibers with PPF, as well as a decrease in the mechanical properties, especially Young’s modulus. The obtained results suggest that PPF residues could promote the biodegradability of PLA/PBAT-based fiber composites.
Impaired Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex on Video Head Impulse Test in Superior Canal Dehiscence: “Spontaneous Plugging” or Endolymphatic Flow Dissipation?

Surgical plugging of the superior semicircular canal (SSC) represents an effective procedure to treat disabling symptoms in superior canal dehiscence (SCD), despite resulting in an impaired vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) gain for the SSC. On the other hand, SSC hypofunction on video head impulse test (vHIT) represents a common finding in patients with SCD exhibiting sound/pressure-induced vertigo, a low-frequency air–bone gap (ABG), and enhanced vestibular-evoked myogenic potentials (VEMPs). “Spontaneous canal plugging” has been assumed as the underlying process. Nevertheless, missing/mitigated symptoms and/or near-normal instrumental findings would be expected. An endolymphatic flow dissipation has been recently proposed as an alternative pathomechanism for SSC VOR gain reduction in SCD. We aimed to shed light on this debate by comparing instrumental findings from 46 ears of 44 patients with SCD exhibiting SSC hypofunction with post-operative data from 10 ears of 10 patients with SCD who underwent surgical plugging. While no difference in SSC VOR gain values was found between the two groups (p = 0.199), operated ears developed a posterior canal hypofunction (p = 0.002). Moreover, both ABG values (p = 0.012) and cervical/ocular VEMP amplitudes (p < 0.001) were significantly higher and VEMP thresholds were significantly lower (p < 0.001) in ears with SCD compared to operated ears. According to our data, canal VOR gain reduction in SCD should be considered as an additional sign of a third window mechanism, likely due to an endolymphatic flow dissipation.
Cost‐effectiveness of a decentralized, community‐based “one‐stop‐shop” hepatitis C testing and treatment program in Yangon, Myanmar

The availability of direct‐acting antiviral (DAA) treatment and point‐of‐care diagnostic testing has made hepatitis C (HCV) elimination possible even in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs); however, testing and treatment costs remain a barrier. We estimated the cost and cost‐effectiveness of a decentralized community‐based HCV testing and treatment program (CT2) in Myanmar.
Spatial Correlation of Tuberculosis (TB) Incidents to the MODIS LST Biophysical Signature of African Countries

Monthly night averaged land surface temperature (LST) imagery is analyzed throughout a year-period (2008), in an attempt to capture the seasonal variability of LST, and parametrically represent and classify the African Countries. Segmentation outlined in an objective way the temporal variation of LST during the 2008, grouped in 9 zones with distinct spatial distribution, each one presenting a distinct annual variation of monthly LST. Tuberculosis incidence per county for the year 2008 was correlated to the percentage areal occurrence of the 9 biophysical zones. More specifically statistical analysis indicates that there is an increase of TB-IR per country if the percent occurrence of either zone 4 or zone 6 is increased. Such evidence was already known, but it is the first time that this correlation was quantified on the basis of high resolution LST data comparable to the previous studies that were based on the very sparse meteorological stations network. The MODIS multi- temporal LST data can assist the modeling of the disease risk and disease spatial distribution as well as environmental modeling, climatic change studies at moderate resolution/country level scale.