Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intermuscular coherence of plantar and dorsiflexor muscles in older adults with Parkinson’s disease and age-matched controls during bipedal and unipedal stance

Introduction Postural instability increases with age and is exacerbated in neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease (PD). Reducing the base of support from bipedal to unipedal stance increases center of pressure (CoP) parameters and intermuscular coherence in lower-leg muscles of healthy older adults. To further develop an understanding of postural control in an altered state of neurological impairment, we explored intermuscular coherence in lower-leg muscles and CoP displacement in older adults with PD. Methods This study measured surface EMG from the medial (MG) and lateral (LG) gastrocnemii, soleus (SOL), and tibialis anterior (TA), and examined EMG amplitude and intermuscular coherence during bipedal and unipedal stance on a force plate with firm (no foam) and compliant (standing on foam) surface conditions in nine older adults with PD (70±5 years, 6 females) and 8 age-matched non-Parkinsonian older adults (5 females). Intermuscular coherence was analyzed between agonist-agonist and agonist-antagonist muscle pairs in the alpha (8-13 Hz) and beta (15-35 Hz) frequency bands. Results CoP parameters increased from bipedal to unipedal stance in both groups (p < 0.01), but did not increase from the firm to compliant surface condition (p > 0.05). During unipedal stance, CoP path length was shorter in older adults with PD (2027.9 ± 1074.1 mm) compared to controls (3128.5 ± 1198.7 mm) (p < 0.01). Alpha and beta agonist-agonist and agonist-antagonist coherence increased by 28% from bipedal to unipedal stance (p > 0.05), but did not differ between older adults with PD (0.09 ± 0.07) and controls (0.08 ± 0.05) (p > 0.05). The older adults with PD also had greater normalized EMG amplitude of the LG (63.5 ± 31.7%) and TA (60.6 ± 38.4%) during the balance tasks (p > 0.05) than the non-Parkinsonian counterparts. Discussion Older adults with PD had shorter path lengths during unipedal stance and required greater muscle activation than older adults without PD to perform the tasks, but intermuscular coherence did not differ between the groups. This may be attributable to their early disease stage and high motor function.
Learner migration at secondary schools in South Africa: Benefits and challenges

Learner migration, which occurs worldwide, is the voluntary and intentional movement of learners from 1 school to another school of their choice in order to secure better learning opportunities. The study reported on here contributes to the literature on learner migration by focusing on the inequalities caused by racism, benefits and challenges that result from learner migration at selected secondary schools across the 9 provinces of South Africa. Bronfenbrenner's bio-ecological theory was used as the theoretical framework to inform a qualitative research inquiry. A purposeful sample of 9 secondary school principals, 27 secondary school learners who migrated and 27 parents of learners who migrated were drawn from across the 9 provinces. Data were collected through semi-structured individual interviews with principals and focus-group interviews with parents and learners. The findings indicate that learner migration provides benefits to learners and their parents through effective principal leadership; sound discipline; quality school facilities and resources; and improved educational opportunities at the receiving schools. However, learner migration is accompanied by several challenges: principals at receiving schools face added administrative and managerial pressure; parents of learners who migrate encounter added financial burdens; and learners who migrate often face arduous travel to and from the receiving school and, in some cases, an intolerant atmosphere at the receiving schools. It is concluded that learner migration is a complex phenomenon requiring effective holistic management.
Optimized Design of Man-machine Based on DELMIA and MTM for Die-lip Precision Turning

A comprehensive set of correction methods is proposed for the unreasonable human-machine operation problems in the manufacturing process of die-lip finishing turning. Firstly, video analysis and action decomposition of the current situation of the operation procedure of die-lip finishing turning are conducted, and it is found that the operation process is unreasonable and the action posture is not standardized; secondly, the action is evaluated by simulation analysis based on RULA and NIOSH analysis method in DELMIA, and it is found that the labor load of workers is high and the comfort is low, and there is a risk of damage; finally, the ergonomics and MTMUAS methods are used to optimize the die-lip finishing turning. Finally, the ergonomics and MTM-UAS methods were used to optimize the operation process and formulate standard working hours, and the perfected action was evaluated by simulation again. Comparing the before and after analysis and evaluation results, we obtain that the utilization rate of workers increased from 43.8 to 49.9%, and the utilization rate of machines and equipment increased from 54.7 to 62.3%. The result shows a significant improvement in human-machine efficiency and a significant reduction in the intensity of work and risk of physical damage caused by the improper posture of workers.
Static Security Assessment of Large Power Systems Under Contingency Cases

The rapid expansion of the power system network, increasing power demand and integration of renewable energy resources have made the power system vulnerable to outages. A power system should be in a secure state under normal and contingency conditions. An uncontrollable and cascading outage may lead to a partial or complete blackout. To avoid these catastrophic events, security assessment of N-1 and N-2 contingencies is very essential. The static security assessment (SSA) is computationally burdensome and requires a fast calculation methodology or strategies to assess the critical contingencies and appropriate remedial actions. This paper proposes a conjugate gradient method (CGM) based strategy for efficient contingency screening and ranking. The proposed method has been tested on standard IEEE-9, 118 bus system and 246 bus Northern Regional Power Grid (NRPG) network of Power Grid Corporation of India Limited (PGCIL). Results are compared with the various linear equation (LE) solver-based methods to show the computational benefits in the N-1 and N-2 SSA of the large power system.
Contribution of Oxidative Stress, Apoptosis, Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress and Autophagy Pathways to the Ameliorative Effects of Hesperidin in NaF‐Induced Testicular Toxicity

The ameliorative effects of hesperidin (HES) on the toxicities created by sodium fluoride (NaF) in the testes tissue of rats were studied via oxidative stress, apoptosis and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress pathways. The animals were divided into five distinct groups (7 rats in each group). Group 1 was control group, group 2 received NaF‐only (600 ppm), group 3 received HES‐only (200 mg/kg bw); group 4 received NaF (600 ppm)+HES (100 mg/kg bw) and group 5 received NaF (600 ppm)+HES (200 mg/kg bw) for 14 days. NaF‐induced testes tissue damage by reducing activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT) and glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and levels of glutathione (GSH), and increasing lipid peroxidation levels. NaF treatment significantly downregulated the mRNA levels of SOD1, CAT and GPx. NaF supplementation caused apoptosis in the testes by upregulating p53, NFkB, caspase‐3, caspase‐6, caspase‐9, and Bax and downregulating Bcl‐2. Furthermore, NaF caused ER stress via increasing mRNA transcript levels of PERK, IRE1, ATF‐6 and GRP78. NaF treatment led to autophagy via upregulation of Beclin1, LC3A, LC3B and AKT2. In testes tissue, however, co‐treatment with HES at doses of 100 and 200 mg/kg significantly reduced oxidative stress, apoptosis, autophagy and ER stress. Overall, the findings of this study suggest that HES may help to reduce testes damage caused by NaF toxicity.
Effect of pressure on the zone-center phonons of PbTiO 3 and on the ferroelectric-paraelectric phase transition

The first-order Raman spectrum of single-crystalline PbTiO, in the teatragonal ferroelectric phase was studied at room temperature as a function of hydrostatic pressure up to 80 kbar. Mode Gruneisen parameters, as well as higher-order coefficients in the expansion of phonon frequency vs pressure are reported for all zone-center TO phonons, The pressure P, at which the ferroelectric-paraelectric (FE ~ PE) phase transition would occur continously can be obtained by fitting the pressure dependence of the lowest E(TO) "soft" mode frequency with a Curie-gneiss-type law. This criterion yields P, = 90 ~ 4 kbar. Limits for the first derivative of the transition temperature with pressure are similarly obtained and yield 5.2 & —d Tc/d P & 5.9 K/kbar. The information on the FE ~ PE phase transition obtained here is in good agreement with previously reported data obtained by measuring the pressure dependence of the dielectric constant in the PE phase.
Epigenetic Regulation in Breast Cancer: Insights on Epidrugs

Breast cancer remains a common cause of cancer-related death in women. Therefore, further studies are necessary for the comprehension of breast cancer and the revolution of breast cancer treatment. Cancer is a heterogeneous disease that results from epigenetic alterations in normal cells. Aberrant epigenetic regulation is strongly associated with the development of breast cancer. Current therapeutic approaches target epigenetic alterations rather than genetic mutations due to their reversibility. The formation and maintenance of epigenetic changes depend on specific enzymes, including DNA methyltransferases and histone deacetylases, which are promising targets for epigenetic-based therapy. Epidrugs target different epigenetic alterations, including DNA methylation, histone acetylation, and histone methylation, which can restore normal cellular memory in cancerous diseases. Epigenetic-targeted therapy using epidrugs has anti-tumor effects on malignancies, including breast cancer. This review focuses on the importance of epigenetic regulation and the clinical implications of epidrugs in breast cancer.
Lightweight Network-Based Surface Defect Detection Method for Steel Plates

This article proposes a lightweight YOLO-ACG detection algorithm that balances accuracy and speed, which improves on the classification errors and missed detections present in existing steel plate defect detection algorithms. To highlight the key elements of the desired area of surface flaws in steel plates, a void space convolutional pyramid pooling model is applied to the backbone network. This model improves the fusion of high- and low-level semantic information by designing feature pyramid networks with embedded spatial attention. According to the experimental findings, the suggested detection algorithm enhances the mapped value by about 4% once compared to the YOLOv4-Ghost detection algorithm on the homemade data set. Additionally, the real-time detection speed reaches about 103FPS, which is about 7FPS faster than the YOLOv4-Ghost detection algorithm, and the detection capability of steel surface defects is significantly enhanced to meet the needs of real-time detection of realistic scenes in the mobile terminal.
Variational segmentation of x-ray image with overlapped objects

Image segmentation is a classical and challenging problem in image processing and computer vision. Most of the segmentation algorithms, however, do not consider overlapped objects. Due to the special characteristics of X-ray imaging, the overlapping of objects is very commonly seen in X-ray images and needs to be carefully dealt with. In this paper, we propose a novel energy functional to solve this problem. The Euler-Lagrange equation is derived and the segmentation is converted to a front propagating problem that can be efficiently solved by level set methods. We noticed that the proposed energy functional has no unique extremum and the solution relies on the initialization. Thus, an initialization method is proposed to get satisfying results. The experiment on real data validated our proposed method.
Small-Sample Comparisons of Level and Power for Simple Goodness-of-Fit Statistics under Cluster Sampling

Abstract Monte Carlo methods were used to examine the Type I error performance of a number of goodness-of-fit statistics under cluster sampling. The study has reduced the comparison to four procedures: (a) X 2 s, the Rao-Scott Satterthwaite adjusted X 2; (b) XJ , Fay's jackknifed X 2; (c) FW , a modified Wald statistic referred to an F distribution; and (d) FX 2 c, an F-based version of the Rao-Scott -adjusted X 2, depending only on the cell “design effects” (DE) unlike the others. The statistic FX 2 c performs well provided that the coefficient of variation, a, of the eigenvalues, λ i , of the “design effects matrix” is small. In general, both X 2 s and XJ perform well even when a is not small. FW behaves reasonably well for tests of uniform probability, π = π0 = (1/k, …, 1/k)′, where k is the number of categories and π = (π1, …, πk-1)′, πk = 1 – π1 - … - πk-1, but it is sensitive to skewness in π0. The power performance of procedures (a)–(d) was also examined. Attention was focused on π0 = (1/k, …, 1/k).
The Efficacy of Focused Extracorporeal Shock Wave Therapy and Ultrasound Therapy in the Treatment of Calcar Calcanei: A Randomized Study

The prospective, simple randomized study assesses the effect of focused extracorporeal shock wave therapy (f-ESWT) on pain intensity and calcification size compared to the application of ultrasound physical therapy in treating patients with calcar calcanei. A total of 124 patients diagnosed with calcar calcanei were consecutively included in the study. The patients were divided into two groups: the experimental group (n = 62), which included the patients treated with f-ECWT, and the control group (n = 62), consisting of patients treated with the standard ultrasound therapy method. The experimental group's patients received ten therapy applications spaced seven days apart. The patients in the control group had ten ultrasound treatments on ten consecutive days over two weeks. All patients in both groups were tested using the Visual Analog Scale (VAS) to measure pain intensity before the beginning and at the end of treatment. The size of the calcification was assessed in all patients. The study hypothesizes that f-ESWT reduces the pain and the size of the calcification. Pain intensity reduction was registered in all patients. The calcification size in patients in the experimental group was reduced from the initial range of 2 mm–15 mm, to a content of 0.0 mm–6.2 mm. The calcification size in the control group ranged from 1.2 to 7.5 mm, without any change. None of the patients experienced any adverse reactions to the therapy. Patients treated with standard ultrasound therapy did not have a statistically significant reduction in the calcification size. In contrast, the patients in the experimental group treated with f-ESWT showed a substantial decrease in the calcification size.
ADAPTIVE OPTICS FEEDBACK CONTROL

This paper concentrates on the control aspects of Adaptive Optics (AO) systems and includes a prior exposure to linear control systems from the “classical” point of view. The AO control problem is presented and the well-established optimized modal gain integral control approach is discussed. The design of a controller from a modern control point of view is addressed by means of a linear quadratic Gaussian control methodology. The proposed approach emphasizes the ability of the adaptive optics loop to reject the atmospheric aberration. We derive a diagonal state space system which clearly separates the dynamics of the plant (deformable mirror & wavefront sensor) from the disturbance dynamics (atmospheric model). This representation facilitates the numerical resolution of the problem. A frequency analysis is carried out to check performance and robustness speciﬁcations of the multiple-input multiple-output feedback system. The eﬀectiveness of the approach is demonstrated through numerical experiments.
A Synthetic Biology Approach for Vaccine Candidate Design against Delta Strain of SARS-CoV-2 Revealed Disruption of Favored Codon Pair as a Better Strategy over Using Rare Codons

The SARS-CoV-2 delta variant (B.1.617.2) appeared for the first time in December 2020 and later spread worldwide. Currently available vaccines are not so efficacious in curbing the viral pathogenesis of the delta strain of COVID; therefore, the development of a safe and effective vaccine is required. In the present study, we envisaged molecular patterns in the structural genes’ spike, nucleoprotein, membrane, and envelope of the SARS-CoV-2 delta variant. The study was based on determining compositional features, dinucleotide odds ratio, synonymous codon usage, positive and negative codon contexts, rare codons, and insight into relatedness between the human host isoacceptor tRNA and preferred codons from the structural genes. We found specific patterns, including a significant abundance of T nucleotide over all other three nucleotides. The underrepresentation of GpA, GpG, CpC, and CpG dinucleotides and the overrepresentation of TpT, ApA, CpT, and TpG were observed. A preference towards ACT- (Thr), AAT- (Asn), TTT- (Phe), and TTG- (Leu) initiated codons and aversion towards CGG (Arg), CCG (Pro), and CAC (His) was present in the structural genes of the delta strain. The interaction between the host tRNA pool and preferred codons of the envisaged structural genes revealed that the virus preferred the codons for those suboptimal numbers of isoacceptor tRNA were present. We see this as a strategy adapted by the virus to keep the translation rate low to facilitate the correct folding of viral proteins. The information generated in the study helps design the attenuated vaccine candidate against the SARS-CoV-2 delta variant using a synthetic biology approach. Three strategies were tested: changing TpT to TpA, introducing rare codons, and disrupting favored codons. It found that disrupting favored codons is a better approach to reducing virus fitness and attenuating SARS-CoV-2 delta strain using structural genes.
A Radial Hybrid Estimation of Distribution Algorithm for the Truck and Trailer Routing Problem

The truck and trailer routing problem (TTRP) has been widely studied under different approaches. This is due to its practical characteristic that makes its research interesting. The TTRP continues to be attractive to developing new evolutionary algorithms. This research details a new estimation of the distribution algorithm coupled with a radial probability function from hydrogen. Continuous values are used in the solution representation, and every value indicates, in a hydrogen atom, the distance between the electron and the core. The key point is to exploit the radial probability distribution to construct offspring and to tackle the drawbacks of the estimation of distribution algorithms. Various instances and numerical experiments are presented to illustrate and validate this novel research. Based on the performance of the proposed scheme, we can make the conclusion that incorporating radial probability distributions helps to improve the estimation of distribution algorithms.
Evaluation of Quadrature Signal Generation Approaches for Single-Phase Electric Aircraft Grids

This article evaluates non-adaptive orthogonal signal generation (OSG) approaches to understand their suitability for single-phase electric aircraft (EA) grids. It is noteworthy that the OSG approaches are widely accepted filtering approaches solving the problem of accurately estimating the grid parameters, i.e., amplitude, phase, and frequency. Also, the limited information provided by the single-phase grid voltage signal can be elevated with better filtering capability such that phase-locked loops (PLLs) and frequency-locked loops (FLLs) can perform better under distorted grid voltage conditions. Keeping in view that the non-adaptive OSG approaches do not involve frequency feedback loops, thus demonstrating fast extraction of fundamental orthogonal signals, are considered for further investigation. However, the issue is that not all the OSG approaches are suitable for single-phase EA grids owing to the broader frequency variation range, i.e., 360 Hz to 900 Hz. Hence, it affects the dynamic performance abilities of PLLs and FLLs under wider frequency variations. Furthermore, unlike the utility grid, any OSG approach tuned and designed at the nominal frequency of the EA grid, i.e., 400 Hz, will not yield proper magnitude in the output and are prone to phase errors. Therefore, in this research, non-adaptive approaches are documented employing computationally simpler error correction approaches that can help estimate the error-free amplitude and phase information. The numerical and experimental investigation reveals that the EA grid-connected converters and active power filter applications can take advantage of the utility grid OSG approaches.
Using relief texture for interactive and tangible virtual environments

This paper first introduces a way to improve interactivity with high polygon count virtual objects through the “mixed” use of image-based representation within one object. That is, both 3D polygonal and image-based representations are maintained for an object, and switched for rendering depending on the functional requirement of the object. Furthermore, in order to reduce the popping effect and provide smooth and gradual transition during the object representation switch, the object is subdivided with the subdivided parts possibly represented differently, i.e., using 3D models or images. As for the image-based representation, the relief texture (RT) method is used. In particular, through the use of the mixed representation, a new way called TangibleScreen is proposed to provide object tangibility by associating the image-based representation with a physical prop (projecting the RTs) in a selective and flexible way. Overall, the proposed method provides a way to maintain an interactive frame rate with selective perceptual details in a large-scale virtual environment, while allowing the user to interact with virtual objects in a tangible way.
Expanding Glycomic Investigations through Thiol-Derivatized Glycans

N-(2-thioethyl)-2-aminobenzamide (TEAB), a novel glycan auxiliary, was synthesized and its utility was evaluated. The auxiliary was conjugated to glycans by reductive amination with the water-stable reagent 2-picoline borane complex. Glycan products, which ranged from 1 to 7 linked hexoses, were all isolated in yields ranging from 60% to 90% after purification by reverse-phase chromatography. The novel conjugate introduces a convenient, shelf-stable thiol directly onto the desired free glycans with purification advantages and direct modification with efficient reactions through alkenes, halides, epoxides, disulfides, and carboxylates in yields of 49% to 93%. Subsequently, a thiol-selective modification of the BSA protein was used to generate a neoglycoprotein with a bifunctional PEG–maleimide linker. To further illustrate the utility of a thiol motif, 2-thiopyridine activation of a thiol-containing support facilitated the covalent chromatographic purification of labeled glycans in yields up to 63%. Finally, initial proof of concept of implementation in a light printed microarray was explored and validated through FITC-labeled concanavalin A binding. In conclusion, the thiol-functionalized glycans produced greatly expand the diversity of bioconjugation tools that can be developed with glycans and enable a variety of biological investigations.