Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The influence of chronic nicotine administration on behavioural and neurochemical parameters in male and female rats after repeated binge drinking exposure.

AIMS The possible interaction between nicotine and 'binge drinking' in eliciting changes in behavioural patterns of 'binge drinking' rats as well as nucleus accumbens (NAc) glutamate levels has been investigated in these present studies. METHODS Adult or adolescent male and female rats received ethanol, 2 g/kg or 3 g/kg, by gavage in a 'binge drinking' regimen (3 times/day over a 6 h period, for 2 days followed by 5 days of abstinence) combined with or without nicotine, 0.3 g/kg, for either a 5-week (adult) or a 4-week (adolescent) period. Motor activity was then assessed for a period of 60 min after three further doses of ethanol or water. In addition, the NAc glutamate level was assayed in each group for 1 h after the first gavage regimen with ethanol, 2 g/kg or 3 g/kg, or water. RESULTS Adult female rats showed greater sensitivity to each ethanol dose (2 g/kg and 3 g/kg) than the adult male rats, their motor activity decreasing during the first and third 'binge'. In contrast, in male adult rats, the sedative effects of ethanol were reduced, particularly after the third binge when no significant changes in the locomotor activity were apparent between the ethanol-administered male rats and controls. Adolescent rats did differ in their response to ethanol in comparison with adult rats. It was noteworthy that in young female adolescent rats, given 2 g/kg ethanol, motor activity was enhanced, thereby indicating that adolescent female rats are less sensitive to the sedative effects of ethanol at specific doses. In addition, male and female adolescent rats showed little change in locomotor activity in comparison with controls during the third 'binge administration' possibly indicating that tolerance to such alcohol doses was occurring. Nicotine administration did prevent the decrease in locomotor activity after ethanol administration during the first binge regimen in both male and female adolescents as well as adult female rats. However, after the third binge, such alcohol-induced changes in motor activity were not so well defined in the female adult rats that now showed significant decreases in motor activity. In contrast, adolescent male and female rats still showed similar motor activity to that of the controls. No clear association between the NAc glutamate extracellular content and locomotor activity was discernible in either adult or adolescent rats in these present studies. However, chronic nicotine administration markedly reduced the elevated basal glutamate content in the 'binge drinking female' adult rats. CONCLUSIONS These studies have shown clear and distinct differences, with respect to both sensitivity and tolerance, in adult and adolescent male and female rats, which could be modified by supplementation with nicotine.
Virtual Tourism with Drones: Experiments and Lag Compensation

Tourism always involves physical movement between places, an activity that may be cumbersome, expensive, or even dangerous. Virtual tourism aims at reducing limitations by recreating real touristic venues in computers as 3D models. However, virtual tourism is always premade or prerecorded. In our virtual tourism approach we use UAVs to fly around at the target venues, and send a video they record live to a tourist sitting at home, or walking in a treadmill. The video is presented in a VR visor, and head movements steer the orientation of the drone. This way tourists have the impression to really visit a remote site live, without any limitations. We present experimental results and analyze the overhead of compensating Internet network delay.
Rescue of a chimeric rinderpest virus with the nucleocapsid protein derived from peste-des-petits-ruminants virus: use as a marker vaccine

The nucleocapsid (N) protein of all morbilliviruses has a highly conserved central region that is thought to interact with and encapsidate the viral RNA. The C-terminal third of the N protein is highly variable among morbilliviruses and is thought to be located on the outer surface and to be available to interact with other viral proteins such as the phosphoprotein, the polymerase protein and the matrix protein. Using reverse genetics, a chimeric rinderpest virus (RPV)/peste-des-petits-ruminants virus (PPRV) was rescued in which the RPV N gene open reading frame had been replaced with that of PPRV (RPV–PPRN). The chimeric virus maintained efficient replication in cell culture. Cattle vaccinated with this chimeric vaccine showed no adverse reaction and were protected from subsequent challenge with wild-type RPV, indicating it to be a safe and efficacious vaccine. The carboxyl-terminal variable region of the rinderpest N protein was cloned and expressed in Escherichia coli. The expressed protein was used to develop an indirect ELISA that could clearly differentiate between RPV- and PPRV-infected animals. The possibility of using this virus as a marker vaccine in association with a new diagnostic ELISA in the rinderpest eradication programme is discussed.
Preliminary steps toward artificial protocell computation

Protocells are hypothesised as a transitional phase in the origin of life, prior to the evolution of fully functional prokaryotic cells. The work reported here is being done in the context of the PACE project, which is investigating the fabrication of artificial protocells de novo. We consider here the important open question of whether or how articifial protocells (if or when they are successfully fabricated) might be applied as “computing” devices—what sort of computing might they be suitable for, and how might they be “programmed”? We also present some preliminary analysis of a crude model of such “evolutionary protocell computation”.
Fast PET reconstruction using Multi-scale Fully Convolutional Neural Networks

Reconstruction of PET images is an ill-posed inverse problem and often requires iterative algorithms to achieve good image quality for reliable clinical use in practice, at huge computational costs. In this paper, we consider the PET reconstruction a dense prediction problem where the large scale contextual information is essential, and propose a novel architecture of multi-scale fully convolutional neural networks (msfCNN) for fast PET image reconstruction. The proposed msfCNN gains large receptive fields with both memory and computational efficiency, by using a downscaling-upscaling structure and dilated convolutions. Instead of pooling and deconvolution, we propose to use the periodic shuffling operation from sub-pixel convolution and its inverse to scale the size of feature maps without losing resolution. Residual connections were added to improve training. We trained the proposed msfCNN model with simulated data, and applied it to clinical PET data acquired on a Siemens mMR scanner. The results from real oncological and neurodegenerative cases show that the proposed msfCNN-based reconstruction outperforms the iterative approaches in terms of computational time while achieving comparable image quality for quantification. The proposed msfCNN model can be applied to other dense prediction tasks, and fast msfCNN-based PET reconstruction could facilitate the potential use of molecular imaging in interventional/surgical procedures, where cancer surgery can particularly benefit.
Mixed norm minimization for MIMO cellular interference channel

This paper considers a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) cellular interference channel. In order to exploit the maximum degrees of freedom, the rank constrained rank minimization (RCRM) framework is adopted to formulate the interference alignment for the MIMO cellular network. Considering the practical signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is limited, we propose a joint Frobenius norm and nuclear norm algorithm, which not only maximizes the achievable degrees of freedom but also minimizes the power of the interference matrices. Optimum solutions are iteratively achieved with guaranteed convergence. Simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Auto-Configuration of a Dynamic Non-Overlapping Camera Network

In order to monitor sufficiently large areas of interest for surveillance or any event detection, we need to look beyond stationary cameras and employ an automatically configurable network of non-overlapping cameras. These cameras need not have an overlapping Field of View (FoV) and should be allowed to move freely in space. Moreover, features like zooming in/out, readily available in security cameras these days, should be exploited in order to focus on any particular area of interest if needed. In this paper, a practical framework is proposed to self-calibrate dynamically moving and zooming cameras and determine their absolute and relative orientations, assuming that their relative position is known. A global linear solution is presented for self-calibrating each zooming/focusing camera in the network. After self-calibration, it is shown that only one automatically computed vanishing point and a line lying on any plane orthogonal to the vertical direction is sufficient to infer the dynamic network configuration. Our method generalizes previous work which considers restricted camera motions. Using minimal assumptions, we are able to successfully demonstrate promising results on synthetic as well as on real data. Index Terms self-calibration, non-overlapping camera network, vanishing line, image of the absolute conic.
Draft Force Inputs for Primary and Secondary Tillage Implements in a Clay Loam Soil

Tillage is the base operation in agriculture and its energy represents a considerable portion of the energy utilized in crop production. To measure the implement force requirements, are used dynamometers that are pull or three-point hitch types. In this research, an 82 kW research tractor equipped with an instrumentation system was used to determine the draft force inputs for four common tillage Implements applied to a clay loam soil in west Azarbaijan, Iran. Implements included moldboard plow plus chisel plow as primary and disk harrow plus field cultivator as secondary implements. Operating depth for the primary and secondary implements was about 250 and 100 mm, respectively. Draft measurements were compared to those predicted by ASABE Standard D497.5 (ASABE Standards, 2006) and were found to vary. It was declared that draft force of moldboard plow and field cultivator was about 2.14 and 1.8 times as much as the chisel plow and disk harrow, respectively. The large difference in implement draft indicates that substantial energy savings can be readily obtained by selecting energy-efficient tillage implements.
Dynamic Query Processing for Hidden Web Data Extraction

In this digital world every one seeks for the information on the internet. As the time passed every one placed their digital content on the web. On the web the website developers support to place the data in the relational databases. The databases from different organizations and agencies are available online and are accessible through web query interfaces. The web query interfaces act as the front door to access the information from these relational databases. But these web forms or web query interfaces need human intervention to submit the form data. So in order to make search engines capable of accessing the relational databases i.e. data behind query interfaces, the query generation should be done automatically. So in this paper we discuss the different form submission techniques to fetch the data from the databases and propose a novel technique “Dynamic Query Processing for Hidden Web Data Extraction”.
Kinematic analysis and design of a six D.O.F. 3-PRPS in-parallel manipulator

This paper presents a kinematic analysis and design characteristics of an in-parallel manipulator developed for the probing task application that requires high precision, active compliance, and high control bandwidth. The developed manipulator is a class of six-degree-of-freedom in-parallel platforms with 3 PRPS (prismatic-revolute-prismatic-spherical joints) chain geometry. The main advantages of this manipulator, compared with the typical Stewart platform type, are the capability of pure rotation generation and the easy prediction of the moving platform motion. The purpose of this paper is to develop an efficient kinematic model which can be used for real-time control and to propose systematic methods to design the manipulator considering workspace, manipulability, resistivity, singularity, and the existence conditions of the forward kinematic solution. Particularly, we propose a new method for checking the singularity of the parallel manipulator using the translational and rotational resistivity measures. A series of simulation are carried out to show kinematic characteristics and performance of the manipulator mechanism. A prototype manipulator was built based on the kinematic analysis results.
Evaluating the Impact of Snippet Highlighting in Search

When viewing a list of search results, users see a snippet of text from each document. For an ambiguous query, the list may contain some documents that match the user’s interpretation of the query and some that correspond to a completely different interpretation. We hypothesize that selectively highlighting important words in snippets may help users scan the list for relevant documents. This paper presents a lab experiment where we show the user a top-10 list, instructing them to look for a particular interpretation of an ambiguous query, and track the speed and accuracy of their clicks. We find that under certain conditions, the additional highlighting improves the time to click without decreasing the user’s ability to identify relevant documents.
BRAF (V600E) mutation and the biology of papillary thyroid cancer

BRAF (V600E) mutation is the most frequent genetic alteration in papillary thyroid carcinomas (PTCs) that are 80–90% of all thyroid cancers. We evaluated the relationship between BRAF (V600E) and tumor, host, and environmental factors in PTCs from all geographical areas of Sicily. By PCR, BRAF (V600E) was investigated in a series of 323 PTCs diagnosed in 2002–2005. The correlation between clinicopathological tumor, host, and environmental characteristics and the presence of BRAF (V600E) were evaluated by both univariate and multivariate analyses. BRAF (V600E) was found in 38.6% PTCs, with a 52% frequency in the classical PTCs and 26.4% in the tall cell variant. Univariate analysis indicated that BRAF (V600E) was associated with greater tumor size ( P Z 0.0048), extra-thyroid invasion ( P ! 0.0001), and cervical lymph nodal metastases ( P Z 0.0001). Multivariate logistic regression analysis conﬁrmed that BRAF (V600E) was an independent predictor of extra-thyroid invasion ( P Z 0.0001) and cervical lymph nodal metastasis ( P Z 0.0005). The association between BRAF (V600E) and extra-thyroid invasion was also found in micro-PTCs ( P Z 0.006). In 60 classical PTCs, BRAF (V600E) was positively correlated with matrix metalloproteinase-9 expression ( P Z 0.0047), suggesting a possible mechanism for BRAF (V600E) effect on PTC invasiveness. No association was found between BRAF (V600E) and patient age, gender, or iodine intake. In contrast, a strong association was found with residency in Eastern Sicily ( P ! 0.0001 compared with Western Sicily). These results indicate that BRAF (V600E) mutation is a marker of aggressive disease in both micro- and macro-PTCs. Moreover, for the ﬁrst time, a possible link between BRAF (V600E) mutation and environmental carcinogens is suggested.
Adaptive Disengagement Buffers Self-Esteem From Negative Social Feedback

The degree to which self-esteem hinges on feedback in a domain is known as a contingency of self-worth, or engagement. Although previous research has conceptualized engagement as stable, it would be advantageous for individuals to dynamically regulate engagement. The current research examined whether the tendency to disengage from negative feedback accounts for variability in self-esteem. We created the Adaptive Disengagement Scale (ADS) to capture individual differences in the tendency to disengage self-esteem from negative outcomes. Results demonstrated that the ADS is reliable and valid (Studies 1 and 2). Furthermore, in response to negative social feedback, higher scores on the ADS predicted greater state self-esteem (Study 3), and this relationship was mediated by disengagement (Study 4). These findings demonstrate that adaptive disengagement protects self-esteem from negative outcomes and that the ADS is a valid measure of individual differences in the implementation of this process.
An Integrated Dynamic Traffic Assignment–Bayesian Belief Networks Methodology to Assess Traffic Safety

Traffic conditions significantly affect drivers‟ behavior that constitutes one of the principal causes of road accidents. Being able to accurately predict traffic conditions significantly improves the assessment of accident risk. Traditional approaches to traffic flow analysis use static representations of the road system and as such have limited accuracy. Dynamic Traffic Assignment (DTA) approaches better utilize temporal aspects of such system (where and when to travel on the road network) to produce better predictions. The work presented herein integrates two mature methodologies namely simulation-based DTA and Bayesian Networks (BN) to address this problem. The former is widely used in transport modeling to predict driver‟s travel behavior while the later constitute a powerful artificial intelligence technique that predicts effects given prior knowledge and input evidence in uncertain settings. The integration of BN with the DTA-based simulator, Visual Interactive Systems for Transport Algorithms (VISTA), provides the framework for improved safety evaluation of road networks and future planning.
A Novel Comb-Pilot Transform Domain Frequency Diversity Channel Estimation for OFDM System

Due to implementation complexity, the transform domain channel estimation based on training symbols or comb-type pilots has been paid more attention because of its efficient algorithm FFT/IFFT. However, in a comb-type OFDM system, the length of the channel impulse response is much smaller than the pilot number. In this case, the comb-pilot transform domain channel estimation only works as interpolation like the Least Squares (LS) algorithm, but loses the noise suppression function. In this paper, we pro- pose a novel frequency diversity channel estimation method via grouped pilots combining. With this estimator, not only the channel frequency response on non-pilot subcarriers can be interpolated, but also the noise can be better suppressed. Moreover, it does not need prior statistical characteristics of the wireless channel.
Delay-aware resource allocation scheme for heterogeneous multi-radio access system based on Lyapunov optimization

A delay-aware resource allocation algorithm for the heterogeneous multi-radio access (MRA) system, where multiple mobile terminals are served by long term evolution (LTE) and wireless local area network (WLAN) access technologies, is proposed in this paper. Taking both the queue dynamics and physical layer metrics into account when modeling the problem, the algorithm is designed to stabilize all queues while minimizing the total power consumption by minimizing the upper bound of the drift-plus-penalty expression based on Lyapunov optimization theory. Dividing the primary mixed integer programming problem into two sub-problems, the close-form suboptimal solution can be obtained through the standard techniques of the convex minimization with relatively low complexity. The simulation results show that a fundamental improvement in terms of delay performance can be achieved by the proposed algorithm compared with the conventional algorithm based on the sum-rate maximization.
Improved Design of Low Power TPG Using LP- LFSR

This paper presents a novel test pattern generator which is more suitable for built in self test (BIST) structures used for testing of VLSI circuits. The purpose of the BIST is to reduce power dissipation without affecting the fault coverage. The demonstrated test pattern generator reduces the switching activity among the test patterns at the most. In this method, the single input change patterns generated by a counter and a gray code generator are Exclusive-ORed with the seed generated by the low power linear feedback shift register (LP- LFSR). The proposed scheme is evaluated by using a 4x4 Braun array multiplier. The System-On-Chip (SOC) approach is adopted for implementation on Altera Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) based SOC kits with Nios II soft-core processor. From the implementation results, it is verified that the testing power for the proposed method is reduced by a significant percentage.
The Effect of Recovery Duration on Vastus Lateralis Oxygenation, Heart Rate, Perceived Exertion and Time Motion Descriptors during Small Sided Football Games

Purpose Small sided games (SSG) of football are an effective and efficient format to simultaneously train the physiological, technical, and tactical components of football. The duration of the recovery period between bouts of SSG will affect the physiological response to subsequent bouts. It was hypothesised that decreasing the duration of recovery periods separating serial SSG bouts would increase physiological, and perceptual responses, and decrease high speed running, and distance during SSG bouts. Methods Twelve experienced footballers (mean ± SD; age 21 ± 3 yrs; VO2peak 64 ± 7 ml·min·kg−1; playing experience 15 ± 3 yrs) completed two SSG sessions. Each SSG consisted of 3 vs. 3 players and 6 bouts of 2 min duration, with bouts separated by either 30 s recovery (REC-30) or 120 s recovery (REC-120). Deoxygenated haemoglobin (HHb) in the vastus lateralis (VL) (using near infrared spectroscopy), heart rate (HR) and time motion descriptors (TMD) (speed and distance) were measured continuously during the SSG sessions and perceived exertion (RPE) was measured for each bout. Results During the recovery periods, in REC-30 compared to REC-120, there was a significant (p < 0.05) main effect of a higher HHb and HR. During the bouts, in REC-30 compared to REC-120, there were no significant differences in HHb, HR, RPE, or TMD, but within both REC-30 and REC-120 there were significant increases as a function of bout number in RPE. Conclusions Although a four-fold increase in recovery period allowed a significant increase in the recovery of HHb and HR, this did not increase the physiological, and perceptual responses, or time motion descriptors during the bouts. These results could have been due to the regulation of effort (pacing), in these experienced players performing an exercise task to which they were well adapted.
A Monolithically Integrated Segmented Linear Driver and Modulator in EPIC 0.25- $\mu$ m SiGe:C BiCMOS Platform

In this paper, a monolithically integrated segmented linear driver and Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) are presented. The transmitter is fabricated in electronic-photonic integrated circuit 0.25-μm SiGe:C BiCMOS technology, with fT/fmax = 190 GHz. The driver and the modulator are divided into 16 segments and the MZM phase shifter has a total length of 6.08 mm. The segmented driver delivers a maximum of 4 Vpp differentially, featuring a gain of 13 dB and total harmonic distortion below 5%. Electro-optical time-domain measurements using PAM-4 modulation format are performed, demonstrating optical eye-diagrams up to 25 Gbaud. The electro-optical bandwidth of the transmitter is 18 GHz. The power dissipation of the driver is 1.5 W, resulting in an energy per bit of 30 pJ/bit at 50 Gb/s. The reported optical transmitter demonstrates for the first time an implementation of a linear driver integrated with an MZM in a Si monolithic process.