Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mesopattern of immobilised bone morphogenetic protein-2 created by microcontact printing and dip-pen nanolithography influence C2C12 cell fate

Dip-pen nanolithography and microcontact printing were used to fabricate mesopatterned substrates for cell differentiation experiments. A biotin–thiol was patterned on gold substrates and subsequently functionalised with streptavidin and biotinylated bone morphogenetic protein-2 (BMP-2). The feasibility of mesopatterned substrates containing immobilised BMP-2 was proven by obtaining similar differentiation outcomes compared to the growth factor in solution. Therefore, these substrates might be suitable for replacing conventional experiments with BMP-2 in solution.
Regulatory limits for pesticide residues in water (IUPAC Technical Report)

National governments introduced residue limits and guideline levels for pesticide residues in water when policies were implemented to minimize the contamination of ground and surface waters. Initially, the main attention was given to drinking water. Regulatory limits for pesticide residues in waters should have the following characteristics: definition of the type of water, definition of the residue, a suitable analytical method for the residues, and explanation for the basis for each limit. Limits may be derived by applying a safety factor to a no-effect-level, or from levels occurring when good practices are followed and also passing a safety assessment, or from the detection limit of an analytical method, or directly by legislative decision. The basis for limits and guideline values issued by WHO, Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Japan, Canada, European Union, and Taiwan is described, and examples of the limits are provided. Limits have been most commonly developed for drinking water, but values have also been proposed for environmental waters, effluent waters, irrigation waters, and livestock drinking waters. The contamination of ground water is of concern because it may be used as drinking water and act as a source of contamination for surface waters. Most commonly, drinking water standards have been applied to ground water. The same terminology may have different meanings in different systems. For example, guideline value (GV) in WHO means a value calculated from a toxicology parameter, whereas in Australia, a GV is at or about the analytical limit of determination or a maximum level that might occur if good practices are followed. In New Zealand, the GV is the concentration where aesthetic significance is influenced.The Australian health value (HV) is conceptually the same as the WHO GV. The New Zealand maximum acceptable value (MAV) and the Canadian maximum acceptable concentration (MAC) are also conceptually the same as the WHO GV. Each of the possible ways of defining the residues has its merits. A residue limit in water expressed as the sum of parent and toxicologically relevant transformation products makes sense where it is derived from the acceptable daily intake (ADI). For monitoring purposes, where it is best to keep the residue definition as simple as possible for the sake of practical enforcement and economy, theparent or a marker residue is preferable. It is also possible for parent and degradation products (hydrolysis and photolysis products and metabolites) to become physically separated as the water moves through soil strata, which suggests that separate limits should be set for parent and important degradation products. The Commission has made 12 recommendations for regulatory limits for pesticide residues in water. The recommendations will act as a checklist for authorities introducing or revising limits or guidelines for pesticide residues in water.
Identifying the sources of uncertainty in climate model simulations
of solar radiation modification with the G6sulfur and G6solar
Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP)
simulations

Abstract. We present here results from the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP) simulations for the experiment G6sulfur and G6solar for six Earth System Models participating in the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) Phase 6. The aim of the experiments is to reduce the warming from that resulting from a high-tier emission scenario (Shared Socioeconomic Pathways SSP5-8.5) to that resulting from a medium-tier emission scenario (SSP2-4.5). These simulations aim to analyze the response of climate models to a reduction in incoming surface radiation as a means to reduce global surface temperatures, and they do so either by simulating a stratospheric sulfate aerosol layer or, in a more idealized way, through a uniform reduction in the solar constant in the model. We find that, by the end of the century, there is a considerable inter-model spread in the needed injection of sulfate (29 &pm; 9 Tg-SO2/yr between 2081 and 2100), in how the aerosol cloud is distributed latitudinally, and in how stratospheric temperatures are influenced by the produced aerosol layer. Even in the simpler G6solar experiment, there is a spread in the needed solar dimming to achieve the same global temperature target (1.91 &pm; 0.44 %). The analyzed models already show significant differences in the response to the increasing CO2 concentrations for global mean temperatures and global mean precipitation (2.05 K &pm; 0.42 K and 2.28 &pm; 0.80 %, respectively, for the SSP5-8.5-SSP2-4.5 difference between 2081 and 2100): the differences in the simulated aerosol spread then change some of the underlying uncertainty, for example in terms of the global mean precipitation response (−3.79 &pm; 0.76 % for G6sulfur compared to −2.07 &pm; 0.40 % for G6solar against SSP2-4.5 between 2081 and 2100). These differences in the aerosols behavior also result in a larger inter-model spread in the regional response in the surface temperatures in the case of the G6sulfur simulations, suggesting the need to devise various, more specific experiments to single out and resolve particular sources of uncertainty. The spread in the modelled response suggests that a degree of caution is necessary when using these results for assessing specific impacts of geoengineering in various aspects of the Earth system: however, all models agree that, compared to a scenario with unmitigated warming, stratospheric aerosol geoengineering has the potential to both globally and locally reduce the increase in surface temperatures.
Optical properties of AlN thin films grown by plasma enhanced atomic layer deposition

Crystalline aluminum nitride (AlN) films have been prepared by plasma enhanced atomic layer deposition within the temperature range of 100 and 500 °C. The AlN films were characterized by x-ray diffraction, spectroscopic ellipsometry, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, optical absorption, and photoluminescence. The authors establish a relationship between growth temperature and optical properties and in addition, the refractive indices of the AlN films were determined to be larger than 1.9 within the 300–1000 nm wavelength range. Infrared reflectance spectra confirmed the presence of E1(TO) and A1(LO) phonon modes at ∼660 cm−1 and 895 cm−1, respectively. Analysis of the absorption spectroscopy show an optical band edge between 5.78 and 5.84 eV and the absorption and photoluminescence emission properties of the AlN layers revealed defect centers in the range of 250 and 300 nm at room temperature.
Frequency of anxiety and depression in patients with pain visiting pain clinic

Pak J Surg 2013; 29(1):36-40 Introduction: Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage. Pain is one of the commonest presentation and a major concern for the patients in clinical practice and in many cases it remains a challenging problem for both patients and therapists. Pain is a major symptom in many medical conditions, and severe and chronic pain, if untreated, can signifi cantly interfere with a person’s quality of life and general functioning.1 Pain interferes with sleep, impairs activities of daily living and reduces the productivity which may lead to a poor quality of life. Pain also provokes an emotional response in the suff erers and one is expected to have irritability and agitation and if pain gets teasing and prolonged, the patient may feel constantly tense and stressed. Over the time, this constant stress can result in difAbstract Objective: Th is study was aimed to see the frequency of Anxiety and Depression in patients with pain reported at a pain clinic Design: Cross sectional study Sett ing and duration: Department of Psychiatry & Anesthesiology Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, Karachi Medical & Dental College Karachi from Aug 2012 to Oct 2012. Method: All those patients with severe and chronic pain, who were referred for pain management at pain clinic of Anesthesia department, were included in the study. Th e sample included patients of both sexes and all ages, irrespective of their marital and educational status. A total of 118 patients, fulfi lling the inclusion criteria were enrolled for the study. A writt en informed consent was taken from all these patients and their demographic details were obtained by using a Performa specially designed for this purpose. Th e diagnostic criteria of DSM IV(diagnostic and statistics manual) for Depression and anxiety disorders was used for clinical assessment and then the selected sample was administered Urdu version of HADS (Hospital Anxiety Depression Scale) to establish the presence of Anxiety & Depression. HADS is a widely used instrument in clinical practice and it is a 14 item self administered questionnaire designed to assess the magnitude of anxiety & depression in the selected sample. All the fi ndings were recorded, compiled and tabulated. Results: A total of 118 patients comprising 34 males and 84 females ranging between 28-72 years of age with a mean age of 47.4 years completed the study. Of the patients studied, 84 were married and 34 were unmarried. 38% of the patients had chronic backache while 32% had the medical diagnosis of prolapsed inter-vertebral disc. In the studied sample of 118 patients, 53 % had depression, and 44 % had anxiety. Conclusion: Anxiety and Depression are common co-morbidities in patients suff ering from pain
Transnational corporations, food systems and their impacts on diets in developing countries

In what is traditionally known as the nutrition transition (Popkin, 2006), rising incomes in low income countries lead diets to progress from reliance on starchy staples to include more fruit and vegetables, animal products and vegetable oils, but there is also a tendency towards an increase in intake of processed, energy dense, non-traditional foods which are often high in sugar, salt and harmful fatty acids and poor in micronutrients. The reduced prevalence of under-nutrition and the consumption of a more diverse diet have been observed in most of the developing world over the past 20 years, but overweight, obesity and diet-related non-communicable diseases are a more recent phenomenon which has spread from the developed world to growing segments of poorer nations; and today 2 billion people globally suffer micro-nutrient deficiencies. (SOFA, 2013; IFPRI, 2015).
Decision-Aware Model Learning for Actor-Critic Methods: When Theory Does Not Meet Practice

Actor-Critic methods are a prominent class of modern reinforcement learning algorithms based on the classic Policy Iteration procedure. Despite many successful cases, Actor-Critic methods tend to require a gigantic number of experiences and can be very unstable. Recent approaches have advocated learning and using a world model to improve sample efﬁciency and reduce reliance on the value function estimate. However, learning an accurate dynamics model of the world remains challenging, often requiring computationally costly and data-hungry models. More recent work has shown that learning an everywhere accurate model is unnecessary and often detrimental to the overall task; instead, the agent should improve the world model on task-critical regions. For example, in Iterative Value-Aware Model Learning, the authors extend model-based value iteration by incorporating the value function (estimate) into the model loss function, showing the novel model objective reﬂects improved performance in the end task. Therefore, it seems natural to expect that model-based Actor-Critic methods can beneﬁt equally from learning value-aware models, improving overall task performance, or reducing the need for large, expensive models. However, we show empirically that combining Actor-Critic and value-aware model learning can be quite difﬁcult and that naive approaches such as maximum likelihood estimation often achieve superior performance with less computational cost. Our results suggest that, despite theoretical guarantees, learning a value-aware model in continuous domains does not ensure better performance on the overall task.
A novel hydrogel matrix on gold surfaces in surface plasmon resonance sensors for fast and efficient covalent immobilization of ligands

Gold surfaces intended for surface plasmon resonance sensors have been derivatized with a flexible matrix composed of carboxymethylated dextran to provide fast and efficient coupling of proteins and other ligands at low concentrations using the principles of ionic pre-concentration; these hydrophilic and protein compatible hydrogel surfaces allow increased immobilization capacity as compared to monolayer based coatings, for applications in biospecific interaction analysis.
The allocation of after-school time and child socio-emotional skills

In this paper, we study the effect of the allocation of after-school time on children’s noncognitive development, using data from the Millennium Cohort Study (UK) and focusing on children aged 7-11 years old. We classify the time spent outside of school into seven groups of activities and evaluate their impact on five socio-emotional skills drawn from the Strength and Difficulties questionnaire, taking advantage of the panel structure of the data. We then test the robustness of our estimates against endogeneity issues. Time spent on sports, studying, reading, tidying up, and active time with parents have beneficial effects, while video-screen time and extra hours at school have harmful ones.
Comprehensive Left Ventricular Mechanics Analysis by Speckle Tracking Echocardiography in COVID-19

Background: Cardiac involvement and the consequences of inflammation induced by SARS-CoV2 infection could have catastrophic long-term consequences. Left ventricular mechanics could identify a specific pattern of myocardial fiber damage in patients infected with COVID-19. To our knowledge there are no publications referring to the global description of ventricular mechanics in patients with COVID-19. Objective: To describe left ventricular mechanics in hospitalized patients with COVID-19. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, we included 40 hospitalized patients with confirmed diagnostic of COVID-19, from April 11, 2020, to September 6, 2020. Demographic and laboratory data, clinical and echocardiographic characteristics were collected, as well as events during hospitalization. Left ventricular deformation was analyzed and reported. Results: Subclinical dysfunction was observed in 82.5% (left ventricular longitudinal strain [LVGLS] -17.05% and global circumferential strain [GCS] -18.6%) of the patients, likewise, the mean twist and apical rotation were preserved, and even increased as part of the compensating mechanism to maintain the ejection fraction. Conclusion: In patients hospitalized with COVID-19, despite having a normal left ventricular ejection fraction, subclinical myocardial damage was found, manifested by a decrease in Global Longitudinal Strain (GLS) and Global Circumferential Strain (GCS). This behavior is similar to that of cardiomyopathies in the early stage of the disease, and given the pathophysiological mechanisms involved in the disease, its long-term consequences should be monitored and evaluated.
SIMULTANEOUS DETERMINATION OF PARACETAMOL AND IBUPROFENE MIXTURES BY HIGH PERFORMANCE LIQUID CHROMATOGRAPHY

Analytical method for the determination of paracetamol and ibuprofene mixtures has been developed by High Performance Liquid Chromatography using C-18 column and acetinitrile – phosphate buffer pH = 4.5 (75:25) containing 0.075 % sodium hexanesulfunate as a mobile phase. The detector was set at 215 nm. Using such conditions, retention time for paracetamol and ibuprofen was 4.89 and 7.11 min, respectively. The recovery for paracetamol and ibuprofen was found to be 101.07± 0.73 % and 102.02 ± 1.58 %, respectively. The detector limits of the method was 1.30 and 1.60 μg/ml with the relative standard deviation (RSD) 0.74 and 1.52 % for paracetamol and ibuprofen, respectively.
Cardiovascular late effects of chemotherapy in colorectal cancer patients

Background. The acute cardiotoxicity of specific chemotherapeutic agents which are used in the treatment of colon cancer is well described. Although the survival prognosis for colorectal cancer patients has improved in recent years, cardiotoxic long-term effects after chemotherapy are largely unexplored. Objectives. What are the most common cardiotoxic events following chemotherapy, how are these assessed in different study designs, and how long is the study period? Materials andmethods. A literature research on cardiovascular effects of chemotherapy in colorectal cancer patients was performed in two leading medical databases. Results. The overall incidence of cardiovascular events in the 28 included studies is between 0.1% and 57.0%. The three most commonly reported cardiovascular symptoms are venous thromboembolism (10 studies; 0.1–35.6%), angina pectoris (6 studies; 0.8–8.5%) and heart failure (5 studies; 0.1–54.5%). More than half of the studies only reported events during chemotherapy (about 6 months). Of the studies with longer observation periods, over 60% focus on venous thromboembolism. Conclusion. Venous thromboembolism needs special attention in patients with colorectal cancer, and patients as well as primary physicians need to be educated in early signs of cardiovascular symptoms and prevention measurements. Future studies should differentiate acute, early and late effects of cardiotoxicity and collect data on cardiovascular risk profiles. Study designs with longer observation periods and the linkage of cancer registry or health databases should be encouraged.
Analyzing the Overhead of File Protection by Linux Security Modules

Over the years, the complexity of the Linux Security Module (LSM) is keeping increasing (e.g. 10,684 LOC in Linux v2.6.0 vs. 64,018 LOC in v5.3), and the count of the authorization hooks is nearly doubled (e.g. 122 hooks in v2.6.0 vs. 224 hooks in v5.3). In addition, the computer industry has seen tremendous advancement in hardware (e.g., memory and processor frequency) in the past decade. These make the previous evaluation on LSM, which was done 18 years ago, less relevant nowadays. It is important to provide up-to-date measurement results of LSM for system practitioners so that they can make prudent trade-offs between security and performance. This work evaluates the overhead of LSM for file accesses on Linux v5.3. 0. We build a performance evaluation framework for LSM. It has two parts, an extension of LMBench2.5 to evaluate the overhead of file operations for different security modules, and a security module with tunable latency for policy enforcement to study the impact of the latency of policy enforcement on the end-to-end latency of file operations. In our evaluation, we find opening a file would see about 87% (Linux v5.3) performance drop when the kernel is integrated with SELinux hooks (policy enforcement disabled) than without, while the figure was 27% (Linux v2.4.2). We found that the performance of the above downgrade is affected by two parts, policy enforcement, and hook placement. To further investigate the impact of policy enforcement and hook placement respectively, we build a Policy Testing Module, which reuses hook placements of LSM, while alternating latency of policy enforcement. With this module, we are able to quantitatively estimate the impact of the latency of policy enforcement on the end-to-end latency of file operations by using a multiple linear regression model and count policy authorization frequencies for each syscall. We then discuss and justify the evaluation results with static analysis on syscalls' call graphs.
A Dynamic Motion Tracking Control Approach for a Quadrotor Aerial Mechanical System

This paper deals with the reference trajectory tracking problem and simultaneous active disturbance suppression on a class of controlled aerial mechanical systems by processing measurable output signals. A novel dynamic control method for desired motion reference trajectory tracking for quadrotor helicopters is introduced. Measurements of position output signals for efficient and robust tracking of motion profiles specified for the unmanned aerial vehicle are only required. Thus, differentiation of signals and real-time estimation of disturbances affecting the multi-input multioutput, underactuated nonlinear dynamic system are unnecessary. The presented active control approach can be directly extended for a class of vibrating mechanical systems. Analytical, experimental, and numerical results are presented to prove the satisfactory performance of the proposed trajectory tracking control approach for considerably perturbed operating scenarios.
An Experimental Study of the Matrix-fracture Interaction During Miscible Displacement in Fractured Porous Media: A Micromodel Study

During miscible displacements in fractured porous media, one of the most important factors that plays a significant role in oil production is the matrix-fracture interaction. In this work, a series of hydrocarbon injection experiments have been performed on a fractured glass micromodel that was designed specifically to study matrix-fracture interaction. A high quality image analysis method was used to determine the fluid flow behavior, solvent front movement, and viscous fingering associated with solvent movement in matrix and fractures. Observations showed that in the case of unit viscosity ratio, the injection rate increased the slope of recovery curve and consequently improved the final oil recovery. However, when using a viscosity ratio of 65, the injection rate increased the oil recovery at earlier times due to the breakthrough and fracture drainage. At later times, diffusion and dispersion became dominant and oil recovery decreased. Studying the effect of molecular diffusion revealed that by using an optimum solvent the oil recovery at both early and late times increased. Fingering phenomena appeared in the matrix as fingers and in the matrix as channeling, which drained fracture in early times of the process. In higher viscosity ratios, dispersion dominantly takes place in an upward direction, however, in the lower viscosity ratio the effect of fracture in flooding decreased and dispersion takes place in a left-to-right direction. It can be concluded that during miscible displacement in fractured porous media dispersion in fracture is directly proportional to viscosity ratio while dispersion in matrix is inversely proportional to it. The results of this work are helpful in understanding the matrix-fracture interaction, the effect of injection rate, molecular diffusion, and viscous fingering behavior, which are crucial for accurate prediction of oil recovery in fractured reservoirs during miscible displacements.