Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE METHYLATION-SENSITIVE AMPLIFICATION POLYMORPHISM IN JUVENILE AND ADULT PHASE CRAB APPLE (MALUS MICROMALUS)

Cytosine methylation has been implicated in regulation of gene expression, genomic imprinting and chromatin remodeling, resulting both in temporal and developmental regulation. Keeping in view its importance in development, this study was carried out to explore the methylation-sensitive amplification polymorphism (MSAP) associated with the transition from juvenile to adult phase in Malus micromalus. For detection of methylation in the genome of M. micromalus, a pair of restriction endo-nucleases HpaII-MspI was used. Genomic DNA from juvenile and adult phase leaves of the seedling tree, that was undigested (control) and digested with each enzyme HpaII and MspI, was amplified using selected primers. In total 72 bands were amplified with the help of 12 primers. Post amplification digestion of these bands with MspI or HpaII revealed 35 bands containing CCGG. Ten bands absent in amplified profiles from J phase digested DNA, appeared in amplified products from digested A phase DNA, indicating de novo methylation at CCGG. Five bands disappeared in A phase while these bands were present in J phase DNA amplified profiles, revealing presence of restriction site without methylation in A phase. These results are suggestive that demethylation may have occurred in A phase. Seventeen motifs of DNA methylation at CCGG remaining similar in both phases seem to have been maintained from basal to crown part of the seedling tree. Amplified profiles produced from restricted DNA from both phases showed polymorphism due to differential methylation.
Survival of the Fittest on Wall Street

This paper studies an application of a Darwinian theory of portfolio selection to stocks listed in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). We analyze numerically the long-run outcome of the competition of fix-mix portfolio rules in a stock market with actual DJIA dividends. In the model seemingly rational strategies can do very poorly against seemingly irrational strategies. Moreover, the interaction of strategies can lead to stochastic time series of asset prices that do not converge. The simulations also show that the evolutionary portfolio rule dis
Determination of developmental stage of cervical vertebrae at menarche in female orthodontic patients in Ahwaz

Growth modification is one of the most common treatments in orthodontics; however the success of such treatment depends on patients’ growth stage and skeletal maturity. Therefore estimating patients’ remaining growth potential has important values in treatment planning. The aim of the study was to determine a relationship between developmental stage of cervical vertebrae as a radiographic growth parameter and menarche as a biological parameter. Lateral cephalometric radiographs of 350 female orthodontic patients between 8-18y/o were collected. After getting informed consent, subjects were asked about menarche incidence and the exact date of onset. Subjects whose menarche have not yet happened were followed for six months afterwards so they would be included in the study when menarche occurred. Finally 96 cephalograms with high quality and complete visualization of cervical vertebrae of nonsyndromic patients were considered in the study. Included subjects had their menarche six month before or after the date of radiographic acquisition. To determine the developmental stage of subjects, each lateral cephalogram was separately traced by two professors and the Bacetti methods was used to determine the cervical vertebrae maturation (CVM) of the second, third and fourth vertebrae and were assigned to each of the six developmental stages. Then the percentages of the incidence of menarche in each of the six stages were calculated in order to determine the maximum odds of the incidence of the menarche in each stage. Highest percentage of the incidence of menarche was related to the fourth stage of CVM (37.5 %), with the minimum in the first stage (0%). The highest incidence rates of menarche were noted in the fourth and fifth stages of the development of cervical vertebrae. Consequently, it is advisable to render growth modification treatments before menarche in females.
Optimal decision making for sperm chemotaxis in the presence of noise

For navigation, microscopic agents such as biological cells rely on noisy sensory input. In cells performing chemotaxis, such noise arises from the stochastic binding of signaling molecules at low concentrations. Using chemotaxis of sperm cells as application example, we address the classic problem of chemotaxis towards a single target. We reveal a fundamental relationship between the speed of chemotactic steering and the strength of directional fluctuations that result from the amplification of noise in the chemical input signal. This relation implies a trade-off between slow, but reliable, and fast, but less reliable, steering. By formulating the problem of optimal navigation in the presence of noise as a Markov decision process, we show that dynamic switching between reliable and fast steering substantially increases the probability to find a target, such as the egg. Intriguingly, this decision making would provide no benefit in the absence of noise. Instead, decision making is most beneficial, if chemical signals are above detection threshold, yet signal-to-noise ratios of gradient measurements are low. This situation generically arises at intermediate distances from a target, where signaling molecules emitted by the target are diluted, thus defining a `noise zone' that cells have to cross. Our work addresses the intermediate case between well-studied perfect chemotaxis at high signal-to-noise ratios close to a target, and random search strategies in the absence of navigation cues, e.g. far away from a target. Our specific results provide a rational for the surprising observation of decision making in recent experiments on sea urchin sperm chemotaxis. The general theory demonstrates how decision making enables chemotactic agents to cope with high levels of noise in gradient measurements by dynamically adjusting the persistence length of a biased persistent random walk.
COMPARISON OF TWO DISTINCT EARTHCARE MULTI SPECTRAL IMAGER SIMULATORS

The Earth Cloud-Aerosol-Radiation Explorer (EarthCARE) is a multi-instrument satellite mission of the ESA Earth Explorer Core missions, which will be launched in 2013. EarthCARE will observe the atmosphere in order to better understand the interactions between clouds and aerosols with respect to solar radiation and to their feedbacks on the climate system. One of the four instruments onboard the EarthCARE satellite, the Multi Spectral Imager (MSI), will passively observe the atmosphere using 7 channels at visible and thermal infrared wavelengths. This imager observes with a swath-width of 150 km and a pixel resolution of 0.5 km. The MSI observations will produce the data needed for describing the horizontal spatial distribution of cloud optical and microphysical properties. In order to prepare for the EarthCARE mission configuration and for the required retrieval algorithms, ESA developed the EarthCare SIMulator (ECSIM). ECSIM is a tool capable to simulate the four instruments onboard EarthCARE for the same cloud scene simultaneously. For the evaluation of the ECSIM-MSI, we present a comparison of the ECSIM 3-Dimensional MSI simulations against simulations of the well tested ”Monte Carlo code for the Physically correct tracing of photons in the cloudy atmosphere” (MYSTIC), which is part of the libRadtran radiative transfer package. Both simulations are based on an identical input provided by the Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model COSMO-DE developed at the German Weather Service. Differences in the radiative transfer models and in the simulated radiances will be discussed. The two simulators show good ability in simulating the reflectances coming from the modelled cloud scene. Furthermore, with this work we show that both simulators, ECSIM and LibRadtran/MYSTIC, are also suitable to simulate large cloud scenes with high spatial resolution.
Feasibility of VHE gamma ray detection by an array of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes using the fluorescence technique

The last 20 years have seen the development of new techniques in Astroparticle Physics providing access to the highest end of the electromagnetic spectrum. It has been shown that some sources emit photons up to energies close to 100 TeV. Yet the fluxes of these photons are incredibly low and new detection techniques are needed to go higher in energy. A new technique that would use the new generation of Cherenkov Telescopes, i.e., the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), is proposed to push further the energy frontier. It is based on the detection of the fluorescence radiation emitted in extensive air showers, a successful method used in ultra-high-energy cosmic ray experiments, like the Pierre Auger Observatory. It would complement the standard imaging atmospheric Cherenkov technique with only minor modifications of the hardware currently being developed for the CTA and would not imply significant extra costs during its planned operation.
Effect of genotype and lactation on milk urea nitrogen, blood urea nitrogen and milk composition of dairy cows

This study was aimed to evaluate milk urea nitrogen (MUN) of cows considering variations in dietary nutrition, genetic quality and lactation yield which will be helpful to develop practical feeding guidelines for dairy cows based on MUN. A total of forty dairy cows consisting 20 native and 20 crossbred milking cows were selected in Sonaimuri, Noakhali in winter season to know the daily feed availability to cows. Feed, milk and blood samples were collected and analyzed. The dry matter intake of the local and crossbred cows were 2.58 and 2.74 (g/100 kg live weight respectively) and they did not show statistical variation (p 0.05). Live weight, body condition score and milk yield and MUN varied significantly between genotypes although blood urea nitrogen (BUN) value did not differ significantly. Strong correlation between lactose and protein percentage was observed in both the lactations in local cows. Milk minerals are negatively correlated with protein, SnF and minerals in first lactation whereas moderate to strong relation was observed in second lactation with those parameters. Milk constituents didn’t show any difference between local & crossbred cows. Strong correlation between milk protein and lactose with SnF were observed in both local and crossbred cows in first lactation stage. BUN value showed a moderate correlation between milk yields of local cows. The results revealed that genotype and lactation have no effect on BUN although MUN value showed significant difference between local and crossbred cows. Bangladesh J. of Livestock Res. 19(1-2): 74-84, Jan-Dec 2012
Free actions of free groups on countable structures and property (T)

We show that if G is a non-archimedean, Roelcke precompact Polish group, then G has Kazhdan's property (T). Moreover, if G has a smallest open subgroup of finite index, then G has a finite Kazhdan set. Examples of such G include automorphism groups of countable ! -categorical structures, that is, the closed, oligomorphic permuta- tion groups on a countable set. The proof uses work of the second author on the unitary representations of such groups, together with a separation result for infinite permutation groups. The latter allows the construction of a non-abelian free subgroup of G acting freely in all infinite transitive permutation representations of G.
Near real time detection of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon using MODIS imagery

The objective of this paper is to provide near real time information about deforestation detection (DETER) in the entire Brazilian Amazon using MODIS high temporal resolution images. It is part of the operational deforestation monitoring project to estimate the annual deforestation rate in the Brazilian Amazon (PRODES). A rapid deforestation detection method was designed to support land use policies in this region. In order to evaluate the proposed method a test site was selected covering a Landsat ETM+ scene (227/68) located in Mato Grosso State. For this purpose a multitemporal series of MODIS surface reflectance images (MOD09) and the corresponding ETM+ images from June to October 2002 were analyzed. It was found that small deforested areas (lower than 15 ha) were detected by MODIS images with lower accuracy when compared with ETM+ images. As the deforested areas increase MODIS and ETM+ results tend to converge. This procedure showed to be adequate to operationally detect and monitor deforested areas and has been used since 2004 as part of a government plan to control the Amazon deforestation.
Variations in the age of Arctic sea‐ice and summer sea‐ice extent

Three of the past six summers have exhibited record low sea‐ice extent on the Arctic Ocean. These minima may have been dynamically induced by changes in the surface winds. Based on results of a simple model that keeps track of the age of ice as it moves about on the Arctic Ocean, we show that the areal coverage of thick multi‐year ice decreased precipitously during 1989–1990 when the Arctic Oscillation was in an extreme “high index” state, and has remained low since that time. Under these conditions, younger, thinner ice anomalies recirculate back to the Alaskan coast more quickly, decreasing the time that new ice has to ridge and thicken before returning for another melt season. During the 2002 and 2003 summers this anomalously younger, thinner ice was advected into Alaskan coastal waters where extensive melting was observed, even though temperatures were locally colder than normal. The age of sea‐ice explains more than half of the variance in summer sea‐ice extent.
Transhuman Education? Sloterdijk's Reading of Heidegger's Letter on Humanism

Peter Sloterdijk presented a reading of Heidegger's Letter on Humanism at a conference held at Elmau in 1999. Reinterpreting the meaning of humanism in the light of Heidegger's Letter, Sloterdijk focused his presentation on the need to redefine education as a form of genetic ‘taming’ and proposed what seemed to be support for positive eugenics. Although Sloterdijk claimed that he only wanted to open a debate on the issue, he could not have been surprised at the level of opposition this suggestion aroused. In the weeks following, he blamed Habermas for raising this opposition and for refusing to engage with him openly. Although Luis Arenas has chronicled the aftermath of Sloterdijk's paper, it may be of interest to educators to examine how Heidegger's text is presented. What is this new humanism? If Heidegger's new humanism was based on a mystical attitude towards Being, so Sloterdijk's new humanism was to be based on the materialist principles of a biotechnological age. Unlike Heidegger who rejected technology as yet one further example of the forgetfulness of Being, Sloterdijk seems to embrace technology and the enhancement of the human body and mind as the next great step forward in educational theory. Could he possibly be right? Is education in these times a partner or an opponent of the technological enhancement of the human being? This article tries to identify Sloterdijk's disagreements with Heidegger on the question of the human.
Male individuals in cultivated Fritillaria persica L. (Liliaceae): real androdioecy or gender disphasy?

In the last twenty years the growing number of studies about the reproductive biology in angiosperms has brought to light new cases of andromonoecy and androdioecy, the rarest sexual models among flowering plants. Female- sterile sexual systems, especially within order Liliales and family Liliaceae, often seem to occur in the particular form of size/age dependent sex allocation, known as "gender disphasy". The presence of male individuals of Fritillaria persica (Liliaceae) is here documented. Comparative morphological and functional sexual expression of this species, among males and hermaphrodites, was investigated by means of flowers counting, morphometric measurements of plants and pollen-grains, pollen viability and germinability tests, and crossing experiments. The results show that hermaphrodite plants are significantly bigger and produce a higher number of flowers than males. On the other hand, there is no difference either in terms of pollen size or potential male fitne ss, between the 2 sex types. This suggests the occurrence of gender disphasy in this species, even if our preliminary crossing experiments seem to show an effective higher fitness of male individuals in fertilization. F. persica resulted also partially self-compatible. Our results are discussed in relation to recent findings about andromonoecious and androdioecious breeding systems within Liliales.
Neural Mechanisms of Perceptual Learning

Author(s): Rokem, Ariel Shalom | Advisor(s): Silver, Michael A | Abstract: Perceptual learning is a pervasive and specific improvement in the performance of a perceptual task with training. This dissertation examines the role of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine(ACh) in perceptual learning in a series of behavioral and pharmacological studies in healthy human subjects. ACh plays a role in cognitive functions such as attention and in animal models it has been found to play a role in the facilitation of neural plasticity.The work described here focused on the learning of a visual motion direction discrimination task. In the first study described, I provide a theoretical framework for the study of learning of this task. This part examined the "oblique effect", an advantage in performing this task when stimuli are presented in cardinal, rather than oblique directions. I present both experimental evidence and a population coding model that indicate the oblique effect in behavior may rely on the unequal representation of oblique and cardinal directions in visual areas in cortex. The model suggests that the oblique effect relies on an interplay of this representation with the decoding of the stimulus in higher cortical regions.In the second part of this thesis, participants were administered the cholinesterase inhibitor donepezil while training on the motion direction discrimination task, performed in oblique directions. As previously described, this training abolishes the behavioral oblique effect. Moreover, donepezil increased the effects of training on performance and the specificity of these effects to the oblique direction and the visual field location in which learning took place, suggesting that ACh directs learning towards cells encoding behaviorally relevant features of the stimulus.The third part presents a study investigating the role of ACh in the allocation of voluntary visual spatial attention (which can be allocated in a goal-oriented manner) and involuntary attention (which is automatically captured by salient events). We used an anti-predictive spatial cueing task to assess the effects of pharmacological enhancement of cholinergic transmission on behavioral measures of voluntary and involuntary attention. We found that cholinergic enhancement with donepezil augments the benefits of voluntary attention but does not affect involuntary attention, suggesting that they rely on different neurochemical mechanisms.Taken together, the results of the second and third parts of this thesis provide converging evidence for a potential mechanism of learning: ACh mediates the allocation of voluntary attention, which in turn provides a necessary substrate for learning to occur.
A Low-Cost Open Source 3D-Printable Dexterous Anthropomorphic Robotic Hand with a Parallel Spherical Joint Wrist for Sign Languages Reproduction

We present a novel open-source 3D-printable dexterous anthropomorphic robotic hand specifically designed to reproduce Sign Languages’ hand poses for deaf and deaf-blind users. We improved the InMoov hand, enhancing dexterity by adding abduction/adduction degrees of freedom of three fingers (thumb, index and middle fingers) and a three-degrees-of-freedom parallel spherical joint wrist. A systematic kinematic analysis is provided. The proposed robotic hand is validated in the framework of the PARLOMA project. PARLOMA aims at developing a telecommunication system for deaf-blind people, enabling remote transmission of signs from tactile Sign Languages. Both hardware and software are provided online to promote further improvements from the community.
Adaptation to water level variation: Responses of a floating-leaved macrophyte Nymphoides peltata to terrestrial habitats

A straightforward experimental approach was carried out to study the adaptation responses of a typical floating-leaved aquatic plant Nymphoides peltata to changes in water availability. N. peltata grown in terrestrial habitat was approximately 88.77% lower in total biomass, 62.75% higher in root biomass allocation, 80.9% higher in root-shoot ratio, and 54.5% longer in leaf longevity compared with N. peltata grown in aquatic habitats. Anatomical analyses suggest that aquatic-grown N. peltata exhibits a well-developed lacunal system in leaf, petiole, and coarse root. Moreover, aquatic-grown N. peltata had approximately a higher in lacunal system in leaf, petiole, and coarse root by 28.57%, 56.41% and 82.35%, respectively, than those of terrestrial-grown N. peltata. These results indicated that N. peltata was well adapted to the terrestrial habitat because of its biomass allocation, morphological, and anatomical strategies that depended on the increase in root biomass allocation and leaf longevity, as well as the decrease in the lacunal system volume in leaf, petiole, and coarse root. This indicates that N. peltata can develop multiple morphological and anatomical strategies, an integrated approach to enhance survival in dynamic and unpredictable environments.
Urban-rural difference in patients utilizing the service of telehealthcare

There are concerns about the unbalanced distribution of healthcare resources between rural and urban areas. There have been attempts to use existing healthcare resources more effectively through telehealthcare. Usability is an important indicator for evaluating patient behavior and determining service improvements. Nevertheless, usability has not been studied extensively enough. This study analyzed the usability differences between urban and rural areas in Taiwan for a web portal used in a telehealthcare program. Data were collected for two years. Usability data includes the frequency of web portal patient logins, the frequency of glucose measurements, whether the records were transmitted to the system through 3G networks automatically or were manually inputted, and the correlation of the mean 3-month daily glucose levels and HbA1c results. Patients in urban areas logged into the web portal more frequently ( p < .001) and recorded glucose levels more frequently ( p = .003). More patients in the rural area transmitted their daily glucose levels using devices ( p < .001). Mean 3-month daily glucose levels and HbA1c results appear to be highly consistent. Patients in urban areas did not readily change glucometer habits but were willing to log in to web portal and record daily glucose levels manually. Patients in rural areas were willing to use the 3G glucometer to transmit data more frequently. For patients in urban areas, web portals should provide more information and smart applications. For patients in rural areas, the application should be simple and easy to use.