Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reduced cadherin expression associated with resistance to Bt toxin Cry1Ac in pink bollworm.

BACKGROUND Better understanding of the molecular basis of resistance is needed to improve management of pest resistance to transgenic crops that produce insecticidal proteins from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). Here we analyzed resistance of the pink bollworm (Pectinophora gossypiella) to Bt toxin Cry1Ac, which is used widely in transgenic Bt cotton. Field-evolved practical resistance of pink bollworm to Cry1Ac is widespread in India, but not in China or the United States. Previous work with laboratory- and field-selected pink bollworm indicated that resistance to Cry1Ac is caused by qualitative changes in the amino acid sequence of a midgut cadherin protein (PgCad1) that binds Cry1Ac in susceptible larvae. RESULTS Relative to a susceptible strain, the laboratory-selected APHIS-R strain had 530-fold resistance to Cry1Ac with autosomal recessive inheritance. Unlike previous results, resistance in this strain was not consistently associated with insertions or deletions in the expected amino acid sequence of PgCad1. However, this resistance was associated with 79- to 190-fold reduced transcription of the PgCad1 gene and markedly lower abundance of PgCad1 protein. CONCLUSION The ability of pink bollworm and other major pests to evolve resistance to Bt toxins via both qualitative and quantitative changes in receptor proteins demonstrates their remarkable adaptability and presents challenges for monitoring and managing resistance to Bt crops. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Biased Distributions and Decay of Long Interspersed Nuclear Elements in the Chicken Genome

The genomes of birds are much smaller than mammalian genomes, and transposable elements (TEs) make up only 10% of the chicken genome, compared with the 45% of the human genome. To study the mechanisms that constrain the copy numbers of TEs, and as a consequence the genome size of birds, we analyzed the distributions of LINEs (CR1's) and SINEs (MIRs) on the chicken autosomes and Z chromosome. We show that (1) CR1 repeats are longest on the Z chromosome and their length is negatively correlated with the local GC content; (2) the decay of CR1 elements is highly biased, and the 5′-ends of the insertions are lost much faster than their 3′-ends; (3) the GC distribution of CR1 repeats shows a bimodal pattern with repeats enriched in both AT-rich and GC-rich regions of the genome, but the CR1 families show large differences in their GC distribution; and (4) the few MIRs in the chicken are most abundant in regions with intermediate GC content. Our results indicate that the primary mechanism that removes repeats from the chicken genome is ectopic exchange and that the low abundance of repeats in avian genomes is likely to be the consequence of their high recombination rates.
Association of Increased Youth Suicides in the United States With the Release of 13 Reasons Why.

Importance On March 31, 2017, Netflix released the show 13 Reasons Why, sparking immediate criticism from suicide prevention organizations for not following media recommendations for responsible suicide portrayal and for possible suicide contagion by media. To date, little research has been conducted into the associations between the show and suicide counts among its young target audience. Objective To analyze the changes in suicide counts after the release of 13 Reasons Why. Design, Setting, and Participants For this time series analysis, monthly suicide data for the age groups 10 to 19 years, 20 to 29 years, and 30 years or older for both US males and females from January 1, 1999, to December 31, 2017, were extracted from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's WONDER (Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research) database. Twitter and Instagram posts were used as a proxy to estimate the amount of attention the show received through social media from April 1, 2017, to June 30, 2017. Autoregressive integrated moving average time series models were fitted to the pre-April 2017 period to estimate suicides among the age groups and to identify changes in specific suicide methods used. The models were fitted to the full time series with dummy variables for (1) April 2017 and (2) April 1, 2017, to June 30, 2017. Data were analyzed in December 2018 and January 2019. Main Outcomes and Measures Suicide data before and after the release of the show in 2017. Results Based on social media data, public interest in the show was highest in April 2017 and was negligible after June 2017. For 10- to 19-year-old males and females, increases in the observed values from April to June 2017 were outside the 95% confidence bands of forecasts. Models testing 3-month associated suicide mortality indicated 66 (95% CI, 16.3-115.7) excess suicides among males (12.4% increase; 95% CI, 3.1%-21.8%) and 37 (95% CI, 12.4-61.5) among females (21.7% increase; 95% CI, 7.3%-36.2%). No excess suicide mortality was seen in other age groups. The increase in the hanging suicide method was particularly high (26.9% increase; 95% CI, 15.3%-38.4%). Conclusions and Relevance Caution must be taken in interpreting these findings; however, the suicide increase in youth only and the signal of a potentially larger increase in young females all appear to be consistent with a contagion by media and seem to reinforce the need for collaboration toward improving fictional portrayals of suicide.
Connexions of the somatic sensory cortex of the rhesus monkey. II. Contralateral cortical connexions.

THE current interest in the commissural connexions of the cerebral cortex derives from the work of Sperry (1961), Myers (1962a), Gazzaniga (1966) and others, who have clearly shown that the fore-brain commissures play a significant part in the interhemispheric transfer of learning based upon peripheral sensory cues. A recent investigation by Kaas, Axelrod and' Diamond (1967) indicates that commissural fibres may also be involved in mechanisms more complex than mere transfer, for in their study an auditory memory trace appeared to be kept out of one hemisphere by an active suppression originating in the contralateral hemisphere. The anatomical basis for the transfer of learning and for the more subtle effects shown by Kaas et al. is as yet unclear, but there are reasons for considering that the organization of the pathway joining the two hemispheres is not a simple one. This is particularly so in regard to the primary sensory areas of the cortex, for some subdivisions of these areas receive commissural fibres from more than one area of the opposite side while parts of others neither send nor receive such fibres (Myers, 1962Z>; Choudhury, Whitteridge and Wilson, 1965; Ebner and Myers, 1965; Garey, Jones and Powell, 1968; Jones and Powell, 1968; Pandya and Vignolo, 1968). In the absence of commissural connexions between certain significant parts of the peripheral representation of the primary sensory areas such as the freer parts of the limbs or the periphery of the visual field, it is unlikely that information ultimately concerned in learning is transferred (or withheld from transfer) at this level of cortical function. On the other hand, the parts of the sensory areas which are commissurally connected should be functionally different from those which are not. It seemed worth while, therefore, to extend the study on the somatic sensory cortex of the cat to the monkey not only for the obvious reason of its closer affinity to man, but also because the larger size and clearer boundaries of the architectonic and functional subdivisions of the first somatic sensory area make these individual subdivisions more amenable to investigation .
Limitations on Lateral Nanowire Scaling Beyond 7-nm Node

In this letter, we have studied the impact on lateral nanowire transistor's (LNW) performance of reducing the wire diameter from 7 nm to 5 nm. As technology scaling continues, the LNW device size is scaled here for beyond 7-nm nodes. Reducing the NW's gate length causes huge degradation in electrostatic control of the device. The degraded electrostatic is improved by reducing the wire diameter. DC and ring oscillator benchmark have been performed for different NW size for sub-7-nm node using TCAD-based compact models. Using the 5-nm-diameter-based LNW at the gate length of 10 nm around 8-mV/decade subthreshold slope improvement is observed as compared with the 7-nm-diameter LNW. This leads to the possibility of improved performances for the 5-nm-diameter-based device. The NW device, with 5-nm wire diameter and 10-nm gate length can provide some area gain. Although the 5-nm-diameter device increases channel confinement, due to the reduced drive current and increased parasitics, overall device speed is lagging behind the 7-nm diameter device.
An Easy-to-Use Approach for Practical Bus-Based System Design

We present an easy-to-use model that addresses the practical issues in designing bus-based shared-memory multiprocessor systems. The model relates the shared-bus width, bus cycle time, cache memory, the features of a program execution, and the number of processors on a shared bus to a metric called request utilization. The request utilization is treated as the scaling factor for the effective average waiting processors in computing the queuing delay cycles. Simulation study shows that the model performs very well in estimating the shared bus response time. Using the model, a system designer can quickly decide the number of the processors that a shared bus is able to support effectively, the size of the cache memory a system should use, and the bus cycle time that the main memory system should provide. With the model, we show that the design favors caching the requests for a contention-based medium instead of speeding up the transfers although the same performance can be respectively achieved by the two techniques in a contention-free situation.
Role of Mast Cell-Derived Adenosine in Cancer

Accumulating evidence has highlighted the accumulation of mast cells (MCs) in tumors. However, their impact on tumor development remained controversial. Indeed, cumulative data indicate an enigmatic role for MCs in cancer, whereby depending on the circumstances, which still need to be resolved, MCs function to promote or restrict tumor growth. By responding to multiple stimuli MCs release multiple inflammatory mediators, that contribute to the resolution of infection and resistance to envenomation, but also have the potency to promote or inhibit malignancy. Thus, MCs seem to possess the power to define tumor projections. Given this remarkable plasticity of MC responsiveness, there is an urgent need of understanding how MCs are activated in the tumor microenvironment (TME). We have recently reported on the direct activation of MCs upon contact with cancer cells by a mechanism involving an autocrine formation of adenosine and signaling by the A3 adenosine receptor. Here we summarized the evidence on the role of adenosine signaling in cancer, in MC mediated inflammation and in the MC-cancer crosstalk.
Nickel allergy and allergic contact dermatitis: A clinical review of immunology, epidemiology, exposure, and treatment

Nickel is the most frequent cause of contact allergy worldwide and has been studied extensively. This clinical review provides an updated overview of the epidemiology, exposure sources, methods for exposure quantification, skin deposition and penetration, immunology, diagnosis, thresholds for sensitization and elicitation, clinical pictures, prevention, and treatment. The implementation of a nickel regulation in Europe led to a decrease in the prevalence of nickel allergy, and changes in the clinical picture and disease severity. Nevertheless, the prevalences of nickel allergy in the European general population are approximately 8% to 19% in adults and 8% to 10% in children and adolescents, with a strong female predominance. Well‐known consumer items such as jewellery and metal in clothing are still the main causes of nickel allergy and dermatitis, although a wide range of items for both private and occupational use may cause dermatitis. Allergic nickel dermatitis may be localized to the nickel exposure site, be more widespread, or present as hand eczema. Today, efficient methods for exposure quantification exist, and new insights regarding associated risk factors and immunological mechanisms underlying the disease have been obtained. Nevertheless, questions remain in relation to the pathogenesis, the persistent high prevalence, and the treatment of severe cases.
Comparison of antispasmodic effects of Dracocephalum kotschyi essential oil, limonene and α-terpineol

Dracocephalum kotschyi is an essential oil containing plant found in Iran. In Iranian traditional medicine, D. kotschyi has been used as antispasmodic and analgesic but so far there is no pharmacological report about its antispasmodic activity. Therefore, the objective of this research was to study antispasmodic activity of the essential oil of D. kotschyi and two of its constituents namely limonene and α-terpineol. The essential oil was obtained from aerial parts of D. kotschyi using hydrodistillation method. The main components found in the essential oil were α-pinene (10%), neral (11%), geraniol (10%), α-citral (12%), limonene (9%) and α-terpineol (1.1%). For antispasmodic studies, a portion of rat ileum was suspended under 1 g tension in Tyrode's solution at 37 °C and gassed with O2. Effect of the D. kotschyi essential oil, limonene and α-terpineol were studied on ileum contractions induced by KCl (80 mM), acetylcholine (ACh, 500 nM) and electrical field stimulation (EFS). The essential oil, in a concentration dependent manner inhibited the response to KCl (IC50=51 ± 8.7 nl/ml), ACh (IC50=19 ± 2.7 nl/ml) and EFS (IC50=15 ± 0.5 nl/ml). Limonene and α-terpineol showed same pattern of inhibitory effect on ileum contraction. Their inhibitory effects were also concentration dependent. However, limonene was more potent than the essential oil while the α-terpineol was less potent than either limonene or the essential oil. From this experiment it was concluded that D. kotschyi essential oil has inhibitory effect on ileum contractions. Limonene contribute a major role in inhibitory effect of the essential oil while α-terpineol has weak antispasmodic activity.
Reinforcement Learning inspired Deep Learned Compositional Model for Decision Making in Tracking

We formulate a tracker which performs incessant decision making in order to track objects where the objects may undergo different challenges such as partial occlusions, moving camera, cluttered background etc. In the process, the agent must make a decision on whether to keep track of the object when it is occluded or has moved out of the frame temporarily based on its prediction from the previous location or to reinitialize the tracker based on the belief that the target has been lost. Instead of the heuristic methods we depend on reward and penalty based training that helps the agent reach an optimal solution via this partially observable Markov decision making (POMDP). Furthermore, we employ deeply learned compositional model to estimate human pose in order to better handle occlusion without needing human inputs. By learning compositionality of human bodies via deep neural network the agent can make better decision on presence of human in a frame or lack thereof under occlusion. We adapt skeleton based part representation and do away with the large spatial state requirement. This especially helps in cases where orientation of the target in focus is unorthodox. Finally we demonstrate that the deep reinforcement learning based training coupled with pose estimation capabilities allows us to train and tag multiple large video datasets much quicker than previous works
A Study on the Factors Affecting Audio-Video Subjective Experience in Virtual Reality Environments

Virtual Reality brings a new experience in visual and auditory. Immersive experience in virtual reality is not only from the visual feeling of panoramic video, spatial audio also plays a vital role. Unfortunately, combination quality assessment of panoramic video and spatial audio is still lacking. In this paper, we propose a subjective experimental methodology to prove the influence of four impairment types on subjective experience, including video and audio impairment, temporal and spatial synchronization. Subjective experiment is conducted and the results verify that the four impairment types have different influence degree on user experience.
Distribution of glutamate‐gated chloride channel subunits in the parasitic nematode Haemonchus contortus

Glutamate‐gated chloride channels (GluCl) are related to γ‐aminobutyric acid‐A (GABAA) receptors and are the target sites for the avermectin/milbemycin (A/M) anthelmintics, drugs that cause paralysis of the somatic and pharyngeal muscles in nematodes. We have previously identified four GluCl subunits, HcGluClα, HcGluClβ, HcGluClα3A, and HcGluClα3B from the sheep parasite Haemonchus contortus. We raised specific antisera against all of these subunits and used them in immunofluorescence experiments on adult parasites. All of the subunits were expressed in the motor nervous system, especially motor neuron commissures. Double‐immunostaining experiments suggested that HcGluClα and HcGluClβ were expressed on the same commissures; these were also stained with an anti‐GABA antibody, suggesting that they may be inhibitory motor neurons. The HcGluClβ subunit was also detected in lateral and sublateral nerve cords. The HcGluClα3A and ‐B subunits, products of an alternatively spliced gene, were expressed in different neurons. We found HcGluClαA in a pair of sensory, possibly amphid, neurons in the head, in addition to the motor neuron commissures. HcGluClα3B was detected in three cell bodies, probably of pharyngeal neurons, and to ventral and lateral cords. These results indicate that the GluCl are widely distributed in the H. contortus nervous system and suggest that they have critical roles controlling locomotion, pharyngeal function, and possibly sensory processing in parasitic nematodes. They also provide an explanation for the observed effects of the A/M anthelmintics. J. Comp. Neurol. 462:213–222, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Aging-Aware Design Verification Methods Under Real Product Operating Conditions

We examined how to verify the circuit aging performance regarding the easily missed, but considerable stress conditions of transistors. First, power-down mode of integrated circuits may influence unintended device degradation and cause aging-induced mismatching of the circuit. Next, Positive Bias Temperature Instability (PBTI) for PMOS, unlike NMOS, is less significant for device-level reliability, yet some PBTI degradation for PMOS may still cause risk in sensitive circuit. These aging verification methods developed here can help circuit designers against aging and provide more robust product solutions.
Optimal Electric Vehicle Charging Station Placing with Integration of Renewable Energy

In light of the large-scale electric vehicle (EV) development which outnumber the public charging stations, it is imperative to design and locate electric vehicle charging station (EVCS) in order to deliver lower costs for both charging infrastructure owners and distribution grids. In this paper, we investigated the location problem of EVCSs on city-scale in a synergy between photovoltaic (PV) panels and the grid where budget constraint and cooperative covering of charging spots are considered. Based on the assignment rules of energy management for each charging station, a mixed integer linear model is developed to formulate the problem. This paper aims to combine modelling of the power consumption and production associated with both grid and renewable energies and maximization of EVCS profits, on the owner of charging station side. Applying the model to five charging station candidates in Mashhad, the results show that using this model and the simultaneous presence of EVs and renewable energy sources in the network, make a reduction in costs while an increase in profits.
Reliability Evaluation Based on Sentiment Analysis of Online Comment

E-commerce products are becoming widely acceptable because of their advantages in terms of purchasing convenience. At the same time, due to the unique characteristics of e-commerce products, it is increasingly difficult for customers to define and evaluate the authenticity and reliability of products, which usually requires a large amount of failure data through the reliability test that is non-applicable to e-commerce products. Here we provide a novel reliability analysis based on users' subjective sentiments for e-commerce products. Based on data from online sellers and user comments, we calculate the reliability of e-commerce products by a neural network for their sentimental values. We evaluate and weight the usefulness of each comment by using multifaceted data such as comment date, buyer's credit level, and the number of comments in a given day. Our findings are helpful for evaluating the reliability of e-commerce products, thus better design potential new products with large user adoption.
Estimation of SIR-EPDM blend ratio using GRNN

The control and instrumentation (C&I) circuits of engineering systems are equally critical as even a minor fault may leads to major shut down of plants or may leads to major accidents. Hence the (C&I) circuits need to be designed considering both electrical and mechanical parameters. The cable materials, besides possessing good electrical properties should also have desired mechanical properties. Hence it becomes necessary to find suitable cable material that possesses required electrical and mechanical properties. The preparation of new cable material by suitably blending existing material provides better results. This paper presents a method of identifying the suitable blend ratio of Silicone Rubber (SiR) and Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) using Generalized Regression Neural Network (GRNN). The five different compositions of SiR-EPDM blends (A-90/10; B-70/30; C-50/50; D-30/70; E 10/90) were prepared. The mechanical parameters like tensile strength (TS), elongation at break (EB), Hardness (H) and the electrical parameters like volume resistivity (VRY), surface resistivity (SRY), arc resistance time (ART), comparative tracking index (CTI), Breakdown Voltage (BDV), Dielectric Strength (DS), Dielectric Constant (DC) were measured as per ASTM/IEC standards. The GRNN model was trained using the measured data. The proposed GRNN model has been tested with new data sets using MATLAB-SIMULINK. The test result reveals that GRNN model can effectively identify the SiR -EPDM blend ratio in order to meet the required electro-mechanical parameters for any specific application.
Soft Error Performance of High-Speed Pulsed-DICE-Latch Design in 16 nm and 7 nm FinFET Processes

A pulsed-DICE latch design that operates similar to an edge-triggered flip-flop with improved SER performance is presented. Design was implemented along with conventional D-flip-flop and conventional DICE flip-flop in 16 nm and 7 nm bulk FinFET CMOS processes. The pulsed-DICE latch did not show any upsets with alpha particles and neutrons and has more than 2 orders of magnitude improvement in heavy-ion cross-section compared to conventional D-FF. The proposed design benefits from 60% higher speed than the conventional DICE flip-flop design along with significantly lower area and power penalties.