Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessment of anti-androgenic potential of candidate "green" dibenzoate plasticizers in mammalian MA-10 cells

Plasticizers are additives to plastics that impart flexibility and the ability to process polymers. Unfortunately, due to their leaching potential and widespread use, they have become ubiquitous contaminants in the environment. Studies have correlated the rise of many health issues to the chronic exposure to these compounds and have suggested them as potential carcinogens and endocrine-disruptors. In particular, available evidence indicates that they disturb steroid production such as testosterone production and therefore, behave as anti-androgens. The seriousness of this issue has prompted researchers to develop "green" plasticizers to avoid adverse effects. In this thesis, a series of potential alternative plasticizers were screened for their anti-androgenic potential in vitro using a mouse Leydig tumor cell line, the MA-10 cells. Optimal solvent and plasticizer concentrations and time frame conditions were determined to ensure viability of the cells for the duration of the experiments. Using these optimized testing conditions, potential green plasticizers, including the 1,3-propanediol (C3), 1,4-butanediol (C4), 1,5-pentanediol (C5) and 1,6-hexanediol (C6) dibenzoates, were studied by monitoring their effects on progesterone synthesis. Based on these results and those of others from our group, the candidature of C4 is supported as a potential green plasticizer. %%%%Les plastifiants sont des adjuvants ajoutes aux formulations de plastiques pour les rendre plus flexibles et plus faciles a manipuler. Malheureusement, etant donne leur tendance a migrer de la matrice polymere et leur utilisation repandue, ils sont devenus des contaminants environnementaux omnipresents. Des etudes ont correle la hausse de certaines maladies a l'exposition chronique a ces composes et evoquent leurs risques en tant que potentiels carcinogenes et perturbateurs endocriniens. Notamment, il y a evidence qu'ils perturbent la formation de certains steroides dont la testosterone et ainsi, agissent comme des anti-androgenes. L'importance de ce sujet a incite les chercheurs a developper des plastifiants ‘verts' pour eviter les effets negatifs associes a ces composes. Dans cette these, des composes alternatifs ont ete testes pour leur effet anti-androgene in vitro avec la lignee cellulaire tumorale interstitielle du testicule de souris, les cellules MA-10. Des concentrations optimales de solvant et plastifiants ainsi qu'une duree optimale d'exposition ont ete determinees afin d'assurer la viabilite des cellules au cours des experiences. En employant les conditions optimales etablies, des composes selectionnes en tant que potentiels plastifiants verts, incluant les dibenzoates de 1,3-propanediol (C3), de 1,4-butanediol (C4), de 1,5-pentanediol (C5) et de 1,6-hexanediol (C6), ont ete etudies en mesurant l'impact sur la synthese de progesterone. Les resultats de cette etude, appuyes par d'autres resultats de notre groupe, demontrent le potentiel du C4 en tant que potentiel plastifiant vert.
Analysis of aerosol effects on warm clouds over the Yangtze River Delta from multi-sensor satellite observations

Abstract. Aerosol effects on low warm clouds over the Yangtze River Delta (YRD, eastern China) are examined using co-located MODIS, CALIOP and CloudSat observations. By taking the vertical locations of aerosol and cloud layers into account, we use simultaneously observed aerosol and cloud data to investigate relationships between cloud properties and the amount of aerosol particles (using aerosol optical depth, AOD, as a proxy). Also, we investigate the impact of aerosol types on the variation of cloud properties with AOD. Finally, we explore how meteorological conditions affect these relationships using ERA-Interim reanalysis data. This study shows that the relation between cloud properties and AOD depends on the aerosol abundance, with a different behaviour for low and high AOD (i.e. AOD 0.35). This applies to cloud droplet effective radius (CDR) and cloud fraction (CF), but not to cloud optical thickness (COT) and cloud top pressure (CTP). COT is found to decrease when AOD increases, which may be due to radiative effects and retrieval artefacts caused by absorbing aerosol. Conversely, CTP tends to increase with elevated AOD, indicating that the aerosol is not always prone to expand the vertical extension. It also shows that the COT–CDR and CWP (cloud liquid water path)–CDR relationships are not unique, but affected by atmospheric aerosol loading. Furthermore, separation of cases with either polluted dust or smoke aerosol shows that aerosol–cloud interaction (ACI) is stronger for clouds mixed with smoke aerosol than for clouds mixed with dust, which is ascribed to the higher absorption efficiency of smoke than dust. The variation of cloud properties with AOD is analysed for various relative humidity and boundary layer thermodynamic and dynamic conditions, showing that high relative humidity favours larger cloud droplet particles and increases cloud formation, irrespective of vertical or horizontal level. Stable atmospheric conditions enhance cloud cover horizontally. However, unstable atmospheric conditions favour thicker and higher clouds. Dynamically, upward motion of air parcels can also facilitate the formation of thicker and higher clouds. Overall, the present study provides an understanding of the impact of aerosols on cloud properties over the YRD. In addition to the amount of aerosol particles (or AOD), evidence is provided that aerosol types and ambient environmental conditions need to be considered to understand the observed relationships between cloud properties and AOD.
Metastable liquids

How far can one supercool a liquid before it crystallizes? How much can one stretch it before cavitation occurs ? In order to answer such questions, we have studied liquid helium, a model system. In this review, we show the limitations of the elementary ‘standard nucleation theory’. We then show that the existence of ‘spinodal’ limits needs to be considered in the framework of ‘density functional’ methods. We also briefly consider the possibility of nucleation by quantum tunnelling. The main emphasis is on cavitation and crystallization in liquid helium, but we also mention several connections with more classical systems, in particular water.
Velocity and Acceleration Analysis of Contact Between Three-Dimensional Rigid Bodies

During manipulation and locomotion tasks encountered in robotics, it is often necessary to control the relative motion between two contacting rigid bodies. In this paper we obtain the equations relating the motion of the contact points on the pair of contacting bodies to the rigid-body motions of the two bodies. The equations are developed up to the second order. The velocity and acceleration constraints for contact, for rolling, and for pure rolling are derived. These equations depend on the local surface properties of each contacting body. Several examples are presented to illustrate the nature of the equations.
1 Deductive Verification of MPI Protocols

This chapter presents the PARTYPES framework to statically verify C programs that use the Message Passing Interface, the widely used standard for message-based parallel applications. Programs are checked against a protocol specification that captures the interaction in an MPI program. The protocol language is based on a dependent type system that is able to express various MPI communication primitives, including point-to-point and collective operations. The verification uses VCC, a mechanical verifier for concurrent C programs. It takes the program protocol written in VCC format, an annotated version of the MPI library, and the program to verify, and checks whether the program complies with the protocol.
Composition effects on the early-stage oxidation kinetics of "001… Cu-Au alloys

An in situ environmental transmission electron microscopy study of the nucleation and growth of oxide islands during the early-stage oxidation of (001) Cu1−xAux alloys (x⩽38at.%) was undertaken in order to investigate the effects of alloying on oxide island nucleation behavior and growth kinetics. The kinetic data reveal that Au enhances the nucleation density of oxide islands and suppresses their growth rate. Our results provide insight into reasons for the decreased passivation properties of Cu when alloyed with Au.
Bankable Assets: Africa faces many obstacles in devloping financial systems

Sound, deep, and efficient financial sectors are vital for high sustained, private sector-led growth. But financial sectors in their current form pose major problems for the economies of sub Saharan Africa (SSA). Insufficient access to credit by small and medium- sized enterprises constrains their ability to expand and limits countries' growth potential. Most households cannot build formal savings, so their ability to escape poverty by investing in education or housing is limited.
Gravitational Tension and Thermodynamics of Planar AdS

We derive new thermodynamic relations for asymptotically planar AdS black hole and soliton solutions. In addition to the ADM mass, these spacetimes are characterized by gravitational tensions in each of the planar spatial directions. We show that with planar AdS asymptotics, the sum of the ADM mass and tensions necessarily vanishes, as one would expect from the AdS /CFT correspondence. Each Killing vector of such a spacetime leads to a Smarr formula relating the ADM mass and tensions, the black hole horizon and soliton bubble areas, and a set of thermodynamic volumes that arise due to the non-vanishing cosmological constant. These Smarr relations display an interesting symmetry between black holes and bubbles, being invariant under the simultaneous interchange of the mass and black hole horizon area with the tension and soliton bubble area. This property may indicate a symmetry between the confining and deconfined phases of the dual gauge theory. bmahmoud@physics.umass. edu bett@physics.umass. edu kastor@physics.umass. edu traschen@physics.umass. edu
Fabrication of LaNiO3 Porous Hollow Nanofibers via an Electrospinning Technique

Polyvinyl Pyrrolidone(PVP)/[La(NO3)3+Ni(CH3COO)2] composite nanofibers were fabricated via an electrospinning technique. SEM micrographs indicated that the surface of the prepared composite fibers was smooth, and the diameters of the nanofibers were in the range of 1-3μm. XRD analysis revealed that the composite nanofibers were amorphous in structure. LaNiO3 nanofibers were fabricated by calcination of the PVP/[La(NO3)3+Ni(CH3COO)2] composite fibers. The diameters of LaNiO3 nanofibers were smaller than those of the relevant composite fibers. The surface of the LaNiO3 nanofibers became coarse with the increase of calcination temperatures. LaNiO3 porous hollow nanofibers formed by nanoparticles were acquired when firing temperature was 600-900oC. SEM images indicated that the diameters of the synthesized LaNiO3 nanofibers ranged from 500 to 800nm, and their lengths were greater than 100μm. XRD analysis revealed that LaNiO3 nanofibers were trigonal in structure with space group . Possible formation mechanism for LaNiO3 nanofibers was preliminarily proposed.
Unsupervised Learnable Sinogram Inpainting Network (SIN) for Limited Angle CT reconstruction.

In this paper, we propose a sinogram inpainting network (SIN) to solve limited-angle CT reconstruction problem, which is a very challenging ill-posed issue and of great interest for several clinical applications. A common approach to the problem is an iterative reconstruction algorithm with regularization term, which can suppress artifacts and improve image quality, but requires high computational cost. The starting point of this paper is the proof of inpainting function for limited-angle sinogram is continuous, which can be approached by neural networks in a data-driven method, granted by the universal approximation theorem. Based on this, we propose SIN as the fitting function -- a convolutional neural network trained to generate missing sinogram data conditioned on scanned data. Besides CNN module, we design two differentiable and rapid modules, Radon and Inverse Radon Transformer network, to encapsulate the physical model in the training procedure. They enable new joint loss functions to optimize both sinogram and reconstructed image in sync, which improved the image quality significantly. To tackle the labeled data bottleneck in clinical research, we form a sinogram-image-sinogram closed loop, and the difference between sinograms can be used as training loss. In this way, the proposed network can be self-trained, with only limited-angle data for unsupervised domain adaptation. We demonstrate the performance of our proposed network on parallel beam X-ray CT in lung CT datasets from Data Science Bowl 2017 and the ability of unsupervised transfer learning in Zubal's phantom. The proposed method performs better than state-of-art method SART-TV in PSNR and SSIM metrics, with noticeable visual improvements in reconstructions.
Millennial Recurrence of Large Earthquakes on the Haiyuan Fault near Songshan, Gansu Province, China

The Haiyuan fault is a major active left-lateral fault along the northeast edge of the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau. Studying this fault is important in understanding current deformation of the plateau and the mechanics of continental deformation in general. Previous studies have mostly focused on the slip rate of the fault. Paleo- seismic investigations on the fault are sparse, and have been targeted mostly at the stretch of the fault that ruptured in the 1920 M 8.6 earthquake in Ningxia Province. To investigate the millennial seismic history of the western Haiyuan fault, we opened two trenches in a small pull-apart basin near Songshan, in Gansu Province. The excavation exposes sedimentary layers of alternating colors: dark brown silty to clayey deposit and light yellowish brown layers of coarser-grained sandy deposit. The main fault zone is readily recognizable by the disruption and tilting of the layers. Six paleoseismic events are identified and named SS1 through SS6, from youngest to oldest. Charcoal is abundant, yet generally tiny in the shallowest parts of the trench exposures. Thirteen samples were dated to constrain the ages of paleoseismic events. All six events have occurred during the past 3500-3900 years. The horizontal offsets associated with these events are poorly known. However, events SS3 to SS6 appear to be large ones, judging from comparison of vertical separations and widths of fault zones. The youngest event SS1 instead seems to be a minor one, probably the 1990 Mw 5.8 earthquake. Thus, four large events in 3500-3900 years would imply a re- currence interval of about 1000 years. Three events SS2 to SS4 prior to 1990 occurred sometime during 1440-1640 A.D., shortly after 890-1000 A.D. and 0-410 A.D., re- spectively. We tentatively associate them with the 1514 A.D., 1092 A.D., and 143 or 374 A.D. historical earthquakes. Taking 10 2 m of slip for large events (SS3 and SS4), comparable to the 1920 M 8 Haiyuan earthquake, their occurrence times would be consistent with the long-term 12 4 mm/yr estimate of Lasserre et al. (1999). However, a more realistic evaluation of slip rate and its possible change with time requires a more rigorous determination of coseismic slip amounts of past earth- quakes.
Pretty good state transfer via adaptive quantum error correction

We examine the role of quantum error correction (QEC) in achieving pretty good quantum state transfer over a class of $1$-d spin Hamiltonians. Recasting the problem of state transfer as one of information transmission over an underlying quantum channel, we identify an adaptive QEC protocol that achieves pretty good state transfer. Using an adaptive recovery and approximate QEC code, we obtain explicit analytical and numerical results for the fidelity of transfer over ideal and disordered $1$-d Heisenberg chains. In the case of a disordered chain, we study the distribution of the transition amplitude, which in turn quantifies the stochastic noise in the underlying quantum channel. Our analysis helps us to suitably modify the QEC protocol so as to ensure pretty good state transfer for small disorder strengths and indicates a threshold beyond which QEC does not help in improving the fidelity of state transfer.
Verified Runtime Model Validation for Partially Observable Hybrid Systems ∗

Formal verification provides strong safety guarantees about models of cyber-physical systems. Hybrid system models describe the required interplay of computation and physical dynamics, which is crucial to guarantee what computations lead to safe physical behavior (e.g., cars should not collide). Control computations that affect physical dynamics must act in advance to avoid possibly unsafe future circumstances. Formal verification then ensures that the controllers correctly identify and provably avoid unsafe future situations under a certain model of physics. But any model of physics necessarily deviates from reality and, moreover, any observation with real sensors and manipulation with real actuators is subject to uncertainty. This makes runtime validation a crucial step to monitor whether the model assumptions hold for the real system implementation. The key question is what property needs to be runtime-monitored and what a satisfied runtime monitor entails about the safety of the system: the observations of a runtime monitor only relate back to the safety of the system if they are themselves accompanied by a proof of correctness. For an unbroken chain of correctness guarantees, we, thus, synthesize runtime monitors in a provably correct way from provably safe hybrid system models. This paper advances these techniques to make the synthesized monitoring conditions robust to partial observability of sensor uncertainty and partial controllability due to actuator disturbance. We show that the monitoring conditions result in provable safety guarantees with fallback controllers that react to monitor violation at runtime. We evaluate the method by synthesizing monitoring conditions from existing case studies on train and road traffic control.
Successive minimum spanning trees

In a complete graph Kn with independent uniform (0,1) (or exponential (1) ) edge weights, let T1 be the minimum‐weight spanning tree (MST), and Tk the MST after deleting the edges of all previous trees. We show that each tree's weight w(Tk) converges in probability to a constant γk , with 2k−2k
Web-based lecture technologies: blurring the boundaries between face-to-face and distance learning

Web-based lecture technologies (WBLT) have gained popularity amongst universities in Australia as a tool for delivering lecture recordings to students in close to real time. This paper reports on a selection of results from a larger research project investigating the impact of WBLT on teaching and learning. Results show that while staff see the advantages for external students, they question the extent to which these advantages apply to internal students. In contrast both cohorts of students were positive about the benefits of the technologies for their learning and they adopted similar strategies for their use. With the help of other technologies, some external students and staff even found WBLT useful for fostering communication between internal and external students. As such, while the traditional boundary between internal and external students seems to remain for some staff, students seem to find the boundary much less clear. Keywords: web-based lecture technologies; staff perception; student perception; distance education; external students; internal students; Lectopia DOI: 10.1080/09687760802315895
Attentional pursuit : How fast can attention follow an object ?

How quickly can we shift the focus of visual attention? We compared the rates of two types of attentional shifts: attentional saccades (shifts between objects) and attentional pursuit (shifts along with a moving object). Instead of measuring the time required for a single shift, which confounds shift time with cue interpretation time, we measured the pace at which observers could make multiple successive shifts in a predictable order. We find that successive attentional saccades between objects are quite slow (300-500 ms). The object-based theory of attention predicts that attention should shift between locations more quickly when in pursuit of a moving object. Our results support this theory. Attentional pursuit is substantially faster taking only 200-250 ms to cover the same distance. “Indexing” a moving object (keeping track of one object) can be done at even faster rates, supporting a distinction between attending to and indexing objects.
Importance of Vanadium-Catalyzed Oxidation of SO2 to SO3 in Two-Stroke Marine Diesel Engines

Low-speed marine diesel engines are mostly operated on heavy fuel oils, which have a high content of sulfur and ash, including trace amounts of vanadium, nickel, and aluminum. In particular, vanadium oxides could catalyze in-cylinder oxidation of SO2 to SO3, promoting the formation of sulfuric acid and enhancing problems of corrosion. In the present work, the kinetics of the catalyzed oxidation was studied in a fixed-bed reactor at atmospheric pressure. Vanadium oxide nanoparticles were synthesized by spray flame pyrolysis, i.e., by a mechanism similar to the mechanism leading to the formation of the catalytic species within the engine. Experiments with different particle compositions (vanadium/sodium ratio) and temperatures (300–800 °C) show that both the temperature and sodium content have a major impact on the oxidation rate. Kinetic parameters for the catalyzed reaction are determined, and the proposed kinetic model fits well with the experimental data. The impact of the catalytic reaction is studied .
0 THE PEER MONITORING ROLE OF THE INTERBANK MARKET IN KENYA AND IMPLICATIONS FOR BANK REGULATION by

We investigate whether the interbank market in Kenya is effective as a peer monitoring and market discipline device and thus complements official bank regulation. We use a unique set of quarterly data on 43 banks which participated in interbank transactions during 2003Q1 2011Q1. We uncover a stable inverse relationship between interbank activity and bank risk levels, even after controlling for differences in bank characteristics. Our results suggest that regulators can use the dynamic interbank borrowing activities among large and small banks as market signals to identify banks that are perceived as risky. However, we also find that if a bank continues to increase its net interbank position up a certain level, the impact on bank risk is reversed from risk-reducing to riskincreasing. Given that Kenya’s banks have spawned the Eastern African financial space, our findings on Kenya’s interbank market have exemplary implications for bank regulation in the region. JEL classification: G21; E58