Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hacia una meta-herramienta de análisis automático de modelos de variabilidad

El análisis automático de modelos de variabilidad es una actividad clave dentro de la gestión de la variabilidad. Existe un variado número de investigaciones y de enfoques que se han centrado en esta temática, fundamentalmente debido a que el hecho de determinar la validez de los modelos e identificar los problemas que contiene tanto a nivel de la definición de una línea de productos de software así como la instanciación y generación de productos en etapas tempranas, agiliza el desarrollo de la misma. Estos numerosos enfoques presentan diferentes tipos de modelos con distintas reglas, elementos y dependencias; diferentes procesos de validación y diversas reglas lógicas que soportan el análisis, así como diferentes solver (resolvedores lógicos) que determinan la validez de los modelos. Teniendo en cuenta este contexto, en este trabajo presentamos una Meta-herramienta de análisis automático basada en un proceso general, con el objetivo de proveer la suficiente flexibilidad que permita ser adaptada a diferentes modelos, reglas y resolvedores lógicos.
Early Treatment Diseases

Early treatment will significantly change the way medicine is practiced and require medical education to change. The following identifies some ways that medical practice will change: • Prediction, loosely “diagnosis” and treatment of a disease will occur for a patient before there are any obvious symptoms of the disease. • The patient may not wish to have knowledge that he/she will likely get the disease and thus may not agree to prediction or treatment. • Prediction of the disease may only be possible during a given time frame before the disease occurs. • Treatment may also only be possible during a given time frame. Certainly, treatment should occur before, possibly long before, there are obvious symptoms. • Prediction or treatment of the disease has the potential of causing harm, so a false positive prediction could cause harm to the patient without any benefit. • Since the process of prediction of a disease could cause harm, then only selected patients (e.g., with a particular genetic makeup) may be candidates for early treatment of a given disease. • Insurance companies may be reluctant to pay for early treatments as the disease has not yet obviously occurred.
Serum sclerostin and irisin as predictive markers for atherosclerosis in Egyptian type II diabetic female patients: A case control study

Diabetes mellitus represents a major independent risk factor for developing fatal cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) presumably through accelerating atherosclerosis; the underlying cause of most CVDs. Notably, this relative risk is reported to be higher in women than men. Endeavors directed towards identifying novel reliable predictive biomarkers are immensely thereby urged to improve the long-term outcome in these diabetic female patients. Sclerostin (SOST) is a Wnt signaling antagonist whereas irisin is a muscle-derived factor released after exercising which enhances browning of white adipose tissue. Emerging lines of evidence hint at potential crosstalk between them and CVDs. The present study aimed to assess the serum levels of SOST and irisin in Egyptian type 2 diabetic (T2DM) female patients with and without atherosclerosis and explore the possible relationship between both markers and other studied parameters among the studied cohorts. In this case-control study, 69 female subjects were enrolled; 39 type 2 diabetes patients with atherosclerosis (T2DM+ATHR), 22 type 2 diabetes patients without atherosclerosis (T2DM-ATHR) and 8 healthy controls. Their serum levels of SOST and irisin were assessed using ELISA. Significant increase in SOST levels were found in T2DM+ATHR compared to T2DM-ATHR and control (259.9 ±17.98 vs. 165.8±13.12 and 142.0±13.31 pg/mL respectively, P<0.001). Conversely, irisin levels were significantly lower in T2DM+ATHR (P<0.001) and T2DM-ATHR (P<0.01) compared to the control group (32.91±2.545 and 58.55±13.19 vs. 473.6±112.7 pg/mL). Interestingly, significant correlations between the levels of SOST and both irisin and fasting blood glucose were noticed in T2DM+ATHR group (r = 0.3754 and 0.3381 respectively, P<0.05). In conclusion, to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate the correlation between SOST and irisin levels in atherosclerotic T2DM female patients implying their potential implication in diabetic cardiovascular pathophysiology and supporting their use as reliable diagnostic/prognostic biomarkers for monitoring and preventing CVDs progression of T2DM female patients.
Computational Sequence Analysis of Inversion Breakpoint Regions in the Cactophilic Drosophila mojavensis Lineage

We investigated rates of chromosomal evolution in Drosophila mojavensis using whole-genome sequence information from D. mojavensis, Drosophila buzzatii, and Drosophila virilis. Drosophila mojavensis is a cactophilic species of the repleta group living under extreme ecological conditions in the deserts of the Southwestern United States and Northwestern México. The genome of D. buzzatii, another member of the repleta group, was recently sequenced and the largest scaffolds anchored to all chromosomes using diverse procedures. Chromosome organization between D. mojavensis and D. buzzatii was compared using MUMmer and GRIMM software. Our results corroborate previous cytological analyses that indicated chromosome 2 differed between these 2 species by 10 inversions, chromosomes X and 5 differed by one inversion each, and chromosome 4 was homosequential. In contrast, we found that chromosome 3 differed by 5 inversions instead of the expected 2 that were previously inferred by cytological analyses. Thirteen of these inversions occurred in the D. mojavensis lineage: 12 are fixed and one of them is a polymorphic inversion previously described in populations from Sonora and Baja California, México. We previously investigated the breakpoints of chromosome 2 inversions fixed in D. mojavensis. Here we characterized the breakpoint regions of the 5 inversions found in chromosome 3 in order to infer the molecular mechanism that generated each inversion and its putative functional consequences. Overall, our results reveal a number of gene alterations at the inversion breakpoints with putative adaptive consequences that point to natural selection as the cause for fast chromosomal evolution in D. mojavensis.
Social determinants of health affecting utilisation of routine maternity services in Nepal: a narrative review of the evidence

Abstract Nepal has one of the highest maternal and neonatal mortality rates among low- and middle-income countries. Nepal’s health system focuses on life-saving interventions provided during the antenatal to postpartum period. However, the inequality in the uptake of maternity services is of major concern. This study aimed to synthesise evidence from the literature regarding the social determinants of health on the use of maternity services in Nepal. We conducted a structured narrative review of studies published from 1994 to 2016. We searched five databases: PubMed; CINAHL; EMBASE; ProQuest and Global Index Medicus using search terms covering four domains: access and use; equity determinants; routine maternity services and Nepal. The findings of the studies were summarised using the World Health Organization’s Social Determinants of Health framework. A total of 59 studies were reviewed. A range of socio-structural and intermediary-level determinants was identified, either as facilitating factors, or as barriers, to the uptake of maternity services. These determinants were higher socioeconomic status; education; privileged ethnicities such as Brahmins/Chhetris, people following the Hindu religion; accessible geography; access to transportation; family support; women’s autonomy and empowerment; and a birth preparedness plan. Findings indicate the need for health and non-health sector interventions, including education linked to job opportunities; mainstreaming of marginalised communities in economic activities and provision of skilled providers, equipment and medicines. Interventions to improve maternal health should be viewed using a broad ‘social determinants of health’ framework.
Strain Sensor Based on MWCNT-Natural Rubber Composite for Wearable Electronics

In this work thin films train sensors based on natural rubber (NR)/multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) composites are proposed. The field of application are wearable electronics and structural health monitoring. The sensors can be fabricated in different geometries depending on the application. Because of the highly flexible polymer matrix it is possible to reach elongations above 150%. The electrical response was measured at different strains showing reproducibility and linearity. In addition, the morphology and surface properties were investigated by electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy (AFM) showing smooth surface.
Maternal and paternal trajectories of depressive symptoms predict family risk and children's emotional and behavioral problems after the birth of a sibling

Abstract The current study examined trajectories of maternal and paternal depression in the year following the birth of an infant sibling, and relations with family risk factors and firstborn children's internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. Latent class growth analysis was conducted on 231 families in a longitudinal investigation (prebirth and 1, 4, 8, and 12 months postbirth) and revealed four classes of families: both mother and father low in depressive symptoms (40.7%); mother high–father low (25.1%); father high–mother low (24.7%), and both mother and father high (9.5%). Families with both mothers and fathers high on depressive symptoms were higher on marital negativity, parenting stress, and children's internalizing and externalizing problems, and lower on marital positivity and parental efficacy than other classes. Children, parents, and marital relationships were more problematic in families with fathers higher on depressive symptoms than in families in which mothers were higher, indicating the significant role of paternal support for firstborn children undergoing the transition to siblinghood. Maternal and paternal depression covaried with an accumulation of family risks over time, no doubt increasing the likelihood of children's problematic adjustment after the birth of their infant sibling.
Interval Type-2 Fuzzy and PID Dual-Mode Controller for an Autonomous Mobile Robot#

The basic feature of mobile robots is to possess obstacle avoidance and autonomous navigation capability, which are inherently two of the most difficult tasks in path planning. In this paper, an interval type-2 fuzzy logic controller (IT2FLC) is used for autonomous navigation in the presence of environmental uncertainties or internal noises. A PID controller is also integrated with the IT2FLC to increase the robustness of the controller for eliminating the control error for tracking paths with small curvatures. The dual-mode design can significantly promote the real-time performance of the autonomous navigation system and effectively eliminate system errors to reach equilibrium points faster. In our experiments, we implemented the proposed fuzzy controller for both the right and left wall following and obstacle avoidance on the P3-DX mobile robot which has eight sonar sensors. The fuzzy controller helps the mobile robot to decide which side or wall would be followed by detecting the nearest wall on each side. Experimental results are illustrated to show that the effectiveness of the proposed controller is better other controllers in avoiding obstacles and wall following.
Clusterdv: a simple density-based clustering method that is robust, general and automatic

Abstract Motivation How to partition a dataset into a set of distinct clusters is a ubiquitous and challenging problem. The fact that data vary widely in features such as cluster shape, cluster number, density distribution, background noise, outliers and degree of overlap, makes it difficult to find a single algorithm that can be broadly applied. One recent method, clusterdp, based on search of density peaks, can be applied successfully to cluster many kinds of data, but it is not fully automatic, and fails on some simple data distributions. Results We propose an alternative approach, clusterdv, which estimates density dips between points, and allows robust determination of cluster number and distribution across a wide range of data, without any manual parameter adjustment. We show that this method is able to solve a range of synthetic and experimental datasets, where the underlying structure is known, and identifies consistent and meaningful clusters in new behavioral data. Availability and implementation The clusterdv is implemented in Matlab. Its source code, together with example datasets are available on: https://github.com/jcbmarques/clusterdv. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Habitat fragmentation is linked to cascading effects on soil functioning and CO2 emissions in Mediterranean holm-oak-forests

We studied key mechanisms and drivers of soil functioning by analyzing soil respiration and enzymatic activity in Mediterranean holm oak forest fragments with different influence of the agricultural matrix. For this, structural equation models (SEM) were built including data on soil abiotic (moisture, temperature, organic matter, pH, nutrients), biotic (microbial biomass, bacterial and fungal richness), and tree-structure-related (basal area) as explanatory variables of soil enzymatic activity and respiration. Our results show that increased tree growth induced by forest fragmentation in scenarios of high agricultural matrix influence triggered a cascade of causal-effect relations, affecting soil functioning. On the one hand, soil enzymatic activity was strongly stimulated by the abiotic (changes in pH and microclimate) and biotic (microbial biomass) modifications of the soil environment arising from the increased tree size and subsequent soil organic matter accumulation. Soil CO2 emissions (soil respiration), which integrate releases from all the biological activity occurring in soils (autotrophic and heterotrophic components), were mainly affected by the abiotic (moisture, temperature) modifications of the soil environment caused by trees. These results, therefore, suggest that the increasing fragmentation of forests may profoundly impact the functioning of the plant-soil-microbial system, with important effects over soil CO2 emissions and nutrient cycling at the ecosystem level. Forest fragmentation is thus revealed as a key albeit neglected factor for accurate estimations of soil carbon dynamics under global change scenarios.
Ontology Based Informational Retrieval System on the Semantic Web: Semantic Web Mining

In this manuscript we are presenting an efficient framework for retrieving the information from the Semantic Web using an Ontology-based approach. The present web is comprised of unstructured information which is extremely difficult to be retrieved by the search engine. The semantic web covers up this bug by exploiting the ontologies on the web and making the information machine understandable to be effectively retrieved by the search engine.
Neural activation following offensive aggression in Japanese quail

ABSTRACT Aggression is a fundamental part of animal social behaviour. In avian species, little is known about its neural representation. In particular, neural activity following offensive aggression has not been studied in detail. Here, we investigated the patterns of brain activation using immediate-early gene (IEG) expression in male Japanese quail that showed pronounced aggressive behaviours during a 30 min male–male interaction and compared them to those of males that did not interact with a conspecific. In aggressive males, we found a massive induction of the IEG ZENK in pallial brain structures such as the intermediate medial mesopallium, the caudomedial mesopallium and the intermediate medial nidopallium. To a lesser extent, activation was observed in subpallial areas such as the nucleus taeniae of the amygdala and in the medial portion of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. Our data suggest that the modulation of aggressive behaviour involves the integration of multisensory information. Summary: The manuscript describes the pronounced activation of the immediate early gene ZENK in the pallium of male Japanese quails following offensive aggressive behaviour.
Overexpression of ATG8 in Arabidopsis Stimulates Autophagic Activity and Increases Nitrogen Remobilization Efficiency and Grain Filling

Autophagy knock-out mutants in maize and in Arabidopsis are impaired in nitrogen (N) recycling and exhibit reduced levels of N remobilization to their seeds. It is thus impoortant to determine whether higher autophagy activity could, conversely, improve N remobilization efficiency and seed protein content, and under what circumstances. As the autophagy machinery involves many genes amongst which 18 are important for the core machinery, the choice of which AUTOPHAGY (ATG) gene to manipulate to increase autophagy was examined. We choose ATG8 overexpression since it has been shown that this gene could increase autophagosome size and autophagic activity in yeast. The results we report here are original as they show for the first time that increasing ATG8 gene expression in plants increases autophagosome number and promotes autophagy activity. More importantly, our data demonstrate that, when cultivated under full nitrate conditions, known to repress N remobilization due to sufficient N uptake from the soil, N remobilization efficiency can nevertheless be sharply and significantly increased by overexpressing ATG8 genomic sequences under the control of the ubiquitin promoter. We show that overexpressors have improved seed N% and at the same time reduced N waste in their dry remains. In addition, we show that overexpressing ATG8 does not modify vegetative biomass or harvest index, and thus does not affect plant development.
Adipose mesenchymal stem cells–derived exosomes attenuate retina degeneration of streptozotocin-induced diabetes in rabbits

This study aimed to evaluate the effect of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs)–derived exosomes in retina regeneration of experimentally induced diabetes mellitus (DM) in a rabbit model. Exosomes are extracellular vesicles that contain many microRNAs (micRNAs), mRNAs, and proteins from their cells of origin. DM was induced by intravenous (IV) injection of streptozotocin in rabbits. MSCs were isolated from adipose tissue of rabbits. Exosomes were extracted from MSCs by ultracentrifugation. Exosomes were injected by different routes (IV, subconjunctival (SC), and intraocular (IO)). Evaluation of the treatment was carried out by histopathological examination of retinal tissues and assessment of micRNA-222 expression level in retinal tissue by real-time polymerase chain reaction. Histologically, by 12 weeks following SC exosomal treatment, the cellular components of the retina were organized in well-defined layers, while IO exosomal injection showed well-defined retinal layers which were obviously similar to layers of the normal retina. However, the retina appeared after IV exosomal injection as irregular ganglionic layer with increased thickness. MicRNA-222 expression level was significantly reduced in diabetic controls when compared to each of healthy controls and other diabetic groups with IV, SC, and IO routes of injected exosomes (0.06 ± 0.02 vs. 0.51 ± 0.07, 0.28 ± 0.08, 0.48 ± 0.06, and 0.42 ± 0.11, respectively). We detected a significant negative correlation between serum glucose and retinal tissue micRNA-222 expression level (r = −0.749, p = 0.001). We can associate the increased expression of micRNA-222 with regenerative changes of retina following administration of MSCs-derived exosomes. The study demonstrates the potency of rabbit adipose tissue–derived MSCs exosomes in retinal repair. So, exosomes are considered as novel therapeutic vectors in MSCs-based therapy through its role in shuttling of many factors including micRNA-222.
Generalization of the primary tone phase variation method: An exclusive way of isolating the frequency-following response components.

The primary tone phase variation (PTPV) technique combines selective sub-averaging with systematic variation of the phases of multitone stimuli. Each response component having a known phase relationship with the stimulus components phases can be isolated in the time domain. The method was generalized to the frequency-following response (FFR) evoked by a two-tone (f 1 and f 2) stimulus comprising both linear and non-linear, as well as transient components. The generalized PTPV technique isolated each spectral component present in the FFR, including those sharing the same frequency, allowing comparison of their latencies. After isolation of the envelope component f 2 - f 1 from its harmonic distortion 2f 2 - 2f 1 and from the transient auditory brainstem response, a computerized analysis of instantaneous amplitudes and phases was applied in order to objectively determine the onset and offset latencies of the response components. The successive activation of two generators separated by 3.7 ms could be detected in all (N = 12) awake adult normal subjects, but in none (N = 10) of the sleeping/sedated children with normal hearing thresholds. The method offers an unprecedented way of disentangling the various FFR subcomponents. These results open the way for renewed investigations of the FFR components in both human and animal research as well as for clinical applications.
Near-Infrared Fusion via Color Regularization for Haze and Color Distortion Removals

Different from conventional haze removal methods based on a single image, near-infrared imaging can provide two types of multimodal images: one is the near-infrared image and the other is the visible color image. These two images have different characteristics regarding color and visibility. The captured near-infrared image is haze-free, but it is grayscale, whereas the visible color image has colors, but it contains haze. There are serious discrepancies in terms of brightness and image structures between the near-infrared image and the visible color image. Due to this discrepancy, the direct use of the near-infrared image for haze removal causes a color distortion problem during near-infrared fusion. The key objective for the near-infrared fusion is therefore to remove the color distortion as well as the haze. To achieve this objective, this paper presents a new near-infrared fusion model that combines the proposed new color and depth regularizations with the conventional haze degradation model. The proposed color regularization sets the color range of the unknown haze-free image based on the combination of the two colors of the colorized near-infrared image and the captured visible color image. That is, the proposed color regularization can provide color information for the unknown haze-free color image. The new depth regularization enables the consecutively estimated depth maps not to be largely deviated, thereby transferring natural-looking colors and high visibility of the colorized near-infrared image into the preliminary dehazed version of the captured visible color image with color distortion and edge artifacts. Experimental results show that the proposed color and depth regularizations can help remove the color distortion and the haze simultaneously. The effectiveness of the proposed color regularization for the near-infrared fusion is verified by comparing it with other conventional regularizations.