Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Potassium Channels and Their Potential Roles in Substance Use Disorders

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are ubiquitous throughout the world. However, much remains to be done to develop pharmacotherapies that are very efficacious because the focus has been mostly on using dopaminergic agents or opioid agonists. Herein we discuss the potential of using potassium channel activators in SUD treatment because evidence has accumulated to support a role of these channels in the effects of rewarding drugs. Potassium channels regulate neuronal action potential via effects on threshold, burst firing, and firing frequency. They are located in brain regions identified as important for the behavioral responses to rewarding drugs. In addition, their expression profiles are influenced by administration of rewarding substances. Genetic studies have also implicated variants in genes that encode potassium channels. Importantly, administration of potassium agonists have been shown to reduce alcohol intake and to augment the behavioral effects of opioid drugs. Potassium channel expression is also increased in animals with reduced intake of methamphetamine. Together, these results support the idea of further investing in studies that focus on elucidating the role of potassium channels as targets for therapeutic interventions against SUDs.
Engineering the electronic structure of epitaxial graphene by transfer doping and atomic intercalation

Homogeneous graphene layers can be grown epitaxially on SiC(0001), promising scalable graphene technology. However, covalent bonds at the SiC–graphene interface induce strong n -doping of the graphene. This doping can be compensated by functionalizing the graphene surface with electronegative molecules. Alternatively, the influence of the substrate can be largely suppressed by breaking the covalent bonds through atomic intercalation. Hydrogen atoms migrate under the graphene, passivate the underlying SiC layer, and decouple the graphene from the substrate. In this way, large-scale, homogeneous, quasi-free-standing graphene layers can be achieved. By intercalation of germanium, the electronic structure of the decoupled graphene can be tailored. Two symmetrically doped, namely, n - and p -type, phases are stabilized, depending on the amount of intercalated germanium. This is achieved by annealing a germanium film at various temperatures after it is initially deposited on the covalently bonded carbon layer. In an intermediate temperature regime, lateral p – n junctions between the two phases can be formed, size-tailored on a mesoscopic scale.
PROTEIN PROFILE DIFFERENCES IN LONGISSIMUS MUSCLE OF TENDER AND TOUGH LAMB AT 1 AND 5 DAYS OF AGEING

This experiment aimed to determine changes in the proteomic profiles from m. longissimus thoracis et lumborum (LL) of lambs selected as extremes of tenderness and toughness from a population group. To achieve the aim, two different comparisons were performed. The first comparison investigated changes in protein profiles of tender and tough LL muscle samples collected after Day 1 of ageing (Experiment 1; n = 9 for each group). Comparison 2 investigated changes in protein profiles of tender and tough LL muscle samples collected after 5 days of ageing (n = 9 for each group). The average Warner Bratzler shear force (WBsf) readings for the tender and tough LL muscle samples in Experiment 1 was 3.27kg(pH5.54) and 6.30kg(pH5.60), respectively. Whilst, Experiment 2, the tender and tough LL muscle samples had an average WBsf readings of 2.48kg(pH5.62) and 3.16kg(5.52) at Day 5, respectively. All samples used in Experiment 2 had an initial WBsf reading of 4.5kg at Day 1 ageing. Proteomic profiles were examined by 2D-Fluorenscence Difference In-Gel Electrophoresis (2DDIGE) and proteins with altered relative abundance between groups were identified by MALDI TOF/TOF mass spectrometry. In experiment 1, 25 proteins showed altered relative abundance between the tender and tough LL muscles samples at Day 1 of ageing. These proteins were primarily metabolic enzymes involved in glycolysis and heat shock proteins involved in stress responses within the cell. In experiment 2, 22 proteins had altered relative abundance in the LL muscle of lamb after ageing for 5 days. In this experiment, the differentially modified proteins were also predominantly metabolic enzymes.
Strategic approach to the development of ecotourism in Bor District, Serbia

The increase in ecotourism popularity at a global level is a consequence of the increased human concern for the state of natural resources. This type of alternative tourism is increasingly present in tourist trends around the world. For developing countries, ecotourism can be an opportunity for accelerating economic development by exploiting natural resources, without changing their original state. Although it offers great opportunities, the management of tourism in protected or unprotected natural assets is a great challenge. The importance of integrating the actions of all stakeholders and the usage of strategic approach are often neglected. The aim of this paper is to generate strategies for the development of ecotourism in Bor and its surroundings. For this purpose, a combined SWOT-TOWS methodology is applied. Based on the obtained results, nine strategies are proposed, whose implementation would enable the usage of natural and cultural and historical potentials for the revival of ecotourism in this area.
Static and dynamic bridge amplifier calibration according to ISO 4965-2

Dynamic measurements to correctly adjust the magnitude in fatigue testing require a dynamic calibration of force transducers and conditioning electronics if the dynamic loads are to be measured correctly. International standard ISO 4965 describes a calibration method for these components. At PTB, such a calibration of bridge amplifiers has now been performed for the first time. The calibration includes tests with static and dynamic signals. The reference for the calibration is the dynamic bridge standard of PTB. It is particularly suitable for this application as it can generate static and dynamic signals, and thus all investigations can be performed with one reference and in a reasonably short time. The signal creation and the data analysis were carried out using the open source program GNU Octave. For the data analysis, a semi-automatic procedure was developed to simplify the process. Calibrations of two digital bridge amplifiers were carried out.
Impact of Exposure to Dim Artificial Light at Night during Sleep on Cognitive Function

Sleep is a complex interaction with various brain structures, neurotransmitter systems, and regulatory hormones [1]. It is a reversible and repetitive action that includes roles such as recovery and growth, learning and memory reinforcement, and restorative processes [2]. Therefore, sleep is an essential element of human life that maintains a circadian rhythm of day and night [3]. Any problems with the amount and quality of sleep can affect the human circadian rhythm, mood, activity, and productivity [4,5]. In addition, sleep deprivation and sleep deterioration affect not only human daily life, but also the incidence and exacerbation of various psychiatric disorders such as mood disorders, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Impact of Exposure to Dim Artificial Light at Night during Sleep on Cognitive Function
Modeling Interviewer Effects with Multilevel Models

It is generally recognized that interviewers may have an important effect on the quality of the data collected in survey research. This article presents an application of the hierarchical regression model (multilevel regression model) in the analysis of interviewer effects. The hierarchical regression model offers an elegant way to analyze the effects of specific interviewer and respondent characteristics. It is especially attractive if the research design does not provide for a random assignment of respondents to interviewers, because it allows the researcher to use statistical instead of experimental control by modeling the interviewer effects conditional on the respondent effects.
Non-Invasive Ventilation in Preventing Intubation and Reintubation in The Intensive Care Unit of Pediatrics Zagazig University Hospital

Background: Non-invasive ventilation (NIV) refers to methods of respiratory assistance without an indwelling endotracheal tube. Objectives: To evaluate the efficacy, identify possible predictors for the success of NIV in preventing intubation and re-intubation, and to determine the characteristics, and outcomes associated with NIV therapy in Pediatric intensive care units (PICUs) settings. Patients and Methods: A clinical trial study was conducted at the Pediatric Intensive Care Units, Children Hospital, Zagazig University and Al-Ahrar Educational Hospital on 60 patients divided equally into two groups; group A with NIV as the first line and group B with NIV after extubation. Patients were followed up till weaning. Results: Male constituted a larger percentage with both groups. One-sixth and 20% of patients within group A and B respectively had failed to wean. There is a statistically significant difference between the outcome of weaning among group A and all of PIM-2 score, PIM-2 percent, and NIV duration. While the relation is significant between the outcome of weaning among group B and patients’ age, body weight, and NIV duration. Increasing NIV duration significantly predicts weaning success in group A while increasing body weight predicts it in group B. Conclusion: Non-invasive ventilation as the first line of treatment in acute respiratory failure provides significant avoidance of intubation and lowers the incidence and risk of complications. Non-invasive ventilation if considered after weaning of invasive mechanical ventilation it helps to avoid re-intubation and failure of weaning. The most important significant predictors of NIV outcome are NIV duration and body weight.
Functional links between rural and urban areas in the territory of the city of Banja Luka and the perspective of their development

Different types of interactions between rural and urban areas have the effect of improving economic, social, cultural and political dimensions in both areas, separating these two areas by their type of activity. Rural and urban types of regions have different resources and means that can be used in a complementary way. In rural-urban interaction there is a possibility of occurrence of conflict of interest of these two areas. This kind of conflict should be overcome when applying the partnership approach between rural and urban areas. The types of rural areas, depending on the proximity of the urban center and the functions of these areas, are divided into suburban, agricultural and remote type areas. By determining the functions of each type of area, the type and intensity of the interactions of rural areas with the urban center are presented. Rural entrepreneurs are able to bridge rural-urban differences, possessing certain market knowledge and descriptions of the characteristics of urban environments, while benefiting from their position. Rural entrepreneurs’ interaction with the urban environment can contribute to sustainable economic relations between citizens in urban and rural areas. This paper presents the results of research related to determining the functions of certain areas, their strengths, unused and utilized resources, the frequency of interaction with the urban environment and the perspectives of suburban, agricultural and remote type areas in the context of interaction with the urban environment.
Catastrophe and Environmental Restoration: Analyzing the Frames and Sources of Oyster Restoration News Stories

Restoration of oyster habitats is a critical solution to halt the decline of one of the world’s most threatened resources. News coverage about environmental topics, like oyster restoration, is important to local communities that are directly impacted. However, little research has assessed how restoration topics are framed by journalists, nor how environmental disasters may affect framing of news stories for the public. This study employed a longitudinal framing analysis, using the quantity of coverage and social responsibility theories, to examine how coverage of the restoration of oyster ecosystems shifted before, during, and after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The frames and sources of 763 newspaper articles were assessed, including 18 local newspapers from five U.S. Gulf Coast states and three high-circulation national newspapers. Logistic regression analyses revealed that the occurrence of an environmental catastrophe shifted media focus from environmental frames before the spill to community and economic frames during and after the spill. Stories were dominated by environmental frames (49%) and primarily relied on quotes from resource managers (50%) over all other groups. Local resource users were quoted less than 5% of the time in local articles. Findings provide a foundation for natural resource managers and communication specialists to understand how information about natural resources changes during disasters and reveals the perspectives that are most and least commonly used to frame and define stories about coastal resources and important gaps in coverage.
Probabilistic Anchor Assignment with IoU Prediction for Object Detection: Supplementary Material

We train our models with 8 GPUs each of which holds two images during training. The parameters of Batch Normalization layers [2] are frozen as is a common practice. All backbones are pre-trained with ImageNet dataset [3]. We set the initial learning rate to 0.01 and decay it by a factor of 10 at 90k and 120k iterations for the 135k setting and at 120k and 160k for the 180k setting. For the 180k setting the multi-scale training strategy (resizing the shorter side of input images to a scale randomly chosen from 640 to 800) is adopted as is also a common practice. The momentum and weight decay are set to 0.9 and 1e-4 respectively. Following [1] we use the learning rate warmup for the first 500 iterations. It is noted that multiplying individual localization losses by the scores of an auxiliary task (in our case, this is predicted IoUs with corresponding GT boxes, and centerness scores when using the centerness prediction as in [4, 5]), which is also applied in previous works [4, 5], helps train faster and leads to a better performance.
An Automated Approach of Detection of Memory Leaks for Remote Server Controllers

Memory leaks are a major concern to the long running applications like servers which make the working set to grow with the program. This eventually leads to system crashing. This paper discusses a staged approach to detect leaks in firmware of remote server controller. Remote server controller monitors the server remotely with many processes running in the background. Any memory leak in the long running applications pose a threat to the performance of the system. The approach adopted here filters the processes running in the system with leaks based on time threshold in the first stage. These processes with leaks are passed to the next stage where precise memory leak detection is done using the open source dynamic instrumentation tool Valgrind. The system leverages an automated leak detection approach that invokes the leak detection process on encountering any severity in the system and generates a consolidated leak report. The proposed approach has less impact on the performance of the system and is faster compared to many available systems as there is no need to modify or re-compile the program. In addition, the automated approach offers an effective technique for detecting possible leakages in early software development phases.
Effects of optimized nursing on the prognosis of patients with acute myocardial infarction

Objective: This study aimed to explore the effects of optimized nursing process on the prognosis of patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI). Methods: In total, 98 AMI patients treated in our hospital from January to December 2019 were divided into an Experimental Group (EG, n=53, with optimized nursing process from July to December 2019) and a Control Group (CG, n=45, without optimized nursing process from January to June 2019). The two groups were compared for time to triage evaluation, electrocardiogram (ECG), venous blood sampling, and intravenous administration, effects at 2 h after treatment, quality of life (QOL) score at 1 d after hospitalization and 2 weeks after nursing, and changes in self-efficacy score. Results: (1) For patients in the EG, the time to triage evaluation, ECG, venous blood sampling and intravenous administration was significantly shorter and the rates of chest pain relief, ST-segment resolution (STR) and myocardial enzyme spectrum resolution (MESR) at 2 h after treatment were significantly higher as compared with the CG (P<0.05). (2) The two groups demonstrated no statistical difference in QOL scores (P>0.05) at 1 d after hospitalization but achieved marked elevation at 2 weeks after nursing. As a result, the QOL scores of EG patients exceeded that of the CG patients (P<0.05). (3) While no statistical difference was found between the 2 groups for self-efficacy score at 1 d after hospitalization and 1 week after nursing (P>0.05), higher results were yielded in the EG as compared with the CG 1 at 2 weeks after nursing (P<0.05). Conclusion: Optimized nursing process can improve the quality of treatment, outcome, QOL, self-efficacy, and prognosis of AMI patients.
Lhx6 regulates canonical Wnt signaling to control the fate of mesenchymal progenitor cells during mouse molar root patterning

Mammalian tooth crown formation has long served as a model for investigating how patterning and morphogenesis are orchestrated during development. However, the mechanism underlying root patterning and morphogenesis remains poorly understood. In this study, we find that Lhx6 labels a subpopulation of root progenitor cells in the apical dental mesenchyme, which is closely associated with furcation development. Loss of Lhx6 leads to furcation and root number defects, indicating that Lhx6 is a key root patterning regulator. Among the multiple cellular events regulated by Lhx6 is the odontoblast fate commitment of progenitor cells, which it controls in a cell-autonomous manner. Specifically, Lhx6 loss leads to elevated expression of the Wnt antagonist Sfrp2 and down-regulation of Wnt signaling in the furcation region, while overactivation of Wnt signaling in Lhx6+ progenitor cells partially restore the furcation defects in Lhx6-/- mice. Collectively, our findings have important implications for understanding organ morphogenesis and future strategies for tooth root regeneration.
VU Research Portal Childhood individual differences

Peer bullying and victimization is a widespread phenomenon among school-age children and can have detrimental effects on the development of children. To examine whether having a close companion during childhood increases or decreases risk of victimization and bullying this study compared twins to singleton children. A large group of twins ( N =9,909) were included who were compared to their related non-twin siblings ( N =1,534) aged 7-12 from the Netherlands Twin Register, thus creating optimal matching between twins and non-twins. Bullying and victimization were each based on a four-item scale filled out by their teachers. Prevalence rates for either bullying or victimization did not differ between twins and singletons. In total, in the past couple of months 36% of children bullied peers moderately to severely, and 35% suffered moderately to severely from victimization. Boys were more likely to bully and were more prone to become a victim than girls. The most notable finding is that female twin pairs placed together in the same classroom did not bully more often, but were victimized less often, thus pointing to a protective effect of having a close companion in the classroom.
An Adversarial Training Based Machine Learning Approach to Malware Classification under Adversarial Conditions

The use of machine learning (ML) has become an established practice in the realm of malware classification and other areas within cybersecurity. Characteristic of the contemporary realm of intelligent malware classification is the threat of adversarial ML. Adversaries are looking to target the underlying data and/or models responsible for the functionality of malware classification to map its behavior or corrupt its functionality. The ends of such adversaries are bypassing the cybersecurity measures and increasing malware effectiveness. We develop an adversarial training based ML approach for malware classification under adversarial conditions that leverages a stacking ensemble method, which compares the performance of 10 base ML models when adversarially trained on three data sets of varying data perturbation schemes. This comparison ultimately reveals the best performing model per data set, which includes random forest, bagging and gradient boosting. Experimentation also includes stacking a mixture of ML models in both the first and second levels in the stack. A first level stack across all 10 ML models with a second level support vector machine is top performing. Overall, this work reveals that a malware classifier can be developed to account for potential forms of training data perturbation with minimal effect on performance.
The Effect of Droplet Size on Surface Tension

The effect of droplet size on surface tension is given theoretical consideration with the help of results of the Gibbs thermodynamic theory of capillarity and of previous results of the author as to the sign and magnitude of superficial densities. It is concluded that surface tension can be expected to decrease with decrease in droplet size over a wide range of circumstances. In addition, approximate figures are obtained for the rate at which such decreases may be expected. The decreases become significant for very small drops. The results are of interest in view of the important role of surface tension in determining the behavior of small droplets.
Theoretical study on key factors in DNA sequencing with graphene nanopores

Solid-state nanopores, in particular graphene nanopores, are believed to have promising applications in DNA sequencing. Many efforts have been made in this research area, the ultimate goal is to extend the DNA translocation time and to achieve single-base resolution. Unfortunately, several factors in DNA sequencing are still not well understood. In this paper, we report a study on the effects of two main factors, the salt concentration and the bias voltage, on the corresponding ionic current. We propose a theoretical model to explore the relationship between the occupied nanopore area and the current. We demonstrate that the DNA translocation time can be prolonged by decreasing the bias voltage and by properly narrowing the nanopore diameter. We find that the reduction of the blockade current depends on the ratio of the unoccupied nanopore area to the total nanopore area.
Biosynthesis of 2-Nor-6-deoxyerythronolide B by Rationally Designed Domain Substitution

-keto group reduction. The apparentuse of each enzyme activity in the PKS only once duringbiosynthesis suggests that novel polyketides can be generatedby genetic manipulation of the individual activities. Further,the modularity of the PKSs has led to the idea that the con-cepts of combinatorial chemistry can be translated into “com-binatorial biosynthesis” through rearrangement of the geneticmodules.