Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Técnicas moleculares para la detección de cianobacterias en los embalses Riogrande II y La Fe, Colombia

Molecular techniques for cyanobacteria detection at Riogrande II and La Fe water reservoirs, Colombia. In lentic water bodies as reservoirs occur eutrophication processes, originated mainly from human activities (i.e. agriculture, animal exploitation). This influx of nutrients in aquatic ecosystems could promote blooms of potentially toxic cyanobacteria. The purpose of this work is to detect the presence of cyanobacteria strains in water samples, using molecular techniques to help in preventive management of reservoirs dedi- cated to water purification. We used two molecular techniques to detect genes implied with the synthesis of hepatotoxic microcystins from potentially toxic cyanobacteria strains, and to evaluate the molecular diversity of cyanobacteria in water samples from two high-mountain reservoirs used for purification of drinking water for the metropolitan area of Medellin, Colombia. Between 2010-2011 collections of 12 water samples were taken and DNA extraction together with PCR and DGGE analyses where carried out. We amplified 22 sequences between 250-300bp of the genes mcyA and mcyE, and these sequences were related with several strains and cyanobacteria genera accessions from NCBI-GenBank databases. Moreover, sequence amplifications of the 16S small ribosomal RNA subunit - 16S rRNA- between 400-800bp were also performed in order to use them for the DGGE technique. The amplification products of DGGE were set in polyacrilamide gel with posterior denaturing electrophoresis, and the scanned images of the gel bands were analysed with the software GelCompar II. For Riogrande II and La Fe reservoirs we found 35 and 30 different DGGE bands, respectively, as a measurement of molecular diversity in these artificial ecosystems. Here, we demonstrated the utility of two molecular techniques for the detection of genes associated with toxicity and molecular diversity of cyanobacteria in reservoirs destined for drinking water in urban centers. We recommend strongly following with periodically molecular biology studies in these ecosystems combined with limnological and ecological data, as new tools for management of plants of water purification and for the prevention of potentially public health concerns. Rev. Biol. Trop. 62 (1): 403-419. Epub 2014 March 01.
Why Planned Interventions for Capacity Development in the Environment Often Fail: A Critical Review of Mainstream

Capacity development in the subfield of the environment is a mode of planned intervention that has become one of the mainstays of development policy. Capacity development interventions are, however, characterized by a low level of success. Explored in this paper is the theoretical grounding for why planned interventions for capacity development in the environment often fail. Drawing on a review of mainstream systems theory and strategic management approaches, it is argued that these rely on overoptimistic assumptions about the institutional and social reality as manageable and controllable. An actor-oriented and constructivist approach is proposed as an alternative to improve our understanding of the unintended and unplanned outcomes of capacity development.
Coboundaries of commuting Borel automorphisms

We show that if \(S\), \(T\) are two commuting automorphisms of a standard Borel space such that they generate a free Borel \(\mathbb{Z}^2\)-action then \(S\) and \(T\) do not have same sets of real valued bounded coboundaries. We also prove a weaker form of Rokhlin Lemma for Borel \(\mathbb{Z}^d\)-actions.
Inferring food intake from multiple biomarkers using a latent variable model

Metabolomic based approaches have gained much attention in recent years due to their promising potential to deliver objective tools for assessment of food intake. In particular, multiple biomarkers have emerged for single foods. However, there is a lack of statistical tools available for combining multiple biomarkers to infer food intake. Furthermore, there is a paucity of approaches for estimating the uncertainty around biomarker based prediction of intake. Here, to facilitate inference on the relationship between multiple metabolomic biomarkers and food intake in an intervention study conducted under the A-DIET research programme, a latent variable model, multiMarker, is proposed. The proposed model draws on factor analytic and mixture of experts models, describing intake as a continuous latent variable whose value gives raise to the observed biomarker values. We employ a mixture of Gaussian distributions to flexibly model the latent variable. A Bayesian hierarchical modelling framework provides flexibility to adapt to different biomarker distributions and facilitates prediction of the latent intake along with its associated uncertainty. Simulation studies are conducted to assess the performance of the proposed multiMarker framework, prior to its application to the motivating application of quantifying apple intake.
Handling missing data in model-based clustering

Gaussian Mixture models (GMMs) are a powerful tool for clustering, classification and density estimation when clustering structures are embedded in the data. The presence of missing values can largely impact the GMMs estimation process, thus handling missing data turns out to be a crucial point in clustering, classification and density estimation. Several techniques have been developed to impute the missing values before model estimation. Among these, multiple imputation is a simple and useful general approach to handle missing data. In this paper we propose two different methods to fit Gaussian mixtures in the presence of missing data. Both methods use a variant of the Monte Carlo Expectation-Maximisation (MCEM) algorithm for data augmentation. Thus, multiple imputations are performed during the E-step, followed by the standard M-step for a given eigen-decomposed component-covariance matrix. We show that the proposed methods outperform the multiple imputation approach, both in terms of clusters identification and density estimation.
The Importance of Prior Knowledge in Precise Multimodal Prediction

Roads have well defined geometries, topologies, and traffic rules. While this has been widely exploited in motion planning methods to produce maneuvers that obey the law, little work has been devoted to utilize these priors in perception and motion forecasting methods. In this paper we propose to incorporate these structured priors as a loss function. In contrast to imposing hard constraints, this approach allows the model to handle non-compliant maneuvers when those happen in the real world. Safe motion planning is the end goal, and thus a probabilistic characterization of the possible future developments of the scene is key to choose the plan with the lowest expected cost. Towards this goal, we design a framework that leverages REINFORCE to incorporate non-differentiable priors over sample trajectories from a probabilistic model, thus optimizing the whole distribution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on real-world self-driving datasets containing complex road topologies and multi-agent interactions. Our motion forecasts not only exhibit better precision and map understanding, but most importantly result in safer motion plans taken by our self-driving vehicle. We emphasize that despite the importance of this evaluation, it has been often overlooked by previous perception and motion forecasting works.
Influence of supranutritional vitamin E supplementation in the feed on swine growth performance and deposition in different tissues

The effects of supranutritional vitamin E supplementation in the diet on the growth performance of pigs, the deposition of α-tocopherol in different tissues and the activity of certain blood enzymes were investigated. Pigs receiving diets supplemented with 100 and 200 IU vitamin E kg−1 feed exhibited significant improvement in daily body gain and feed conversion efficiency in the early growth phase (P < 0.05). With advance in age. the growth curves of pigs fed the higher levels of vitamin E tended to become parallel to that of the control group (10 IU vitamin E kg−1 feed), suggesting that the advantage gained in body weight in the early growth period actually persisted in subsequent phases. The concentrations of α-tocopherol in blood plasma and different tissues (heart, kidney, lung and liver) significantly increased (P<0.05) with increasing levels of dietary vitamin E. However, the activity of lactate dehydrogenase, creatine kinase and aspartate aminotransferase in blood plasma was not influenced by the levels of vitamin E supplementation.
Influence of androgenic status on the α2/β-adrenergic control of lipolysis in white fat cells: predominant α2-antilipolytic response in testosterone-treated-castrated hamsters

The aim of this study was to evaluate the influence of castration with or without testosterone propionate (TP) administration (one daily injection of 1 mg for 10 days) on the fat cell lipolytic activity in male hamsters. Basal and maximal lipolytic responses to the pure β-adrenergic agonist isoproterenol, the mixed α2- and β-adrenergic agonist epinephrine, and the nonadrenergic compounds ACTH and 3- isobutyl-1-methylxanthine were all reduced by half in castrated animals. TP treatment restored these defective responses to control values, except the response to epinephrine which remained paradoxically unchanged. Sensitivity of lipolysis to epinephrine was unimpaired by castration but markedly reduced (10-fold) in TP-treated castrated hamsters. The antilipolytic potencies of the α2-component of epinephrine and of the two α2- agonists, UK 14304 and clonidine, were reduced by half in castrated animals, and returned to a value slightly higher than control after TP treatment. These changes in lipolysis were acco.
Sucrose synthase and sucrose phosphate synthase, but not acid invertase, are regulated by cold acclimation and deacclimation in cabbage seedlings

Summary Cabbage seedlings acquire freezing tolerance during exposure to low temperature (acclimation), however, it is lost by returning the plants to moderate temperature (deacclimation). Soluble sugars, except myo -inositol, accumulated during cold acclimation in the leaves of cabbage seedlings. During deacclimation for 5 days, sucrose, glucose and fructose contents decreased rapidly to the same levels as before cold acclimation. To identify the enzymes responsible for changes in sugar concentrations, we investigated changes in activities of sucrose synthase (E.C. 2.4.1.13), sucrose phosphate synthase (E.C. 2.4.1.14) and acid invertase (E.C. 3.2.1.26) during cold acclimation and deacclimation. Activity of sucrose synthase during cold acclimation increased up to 3 times the activity before cold acclimation, but decreased to the level of activity before cold acclimation during deacclimation. The activity of sucrose phosphate synthase also increased during cold acclimation, but decreased to the level of activity before cold acclimation during deacclimation. However, the activity of acid invertase decreased gradually during cold acclimation and did not increase to the level of activity before cold acclimation during deacclimation. These results suggest that SS and SPS, but not acid invertase, are regulated by cold acclimation and deacclimation and play important roles in sugar accumulation and acquisition of freezing tolerance in the leaves of cabbage seedlings.
M3P: Learning Universal Representations via Multitask Multilingual Multimodal Pre-training

We present M3P, a Multitask Multilingual Multimodal Pre-trained model that combines multilingual pre-training and multimodal pre-training into a unified framework via multitask pre-training. Our goal is to learn universal representations that can map objects occurred in different modalities or texts expressed in different languages into a common semantic space. In addition, to explicitly encourage fine-grained alignment between images and non-English languages, we also propose Multimodal Code-switched Training (MCT) to combine monolingual pre-training and multimodal pre-training via a code-switch strategy. Experiments are performed on the multilingual image retrieval task across two benchmark datasets, including MSCOCO and Multi30K. M3P can achieve comparable results for English and new state-of-the-art results for non-English languages.
BV (RI) c photometric study of three variable PMS stars in the field of V733 Cephei

This paper reports results from the first long-term BV (RI) c photometric CCD observations of three variable pre-main-sequence stars collected during the period from February 2007 to January 2020. The investigated stars are located in the field of the PMS star V733 Cep within the Cepheus OB3 association. All stars from our study show rapid photometric variability in all-optical passbands. In this paper, we describe and discuss the photometric behavior of these stars and the possible reasons for their variability. In the light variation of two of the stars, we found periodicity.
Temporal variability of abundance and the distribution of species

The geographic range size of congeneric species of rodents and noctuid moths is positively correlated with the amplitude of fluctuation of their local populations. This result is explained by two complementary hypotheses. First, selective species extinction may preferentially "weed out" small-ranging species with large population fluctuations because they should be shorter-lived than comparably restricted species with stable population levels. Second, compared with allied species occupying small areas, widespread species may be selected at the individual level to have relatively opportunistic life histories enabling them to exploit relatively unstable resources and habitats. This two-part interpretation makes two testable predictions which are confirmed by numerous cited literature reports: (1) wide-ranging species should more often be found in disturbed, ephemeral, or strongly seasonal habitats than their narrowly distributed relatives, and (2) widespread species should have higher reproductive potentials than their restricted congenerics. Several ecological and evolutionary implications of these findings are discussed, including their possible bearing on the controversial problem of evolutionary stasis.
Normative and Institutional Currents and Commonalities: A Global Perspective for Public Managers

What can professional public managers learn from the global movement toward the institutionalization and formalization of public service ethics? At the national, multinational, and international levels, this analysis shows fragmented, incremental development as the dominant pattern, together with a conviction that anti-corruption systems are critical for democratic development and managerial maturity. There is also wide recognition that the success of an ethics system requires dynamic prevention elements, which generally translates into integrity programs. The commonalities in these programs across countries and regions suggest that the core values of honesty, transparency, and professionalism shared by professionals everywhere are associated with their role and training rather than with cultural particulars. These standards give rise to the duty to pursue the public interest. Among empirical findings at the citizen level are a relationship between democratic attitudes and tolerance of corruption, a curvilinear relationship between income and subjective well-being, and the high value placed on individual autonomy in postmodern societies.
CAPPA: Continuous-Time Accelerated Proximal Point Algorithm for Sparse Recovery

This letter develops a novel Continuous-Time Accelerated Proximal Point Algorithm (CAPPA) for <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\ell _1$</tex-math></inline-formula>-minimization problems with provable fixed-time convergence guarantees. The problem of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\ell _1$</tex-math></inline-formula>-minimization appears in several contexts such as Sparse Recovery (SR) in Compressed Sensing (CS) theory and sparse linear and logistic regressions in machine learning. Most existing algorithms for solving <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\ell _1$</tex-math></inline-formula>-minimization problems are discrete-time and require exhaustive computer-guided iterations. CAPPA alleviates this problem on two fronts: (a) it encompasses a continuous-time algorithm that can be implemented using analog circuits; (b) it outperforms Locally Competitive Algorithm (LCA) and finite-time LCA (recently developed continuous-time dynamical systems for solving SR problems) by exhibiting provable fixed-time convergence to optimal solution. Consequently, CAPPA is better suited for fast and efficient handling of SR problems.
Natural Language Processing of Arabic and its Dialects

This tutorial introduces the different challenges and current solutions to the automatic processing of Arabic and its dialects. The tutorial has two parts: First, we present a discussion of generic issues relevant to Arabic NLP and detail dialectal linguistic issues and the challenges they pose for NLP. In the second part, we review the state-of-the-art in Arabic processing covering several enabling technologies and applications, e.g., dialect identification, morphological processing (analysis, disambiguation, tokenization, POS tagging), parsing, and machine translation.
Human skin cell fractions fail to self-organize within a gellan gum/hyaluronic acid matrix but positively influence early wound healing.

Split-thickness autografts still are the current gold standard to treat skin, upon severe injuries. Nonetheless, autografts are dependent on donor site availability and often associated to poor quality neoskin. The generation of dermal–epidermal substitutes by tissue engineering is seen as a promising strategy to overcome this problematic. However, solutions that can be safely and conveniently transplanted in one single surgical intervention are still very challenging as their production normally requires long culture time, and graft survival is many times compromised by delayed vascularization upon transplantation. This work intended to propose a strategy that circumvents the prolonged and laborious preparation period of skin substitutes and allows skin cells self-organization toward improved healing. Human dermal/epidermal cell fractions were entrapped directly from isolation within a gellan gum/hyaluronic acid (GG-HA) spongy-like hydrogel formed from an off-the-shelf dried polymeric network. Upon transplantation into full-thickness mice wounds, the proposed constructs accelerated the wound closure rate and re-epithelialization, as well as tissue neovascularization. A synergistic effect of the GG-HA matrix and the transplanted cells over those processes was demonstrated at early time points. Despite the human-derived and chimeric blood vessels found, the proposed matrix did not succeed in prolonging cells residence time and in sustaining the self-organization of transplanted human cells possibly due to primitive degradation. Despite this, the herein proposed approach open the opportunity to tackle wound healing at early stages contributing to re-epithelialization and neovascularization.
High-throughput HIV sequencing: evolution in 2D

Evaluation of: Willerth SM, Pedro HA, Pachter L, Humeau LM, Arkin AP, Schaffer DV: Development of a low bias method for characterizing viral populations using next generation sequencing technology. PLoS ONE 5(10), E13564 (2010). The recent commercialization of high-throughput sequencing technologies has brought about the possibility of characterizing complex viral populations at previously unattainable scales. An important consideration in designing experiments with these technologies is the need for large quantities of input DNA. To accommodate low-input samples, an amplification step is required, usually a PCR, which comes at the risk of introducing a bias that potentially distorts the view of the viral population composition. By implementing a new sample preprocessing protocol, Willerth et al. address these experimental limitations in the context of complete HIV genome sequencing. Moreover, to facilitate the assembly of short and potentially divergent HIV-derived reads, the authors construct a full-len.
Relationship between blood pressure and flow rate in arteries using a modified Windkessel model

This study examined the flow rate in arteries using the modified Windkessel model, considering various models for blood pressure. An exact solution was derived using a Laplace transform method and the effects of blood pressure on the flow rate in an artery were examined. The effects of the flow resistance, arterial compliance, and inertia of blood on the flow rate were also investigated. The flow rate decreased with increasing inertia of the blood and flow resistance and decreasing arterial compliance. The height and position of the secondary peak were determined by a combination of the flow resistance, arterial compliance, and blood inertance. The results suggest that the risk of hypertension may increase with age because decreases in flow rate due to an increase in flow resistance and a decrease in arterial compliance were more substantial than the increase in flow rate caused by a decrease in blood inertance. The proposed method can provide information to examine how factors, such as aging, disease, and exercise, affect the flow rate in blood vessels.
Proposed Use of Adjusted Intake Based on Forage Particle Length for Calculation of Roughage Indexes

Abstract Effects of forage intake and particle length on chewing time were investigated. Two ratios of forage to concentrate, 33:67 and 50:50, and three lengths of forage particles were compared in two 3×3 Latin squares repeated a second year. Distribution of forage particle length was determined with an oscillating screen particle separator. Weighted mean particle lengths, . 31, . 43, and . 51cm, were measured for the three forages. Actual intakes of forage dry matter and fibrous constituents were multiplied by mean particle length of the forage to obtain intakes adjusted (kg.cm) for particle length. Although there were no differences in intake of forage dry matter, or of neutral detergent fiber and acid detergent fiber between forage particle lengths, adjustment for particle length revealed that total chewing time was associated with mean particle length of the consumed forage. Total chewing time affected concentration of rumen volatile fatty acids, pH, and milk fat percentage between ratios of forage to concentrate. Roughage indexes based on adjusted forage intake or intake of forage fibrous constituents are reported. The quadratic equation that described the roughage index (Ŷ) for the adjusted forage intake was Ŷ = 365.2−69.6X + 4.73X 2 .
β1- and α6-integrin are surface markers on mouse spermatogonial stem cells

Although spermatogenesis is essential for reproduction, little is known about spermatogonial stem cells. These cells provide the basis for spermatogenesis throughout adult life by undergoing self-renewal and by providing progeny that differentiate into spermatozoa. A major impediment to our understanding of the biology of these stem cells is the inability to distinguish them from spermatogonia that are committed to differentiation. We made use of the known association of stem cells with basement membranes and our spermatogonial transplantation assay system to identify specific molecular markers on the stem cell surface. Selection of mouse testis cells with anti-β1- or anti-α6-integrin antibody, but not anti-c-kit antibody, produced cell populations with a significantly enhanced ability to colonize recipient testes and generate donor cell-derived spermatogenesis. We demonstrate spermatogonial stem cell-associated antigens by using an assay system based on biological function. Furthermore, the presence of surface integrins on spermatogonial stem cells suggests that these cells share elements of a common molecular machinery with stem cells in other tissues.