Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Recent advances in cochlear hair cell nanophysiology: subcellular compartmentalization of electrical signaling in compact sensory cells

In recent years, genetics, physiology, and structural biology have advanced into the molecular details of the sensory physiology of auditory hair cells. Inner hair cells (IHCs) and outer hair cells (OHCs) mediate two key functions: active amplification and non-linear compression of cochlear vibrations by OHCs and sound encoding by IHCs at their afferent synapses with the spiral ganglion neurons. OHCs and IHCs share some molecular physiology, e.g. mechanotransduction at the apical hair bundles, ribbon-type presynaptic active zones, and ionic conductances in the basolateral membrane. Unique features enabling their specific function include prestin-based electromotility of OHCs and indefatigable transmitter release at the highest known rates by ribbon-type IHC active zones. Despite their compact morphology, the molecular machineries that either generate electrical signals or are driven by these signals are essentially all segregated into local subcellular structures. This review provides a brief account on recent insights into the molecular physiology of cochlear hair cells with a specific focus on organization into membrane domains.
Automated analysis and indexing of lecture videos

Learning from online videos mainly helps the students and every individual understand a specific topic easily because of the realistic picturization. One of resources available to students is automated analysis and indexing of online lecture videos using image processing. Many online educational organizations and universities use video lectures to support teaching and learning. In past decades, video lecture portals have been widely used and are very popular. The text displayed in these video lectures are a valuable source for analyzing and indexing the lecture contents. Considering this scenario, we present an approach for automatic analysis and indexing of lecture videos using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. For this, we segregated the unique key frames from a lecture video to extract the video contents. After the segregation of key frames by applying OCR and ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) technology we can extract the textual data contents from the video lecture. From the obtained metadata, we segmented the video lecture based on the time-based text occurrence of the topics. The performance and the effectiveness of proposed analysis and indexing is proven by the evaluation.
Analysis of bioactive compounds in leafy vegetables

The leafy vegetables like Amaranth, Coriander, Gogu, and Mint, were chosen to analyze the bioactive compounds in different processing methods. Standard procedures were followed for extraction and analysis of bioactive compounds. The results revealed that the percent change in bioactive compounds in leafy vegetables was ranged from 2.79 to 48.9 for total phenolics, 0.8 to -17.4 for flavonoid content upon open cooking. The DPPH radical scavenging activity and FRAPS was 4.73 to 50.4, and 2.93 to 14. respectively2. The percent change in total phenolic content in leafy vegetables upon pressure cooking was ranged between 9.98 to 78.6, total flavonoids -25.8 to 53.3, DPPH radical scavenging activity -2.7 to 102.5, and FRAP ranged between 332 to 667.
INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGIES FOR CREATION OF PROBIOTIC FOODS

NACHEVA, I. , M. DONEVA, Y. TODOROV, P. METODIEVA, D. MITEVA, K. DIMOV and Tsv. TSVETKOV, 2014. Innovative technologies for creation of probiotic foods. Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., 20: 830-833 Lyophilized probiotic products have been developed by high technology methods for nutrition prophylaxis and healthy nutrition to ensure a maximum working capacity and wellbeing of each individual. In their composition are included natural sources of essential bioelements and physiologically active substances – a complex of probiotic lactic acid bacteria, oligosaccharides, antioxidants, vitamins and others. Their fine consistency and chemical composition create a possibility for rhythmical introduction in the organism of nutritious mixtures with adequate content of plastic substances and energy. Their proved healthy effect makes them suitable to be included in combined nutrition diets for ensuring of better quality of life in terms of the effective prevention and improvement of the health status of the population
Evaluation in cattle of fiber-modified adenovirus vector-vaccine against foot-and-mouth 1 disease 2 3 4

Evaluation in cattle of fiber-modified adenovirus vector-vaccine against foot-and-mouth 1 disease 2 3 4 Gisselle N. Medina, Nestor Montiel, Diego Sturza, Fayna Diaz-San Segundo, Elizabeth 5 Ramirez-Medina , Marvin J. Grubman, Teresa de los Santos* 6 7 a Plum Island Animal Disease Center, Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of 8 Agriculture, NEA, P.O. Box 848, Greenport, NY 11944, United States 9 b Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, PIADC Research Participation Program, Oak 10 Ridge, TN 37831, United States 11 #These authors contributed equally to this work 12 13 *Corresponding author: 14 Teresa de los Santos 15 Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC), ARS, NAA, USDA. 16 P.O. Box 848, Greenport, NY 11944. 17 Tel: 631-323-3020 18 Fax: 323-323-3006 19 e-mail: teresa.delossantos@ars.usda. gov 20 21 Running title: Evaluation of an Ad5-RGD vector vaccine in cattle 22 23 24 CVI Accepted Manuscript Posted Online 25 November 2015 Clin. Vaccine Immunol. doi:10.1128/CVI.00426-15 Copyright © 2015, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
Evaluation of Disease Risk Comorbidity Index after Allogeneic Stem Cell Transplantation in a Cohort with Patients Undergoing Transplantation with In Vitro Partially T Cell Depleted Grafts

Outcomes of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) are influenced by comorbidities, disease type, and status at transplantation. Several prognostic scores can be used, such as the disease risk index (DRI) or the hematopoietic cell transplantation-specific comorbidity index (HCT-CI). Recently, a new prognostic tool, the disease risk comorbidity index (DRCI), combining the DRI and the HCT-CI, was published. The DRCI determines 6 patient groups (very low risk [VLR], low risk [LR], intermediate risk 1 [IR-1], intermediate risk 2 [IR-2], high risk [HR], and very high risk [VHR]) with a significant predictive value for overall survival (OS), disease-free survival (DFS), relapse incidence (RI), and graft-versus-host disease-free/relapse-free survival (GRFS). However, the DRCI has not been evaluated for patients allografted with partially in vitro T cell depleted (pTDEP) grafts. In our center, we offer pTDEP to reduce graft-versus-host disease for patients in complete remission at transplant time. In this retrospective study, we investigated the DRCI in 404 adult patients (including 37.6% pTDEP) undergoing a first HSCT [. ] BEAUVERD, Yan, et al. Evaluation of Disease Risk Comorbidity Index after Allogeneic Stem Cell Transplantation in a Cohort with Patients Undergoing Transplantation with In Vitro Partially T Cell Depleted Grafts. Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation, 2020 DOI : 10.1016/j.bbmt. 2020.09. 022
ASSESSMENT OF CAUSE AND EFFECT RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DIFFERENT CHARACTER COMBINATIONS ON YIELD AND QUALITY OF BREAD WHEAT (TRITICUM AESTIVUM L.)

The entities of the exiting investigation consist of 20 promising lines of bread wheat that were laid in a randomized block design (RBD) with three replications, aiming to examine the correlation and path coefficient analysis with respect to eight quantitative/qualitative characters. The mutual association of plant characters is determined by the correlation coefficient whereas path analysis splits the correlation coefficient into the measure of direct and indirect effects so that the relative contribution of each component character to the yield could be assessed. The grain yield incredibly showed a considerable positive association with the number of effective tillers plant-1, spike length, number of grains spike-1, 1000 grain weight, and harvest index both at the genotypic and phenotypic levels. There was a negative and nominal association between grain yield and protein content whereas yield contributing characters observed a positive and insignificant relationship with protein content. Path analysis reflected that harvest index, 1000 grain weight, and the number of grains spike-1 acquired the greatest and positive direct effect with grain yield. Consequently, the current investigation divulged the significance of the number of effective tillers plant-1, spike length, number of grains spike-1, 1000 grain weight, and harvest index as selection criteria for the nomination of elite wheat lines in the breeding population for the advancement of yield in bread wheat.
Linear Parameter Uncertainty Quantiﬁcation using Surrogate Gaussian Processes

We consider uncertainty quantiﬁcation using surrogate Gaussian processes. We take a previous sampling algorithm and provide a closed form expression of the resulting posterior distribution. We extend the method to weighted least squares and a Bayesian approach both with closed form expressions of the resulting posterior distributions. We test methods on 1D deconvolution and 2D tomography. Our new methods improve on the previous algorithm, however fall short in some aspects to a typical Bayesian inference method.
Academic Resilience and Subjective Well-Being amongst College Students using Online Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) that is currently spreading in Indonesia has prompted the government to implement various prevention efforts to limit its spread. One of the sectors affected by this pandemic is the education sector, owing to the Ministry of Education and Culture (Kementrian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan) of the Republic of Indonesia instruction to higher education institutions to implement the Study from Home (SFH) policy. This causes abrupt changes and considerable pressures on college students both internally and externally, which might trigger negative emotions, including stress in undergoing Study from Home (SFH). This study aims to explore the correlation between academic resilience and the subjective well-being of college students experiencing online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study uses a literature review to collect data, focusing on theoretical studies, and the references used are inseparable from scientific literature. The results show that resilience is crucial in online learning to maintain and improve the students’ subjective well-being. Students with a high level of resilience tend to have a high level of subjective well-being as well, meaning that they are able to regulate their emotions better in addition to controlling internal pressures caused by online learning. Keywords: Academic resilience, subjective well-being, online learning, COVID-19
Non-parallel and many-to-many voice conversion using variational autoencoders integrating speech recognition and speaker verification

: We propose non-parallel and many-to-many voice conversion (VC) using variational autoencoders (VAEs) that constructs VC models for converting arbitrary speakers’ characteristics into those of other arbitrary speakers without parallel speech corpora for training the models. Although VAEs conditioned by one-hot coded speaker codes can achieve non-parallel VC, the phonetic contents of the converted speech tend to vanish, resulting in degraded speech quality. Another issue is that they cannot deal with unseen speakers not included in training corpora. To overcome these issues, we incorporate deep-neural-network-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) and automatic speaker veriﬁcation (ASV) into the VAE-based VC. Since phonetic contents are given as phonetic posteriorgrams predicted from the ASR models, the proposed VC can overcome the quality degradation. Our VC utilizes d -vectors extracted from the ASV models as continuous speaker representations that can deal with unseen speakers. Experimental results demonstrate that our VC outperforms the conventional VAE-based VC in terms of mel-cepstral distortion and converted speech quality. We also investigate the eﬀects of hyperparameters in our VC and reveal that 1) a large d -vector dimensionality that gives the better ASV performance does not necessarily improve converted speech quality, and 2) a large number of pre-stored speakers improves the quality.
Eco-Epidemiology of Cutaneous Leishmaniasis in Golestan Province, Northeastern Iran: A Systematic Review

1. Health Management and Social Development Research Center, Golestan University of Medical Sciences, Gorgan, Iran 2. Infectious Disease Research Center, Golestan University of Medical Sciences, Gorgan, Iran 3. Vector-borne Diseases Research Center, North Khorasan University of Medical Sciences, Bojnurd, Iran 4. Kalaleh Health Center, Golestan University of Medical Sciences, Gorgan, Iran. 5. Management and Social Development Research Center, Golestan University of Medical Sciences, Gorgan, Iran
Processing and Enzymatic Treatment Effects on Louisiana-Grown Fresh Satsuma Juice

A study was performed to evaluate the ability to rapidly produce fresh satsuma (Citrus reticulata) juice from local fruit with minimum processing inputs. Volatile flavor and aroma compounds, subjective assessments, and quality parameters were used to determine the changes that occur from different juice processing techniques, storage conditions, and enzymatic treatments. In freshly pressed Louisiana-grown satsuma juices, 44 compounds were recovered, ofwhich 31were positivelyidentified. Basedonvolatile recovery and aconsensusapproach usedin orange- fleshed Citrus species reported in the literature, 19 compounds were evaluated. Limonene was the dominant integrated peak in all unpeeled and peeled pressed juices (PPJ). Peel removal resulted in 98.4% of the total volatiles being lost and the distribution of the volatiles remaining was markedly different compared with whole-pressed fruit juice. Aside from a 63.4% increase in valencene after enzyme treatments, there seemed to be no marked volatile, subjective, or quality improvements from the enzymes used in this study. In general, peeled pressed fruit produced an acceptable, mildly citrus-flavored, balanced acidity, sweet, not-from-concentrate juice. Concentrates made from PPJ and reconstituted satsuma juices indicated clearly that most desirable aroma/flavor volatile compounds were stripped from juices during concentrating. Data reported suggest more attention would be required to maintain the top notes and subtle volatile balance during commercialization in rapidly produced fresh satsuma juices through use of industrial equipment (peeler) or by adding back essence or flavor packs for consistent consumer satisfaction.
Simplifying Simulation of Distributed Datastores Based on Statistical Estimating CAP-Constraint Violation

Running software in a distributed manner is a common practice nowadays. This approach produces a lot of new challenges which should be thought in advance. This paper is the next step on understanding systems such as distributed datastores by using statistical estimation for violation of guarantees from Brewer’s Conjecture. The paper focuses on ﬁnding ways for simpliﬁcation of theoretical and practical modelling of a system of a distributed datastore. Considering that real-world distributed datastore consists of nodes with a diﬀerent distribution of fail and recovery time it is proposed to substitute every node of distributed datastore with nodes with one common distribution of fail and one common distribution of recovery time. The veriﬁcation of the approach is done by modelling systems and statistically comparing their violation of guarantees from Brewer’s Conjecture. The results allow us to deﬁne cases where we can substitute one system with another without losing perception of its behaviour.
Predator‐scale spatial analysis of intra‐patch prey distribution reveals the energetic drivers of rorqual whale super‐group formation

1. Animals are distributed relative to the resources they rely upon, often scaling in abundance relative to available resources. Yet, in heterogeneously distributed environments, describing resource availability at relevant spatial scales remains a challenge in ecology, inhibiting understanding of predator distribution and foraging decisions. 2. We investigated the foraging behavior of two species of rorqual whales within spatially limited and numerically extraordinary super aggregations in two oceans. We additionally described the lognormal distribution of prey data at species-specific spatial scales that matched the predator’s unique lunge-feeding strategy. 3. Here we show that both humpback whales off South Africa’s west coast and blue whales off the US west coast perform more lunges per unit time within these aggregations than when foraging individually, and that the biomass within gulp-sized parcels was on average higher and more tightly distributed within super-group associated prey patches, facilitating greater energy intake per feeding event as well as increased feeding rates. 4. Prey analysis at predator-specific spatial scales revealed a stronger association of supergroups with patches containing relatively high geometric mean biomass and low geometric standard deviations than with arithmetic mean biomass, suggesting that the foraging decisions of rorqual whales may be more influenced by the distribution of high-biomass portions of a patch than total biomass. The hierarchical distribution of prey in spatially-restricted, temporally-transient, super-group associated patches demonstrated high biomass and less A cc ep te d A rt ic le
Preparation and microstructural analysis of poly(ethylene oxide) comb‐type grafted poly(N‐isopropyl acrylamide) hydrogels crosslinked by poly(ϵ‐caprolactone)

Poly(N-isopropyl acrylamide) (PNIPAAm)-graft-poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) hydrogels crosslinked by poly(ϵ-caprolactone) diacrylate were prepared, and their microstructures were investigated. The swelling/deswelling kinetics and compression strength were measured. The relationship between the structure and properties of hydrogel are discussed. It was found that the PEO comb-type grafted structure reduced the thermosensitivity and increased the compression strength. The addition of poly(ϵ-caprolactone) (PCL) accelerated the deswelling rate of the hydrogels. Meanwhile, the entanglement of PCL chains restrained the further swelling of the network of gels. The PCL crosslinking agent and PEO comb-type grafted structure made the behavior of the hydrogels deviate from the rubber elasticity equations. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci., 2013
Discrepancy between plasma cortisol level and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio in sheep during shearing

Moneva, P., Yanchev, I. , Dyavolova, M. , & Gudev, D. (2019). Discrepancy between plasma cortisol level and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio in sheep during shearing. Bulgarian Journal of Agricultural Science, 25(3), 564–569 The object of the present study was to investigate the link between adrenal and leukocyte responses to shearing stress in sheep. The primary parameters determined in this study were cortisol dynamics and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte (N/L) ratio in lactating non-pregnant ewes from the Bulgarian synthetic dairy population (n = 20) and non-pregnant ewes from the Ile de France (meat type) breed (n=20) during shearing. The ewes were shorn at the beginning of June. Blood samples were taken before shearing, immediately after shearing and at 3 h following the onset of shearing. Ile de France ewes were divided into two subgroups based on their reactivity to shearing as assessed by cortisol level immediately after shearing. Group I comprised ewes that had high cortisol level (more stress-reactive) and group II comprised ewes that had low plasma cortisol level immediately after shearing (less stress-reactive). Cortisol level in the ewes of Bulgarian synthetic dairy population (BSDP) was higher immediately after shearing (P < 0.001) as compared to Ile de France ewes. Plasma cortisol level in the ewes of Bulgarian synthetic dairy population (BSDP) declined signifi cantly at 3 h after the onset of shearing while at that time, cortisol levels in the other group tended to decline but did not reach level of signifi cance. There was signifi cantly higher N/L ratio in BSDP ewes as compared to Ile de France ewes immediately after shearing. Neutrophil-tolymphocyte ratio increased signifi cantly in both breeds of sheep at 3 h following the onset of shearing. Plasma cortisol levels in the more reactive Ile de France ewes were higher across all measurements as compared to less reactive ewes while N/L ratio immediately after shearing and at 3 h since the onset of shearing was higher in less stress-reactive ewes. These results suggest that the magnitude of cortisol response to acute stress is not matched by a corresponding increase in N/L ratio. The results are interpreted to mean that total plasma cortisol level plays a lesser role than free cortisol in N/L traffi cking and that neutrophil elastase-induced cleavage of corticosteroid-binding globulin regulates the amount of free cortisol.
DEPOSITION OF PLCT THICK FILMS BY A MODIFIED SOL-GEL PROCESSING

ABSTRACT The PLCT thick films were spin-deposited on various substrates by using a modified sol-gel process. The crystallization, surface morphology and the chemical state's properties of the PLCT thick films have been investigated. It is revealed that the success of this route is due to the elimination of the agglomeration among the nanometer particles. SEM observation shows that the PLCT thick films are rather smooth and have a good distribution of small grains. The chemical state of PLCT thick films were also analyzed by used XPS.
Trifecta : the Blockchain TriLemma Solved Trifecta Blockchain Team

We present Trifecta , a new blockchain which solves the Trilemma of decentralization, security and scalability: 1) it is fully permissionless; 2) it achieves full security, guaranteeing liveness and consistency against a fully adaptive adversary with 50% of the resource; 3) it achieves vertical scaling of throughput and conﬁrmation latency to the physical limits of the participating nodes; 4) it achieves horizontal scaling with the number of nodes, enabling full decentralization. Trifecta comes in two versions: Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake. A full-stack implementation in Rust achieves a throughput o 250 , 000 transactions per second and a conﬁrmation latency of the order of 20 to 30 seconds on a network of 100 EC2 nodes. This whitepaper explains the design and prototype of the system. Trifecta is built on top of Prism [4, 19].
Supplementary Material

We provide additional material to supplement our work. Appendix A verifies the accuracy of our re-implementation of [1], which is, to our knowledge, the only pre-existing work on few-shot 3D reconstruction. Appendix B further examines ways of incorporating shape priors into the encoder-decoder architecture of [1]. In Appendix C, we report performance on base classes for our three considered methods and Wallace et al. [1]. Appendix D shows learned attention maps obtained using the CGCE model, analyses similarities across classes, and the choice of hyperparameters. Finally, we provide more qualitative examples in Appendix E.