Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Diastematomyelia differences in management of diastemetomyelia with associated abnormalities versus isolated diastemetomyelia: a case series

DM also known as SCM is a type of spinal dysraphism. It is a very rare congenital spinal anomaly characterized by clefting of the spinal cord due to a partial or complete bony or fibrous septum within the spinal canal with splaying of the posterior spinal elements which results in localized division of the spinal cord. The two parts on either side of the septum i.e., the two hemi cords typically reunite below the cleft with the conus lying in an abnormally low position. The cleft is most commonly located (70-80%) at the upper lumbar or lower thoracic regions, but it manifests at any level of the spinal cord. The pathology was first described by Cruvelhier in 1853. Two types of DM have been defined: type 1 is characterised by each hemi cord having its own dural sheath, and type 2 is characterised by both hemi cords covered by a common dural sheath. About 1-3 per 1000 live birth is the estimated incidence of spinal dysraphism and NTD. It occurs more commonly in females (5570%). The clinical significance of DM is that it may manifest as an isolated abnormality or in association with other spinal abnormalities such as spina bifida, ArnoldChiari malformation, hemivertebra, butterfly vertebra, or kyphoscoliosis and also can be seen as part of JarchoLevin syndrome. Prenatal diagnosis of DM is possible by USG. Amniotic fluid acetylcholine esterase (AF-AChE) levels and foetal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can be helpful to rule out additional anomalies. ABSTRACT
Pharmacognostic evaluation of Nelsonia canescens. (Lam) Spreng. (Acanthaceae) Root

Abstract Introduction : Nelsonia canescens (Acanthaceae), commonly used in name of ‘Rasna (Bodo Rasna)’ in Orissa, its root is being recommended in cases of pain and inflammation. Ethnic people use this plant very commonly. Review of the literature did not reveal much work on this plant, but ethnomedically root is said to be good anti inflammatory properties. Hence, it was thought worth to study the root of this plant. Method : The present investigation deals with macroscopic, microscopic study of the Nelsonia canescens root including its powder characteristics following standard procedures. Results : Chief microscopical characters include parenchymatous cortical zone, inner wall of the cell get detached and embedded in different form in cell cavities, medullary rays arising from the primary bundles, uni to tri seriate and getting wider towards periphery. Conclusion : Such a study would serve as a useful gauge in standardization of the root material and ensuring quality of the formulations.
Exponential Computing Digital Circuit Design Developed for FPGA-based Embedded Systems

Digital systems consist of thousands of digital circuit blocks operating in the background, working in their simplest form such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. In exponential expressions like square roots and cube roots, just like these circuits, it is found in many digital systems and performs tasks. Although these processes seem to be used only in circuits carrying out mathematical operations, they actually take an active role in solving many engineering problems. In this study, a digital circuit design that computes both the integer and a floating point exponent of a 32-bit floating-point number has been realized. This digital circuit, which is coded with VHDL language, can be used from beginner to advanced level in FPGA based systems. This digital circuit, which is coded with VHDL language, can be used from beginner to advanced level in FPGA based systems. In addition, three floating IP cores - logarithm, multiplication and exponent - were used in this digital circuit, and results were obtained with a total of five finite state machines in sixty-six clock pulse time.
Equilibration of polychlorinated biphenyls and toxaphene with air and water

The vapor pressure and solubility (as subcooled liquids) and Henry's law constants (HLCs) for the individual chlorobiphenyl compounds (CBC) in Aroclor 1242, 1254, and 1260, as well as the HLCs for toxaphene, have been determined with an equilibration technique. The results were obtained from one set of measurements, for all of the CBC present in the materials of interest, the subcooled organic mixtures that are partitioning in the environment. The HLCs of the CBC varied from about 3.3 x 10/sup -4/ to 5 x 10/sup -5/ atm m/sup 3//mol at 20/sup 0/C, and those of the Aroclors were about 2 x 10/sup -4/ atm m/sup 3//mol. These HLCs are such that the transport rate of these compounds through the air/water interface should be dependent on both the gas- and liquid-phase mass-transfer coefficients. The solubility of the polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in water is shown to be significantly lower when a solution is prepared by adding an organic solution (acetone, methanol, etc.) of the PCBs to water. These results affect the design and the interpretation of the results from toxicity experiments. 37 references, 5 tables.
Simulation of Titicaca Lake Water Level Fluctuations Using Hybrid Machine Learning Technique Integrated with Grey Wolf Optimizer Algorithm

Lakes have an important role in storing water for drinking, producing hydroelectric power, and environmental, agricultural, and industrial uses. In order to optimize the use of lakes, precise prediction of the lake water level (LWL) is a main issue in water resources management. Due to the existence of nonlinear relations, uncertainty, and characteristics of the time series variables, the exact prediction of the lake water level is difficult. In this study the hybrid support vector regression (SVR) and the grey wolf algorithm (GWO) are used to predict lake water level fluctuations. Also, three types of data preprocessing methods, namely Principal component analysis, Random forest, and Relief algorithm were used for finding the best input variables for prediction LWL by the SVR and SVR-GWO models. Before the LWL simulation on monthly time step using the hybrid model, an evolutionary approach based on different monthly lags was conducted for determining the best mask of the input variables. Results showed that based on the random forest method, the best scenario of the inputs was Xt−1, Xt−2, Xt−3, Xt−4 for the SVR-GWO model. Also, the performance of the SVR-GWO model indicated that it could simulate the LWL with acceptable accuracy (with RMSE = 0.08 m, MAE = 0.06 m, and R2 = 0.96).
Electric-Field- and Hydrogen-Passivation-Induced Band Modulations in Armchair ZnO Nanoribbons

We report on the electric-field- and H chemical-absorption-induced band manipulations of armchair ZnO nanoribbons using first-principles calculations. It is shown that the band gap of a semiconducting armchair nanoribbon can be reduced monotonically with increasing transverse field strength, demonstrating a giant Stark effect. The critical field strength to completely close the band gap decreases with increasing ribbon width, while it is almost independent of the stacking thickness. On the other hand, the nanoribbon with the edges fully passivated shows an enhanced gap but a slightly weaker Stark effect. We also observe hydrogen-termination-induced metallization of the ribbons when only the edge O atoms are passivated, which results from an n-type doping effect. These findings suggest potential ways of band engineering in armchair ZnO nanoribbons.
Increasing Growth of Lettuce and Mizuna under Sole-Source LED Lighting Using Longer Photoperiods with the Same Daily Light Integral

Light recommendations for horticultural crops often focus on the optimal daily light integral (DLI) without regard to how that light is delivered throughout each day. Because photosynthesis is more efficient at lower photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD), we hypothesized that longer photoperiods with lower PPFD results in faster growth than shorter photoperiods with higher PPFD and the same DLI. We quantified the effect of different photoperiods, all providing the same DLI, on photosynthesis and growth of two leafy greens. Mizuna (Brassica rapa var. japonica) and lettuce (Lactuca sativa) “Little Gem” were grown from seed in a controlled environment chamber (20 °C and 819 µmol·mol−1 CO2) under six photoperiods (10, 12, 14, 16, 18, and 20 h). LED fixtures provided white light and PPFD was adjusted so each treatment received a DLI of 16 mol·m−2·d−1. Mizuna and lettuce were harvested 30 and 41 days after planting, respectively. Longer photoperiods with lower PPFD increased light interception, chlorophyll content index, quantum yield of photosystem II, and aboveground biomass, but decreased instantaneous CO2 assimilation of lettuce and mizuna. Aboveground biomass increased 16.0% in lettuce and 18.7% in mizuna in response to increasing the photoperiod from 10 to 20 h. In summary, extending the photoperiod and lowering PPFD increases growth of lettuce and mizuna by increasing light interception and the quantum yield of photosystem II.
Gas‐Transfer Measurements Using Headspace Analysis of Propane

A sampling and analysis procedure for the tracer measurement of gas transfer is presented. Dissolved propane was used as a gas‐transfer tracer. The propane samples were analyzed by a headspace gas chromatographic technique that was tested as an alternative to the purge‐and‐trap technique previously used for tracer measurements. Headspace analysis is simple, fast, precise, and does not require the extensive apparatus required by the purge‐and‐trap technique, so that any gas‐chromatography laboratory can perform it. Headspace analysis was found to give excellent results with low uncertainty and a low limit of detection. Gas‐transfer measurements were performed on flow across a large‐scale laboratory weir. A detailed uncertainty analysis was conducted for the transfer measurements. The results are applicable to other tracer measurements of gas transfer, and the head‐space technique may be applied, with modifications, for the laboratory analysis of any volatile compound.
572 Fibroblast activating protein (FAP)-targeting IL-12 (anti-FAP/IL-12) TMEkine™ potentiates anti-cancer effects in preclinical cancer models

Although cancer immunotherapy showed promising results in hematological malignancies, it has come up with relatively low tumor response for many solid tumors partly due to immune-suppressive tumor microenvironment (TME). Because of the immune-suppressive nature of TME, TME has been an active area of research and therapeutic target for restoring immune system and subsequent tumor growth inhibition. Among the many components in TME, cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) are one of the key cell components of TME where one of the promising solid-tumor TME marker, fibroblast-activating protein (FAP) is highly expressed. Here we have developed an antibody-cytokine fusion protein from our TMEkine™ platform containing anti-FAP and IL-12. Our TMEkine™ (anti-FAP-IL-12) molecule induced strong anti-cancer effects in preclinical solid tumor models by immune-modulation.IL-12 cytokine was mutated in TMEkine™ (anti-FAP-IL-12) to reduce systemic toxicity and its binding affinity was tested to FAP and IL-12 receptor. The anti-tumor activity of anti-FAP-IL-12 was investigated on CT26 (murine colorectal cancer) syngeneic mouse models with/without NIH-3T3 (murine fibroblast). Additionally, mice showing complete response after anti-FAP-IL-12 administration were re-injected CT26 with/without 4T1 cells for re-challenge study to monitor long-term durable response generated from the initial immune activation.We showed that TMEkine™ (anti-FAP-IL-12) interacts with FAP and IL-12 receptor. IL-12 activity was attenuated by our IL-12 mutants. We also showed that TMEkine™ (anti-FAP-IL-12) induced IFN-γ from primary human T cells and NK cells. TMEkine™ (anti-FAP-IL-12) administration resulted in significant reduction of the tumor burden in both CT26+NIH-3T3/FAP+ and CT26/FAP+ models. In the re-challenge experiments, CT26 tumor growth was inhibited significantly compared to 4T1 tumor suggesting memory immune response was generated in TMEkine™ (anti-FAP-IL-12) treated mice.These findings provide evidences that the treatment of anti-FAP/IL-12 TMEkine™ induced anti-cancer effects without serious adverse effects. Anti-FAP/IL-12 has a strong potential to provide a therapeutic option for cancer-specific immunomodulator and cancer cell eradication.
Demand Elasticity for Local Public Transport in Polish Cities: Do Local Policies Matter?

Since 1990, the number of local public transport passengers has been steadily decreasing with a simultaneous increase in the number of residents using individual transport. Since that process has contributed to an increase in traffic congestion and the deterioration of air quality in cities, local governments have tried to reverse that negative trend. A few years now, a reversal of this trend has been observed in some cities. This article, using data on the number of passengers in over 80 Polish cities, presents regression models explaining the factors influencing the demand for public transport services, and it estimates the demand elasticity related to various independent variables. The explanatory model refers both to the features of the cities’ socio-economic environment and to the organization of the service. The results indicate that local policies matter: the density of the public transport network is the most important factor in relation to the volume of demand, while the ticket price level is almost irrelevant. Demand is also clearly increasing in the largest cities, but the relationship between demand and population size is not a linear one.
A primer on understanding Google Earth Engine APIs

This article is build on the experience of using Google Earth Engine as a development framework for a previous work by the same authors. Being primarily a distributed parallel computing platform, it is designed around a functional language pattern, even though supported on an object model, and a map / reduce distributed workload paradigm. Leveraging the sheer computing power delivered by the Google infrastructure and a multi petabyte remote sensing data repository, Google Earth Engine is an efficient development framework that presents itself in two basic flavors: one online integrated development environment which uses the browser Javascript engine; two APIs that can be deployed to a Python or a NodeJS environment. This work emphasizes the comparison between the Javascript browser based implementation and the Python environment packages.
On the design of extended state observer-based robust finite controller: For underactuated robotic system with multiple sources of uncertainties

Controlling an underactuated robot is always an important research and engineering issue, especially when the robot is suffering from multiple sources of uncertainties, such as unmodeled dynamics, external disturbance, and parameter uncertainties. To cope with these uncertainties in such uncertain nonlinear systems which is not fully-actuated, this paper proposes a control method that can actively estimate these uncertainties via the extended state observer (ESO), under the scheme of output-feedback control, the lumped uncertainties can be online estimated and actively compensated. Every joint of the underactuated robotic system can robustly reach the pre-given state in finite-time even though there are only fewer joints than the actual number of joints that can be controlled directly. The experimental results demonstrate the control process and validate that the proposed method is feasible for the studied underactuated robotic system.
MiR-144 Regulates Hemoglobin Expression in Human Erythroid Cell Line

The regulation of globin gene expression is significantly important to understand the pathogenesis of globin gene disorders. Recent findings have shown that microRNAs (miRNAs, miRs) play an important role in the regulation of globin gene expression. The miR-144 is an erythroid lineage-specific miRNA, in which its expression mediates NRF2 gene silencing and inhibits fetal hemoglobin expression. However, roles of miR-144 to other globin genes expression especially in ɑ-globin cluster remain unknown. This study, thus, examined the functional studies of miR-144 to globin gene expression in K562 human erythroid cell line. The results revealed that ɑ-globin and ζ-globin gene expression were silenced by the overexpressed miR-144 and that correlated with the reduced expression of KLF1the suspected target gene. By contrast, transfection with miR-144 inhibitor reversed the silencing effect of miR-144. On the other hand, miR-144 had no effect to β-globin gene expression. Our results sustain the findings of the previous studies that the overexpression of miR-144 correlates with the repressing of NRF2 and γ-globin gene expression. Taken together, our results suggest that miR-144 plays a key role in globin gene expression by silencing γ-globin through NRF2 target mRNA and repressing adult ɑ-globin and embryonic ζ-globin gene expression possibly by targeting KLF1 gene.
Biogas production from an anaerobic pond treating domestic wastewater in Burkina Faso.

Abstract The production of biogas and its composition from an anaerobic pond treating domestic wastewater have been studied in the Sudano-Sahelian climate of Burkina Faso. The biogas production was measured from March 2010 to March 2011 using a floating static chamber, and the composition was analysed using a micro-gas chromatograph. The composition of biogas produced was relatively constant with time. The major component of the biogas by volume was CH4 which accounted for an average of 80.5%, N2 for 11.8%, O2 for 5% and CO2 for 2.5%. The mean areal production rates of biogas and methane respectively were 121 and 97 L m−2 d−1. The mean methane production rates were 248 L kg−1 COD removed and 588 L kg−1 VSS removed. The average daily volume of biogas and its corresponding methane were 5.73 and 4.63 m3 d−1, respectively, equivalent to a ratio of 7.3 m3 CH4 per capita-year. The conversion of this methane production to electricity could reduce the CO2 equivalent greenhouse gas emission from petrol combustion.
Self-concept content and structure: motivation and performance implications

PurposeSubstantial research has examined the self-concept, but little work has investigated the contents and structure of the self-concept in combination within performance settings, particularly from a within-person perspective. Thus, this research developed and examined a conceptual framework based on Greenwald et al. (2002) to understand how core self-evaluations (CSE) and self-concept clarity (SCC) interact to influence motivational orientation with implications for performance dimensions.Design/methodology/approachFull-time employees (N = 138) completed daily measures of CSE, SCC, motivational orientation, organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) and counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs) over the course of three weeks.FindingsMultilevel modeling indicated CSE influences motivational orientation, SCC can moderate these relationships and motivational orientation relates to OCBs and counterproductive work behaviors.Originality/valueThis work contributes to this research area by developing and examining an integrative conceptual framework involving aspects of self-concept, motivation and performance from a within-person perspective.
INTERACTIVE EFFECTS OF TRAIT AND STATE ANXIETY ON VISUAL SPATIAL WORKING MEMORY CAPACITY

Anxiety is associated with low visual spatial working memory capacity (VSWMC) in the presence of task-irrelevant distractors. Because anxious individuals have difficulty suppressing processing of distractors, VSWMC is depleted. However, results of association between anxiety and VSWMC in the absence of distractors are inconsistent among previous studies. In the present study, distinct roles of trait and state anxiety were focused. The present study investigated the interactive effects of trait and state anxiety on VSWMC without distractors using a change detection task. In the task, a memory array of oriented bars to be encoded was presented followed by a test array, and participants were required to answer whether the test array was identical to or different from the memory array. Orientation of one bar changed largely (i.e., low-precision condition) in Experiment 1 and slightly (high-precision condition) in Experiment 2. In Experiment 1, the interactive effects of trait and state anxiety on VSWMC were observed. VSWMC was positively associated with state anxiety when trait anxiety was low, whereas VSWMC was negatively associated with state anxiety when trait anxiety was high. These interactive effects were not observed under high-precision condition in Experiment 2, in which VSWMC was negatively correlated with state anxiety irrespective of trait anxiety. These results indicated that under low-precision condition, high state anxiety widely allocate working-memory resources and VSWMC becomes high. However, because high trait anxious individuals have difficulty controlling allocation of working-memory resources, high trait anxiety decreases VSWMC under high state anxiety. Under high-precision condition, it is necessary to allocate working-memory resources narrowly to detect slight change. Because of wide allocation of working-memory resources in high state anxious individuals, state anxiety is negatively correlated with VSWMC under high-precision condition. either identical to the original memory array or differed by one orientation. There were two conditions: high and medium precision. In the high-precision condition, differed item rotated 15º condition, rotated orientation and degrees randomly each presented equally often. There 60 trials in each set size and precision condition ( 360 trials). Individuals’ memory capacity was again calculated by K-values following a standard formula (Cowan, 2001).
Moving from Market Opacity to Methodological Opacity: Are Web Data Good Enough for French Property Market Monitoring?

The big data era facilitates the use of new online data sources in both academic and professional fields: In real estate, for instance, private Web data such as online property price estimates have become commonly used sources for investigating property markets. The quality of such data, however, has not been routinely assessed. This article therefore statistically analyzes the quality of Web data for mapping local property prices. To do so, it compares property estimates drawn from ten Web sites and property prices calculated from the Demande de Valeurs Foncières central state tax services database for a stratified sample of sixty French municipalities. This study reaches a paradoxical conclusion and theorizes it as a shift from market opacity to methodological opacity: Although it has become easier to obtain property price estimates at a local level, this commodified form of information is hardly suitable for geographical research on local property markets due to its varying, unpredictable quality. The partially disclosed or even missing metadata and methodologies make it indeed impossible to identify the sources of biases (sampling or stock vs. flow effects). The article shows that this methodological opacity is directly linked to the strategic role of copyrighted information in a context of property market reintermediation.