Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fracture strength of endodontically treated lateral incisors restored with new zirconia reinforced rice husk nanohybrid composite

Background This study aimed to compare the fracture strength, fracture pattern and type of fracture of endodontically treated maxillary lateral incisors restored with new zirconia reinforced rice husk nanohybrid composite. Material and Methods Eighty mature permanent maxillary lateral incisors from patients age range of 30-60 years with single canal were selected and randomly divided into: Group 1 – RCT + nanofilled composite (Filtek), Group 2 – RCT + microhybrid composite (Zmack), Group 3 – RCT + new nanohybrid composite (Zr-Hybrid) and Group 4 - Intact teeth (control). Standardized mesio-palatal-distal cavity was prepared, and endodontic treatment was carried out using crown-down technique until size 30, tapered 0.04. Obturation was completed using single cone technique with gutta-percha and AH plus sealer. Cavity access was restored with respective composite resins. Next, teeth were stored in incubator for 24 hours and subdivided into aged and unaged subgroups. Teeth in aged subgroups were subjected to 2500 thermal cycles for 5ºC, 37ºC and 55ºC with 30 seconds dwell time and 5 seconds transfer time. After that, root surfaces of teeth were covered with silicone-based material and placed in boxes filled with acrylic until the cemento-enamel-junction (CEJ) level. They were then tested under Universal Testing Machine until fracture occurred. Samples were then viewed under Leica microscope to determine the fracture pattern and type of fracture. Data analyzed using One-way ANOVA complimented by post hoc Tukey HSD and paired sample T test for fracture strength. Fracture pattern and type of fracture were analyzed using Chi-square test. Level of significance was set at p<0.05. Results Significant differences were observed (p<0.05) with Group 3 demonstrating the highest fracture strength followed by Group 4, Group 1 and lastly Group 2 in both aged and unaged subgroups respectively. A significant decreased in fracture strength was noted in Group 1 and Group 2 (p<0.05) as number of thermocycle increased but no significant differences were noted in Group 3 and Group 4 (p>0.05). Besides, Group 3 and Group 4 showed higher rate of favorable fracture pattern, followed by Group 1 and lastly Group 2. Most favorable fracture pattern was noted to exhibit horizontal fracture type (86.36%), whereas most unfavorable fracture pattern exhibited vertical fracture type (77.78%). Conclusions Endodontically treated teeth restored with new zirconia reinforced rice husk nanohybrid composite (Zr-Hybrid) demonstrated higher fracture strength than commercialized composite resins especially after artificial ageing. Zr-Hybrid showed similar fracture pattern to those of intact teeth with higher rate of horizontal fracture type. Key words:Fracture strength, fracture pattern, composite resin, rice husk, Zirconia.
Revisit Retinex Theory: Towards a Lightness-Aware Restorer for Underexposed Images

We investigate how to correct exposure of underexposed images. The bottleneck of previous methods mainly lies in their naturalness and robustness when dealing with images with various exposure levels. When facing well-exposed or extremely underexposed images, they may produce over- or underenhanced outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel retinex-based approach, namely, LiAR (short for lightness-aware restorer). The word “lightness-aware” refers to that the estimated illumination not only is a component to be adjusted but also serves as a measure that reflects the brightness of the scene, determining the degree of adjustment. In this way, underexposed images can be restored adaptively according to their own brightness. Given an image, LiAR first estimates its illumination map using a specially designed loss function which can ensure the result’s color consistency and texture richness. Then adaptive correction is performed to get properly exposed output. LiAR is based on internal optimization of the single test image and does not need any prior training, implying that it can adapt itself to different settings per image. Additionally, LiAR can be easily extended to the video case due to its simplicity and stability. Experiments demonstrate that facing images/videos with various exposure levels, LiAR can achieve robust and real-time correction with high contrast and naturalness. The relevant code and collected data are publicly available at https://cslinzhang.github. io/LiAR-Homepage/ .
Stock Price Manipulation Detection based on Autoencoder Learning of Stock Trades Affinity

Stock price manipulation, a major problem in capital markets surveillance, uses illegitimate means to influence the price of traded stocks in order to reap illicit profit. Most of the existing attempts to detect such manipulations have either relied upon annotated trading data, using supervised methods, or have been restricted to detecting a specific manipulation scheme. There have been a few unsupervised algorithms focusing on general detection yet none of them explored the innate affinity among the stock trades, be it normal or manipulative. This paper proposes a fully unsupervised model based on the idea of learning the relationship among stock prices in the form of an affinity matrix. The proposed affinity matrix based features are used to train an under-fitting autoencoder in order to learn an efficient representation of the normal stock prices. A kernel density estimate of the normal trading data is used as the reconstruction error of the autoencoder. During the detection phase, the normal dataset has been injected with synthetic manipulative trades. A kernel density estimation based clustering technique is then used to detect manipulative trades based on their autoencoder representation. The proposed approach is validated on benchmark stock price data from the LOBSTER project and the obtained results show dramatic improvements in the detection performance over existing price manipulation detection techniques.
Impact of medical and nonmedical factors on physician decision making for HIV/AIDS antiretroviral treatment.

To examine influences of medical factors (e.g., viral load) and nonmedical factors (e.g., patient characteristics) on treatment decisions for highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), we sent a survey to a random sample of 995 infectious disease physicians who treat patients with HIV/AIDS in the United States in August, 1998. The response rate was 53%. Respondents were asked to report their current practices with respect to antiretroviral treatment and the extent to which each of three medical and 17 nonmedical factors would influence them for or against prescribing HAART to a hypothetical HIV-positive patient. Most reported initiating HAART with findings of low CD4 + cell counts and high viral loads, and weighing CD4 + cell counts, viral load, and opportunistic infection heavily in their decisions to prescribe HAART. Patients' prior history of poor adherence was weighed very much against initiating HAART. Patient homelessness, heavy alcohol use, injection drug use, and prior psychiatric hospitalization were cited by most physicians as weighing against HAART initiation. Thus, most physicians in this sample follow guidelines for the use of HAART, and nonmedical factors related to patients' life situations are weighed as heavily as disease severity in treatment decisions. As HIV increasingly becomes a disease associated with economic disadvantage and other social health problems, it will be essential to develop interventions and care support systems to enable patients experiencing these problems to benefit from HIV treatment advances.
Effect of fruit on flowering in relation to biennial bearing in sweet orange (Citrus sinensis)

SummaryFlowering and fruit-setting in the sweet orange cv. ‘Late Valencia’ were observed for three consecutive seasons that comprised two “off-years” and one “on-year”. Twice as many flowers per unit area of tree canopy were observed in the “on-year” as in the two “off-years”. There was a significant negative correlation between the yield of the previous crop and the number of flowers per square yard of tree canopy.There were no significant differences between an “off-year” and an “on-year” in the proportions of inflorescences classified according to the number of flowers and number of leaves per inflorescence. Furthermore, the previous crop had no direct effect on fruit-set, the percentage fruit-set being similar in all three seasons.Observations made during blossoming, when the trees were bearing an “on-year” crop, showed that practically no flowers were produced on fruit-bearing wood. The few inflorescences that were recorded on fruit-bearing wood tended to be of the leafless types.It is suggested that.
de bagazo de caña Bleached pulp and fermentable sugars from sugarcane pith bagasse

Pith bagasse is a sub-exploited residue produced in large quantities in sugar mills and paper mills. It is a mixture of parenchyma cells, vessels and small-size cellulose fibers. The content of carbohydrates and lignin in pith is similar to the fiber fraction. In order to take advantage of this significant carbohydrate content, two distinct processes were applied to the pith material: Pulping-bleaching, and enzymatic hydrolysis. In the first case the pith was treated with pre-hydrolysis, soda pulping, bleaching and beating process, obtaining bleached pith-pulp with 68% ISO brightness and 0,38% of residual lignin. The largest increase in strength (77,6% increase in tensile index, IT) happened when 30% of this unbeaten pulp was added to paperboard, while with 10% of refined bleached pulp, IT increased in 43,8%. In the second, the pith was enzymatically hydrolyzed. In 6 h of hydrolysis a yield of 86,6% of fermentable sugars was obtained in both, cooked pith-pulp and bleached pith-pulp, close to 100% hydrolysis of carbohydrates present in the substrate, which is significant because the yield of fermentable sugars from untreated pith was only 26,1%.
Late Leaf Spot Progression on Peanut as Affected by Components of Partial Resistance

Components of partial resistance to late leaf spot (Cercosporidium personatum) and disease progression on 14 peanut genotypes were quantified in field experiments at Marianna, Florida, during 1988 and 1989. The resistance components measured were 1) incubation period, 2) latent period, 3) maximum percentage of lesions that sporulated, 4) lesion size, 5) lesion number, 7) degree of sporulation, and 7) percent necrotic area. Lower area under the disease progress curve (AUDPC) values, reduced apparent infection rates, and lower end-of-season disease levels were observed on genotypes UF81206-1, PI 261893, US29-b3-B, and US202-b2 compared to other genotypes in the study. Both apparent infection rate and AUDPC values were highly correlated with latent period (r = −0.68 to −0.79, P ≤ 0.01) and maximum percentage of lesions that sporulated (r = 0.72-0.81, P ≤ 0.01). Latent period and maximum percentage of lesions that sporulated were the components most highly correlated with late leaf spot disease development, and these two components were highly correlated with one another (r = -0.84). Using either of these two components to evaluate peanut genotypes for resistance to late leaf spot may facilitate more rapid selection of lines with improved levels of rate-reducing resistance
Expanding Partnerships in Conservation

Protected areas around the globe - national parks, wildlife reserves, biosphere reserves - will prosper only if they are supported by the public, the private sector, and the full range of government agencies. Yet such support is unlikely unless society appreciates the importance of protected areas to their own interests, and the protected areas are well-managed and contribute to the national welfare in a cost-effective way. A crucial foundation for success is full cooperation between individuals and institutions. Based on papers presented at the IVth World Congress on National Parks and Protected Areas, Expanding Partnerships in Conservation explores how new and stronger partnerships can be formed between managers of protected areas and other sectors of society. It describes a range of activities currently underway in many parts of the world that are intended to improve conservation efforts at the international, national, and local level. The book will be a valuable resource for anyone involved with establishing new protected areas, improving the management of existing areas, and building more positive relationships with the people who live in and around the protected areas.
The Reciprocal Relation of Soil and Insects

The soil is an integral factor in the study of many biological problems. The importance of this has been recognized by the agronomist, the botanist, and the chemist. The zoologist, and particularly the entomologist, on the other hand, have not given the soil the consideration necessary to an understanding of many of the fundamental animal activities. This was brought to the writers' attention in connection with a study of subterranean insects which attack the roots of crops; and the present paper, which might be termed a preliminary survey of the field of soil entomology, is an attempt to review some of the work which has been done along this line and to suggest the scope and possibilities of future research. While the literature on soils and soil insects is voluminous, little effort has been made to systematize or correlate the data. It is only within recent years that the entomologist has recognized the fact that the basis of entomological study is insect behavior, which in turn is a response to the influence of the environmental complex. In other words, we now have the application of the principle of cause and effect, and the entomologist is no longer confined to insects, but investigates all factors which influence their activities. The soil offers a multiplicity of problems which are of direct interest to the entomologist. It is the home of a vast series of insects either during their entire life or some portion of it. It affords shelter and protection to another large group. In addition, being the medium for plant growth, it becomes a factor in the food supply of insects. Distribution, relative abundance, and seasonal activities of insects may be correlated with certain soil conditions. Finally, a knowledge of soils is fundamental to the development of many control measures. On the other hand, while insect life is largely dependent on the soil, there is also a reciprocal relation, since the soil is benefited by the presence of insects.
Towards an Accessible Use of a Brain-Computer Interfaces-Based Home Care System through a Smartphone

This study proposes a home care system (HCS) based on a brain-computer interface (BCI) with a smartphone. The HCS provides daily help to motor-disabled people when a caregiver is not present. The aim of the study is two-fold: (1) to develop a BCI-based home care system to help end-users control their household appliances, and (2) to assess whether the architecture of the HCS is easy for motor-disabled people to use. A motion-strip is used to evoke event-related potentials (ERPs) in the brain of the user, and the system immediately processes these potentials to decode the user's intentions. The system, then, translates these intentions into application commands and sends them via Bluetooth to the user's smartphone to make an emergency call or to execute the corresponding app to emit an infrared (IR) signal to control a household appliance. Fifteen healthy and seven motor-disabled subjects (including the one with ALS) participated in the experiment. The average online accuracy was 81.8% and 78.1%, respectively. Using component N2P3 to discriminate targets from nontargets can increase the efficiency of the system. Results showed that the system allows end-users to use smartphone apps as long as they are using their brain waves. More important, only one electrode O1 is required to measure EEG signals, giving the system good practical usability. The HCS can, thus, improve the autonomy and self-reliance of its end-users.
Role of Sphingolipid Signaling in Glomerular Diseases: Focus on DKD and FSGS

Sphingolipids are well-recognized as major players in the pathogenesis of many human diseases, including chronic kidney disease. The kidney is a very sensitive organ to alterations in sphingolipid metabolism. The critical issues to be addressed in this review relate to the role of sphingolipids and enzymes involved in sphingolipid metabolism in the pathogenesis of glomerular diseases with a special focus on podocytes, a key cellular component of the glomerular filtration barrier. Among several sphingolipids, we will highlight the role of ceramide, sphingosine, sphingosine-1-phosphate and ceramide-1-phosphate. Additionally, we will summarize the current knowledge with regard to the use of sphingolipids as therapeutic agents for the treatment of podocyte injury in kidney disease.
Assessment of cytotoxic and antimicrobial activities of two components of Cymbopogon citratus essential oil

Background There is a continuing search for compuounds to improve the chemical plaque inhibitory action of oral hygiene products. Although the antibacterial effects of chlorhexidine (CHX) and essential oils components, citral/myrcene, have been described, there is contradictory information regarding their cytotoxic effects in host tissues. This study aimed to evaluate the cytotoxic activity of the major components of the oil C. citratus, citral and myrcene on human periodontal ligament fibroblast (HPLF) cultures and their antimicrobial effect on different bacterial species present in supragingival biofilm. Material and Methods Cytotoxicity of the compounds to HPLF was determined by MTT assay. Antimicrobial activity was tested against reference strains of Enterococcus faecalis, Streptococcus mutans and Lactobacillus rhamnosus and for S. mutans clinical strains by broth microdilution assay. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with Games-Howell post-hoc multiple comparison or unpaired t tests were used for inter- and intragroup comparisons. Results Overall, all of the compounds under study showed a cytotoxic effect to HPLF which varied in a dose-dependant manner. Whilst myrcene did not show bacteriostatic activity at tested concentrations, both citral and CHX exhibited bacteriostatic/bactericidal effects to all strains at specific concentrations, being CHX most effective to inhibit bacterial growth at lower concentrations than what observed for citral. Conclusions Based on these findings, it would possible to conclude that whereas myrcene might be ineffective to control bacterial growth, citral could have a promising antimicrobial activity against dental colonizers with low cytotoxicity, and may be useful for preventing the onset and progression of oral diseases. Key words:Antimicrobial activity, citral, cytotoxicity, chlorhexidine, myrcene.
Changes in alder fens following a decrease in the ground water table: results of a geographical information system application

1. As a consequence of large-scale decreases in the ground water table in western parts of the lower Rhine area, Germany, several Alnus glutinosa fens have undergone distinct changes in species composition and show signs of intensive peat mineralization. 2. The chemistry of peat and the distribution patterns of vegetation were studied in an affected fen of 6.6 ha. Ground water level, pH of the peat, exchangeable cations, total nitrogen, organic carbon contents and herb layer composition were assessed at each intersection of a rectangular 25 × 25 m grid. The evaluation of individual grid values was performed with a geographical information system (GIS). Isolines and overlays for selected data sets were used to assess extent and direction of change. 3. The peat of the drained areas showed decreased nitrogen, organic carbon, calcium and magnesium contents and low pH values. In contrast, bulk density and exchangeable aluminium increased in the mineralized peat. Though more than 800 g m −2 of nitrogen was still found in the upper 10 cm in the wet areas, nitrogen stores diminished to about half this amount in drained peat. The decline in pH values and in calcium and magnesium contents was mainly attributed to H + production related to nitrogen mineralization. 4. The evaluation of overlays for selected variables showed a strong relation between the decrease in ground water level and declining cover of Carex acutiformis as well as peat acidification. Increases in exchangeable aluminium were also closely related to peat acidification. 5. The investigation showed that spatial evaluation of ecological data can be useful for assessment of man-induced ecosystem changes
Posaconazole-Induced Hypertension Masquerading as Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia in a Child with Cystic Fibrosis

Background Deficiency of 11β-hydroxylase is the second most common cause of congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), presenting with hypertension, hypokalaemia, precocious puberty, and adrenal insufficiency. We report the case of a 6-year-old boy with cystic fibrosis (CF) found to have hypertension and cortisol insufficiency, which were initially suspected to be due to CAH, but were subsequently identified as being secondary to posaconazole therapy. Case Presentation. A 6-year-old boy with CF was noted to have developed hypertension after administration of two doses of Orkambi™ (ivacaftor/lumacaftor), which was subsequently discontinued, but the hypertension persisted. Further investigations, including echocardiogram, abdominal Doppler, thyroid function, and urinary catecholamine levels, were normal. A urine steroid profile analysis raised the possibility of CAH due to 11β-hydroxylase deficiency, and a standard short synacthen test (SST) revealed suboptimal cortisol response. Clinically, there were no features of androgen excess. Detailed evaluation of the medical history revealed exposure to posaconazole for more than 2 months, and the hypertension had been noted to develop two weeks after the initiation of posaconazole. Hence, posaconazole was discontinued, following which the blood pressure, cortisol response to the SST, and urine steroid profile were normalized. Conclusion Posaconazole can induce a clinical and biochemical picture similar to CAH due to 11β-hydroxylase deficiency, which is reversible. It is prudent to monitor patients on posaconazole for cortisol insufficiency, hypertension, and electrolyte abnormalities.
The Effects of Platelet-Rich and Platelet-Poor Plasma on Biological Characteristics of BM-MSCs In Vitro

Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) and its byproduct platelet-poor plasma (PPP) are rich sources of cytokines in tissue damage repair. Bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BM-MSCs) have received more and more attention for their ability to treat multiple diseases. The purpose of our study was to investigate the biologic action of PPP and PRP on BM-MSCs. The adipogenic potential of BM-MSCs revealed no obvious change, but the osteogenic ability of BM-MSCs was enhanced after treated with PRP. CCK8 assays and cell colony formation assays showed that PRP promoted cell proliferation, while this effect of PPP was not obvious. No obvious difference was found in cell cycle and apoptosis of BM-MSCs between PRP and PPP treatment. Expression of β-galactosidase, a biological marker of senescence, was decreased upon PRP treatment which indicated that PRP provided significant protection against cellular senescence. The migratory capacity of BM-MSCs was detected by scratch and transwell assays. The results indicated that PRP could affect the migration ability of BM-MSCs. From immunofluorescence detection and western blot, we demonstrated that the level of epithelial-mesenchymal transition-related proteins was changed and several pluripotency marker genes, including Sox2, Sall4, Oct4, and Nanog, were increased. Finally, the expression of the key signal pathway such as PI3K/AKT was examined. Our findings suggested that PRP promoted cell migration of BM-MSCs via stimulating the signaling pathway of PI3K/AKT.