Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Feral Cats on the Evolution of Antipredator Behaviors in the Aegean Wall Lizard (Pordarcis erhardii)

5 Introduction 6 Materials and Methods 8 Study area 8 Cat population survey 8 Study species 8 Ecological measurements 9 Field methods 9 Results 12 Site comparisons 12 Lizard population density 12 Antipredator behaviors 13 Cat predation experiment 14 Discussion 16 Figures 19 Tables 29 Appendices 31 Bibliography 33
An area efficient low-voltage 6-T SRAM cell using stacked silicon nanowires

An area efficient low-voltage 6-T SRAM cell using stacked silicon nanowires is proposed. Among emerging CMOS devices, nanowire (NW) / gate-all-around (GAA) silicon MOSFETs have shown advantages for scaling features as the semiconductor technology continues to progress. While preserving the intrinsic GAA advantages, this paper provides a design methodology for the optimal and feasible manufacturability with different doping concentrations to achieve high density design and assesses the performance via three-dimensional TCAD simulation. However, due to limited atoms in the extremely scaled channel, a heavy doping with in-situ doping process is needed. In addition, using vertical stacked gate-all-around MOSFETs to achieve high density in the same layout area with the proposed multi-threshold doping scheme is beneficial for system on chip (SoC) application. Circuit performance projection of the 6-T SRAM is provided based on balanced read and write performances.
Web-based university staff's publication analysis system

This paper proposes an architecture of a web-based publication analysis system that makes the process of multi-source data gathering much easier, serves as a centralized data storage system and automates most of the time consuming procedures of statistical analysis. Every academic staff member is required to keep an up to date list of their research publications. Having access to all of the data, for all staff members, the system can easily aggregate and perform multiple statistical analyses on these data. The resulting analyses could be very important for the university management as they reveal the current research status of the institution and help managers forecast and plan strategies for its improvement. The system implements a 3-tier architecture where user interface, business logic and data are separated into three functionally-independent non-overlapping layers. That provides easier data replication and portability; higher reliability and flexibility; and allows fast and easy personalization or complete change of the user interface. The paper describes both the architecture and the system's features in details and presents some statistical analyses of the publication activity of the researchers at the University of Ruse.
Calculation and simulation of mechanical pressure of XLPE-SR surface in cable joints

Interfacial breakdown in cable accessories can lead to high voltage cable fault. One of the paramount factors of interfacial electric strength is interfacial mechanical pressure, which depends on the magnitude of interference and variates with the operating temperature. Since the growing industry of cable accessory lacks a unified standard for interfacial pressure, accessory products differ in a range of sizes, resulting in different initial interfacial mechanical pressure. With the difficult measurement of interfacial pressure, the uncertain initial pressure brings higher degree of uncertainty during operation, as high pressure can cause the deformation of insulation while low pressure cannot guarantee the interfacial electric strength. In this paper, theoretical calculation of the interfacial mechanical pressure is conduct and verified by simulation. The impact of high temperature on the mechanical pressure is also shown in the simulation results.
Memristor models optimization for large-scale 1T1R memory arrays

Recently, memristive devices have been shown to possess unique and intriguing properties such as small size, high density, non-volatility, state-dependent behavior, good scalability, very low leakage current, and compatibility with CMOS technology. When using memristive devices at the circuit level a major requirement is the availability of a simple, accurate and efficient model that adequately characterizes circuit performance. Most existing models for memristive devices presented in the literature suffer from high complexity and computational inefficiency. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to reduce the computational complexity of existing models and improve simulation time while maintaining circuit designer requirements in terms of accuracy. Using this technique, the simulation time can be improved by around 20% while maintaining a good accuracy.
State space model-oriented design for efficiency improvement of Class E power amplifier

This paper proposes a design-oriented approach for Class E power amplifier drain efficiency maximization. The proposed approach merges the versatility of the State Space circuits' description, with the numerical convergence to the Class E optimal working conditions by a transient analysis. The tool provides an automatic optimization of the Class E components, just by inserting the design specifications and the starting values. The second step of the automatic iterative tuning allows preserving the highest value of power efficiency. All specifications realize a three-dimensional matrix, which allows converging (with 60 iterations in about 3s) to an optimal solution by using the crosscheck of the specifications. Finally, as case study, an η-optimal design has been implemented by using the proposed tool. We compare the analytical design of the Class E PA implemented in TSMC 65nm CMOS technology, with the State Space Model technique here described. The new design reaches an efficiency of 87% in simulation, with an η increment of 12% respect the original design.
Melatonin Mitigates Salt Stress in Wheat Seedlings by Modulating Polyamine Metabolism

Melatonin, a small molecular weight indoleamine molecule, is involved in various biological processes and responses to environmental cues in plants. However, its function in abiotic stress response and the underlying mechanisms is less clear. In this study, we investigated the effect of melatonin on wheat seedlings growth under salt stress condition. Exogenous melatonin pretreatment partially mitigated the salt-induced inhibition of whole-plant growth as judged from shoot dry weight, IAA content, leaf photosynthesis rate, maximum photochemistry efficiency of photosystem II, and chlorophyll. The mitigation was also observed in reduced accumulation of H2O2 in melatonin-pretreated wheat seedlings exposed to salt stress. Exogenous melatonin increased endogenous melatonin content by evaluating the levels of TaSNAT transcript, which encodes a key regulatory enzyme in the melatonin biosynthetic pathway. Furthermore, melatonin increased polyamine contents by accelerating the metabolic flow from the precursor amino acids arginine and methionine to polyamines; melatonin also decreased the degradation of salt-induced polyamines. Taken together, these results provide the evidence that melatonin mitigates salt stress mainly through its regulation on polyamine metabolism of wheat seedlings.
Consequences of haemogregarine infection on the escape distance in the lacertid lizard, Podarcis vaucheri

Nowadays it is widely accepted that parasites play a significant role in the community structures in which they occur, and ultimately upon ecosystems. Furthermore, infection by parasites might be associated with consider - able deterioration of individual host fitness. While the apicomplexan parasites belonging to the genus Hepatozoon can provoke severe deleterious effects in some mammals, impact on other hosts, such as reptiles, is still unclear. We assessed the effect of Hepatozoon parasites on Podarcis vaucheri flight-initiation distance from a simulated predator, a behaviour that is determinant for a successful escape and is therefore likely to have major implications on a lizard's survival. We found that flight-initiation distance was not dependent on the time of the day or tail condition. Subadults exhibited worse body condition than adults and females had worse body condition than males. Regarding intensity of parasitism, subadults showed higher parasitemia levels. Escape distance was not associated with parasitic load or any of the other studied features, which is indicative of limited impact of the parasite. This negligible effect might explain the remarkably high prevalence (more than 96%) of this parasitic group within this P. vaucheri population.
Cloud based content classification with global-connected net (GC-Net)

Real-time classification of video content has been envisioned to revolutionize human lives. The paper introduces a cloud-based video classification system that is able to perform lightweight video classification on real-time captured video content. An Internet of things (IoT) device, called Content Classification Box (CCB), is defined as an add-on to one or a number of cameras in vicinity for content classification. The CCB will communicate with the cloud server once any interested content/event (such as abnormality) is identified, in which the corresponding video content is transported to the cloud server for further inspection. To achieve the lightweight and intelligent video content classification at the CCB, a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) framework, namely Global-Connected Net (GC-Net), is introduced. GC-Net is featured by a novel deep learning architecture for exploitation of all the earlier hidden layer neurons, as well as an activation function that has the potential to approximate complexity functions. We will show that the proposed CNN framework can achieve similar performance in a number of object recognition benchmark tasks, namely MNIST and CIFAR-10/100, under significantly less number of parameters, thus being able to apply to low-computation and low-memory scenarios.
Low phase noise K-band VCO and high efficiency E-band power amplifier for mobile network backhaul in SiGe BiCMOS

The mobile communication infrastructure is evolving toward small- and pico-cell networks, enabling higher channels capacity and user data-rate. This is motivating development of mmWave silicon transceivers for backhaul, and BiCMOS represents an optimal compromise between cost and performance. This paper proposes a Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) and Power Amplifier (PA) suited for of E-band backhaul. Circuit topologies exploit the benefits of an advanced 55nm BiCMOS technology, fulfilling system requirements with low power consumption. The Class-C VCO features a state-of-the-art minimum phase noise of −119dBc/Hz at 1MHz offset from 20GHz with 55mW only. The PA is based on a common-base output stage leveraging current clamping to scale the DC current with Pout, keeping high power added efficiency (PAE) in back-off. Psat at 80GHz is 19dBm and OP1dB is 18dBm. The PAE at OP1dB and 6dB back-off is 22% and 8.5% respectively, at least ∼2x higher than reported E-band silicon PA at comparable Pout.
Xcel-RAM: Accelerating Binary Neural Networks in High-Throughput SRAM Compute Arrays

Deep neural networks are biologically inspired class of algorithms that have recently demonstrated the state-of-the-art accuracy in large-scale classification and recognition tasks. Hardware acceleration of deep networks is of paramount importance to ensure their ubiquitous presence in future computing platforms. Indeed, a major landmark that enables efficient hardware accelerators for deep networks is the recent advances from the machine learning community that have demonstrated the viability of aggressively scaled deep binary networks. In this paper, we demonstrate how deep binary networks can be accelerated in modified von Neumann machines by enabling binary convolutions within the static random access memory (SRAM) arrays. In general, binary convolutions consist of bit-wise exclusive-NOR (XNOR) operations followed by a population count (popcount). We present two proposals: one based on charge sharing approach to perform vector XNOR and approximate popcount and another based on bit-wise XNOR followed by a digital bit-tree adder for accurate popcount. We highlight the various tradeoffs in terms of circuit complexity, speed-up, and classification accuracy for both the approaches. Few key techniques presented as a part of the manuscript are the use of low-precision, low-overhead analog-to-digital converter (ADC), to achieve a fairly accurate popcount for the charge-sharing scheme and proposal for sectioning of the SRAM array by adding switches onto the read-bitlines, thereby achieving improved parallelism. Our results on benchmark image classification datasets for CIFAR-10 and SVHN on a binarized neural network architecture show energy improvements of up to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$6.1\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2.3\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> for the two proposals, compared to conventional SRAM banks. In terms of latency, improvements of up to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$15.8\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$8.1\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> were achieved for the two respective proposals.
Huperzine A attenuates nonalcoholic fatty liver disease by regulating hepatocyte senescence and apoptosis: an in vitro study

Objective This study was undertaken to detect if free fatty acids (FFA) induce hepatocyte senescence in L-02 cells and if huperzine A has an anti-aging effect in fatty liver cells. Methods L-02 cells were treated with a FFA mixture (oleate/palmitate, at 3:0, 2:1, 1:1, 1:2 and 0:3 ratios) at different concentrations. Cell viability and fat accumulation rate were assessed by a Cell Counting Kit 8 and Nile Red staining, respectively. The mixture with the highest cell viability and fat accumulation rate was selected to continue with the following experiment. The L-02 cells were divided into five groups, including the control group, FFA group, FFA + 0.1 μmol/L huperzine A (LH) group, FFA + 1.0 μmol/L huperzine A (MH) group and FFA + 10 μmol/L huperzine A (HH) group, and were cultured for 24 h. The expression of senescence-associated β-galactosidase (SA-β-gal) was detected by an SA-β-gal staining kit. The expression levels of aging genes were measured by qRT-PCR. The expression levels of apoptosis proteins were detected by a Western blot. ELISA kits were used to detect inflammatory factors and oxidative stress products. The expression of nuclear factor (NF-κB) and IκBα were detected by immunofluorescence. Results The FFA mixture (oleate/palmitate, at a 2:1 ratio) of 0.5 mmol/L had the highest cell viability and fat accumulation rate, which was preferable for establishing an in vitro fatty liver model. The expression of inflammatory factors (TNF-α and IL-6) and oxidants Malonaldehyde (MDA), 4-hydroxynonenal (HNE) and reactive oxygen species (ROS) also increased in the L-02 fatty liver cells. The expression levels of aging markers and aging genes, such as SA-β-gal, p16, p21, p53 and pRb, increased more in the L-02 fatty liver cells than in the L-02 cells. The total levels of the apoptosis-associated proteins Bcl2, Bax, Bax/Bcl-2, CyCt and cleaved caspase 9 were also upregulated in the L-02 fatty liver cells. All of the above genes and proteins were downregulated in the huperzine A and FFA co-treatment group. In the L-02 fatty liver cells, the expression of IκBα decreased, while the expression of NF-κB increased. After the huperzine A and FFA co-treatment, the expression of IκBα increased, while the expression of NF-κB decreased. Conclusion Fatty liver cells showed an obvious senescence and apoptosis phenomenon. Huperzine A suppressed hepatocyte senescence, and it might exert its anti-aging effect via the NF-κB pathway.
An overview of thermal face recognition methods

The popularity of surveillance systems grows as well as a need for better security systems particularly in a bad lighting conditions or at night. The aim of a security system is to collect as many details as possible to enable a better recognition of persons. In this paper, a comparison of representative thermal face recognition methods will be given, emphasizing their strengths and weaknesses. Then, trends in the development of surveillance and security systems will be outlined such as fusion of visible and thermal images and use of convolutional neural networks. Also, existing challenges of thermal facial recognition and its applications in a real world will be pointed out.
Headphone and Head-Mounted Visual Displays for Virtual Environments

A realistic auditory environment can contribute to both the overall subjective sense of presence in a virtual display, and to a quantitative metric predicting human performance. Here, the role of audio in a virtual display and the importance of auditory-visual interaction are examined. Conjectures are proposed regarding the effectiveness of audio compared to visual information for creating a sensation of immersion, the frame of reference within a virtual display, and the compensation of visual fidelity by supplying auditory information. Future areas of research are outlined for improving simulations of virtual visual and acoustic spaces. This paper will describe some of the intersensory phenomena that arise during operator interaction within combined visual and auditory virtual environments. Conjectures regarding audio-visual interaction will be proposed.
nteraction of miltefosine with intercellular membranes of stratum corneum and iomimetic lipid vesicles ais

Miltefosine (MT) is an alkylphospholipid approved for breast cancer metastasis and visceral leishmaniasis treatments, although the respective action mechanisms at the molecular level remain poorly understood. In this work, the interaction of miltefosine with the lipid component of stratum corneum (SC), the uppermost skin layer, was studied by electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy of several fatty acid spin-labels. In addition, the effect of miltefosine on (i) spherical lipid vesicles of 1,2-dipalmitoyl-snglycero-3-phosphatidylcholine (DPPC) and (ii) lipids extracted from SC was also investigated, by EPR and time-resolved polarized fluorescence methods. In SC of neonatal Wistar rats, 4% (w/w) miltefosine give rise to a large increase of the fluidity of the intercellular membranes, in the temperature range from 6 to about 50 ◦C. This effect becomes negligible at temperatures higher that ca. 60 ◦C. In large unilamelar iltefosine tratum corneum hospholipid bilayer vesicles of DPPC no significant changes could be observed with a miltefosine concentration 25% molar, in close analogy with the behavior of biomimetic vesicles prepared with bovine brain ceramide, behenic acid and cholesterol. In these last samples, a 25 mol% molar concentration of miltefosine produced only a modest decrease in the bilayer fluidity. Although miltefosine is not a feasible skin permeation enhancer due to its toxicity, the information provided in this work could be of utility in the development of a MT topical treatment of cutaneous leishmaniasis.
An Energy-based Generative Sequence Model for Testing Sensory Theories of Western Harmony

The relationship between sensory consonance and Western harmony is an important topic in music theory and psychology. We introduce new methods for analysing this relationship, and apply them to large corpora representing three prominent genres of Western music: classical, popular, and jazz music. These methods centre on a generative sequence model with an exponential-family energy-based form that predicts chord sequences from continuous features. We use this model to investigate one aspect of instantaneous consonance (harmonicity) and two aspects of sequential consonance (spectral distance and voice-leading distance). Applied to our three musical genres, the results generally support the relationship between sensory consonance and harmony, but lead us to question the high importance attributed to spectral distance in the psychological literature. We anticipate that our methods will provide a useful platform for future work linking music psychology to music theory.
Nonisolated Harmonics-Boosted Resonant DC/DC Converter With High-Step-Up Gain

High-step-up dc/dc converters are widely required in grid-connected applications with renewable energy sources. An extremely high-ratio step-up nonisolated dc/dc converter, in the form of a harmonics-boosted resonant converter, is proposed in this paper. This proposed converter consists of a high-frequency dc/ac inverter stage that is followed by a passive ac/dc rectifier stage connected in cascade. Conventionally, such a dc/ac inverter is designed to output a pure sinusoidal ac voltage with an amplitude several times the amplitude of the input voltage. However, for the proposed converter, the harmonics-boosted inverter stage is designed to contain selected voltage harmonics that significantly boost the amplitude of its output voltage. This greatly increases the overall gain of the converter. The adopted ac/dc stage is a diode-capacitor rectifier, which is of high efficiency and easily extendable to increase the voltage gain. Importantly, the proposed converter involves only one active switch. With only one active switch, the driver's loss is minimized and the converter's control is simplified. Zero-voltage switching is applied to reduce the switching loss, which also allows the converter to operate efficiently at high frequency, and thus can be designed for high power density. The optimal design of the two converter stages and their combined voltage gain is investigated and reported. Besides, a design guideline of the proposed converter is provided. A prototype of a 57-time harmonics-boosted resonant converter with 3.3 V input voltage, 500 kHz switching frequency, and 21 W output power, is built. The experimental result shows that the achieved converter's efficiency is as high as 88.6%.
Gene buddies: linked balanced polymorphisms reinforce each other even in the absence of epistasis

The fates of genetic polymorphisms maintained by balancing selection depend on evolutionary dynamics at linked sites. While coevolution across linked, epigenetically-interacting loci has been extensively explored, such supergenes may be relatively rare. However, genes harboring adaptive variation can occur in close physical proximity while generating independent effects on fitness. Here, I present a model in which two linked loci without epistasis are both under balancing selection for unrelated reasons. Using forward-time simulations, I show that recombination rate strongly influences the retention of adaptive polymorphism, especially for intermediate selection coefficients. A locus is more likely to retain adaptive variation if it is closely linked to another locus under balancing selection, even if the two loci have no interaction. Thus, two linked polymorphisms can both be retained indefinitely even when they would both be lost to drift if unlinked. Such clusters of mutually reinforcing genes may underlie phenotypic variation in natural populations. Future studies that measure selection coefficients and recombination rates among closely linked genes will be fruitful for characterizing the extent of this phenomenon.