Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of fiber surface treatments on the fiber–matrix interaction in banana fiber reinforced polyester composites

Cellulosic fibers have been used as cost-cutting fillers in plastic industry. Among the various factors, the final performance of the composite materials depends to a large extent on the adhesion between the polymer matrix and the reinforcement and therefore on the quality of the interface. To achieve optimum performance of the end product, sufficient interaction between the matrix resin and the cellulosic material is desired. This is often achieved by surface modification of the resin or the filler. Banana fiber, the cellulosic fibers obtained from the pseudo-stem of banana plant (Musa sepientum) is a bast fiber with relatively good mechanical properties. The fiber surface was modified chemically to bring about improved interfacial interaction between the fiber and the polyester matrix. Various silanes and alkali were used to modify the fiber surface. Modified surfaces were characterized by SEM and FTIR. The polarity parameters of the chemically modified fibers were investigated using the solvatochromic technique. The results were further confirmed by electrokinetic measurements. Chemical modification was found to have a profound effect on the fiber–matrix interactions. The improved fiber–matrix interaction is evident from the enhanced tensile and flexural properties. The lower impact properties of the treated composites compared to the untreated composites further point to the improved fiber–matrix adhesion. In order to know more about the fiber–matrix adhesion, fractured surfaces of the failed composites where further investigated by SEM. Of the various chemical treatments, simple alkali treatment with NaOH of 1% concentration was found to be the most effective. The fiber–matrix interactions were found to be dependent on the polarity of the modified fiber surface.
Restrictions in time and space – new insights into generation of specific neuronal subtypes in the adult mammalian brain

Key questions in regard to neuronal repair strategies are which cells are best suited to regenerate specific neuronal subtypes and how much of a neuronal circuit needs to persist in order to allow its functional repair. Here we discuss recent findings in the field of adult neurogenesis, which shed new light on these questions. Neural stem cells in the adult brain generate very distinct types of neurons depending on their regional and temporal specification. Moreover, distinct brain regions differ in the mode of neuron addition in adult neurogenesis, suggesting that different brain circuits may be able to cope differently with the incorporation of new neurons. These new insights are then considered in regard to the choice of cells with the appropriate region‐specific identity for repair strategies.
Rapid activation of presynaptic nicotinic acetylcholine receptors by nerve‐released transmitter

Nicotine's ability to enhance neurotransmitter release has implicated presynaptic nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) in synaptic modulation, but there are few examples where presynaptic nAChRs are known to be activated by nerve‐released transmitter. We searched for endogenous activation of presynaptic nAChRs in the calyceal nerve terminals of the chick ciliary ganglion by imaging presynaptic calcium transients using dextran‐coupled indicator dyes. The amplitude of Ca2+ signals recorded in individual nerve terminals was frequency dependent over 2–50 Hz. Calcium transients evoked by stimulation of the preganglionic nerve were significantly reduced (≈10–15%) by the nonspecific nAChR antagonist d‐tubocurarine (d‐TC; 100 µm) and the α7‐specific antagonist methyllycaconitine (20–50 nm) but were not affected by 10 µm dihydro‐β‐erythroidine, which should inhibit several non‐α7 nAChRs. Feedback was rapid and did not require a stimulation‐dependent build‐up of transmitter, as d‐TC and MLA reduced the amplitude of the first calcium transient in a 2‐Hz train. Choline is an agonist at α7 nAChRs but is not the sole agonist in this system, as inhibition of acetylcholinesterase by echothiophate failed to reduce calcium transients. These results show that nerve‐released acetylcholine (ACh) feeds back onto presynaptic α7 nAChRs to enhance calcium signals within the terminal. This feedback may help maintain the high rate of transmission at this cholinergic synapse.
A Comparison of Hybrid Beamforming and Digital Beamforming With Low-Resolution ADCs for Multiple Users and Imperfect CSI

For 5G, it will be important to leverage the available millimeter wave spectrum. To achieve an approximately omnidirectional coverage with a similar effective antenna aperture compared to state-of-the-art cellular systems, an antenna array is required at both the mobile and base station. Due to the large bandwidth and inefficient amplifiers available in CMOS for mmWave, the analog front end of the receiver with a large number of antennas becomes especially power hungry. Two main solutions exist to reduce the power consumption: hybrid beam forming and digital beam forming with low resolution Analog to digital converters (ADCs). In this paper, we compare the spectral and energy efficiency of both systems under practical system constraints. We consider the effects of channel estimation, transmitter impairments, and multiple simultaneous users for a wideband multipath model. Our power consumption model considers components reported in the literature at 60 GHz. In contrast to many other works, we also consider the correlation of the quantization error, and generalize the modeling of it to nonuniform quantizers and different quantizers at each antenna. The result shows that as the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gets larger the ADC resolution achieving the optimal energy efficiency gets also larger. The energy efficiency peaks for 5-b resolution at high SNR, since due to other limiting factors, the achievable rate almost saturates at this resolution. We also show that in the multiuser scenario digital beamforming is in any case more energy efficient than hybrid beamforming. In addition, we show that if mixed ADC resolutions are used, we can achieve any desired tradeoff between power consumption and rate close to those achieved with only one ADC resolution.
Broad Ligament Hernia-Associated Bowel Obstruction

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE We present the case of a female patient 29 years of age with antecedents of laparoscopic laser ablation for endometriosis, laparoscopic appendectomy, and umbilical hernioplasty. METHODS The patient was admitted to the hospital's emergency room for abdominal pain in the epigastrium, transfixing, irradiating to both upper quadrants and to the lumbar region, accompanied by nausea and gastrobiliary vomiting. Lipase determination was 170 mg/dL. Other laboratory findings were normal. Plain abdominal films on the patient's admission were normal, and computed tomography (CT) showed data compatible with acute pancreatitis. Without improvement during the patient's hospital stay, pain and vomiting increased in intensity and frequency. RESULTS New abdominal x-rays revealed dilatation of small bowel loops. Management was begun for intestinal obstruction, with intravenous hydration and placement of a nasogastric tube without a good response. At 48 hours, a diagnostic laparoscopy was performed, revealing a 3-cm internal hernia in the left broad ligament in which a 20-cm segment of terminal ileum was encased. We performed liberation of the ileal segment and closed the hernial orifice by using the laparoscopic approach. CONCLUSION The patient's evolution was excellent.
PREVALENCE OF ANTIBODIES ANTI-BARTONELLA HENSELAE IN WESTERN SICILY: CHILDREN, BLOOD DONORS, AND CATS

To evaluate seroprevalence of B. henselae infection both in Sicilian children and healthy blood donors. Furthermore, circulation of Bartonella in the natural reservoir was also studied. Two hundred forty-three children, living in Sicily (Palermo), affected by various diseases, without clinical features suggesting B. henselae infection, together with 122 healthy blood donors were serologically investigated for IgG and IgM antibodies by indirect fluorescent antibody test (IFAT). One hundred twenty stray and 62 pet cats were also analyzed only for IgG. Among children 25.1% had IgG antibodies to B. henselae; 18.5% showed a titer 1:64, 2.4% 1:128, 2.4% 1:256, 0.8% 1:512, 0.4% 1:1024, and 0.4% 1:5120. Among healthy blood donors 11.4% had IgG class antibodies to B. henselae; 9.8% showed a titer 1:64 and 1.6% 1:128. All the human serum samples did not show positive results for B. henselae IgM class antibodies. Stray cats (68.3%) and pet cats (35.4%) also had IgG class antibodies to B. henselae. We demonstrated high frequency of serologic evidence of past B. henselae infection, in young Italian children, affected by various diseases, apparently free of any clinical features suggesting B. henselae infection. This observation is supported by high circulation of Bartonella in cats.
Recognition and Management of Behavioral Disturbances in Dementia.

Behavioral disturbances are seen in most patients with dementia at some point in their course. They cause immense patient suffering and are responsible for caregiver stress, institutionalization, and hospitalization. Identification of predisposing and precipitating factors is very important. The approach to the management of behavioral disturbances in dementia patients should be structured and thorough. Ensuring the safety of the patient and others should be paramount. Addressing the causes of behavioral disturbances such as comorbid medical illnesses, polypharmacy, pain, personal need, environmental factors, etc. is critical to a successful outcome. Many behavioral disturbances such as wandering and hoarding are not amenable to pharmacotherapy. Nonpharmacologic interventions are the mainstay of managing behavioral disturbances. Success of pharmacologic interventions will depend on accurate identification of specific syndromes, e.g., depression-anxiety and psychosis and severity of symptoms. Response to pharmacologic interventions is usually modest and may be associated with significant symptom resolution. Many behavioral disturbances can be prevented by avoiding inappropriate medications and educating patient, family, caregivers, and health care providers. Hospitalization can be avoided and institutionalization delayed by early recognition and treatment of behavioral disturbances. Leadership from physicians to implement preventive measures is recommended. Research to clarify the biological underpinnings of behavioral disturbances and to address cost-effectiveness of currently identified interventions is needed.
Regulation of the DC/DC Buck-Boost Converter-Inverter-DC Motor System: Sensorless Passivity Based Control

In this paper, via a passive control, the regulation task of the DC/DC Buck-Boost converterinverterDC motor system is solved. Such a control, on the one hand, takes advantage of the energetic structure associated with the error dynamics of the system. On the other hand, it does not require the use of electromechanical sensors to control the angular velocity of the motor. The control performance is verified through numerical simulations, with Matlab-Simulink, in two directions: i) The control is introduced in the mathematical model associated with the system under study. ii) The control, implemented via PWM, is introduced in the corresponding electronic circuit. The results of simulation in closed-loop, in average, show much similarity to each other; which shows the viability of the control for its experimental implementation.
Adolescents and the right to health: Eliminating age-related barriers to HIV/AIDS services in Rwanda

Abstract Under international, regional, and domestic law, adolescents are entitled to measures ensuring the highest attainable standard of health. For HIV/AIDS, this is essential as adolescents lack many social and economic protections and are disproportionately vulnerable to the effects of the disease. In many countries, legal protections do not always ensure access to health care for adolescents, including for HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, and care. Using Rwanda as an example, this article identifies gaps, policy barriers, and inconsistencies in legal protection that can create age-related barriers to HIV/AIDS services and care. One of the most pressing challenges is defining an age of majority for access to prevention measures, such as condoms, testing and treatment, and social support. Occasionally drawing on examples of existing and proposed laws in other African countries, Rwanda and other countries may strengthen their commitment to adolescents' rights and eliminate barriers to prevention, family planning, testing and disclosure, treatment, and support. Among the improvements, Rwanda and other countries must align its age of consent with the actual behavior of adolescents and ensure privacy to adolescents regarding family planning, HIV testing, disclosure, care, and treatment.
New therapeutic option for thromboembolism – dabigatran etexilate

Background: Thrombin plays a key role in blood coagulation and haemostasis; thus its inhibition has been identified as a reasonable target to block the coagulation cascade. Direct thrombin inhibitors are potential prophylactic agents for venous thromboembolism and arterial thrombosis, which often accompany operative procedures and cardiac disease, especially orthopedic surgery and atrial fibrillation, respectively. New orally available anticoagulant agents with a wide therapeutic window are keenly anticipated because warfarin and heparins have some disadvantages, and recent progress in pharmaceutical techniques has led to the development of orally administered direct thrombin inhibitors. Objectives: In this review, we discuss the usefulness of dabigatran etexilate as a new therapeutic option for preventing thromboembolism, including chemistry, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamics, from the results of recent clinical studies. Methods: We systematically focused on relevant published studies, as data from recent clinical studies were difficult to obtain owing to their ongoing status. Conclusions: Dabigatran etexilate is a promising new oral anticoagulant that offers greatly expanded therapeutic options for both patients and physicians.
Application of multidimensional interpolation and random forest regression to enhanced oil recovery modeling

The oil and gas industry successfully existed long before the advent of digital technology. The main driver for new solutions and the use of new technologies in the oil and gas industry is the complication of methods of oil extraction. It is necessary to make more accurate predictions of production while increasing the cost of obtaining the initial information for modeling. This state of things leads to the inevitable use of the most advanced modelling techniques, which primarily include machine learning. The complexity of the machine learning application in the oil and gas industry is that it is necessary to obtain a result beyond the available methods on the one hand, and on the other hand, the quantity and quality of the original data should not increase. Proposed application of machine learning was the modeling of the additional production from tertiary methods of improving oil recovery. The authors found an original way of applying regression based on Random Forest to the regional surrogate model of the oilfield. The successful application of machine learning for modeling made it possible to increase the accuracy of planning and economy to the digital oilfield processes.
Synthesis of graphene oxide inks for printed electronics

Two-dimensional crystals of Graphene Oxide (GO) were synthesized by modified Hummers method: flakes of specific lateral size 1–2 μm were obtained as a stable aqueous suspension. The size of GO flakes can be controlled via initial graphite powder grain size as well as via respective filtration or centrifugation of the GO solution. The concentration of GO in the solution can be varied between 4 mg/mL and 0.005 mg/mL. The GO is highly hydrophilic material, has good solubility in water and forms therefore a stable colloidal solution. The obtained GO suspension can be used as an ink for printed electronics of graphene oxide.
A computationally constrained optimization framework for implementation and tuning of speech enhancement systems

In this work, we propose an optimization framework for tuning the parameters of a speech enhancement system to maximize its performance while constraining its computational complexity imposed by a target platform. Some parameters allow for enabling or disabling certain algorithmic components of the system, effectively guiding the implementation effort. The speech enhancement system is deployed in a speech recognition front-end and in a full-duplex telephony system. The optimization variables are the parameters of the system and the performance is measured using phone accuracy rate and mean opinion score, respectively. The problem is then a nonlinear program of combinatorial nature which is solved efficiently using a genetic algorithm. The results show improvement in performance over common tuning and implementation strategies.
DeepSafe: A Data-driven Approach for Checking Adversarial Robustness in Neural Networks

Deep neural networks have become widely used, obtaining remarkable results in domains such as computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, audio recognition, social network filtering, machine translation, and bio-informatics, where they have produced results comparable to human experts. However, these networks can be easily fooled by adversarial perturbations: minimal changes to correctly-classified inputs, that cause the network to mis-classify them. This phenomenon represents a concern for both safety and security, but it is currently unclear how to measure a network's robustness against such perturbations. Existing techniques are limited to checking robustness around a few individual input points, providing only very limited guarantees. We propose a novel approach for automatically identifying safe regions of the input space, within which the network is robust against adversarial perturbations. The approach is data-guided, relying on clustering to identify well-defined geometric regions as candidate safe regions. We then utilize verification techniques to confirm that these regions are safe or to provide counter-examples showing that they are not safe. We also introduce the notion of targeted robustness which, for a given target label and region, ensures that a NN does not map any input in the region to the target label. We evaluated our technique on the MNIST dataset and on a neural network implementation of a controller for the next-generation Airborne Collision Avoidance System for unmanned aircraft (ACAS Xu). For these networks, our approach identified multiple regions which were completely safe as well as some which were only safe for specific labels. It also discovered several adversarial perturbations of interest.
In vitro evidence for an unusual progenitor cell in acute monocytic leukemia

The peripheral blood of 2 patients with acute monocytic leukemia of the undifferentiated type was studied for the presence of leukemic progenitor cells in colony forming assays. The peripheral blood of both patients contained only one type of progenitor cell as determined with these assay systems. Daughter cells of these progenitor cells morphologically and histochemically resembled monoblasts and immature macrophages. Similar progenitor cells were not encountered in the study of 5 patients with acute myelogenous leukemia whose peripheral blood cells formed colonies in the same system. The finding of this unusual progenitor cell supports the existence of acute monocytic leukemia as a separate clinicopathologic entity, and suggests that it represents a malignant transformation of a progenitor cell of the monocyte/macrophage series. An alternative explanation of these observations would be provided by single phenotypic expressions of a multi‐potent stem cell which has undergone malignant transformation.
Isolation and analysis of genes involved in siderophore biosynthesis in plant-growth-stimulating Pseudomonas putida WCS358

The plant-growth-stimulating Pseudomonas putida WCS358 was mutagenized with transposon Tn5. The resulting mutant colony bank was screened for mutants defective in the biosynthesis of the fluorescent siderophore. A total of 28 mutants, divided into six different classes, were isolated that were nonfluorescent or defective in iron acquisition or both. These different types of mutants together with the probable overall structure of the siderophore, i.e., a small peptide chain attached to a fluorescing group, suggest a biosynthetic pathway in which the synthesis of the fluorescing group is preceded by the synthesis of the peptide part. A gene colony bank of P. putida WCS358 was constructed with the broad-host-range cosmid vector pLAFR1. This genomic library, established in Escherichia coli, was mobilized into the 28 individual mutants, screening for transconjugants restored in fluorescence or growth under iron-limiting conditions or both. A total of 13 cosmids were found to complement 13 distinct mutants. The complementation analysis revealed that at least five gene clusters, with a minimum of seven genes, are needed for siderophore biosynthesis. Some of these genes seem to be arranged in an operon-like structure.
Using Diagrams for the Semantic Annotation of Multimedia

Currently there is much interest in the creation of well-defined multimedia annotations, especially in the context of the semantic Web and MPEG standards. However, there is a lack of tools that support the creation of standards-based annotations. We introduce an approach that lets users create annotations using simple diagrams with unconstrained linking and labelling and an architecture for formally interpreting them in an interactive process that matches the user input with formal ontologies based on information from the ontologies itself and general background knowledge. The interpretations can be used for reasoning tasks, such as querying and validation, and to guide the user in the further knowledge creation process. We discuss the state of the art in related technologies, outline the design, architecture and algorithms, and describe the implemented prototype.
Image Retrieval Method for Deep Neural Network

Because of the large data in the image database, the key problem of the retrieval algorithm is to retrieve the required image in the short time. Aiming at this problem, this article given a self-learning deep belief neural network method, and through building layers, input, output, and self-learning algorithm in network architecture to get global algorithm for image retrieval. The accuracy and the convergence of the proposed retrieval method are verified by experiments.