Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Occurrence and diversity of Frankia in Tunisian soil

There is a lack of studies on the occurrence and diversity of Frankia in African soils, including those in northern African regions. The present study on Tunisian soils is an attempt to address this issue using AInus glutinosa, Elaeagnus angustifolia and Casuarina glauca in a plant capturing bioassay on 30 soil samples, followed by amplified 16S ribosomal DNA restriction pattern analysis (ARDRA). A total of seven ARDRA haplotypes of Frankia have been detected in root actinorhizas that have been affiliated to theoretical ARDRA haplotypes upon in silico digestion of selected 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene sequences retrieved from GeneBank and confirmed by their partial 16S rRNA gene sequencing. F/aeagnus-compatible Frankia isolates were widespread and form four ARDRA haplotypes affiliated to Frankia, colonizing Elaeagnaceae and Rhamnaceae in two different phylogenetic subgroups. Alnus-compatible strains occurring in northern subhumid area were closely related to AInus-Morella-compatible strains and clustered in two ARDRA haplotypes. Casuarina-compatible strains lack variability in several northern arboreta. The relatively wide diversity of Tunisian Frankia strains opens the perspective that African soil could be an interesting reservoir for the isolation of new actinorhizal strains that could be used as potential biofertilizers to counteract the progressive soil desertification which indeed is a crucial environmental problem in Northern Africa.
TETRIS

The high accuracy of deep neural networks (NNs) has led to the development of NN accelerators that improve performance by two orders of magnitude. However, scaling these accelerators for higher performance with increasingly larger NNs exacerbates the cost and energy overheads of their memory systems, including the on-chip SRAM buffers and the off-chip DRAM channels. This paper presents the hardware architecture and software scheduling and partitioning techniques for TETRIS, a scalable NN accelerator using 3D memory. First, we show that the high throughput and low energy characteristics of 3D memory allow us to rebalance the NN accelerator design, using more area for processing elements and less area for SRAM buffers. Second, we move portions of the NN computations close to the DRAM banks to decrease bandwidth pressure and increase performance and energy efficiency. Third, we show that despite the use of small SRAM buffers, the presence of 3D memory simplifies dataflow scheduling for NN computations. We present an analytical scheduling scheme that matches the efficiency of schedules derived through exhaustive search. Finally, we develop a hybrid partitioning scheme that parallelizes the NN computations over multiple accelerators. Overall, we show that TETRIS improves mthe performance by 4.1x and reduces the energy by 1.5x over NN accelerators with conventional, low-power DRAM memory systems.
Multi-epitope-based peptide vaccine design against SARS-CoV-2 using its spike protein

SARS CoV-2 has particularly been efficient in ensuring that many countries are brought to a standstill. With repercussions ranging from rampant mortality, fear, paranoia and economic recession, the virus has brought together countries in order to look at possible therapeutic countermeasures. With prophylactic interventions possibly months away from being particularly effective, a slew of measures and possibilities concerning the design of vaccines are being worked upon. We attempted a structure-based approach utilizing a combination of epitope prediction servers to develop a multi-epitope-based subunit vaccine that involves the two major domains of the spike glycoprotein of SARS CoV-2 (S1 and S2) coupled with a substantially effective chimeric adjuvant to create stable vaccine constructs through MD simulations. The designed constructs were evaluated based on their docking with Toll Like Receptor (TLR) 4. Our findings provide an epitope-based peptide fragment; which can be a potential candidate for the development of a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. Recent experimental studies based on determining immunodominant regions across the spike glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2 indicate the presence of the predicted epitopes included in this study.
Transient and layer-specific reduction in neocortical PV inhibition during sensory association learning

Sensory and motor learning reorganizes neocortical circuitry, particularly manifested in the strength of excitatory synapses. Prior studies suggest reduced inhibition can facilitate glutamatergic synapse plasticity during learning, but the role of specific inhibitory neurons in this process has not been well-documented. Here we investigate whether inhibition from parvalbumin (PV)-expressing neurons is altered in primary somatosensory cortex in mice trained in a whisker-based reward-association task. Anatomical and electrophysiological analyses show PV input to L2/3, but not L5, pyramidal (Pyr) neurons is rapidly suppressed during early stages of sensory training, effects that are reversed after longer training periods. Importantly, sensory stimulation without reward does not alter PV-mediated inhibition. Computational modeling indicates that reduced PV inhibition in L2/3 selectively enables an increase in translaminar recurrent activity, also observed during SAT. PV disinhibition in superficial layers of the neocortex may be one of the earliest changes in learning-dependent rewiring of the cortical column. Impact statement Tactile learning is associated with reduced PV inhibition in superficial layers of somatosensory cortex. Modeling studies suggest that PV disinhibition can support prolonged recurrent activity initiated by thalamic input.
Life history adaptation along a latitudinal cline in the water strider Aquarius remigis (Heteroptera: Gerridae)

We addressed the general hypothesis that life history differences among eastern populations of the North American water strider, Aquarius remigis (Heteroptera: Gerridae), along a north‐south gradient are manifestations of genetic differentiation due to natural selection. We raised offspring of two field‐caught populations from each of three latitudes in a common laboratory environment at 20° C and two photoperiods. Nearly all Quebec (PQ) individuals (ca. 46° N) entered diapause to reproduce the following spring (univoltine life cycle), while intermediate proportions of New York (NY; ca. 43° N) and New Jersey (NJ; ca. 41° N) individuals reproduced directly, producing a second generation (bivoltine life cycle). PQ females were smaller, developed faster, and laid smaller eggs than NY and NJ individuals; NY and NJ populations differed little in these variables. NY females had longer life spans than either PQ or NJ females, but lower oviposition rates. Total reproductive output did not differ across latitudes. Photoperiod affected body length, development time, and reproductive pathway, resulting in a latitude by environmental interaction. PQ individuals reproduced directly under 15L : 9D (summer) conditions only, while the NY and NJ populations exhibited more direct reproduction under 13L : 11D (spring or fall) conditions. Some life history characters of the NY and NJ populations displayed the higher variability indicative of phenological transition zones. These results indicate local adaptation of populations to long‐term climatic patterns. Water striders appear to adapt to longer seasons by extending development, growing larger, and breeding directly. Larger body size and extended or rapid development are associated with bivoltinism and increase in egg size, but not necessarily with higher fecundity or oviposition rate. The phenological transition zone appears to be unrelated to a transition zone a little further south established by allozyme data and morphology, as all populations studied here could be electrophoretically identified as northern "type".
Nitrogen Fixation Activity (Acetylene Reduction) in the Rhizosphere of Salt Marsh Angiosperms, Georgia, U.S.A.

The potential importance of biological nitrogen fixation to the productivity of salt marsh macrophytes was investigated in a Georgia estuary. Total nitrogen content, soil density, and nitrogen fixation activity as measured by C2H2 reduction were measured in the rhizosphere of nine species of macrophytes. Monthly ethylene production measurements showed maximum activity in May-June followed by a secondary activity peak in early autumn. At most sites the activity declined significantly in July. The highest mean monthly activity of 40-80 68 C2H4 m~2 h"1 occurred in the tall Spartina alterniflora along the creek bank at a soil depth of 20—30 cm. The rates of ethylene production were not related to the nitrogen content of the soil. Total nitrogen content in various soils was quite different but changed very little over the year. Significant correlations were found between ethylene production and (1) macro-organic matter in the soil, (2) soil density, and (3) net aerial primary production in each habitat, suggesting the importance of primary production and root exudation as a source of organic carbon for nitrogen fixation or, conversely, nitrogen fixation as a source of combined nitrogen for primary production. Nitrogen fixation in Duplin River Estuary supplies an estimated 14.8 g Nm~2 annually, equivalent to the amount of nitrogen required by major salt marsh macrophytes.
Fuel composition influences fire characteristics and understorey hardwoods in pine savanna

Fuels in the groundcover of frequently burned south‐eastern pine savannas include shed leaves of trees. Flammable needles of longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) potentially increase maximum fire temperatures and durations of heating, negatively affecting other trees within the groundcover. Less flammable leaves that accumulate around the bases of understorey stems of hardwood trees such as mockernut hickories (Carya alba) in the fall potentially depress maximum fire temperatures and durations of heating, enhancing post‐fire recovery. We experimentally manipulated amounts of pine and hickory leaves beneath understorey hickory stems in a pine savanna, measured temperatures during prescribed fires and assessed combustion of fuels and survival and regrowth of hickory stems. Pine needles increased fire temperatures and durations of heating relative to herbaceous fuels and increased combustion of hickory leaves. Hickory leaves, however, neither increased nor decreased fire characteristics relative to herbaceous fuels. All hickories survived fire by resprouting. When pine needles were absent, most hickories resprouted from buds located above‐ground along the stem at heights inversely related to temperature increase. In contrast, resprouting occurred only from underground root crowns when pine needles were present. Such differences in locations of resprouts influenced sizes of stems at the end of the growing season. Synthesis. Groundcover fuels containing flammable leaves shed by pyrogenic species of savanna trees affect local fire characteristics and resprouting of non‐pyrogenic understorey trees. Thus, local variation in flammable fuels produced by pyrogenic species can engineer landscape dynamics of other trees in savannas.
Analysis of Communication Networks using Motifs

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a powerful tool for Data Science. The enormous popularity of SNA has mostly been due to the vast advancements in Social Media. Although few popular platforms are well known in public, still there exists numerous such platforms where SNA techniques are applied to understand the social behaviour. One such platforms are Communication Networks. We have taken these as an example to identify triads within the network, in order to show the power of applying the Motifs Analysis. To this end we have obtained three data sets representing small-world communication networks of varying size, applied triad counting and compared the counts to random network with same number of nodes and edges. This type of analysis is useful in specifying whether or not social networks of certain domain shows a similar pattern. We are able to show that Communication Networks represent a peculiar pattern that is not a random occurrence. Our results show that two way communication is more frequent in communication network. We have included the script for Network Libraries to extend this further into elaborate analysis in future.
Ear recognition in degraded conditions based on spectral saliency: smart home access

Abstract. Since earprint is an encouraging physical trait that has been recently promoted as a biometric asset, we propose it as an alternative to other popular biometrics thanks to its uniqueness and stability. We propose an approach for ear recognition to smart home access in degraded conditions based on local and frequency domain features. The saliency is estimated with the dual tree complex wavelets in five scales and six rotation angles. Several statistic features are generated from the extracted feature vector and its first and second derivatives. The Harris descriptors are deployed to extract corner points invariant to scale, translation, and rotation. All the extracted features are fused at a feature level. To evaluate our research, we use the USTB-I and EVDDC databases. Different classifiers are utilized in the evaluation like the support vector machine, the K-nearest neighbor, and the random forest. The best recorded accuracy is 93.88% and 92.5%, respectively, with the KNN classifier.
Interactions of the nonhost French bean plant (Phaseolus vulgaris) with parasitic and saprophytic fungi. II. Fungal development after inoculation by injection or wounding

Germination and growth of four saprophytic and five parasitic fungi nonpathogenic on French bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L. cv. Pinto) were examined in leaves after the epidermis was bypassed by injection or wounding. In unheated leaves, only the parasites had the ability to spread from the wound site and to germinate and grow inside the tissue after injection. The saprophytes behaved similarly only after the leaves were given a preinoculation heat treatment, suggesting a sensitivity to heat-sensitive inhibitors. For two of the saprophytes, evidence for the presence of heat-insensitive inhibitors also was found. Unlike the intercellular growth following stomatal penetration, growth of all of the parasites was affected by heat-sensitive defenses once the epidermis was bypassed. The greater intercellular growth after injection as compared with stomatal penetration suggested that the guard cells play a significant role in the resistance of intact, unheated leaves to Cladosporium fulvum Cooke. Of the saprophytes .
Analysis of the wavefront reconstruction error of the spot location algorithms for the Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor

Abstract. Spot location algorithms greatly influence the wavefront measurement error of the Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor. Based on numerical simulations and experiments, we compare the wavefront reconstruction error of several spot location algorithms under different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions. We solve the problem of how to select the most suitable spot location algorithm and optimal parameters under different SNR conditions, which mimic the realistic working environment of the adaptive optics system changes. We find the optimal threshold and optimal window setting rules of the center of gravity (COG), intensity weighted centroiding, and weighted center of gravity (WCOG) algorithms. The correctness of our recommendation of spot location algorithms under different SNR conditions is supported by numerical simulations and experiments. We find that when the SNR is extremely low, that is the SNR is lower than 2, the cross-correlation algorithm and the thresholding WCOG algorithm are the best choices. When the SNR is moderately low, that is the SNR ranges from 2 to 10, the best choice is the thresholding WCOG algorithm. When the SNR is high, that is, the SNR is higher than 10, the simple algorithm of thresholding COG is the best choice.
Chromosome organization in meiosis revealed by light microscope analysis of silver-stained cores

Three species of grasshoppers have been analyzed by means of a modified silver impregnation technique that reveals the presence of a chromatid core that identifies chiasmata at first meiotic metaphase. In terms of the behaviour of the chromatid core most of the configurations observed at diplotene with orcein are easily recognized in metaphase I silver-stained bivalents. Some "hidden" configurations, as well as simple chromatin associations, that do not appear to represent chiasmata have also been detected. The disposition and behaviour of the chromatid cores in metaphase I and anaphase I provide grounds to support a reorganization of half-bivalents between first and second division. Key words: chromatid core, meiotic chromosome organization, chiasma formation, insect cytogenetics.
Effective size of harvested ungulate populations

The harvest of ungulate populations is often directed against certain sex or age classes to maximize the yield in terms of biomass, number of shot animals or number of trophies. Here we examine how such directional harvest affects the effective size of the population. We parameterize an age‐specific model assumed to describe the dynamics of Fennoscandian moose. Based on expressions for the demographic variance for a small subpopulation of heterozygotes Aa bearing a rare neutral allele a, we use this model to calculate how different harvest strategies influence the effective size of the population, given that the population remains stable after harvest. We show that the annual genetic drift, determined by , increases with decreasing harvest rate of calves and increasing sex bias in the harvest towards bulls 1 year or older. The effective population size per generation decreased with reduced harvest of calves and increased harvest of bulls 1 year or older. The magnitude of these effects depends on the age‐specific pattern of variation in reproductive success, which influences the demographic variance. This shows that the choice of harvest strategy strongly affects the genetic dynamics of harvested ungulate populations.
Effect of loading rate on the shear performance and fracture behavior of micro-scale BGA structure Cu/Sn–3.0Ag–0.5Cu/Cu joints under coupled electromechanical loads

In this study, the shear performance and fracture behavior of micro-scale BGA structure Cu/Sn–3.0Ag–0.5Cu/Cu joints under electro-mechanically coupled loads with different loading rates (from 0.1 N/min to 1 N/min) and current densities (6.0×103 A/cm2, 8.0×103 A/cm2 and 1.0×104 A/cm2) have been investigated. The results show that shear strength of joints increases with the increase of loading rate at various current densities, and the relationship between the current density and the increasing rate of shear strength can be fitted by the Boltzmann function. In addition, for joints under high-density current stressing with low loading rate, fracture is prone to occur at the solder/IMC interface by a brittle fracture mode. While for joints under low-density current stressing with high loading rate, fracture tends to happen in the solder matrix by a ductile fracture mode.
Electromagnetic Actuators for Ultra-fast Air Switches to Increase Arc Voltage by Increasing Contact Speed

In this article, the previously known Thomson coil has been used as an actuator for open-close of a prototype power switch instead of a conventional spring mechanism that can be used in future vacuum circuit breakers, HVDC breakers and hybrid fault current limiters. Feasibility of increasing the opening speed to 80 m/s and its momentum control is discussed through finite element method simulations. Dynamics of Thomson drive is simulated, and speed dependencies to the frequency and stored energy are extracted in few diagrams to facilitate actuator tune-up to reach this considerable speed for a rather heavy disk. The contact speed in an experimental prototype switch is increased up to 22.5 m/s, and the dependencies of the arc voltage generated in ultra-fast air switches to the opening speed are investigated. Measured arc voltages and high-speed recordings of arc cores are presented. It is shown that by increasing the contact speed, the arc voltage rises rapidly. Thus, the number of required series arcs and the total resistance is reduced, so lower commutation time for higher fault currents are possible in hybrid FCLs or HVDC breakers.
Interest Estimation for Images Using Eye Gaze-based Visual and Text Features via DLPCCA

This paper presents a new method to realize estimation performance improvement of user-specific interests for images. The proposed method computes projections which transform visual and text features to eye gaze-based features that reflect user’s interests by utilizing discriminative locality preserving canonical correlation analysis (DLPCCA). DLPCCA can calculate projections suitable for interest estimation by considering the class information and locality of data structure. Experimental results are shown for verifying the effectiveness of our method.
Emotion Recognition System using Pulse Plethysmograph

Emotion recognition is significant for the advancement and development of modern technology. Existing methods currently in use are less accurate, expensive, and complicated. This system is based on Pulse Plethysmograph (PuPG) signal analysis and brings novelty in the emotion recognition system. In this study, 594 PuPG signals were acquired from various subjects for five emotions under consideration. Data acquisition was performed by attaching the PuPG sensor to the subject's index finger. Raw PuPG signals were preprocessed to remove the noisy components. Then, after comprehensive features analysis, twenty-two features possessing maximum interclass differences were selected to classify emotions under investigation through Ensemble Bagged Trees, K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Tree classification methods. Ensemble Bagged Trees achieved a maximum average accuracy of90.7% upon extensive experimentation. The proposed methodology is simple, low cost, and accurate as compared to existing methods and provides a new paradigm towards developing emotion recognition systems.
Social factors influencing reproduction in wild lions

The paper summarizes seven years of records of the reproductive history of two wild prides of lions (Panthera leo L.) in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. These records are analyzed to demonstrate ways in which lion reproduction is influenced by their social group and by changes in that group. Females gave birth at any time of year; they did so sooner if their previous litter died. Females synchronized births with other pride members. Takeover of the pride by new males resulted in a drop in the birth rate. Most cubs died, before two years old. Birth synchrony resulted in better cub survival. The arrival of new males resulted in an increase in cub mortality. Females came into oestrus synchronously with other pride members. Males had a much longer effective reproductive life if they had male companions. The proximate causes of these features of lion reproduction are considered, and the evolution of aspects of the organization of reproduction in lions is discussed.