Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Review of Measuring Metabolic Rates: A Manual for Scientists

Animal calorimetry quantifies the heat resulting from the intricate metabolic combustion process termed “the fire of life” by pioneering nutritionistMax Kleiber (1975). This fire is expressed in joules, watts, or calories, with the latter being preferred by us rebarbative old-school types who resist taking the “calorie” out of calorimetry, so to speak, because “the calorie defined in terms of mass and difference in temperature is the most directly understandable and therefore most useful unit” (Kleiber 1972, p. 309). But typically, the respiratory gases oxygen (O2) and carbondioxide (CO2) are actually measured, as each liter of O2 consumption represents∼4.7–5.0 kcal ofmetabolic energy transfer depending on how much CO2 is released per liter of O2 uptake. Accordingly, O2 consumption and CO2 production are the respirometric signals of indirect calorimetry, the predominant approach to measuring metabolic rates, which is the title of John Lighton’s book, now in its second edition (Lighton 2019). The book’s emphasis is on the technology, techniques, equations, and data analytic methods used in respirometry, matters to which Lighton brings the hard-won knowledge of one who has been there, done that, translated his knowledge into a thriving calorimetry business, and successfully distilled his knowledge into the book that I wish had existed when I first entered the field. The equations for converting gas exchange into heat energy (Weir 1949; Kaiyala et al. 2019) owe their biophysical validity to Hess’s law of constant heat summation, the intuitively elusive but enormously powerful concept that the total heat energy released in a chemical reaction does not depend on its number of steps or temperature. Hence, the coupling of O2 uptake and CO2 release with the resulting heat yields in the low-temperature catalytic combustions thatpoweranimal life can literallybeworked outbyequating thegas exchangesandcaloricyieldswhensuddenly combusting carbohydrates, fats, and proteins in high-temperature bomb calorimeters (Kleiber 1975).
Getting science priorities straight: how to increase the reliability of specimen identification?

‘We advise the authors to find a native English speaker to proofread the manuscript’. This is a standard feedback journals give to non-native English speakers. Journals are justifiably concerned with grammar but do not show the same rigour about another step crucial to biological research: specimen identification. Surveying the author guidelines of 100 journals, we found that only 6% of them request explicitly citation of the literature used in specimen identification. Authors hamper readers from contesting specimen identification whenever vouchers, identification methods, and taxon concepts are not provided. However, unclear taxonomic procedures violate the basic scientific principle of reproducibility. The scientific community must continuously look for practical alternatives to improve taxonomic identification and taxonomic verification. We argue that voucher pictures are an accessible, cheap and time-effective alternative to mitigate (not abolish) bad taxonomy by exposing preventable misidentifications. Voucher pictures allow scientists to judge specimen identification actively, based on available data. The popularization of high-quality image devices, photo-identification technologies and computer vision algorithms yield accurate scientific photo-documentation, improving taxonomic procedures. Taxonomy is timeless, transversal and essential to most scientific disciplines in biological sciences. It is time to demand rigour in taxonomic identifications.
Probability distributions of helminth parasite burdens within the human host population following repeated rounds of mass drug administration and their impact on the transmission breakpoint

The existence of multiple stable equilibria in models of parasitic helminth transmission was a ground-breaking discovery over 30 years ago. An implication of this discovery, that there is a level of infection below which transmission cannot self-sustain called the transmission breakpoint, has in part motivated the push towards the elimination of many human diseases caused by the multiple species of helminth worldwide. In the absence of vaccines, the predominant method in this push towards elimination is to repeatedly administer endemic populations with anthelmintic drugs, over several treatment rounds, in what has become to be known as mass drug administration (MDA). MDA will inevitably alter the distribution of parasite burdens among hosts from the baseline distribution, and significantly, the location of the transmission breakpoint is known to be dependent on the level of aggregation of this distribution—for a given mean worm burden, more highly aggregated distributions where fewer individuals harbour most of the burden, will have a lower transmission breakpoint. In this paper, we employ a probabilistic analysis of the changes to the distribution of burdens in a population undergoing MDA, and simple approximations, to determine how key aspects of the programmes (including compliance, drug efficacy and treatment coverage) affect the location of the transmission breakpoint. We find that individual compliance to treatment, which determines the number of times an individual participates in mass drug administration programmes, is key to the location of the breakpoint, indicating the vital importance to ensure that people are not routinely missed in these programmes.
Electronic friction near metal surfaces: a case where molecule-metal couplings depend on nuclear coordinates

We derive an explicit form for the electronic friction as felt by a molecule near a metal surface for the general case that molecule-metal couplings depend on nuclear coordinates. Our work generalizes a previous study by von Oppen et al [Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology, 3, 144, 2012], where we now go beyond the Condon approximation (i.e. molecule-metal couplings are not held constant). Using a non-equilibrium Green's function formalism in the adiabatic limit, we show that fluctuating metal-molecule couplings lead to new frictional damping terms and random forces, plus a correction to the potential of mean force. Numerical tests are performed and compared with a modified classical master equation; our results indicate that violating the Condon approximation can have a large effect on dynamics.
Partial multiview clustering with locality graph regularization

Multiview clustering (MVC) collects complementary and abundant information, which draws much attention in machine learning and data mining community. Existing MVC methods usually hold the assumption that all the views are complete. However, multiple source data are often incomplete in real‐world applications, and so on sensor failure or unfinished collection process, which gives rise to incomplete multiview clustering (IMVC). Although enormous efforts have been devoted in IMVC, there still are some urgent issues that need to be solved: (i) The locality among multiple views has not been utilized in the existing mechanism; (ii) Existing methods inappropriately force all the views to share consensus representation while ignoring specific structures. In this paper, we propose a novel method termed partial MVC with locality graph regularization to address these issues. First, followed the traditional IMVC approaches, we construct weighted semi‐nonnegative matrix factorization models to handle incomplete multiview data. Then, upon the consensus representation matrix, the locality graph is constructed for regularizing the shared feature matrix. Moreover, we add the coefficient regression term to constraint the various base matrices among views. We incorporate the three aforementioned processes into a unified framework, whereas they can negotiate with each other serving for learning tasks. An effective iterative algorithm is proposed to solve the resultant optimization problem with theoretically guaranteed convergence. The comprehensive experiment results on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
New proofs of ownership for efficient data deduplication in the adversarial conspiracy model

The primitive of proofs of ownership (PoWs) enables a prover to efficiently convince a verifier that he/she indeed owns a certain message in a knowledge‐proof manner. As a result, it can prevent an adversary who only has a short information of the message from accessing the whole one. We argue that the existing PoWs based on Merkle hash tree and specific encodings are not much efficient if the size of message is sufficiently huge. In this paper, we first propose a new PoW protocol based on the chameleon hash function without key exposure. Interestingly, it is equivalent to having the prover compute a new collision of chameleon hashing as the proof in our construction. Therefore, the proposed protocol is much efficient since the computation and storage overhead of proof is independent of the size of the message. Moreover, we utilize the proposed PoWs to design a deduplication scheme over ciphertext.
Learning to disentangle emotion factors for facial expression recognition in the wild

Facial expression recognition (FER) in the wild is a very challenging problem due to different expressions under complex scenario (e.g., large head pose, illumination variation, occlusions, etc.), leading to suboptimal FER performance. Accuracy in FER heavily relies on discovering superior discriminative, emotion‐related features. In this paper, we propose an end‐to‐end module to disentangle latent emotion discriminative factors from the complex factors variables for FER to obtain salient emotion features. The training of proposed method contains two stages. First of all, emotion samples are used to obtain the latent representation using a variational auto‐encoder with reconstruction penalization. Furthermore, the latent representation as the input is thrown into a disentangling layer to learn a set of discriminative emotion factors through the attention mechanism (e.g., a Squeeze‐and‐Excitation block) that encourages to separate emotion‐related factors and nonaffective factors. Experimental results on public benchmark databases (RAF‐DB and FER2013) show that our approach has remarkable performance in complex scenes than current state‐of‐the‐art methods.
Molecular Basis of Hypertension: A Systematic Review on the Role of Metal Ions for Increase Prevalence of Hypertension in India

Metal ions played critical role in regulation of hypertension (HT) or blood pressure (BP). The physiological roles of metals commonly present in the diet in the etiology of HT need to be reviewed as recent survey on the metal status in the various vegetable and meat food stuffs commonly consumed by living population in India revealed an imbalance in its level. Higher levels of zinc (Zn) in diet is observed to increase the BP by various mechanisms including oxidative stress through decreased activity of superoxide dismutase (SOD) enzyme, increasing levels of angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) and aldosterone and by causing acidification due to change in the levels of H+, Na+, K+ and Ca2+ ions in the blood. High level of copper (Cu) and low level of magnesium (Mg) and manganese (Mn) in the blood is also associated with HT through various mechanisms like elevation of chronic inflammation, accelerating Na+ pump of cell membrane and by disturbing lipid metabolism in the body. An epidemiological study conducted in the population of Manipur, India consuming Zn rich diet reveals significant disparities in distribution of the metals in the blood of the hypertensive (HTS) patients as compared to the normotensives (NT) control and thus indicates that the change in body metal homeostasis may be a triggering factor for the development of HT in this population and corroborate the reports of published literatures. The role of the metals variations in the body and their possible involvement in HT is reviewed and discussed in this paper.
ACCEPTED AUTHOR VERSION OF THE MANUSCRIPT: A comparison of morphometric indices, mineralization level of long bones and selected blood parameters in hens of three breeds

The aim of the study was to compare morphometric indices and the mineralization level of humerus, femur and tibia in Leghorn (H-22), Sussex (S-66) and Rhode Island Red (R-11) hens at different age (weeks 6., 16., 45. and 64.), as well as some blood parameters. The material for the experiment was one-day old chicks of breeds: Leghorn (H-22), Sussex (S-66) and Rhode Island Red –RIR (R-11), which were separated into three groups. At 6, 16, 45 and 64 weeks of the study, 10 birds selected from each group were weighed, slaughtered, and their right femurs, tibiae and humeri were dissected. After removing soft tissues, the bones were weighed and measured for length, diameter, and the Seedor index (SI) was calculated. The bones were analysed for the content of calcium (Ca), phosphorus (P) and crude ash (CA). At 64 weeks, blood was collected from the hens and analysed for the concentration of Ca, P, pyridinoline and deoxypyridinoline. The study showed that hen breed had an effect mostly on morphometric indices of the bones such as bone weight and diameter, and the Seedor index (SI), while the age of birds had an effect on the bone mineralization level up to 45 weeks of age. The bone mineralization did not decrease in the studied breeds of hens at the end of the laying period. It was also found that heavier birds (RIR) had greater diameter bones and a higher SI, but the content of ash and minerals in the bones of that breed was generally similar to the Leghorn and Sussex hens. RIR hens exhibited higher phosphorus plasma concentration compared to Sussex hens. This may suggest that RIR birds have a slightly stronger bone system compared to Leghorn and Sussex hens.
BRICS – quo vadis?

ABSTRACT The BRICS countries gained importance on the international stage with two opposing scenarios from the literature dictating discussions. The first proclaimed that BRICS would become a major economic force globally, while the second perceived it as a mere symbolic type of gesture with minimal impact. Based on this, should the group be able to fully converge and unite, the first may become true, but if the second narrative becomes reality, the group may diverge with limited impact globally. To become an economic entity that has significant influence in international affairs, unity rather than diversity is imperative. Following a desk-top literature approach in this study, it seems to indicate that BRICS forms a heterogeneous coalition, focussed on advancing members’ individual, rather than collective interest, using the benefit of being aligned with a potential economic powerhouse. Therefore, it seems as if the second scenario, seems more plausible.
Work limiting health and divorce behaviour: a retrospective analysis with SIPP data

ABSTRACT This study examines the influence of six work-limiting health conditions that appear to arrive largely unexpectedly for married men and women – cancer, carpal tunnel syndrome, deafness or serious trouble hearing, paralysis, thyroid trouble and tumour cyst or growth – on subsequent divorce. Using information contained in the 2004 Survey of Income and Program Participation, we select men and women who are once married and had no health conditions prior to the first marriage into the sample. We find that divorce behaviour is not explained by the onset of unexpected health conditions while it is closely related to the onset of the more predictable set of all health conditions. The patterns of response vary by race and ethnicity. The article contributes to the literature by providing a more detailed comparison between the effects of less predictable health conditions on subsequent divorce behaviour versus the average effect of any work-limiting health problem.
Visualizing Mast Cell Activation: Single Molecule Dynamics of Early Events in FceRI Signaling

Healthy immune cell behavior requires sensitive and robust control over the processes that regulate signal transduction. In this work we employ single molecule fluorescence imaging techniques to quantify adapter protein recruitment, lateral mobility, receptor aggregation, and cytoskeletal organization to create a better understanding of many key processes in immune cell regulation. We focus on understanding the initiating events in Fc RI signaling in mast cells. Mast cell signaling encompassing a wide array of cellular outcomes including calcium flux, release of pre-formed inflammatory mediators and the production of cytokines. Careful control over appropriate reactions to external antigens is necessary for mast cells to properly function within the context of an immune response. The antigen binding and signaling domains of Fc RI are carried on different subunits. Because no studies to date have thoroughly investigated the integrity of the Fc RI complex, it remains unclear how antigen binding regulates the dynamics and spatio-temporal distribution of the intracellular signaling ITAM domains. We address this by quantifying the dynamics and localization of the
[The anti-allergic activity and mechanism of action of gamma-carboline derivatives].

: The antianaphylactic effect of new antihistaminic agents by derivatives of gamma-carboline dimebon and meraboin was studied by the method of passive cutaneous anaphylaxis. It was found that the agents in a dose amounting to 10% of LD50 possessed a high anaphylactic activity which did not correlate with the degree of their antihistaminic effect. During in vitro experiments the mechanism of action of dimebon and meraboin can be conditioned also by their ability to decrease histamine release from mast cells and to reduce the activity of cAMP-dependent phosphodiesterase.
Catalytic crosslinking of a regenerated hydrophobic benzylated cellulose and nano TiO2 composite for enhanced oil absorbency

Abstract Hydrophobic cellulosic composites with the nano form of metal oxides possess good absorptive and adsorptive potentials. Native cellulose was regenerated, benzylated, crosslinked and blended with TiO2 nanoparticles to absorb toluene, xylene, chloroform, kerosene and petrol. The composite was fully characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission emission microscopy (TEM), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The effect of crosslinker, catalyst and time of absorption was investigated. The FTIR shows stretch and bend vibrations of hydroxyl (-OH), alkyl (-CH), aromatic double bond (C=C) for benzyl cellulose while the appearance of new peaks at 816, 769 and 726 cm−1 for Ti-O stretching vibrations confirms the successful synthesis of the composite. The SEM images revealed the transformation of foam-like appearance of benzyl cellulose to a solidified mass after TiO2 compositing. Enhanced oil absorption was seen as the amount of the aluminum sulfate catalyst was doubled as a high Qmax of 24.16, 25.81, 27.22, 24.03 and 24.43 was obtained when the amount of catalyst used was doubled.
Does economic policy uncertainty aggravate financial constraints?

This paper examines the impact of economic policy uncertainty on economic growth due to its effects on firms' investment decisions, which subsequently justify firms' financial constraints. Using a sample of Chinese listed firms, the study documents that economic policy uncertainty reduce firms' financial constraints. The reduction in financial constraints stems mainly from the decrease in investments which increases the firm’s cash holding. Additional tests reveal that the reduction in firms’ financial constraints is pronounced more among non-politically connected firms compared to their counterparts. Further tests reveal that a reduction in a firms' financial constraints is of a short-term nature. In the long run, economic policy uncertainty increase firms' financial constraints. The study recommends that changes in policies must be done carefully to avoid turbulence and friction in firms’ investment decisions.
ACCEPTED AUTHOR VERSION OF THE MANUSCRIPT: Effect of dietary supplementation with dried tuber of Jerusalem artichoke on skatole level in backfat and CYP2E1 mRNA expression in liver of boars

The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of diets containing different levels of dried tuber of Jerusalem artichoke, Helianthus tuberosus , on skatole levels in back fat and on the CYP2E1 mRNA expression in the liver of commercial crossbred pigs. A total of 23 uncastrated male pigs from 10 litters of a commercial crossbred population of Large White × (Landrace × Large White), were used in this study. Boars were randomly divided into four different dietary treatment groups - a control group (K1; 5 boars; without supplementation of Jerusalem artichoke,) and three experimental groups (6 boars each) that were fed with the diet containing different levels of dried Jerusalem artichoke (K2 – 4.1%; K3 – 8.2%; K4 – 12.2%) for 14 days before slaughter. Significant effects of diet on skatole levels were observed between the control group and the experimental groups (P = 0.0078). The lowest level of skatole was in the K3 group with 8.2% of Jerusalem artichoke. As for CYP2E1 , a negative correlation was observed between the levels of skatole and CYP2E1 mRNA expression. Significant effect (P = 0.0055) was found in all experimental groups compared to the K1 group, and most pronounced in the K2 and K3 groups. The supplementation with Jerusalem artichoke resulted in lower level of skatole and higher CYP2E1 mRNA expression. The results suggest that affecting the expression of CYP2E1 by feed supplements could be an option to effectively reduce the levels of skatole in adipose tissue of entire male pigs.
‘Wolf-Pack Approximation’ utilizando funções de núcleo

Through metaphors of natural phenomena, one can construct computational models that are able to simulate or solve complex problems. Often, those are more intuitive to use and less computationally expensive to run . Within complex problems, function approximation features as a very important class of problems, since functions are good ways to represent real-world problems or to describe reality from a sparse set of entries (e.g. points). Even though the vast range of techniques in existence for dealing with approximation of functions such as linear programming, e.g, the SIMPLEX algorithm, in the worst case, they are of exponential complexity O(2). On the other hand, the very good approach of some metaheuristic such as artificial neural networks, completely lack in explanatory power towards the underlying relationships with the data. In this context Wolf-Pack Approximation (WPA), although another metaheuristic, features as a new computational alternative to the approximation problem of a given set of entry points. This paper put forward an enlarged and restructured version of WPA, which had some important limitations in its inception, namely, (i) the lack of communication between the wolves and (ii) the use of simple function (i.e. circles) for modeling the contour of the input points of the problems. Thus, in this work we propose mechanisms to increase the effectiveness of the initial version of WPA. To validate the current proposition, WPA2 was used in complex tasks of digital image representation, where several analyses and comparison were performed. Keywords—Multiagent Systems, Approximation of Functions, Bio-inspired Computation, Representation of Digital Images, Wolf-Pack Approximation.