Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Growth of thermophilic spore forming bacilli in milk during the manufacture of low heat powders

The survival and growth of Bacillus stearothermophilus and Bacillus licheniformis, naturally present (30-300 colony forming units/ml) in late season skim milk, was monitored in a three effect evaporator during low heat skim milk powder manufacture. Substantial growth was shown to occur in the preheating stages prior to direct steam heating. A typical heat treatment (77°C, 15 s) used in the manufacture of low heat powder did not inactivate the bacteria, which continued to grow in the heater. The importance of preheaters in influencing thermophile growth in the evaporator is demonstrated by the finding that growth in the preheater stages was accompanied by growth in subsequent evaporator effects which significantly exceeded that observed when the final two preheaters were bypassed. A mid-run mini-clean procedure incorporating 0.2% hydrogen peroxide for decontaminating the evaporator was tested and may prove useful in extending evaporator run times.
Book Reviews

Ash Amin, ’Flexible Specialisation and Small Firms in Italy: Myths and Realities’, Antipode, 21:1, 1989, pp13-34. HE CRISIS OF THE SO-CALLED ancien regime, or ‘Fordism’, has led -~to new forms of production in Western economies. It has been argued (e.g. Piore and Sabel, 1984) that the demise of mass markets and the development of new process technologies have paved the way for a new organisational principle termed ’flexible specialisation’. This paper focuses on this form of production organisation. Amin highlights three broad characteristics to distinguish it from ’Fordism’ including: &dquo;a reduction of product, production, transaction and management costs and rigidities as a result of the fragmentation of the technical division of labour among interconnected and task specialist units and firms . a renewed craft tradition which combines paternalistic and participatory practices with flexible work arrangements . (and) the resurgence of regional economies, usually through the build-up of a product specialism by particular areas (e.g. textiles in Prato, electronics in Silicon Valley), and the local containment of the various social, economic and institutional mechanisms enabling further growth in independent firms&dquo; ( p.15) . Before criticising the existence of flexible specialisation in Italy, Amin questions these three principles using already established literature. First, even if markets become fragmented (and doubts are raised about this) then ’Fordism’ techniques have coped through the use of batch and craft production and the use of common components in differentiated products. Second, the emancipatory effects of ’flexible specialisation’ are questioned on grounds such as the polarisation in the conditions of the workforce and the deregulation of wages and wage security. Third, in a spatial context, the ’industrial district’ understates the significantly different origins and key actors in regions which may, for example, be large subcontractors or government defence bodies. Therefore, conceptually, Amin argues that the proclamations about a new regime of production organisation in the form of ’flexible specialisation’ remains controversial. The model of ’flexible specialisation’ has been most popularised through the use of examples from the industrial districts of Italy. With regard to macro-
Beat gestures influence which speech sounds you hear

Beat gestures – spontaneously produced biphasic movements of the hand – are among the most frequently encountered co-speech gestures in human communication. They are closely temporally aligned to the prosodic characteristics of the speech signal, typically occurring on lexically stressed syllables. Despite their prevalence across speakers of the world’s languages, how beat gestures impact spoken word recognition is unclear. Can these simple ‘flicks of the hand’ influence speech perception? Across six experiments, we demonstrate that beat gestures influence the explicit and implicit perception of lexical stress (e.g., distinguishing OBject from obJECT), and in turn, can influence what vowels listeners hear. Thus, we provide converging evidence for a manual McGurk effect: even the simplest ‘flicks of the hands’ influence which speech sounds we hear. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Beat gestures are very common in human face-to-face communication. Yet we know little about their behavioral consequences for spoken language comprehension. We demonstrate that beat gestures influence the explicit and implicit perception of lexical stress, and, in turn, can even shape what vowels we think we hear. This demonstration of a manual McGurk effect provides some of the first empirical support for a recent multimodal, situated psycholinguistic framework of human communication, while challenging current models of spoken word recognition that do not yet incorporate multimodal prosody. Moreover, it has the potential to enrich human-computer interaction and improve multimodal speech recognition systems.
Fireflies with or without prespermatophores: Evolutionary origins and life‐history consequences

During mating, some male North American fireflies produce spermatophores from prespermatophores in their paired reproductive accessory glands. Other species of fireflies have neither prespermatophores nor spermatophores. To establish a pattern of spermatophore occurrence across firefly species, we examined the male internal reproductive system in 20 Japanese species belonging to 10 genera for the presence or absence of prespermatophores. Twelve species from seven genera produced prespermatophores, while eight species from three genera did not. Superimposed on a molecular phylogeny of Japanese fireflies based on mitochondrial 16S ribosomal DNA sequences, the basal group was prespermatophore producers. Prespermatophores appear to have been lost in two different lineages. Species without prespermatophores are characterized by degeneration of both the forewings and hindwings, and by body gigantism in females.
Current trends and future prospects of lipstatin: a lipase inhibitor and pro-drug for obesity

Obesity is an alarming state caused by an energy imbalance. It is associated with cardiovascular diseases, type-II diabetes, and cancer. Physical inactivity and overeating are the main causes of obesity but scientific reports also support the involvement of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) in adiposity. Lipids are known to produce more energy than sugars and proteins, hence controlling the digestion of dietary lipids is a promising approach to treat obesity. Lipstatin is a β-lactone molecule which controls the digestive activity of pancreatic lipases and thus controls the absorption of fat in the small intestine. The three dimensional structure of pancreatic lipase revealed that its active site is masked by a lid domain which is opened by the action of bile salt micelles and colipase. Lipstatin is supposed to inhibit the catalytic activity of pancreatic lipase by acylation of the serine residue present in the active site. A binding study suggests that one molecule of lipstatin binds with one molecule of lipase. Tetra-hydro-lipstatin is an Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) of lipstatin which is utilized in antiobesity medicines. Lipstatin is a natural product produced from Streptomyces toxytricini but poor productivity heightens the cost. The mechanism of lipstatin biosynthesis in bacteria is still unexplored. However, the acyl-coenzyme A carboxylase (ACCase) complex plays a key role in lipstatin biosynthesis. The present review focuses on the implications and causes of obesity, the status of antiobesity drugs, the mechanism of inhibition of pancreatic lipases, the biosynthesis of lipstatin and the present status of lipstatin production.
Circuit lower bounds from NP-hardness of MCSP under turing reductions

The fundamental Minimum Circuit Size Problem is a well-known example of a problem that is neither known to be in P nor known to be NP-hard. Kabanets and Cai [18] showed that if MCSP is NP-hard under "natural" m-reductions, superpolynomial circuit lower bounds for exponential time would follow. This has triggered a long line of work on understanding the power of reductions to MCSP. Nothing was known so far about consequences of NP-hardness of MCSP under general Turing reductions. In this work, we consider two structured kinds of Turing reductions: parametric honest reductions and natural reductions. The latter generalize the natural reductions of Kabanets and Cai to the case of Turing-reductions. We show that NP-hardness of MCSP under these kinds of Turing-reductions imply superpolynomial circuit lower bounds for exponential time.
Measuring and comparing the accuracy of species distribution models with presence–absence data

Species distribution models have been widely used to predict species distributions for various purposes, including conservation planning, and climate change impact assessment. The success of these applications relies heavily on the accuracy of the models. Various measures have been proposed to assess the accuracy of the models. Rigorous statistical analysis should be incorporated in model accuracy assessment. However, since relevant information about the statistical properties of accuracy measures is scattered across various disciplines, ecologists find it difficult to select the most appropriate ones for their research. In this paper, we review accuracy measures that are currently used in species distribution modelling (SDM), and introduce additional metrics that have potential applications in SDM. For the commonly used measures (which are also intensively studied by statisticians), including overall accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, kappa, and area and partial area under the ROC curves, promising methods to construct confidence intervals and statistically compare the accuracy between two models are given. For other accuracy measures, methods to estimate standard errors are given, which can be used to construct approximate confidence intervals. We also suggest that as general tools, computer-intensive methods, especially bootstrap and randomization methods can be used in constructing confidence intervals and statistical tests if suitable analytic methods cannot be found. Usually, these computer-intensive methods provide robust results.
Value of Alberta Stroke Program early Computed Tomography Score (ASPECTS) in the Evaluation of Middle Cerebral Artery Acute Ischemic Stroke using CT and DW-MRI

Background: Alberta Stroke Program Early Computed Tomography Score (ASPECTS) is a quantitative score to evaluate early ischemic changes in the middle cerebral arterial territory on Computed Tomography (CT) in addition to diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI). Aim: To study the value of ASPECTS using CT and DWI-MRI in patients with acute stroke related to middle cerebral artery (MCA) territories and their values in predicting hemorrhagic transformation (HT). Methods and Materials: A prospective study was done at Al-Imamain Al-Kadhmain Medical City in Baghdad, Iraq from January 2017 to January 2018 and conducted on 100 patients (62 male, 38 female) who had acute ischemic stroke related to MCA territories and imaged with CT and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) within 6 hours of symptoms onset. Results: Male: Female ratio 1.6:1, mean age 58.7 ± 11.78 years, the mean of time between onset of symptoms and CT scan was 165 minutes. The difference between CT and DWI ASPECTS was about one point. CT scan signs of early ischemic changes were found in 58% of the patients while DWI-MRI signs of early ischemic changes were recognized in 75% patients (significance level P=0.011). The overall sensitivity and specificity of CT ASPECTS compared to MRI-DWI was 82.86% and 83.37% respectively and the accuracy was 83.00%, 70 patients had follow up by another MRI to detect HT, patients with low ASPECTS had more tendency to exhibit HT. Conclusion: ASPECTS is a simple applicable tool for early accurate recognition and standardizing the reporting evaluation of acute ischemic stroke related to MCA territories. DWI-ASPECTS scored were roughly one point lower than CT-ASPECTS. Although CT-ASPECTS and DWI-ASPECTS were valuable in predicting symptomatic HT, DWIASPECTS are more sensitive.
Partnering research within the construction industry (1990-2018): a scientometric review

This paper performs a scientometric review of the intellectual structure and evolutionary patterns of partnering research within construction industry (CI). Based on 788 bibliographic records retrieved from Scopus published in 1990-2018, CiteSpace is used to facilitate the scientometric analysis and visualisation of construction partnering research. The results show that: 1) the UK, the USA, and China are the primary origins of construction partnering research, and this domain typically arises from inter-organisation collaboration in business management; 2) research topics covered in the field concentrate on partnering application and performance, trust, partnering mechanism to strengthen performance, development of partnering model, critical success factors, reviews of the development of partnering research, and construction innovation promoted by partnering; 3) strategic partnering should be emphasised through supply chain integration in the CI. This paper provides an in-depth understanding of construction partnering research and inspires further inter-organisation collaboration within the CI.
Antifúngicos naturais e sintéticos: estudo dos mecanismos de ação em sistema de infecção in vitro empregando cepas de Cryptococcus

Cryptococcosis is a systemic mycosis caused mainly by opportunistic yeast Cryptococcus neoformans and Cryptococcus gattii. Among the main clinical manifestations are the development of encephalitis, meningoencephalitis and pulmonar infections. It is estimated that more than one million cases of cryptococcosis occur per year in HIV positive individuals, which classifies the disease as the third among the most importante systemic fungal infections. The ecology of this genus is directly related to the environment. Specie C. neoformans is commonly found in dried excremento of pigeons (Columbia livia) and the species C. gattii is found primarily in plants such as Eucalyptus species. Cryptococcosis treatment is performed with the antifungal drugs amphotericin B and fluoconazole, the later being of a fungistatic used to treat long-term, while effective, may cause a number of adverse reactions and also the development of resistence. Given the difficult control of the yeast and treatment, this work has as main objective, the research of natural substances with high potential antifungal drug with purpose and saneante, fighting yeast in their natural ecological niche and also acting in fighting infection in the host. One way to reduce the cases of infection is through the capacity fungicide. Through the Project BIOTA / FAPESP, we selected two quinonametides triterpenids extracted from Maytenus ilicifolia, the maitenin and pristimerin, which showed potente anti-Cryptococcus MICs, more than 90 % of the disinfection efficiency and low toxicity, indicating the the substances may be promising prototypes with disinfectant activity. Also were evaluated a number of synthetic molecules of the flavonoid Family designated chalcones, for prototyping antifungals for human therapeutic use. Eighty-five percent of chalcones presentaram high fugistatic against isolates of C. neoformans virulence markedly and strongly inhibited the adhesion the fungus and the cell lung human glioma, with greater than 90 % efficiency. In addition, showed no cytotoxicity at 5 different cell lines relating to this route can prototype. These data show that chalcones can mean promising prototypes with potent anti-Cryptococcus activity.
Adaptive power allocation based beamforming algorithm for multiple input and multiple output nonorthogonal multiple access system throughput optimization

The combination of nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) systems is considered a promising approach for 5G mobile communication networks. In addition, techniques such as user selection and beamforming could be applied to improve some parameters of system performance. In this context, we propose a joint user selection, adaptive power allocation, and beamforming algorithm for the downlink of massive MIMO NOMA systems in order to maximize the throughput of users. To this end, we present a novel optimal beamforming solution scheme based on the adaptive computation of signal power values to maximize system throughput, considering the less interfering users. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, simulations were performed considering different power allocation algorithms.
Genetic Variation in Fowl Semen Cholesterol and Phospholipid Levels and the Relationships of These Lipids with Fertility of Frozen-Thawed and Fresh Semen

Abstract We studied the influence of five and six generations of selection for duration of fertility of frozen-thawed fowl semen on spermatozoa and seminal plasma cholesterol and phospholipid levels, their ratios, and their relationships with fertility of frozen-thawed and fresh semen. Males from the selected and control line were used. Cholesterol and phospholipid levels were determined in 2 trials for spermatozoa and in a single trial for seminal plasma per generation. The selected line had significantly (P Spermatozoa cholesterol level, cholesterol to phospholipid ratio, and seminal plasma cholesterol and phospholipid levels were significantly (P .05). The heritability estimates of spermatozoa cholesterol and phospholipid levels ranged from zero to . 66 and zero to . 81, respectively. The phenotypic correlations of spermatozoa and seminal plasma cholesterol with fertility of frozen-thawed semen were negative as were the phenotypic correlations of seminal plasma cholesterol with fertility of fresh semen.
Parental reconstruction in rural goat population with microsatellite markers

Proper knowledge about individual origin and pedigree is a major point for animal breeding and livestock genetic improvement. Mainly for goat, but also for sheep breeding in Sicily information on these points is limited, and sometimes even misleading. Goat milk production is, in many regions and especially in Sicily, a rural enterprise, where males and females graze together and pedigree of offspring can be largely unknown. Genetic improvement in this situation is challenging. Modern DNA techniques can help to identify the parentage (PI, parental identification). In this paper we discuss: i) our set of microsatellites markers in relation to the ECONOGENE set; ii) accuracy of microsatellite genotyping for a goat breed; iii) the principle of verification and identification as tested on one goat breeding farm; iv) direct use of the technique in a running goat breeding program. For a practical application we suggest the use of around 20 quality microsatellite markers, and the use of primiparous milk analysis. In our data set originating from one farm (184 records) for parental verification 17% parent pairs were considered erratic. Parental identification allowed for successful assignment of 49 parent pairs.
Lysosomal acid phosphatase mediates dedifferentiation in the regenerating salamander limb

Abstract In this study, monoclonal antibodies against lysosomal acid phosphatase (LAP) of a salamander, Hynobius leechii, were used to determine the spatial and temporal expression of the LAP in the regenerating limbs. The Western blot and immunohistochemical analysis in the limb regeneration revealed that LAP was highly expressed at the dedifferentiation stage, especially in the wound epidermis and dedifferentiating limb tissues such as muscle and cartilage. With RA treatment, the LAP expression became upregulated in terms of both level and duration in the wound epidermis, blastemal cell and dedifferentiating limb tissues. In addition, in situ activity staining of LAP showed a similar result to that of immunohistochemistry. Thus, the activity profile of LAP activity coincides well with the expression profile of LAP during the dedifferentiation period. Furthermore, to examine the effects of lysosomal enzymes including LAP on salamander limb regeneration, lysosome extract was microinjected into limb regenerates. Interestingly, when the lysosome extract was microinjected into limb regenerates with a low dose of RA (50 µg/g body wt.), skeletal pattern duplication occurred frequently in the proximodistal and transverse axes. Therefore, lysosomal enzymes might cause the regenerative environment and RA plays dual roles in the modification of positional value as well as evocation of extensive dedifferentiation for pattern duplication. In conclusion, these results support the hypothesis that dedifferentiation is a crucial event in the process of limb regeneration and RA-evoked pattern duplication, and lysosomal enzymes may play important role(s) in this process.
Factors Controlling the Activity of Bacteriophage UZ1 against Enterobacter aerogenes Strain BE1 under Simulated Intestinal Conditions

To study specific bacteriophage‐bacteria interactions under intestinal conditions, a previously developed in vitro model system was used, combining a common pathogenic bacterium Enterobacter aerogenes BE1 and a for this bacterium specific bacteriophage, phage UZ1. As many environmental factors may influence the phage‐bacterium interaction, the model was used in this study to investigate the effect of inoculum size, presence of oxygen, and physiological hindrance. When monocultures of E. aerogenes BE1/gfp with increasing inoculum size were infected with phage UZ1, complete host lysis was observed up to an inoculum size of 7 log [CFU/mL]. However, at 8 log [CFU/mL], growth was observed and phage resistant E. aerogenes BE1/gfp cells were isolated. Under simulated intestinal conditions, infection with phage UZ1 resulted in a significant decrease, up to 3 log, of E. aerogenes BE1/gfp compared to the non‐phage treated control. However, no complete removal of the bacterial host could be achieved after 18 h. At high inoculum size, resistant bacteria were also isolated. However, growth curve analysis showed a reduced fitness of the phage UZ1‐resistant bacteria, limiting their intestinal proliferation. Another factor responsible for differences in the bacteriolytic efficiency was the presence of oxygen. Under anaerobic conditions, the latent period increased from 20 min to more then 3 h and the burst size decreased from 70 to less than 24, compared to aerobic conditions. In conclusion, the major factors responsible for different bacteriolytic efficacy were resistance to phage infection by mutation and limited oxygen availability. Although no complete removal of the pathogen was obtained under anaerobic conditions, the strong host specificity of the phage, the decrease in bacterial concentrations and the reduced fitness of phage‐resistant bacteria indicate the possibility for prophylactic use of the phage to reduce the risk of E. aerogenes BE1 infections.