Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effects of cyanocobalamin supplementation during the thawing of frozen boar semen on spermatozoa, in vitro fertilization, and embryonic development

The objective of this study was to assess the in vitro fertilization (IVF) of pig oocytes using frozen-thawed boar sperm in media supplemented with cyanocobalamin. Frozen semen pellets were thawed and incubated for 1 h in fertilization media containing cyanocobalamin (0, 0.5, 1.0 or 2.0 μm) and evaluated for forward progressive motility, viability, and embryo cleavage. Forward progressive motility of the 0.5 and 1.0 μm cyanocobalamin supplements was higher (P < 0.05) than the 0 and 2.0 μm cyanocobalamin supplements. Membrane viability of sperm supplemented with 0.5 μm cyanocobalamin was higher (P < 0.05) than all other groups. Oocytes were matured and fertilized with frozen-thawed boar semen that was previously incubated for 1 h in fertilization media containing cyanocobalamin (0 or 0.5 μm; 100 oocytes/treatment). Fertilization characteristics were evaluated 12 h after IVF of oocytes and embryo development was analyzed at 48 h and 144 h post-IVF. There were no significant differences between treatment groups when evaluating fertilization, polyspermic penetration or male pronucleus development. Embryos derived from oocytes fertilized with 0.5 μm cyanocobalamin supplemented sperm had a higher percentage (P < 0.05) of cleaved embryos compared to those without cyanocobalamin supplementation at 48 h after IVF. There were no significant differences in the percentages of embryos reaching the blastocyst stage by 144 h after IVF between treatment groups. The results of this study suggest that there are positive effects of 0.5 μm cyanocobalamin supplementation during the incubation of frozen-thawed boar semen on early development of IVF derived pig embryos.
Optimisation of the PCR-invA primers for the detection of Salmonella in drinking and surface waters following a pre-cultivation step

A polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based method for the detection of Salmonella species in water samples was optimised and evaluated for speed, specificity and sensitivity. Optimisation of Mg2+ and primer concentrations and cycling parameters increased the sensitivity and limit of detection of PCR to 2.6 x 104 cfu/m. A 6h non-selective pre-enrichment step further increased the limit of detection to 26 cfu/m. Out of 14 different Salmonella strains tested, only two, Salmonella arizonae and Salmonella pullorum, did not give positive amplification results with primers homologous to a conserved region of the invA gene. When environmental and drinking waters were assessed, a non-selective pre-enrichment step was included to increase the detection efficiency of PCR. The PCR method demonstrated specificity in the presence of other competing micro-organisms as confirmed by the conventional culture method. No false positives or negatives were observed when household and environmental water samples were tested by invA-PCR analysis parallel to the culture method.
Running head : CONFUSION AND LEARNING 1 Confusion Can Be Beneficial for Learning

We tested key predictions of a theoretical model positing that confusion, which accompanies a state of cognitive disequilibrium that is triggered by contradictions, conflicts, anomalies, erroneous information, and other discrepant events, can be beneficial to learning if appropriately induced, regulated, and resolved. Hypotheses of the model were tested in two experiments where learners engaged in trialogues on scientific reasoning concepts in a simulated collaborative learning session with animated agents playing the role of a tutor and a peer student. Confusion was experimentally induced via a contradictory information manipulation involving the animated agents expressing incorrect and/or contradictory opinions and asking the (human) learners to decide which opinion had more scientific merit. The results indicated that self-reports of confusion were largely insensitive to the manipulations. However, confusion was manifested by more objective measures that inferred confusion on the basis of learners' responses immediately following contradictions. Furthermore, whereas the contradictions had no effect on learning when learners were not confused by the manipulations, performance on multiple-choice posttests and on transfer tests was substantially higher when the contradictions were successful in confusing learners. Theoretical and applied implications are discussed.
Unconscious acquisition of complex procedural knowledge.

This research demonstrates a process of acquisition of information about a complex pattern of stimuli and the facilitating influence of this knowledge on subjects' subsequent performance. In two experiments, subjects were exposed for 12 hr to a sequence of frames containing a target, and their task was to search for the target in each frame. The sequence was divided into logical blocks of seven trials each. Locations of the target in the seventh trial of each block were predictable on the basis of the specific sequences of target locations in four out of the previous six trials. Pilot studies and extensive postexperimental interviews indicated that none of the subjects noticed anything even close to the real nature of the manipulation (i.e., the pattern). However, the predicted patterns of latency of their responses to the critical trials indicate that they had, in fact, acquired some intuitive (unconscious) knowledge about how the pattern of prior trials was related to the critical trial. The phenomenon is discussed as a ubiquitous unconscious process involved in the development of both elementary and high-level cognitive skills.
Is the well-trodden path always the correct path? New insights into the role of footprint hydrocarbons during ant foraging

Positive feedback and negative feedback are crucial mechanisms in the regulation of biological systems and whilst the role of positive feedback has been well studied in social insect networks, the role of negative feedback has not. This thesis presents evidence of a novel negative feedback mechanism at work during foraging by the ant Lasius niger. In a foraging context, cuticular hydrocarbons, passively deposited on substrate by ants as they walk, can act as a repellent cue. This effect can be measured through branch selection by foraging workers at a trail bifurcation. Evidence from both a highly controlled experimental set up and a more natural foraging context are provided to support this claim. The possible role of this signal in ant foraging networks is considered and comparisons with other known negative feedback mechanisms in ant foraging networks are drawn. Experiments with the ant Monomorium pharaonis were unable to show negative feedback signals being used to optimise food search tactics and this finding is evaluated in relation to the ecology of M. pharaonis. Circumstantial evidence is also presented in support of the hypothesis that L. niger workers can use alarm pheromones to recruit nest mates to unexplored territory. The need for further work testing this hypothesis is highlighted. The communication role of ant interactions during foraging is discussed and, based on new observations with L. niger workers, the position of the signaller relative to the recipient during the interaction is proposed as a possible component of the signalling mechanism. Further possible experiments based on both empirical observations and computational models are proposed to help augment the findings presented in this study.
THE EFFECT OF INFECTION AND ANTIBIOTICS ON THE GUT BRAIN AXIS

Considerable experimental evidence largely from preclinical studies supports the concept of bidirectional interactions between the gut microbiota and the central nervous system. Multiple chemical, neural and immune signalling mechanisms have been identified which can mediate the transfer of information from complex microbial communities in the gut, to various cell types in the gut wall, including enterochromaffin cells and primary afferent nerves. In rodents, the perturbation of microbial homeostasis by introduction of pathogens can influence activity within brain circuits related to emotional behaviour, even before the development of gut inflammation. The suppression or perturbation of microbial communities by oral antibiotics can also influence such behaviours, and such behavioural changes can be associated with altered brain neurochemistry. Even though it is currently unknown if similar effects occur in adult humans on antibiotic therapy, it is intriguing to speculate that the regular antibiotic consumption early in life may affect brain development via the microbiota gut brain axis.
On the Assessment of Nonlocal Climate Feedback. Part II: EFA-SVD and Optimal Feedback Modes*

Abstract The equilibrium feedback assessment (EFA) is combined with the singular value decomposition (SVD) to assess the large-scale feedback modes from a lower boundary variability field onto an atmospheric field. The leading EFA-SVD modes are the optimal feedback modes, with the lower boundary forcing patterns corresponding to those that generate the largest atmospheric responses, and therefore provide upper bounds of the feedback response. The application of EFA-SVD to an idealized coupled ocean–atmosphere model demonstrates that EFA-SVD is able to extract the leading feedback modes successfully. Furthermore, these large-scale modes are the least sensitive to sampling errors among all the feedback processes and therefore are the most robust for statistical estimation. The EFA-SVD is then applied to the observed North Atlantic ocean–atmosphere system for the assessment of the sea surface temperature (SST) feedback on the surface heat flux and the geopotential height, respectively. The dominant local neg.
Photonics in switching: enabling technologies and subsystem design

This paper describes recent research activities and results in the area of photonic switching carried out within the framework of the EU-funded e-Photon/ONe+ network of excellence, Virtual Department on Optical Switching. Technology aspects of photonics in switching and, in particular, recent advances in wavelength conversion, ring resonators, and packet switching and processing subsystems are presented as the building blocks for the implementation of a high-performance router for the next-generation Internet.
Supplementary Material on “ Neighbor Embedding Based Super-Resolution Algorithm Through Edge Detection and Feature Selection ”

The supplement includes experimental results to support the observation in the paper suggesting that the NeedFS performs better in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. ∗ Corresponding author. Tel. 86-21-55664712. Fax. 86-21-65654253 Email addresses: tmchan@cse.cuhk. edu.hk (Tak-Ming Chan), jpzhang@fudan.edu. cn (Junping Zhang), mydaiyu@hotmail.com (Jian Pu), huanghua@xjtu.edu. cn (Hua Huang). URL: http://www.iipl. fudan.edu. cn/ zhangjp (Junping Zhang). Preprint submitted to Elsevier 25 August 2008 1 Experiments and Evaluations The following subsections include the supporting material according to the points mentioned in the Experiments and Evaluations section in the paper. 1.1 Experiment Setting 1.1.1 Validation Images A validation set with 12 images is used as shown in Figure 1. The magnification factor is 4× or 4 times in this experiment. We employ the “leave-one-out” approach for generating sufficient training samples. Namely, each time one image is taken out, downsampled and regarded as the input low-resolution image, while the rest 11 images are used to generate the training set. With the same setting of parameters as SRNE, the low-resolution patch size S is set to be 3, the number of nearest neighbors K is set to be 5, and the overlapping degree is 2 [1] for all of our experiments. Fig. 1. Training images in their original resolutions. From left to right, top to bottom are labeled No.1 to No.12. Each time one image is chosen and downsampled as test input, and the rest form the training set.
Neotypification of Dothistroma septosporum and epitypification of D. pini, causal agents of Dothistroma needle blight of pine

Summary Dothistroma needle blight (DNB) is one of the most devastating needle diseases on Pinus spp. worldwide. Ever since the description of the causal agent of the disease in Europe in 1911 as Cytosporina septospora, and independently in the USA in 1941 as Dothistroma pini, there has been considerable taxonomic discordance regarding the name of the pathogen used in literature. This was compounded both by the proposal of different varieties of the pathogen based on differences in spore size and the application of dual nomenclature where three names, Scirrhia pini, Eruptio pini and Mycosphaerella pini, were used to describe the sexual morph of the fungus. More recent studies using sequence-based methods revealed that DNB can be caused by either one of two distinct species, that is D. septosporum and D. pini. These important species have not been adequately typified, and this perpetuates lack of stability for their names. In this study, these names are fixed to reference sequences linked to living cultures representing type specimens. To achieve this goal, we designate an epitype for D. pini and a neotype for D. septosporum. The known polymorphism in the ITS region, the barcoding gene for these fungi, is characterized and a complete taxonomic history is provided for the genus Dothistroma.
Performance Assessment of Patch-based Bilateral Denoising

In the field of medical image analysis, denoising is one of the most important preprocessing steps before medical analysis. The design of an efficient, robust, and computationally effective edge-preserving denoising algorithm is a widely studied, and yet unsolved problem. One of the most efficient edge-preserving denoising algorithms is the bilateral filter, which is an intuitive generalization of the local M-smoother. In this paper, we propose to modify both the bilateral filter and the local M-smoother to use patches of the image instead of single voxels in the denoising process. Using patches instead of single voxels in the filtering process is a way to adapt the filter to the textures, ramps, and edges of the image, and make the filter more discriminant. The filtering performances of the patch-based algorithms are evaluated on a benchmark and a CT phantom image and compared to the bilateral filter and local M-smoother.
TIMING OF 29 PULSARS DISCOVERED IN THE PALFA SURVEY

We report on the discovery and timing observations of 29 distant long-period pulsars found in the ongoing Arecibo L-band Feed Array pulsar survey. Following discovery with the Arecibo Telescope, confirmation and timing observations of these pulsars over several years at Jodrell Bank Observatory have yielded high-precision positions and measurements of rotation and radiation properties. We have used multi-frequency data to measure the interstellar scattering properties of some of these pulsars. Most of the pulsars have properties that mirror those of the previously known pulsar population, although four show some notable characteristics. PSRs J1907+0631 and J1925+1720 are young and are associated with supernova remnants or plerionic nebulae: J1907+0631 lies close to the center of SNR G40.5−0.5, while J1925+1720 is coincident with a high-energy Fermi γ-ray source. One pulsar, J1932+1500, is in a surprisingly eccentric, 199 day binary orbit with a companion having a minimum mass of 0.33 M⊙. Several of the sources exhibit timing noise, and two, PSRs J0611+1436 and J1907+0631, have both suffered large glitches, but with very different post-glitch rotation properties. In particular, the rotational period of PSR J0611+1436 will not recover to its pre-glitch value for about 12 years, a far greater recovery timescale than seen following any other large glitches.
Multiplexing of long-gauge length fibre optic dynamic strain sensors using range-resolved interferometry

A recently developed range-resolved interferometric signal processing technique is employed to multiplex segments of optical fibre that each act as a long-gauge length dynamic strain sensor, in an approach termed fibre segment interferometry, which is aimed at condition and structural health monitoring. The instrument employs cost-effective diode lasers, off-the-shelf digital signal processing hardware and a very simple optical setup. In this implementation, six concatenated fibre segment sensors of individual length 12.5 cm are formed between seven partial in-fibre reflectors formed by optical fibre Bragg gratings. The interferometric phase signals of the fibre segments are interrogated at a data rate of 98 kHz and, in an experimental demonstration of the ability of the technique to measure dynamic events, the speed of sound in a suspended metal rod is determined, where the acoustic signal is induced by a hammer strike.
Multidimensional Time Series Anomaly Detection: A GRU-based Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoder Approach

Unsupervised anomaly detection on multidimensional time series data is a very important problem due to its wide applications in many systems such as cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things. Some existing works use traditional variational autoencoder (VAE) for anomaly detection. They generally assume a single-modal Gaussian distribution as prior in the data generative procedure. However, because of the intrinsic multimodality in time series data, previous works cannot effectively learn the complex data distribution, and hence cannot make accurate detections. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose a GRU-based Gaussian Mixture VAE system for anomaly detection, called GGM-VAE. In particular, Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) cells are employed to discover the correlations among time sequences. Then we use Gaussian Mixture priors in the latent space to characterize multimodal data. The proposed detector reports an anomaly when the reconstruction probability is below a certain threshold. We conduct extensive simulations on real world datasets and find that our proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art anomaly detection schemes and achieves up to 5.7% and 7.2% improvements in accuracy and F1 score, respectively, compared with existing methods.
Operator methods in fractal analysis , wavelets and dynamical systems ( 06 w 5027 )

Recently our understanding of some of the most exciting new scientific discoveries has proved to rely on fractal features. They are understood by the coming together of mathematics, communication theory, computer graphics, signal/image processing, medical imaging, and quantum theory. Leading researchers on fractals, wavelets, dynamics and their analysis and uses as well as talented younger researchers have converged on the Banff Centre in the week of December 2–7, 2006 for a hosted by Banff International Research Station international workshop on new developments in Operator methods in fractal analysis, wavelets and dynamical systems. More then 40 participants from around the World: Europe, Scandinavian countries, Asia, Australia, the US and Canada took part. The event consisted of three elements: (1) more then 25 scheduled research presentations covering the themes of the workshop; (2) discussions helping to bridge the separate topics; and (3) joint research interaction, including work on joint research papers and projects. The conference activities aimed at creation of new international cooperation patterns and research advances as well as research training of young promising researchers. This event was co-organized by Professors Ola Bratteli (University of Oslo, Norway), Palle Jorgensen (The University of Iowa, USA), David Kribs (University of Guelph), Gestur Olafsson (Louisiana State University, USA) and Sergei Silvestrov (Lund University, Sweden). The names Bratteli and Jorgensen are synonymous with significant advances in these fields. Professor David Kribs is conducting pioneering work in quantum computation, and Professors Gestur Olafsson and Sergei Silvestrov are leading mathematicians in areas covered by the workshop and their applications to neighboring fields such as engineering, physics, and medicine. The expert group that has been assembled focused on the hottest new results in fractal theory and related topics. The workshop brought together experts in areas of pure and applied mathematics who have made independent advances and it has provided a unique opportunity for advancing the field through teamwork and collaboration. Among participants there were a substantial number of distinguished senior researchers as well as junior researchers both with theoretical and applied backgrounds. This mix ensured a
Stability-constrained Optimization for Nonlinear Systems based on Convex Lyapunov Functions

This paper presents a novel scalable framework to solve the optimization of a nonlinear system with differential algebraic equation (DAE) constraints that enforce the asymptotic stability of the underlying dynamic model with respect to certain disturbances. Existing solution approaches to analogous DAE-constrained problems are based on discretization of DAE system into a large set of nonlinear algebraic equations representing the time-marching schemes. These approaches are not scalable to large size models. The proposed framework, based on LaSalle's invariance principle, uses convex Lyapunov functions to develop a novel stability certificate which consists of a limited number of algebraic constraints. We develop specific algorithms for two major types of nonlinearities, namely Lur'e, and quasi-polynomial systems. Quadratic and convex-sum-of-square Lyapunov functions are constructed for the Lur'e-type and quasi-polynomial systems respectively. A numerical experiment is performed on a 3-generator power network to obtain a solution for transient-stability-constrained optimal power flow.
Heavy metal pollution and Pb isotopes in urban soils of Napoli, Italy

Lead isotope analysis is an increasingly widespread tool in the study of environmental pollution as Pb isotope compositions do not change during industrial and environmental processes, and always reflect their source origin. In this study we present the results of R-mode factor analysis for associations between chemical elements in Neapolitan soils, combined with the distribution of Pb concentrations and Pb isotope compositions in order to differentiate natural from anthropogenic metal sources. Results show Neapolitan urban soils to be significantly enriched in Pb, Hg, Zn, Sb, and to a lesser extent in Cu, Cd, Cr and Ni. Lead isotope measurements form a trend suggesting mixing between two end-member compositions, one of clear natural origin (geogenic) and another related to human activities (anthropogenic). Lead isotope investigations demonstrate that road traffic is one of the main sources of metal pollution.
Chagas disease in non-endemic countries: ‘sick immigrant’ phobia or a public health concern?

In recent years, the literature on neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) has advanced in significant ways: there is a renewed sense of urgency in World Health Organization reports, new specialized journals have been launched, and advocacy groups are leveraging social media to gain attention to the burden of NTDs around the world. But as the literature in this field develops, there is a danger of an important split between work that recognizes the profound geopolitical patterning of NTDs, and focuses accordingly on structural factors that lead NTDs to thrive in some areas of the world and not in others; and, alternatively, work that ‘securitizes’ global health and thereby focuses on the ‘risk’ posed by NTDs to populations in non-endemic countries. This article examines this schism through the example of Chagas disease.