Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A quantitative and cytological study of oogonia and oocytes in the foetal and neonatal rat

The ovaries of foetal and neonatal rats (14·5 days post coitum to 2 days post partum) have been studied in order to correlate morphological changes in oogonia and developing oocytes with fluctuations in their numbers. The chromosomal configurations of germ cells at different developmental stages were examined in squash preparations. A volumetric method was devised for the separate estimation of the populations of normal and degenerating germ cells. Counts were made of the numbers of mitoses in germinal and somatic cells up to 19·5 days p. c. Oogonia are mitotically active up to 17·5 days p. c. The onset of the leptotene phase of meiosis in the majority of oocytes (17·5 to 18·5 days p. c.) coincides with a sharp decline in the number of normal oogonial divisions. The duration of the zygotene phase appears to be considerably shorter (19·5 to 20·5 days p. c.) than that of pachytene (range 20·5 days p. c. to 2 days p. p.). Oocytes in the diplotene phase are typically seen at 2 days p. p. The number of germ cells attaining the dictyate or resting phase is small on the first day after birth, but increases on the second. Four different ‘waves’ of degeneration of germ cells were observed. The first, affecting a small number of oogonia, occurs before the onset of meiosis, and is characterized by pyknosis. The second is characterized by degeneration of dividing oogonia which probably sets in before or at mitotic prophase. Such ‘atretic divisions’ reach their peak at 18·5 days p. c. , when the frequency of normal mitotic divisions is relatively low. The third affects germ cells after they have entered meiotic prophase (particularly at the pachytene stage); the chromosomes condense and the cytoplasm becomes eosinophil (referred to as ‘Z’ cells). The fourth affects germ cells at the diplotene phase. Oogonial mitoses are associated with an increase in the population of germ cells from 12000 on day 14·5 to 71000 on day 17·5 p. c. The appearance of ‘atretic divisions’ is largely responsible for the reduction of about 3000 in the number of normal germ cells between days 17·5 and 18·5. Successful mitotic divisions, on the other hand, account for the increase of about 4000 in the total number of germ cells during the same interval. From day 18·5 onwards, both the total number and the number of normal germ cells decreases steadily, first due to the occurrence of ‘atretic divisions’ and later to degeneration of 'Z' cells and atretic cells at diplotene. Thus by 2 days after birth, the peak number of normal germ cells (64000 at 17·5 days p. c.) has fallen to 19000, the total population (peak 75000 at 18·5 days p. c.) being reduced to 27000. The majority of germ cells appear to be eliminated from the ovary within 24 h of the onset of degeneration.
Effect of different calcium sources and calcium intake on shell quality and bone characteristics of laying hens at sexual maturity and end of lay.

The influence of supplemental calcium given in flour or granular form and calcium intake on bone properties and egg characteristics of brown-egg laying hens was investigated at sexual maturity and at end of lay. Physical and mechanical bone characteristics were determined using 3-point and torsional tests. There was no effect of calcium source on the measured bone characteristics at sexual maturity. Bone breaking strength was positively correlated with both stiffness and total calcium intake. At 72 weeks, birds which had been offered additional calcium of either source exhibited considerably higher bone breaking strength than did control birds. Bone stiffness of birds offered limestone granules was significantly higher than control birds. Regression analysis showed strong relationships between calcium intake, bone stiffness and breaking strength. Shell quality was significantly better for birds consuming limestone in a granular form than for control birds. Shell quality for birds given limestone flour was intermediate between the other two groups. It is concluded that calcium supplementation increases egg quality, mechanical properties of the bone and as a consequence, may be able to reduce the risk of broken bones at the end of laying period. These effects are independent of the form of the supplemented calcium.
Effects of abiotic factors and biocontrol agents on chlamydospore formation in Fusarium graminearum and Fusarium sporotrichioides

Abstract Chlamydospores are vital asexual resting cells, which allow most of the Fusarium pathogenic strains to retain their longevity, thus ensuring survival of viable reproductive cells. This study suggested that both abiotic – extreme temperature and growth media, and biotic – antagonistic Bacillus amyloliquefaciens SMCD 518 and mycoparasititic Acremonium strictum SMCD 504 are natural stressors able to shift chlamydospores formation in Fusarium graminearum and F. sporotrichioides under in vitro conditions. In F. sporotrichioides, Minimal Conversion Media (MCM) with mannitol supplement induced high chlamydospore size, and chain abundance at optimal 21°C and extreme 37°C temperatures, respectively. F. graminearum showed low chlamydospore formation on MCM–mannitol, even when exposed to 37°C under prolonged 5 days incubation. Generally, F. sporotrichioides has higher chlamydospore abundance, longer chlamydospore chain, and production rapidity compared to F. graminearum in both abiotic and biotic treatments. However, biocontrol bacteria and mycoparasite posed minimal effects on chlamydospore formation, as compared to abiotic stressors, thus controlling the Fusaria but not triggering them to generate chlamydospores as protection shields.
Détection de Vibrio cholerae dans un écosystème marin par hybridation moléculaire après culture sur un milieu sélectif

Une technique moleculaire d'hybridation sur colonies bacteriennes a ete developpee pour rechercher les souches de Vibrio cholerae dans l'eau de l'estuaire de la Rance. Une sequence de 22 nucleotides selectionnee a l'extremite de la region 16S de l'espace intergenique 16S-23S de l'ADN de V. cholerae a ete marquee a la digoxygenine (DIG). La specificite et la sensibilite de la sonde ont ete demontrees d'une part par hybridation avec des souches de V. cholerae provenant de la Collection de l'Institut Pasteur et de la collection du Centre National de Reference des Vibrions et du Cholera, d'autre part par l'absence d'hybridation avec des souches appartenant a 31 autres especes du genre Vibrio et a 5 autres genres bacteriens. L'hybridation sur colonies permet une detection specifique de V. cholerae dans des echantillons d'eau parmi une population microbienne heterogene, apres enrichissement puis isolement sur milieux selectifs, la gelose TCBS classiquement utilisee pour la recherche des vibrions ou un milieu mANA, non inhibiteur mais favorisant la croissance de cette espece. Elle permet aussi de detecter V. cholerae apres etalement direct de l'echantillon d'eau sur le milieu GNAm, sans etape prealable d'enrichissement, ce qui ameliore la sensibilite de la detection de V. cholerae d'un facteur 10. Cette methode pourrait s'appliquer a la surveillance microbiologique de l'environnement marin et des produits qui en sont issus.
The Diversity of Self-Incompatibility Systems in Flowering Plants

: Flowering plants are the most successful group of land plants and dominate the earth's vegetation with around 300 000 species. This success is, in part, the consequence of a set of unique reproductive innovations that evolved with the flower. Most notable of these innovations were the closed carpel and double fertilization. Closed carpels permitted the evolution of effective mechanisms for pollen selection and discrimination, while double fertilization leading to endosperm formation allowed for more efficient utilization of resources because reserves are only allocated to the seed after fertilization. This review will focus on the most important and best understood mechanism of pollen discrimination, self-incompatibility (SI), a genetically determined pollen recognition system that prevents self-fertilization and fertilization by other individuals with the same incompatibility phenotype. In recent years much progress has been made towards elucidating the molecular mechanisms of SI operating in three distinct SI systems found in the Brassicaceae, Solanaceae and Papaveraceae, respectively. More recent molecular data obtained from the Poaceae, Convolvulaceae and Asteraceae, however, suggest that other molecular mechanisms of SI exist. A survey of classical genetic studies of SI predicts yet further potential molecular mechanisms of SI. We discuss the evolutionary implications of this apparent diversity in molecular pathways leading to SI and stress the need for more molecular studies of different SI systems.
Giardia and Cryptosporidium in raw and finished water

The American Water System has conducted extensive monitoring of its operations since 1988. Analysis of 347 surface water samples collected between 1988 and 1993 showed that the prevalence rate of Giardia and Cryptosporidium was 53.9 percent and 60.2 percent, respectively. But because the parasite assay does not indicate viability or virulence, these results do not necessarily indicate that these water systems were at risk from waterborne pathogens. To supplement coagulation and filtration, the average system will have to apply sufficient disinfection to reduce viable Giardia levels by 3.1 log 10 . An analysis of existing disinfection practices shows that most systems are already applying disinfectant at a level sufficient to reduce Giardia levels. However, the proposed Disinfectants/Disinfection By-products (D/DBP) Rule may hamper the ability of water utilities to apply sufficient disinfection under current operating conditions. Careful integration of the D/DBP and the Enhanced Surface Water Treatment rule is encouraged.
Millimeter-wave full duplex radios

mm-Wave has emerged as an attractive high-speed wireless communication paradigm owing to the high available bandwidth at mm-wave frequencies. Full-Duplex has the potential to double the available capacity in the mm-wave bands by enabling simultaneous radio transmission and reception. While full-duplex has been extensively studied in sub-6 GHz bands, this paper exposes the unique challenges in porting this capability to mm-wave frequencies. We present mmFD, the first comprehensive system design of a mm-wave full-duplex platform. mmFD achieves large self-interference cancellation through novel designs at the antenna, analog and digital frontends. We exploit the small wavelength of mm-wave to achieve strong signal isolation between transmit and receive antennas. We further build a custom IC that achieves high-bandwidth analog cancellation at mm-wave frequencies. Finally, we present digital self-interference cancellation algorithms that address the unique hardware impairments observed at mm-wave frequencies. A detailed evaluation of mmFD demonstrates 84 dB of cancellation and 1.7X throughput gain over equivalent half-duplex systems in rich indoor settings.
Modelling carbon isotope fractionation in tree rings based on effective evapotranspiration and soil water status

Environmental influences on carbon isotope fractionation in tree rings require further elucidation in order to use this parameter as a biological marker of climatic variations. δ13C values in tree-ring cellulose of beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) were analysed for the period from 1950 to 1990. A bioclimatic model of water balance was used to give the actual evapotranspiration as well as the soil water content on a daily basis. δ13C shows a significant decrease from –24·5‰ to –25‰ over this period. Internal CO2 concentration changes from 200 to 220 ppm in relation with the rise of atmospheric CO2. Beside a slight non-significant inter-individual variation, a large year-to-year variation exists. The relative extractable soil water of July, combined with the value of δ13C for the previous year, predicts as much as 70% of this variance. Air temperature or precipitation accounted for less variation. δ13C is strongly correlated with basal area increment, but appeared a more reliable indicator of water status at the stand level.
Face Image Deblurring: A Data-Driven Strategy

Nowadays remarkable progress has been observed in facial detection as a core part of computer vision. Nevertheless, motion blur still presents substantial challenges in face detection. The most recent face image deblurring methods make oversimplifying presumption and fail to restore the highly structured face shape/identity information. Therefore, we propose a data-driven based face image deblurring approach that foster facial detection and identity preservation. The proposed model includes two sequential data streams: Out of any supervision the ﬁrst has been trained on real unlabeled clear/blurred data to generate a close realistic blurred image data during its inference. On the other hand, the generated labeled data has been exploited with by a second supervised learning-based data steam to learn the mapping function from blur domain to the clear one. We utilize the restored data to conduct an experimentation on face detection task. The experimental evaluation demonstrates the outperformance of our results and supports our system design and training strategy.
Ghost calls from operational 4G call systems: IMS vulnerability, call DoS attack, and countermeasure

IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) is an essential framework for providing 4G/5G multimedia services. It has been deployed worldwide to support two call services: VoLTE (Voice over LTE) and VoWi-Fi (Voice over Wi-Fi). VoWi-Fi enables telephony calls over the Wi-Fi network to complement VoLTE. In this work, we uncover that the VoWi-Fi signaling session can be hijacked to maliciously manipulate the IMS call operation. An adversary can easily make ghost calls to launch a stealthy call DoS (Denial of Service) attack against specific cellular users. Only phone numbers, but not any malware or network information, are required from the victims. This sophisticated attack harnesses a design defect of the IMS call state machine, but not simply flooding or a crash trigger. To stealthily detect attackable phones at run time, we exploit a vulnerability of the 4G network infrastructure, call information leakage, which we explore using machine learning. We validate these vulnerabilities in operational 4G networks of 4 top-tier carriers across Asia and North America countries with 7 phone brands. Our result shows that the call DoS attack can prevent the victims from receiving incoming calls up to 99.0% time without user awareness. We finally propose and evaluate recommended solutions.
Examining the Impact of Internet Use on TV Viewing: Details Make a Difference

What consequences does the widespread adoption of the Internet have, both for how Americans spend their time and on their overall psychological well-being? The Internet is used for a wide variety of purposes: communicating with friends and family, meeting new people, acquiring information about news, health, and other topics, entertainment, and commerce. Most research that examines the Internet’s impact on social life has ignored this diversity of use, treating aggregate Internet usage as the independent variable by comparing users versus non-users, heavy versus light users, or early versus late adopters. Most research has also used cross-sectional data, thereby confounding the characteristics of Internet users with the consequences of using the Internet. This paper reports data from a national longitudinal survey, disaggregating Internet use into discrete types of use, and employing longitudinal analyses to test causal relationships. Our results show that cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses lead to different conclusions and that the precise ways that we use the Internet matter. We illustrate these points by examining the effects of Internet use on respondents’ TV viewing habits.
Condition of stream ecosystems in the US: an overview of the first national assessment

Abstract The Wadeable Streams Assessment (WSA) provided the first statistically sound summary of the ecological condition of streams and small rivers in the US. Information provided in the assessment filled an important gap in meeting the requirements of the US Clean Water Act. The purpose of the WSA was to: 1) report on the ecological condition of all wadeable, perennial streams and rivers within the conterminous US, 2) describe the biological condition of these systems with direct measures of aquatic life, and 3) identify and rank the relative importance of chemical and physical stressors affecting stream and river condition. The assessment included perennial wadeable streams and rivers that accounted for 95% of the length of flowing waters in the US. The US Environmental Protection Agency, states, and tribes collected chemical, physical, and biological data at 1392 randomly selected sites. Nationally, 42% of the length of US streams was in poor condition compared to best available reference sites in their ecoregions, 25% was in fair condition, and 28% was in good condition. Results were reported for 3 major regions: Eastern Highlands, Plains and Lowlands, and West. In the West, 45% of the length of wadeable flowing waters was in good condition. In the Eastern Highlands, only 18% of the length of wadeable streams and rivers was in good condition and 52% was in poor condition. In the Plains and Lowlands, almost 30% of the length of wadeable streams and rivers was in good condition and 40% was in poor condition. The most widespread stressors observed nationally and in each of the 3 major regions were N, P, riparian disturbance, and streambed sediments. Excess nutrients and excess streambed sediments had the highest impact on biological condition; streams scoring poor for these stressors were at 2 to 3× higher risk of having poor biological condition than were streams that scored in the good range for the same stressors.
Shell Utilization by the Hermit Crab Pagurus lanuginosus: Sexual Differences and Interspecific Comparisons

Differences in shell preference and utilization patterns among sympatric species of hermit crabs and between males and females of Pagurus lanuginosus were investigated.The shell utilization pattern of P.lanuginosus differed from those of three other species.While P.middendorffii and P.filholi crabs of •£•¥ 3mm in shield length frequently occupied shells of Reticunassa fraterculus,comparably-sized P. lanuginosus did not.Most P.lanuginosus occupied shells of Chlorostoma lischkei and Homalopoma sangarense.The order of shell species preference was similar in both males and females of P.lanuginosus of>3mm in shield length;slight sexual differences were found in the shell preferences of smaller crabs. In shell size preference experiments,the relationships between crab size and size of chosen shell were similar between sexes for each shell species tested.The similarity in shell-size and-species preference and utiliza tion patterns between males and females might be due to weak sexual selection for male body size.
Burrow Use by Salamandrella keyserlingii (Caudata: Hynobiidae)

Abstract We determined the use of refugia by salamanders during daytime in summer and characteristics of these refugia in Salamandrella keyserlingii at Shaamar, Mongolia. Refugia were located at mean distance of 4.17 m from the edge of the water. Among these refugia, blind tunnels within grasslands (mean distance = 7.50 m) were farther apart than open burrows distributed along a steep slope of a pond-shore (2.49 m). Subterranean burrows having mean depth of 15.4 cm were utilized temporarily (individuals captured only once) with proportional habitat use of 0.704 (19/27 refugia). Mean temperature was lower in burrows/under logs (16.22°C) than in ambient air (26.70°C) or among grasslands (25.10°C). Mean relative humidity was higher in burrows/under logs (85.54%) or among grasslands (75.53%) than in ambient air (48.33%). Mean illumination intensity was 27.0 lx in burrows/under logs and 17,188.1 lx on the surface out of refugia. Mean soil pH was 7.52 beneath salamanders in refugia.
Autism detection based on eye movement sequences on the web: a scanpath trend analysis approach

Autism diagnostic procedure is a subjective, challenging and expensive procedure and relies on behavioral, historical and parental report information. In our previous, we proposed a machine learning classifier to be used as a potential screening tool or used in conjunction with other diagnostic methods, thus aiding established diagnostic methods. The classifier uses eye movements of people on web pages but it only considers non-sequential data. It achieves the best accuracy by combining data from several web pages and it has varying levels of accuracy on different web pages. In this present paper, we investigate whether it is possible to detect autism based on eye-movement sequences and achieve stable accuracy across different web pages to be not dependent on specific web pages. We used Scanpath Trend Analysis (STA) which is designed for identifying a trending path of a group of users on a web page based on their eye movements. We first identify trending paths of people with autism and neurotypical people. To detect whether or not a person has autism, we calculate the similarity of his/her path to the trending paths of people with autism and neurotypical people. If the path is more similar to the trending path of neurotypical people, we classify the person as a neurotypical person. Otherwise, we classify her/him as a person with autism. We systematically evaluate our approach with an eye-tracking dataset of 15 verbal and highly-independent people with autism and 15 neurotypical people on six web pages. Our evaluation shows that the STA approach performs better on individual web pages and provides more stable accuracy across different pages.
Natural deuterium and oxygen‐18 enrichment in leaf water of cotton plants grown under wet and dry conditions: evidence for water compartmentation and its dynamics

Abstract. Significant differences in leaf water oxygen and hydrogen isotopic composition were observed between cotton plants grown under wet and dry conditions. The magnitude of the differences could be fully explained by the conventional model that describes the isotopic composition of an evaporating water pool under steady state conditions. The results indicate that leaf water isotopic composition is strongly influenced by transpiration rate via its effects on relative humidity adjacent to the leaf surface and on the isotopic composition of the air moisture. Our application of the model, however, provides evidence that leaf water must consist of a mixture of several isotopically distinct pools. These pools are suggested to reside in the symplast, in the cell walls and intercellular spaces and in the veins. A model is proposed suggesting that only the water residing in the cell walls and the intercellular spaces (the transpiration pool) interacts directly with the external environment. The large symplastic pool responds to the external environment to a limited extent via its relatively slow exchange with water in the transpiration pool. It is likely that the isotopic composition of water in the symplastic pool is strongly buffered against shortterm environmental variations, a possibility that would have important implications for the isotopic conditions under which organic matter biosynthesis occurs.