Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Insight Into the Virulence Related Secretion Systems, Fimbriae, and Toxins in O2:K1 Escherichia coli Isolated From Bovine Mastitis

Mastitis remains a major infection of dairy cows and an important issue for the dairy farmers, and Escherichia coli (E. coli) bovine mastitis is a disease of significant economic importance in the dairy industry. Our study identified six isolates belong to phylogroup B2 from 69 bovine mastitis E. coli strains. Except for one serotype O1 strain, all group B2 isolates were identified into serotype O2 and showed significantly higher mortality in the mouse infection than other phylogroups' strains. Genomic analyses and further tests were performed to examine the role of secretion systems, fimbriae, and toxins during the systemic infection of O2:K1 strain BCE049. Two integral T6SS loci and three predicted effectors clusters were found to assemble the functional T6SS complex and deliver diverse toxic effectors to modulate bacterial virulence in the mouse infection model. A total of four T4SS loci were harbored in the BCE049 genome, three of them are encoded in different plasmids, respectively, whereas the last one locates within the bacterial chromosome at FQU84_16715 to FQU84_16760, and was significantly involved in the bacterial pathogenicity. Numerous predicted pilus biosynthesis gene loci were found in the BCE049 genome, whereas most of them lost long fragments encoding key genes for the pili assembly. Unexpectedly, a type IV pilus gene locus locating at FQU84_01405 to FQU84_01335 in the plasmid 2, was found to be required for the full virulence of mastitis strain BCE049. It should be noted that a genetic neighborhood inserted with diverse genes is encoded by the plasmid 1, which harbors three prominent toxins including β-hemolysin, cytotoxic necrotizing factor 2 and cytolethal distending toxin type III. Consequent studies verified that these toxins significantly contributed to the bacterial pathogenicity. These findings provide a molecular blueprint for understanding the underlying mechanisms employed by the bovine mastitis E. coli to colonize in host and cause systemic infection.
Family Embeddedness and Medical Students’ Interest for Entrepreneurship as an Alternative Career Choice: Evidence From China

Joining the ongoing academic debates around medical students’ alternative career choices, this research examines the role of family in medical school attendees’ entrepreneurial intention (EI). Specifically, this study decomposes the multidimensionality of family embeddedness and highlights the mediated nature of the family–EI relationship. The empirical analysis relied on data from graduation year medical students from diverse geographical locations and from different institution types in China. These data were collected from a total of 687 questionnaires covering the basic information of individual, parents, and family composition, as well as the measuring scale of EI. Examining medical students’ EI and its antecedents provide a dual-missing-link in the extant knowledge, i.e., it adds the medical school piece to the overall picture of university students’ EI, and equally important, it de-trivializes entrepreneurship from the extant theorizations of medical students’ career choices. This study also bears implications for educators, practitioners, and policymakers interested in better understanding EI of medical school attendees and family embeddedness.
Electrochemical Aptasensors – Recent Achievements and Perspectives

This article reviews recent achievements in developing aptamer-based electrochemical biosensors (electrochemical aptasensors). Aptamers are single stranded DNA or RNA molecules with high specificity to various ligands. Their specificity is comparable and in certain cases even higher than those of antibodies. In contrast to antibodies, aptamers are prepared by an in vitro selection procedure developed simultaneously in the early 1990s by L. Gold and A. Ellington. Due to their stability and the possibility of chemical modification aptamers can be immobilized on various supports and serve as artificial receptors in biosensors. The first aptasensors developed in the second half of 1990s were based on optical detection. However, in early 2000 substantial interest arose to the development of electrochemical aptasensors. It has been shown that due to their simplicity and fast response they represent an excellent tool in practical applications. The main focus of this review is to discuss the configuration of aptamers and electrochemical methods for detecting aptamers–analyte interactions. We will also provide a brief history of aptamer development, along with molecular structure and methods of aptamer engineering. Methods for immobilizing aptamers onto a solid support are also discussed.
Soil Texture and Residue Addition Effects on Soil Phosphorus Transformations

The effect of soil texture on P transformation and the extent and timing of crop residue decomposition affects both P availability and the fate of the P added in the residue. Our objectives were to examine P transformation in sand, sandy loam, and loam soils during surface or incorporated wheat (Thiticum aestivum L.) straw decomposition with and without N and P addition. Packed soil cores (4.8 cm diameter by 2.5 cm deep) were incubated in the dark for 10, 30, 60, and 90 d at 25°C and - 0.033 MPa initial soil water pressure. We determined CO 2 respiration, labile inorganic P (Pi), labile organic P (Po), microbial P, NaOH-extractable Pi and Po, and HCl-extractable Pi. Soil texture had a greater effect on P transformation than did residue placement. Microbial P was greatest at 10 d and was 13.0, 9.8, and 6.5 mg kg -1 for the loam, sandy loam, and sand, respectively. Labile Pi was lowest at 10 d and was 22.9, 18.0, and 11.5 mg kg -1 for the loam, sandy loam, and sand, respectively. More of the nutrient P added remained as labile Pi when the residue was surface applied. Residue placement did not affect microbial P, indicating that the effect of placement was indirect. Phosphorus transformations were closely linked to microbial activity and C dynamics.
On the Start of Nucleation in Boiling Heat Transfer

A series of experiments was conducted to provide additional information on the mechanism of bubble formation in boiling liquids. A O.OlO-in. -diam wire was immersed in a vessel filled with water. The entire assembly was claened and then subjected to a pressure of 15,000 psia for periods in excess of 15 minutes. The pressure was then reduced to atmospheric and the wire heated electrically. The results showed that, for properly cleaned wires, nucleation occurs only at a temperature considerably above the normal boiling point. As soon as nucleation does take place, however, the wire temperature abruptly drops. After the drop, the heat transfer from the wire does not show any further effects of the pressurization process. The burnout point in particular remains essentially unchanged.
University of Birmingham Inflammation and skeletal muscle wasting during cachexia

disease and cancer, considerable interest has revolved around their role in mediating cachexia. This has been supported by association studies that report increased levels of pro-inﬂammatory cytokines such as tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF- α ) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) in some, but not all, cancers and in chronic inﬂammatory diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA). In addition, preclinical studies including animal disease models have provided a substantial body of evidence implicating a causal contribution of systemic inﬂammation to cachexia. The presence of inﬂammatory cytokines can affect skeletal muscle through several direct mechanisms, relying on activation of the corresponding receptor expressed by muscle, and resulting in inhibition of muscle protein synthesis (MPS), elevation of catabolic activity through the ubiquitin-proteasomal system (UPS) and autophagy, and impairment of myogenesis. Additionally, systemic inﬂammatory mediators indirectly contribute to muscle wasting through dysregulation of tissue and organ systems, including GCs via the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, the digestive system leading to anorexia-cachexia, and alterations in liver and adipocyte behavior, which subsequently impact on muscle. Finally, myokines secreted by skeletal muscle itself in response to inﬂammation have been implicated as autocrine and endocrine mediators of cachexia, as well as potential modulators of this debilitating condition. While inﬂammation has been shown to play a pivotal role in cachexia development, further understanding how these cytokines contribute to disease progression is required to reveal biomarkers or diagnostic tools to help identify at risk patients, or enable the design of targeted therapies to prevent or delay the progression of cachexia.
Body Composition and Risk of Non- Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease; A Case Control Study

Background: While evidence has been highlight that obesity may be associated to the increased incidence of Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), these data have depended on defective measures of obesity such as body mass index (BMI), and usually have not clearly well-known relationship between body composition (including fat within the nonfat mass) with NAFLAD. Methods: In a case control study of people aged 20–75 years, we directly measured body composition (using bioelectrical impedance analysis), height, weight and waist and hip circumferences who referred to radiology clinics in Kermanshah, Iran. Dietary intake was assessed by the food frequency questionnaire (FFQ). Results: Among 231 people examined, 103 cases with NAFLD and 119 as control were established. The risk of NAFLD was positively associated with higher BMI and the components of the body composition. These associations were strengthened after adjusted for potential confounders including gender, age, marital status, education, smoking, alcohol consumption, and physical activity Conclusion: An increasing prevalence of obesity may be associated with the increasing incidence of NAFLD as observed in many populations. We observed an increased risk of NAFLD associated with increased BMI, central adiposity and the fat component of weight, but found no association with nonfat mass.
Association between metabolic syndrome and bone mineral density among menopausal Saudi women: Case-control study

Background: Metabolic syndrome (MetS) and osteoporosis are two of the world's major healthcare issues. There are several studies which explored the association between MetS and bone mineral density (BMD), but all of them are cross-sectional. These studies cover all populations, including expatriated, which did not determine the actual problem among Saudi women. This is the first case-control study that determines the causal relationship between MetS and BMD. The objective of this study is to determine the relationship between metabolic syndrome and bone mass density among Saudi menopausal women in Eastern Province - Saudi Arabia. Methods: It’s a case-control study and 380 menopausal Saudi women were selected through simple random sampling. They were divided into 190 cases with osteoporosis and 190 without osteoporosis. Bone Mineral Density (BMD) at the total hip was determined using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA). T score was calculated. The association between the risk factors of MetS and bone mineral density was determined by binary logistic regression analysis using SPSS (statistical package of social science) software. Results: Among women, the prevalence of MetS was substantially higher in those with osteoporosis. The Mets is positively correlated with bone mineral density. (r=0.08, p=0.051). The occurrence of MetS was associated with increased osteoporosis among Saudi women (B=0.004; p=0.005) after adjustment of confounders. The existence of obesity was significantly associated with increased odds of Bone marrow density among women (OR 2.56; 95 % CI, 2.22-3.44; p=0.030) after adjustment of confounders. Conclusion: The incidence of MetS was associated with osteoporosis in Saudi women.
Understanding and Detecting International Revenue Share Fraud

—Premium rate phone numbers are often abused by malicious parties (e.g., via various phone scams, mobile malware) as a way to obtain monetary beneﬁt. This beneﬁt comes from the ‘revenue share’ mechanism that enables the owner of the premium rate number to receive some part of the call revenue for each minute of the call trafﬁc generated towards this number. This work focuses on International Revenue Share Fraud (IRSF), which abuses regular international phone numbers as the so-called International Premium Rate Numbers (IPRN) . IRSF often involves multiple parties (e.g., a fraudulent telecom operator in collaboration with a premium rate service provider) who collect and share the call revenue, and is usually combined with other fraud schemes to generate call trafﬁc without payment. Although this fraud scheme has been around for several years, it remains to be one of the most common phone fraud schemes, reportedly leading to billions of dollars of losses every year. In this paper we explore the IRSF ecosystem from multiple angles, via: (i) A telephony honeypot that observes IRSF attempts towards an unused phone number range (i.e., a phone number gray space ), (ii) A dataset of more than 3 Million test IPRNs and more than 206K test call logs we collected from several online IPRN service providers during 4 years, and ﬁnally, (iii) A real-world call data set from a small European operator, involving 689K call records, that we analyze to ﬁnd IRSF cases. By leveraging our observations from (ii), we propose several machine learning features that can be used in IRSF detection. We validate our approach on the dataset in (iii), achieving 98% accuracy with a 0.28% false positive rate in detecting the fraudulent calls.
420-427 Basari N.pmd

Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus play an important role in spreading dengue and chikungunya virus in Malaysia. Currently dengue fever is still the most important threat to this country. The number of dengue cases are on the rise in some states despite the efforts made by the government to keep the surroundings of houses clean and free from Aedes breeding sites. This study was carried out to determine the breeding sites of Aedes in Kuala Terengganu. Samplings were carried out between August 2009 until February 2010 at six study sites from both the urban and rural areas. Samples collected were counted and the distribution classes (class 1 (C1) to class 5 (C5)) were determined. Water tank, glass container and used paint bucket were found to be the most preferable breeding sites in the study areas. Many Ae. aegypti larvae were collected in the urban areas and the highest number of Ae. albopictus larvae were collected from the rural areas. As for the larval distributions, Ae. aegypti recorded a frequent distribution (C4: 60.1-80%) in urban areas while Ae. albopictus recorded infrequent distribution (C2: 20.1-40%). Frequent distributions of Aedes larvae were recorded when relative humidity is high. Apart from environmental factors, human density also could affect the distributions of Aedes larvae in the urban area.
Driving Digital Transformation During a Pandemic: Case Study of Virtual Collaboration in a German Hospital

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has not only changed the private lives of millions of people but has significantly affected the collaboration of medical specialists throughout health care systems worldwide. Hospitals are making changes to their regular operations to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 while ensuring the treatment of emergency patients. These substantial changes affect the typical work setting of clinicians and require the implementation of organizational arrangements. Objective In this study, we aim to increase our understanding of how digital transformation drives virtual collaboration among clinicians in hospitals in times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods We present the lessons learned from an exploratory case study in which we observed the introduction of an information technology (IT) system for enhancing collaboration among clinicians in a German hospital. The results are based on 16 semistructured interviews with physicians from various departments and disciplines; the interviews were generalized to better understand and interpret the meaning of the statements. Results Three key lessons and recommendations explain how digital transformation ensures goal-driven collaboration among clinicians. First, we found that implementing a disruptive change requires alignment of the mindsets of the stakeholders. Second, IT-enabled collaboration presupposes behavioral rules that must be followed. Third, transforming antiquated processes demands a suitable technological infrastructure. Conclusions Digital transformation is being driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the rapid introduction of IT-enabled collaboration reveals grievances concerning the digital dissemination of medical information along the patient treatment path. To avoid being caught unprepared by future crises, digital transformation must be further driven to ensure collaboration, and the diagnostic and therapeutic process must be opened to disruptive strategies.
FULL WAVEFORM INVERSION IN TIME-DOMAIN FOR GEOPHYSICAL APPLICATIONS

Most common seismic processing techniques require a velocity model to image the subsurface based on the recorded wave data. An approach that allows one to recover the velocity field is to cast the parameter recovery as a suitable inverse problem. This involves minimizing a least-squares misfit between synthetic and observed data. To solve the inverse problem, the adjoint-state method, first developed in [2], is employed. This approach originated from control theory [4]. Then A. Tarantola popularized it for seismic inversion in [6]. The resulting method is based on an augmented (associated) Lagrangian, which is obtained by adjoining the forward problem (the constraint) to the misfit functional, and by adding a possible regularization (Tikhonov-like) term. Then the first-order optimality conditions are obtained by enforcing the stationarity of the Lagrangian, yielding the socalled Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) system. The adjoint-state variables evolve backwards in time, and provide a natural measure of the sensitivity of the functional to changes in the model. This approach is attractive from the numerical viewpoint because the computation of the gradient of the misfit functional with respect to the model parameters amounts to performing an evaluation of the forward and of the backward modeling. The associated cost is often almost independent of the number of model parameters, which is not always the case when the Fréchet derivatives of the state variables with respect to the model parameters are directly computed.
Building Healthy Recommendation Sequences for Everyone: A Safe Reinforcement Learning Approach

A key consideration in the design of recommender systems is the long term well-being of users. In this work, we formalize this challenge as a multi-objective safe reinforcement learning problem, balancing positive user feedback and the “healthiness” of user trajectories. We note that in some cases, naively balancing these objectives can lead to unhealthy experiences, even if unlikely, still occurring in a small subset of users. Therefore, we examine a distributional notion of recommendation safety. We propose a reinforcement learning approach that optimizes for positive feedback from users while simultaneously optimizing for the health of worst-case users to remain high. To empirically validate our method, we develop a research simulation environment motivated by a MovieLens recommendation setting that considers exposure to violence as a proxy for unhealthy recommendations. We demonstrate that our method reduces unhealthy recommendations to the most vulnerable users without sacrificing much user satisfaction.
The role of plasma presepsin levels in determining the incidence of septic shock and mortality in patients with sepsis.

INTRODUCTION The present study aimed to investigate the role of plasma presepsin in the early detection of septic shock and in determining the prognosis and mortality of patients with sepsis. METHODOLOGY The study was conducted in the emergency department between 1 January 2017 and 1 July 2017. A total of 106 patients 18 years of age or older who were diagnosed with sepsis according to the quick sequential organ failure assessment (qSOFA) criteria were included in this prospective study. The patients' symptoms, vital signs, additional diseases, demographic attributes, laboratory results, Mortality in Emergency Department Sepsis (MEDS) scores, imaging findings and treatments were recorded. Moreover, the patients' blood samples were collected to measure plasma presepsin, procalcitonin and CRP levels. RESULTS In total, 55.7% of the patients were female. The median age of the patients was 78 (24-103) years, and their 30-day mortality rate was 67%. The presepsin level was significantly higher in the sepsis group than in the healthy control group (p < 0.001). The presepsin levels did not differ significantly between the sepsis and septic shock groups (p = 0.12). Similarly, the procalcitonin levels did not differ significantly between the sepsis and septic shock groups (p > 0.05). There was no significant difference in the presepsin, procalcitonin and CRP levels between survivor and non-survivor patients (p = 0.74). CONCLUSIONS The plasma presepsin level was found to be ineffective in determining the incidence of septic shock and mortality in patients with sepsis in the emergency department.
Connection between νn→ ν̄n̄ reactions and n-n̄ oscillations via additional Higgs triplets

In this work, we investigate the connection and compatibility between νn→ ν̄n̄ reactions and n-n̄ oscillations based on the SU(3)c×SU(2)L×U(1) symmetry model with additional Higgs triplets. We explore the possibility that the scattering process νn→ ν̄n̄ produced by low-energy solar neutrinos gives rise to an unavoidable background in the measurements of n-n̄ oscillations. We focus on two different scenarios, depending on whether the (B − L) symmetry could be broken. We analyze the interplay of the various constraints on the two processes and their observable consequences. In the scenario where both (B+L) and (B−L) could be broken, we point out that if all the requirements, mainly arising from the type-II seesaw mechanism, are satisfied, the parameter space would be severely constrained. In this case, although the masses of the Higgs triplet bosons could be within the reach of a direct detection at the LHC or future high-energy experiments, the predicted n-n̄ oscillation times would be completely beyond the detectable regions of the present experiments. In both scenarios, the present experiments are unable to distinguish a νn→ ν̄n̄ reaction event from a n-n̄ oscillation event within the accessible energy range. Nevertheless, if any of the two processes is detected, there could be signal associated with new physics beyond the Standard Model.