Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Histopathologic features of male domestic cat (Felis domestica) testes induced by bisphenol-A orally

Infertility in cat becomes a serious problem in pet community since many compounds of infertility-caused can be found widely in the environment. One of the compounds causing infertility in mammals is Bisphenol-A (BPA), which is known as an estrogenic compound. The purpose of this research is to observe the changes in testicular histology of male domestic cat (Felis domestica) induced by BPA orally. Sample used in this study were 24 male domestic cats divided into 4 groups, namely the group 1 as control, group 2, 3 and 4 were treated with BPA about 5, 10 and 100 mg/kg bodyweight, respectively for 5 days. The results showed that the estrogenic effect of BPA affects the reproductive system of the cat. The effects of BPA in cat included decrease in the amounts of spermatozoa, vacuolization of seminiferous tubules cells, degeneration of Leydig cells, degeneration of tubular epithelial cells, irregular forms of the germ, interstitial tissue hemorrhage, debris cell filled the lumen of seminiferous tubules. These results suggested that BPA can be harmful to the reproductive system of the cat
Edmodo in semi-technical English courses: towards a more practical strategy for language learning/practice

Abstract This study applied Edmodo as a supplementary environment for additional language practice in a semi-technical English course in an EFL context, with a quasi-experimental between-subjects (control versus experimental group) design. In addition to conventional classroom instruction and practice, the experimental group practiced additional language exercises using Edmodo application while the control group participants worked on similar exercises during extended classroom meetings. The results of paired and independent sample t-tests conducted on both groups’ using 48-item, multiple-choice (vocabulary, grammar, and reading comprehension) pre and posttests revealed that while both groups demonstrated a statistically significant performance in the achievement posttest which was administered at the end of the course, the performance of the experimental group was significantly better than the control. The findings suggest that Edmodo is a valuable and cost-effective tool for language learning/practice beyond the physical and temporal confinements of conventional language classrooms.
Mineral oil foliar applications in combination with insecticides affect tomato potato psyllid (Bactericera cockerelli) and beneficial insects in potato crops

ABSTRACT Tomato potato psyllid (TPP), Bactericera cockerelli (Sülc) (Hemiptera: Triozidae), is a vector for Candidatus Liberibacter solanacearum (Lso), a phloem-limited bacterium that causes severe production problems within the New Zealand potato industry. Field trials were conducted over three consecutive growing seasons between 2013 and 2016 at Pukekohe, New Zealand to determine the efficacy of an isoparaffinic petroleum distilled oil (JMS Stylet Oil®), applied as a foliar treatment within an insecticide programme, to control TPP. The effects of treatments on potato yield, tuber dry matter content and the incidence of zebra chip (ZC) in fried potato crisps were also assessed. This research demonstrated that JMS Stylet Oil, when used in combination with insecticides, achieved fewer insecticide applications, leading to reduced numbers of TPP nymphs and eggs on potato foliage, and lower incidence of ZC in deep-fried tuber crisps than weekly insecticide sprays, without adversely affecting plant growth and crop yields.
Fixed Power Allocation Algorithm Based on Time-Shift Pilot in Massive MIMO System

Massive Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) technology can greatly improve the spectrum utilization rate and system anti-interference ability as the key of technologies in modern wireless communication. However, pilot pollution has restricted the further development of large-scale MIMO technology. In this paper, a fixed allocation algorithm based on time-shift pilot to control pilot pollution in massive MIMO systems is proposed. Firstly, signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) expression of the edge terminal based on time-shift pilot is derived, and then we calculate the proportional power allocation factor through the number of terminals. Finally, the uplink data power is reallocated by combining the proposed algorithm and time-shift pilot strategy. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the communication ability of the edge terminal effectively.
Imbalanced Stoichiometric Reservoir Sedimentation Regulates Methane Accumulation in China's Three Gorges Reservoir

The river‐reservoir continuum drives a separation of sedimentation along the longitudinal hydrodynamic gradients, potentially causing imbalanced stoichiometric sedimentation. However, there are still uncertainties regarding the contribution of imbalanced stoichiometric sedimentation to methane emissions along this continuum. A 2‐year field survey and in situ experiments were conducted in China's Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR), a river‐valley‐dammed reservoir. Sediments were trapped and collected to analyze for particulate carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) concentrations of different sizes in the summer flooded and winter dry seasons along the mainstem. Large amounts of sediments were deposited in the middle part of the TGR, particularly in the summer flood season. Hydrodynamic gradients structured imbalanced stoichiometric sedimentation patterns. Averaged particulate C:N:P proportions in the sediment layer along the upper, middle, and lower parts of the TGR in the first 30 years of reservoir operation were estimated to be 68:7:1, 97:8:1, and 151:13:1, respectively. The middle part of the TGR, being the “control point” of methane accumulation based on seasons, exhibited a shift in stoichiometry and stable isotope signatures, indicating that there was likely a shift in sources of POM. P, specifically in smaller size particles (<10 μm), seemed to be the potential key driver that regulates particulate C:N:P in the sediment of the TGR. Its sedimentation, primarily in the middle part of the TGR, contributed to the significant decreases in particulate C/P ratios and could possibly regulate long‐term CH4 accumulation in the reservoir.
Potentials of essential oils of Chenopodium ambrosioides L. and Cupressus sempervirens L. against stored maize pest, Sitophilus zeamais Motschulsky

Maize is cultivated worldwide and used as food for man and animals as well as in fuel production is usually attacked and destroyed during storage by Sitophilus zeamais. With inaccessibility to the highly toxic non-biodegradable synthetic pesticides, poor peasant farmers are left just with the choice of locally available less toxic plants as pesticide alternatives. It is with this in mind that we tested the insecticidal potentials of essential oils of Chenopodium ambrosioides and Cupressus sempervirens against S. zeamais on stored maize. Mortality, progeny inhibition, repellence and persistence were tested. Pesticidal abilities of both oils increased with dose of application. 200 μL/kg of Ch. ambrosioides caused 100% mortality in 72 hours as well as completely inhibited progeny production. 8μL of both oils were repellent to the weevils. The persistence of both oils however dropped to zero within two weeks. Therefore both plants stand recommended as low persistence botanicals against S. zeamais.
Engineered Cardiac Troponin C Structure-Function Studies: Designing Proteins for Treatment of Cardiomyopathies

The functional effects of mutations associated with cardiomyopathies generally suggest that the Ca2+ responsiveness of the myofilament was affected. This functional change appears to be independent of which protein contains the mutation and therefore indicates that the altered Ca2+ sensitivity could be a critical or causative component of disease expression and progression. However, the correlation underlying this functional change with the disease phenotype is still unclear. Thus, in this work a series of single amino acid-substituted cardiac troponin C (cTnC) variants with altered Ca2+ binding affinities were studied to determine how they influence the Ca2+ activation pathway in myofilament contraction and whether this change in Ca2+ binding will result in adaptive changes in intact cardiomyocytes. These variants have not been identified as associated with any cardiomyopathies and therefore may eventually provide clues as to whether altered Ca2+ signaling of myofilament contraction is causal or an adaptive response in diseased hearts. Firstly, we sought structural and mechanistic explanations for the increased/decreased Ca2+ sensitivity of contraction for the cTnC variants using an array of biophysical techniques. The properties of these cTnC variants were characterized by determining their effects on Ca2+ binding ability, cTnC-cTnI interaction and their modulation by PKA phosphorylation in solution, and their structural alterations using molecular dynamic simulations. We found that cTnC variants have different effects on both binding of Ca2+ and cTnI to cTnC, and they also respond differently upon PKA phosphorylation. MD simulations show, for the first time, that cTnC variants could disrupt crucial hydrophobic interactions so that the closed form of cTnC or the Ca2+ binding loop is destabilized. The findings emphasize the importance of the regulatory domain of cTnC's conformation in the regulation of contraction and suggest that mutations in cTnC that alter myofilament Ca2+ sensitivity can do so by modulating Ca2+ and cTnI binding. Secondly, the functional capacity of the Ca2+ desensitizing variants was characterized by expressing them in cardiomyocytes using adenovirus. Additionally, we demonstrate that engineered cTnC variants can correct the disease-induced abnormal Ca2+ binding sensitivity. Our study provides insights for the development of novel therapeutic strategies for the treatment of cardiomyopathies.
Wavelet Scattering Transform and CNN for Closed Set Speaker Identification

In real world applications, the performances of speaker identification systems degrade due to the reduction of both the amount and the quality of speech utterance. For that particular purpose, we propose a speaker identification system where short utterances with few training examples are used for person identification. Therefore, only a very small amount of data involving a sentence of 2-4 seconds is used. To achieve this, we propose a novel raw waveform end-to-end convolutional neural network (CNN) for text-independent speaker identification. We use wavelet scattering transform as a fixed initialization of the first layers of a CNN network, and learn the remaining layers in a supervised manner. The conducted experiments show that our hybrid architecture combining wavelet scattering transform and CNN can successfully perform efficient feature extraction for a speaker identification, even with a small number of short duration training samples.
Shoulder Kinematics Assessment towards Exoskeleton Development

Neuromuscular and sensorimotor degeneration caused by stroke or any other disease significantly reduce the physical, cognitive, and social well-being across the life span. Mostly, therapeutic interventions are employed in order to restore the lost degrees-of-freedom (DOF) caused by such impairments and automating these therapeutic tasks through exoskeletons/robots is becoming a common practice. However, aligning these robotic devices with the complex anatomical and geometrical motions of the joints is very challenging. At the same time, a good alignment is required in order to establish a better synergy of human-exoskeleton system for an effective intervention procedure. In this paper, a case study of an exoskeleton and shoulder joint alignment were studied through different size and orientation impairment models through motion capture data and musculoskeletal modeling in OpenSim. A preliminary result indicates that shoulder elevation is very sensitive to misalignment and varies with shoulder joint axes orientation; this is partly due to drastic displacement of the upper arm axes with respect to the shoulder joint origin during elevation. Additional study and analysis is required to learn any possible restraint on shoulder elevation that could potentially help in the exoskeleton development.
Gingival Biotype- It’s Significance in Dentistry

This review provides an overview about gingival biotype, its characteristics and various methods availablefor its determination. In recent years, gingival biotype has become a subject of considerable interest inthe era of esthetic-driven dentistry. Gingival biotype is a genetically determined trait that describes thefaciopalatal thickness of gingiva. Various methods for measuring biotype have been suggested. Routinedental procedures subject the gingiva to various insults and the biotypes behave differently to it. Therefore,gingival biotype can provide clinicians with an insight into the precautions that are necessary during tissuehandling to avoid undesirable treatment outcomes.
An Efficient FPGA-Based Implementation for Quantized Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification Network

Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN)-based image scene classification models play an important role in a wide variety of remote sensing applications and achieve great success. However, the large-scale remote sensing images and the intensive computations make the deployment of these DCNN-based models on low-power processing systems (e.g., spaceborne or airborne) a challenging problem. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a high-performance Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based DCNN accelerator by combining an efficient network compression scheme and reasonable hardware architecture. Firstly, this paper applies the network quantization to a high-accuracy remote sensing scene classification network, an improved oriented response network (IORN). The volume of the parameters and feature maps in the network is greatly reduced. Secondly, an efficient hardware architecture for network implementation is proposed. The architecture employs dual-channel Double Data Rate Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DDR) access mode, rational on-chip data processing scheme and efficient processing engine design. Finally, we implement the quantized IORN (Q-IORN) with the proposed architecture on a Xilinx VC709 development board. The experimental results show that the proposed accelerator has 88.31% top-1 classification accuracy and achieves a throughput of 209.60 Giga-Operations Per Second (GOP/s) with a 6.32 W on-chip power consumption at 200 MHz. The comparison results with off-the-shelf devices and recent state-of-the-art implementations illustrate that the proposed accelerator has obvious advantages in terms of energy efficiency.
Evaluation of In-Package Atmospheric Dielectric Barrier Discharge Cold Plasma Treatment as an Intervention Technology for Decontaminating Bulk Ready-To-Eat Chicken Breast Cubes in Plastic Containers

This article evaluates the effects of in-package atmospheric dielectric barrier discharge cold plasma (ADCP) treatment on microbial inactivation, nitrate and nitrite contents, oral toxicity, and storage quality of protein-coated boiled chicken breast cubes (CBCs). ADCP treatment at 24 kV for 3 min inactivated natural mesophilic aerobic bacteria, Salmonella, and Tulane virus in CBCs by 0.7 ± 0.2, 1.4 ± 0.1 log CFU/cube, and 1.1 ± 0.2 log PFU/cube, respectively. ADCP treatment did not affect the nitrite content of CBCs (p > 0.05). Furthermore, the hematological and blood biochemical parameters from toxicity tests indicated the toxicological safety of ADCP-treated CBCs. Microbial counts of natural bacteria and Salmonella in ADCP-treated CBCs were lower than the ADCP-untreated CBCs by 0.7–0.9 and 1.4–1.7 log CFU/cube, respectively, throughout post-treatment storage at 4 °C for 21 d. ADCP treatment did not alter the pH, color, total volatile basic nitrogen, lipid oxidation, and tenderness of CBCs during storage at 4 and 24 °C, and did not change the sensory properties of CBCs following a 3 d storage period at 4 °C (p > 0.05). Thus, ADCP treatment has the potential to be applied as a method to increase the microbiological safety of packaged ready-to-eat chicken products, leading to overall toxicological safety.
Survey of Security Algorithms for Secure Communication in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network

: Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are normal in improving road wellbeing and traffic conditions, in which security is basic. In VANETs, the authentication of the vehicular access control is a vital security administration for both inter vehicle and vehicle roadside unit correspondences. In the mean time, vehicles additionally must be kept from the abuse of the private data and the assaults on their privacy. There is various research works concentrating on giving the mysterious authentication protected privacy in VANETs. In this paper, we explicitly give a review on the privacy preserving authentication (PPA) plans proposed for VANETs. We research and sort the current PPA plots by their key cryptographies for authentication and the systems for privacy safeguarding. We likewise give a near report/rundown of the advantages and disadvantages of the current PPA plans.
Impact of air pollution on reproductive health in Afghanistan

The presence of one or more contaminants (harmful substances) in the atmosphere in a specific quantity, for such duration, which is injurious or tends to be injurious to human health, welfare, animal, or plant life is called air pollution. Air pollutants are of commonly two types, which are produced through natural pollutants; they include dust (crustal material), sea salts, biological material, pollen, spores or plant-animal debris, volcanic eruptions (which release a very large quantity of gases and particles into the atmosphere), periodic forest fires, thunderbolts, wind erosion, and low concentration ozone. Other types of pollutants are produced in human-made (technical) environments, like mobile sources (cars, trucks, airplanes, marine engines, etc.) or point sources (factories, electric power plants, etc.). The high level of air pollution is a big problem all over the world and also in Afghanistan, and all residents of this country are severely exposed to this ever-worsening situation. Air pollution and other extraordinary environmental problems are factors that threaten the livelihood of millions of Afghans, as a study report shows that 60% of Kabul’s residents are exposed to increased levels of harmful toxins, such as, nitrous oxides and sulfur dioxide. According to the State of Global Air report, more than 26,000 afghan deaths could be attributed to pollution in 2007, but United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) documented nearly 3,500 civilian casualties from the war for the same time period, so air pollution is killing more Afghans than war because they burn anything possible to get energy and heat they need. Result of air sampling in major urban centers of Afghanistan shows high amounts of particulate matters (PM), benzo-a-pyrene, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) originating from vehicle exhaust emission. The highest concentrations were founded in Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif (13.6 ng/m3 ). The absence of industrial parks, nonconformity of environmental protection rules, especially by industries, urbanization, degradation of fertile lands, deforestation, seasonal winds, drought, internal migration, and low knowledge about pesticides and herbicides use, are factors that boost the severity of air pollution in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, women are more exposed to high levels of indoor air pollution because they spend more time at home due to their cultural rules; also, women have responsibility for household activities, working in the kitchen to prepare food, they are exposed to poor sanitation and contaminated water supplies, they clean and sweep rooms and yards with inadequate protection equipment, which are significant sources of dust, so they are often exposed to high levels of smoke and dust for long periods.
The influence of coupled physical swelling and chemical reactions on deformable geomaterials

Coupled thermo‐hydro‐mechanical‐chemical modelling has attracted attention in past decades due to many contemporary geotechnical engineering applications (e.g., waste disposal, carbon capture and storage). However, molecular‐scale interactions within geomaterials (e.g., swelling and dissolution/precipitation) have a significant influence on the mechanical behaviour, yet are rarely incorporated into existing Thermal‐Hydro‐Mechanical‐Chemical (THMC) frameworks. This paper presents a new coupled hydro‐mechanical‐chemical constitutive model to bridge molecular‐scale interactions with macro‐physical deformation by combining the swelling and dissolution/precipitation through an extension of the new mixture‐coupling theory. Entropy analysis of the geomaterial system provides dissipation energy, and Helmholtz free energy gives the relationship between solids and fluids. Numerical simulation is used to compare with the selected recognized models, which demonstrates that the swelling and dissolution/precipitation processes may have a significant influence on the mechanical deformation of the geomaterials.
Adaptive dialogue management using intent clustering and fuzzy rules

Conversational systems have become an element of everyday life for billions of users who use speech‐based interfaces to services, engage with personal digital assistants on smartphones, social media chatbots, or smart speakers. One of the most complex tasks in the development of these systems is to design the dialogue model, the logic that provided a user input selects the next answer. The dialogue model must also consider mechanisms to adapt the response of the system and the interaction style according to different groups and user profiles. Rule‐based systems are difficult to adapt to phenomena that were not taken into consideration at design‐time. However, many of the systems that are commercially available are based on rules, and so are the most widespread tools for the development of chatbots and speech interfaces. In this article, we present a proposal to: (a) automatically generate the dialogue rules from a dialogue corpus through the use of evolving algorithms, (b) adapt the rules according to the detected user intention. We have evaluated our proposal with several conversational systems of different application domains, from which our approach provided an efficient way for adapting a set of dialogue rules considering user utterance clusters.
Empowering artisans through design: a case study on the dynamics of collaborative projects

: A growing stream of design research investigates collaborations between artisans and designers, making the case for balanced and systemic approaches. In reality though, such initiatives rarely provoke new understanding or open new perspectives. This research enquiry seeks to address the gap between theory and practice by analysing the dynamics of co-design projects. A guiding framework was built from the literature, composed of three structuring poles: know-how, materials and concepts. Field study was conducted at a French association offering an insertion program to immigrant artisans, which includes a collaborative project with designers. Data was collected through participatory observation and phenomenographic interviews. Results are expressed in form of a typology of projects’ dynamics, leading to recommendations. They relate to preparing the co-design approach, following-up and managing projects, and finally empowering artisans to play an active role in their professional path.