Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association Between Chronic Periodontitis And Hypertension Among Thai Adults

Previous studies suggest that periodontitis may be associated with an increasing�risk of hypertension. However, data from large epidemiological studies are limited. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to examine the association between periodontitis and hypertension using data from a cohort study in a Thai population. The study population comprised of 1,378 employees of the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT), aged 53 to 73 years old, were categorized into no/mild, moderate, or severe periodontitis groups. Hypertension was determined as having systolic blood pressure 140 mmHg or more or diastolic blood pressure 90 mmHg or more, or taking antihypertensive medication. The results of multivariate analysis, after adjusting confounders including age, gender, education level, diabetes mellitus, smoking status, alcohol consumption, frequency of exercise, obesity, hypertriglyceridemia, and hypercholesterolemia, there was a significant association between severe periodontitis and hypertension with an odds ratio of 1.55 (95% CI: 1.03-2.33;�P�= 0.035). In conclusion, severe periodontitis was associated with an increasing�risk of hypertension in this group of Thai adults. However, further longitudinal epidemiological studies are needed.
OSMUNDITES HERBSTII, NUEVA PETRIFICACION TRIASICA DE EL TRANQUILO, PROVINCIA DE SANTA CRUZ

Some petrified fragments of a stem found in El Tranquilo Formation (Triassic) are referred to a new species of Osmundites, 0. herbstii. They are found in the same bed with a frond of Cladophlebis sp. The preservation is prior for making detailed anatomical study, . but sufficient for specific diagnosis. This new species is based mainly on the different pattern . presented by the distribution of mechanical tissue in the petioles, and the number of. meristeles in the central vascular cylinder.
A Robust Drug–Target Interaction Prediction Framework with Capsule Network and Transfer Learning

Drug–target interactions (DTIs) are considered a crucial component of drug design and drug discovery. To date, many computational methods were developed for drug–target interactions, but they are insufficiently informative for accurately predicting DTIs due to the lack of experimentally verified negative datasets, inaccurate molecular feature representation, and ineffective DTI classifiers. Therefore, we address the limitations of randomly selecting negative DTI data from unknown drug–target pairs by establishing two experimentally validated datasets and propose a capsule network-based framework called CapBM-DTI to capture hierarchical relationships of drugs and targets, which adopts pre-trained bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) for contextual sequence feature extraction from target proteins through transfer learning and the message-passing neural network (MPNN) for the 2-D graph feature extraction of compounds to accurately and robustly identify drug–target interactions. We compared the performance of CapBM-DTI with state-of-the-art methods using four experimentally validated DTI datasets of different sizes, including human (Homo sapiens) and worm (Caenorhabditis elegans) species datasets, as well as three subsets (new compounds, new proteins, and new pairs). Our results demonstrate that the proposed model achieved robust performance and powerful generalization ability in all experiments. The case study on treating COVID-19 demonstrates the applicability of the model in virtual screening.
Exploring Wild Hordeum spontaneum and Hordeum marinum Accessions as Genetic Resources for Fungal Resistance

Crop Wild Relatives (CWRs), as potential sources of new genetic variants, are being extensively studied to identify genotypes that will be able to confer resistance to biotic stresses. In this study, a collection of barley wild relatives was assessed in the field, and their phenotypic variability was evaluated using a Barley Description List, reflecting the identified ecosites. Overall, the CWRs showed significant field resistance to various fungal diseases. To further investigate their resistance, greenhouse tests were performed, revealing that several CWRs exhibited resistance against Fusarium culmorum, Pyrenophora teres, and Puccinia hordei G.H. Otth. Additionally, to characterize the genetic diversity within the collection, DNA polymorphisms at 21 loci were examined. We successfully employed barley-specific SSR markers, confirming their suitability for identifying H. spontaneum and even H. marinum, i.e., perennial species. The SSR markers efficiently clustered the investigated collection according to species and ecotypes, similarly to the phenotypic assessment. Moreover, SSR markers associated with disease resistance revealed different alleles in comparison to those found in resistant barley cultivars. Overall, our findings highlight that this evaluated collection of CWRs represents a valuable reservoir of genetic variability and resistance genes that can be effectively utilized in breeding programs.
Farmer Participatory Evaluation and Dissemination of Improved Groundnut Varieties in West Africa

This report summarizes results from the Farmer Participatory Variety selection and dissemination activities conducted in Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal under the CFC funded Groundnut Seed Project. Thirty-nine (39) new varieties were tested by farmers under their management and resources across the four countries. Out of the varieties tested, 17 were selected based on the farmers’ village level criteria which included high pod and fodder yield, resistance to diseases, taste, oil content, drought tolerance and marketability. More than 30 farmers’ associations and small scale seed producers emerged and are producing and distributing seed of selected varieties in the pilot areas. More than 150 tons of seed of different classes that could cover 100,000 hectares were produced. About 74% of the farmers in pilot sites are using modern varieties and about 67% of the groundnut area is planted with them. Participation of farmers in variety selection is major determinant of variety adoption.
Oxytocin levels and self-reported anxiety during interactions between humans and cows

Introduction Positive social interactions with farm animals may have therapeutic benefits on humans by increasing brain oxytocin secretion, as inferred from circulating oxytocin levels. The aim of this observational study was to investigate acute changes in human plasma oxytocin levels and state anxiety associated with interactions with dairy cows. Methods Data were collected from 18 healthy female nursing students who performed stroking and brushing of an unfamiliar cow for 15 min. Blood samples were drawn before entering the cowshed (T1, baseline), and after 5 (T2) and 15 (T3) min of interaction with a cow. At T1 and T3, the students filled out the Norwegian version of the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-State Subscale (STAI-SS). Results Across participants, no significant changes in average plasma oxytocin concentration were detected between time points (p>0.05). There was, however, a modest decline in the STAI-SS scores between T1 and T3 (p=0.015) and a positive correlation between the change in individual level of state anxiety between T1 and T3 and the change in OT concentration of the same individual between T2 and T3 (p = 0.045). Discussion The results suggest that friendly social interactions with cows are beneficial in lowering state anxiety, but any relationship with release of OT into the circulation was complex and variable across individuals. The acute reduction in state anxiety lends support to the value of interacting with farm animals in the context of Green Care for people with mental health challenges.
CACFNet: Cross-Modal Attention Cascaded Fusion Network for RGB-T Urban Scene Parsing

Color–thermal (RGB-T) urban scene parsing has recently attracted widespread interest. However, most existing approaches to RGB-T urban scene parsing do not deeply explore the information complementarity between RGB-T features. In this study, we propose a cross-modal attention-cascaded fusion network (CACFNet) that fully exploits cross-modality. In our design, a cross-modal attention fusion module mines complementary information from two modalities. Subsequently, a cascaded fusion module decodes the multi-level features in an up-bottom manner. Noting that each pixel is labeled with the category of the region to which it belongs, we present a region-based module that explores the relationship between pixel and region. Moreover, in contrast to previous methods that employ only the cross-entropy loss to penalize pixel-wise predictions, we propose an additional loss to learn pixel–pixel relationships. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that the proposed CACFNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in RGB-T urban scene parsing.
Rafting on the Evidence for Lipid Raft-like Domains as Hubs Triggering Environmental Toxicants’ Cellular Effects

The plasma membrane lipid rafts are cholesterol- and sphingolipid-enriched domains that allow regularly distributed, sub-micro-sized structures englobing proteins to compartmentalize cellular processes. These membrane domains can be highly heterogeneous and dynamic, functioning as signal transduction platforms that amplify the local concentrations and signaling of individual components. Moreover, they participate in cell signaling routes that are known to be important targets of environmental toxicants affecting cell redox status and calcium homeostasis, immune regulation, and hormonal functions. In this work, the evidence that plasma membrane raft-like domains operate as hubs for toxicants’ cellular actions is discussed, and suggestions for future research are provided. Several studies address the insertion of pesticides and other organic pollutants into membranes, their accumulation in lipid rafts, or lipid rafts’ disruption by polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), benzo[a]pyrene (B[a]P), and even metals/metalloids. In hepatocytes, macrophages, or neurons, B[a]P, airborne particulate matter, and other toxicants caused rafts’ protein and lipid remodeling, oxidative changes, or amyloidogenesis. Different studies investigated the role of the invaginated lipid rafts present in endothelial cells in mediating the vascular inflammatory effects of PCBs. Furthermore, in vitro and in vivo data strongly implicate raft-localized NADPH oxidases, the aryl hydrocarbon receptor, caveolin-1, and protein kinases in the toxic mechanisms of occupational and environmental chemicals.
An Efficient Training Accelerator for Transformers With Hardware-Algorithm Co-Optimization

Transformers have achieved significant success in deep learning, and training Transformers efficiently on resource-constrained platforms has been attracting continuous attention for domain adaptions and privacy concerns. However, deploying Transformers training on these platforms is still challenging due to its dynamic workloads, intensive computations, and massive memory accesses. To address these issues, we propose an Efficient Training Accelerator for TRansformers (TRETA) through a hardware-algorithm co-optimization strategy. First, a hardware-friendly mixed-precision training algorithm is presented based on a compact and efficient data format, which significantly reduces the computation and memory requirements. Second, a flexible and scalable architecture is proposed to achieve high utilization of computing resources when processing arbitrary irregular general matrix multiplication (GEMM) operations during training. These irregular GEMMs lead to severe under-utilization when simply mapped on traditional systolic architectures. Third, we develop training-oriented architectures for the crucial Softmax and layer normalization functions in Transformers, respectively. These area-efficient modules have unified and flexible microarchitectures to meet various computation requirements of different training phases. Finally, TRETA is implemented under Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) 28-nm technology and evaluated on multiple benchmarks. The experimental results show that our training framework achieves the same accuracy as the full precision baseline. Moreover, TRETA can achieve 14.71 tera operations per second (TOPS) and 3.31 TOPS/W in terms of throughput and energy efficiency, respectively. Compared with prior arts, the proposed design shows 1.4– $24.5\times $ speedup and 1.5– $25.4\times $ energy efficiency improvement.
Cellular and Molecular Processes in Wound Healing

This review summarizes the recent knowledge of the cellular and molecular processes that occur during wound healing. However, these biological mechanisms have yet to be defined in detail; this is demonstrated by the fact that alterations of events to pathological states, such as keloids, consisting of the excessive formation of scars, have consequences yet to be defined in detail. Attention is also dedicated to new therapies proposed for these kinds of pathologies. Awareness of these scientific problems is important for experts of various disciplines who are confronted with these kinds of presentations daily.
Genomic and Transcriptomic Insights into the Evolution and Divergence of MIKC-Type MADS-Box Genes in Carica papaya

MIKC-type MADS-box genes, also known as type II genes, play a crucial role in regulating the formation of floral organs and reproductive development in plants. However, the genome-wide identification and characterization of type II genes as well as a transcriptomic survey of their potential roles in Carica papaya remain unresolved. Here, we identified and characterized 24 type II genes in the C. papaya genome, and investigated their evolutional scenario and potential roles with a widespread expression profile. The type II genes were divided into thirteen subclades, and gene loss events likely occurred in papaya, as evidenced by the contracted member size of most subclades. Gene duplication mainly contributed to MIKC-type gene formation in papaya, and the duplicated gene pairs displayed prevalent expression divergence, implying the evolutionary significance of gene duplication in shaping the diversity of type II genes in papaya. A large-scale transcriptome analysis of 152 samples indicated that different subclasses of these genes showed distinct expression patterns in various tissues, biotic stress response, and abiotic stress response, reflecting their divergent functions. The hub-network of male and female flowers and qRT-PCR suggested that TT16-3 and AGL8 participated in male flower development and seed germination. Overall, this study provides valuable insights into the evolution and functions of MIKC-type genes in C. papaya.
Flow aggregation for SDN-based delay-insensitive traffic control in mobile core networks

Mobile core networks have seen serious network resource contention among a huge amount of delay-sensitive and delay-insensitive traffic leading to network congestion or even failures. Delay-insensitive traffic which is commonly generated by background applications or the operating systems to update the system's status can be postponed to yield network resources for delay-sensitive traffic, especially in the peak times. This study proposes an efficient approach to delay-insensitive traffic control leveraging software defined network (SDN) techniques. The study devises an effective data structure, namely flow tree, to resolve the flow aggregation, an essential issue in SDN-based traffic control, especially when dealing with a huge number of small delay-insensitive traffic flows. The proposed approach significantly reduces the inherent communication cost between the controller and Openflow switches and the storage cost in switches' expensive memories. This approach is significantly robust in controlling a huge number of small flows which are common in the modern mobile core networks and Internet of things environments. Experimental results from both simulated and real datasets reveal the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme.
Expression of heme oxygenase-1 in dendritic cells elicits T cell activation and confers protective immunity against HSV in an in vivo skin infection model

Los virus herpes simple tipo 1 (HSV-1) y tipo 2 (HSV-2) son altamente prevalentes en la población, en parte debido a su frecuente diseminación, aún desde individuos asintomáticos. La infección por HSV puede producir diversas manifestaciones clínicas incluyendo lesiones en piel, ceguera, o incluso encefalitis severa. Un aspecto importante de HSV es su capacidad para interferir con la viabilidad y función de células dendríticas (DC), células presentadoras de antígeno que inician y modulan la respuesta inmune en la interfase entre inmunidad innata y adaptativa. Una enzima del hospedero que participa en respuesta inducida frente a estrés es hemo oxigenasa-1 (HO-1), que se ha visto posee actividad antiviral contra HSV en células epiteliales y neuronales. En este estudio, buscamos evaluar si HO-1 puede modular positivamente la viabilidad de DCs y su función frente a la infección por HSV, lo cual podría ser clave para establecer inmunidad protectora contra estos virus. Nuestros hallazgos indican que HO-1 reduce la infección en DC por HSV-1 y HSV-2, y provee protección contra la muerte celular que inducen estos virus en estas células. La sobreexpresión de HO-1 en DCs no promueve un incremento de los marcadores de maduración y activación, por el contrario, aumentan la presencia de marcadores inhibitorios. Las DCs que expresan HO-1 y están infectadas con HSV, en ensayos de co-cultivo activaron células T CD4 vírgenes hacia fenotipos T regulador (Treg), determinado por la expresión de FoxP3 y OX40, y T helper (Th17) por la secreción de IL-17. La mejora de la función de DCs producto de la expresión de HO-1 se debería a un defecto en el ciclo de replicación de HSV por una disminución en la liberación de partículas infecciosas desde DCs, sin causar un efecto sobre la replicación del genoma y síntesis proteica viral. En un modelo de encefalitis, la transferencia de DCs que expresan HO-1 e infectadas con HSV causó que los animales susceptibles sufrieran un adelanto y aumento de la severidad de la patología. Mientras que, en un modelo de infección en piel, la transferencia de estas DCs demoró el inicio de la enfermedad y redujo el puntaje clínico de la infección por HSV. Adicionalmente, la inducción por HO-1 promueve la migración de DCs a linfonodos popliteos (pLNs) y estimuló células T CD4 Th17 y Tregs. Finalmente, se encontraron en lesiones de piel células Th17, mientras que hubo presencia de T CD8 y Treg a tiempos tempranos y tardíos, respectivamente. Estos resultados sugieren que la expresión de HO-1 en DCs promueve control viral, junto con una respuesta antinflamatoria contra HSV que puede proveer protección en un modelo animal de infección.
Machiavellian intelligence

The hypothesis that intelligence is an adaptation to deal with the complexity of living in semi‐permanent groups of conspecifics, a situation that involves the potentially tricky balance of competition and cooperation with the same individuals, has been influential in recent theorizing about human mental evolution. It is important to distinguish among distinct versions of this general idea, for they predict different cognitive consequences and apply to different species of animal. Empirical support is strong in primates for links between (i) social complexity based on evolved tactics that require a good memory for socially relevant information, (ii) neocortical enlargement, and (iii) size of social groupings. However, the evolution of computational thought and the ability to understand other individuals' intentions are not well explained as products of selection for Machiavellian intelligence. Quite different explanations may therefore be required for increases in intelligence that occurred at different times in human ancestry.
Degrees of Freedom of the MIMO Interference Channel With Cooperation and Cognition

In this paper, we explore the benefits, from the perspective of degrees of freedom (DOF), of user cooperation and cognitive message sharing for a two-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Gaussian interference channel with <i>M</i> <sub>1</sub>, <i>M</i> <sub>2</sub> antennas at transmitters and <i>N</i> <sub>1</sub>, <i>N</i> <sub>2</sub> antennas at receivers. For the case of user cooperation (including cooperation at transmitters only, at receivers only, and at transmitters as well as receivers), the sum DOF is <i>min{M</i> <sub>1</sub>+<i>M</i> <sub>2</sub>, <i>N</i> <sub>1</sub>+<i>N</i> <sub>2</sub>, max(<i>M</i> <sub>1</sub>, <i>N</i> <sub>2</sub>), max(<i>M</i> <sub>2</sub>, <i>N</i> <sub>1</sub>)} , which is the same as the sum DOF of the channel without cooperation. For the case of cognitive message sharing, the sum DOF is <i>min{M</i> <sub>1</sub>+<i>M</i> <sub>2</sub>, <i>N</i> <sub>1</sub>+<i>N</i> <sub>2</sub>, (1-1<sub>T2</sub>)((1-1<sub>R2</sub>) <i>max(M</i> <sub>1</sub>, <i>N</i> <sub>2</sub>) + 1<sub>R2</sub> (<i>M</i> <sub>1</sub>+<i>N</i> <sub>2</sub>)) + 1<sub>T2</sub>(<i>M</i> <sub>1</sub>+<i>M</i> <sub>2</sub>), <i>(1-1</i> <sub>T1</sub>)((1-1<sub>R1</sub>) middotmax(<i>M</i> <sub>2</sub>, <i>N</i> <sub>1</sub>) + 1<sub>R1</sub> (<i>M</i> <sub>2</sub>+<i>N</i> <sub>1</sub>)) + 1<sub>T1</sub>(<i>M</i> <sub>1</sub>+<i>M</i> <sub>2</sub>)} where 1<sub>Ti</sub> = 1 (0) when transmitter <i>i</i> is (is not) a cognitive transmitter and 1<i>Ri</i> is defined in the same fashion. Our results show that while both techniques may increase the sum capacity of the MIMO interference channel, only cognitive message sharing can increase the sum DOF. We also find that it may be more beneficial for a user to have a cognitive transmitter than to have a cognitive receiver.