Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Developmental Programming by Perinatal Glucocorticoids

Early-life environmental factors can have persistent effects on physiological functions by altering developmental procedures in various organisms. Recent experimental and epidemiological studies now further support the idea that developmental programming is also present in mammals, including humans, influencing long-term health. Although the mechanism of programming is still largely under investigation, the role of endocrine glucocorticoids in developmental programming is gaining interest. Studies found that perinatal glucocorticoids have a persistent effect on multiple functions of the body, including metabolic, behavioral, and immune functions, in adulthood. Several mechanisms have been proposed to play a role in long-term programming. In this review, recent findings on this topic are summarized and the potential biological rationale behind this phenomenon is discussed.
The Cost of Resistance to Diamide Insecticide Varies With the Host Plant in Spodoptera frugiperda (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae)

Abstract Fitness costs associated with insect resistance to insecticides can be exploited to implement resistance management programs. However, most of these studies are restricted to evaluating biological traits on artificial diets. Here, we investigated the fitness cost associated with chlorantraniliprole in Spodoptera frugiperda (J.E. Smith) feeding on corn, soybean, and cotton plants. We used a near-isogenic strain of S. frugiperda resistant to chlorantraniliprole (Iso-RR), a susceptible strain (SS), and heterozygotes strains (H1 and H2) to evaluate several biological and population growth parameters. Larval survival of the Iso-RR strain was on average 90% on corn, 65% on soybean, and 57% on cotton plants. Development time of the larval stage also differed among host plants, Iso-RR strain took on average 14, 17, and 26 days to reach the pupal stage on corn, soybean, and cotton plants respectively. Net reproductive rate, intrinsic rate of population increase, and finite rate of population increase were higher for Iso-RR strain feeding on corn plants than other host plants. The relative fitness, based on the intrinsic rate of population increase, of S. frugiperda resistant strain on corn, soybean, and cotton plants were 1.04, 0.85, and 0.88, respectively. Therefore, no fitness cost was observed for S. frugiperda feeding on corn plants, but a significant fitness cost was observed when this pest fed on soybean and cotton plants. We showed that the food source influences the fitness cost of S. frugiperda resistant to diamide. Such information may help to implement resistance management strategies based on each crop. Graphical Abstract
H2O vapor-induced leakage degradation of Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 thin-film capacitors with Pt and IrO2 electrodes

We have investigated the influence of H2O vapor on the leakage characteristics of Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 (PZT) thin-film capacitors with Pt and IrO2 top electrodes by conducting electrical measurements ex situ in air and in situ in an 80% N2/20% O2 atmosphere with controlled humidity ranging from <0.1% to 95.5% relative humidity at 20 °C. The results show that the leakage characteristics of PZT thin-film capacitors are strongly sensitive to H2O vapor in the atmosphere. The onset to H2O-induced leakage degradation depended on the relative humidity and on the quantity of charge passed through the capacitor. A degradation mechanism based on the electrolysis of H2O that has adsorbed on the capacitor from the atmosphere and the role of the electrode material in the degradation process are discussed.
Geometric Galois Actions: Esquisse d'un Programme

Comme la conjoncture actuelle rend de plus en plus illusoire pour moi les perspectives d'un enseignement de recherche a l'Universite, je me suis resolu a demander mon admission au CNRS, pour pouvoir consacrer mon energie a developper des travaux et perspectives dont il devient clair qu'il ne se trouvera aucun eleve (ni meme, semble-t-il, aucun congenere mathematicien) pour les developper a ma place. En guise de document “Titres et Travaux”, on trouvera a la suite de ce texte la reproduction integrale d'une esquisse, par themes, de ce que je considerais comme mes principales contributions mathematiques au moment d'ecrire ce rapport, en 1972. Il contient egalement une liste d'articles publies a cette date. J'ai cesse toute publication d'articles scientifiques depuis 1970. Dans les lignes qui suivent, je me propose de donner un apercu au moins sur quelques themes principaux de mes reflexions mathematiques depuis lors. Ces reflexions se sont materialisees au cours des annees en deux volumineux cartons de notes manuscrites, difficilement dechiffrables sans doute a tout autre qu'a moi-meme, et qui, apres des stades de decantations successives, attendent leur heure peut-etre pour une redaction d'ensemble tout au moins provisoire, a l'intention de la communaute mathematique. Le terme “redaction” ici est quelque peu impropre, alors qu'il s'agit bien plus de developper des idees et visions multiples amorcees au cours de ces douze dernieres annees, en les precisant et les approfondissant, avec tous les rebondissements imprevus qui constamment accompagnent ce genre de travail – un travail de decouverte done, et non de compilation de notes pieusement accumulees.
Atomic and Molecular Gas in the Merger Arp 299

We present MERLIN observations of the atomic and molecular gas of IC 694 a member of the merger system Arp 299. The radio continuum of IC 694 is consistent with a disk of synchrotron emission powered by supernovae remnants. The atomic and molecular gas are located in a similarly orientated 250 pc large disk. The merging system Arp 299 (Mrk 171) consists of two interacting galaxies, IC 694 and NGC 3690. Its far-infrared luminosity of 5.2x 1011L 0 places it in the gap between the nearby starburst galaxies (eg M82) and the more distant Ultra Luminous far- InfraRed Galaxies (ULIRGs, eg Arp 220). The system is rich in molecular gas, with bright CO condensations in the two galactic nuclei, particularly in IC 694, where the molecular gas mass in the inner 280 pc radius is I"'V 5x 10 9 M 0 and where the mm molecular line rations reveal a highly dis-rupted molecular ISM with a bulk temperature ~ 100 K (Aalto et aI1997). The detection of OH megamasers and HI absorption in Arp 299 (Baan & Haschick 1990, BH90), further emphasises the notion of extreme conditions in the ISM. In order to investigate the conditions of the atomic and molecular gas in detail we made sub-arcsecond (10-40pc) resolution MERLIN observations of the HI absorption, the OH megamaser emission and of the A6cm Formaldehyde (H 2CO) line, and compared them with the 200 pc resolution CO images of Aalto et al (1997). Theobservations were made in the spring of 1998. The observations of the source were phase-referenced to the nearby calibrator 1125+596. Initial editing and calibration were carried out using standard MERLIN software; further
The Relation between the Inclinations of Broad Line Regions and the Accretion Disk

According to the standard model, an active galactic nucleus (AGN) consists of an inner accretion disk with a jet around a central massive black hole,and a number of outer broad line regions (BLRs) and narrow line regions (NLRs). The geometrical relationship between the BLRs and the accretion disk is not well understood. Assuming the motion of the BLRs is virialized and its configuration is disk-like, we derived its inclination to the line of sight for a sample of AGNs from their bulge stellar velocity dispersion, their size of the BLRs and their Hβ linewidth. Compared with the inclination of the accretion disk obtained from the X-ray Fe Kα emission lines, we found that there is no positive correlation between the two. Our results showed that BLRs are not coplanar with the accretion disk and that we should be cautious of using the BLRs inclination as the disk inclination.The non-coplanar geometry of the outer BLRs and the inner accretion disk provides clues to the origin of BLRs and the properties of the accretion disk. Our preferable interpretation is that BLRs arise out of the outer part of a warped accretion disk.
Wikiality within the Manosphere: Namuwiki, Gender Equalism, and Antifeminist Disinformation in the Post-Truth Era

This article investigates the dissemination of reactionary antifeminist disinformation and the networked practices of misogynistic users under the guise of “gender equalism” mediated by Namuwiki, South Korea’s most popular wiki. In 2016, a Namuwiki user published an article arguing that “gender equalism” had replaced feminism in Western societies and academia because feminism is in fact female chauvinism, in that it necessarily involves reverse discrimination against men in the pursuit of women’s rights. While most of the references and evidence were miscited or fabricated entirely, the fallacious article was nevertheless expanded and shared widely online as if factual for almost six months. I first explore how the fabricated concept of gender equalism drew on Western antifeminist discourses while appealing to Korean misogynists through condemnation of Korean feminists in particular. Next, I examine how Namuwiki’s norms and policies, such as “notability” and “vandalism,” reproduce and facilitate misogynistic knowledge production. I describe the broad circulation and support of gender equalism as “wikiality within the manosphere,” that is, the creation of a self-reinforcing reality founded on antifeminist sentiments and consensus. By discussing the implications of the case as the epitome of antifeminist disinformation in the post-truth era, I expand the current understanding of “fake news” to include a broader paradigm of fictitious factuality that encompasses the wikiverse within the manosphere and foregrounds misogyny as a critical and inextricable component.
Upscaling unsaturated flows in vertically heterogeneous porous layers

Abstract Characterising interfacial and unsaturated flows in heterogeneous porous layers is of both fundamental and practical interest. Under the assumption of vertical gravitational–capillary equilibrium, we present a theoretical model to describe one-dimensional flows in a porous layer with vertical variations in average pore size, porosity, intrinsic permeability and capillary pressure jump between invading and displaced fluids. The model leads to asymptotic solutions for the saturation distribution and outer envelope of the invading fluid, and for the background pressure drop across the porous layer. Eight dimensionless parameters are recognised after appropriate non-dimensionalisation of the governing equations, the influence of which is demonstrated through a series of example calculations. In particular, four asymptotic regimes are identified, representing unconfined sharp-interface flows, confined sharp-interface flows, unconfined unsaturated flows and confined unsaturated flows. Finally, in the context of flow upscaling, analytical solutions are derived for the effective relative permeability curves on the basis of exact solutions of the saturation field and interface shape, shedding light on the subtle influence of competition between injection/pumping and gravitational forces, wetting and capillary effects, viscosity contrast between the invading and displaced fluids and vertical heterogeneity of the porous layer.
A formal theory of plan recognition

Research in discourse analysis, story understanding, and user modeling for expert systems has shown great interest in plan recognition problems. In a plan recognition problem, one is given a fragmented description of actions performed by one or more agents, and expected to infer the overall plan or scenario which explains those actions. This thesis develops the first formal description of the plan recognition process. Beginning with a reified logic of events, the thesis presents a scheme for hierarchically structuring a library of event types. A semantic basis for non-deductive inference, called "minimum covering entailment", justifies the conclusions that one may draw from a set of observed actions. Minimum covering entailment is defined by delineating the class of models in which the library is complete and the set of unrelated observations is minimized. An equivalent proof theory forms a preliminary basis for mechanizing the theory. Equivalence theorems between the proof and model theories are presented. Minimum covering entailment is related to a formalism for non-monotonic inference known as "circumscription". Finally, the thesis describes a number of algorithms which correctly implement the theory, together with a discussion of their complexity. The theory is applied to a number of examples of plan recognition, in domains ranging from an operating system advisor to the theory of speech acts. The thesis shows how problems of medical diagnosis, a similar kind of non-deductive reasoning, can be cast in the framework, and an example previously solved by a medical expert system is worked out in detail. The analyses provides a firm theoretical foundation for much of what is loosely called "frame based inference", and directly accounts for problems of ambiguity, abstraction, and complex temporal interactions, which were ignored by previous work. The framework can be extended to handle difficult phenomena such as errors, and can also be restricted in order to improve its computational properties in specialized domains.
Using pipe with corrugated walls for a subterahertz free electron laser

A metallic pipe with corrugated walls supports propagation of a high-frequency mode that is in resonance with a relativistic beam propagating along the axis of the pipe. This mode can be excited by a beam whose length is a fraction of the wavelength. In this paper, we study another option of excitation of the resonant mode—via the mechanism of the free electron laser instability. This mechanism works if the bunch length is much longer than the wavelength of the radiation and, hence, does not require bunch compression. As a result, it provides an alternative to excitation by short bunches that can be realized with relatively low energy and low peak-current electron beams.
Promoter methylation analysis of DKK2 may be a potential biomarker for early detection of cervical cancer

Abstract Background Dickkopf 2 (DKK2) plays an important role in multiple cancers. Its potential value in the clinical diagnosis of cervical cancer has remained unclear. Objectives To investigate the expression and promoter methylation levels of DKK2 in cervical cancer and their clinicopathological associations. Methods We used the Gene Expression Omnibus, Oncomine, Cancer Genome Atlas, and University of ALabama at Birmingham CANcer data analysis databases, reverse transcription-PCR, and methylation-specific PCR analysis to predict and examine the expression of DKK2 mRNA and DKK2 methylation levels in cell lines and cervical cancer tissues from 79 patients with cervical cancer and 63 with cervical precancerous lesions including 25 with low-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions (LSIL) and 38 patients with high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions (HSIL). Results DKK2 mRNA expression was downregulated in all cancer cell lines and cervical cancer tissues, whereas hypermethylation of DKK2 was higher in cervical cancer tissue samples. DKK2 methylation in cervical cancer was significantly higher than that in HSIL (χ2 = 8.346, P = 0.004), whereas DKK2 methylation in HSIL was significantly higher than that in normal cervical samples (χ2 = 7.934, P = 0.005) and in LSIL samples (χ2 = 4.375, P = 0.037). DKK2 silencing caused by its promoter hypermethylation was confirmed by treatment with the methyltransferase inhibitor 5-Aza-dC in cell lines. Patients with lymph node metastasis exhibited increased promoter methylation frequency (χ2 = 5.239, P = 0.022) and low DKK2 mRNA expression (χ2 = 3.958, P = 0.047) compared with patients with no lymph node metastasis. Patients with high-risk human papillomavirus infection exhibited increased promoter methylation frequency (χ2 = 6.279, P = 0.015). Conclusions DKK2 epigenetic changes of DKK2 may play a key role in the development of cervical cancer, suggesting that DKK2 hypermethylation could be used as a triage test for screening, early diagnosis, or risk prediction of cervical cancer.
Photonic reservoir computing for nonlinear equalization of 64-QAM signals with a Kramers–Kronig receiver

Abstract Photonic reservoirs are machine learning based systems that boast energy efficiency and speediness. Thus they can be deployed as optical processors in fiber communication systems to aid or replace digital signal equalization. In this paper, we simulate the use of a passive photonic reservoir to target nonlinearity-induced errors originating from self-phase modulation in the fiber and from the nonlinear response of the modulator. A 64-level quadrature-amplitude modulated signal is directly detected using the recently proposed Kramers–Kronig (KK) receiver. We train the readout weights by backpropagating through the receiver pipeline, thereby providing extra nonlinearity. Statistically computed bit error rates for fiber lengths of up to 100 km fall below 1 × 10−3 bit error rate, outperforming an optical feed-forward equalizer as a linear benchmark. This can find applications in inter-datacenter communications that benefit from the hardware simplicity of a KK receiver and the low power and low latency processing of a photonic reservoir.
Sialic acid: an attractive biomarker with promising biomedical applications

Abstract This broad, narrative review highlights the roles of sialic acids as acidic sugars found on cellular membranes. The role of sialic acids in cellular communication and development has been well established. Recently, attention has turned to the fundamental role of sialic acids in many diseases, including viral infections, cardiovascular diseases, neurological disorders, diabetic nephropathy, and malignancies. Sialic acid may be a target for developing new drugs to treat various cancers and inflammatory processes. We recommend the routine measurement of serum sialic acid as a sensitive inflammatory marker in various diseases.
Birds of a Feather Flock Together: How Set Bias Helps to Deanonymize You via Revealed Intersection Sizes

Secure two-party protocols that compute intersection-related statistics have attracted much attention from the industry. These protocols enable two organizations to jointly compute a function (e.g., count and sum) over the intersection of their sets without explicitly revealing this intersection. However, most of such protocols will reveal the intersection size of the two sets in the end. In this work, we are interested in how well an attacker can leverage the revealed intersection sizes to infer some elements' membership of one organization's set. Even disclosing an element's membership of one organization's set to the other organization may violate privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR) since such an element is usually used to identify a person between two organizations. We are the first to study this set membership leakage in intersection-size-revealing protocols. We propose two attacks, namely, baseline attack and feature-aware attack, to evaluate this leakage in realistic scenarios. In particular, our feature-aware attack exploits the realistic set bias that elements with specific features are more likely to be the members of one organization's set. The results show that our two attacks can infer 2.0 similar to 72.7 set members on average in three realistic scenarios. If the set bias is not weak, the feature-aware attack will outperform the baseline one. For example, in COVID-19 contact tracing, the feature-aware attack can find 25.9 tokens of infected patients in 135 protocol invocations, 1.5 x more than the baseline attack. We discuss how such results may cause negative real-world impacts and propose possible defenses against our attacks.
TLS-Anvil: Adapting Combinatorial Testing for TLS Libraries

Although the newest versions of TLS are considered secure, ﬂawed implementations may undermine the promised security properties. Such implementation ﬂaws result from the TLS speciﬁcations’ complexity, with exponentially many possible parameter combinations. Combinatorial Testing (CT) is a technique to tame this complexity, but it is hard to apply to TLS due to semantic dependencies between the parameters and thus leaves the developers with a major challenge referred to as the test oracle problem : Determining if the observed behavior of software is correct for a given test input. In this work, we present TLS-Anvil, a test suite based on CT that can efﬁciently and systematically test parameter value combinations and overcome the oracle problem by dynamically extracting an implementation-speciﬁc input parameter model (IPM) that we constrained based on TLS speciﬁc parameter value interactions. Our approach thus carefully restricts the available input space, which in return allows us to reliably solve the oracle problem for any combination of values generated by the CT algorithm. We evaluated TLS-Anvil with 13 well known TLS implementations, including OpenSSL, BoringSSL, and NSS. Our evaluation revealed two new exploits in MatrixSSL, ﬁve issues directly inﬂuencing the cryptographic operations of a session, as well as 15 interoperability issues, 116 problems related to incorrect alert handling, and 100 other issues across all tested libraries.
FreeWill: Automatically Diagnosing Use-after-free Bugs via Reference Miscounting Detection on Binaries

Memory-safety issues in operating systems and popular applications are still top security threats. As one widely exploited vulnerability, Use After Free (UAF) resulted in hundreds of new incidents every year. Existing bug diagnosis techniques report the locations that allocate or deallocate the vulnerable object, but cannot provide sufﬁcient information for developers to reason about a bug or synthesize a correct patch. In this work, we identiﬁed incorrect reference counting as one common root cause of UAF bugs: if the developer forgets to increase the counter for a newly created reference, the program may prematurely free the actively used object, rendering other references dangling pointers. We call this problem reference miscounting . By proposing an omission-aware counting model, we developed an automatic method, F REE W ILL , to diagnose UAF bugs. F REE W ILL ﬁrst reproduces a UAF bug and collects related execution trace. Then, it identiﬁes the UAF object and related references. Finally, F REE W ILL compares reference operations with our model to detect reference miscounting. We evaluated F REE W ILL on 76 real-world UAF bugs and it successfully conﬁrmed reference miscounting as root causes for 48 bugs and dangling usage for 18 bugs. F REE W ILL also identiﬁed ﬁve null-pointer deref-erence bugs and failed to analyze ﬁve bugs. F REE W ILL can complete its analysis within 15 minutes on average, showing its practicality for diagnosing UAF bugs.