Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Liver Receptor homolog-1 Regulates Apoptosis of Bovine Ovarian Granulosa Cells by Progestogen Receptor Signaling Pathway

Simple Summary Liver receptor homolog-1 (LRH-1) is highly observed in tissues with secretory function, such as the ovaries, suggesting that LRH-1 may play an essential role in the ovarian endocrine. In particular, ovarian granulosa cells (GCs) are the functional cells that produce steroid hormones. The fate of GCs directly affects follicular development or atresia. These effects were lost in granulosa-specific LRH-1-knockout mice, showing that LRH-1 is a central modulator of ovarian function. However, the underlying mechanism LRH-1 in the bovine ovaries remains unclear. We aimed to detect the effect of LRH-1 on steroid hormones in bovine GCs and explore the potential relationship between LRH-1 and the fate of GCs. The results show that LRH-1 was specifically highly expressed in GCs of atretic follicles. Mechanistically, LRH-1 induced the apoptosis of bovine GCs by the progestogen receptor signaling pathway. While this finding provided new ideas for the study of follicular atresia, it also provided a theoretical basis for the clinical diagnosis and treatment for infertility in cow. Abstract The purpose of the present investigation was to assess the function of LRH-1 on GCs and the mechanisms involved. Here, LRH- was highly expressed in the bovine GCs of atretic follicles. Treatment with 50 μM of LRH-1 agonist (DLPC) significantly induced the expression of LRH-1 (p < 0.05). In particular, LRH-1 activation blocked the progestogen receptor signaling pathway via downregulating progesterone production and progestogen receptor levels (p < 0.05), but had no effect on 17 beta-estradiol synthesis. Meanwhile, LRH-1 activation promoted the apoptosis of GCs and increased the activity of caspase 3 (p < 0.05). Importantly, upregulating the progestogen receptor signaling pathway with progestogen could attenuate the LRH-1-induced proapoptotic effect. Moreover, treatment with progestogen decreased the activity of the proapoptotic gene caspase 3 and increased the expression of antiapoptotic gene Bcl2 in LRH-1 activated GCs (p < 0.05). Taken together, these results demonstrate that LRH-1 might be dependent on the progestogen receptor signaling pathway to modulate bovine follicular atresia.
Balancing Area Coordination: Efficiently Integrating Renewable Energy Into the Grid, Greening the Grid

Greening the Grid provides technical assistance to energy system planners, regulators, and grid operators to overcome challenges associated with integrating variable renewable energy into the grid. Coordinating balancing area operation can promote more cost and resource efficient integration of variable renewable energy, such as wind and solar, into power systems. This efficiency is achieved by sharing or coordinating balancing resources and operating reserves across larger geographic boundaries.
Humanizing the Web: Change and Social Innovation

The authors describe how the web is transforming from a one-way information delivery channel to a socially rich communication vehicle, resulting in the humanizing of the web and fulfilling the web's original promise. They explain how the web continues to change businesses, software design, the way we perceive people and the skills required of us. The web's key challenges are defined as six paradoxes and its role as an innovation ecosystem is introduced, emphasizing the consideration of the social web as a software platform, user experience, and business ecosystem. The volume explores the challenges related to the search for Zero-to-One innovations, breakthroughs, and the key strategies for discovering these kinds of innovations for the social web (or through the social web for non-web environments). It also envisions the next generation of the web, including both transformations that are already ongoing and visible as well as new expectations. An important message for companies and organizations is to adopt a set of core business values that will facilitate innovation processes in this future humanized web. These business values are very humane. Finally, the authors discuss key threats and opportunities for this future.
A High-Energy Diet and Spirulina Supplementation during Pre-Gestation, Gestation, and Lactation do Not Affect the Reproductive and Lactational Performance of Primiparous Sows

Simple Summary High-energy or high-fat diets are often fed to pregnant and lactating sows to overcome problems resulting from insufficient energy intake. However, their long-term consumption has the potential to impair the reproductive and lactational traits in sows. The microalga spirulina has been previously described to exert beneficial health effects, and it may potentially reverse the detrimental effects induced by a high-energy diet. In the present study, both a high-energy diet and the spirulina did not affect the reproduction and lactational traits in sows, though they both influenced the colostrum fatty acids profile in a way that may impact offspring growth and health. Moreover, sows fed a high-energy diet tended to have less piglets weaned than sows fed a control diet. The spirulina was not able to reverse these effects but tended to affect the proportion of males and females per litter in a diet-specific manner. Abstract Feeding high-energy (HED) or high-fat diets during gestation and lactation to pigs may help cover the energy requirements of high-prolific sows but may also adversely affect their reproductive performance. The microalga Arthrospira plantensis (Sp), rich in bioactive compounds, has been described to exert beneficial health effects. The present study investigated the effects of HED and Sp intake during gestation and lactation in pigs. Twenty-four primiparous crossbred sows were fed either a HED or a control diet. Half of the sows per group were supplemented with 20 g/day of Sp. Despite a higher gross energy intake, consuming the HED did not affect the sows’ reproductive and lactational performance but significantly modified the colostrum fatty acid (FA) composition and tended to decrease the number of weaned piglets. The Sp supplementation did not affect the reproduction and lactation traits, but slightly affected the colostrum FA composition. A trend was observed for an interaction of diet and Sp in terms of offspring sex ratio with a 50% lower male-to-female ratio in the HED group compared to all other animals. These findings suggest that an HED and Sp intake hardly influence reproduction in sows. However, the HED modified the colostrum FA composition, whereas the Sp had only fewer effects, which may potentially affect offspring performance.
A Comparison of House Price Classification with Structured and Unstructured Text Data

Purchasing a home is one of the largest investments most people make. House price prediction allows individuals to be informed about their asset wealth. Transparent pricing on homes allows for a more efficient market and economy. We report the performance of machine learning models trained with structured tabular representations and unstructured text descriptions. We collected a dataset of 200 descriptions of houses which include meta-information, as well as text descriptions. We test logistic regression and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) classifiers on dividing these houses into binary buckets based on fixed price thresholds. We present an exploration into strategies to represent unstructured text descriptions of houses as inputs for machine learning models. This includes a comparison of term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), bag-of-words (BoW), and zero-shot inference with large language models. We find the best predictive performance with TF-IDF representations of house descriptions. Readers will gain an understanding of how to use machine learning models optimized with structured and unstructured text data to predict house prices.
Facial expression recognition with FRR-CNN

Feature redundancy-reduced convolutional neural network (FRR-CNN) is proposed to address the problem of facial expression recognition. Different from traditional CNN, convolutional kernels of FRR-CNN is induced to be divergent by presenting a more discriminative mutual difference among feature maps of the same layer, which results in generating less redundant features and yields a more compact representation of an image. Furthermore, the transformation-invariant pooling strategy is used to extract representative features cross-transformations. Extensive experiments are conducted on two public facial expression databases and the obtained results demonstrate the efficiency of FRR-CNN comparing with the state-of-the-art expression recognition methods.
Valorization of fruits, vegetables, and their by-products: Drying and bio-drying

Abstract Due to increasing awareness of food sustainability and security among consumers and food manufacturers, the valorization of food products has gained huge interest among researchers with the aim to diversify the product range, including those processed from the by-products. From the United Nations (UN) Environment Programme’s Food Waste Index Report 2021, the wastage of foods reaches 931 million tonnes each year. To align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which aim to halve food waste by 2030, food wastage reduction, especially from fruits and vegetables that have a short shelf life, can be processed into a stable value-added product. Hence, the application of various drying methods on fruits, vegetables, and their by-product were conducted as measures to decrease or avoid possible wastage. In this article, the applications of sun drying, solar drying, convective air drying, hybrid drying, spray drying, drum drying, vacuum drying, freeze-drying, and refractance window drying as means of food valorization strategy and impacts on the physical, chemical, microbiological, and nutritional properties are compiled and reviewed. In addition, bio-drying processes were also presented to reduce the generation of food waste and environmental impact.
Design of wideband patch antennas for PCS and IMT-2000 service

Wideband patch antennas, applicable to PCS and IMT-2000 systems, are described. In order to overcome the narrow bandwidth, typical of a microstrip patch antenna, an electromagnetically coupled (EMC) feeding structure was employed. It was implemented for both a rectangular and a triangular patch. The antenna's characteristics are described for both patch shapes. The antennas, fabricated with a rectangular patch, achieved an impedance bandwidth (SWR ≤ 2) of 595 MHz (30.36 percent), while those with a triangular patch showed a bandwidth of 643.4 MHz (32.83 percent), providing evidence that the proposed designs can be used in the PCS and IMT-2000 service frequency band.
Application of Road Safety Audits in Japan —Organizational Culture and Absorptive Capacity Perspectives

Road safety audits (RSAs) have been applied in many developing and developed countries as a way to enhance the safety of road infrastructure since they were first introduced in the late 1980s in the United Kingdom. RSAs have proven to be an effective tool to enhance the design of both new and existing roads from an overall safety perspective. In the early 2000s, the Government of Japan (GOJ) reviewed RSAs as well as new public management (NPM) (both viewed as good practices in the United Kingdom and other countries) and now promotes RSAs in developing countries through its bilateral and multilateral official development assistance. However, although NPM has been applied within Japan, RSAs have not been applied on Japan’s domestic road projects. This article reviews factors that may explain why the GOJ has not applied RSAs from the organizational culture perspective of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism (MLIT), which administers the Japanese road transport subsector. The article also reviews an RSA pilot project started in 2013 in Chiba Prefecture, Japan and a nation-wide pilot program started in 2015. Factors that may influence how the GOJ can apply RSAs successfully are discussed in line with the MLIT’s absorptive capacity.
Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement in Asphalt Mixtures: State of the Practice

FOREWORD Recycling asphalt pavement creates a cycle of reusing materials that optimizes the use of natural resources. Reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) is a useful alternative to virgin materials because it reduces the need to use virgin aggregate, which is a scarce commodity in some areas of the United States. It also reduces the amount of costly new asphalt binder required in the production of asphalt paving mixtures. This report informs practitioners about the state of the practice for RAP use in the United States as well as best practices for increasing the use of RAP in asphalt pavement mixtures while maintaining high-quality pavement infrastructures. High percentage RAP mixtures are achieved with processing and production practices, resulting in cost and energy savings. Based on an evaluation of pavements containing 30 percent RAP through the Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) program, it has been determined that the performance of pavements containing up to 30 percent RAP is similar to that of pavements constructed from virgin materials with no RAP. This report is of interest to engineers, contractors, and others involved in the specification and design of asphalt mixtures for flexible pavements, as well as those involved in promoting the optimal use of RAP. The U.S. Government does not endorse products or manufacturers. Trademarks or manufacturers' names appear in this report because they are considered essential to the objective of the document. Quality Assurance Statement The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) provides high-quality information to serve the Government, industry, and the public in a manner that promotes public understanding. Standards and policies are used to ensure and maximize the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of its information. FHWA periodically reviews quality issues and adjusts its programs and processes to ensure continuous quality improvement. Abstract With increased demand and limited aggregate and binder supply, hot mix asphalt (HMA) producers discovered that reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) is a valuable component in HMA. As a result, there has been renewed interest in increasing the amount of RAP used in HMA. While a number of factors drive the use of RAP in asphalt pavements, the two primary factors are economic savings and environmental benefits. RAP is a useful alternative to virgin materials because it reduces the use of virgin aggregate and the amount of virgin asphalt binder required in the production of HMA. Using RAP greatly reduces the amount of construction debris going into landfills, and it does not …
A review on production, application, and toxicological analyses of
nanocrystalline cellulose as a novel fat replacer food additive

Nanocrystalline cellulose has gained much attention from the researcher. It provides many applications such as polymer additive, packaging, and tablet filler. This review established the recent isolation method of nanocrystalline cellulose from agricultural by-products, aiming to reduce waste that will affect the environment. The current nanocrystalline cellulose application as a food additive in many food products and its toxicological analyses was discussed. This work can be used as a guideline by researchers and food manufacturers to isolate nanocrystalline cellulose from agricultural waste and its use as a fat replacer in food products.
Proteomics in Multiple Sclerosis: The Perspective of the Clinician

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is the inflammatory demyelinating and neurodegenerative disease of the central nervous system (CNS) that affects approximately 2.8 million people worldwide. In the last decade, a new era was heralded in by a new phenotypic classification, a new diagnostic protocol and the first ever therapeutic guideline, making personalized medicine the aim of MS management. However, despite this great evolution, there are still many aspects of the disease that are unknown and need to be further researched. A hallmark of these research are molecular biomarkers that could help in the diagnosis, differential diagnosis, therapy and prognosis of the disease. Proteomics, a rapidly evolving discipline of molecular biology may fulfill this dire need for the discovery of molecular biomarkers. In this review, we aimed to give a comprehensive summary on the utility of proteomics in the field of MS research. We reviewed the published results of the method in case of the pathogenesis of the disease and for biomarkers of diagnosis, differential diagnosis, conversion of disease courses, disease activity, progression and immunological therapy. We found proteomics to be a highly effective emerging tool that has been providing important findings in the research of MS.
A Novel Method of Chinese Herbal Medicine Classification Based on Mutual Learning

Chinese herbal medicine classification is an important research task in intelligent medicine, which has been applied widely in the fields of smart medicinal material sorting and medicinal material recommendation. However, most current mainstream methods are semi-automatic, with low efficiency and poor performance. To tackle this problem, a novel Chinese herbal medicine classification method based on mutual learning has been proposed. Specifically, two small student networks are designed for collaborative learning, and each of them collects knowledge learned from the other one respectively. Consequently, student networks obtain rich and reliable features, which will further improve the performance of Chinese herbal medicinal classification. In order to validate the performance of the proposed model, a dataset with 100 Chinese herbal classes (about 10,000 samples) was utilized and extensive experiments were performed. Experimental results verify that the proposed method is superior to those of the latest models with equivalent or even fewer parameters, specifically, obtaining 3∼5.4% higher accuracy rate and 13∼37% lower loss. Moreover, the mutual learning model achieves 80.8% Chinese herbal medicine classification accuracy.
Acute Kidney Injury associated with "Triple whammy" combination: a protocol for a systematic review.

Background: “Triple whammy” (TW) refers to the simultaneous use of diuretics, renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system inhibitors and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). To date, the risk of developing acute kidney injury (AKI) associated to this combination has not been deeply investigated. The objectives are to analyze the incidence of AKI associated to the exposure to “triple whammy” including all NSAIDs versus non-exposure to this combination. Secondarily, the risk of hospitalization, severe adverse events, requirement of renal replacement therapy and mortality will be assessed. Also, the incidence of AKI associated to the exposure to “triple whammy” versus non-exposure will be analyzed, including only metamizole as NSAID. Methods: A systematic literature search of intervention studies and analytical observational studies will be conducted in the Cochrane Library, Medline and EMBASE, among others. AKI 12 months after the last prescription of the triple combination will be the main outcome. Relative frequencies, risk of bias and certainty of evidence will be analyzed. Additionally, sensitivity and subgroup analyses will be performed. Results: Once this systematic review has been completed, the results are expected to provide an estimate of the risk associated with this triple combination and the renal variables, in addition to new guidance on the renal treatment of patients potentially receiving triple therapy. Conclusions: This is intended to be the first systematic review of observational studies to analyse TW combination and AKI's risk based on well-validated epidemiological databases exploring drug safety issues.
The relationship among oil and coal consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and economic growth in BRICTS countries

This study aims to analyze the relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, economic growth, and coal and oil consumption in Brazil, Russia, India, China, Turkey, and South Africa by using the bounds test approach autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) over the period from 1969 to 2011. According to ARDL analysis results, it is determined short-run and long-run relationships among selected variables. Three long-run estimators: ARDL cointegration, dynamic ordinary least squares, and fully modified ordinary least squares are utilized to test the robustness of the estimation results. The Granger causality and the forecast error variance decomposition approaches indicate the evidence of a causal relation between variables. According to empirical results, there are the evidence of a uni-directional Granger causality from real gross domestic product (GDP) to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in analyzed countries, uni-directional causality from coal consumption to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, uni-directi.
Environmental Occurrence and Predicted Pharmacological Risk to Freshwater Fish of over 200 Neuroactive Pharmaceuticals in Widespread Use

There is a growing concern that neuroactive chemicals released into the environment can perturb wildlife behaviour. Among these chemicals, pharmaceuticals such as antidepressants and anxiolytics have been receiving increasing attention, as they are specifically prescribed to modify behavioural responses. Many laboratory studies have demonstrated that some of these compounds can affect various aspects of the behaviour of a range of aquatic organisms; however, these investigations are focused on a very small set of neuroactive pharmaceuticals, and they often consider one compound at a time. In this study, to better understand the environmental and toxicological dimension of the problem, we considered all pharmaceuticals explicitly intended to modulate the central nervous system (CNS), and we hypothesised that these compounds have higher probability of perturbing animal behaviour. Based on this hypothesis, we used the classification of pharmaceuticals provided by the British National Formulary (based on their clinical applications) and identified 210 different CNS-acting pharmaceuticals prescribed in the UK to treat a variety of CNS-related conditions, including mental health and sleep disorders, dementia, epilepsy, nausea, and pain. The analysis of existing databases revealed that 84 of these compounds were already detected in surface waters worldwide. Using a biological read-across approach based on the extrapolation of clinical data, we predicted that the concentration of 32 of these neuroactive pharmaceuticals in surface waters in England may be high enough to elicit pharmacological effects in wild fish. The ecotoxicological effects of the vast majority of these compounds are currently uncharacterised. Overall, these results highlight the importance of addressing this environmental challenge from a mixture toxicology and systems perspective. The knowledge platform developed in the present study can guide future region-specific prioritisation efforts, inform the design of mixture studies, and foster interdisciplinary efforts aimed at identifying novel approaches to predict and interpret the ecological implications of chemical-induced behaviour disruption.