Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Infestation of Wild and Ornamental Noncrop Fruits by Drosophila suzukii (Diptera: Drosophilidae)

ABSTRACT Drosophila suzukii (Matsumura) (Diptera: Drosophilidae) is a pest of small fruits and cherries, and has also been noted to infest a variety of wild, ornamental, and uncultivated hosts. Identifying alternative hosts is critical for pest management. Research objectives were to: 1) survey fruits in the field for natural infestation of D. suzukii, 2) determine the susceptibility of fruits in laboratory no-choice studies, and 3) evaluate short-range preference between simultaneously ripe alternative hosts and cultivated fruits in laboratory choice studies. Field surveys identified new hosts or confirmed previously reported hosts including: Berberis aquifolium Pursh, Oregon grape; Cornus spp. , dogwood; Cotoneaster lacteus W.W. Smith, milkflower cotoneaster; Elaeagnus umbellata Thunberg, Autumn olive; Frangula purshiana (de Candolle) A. Gray, cascara buckthorn; Lindera benzoin (L.) Blume, spicebush; Lonicera caerulea L. , blue honeysuckle; Morus sp. , mulberry; Phytolacca americana L. , pokeweed; Prunus avium (L.) L. , wild cherry; Prunus laurocerasus L. , cherry laurel; Prunus lusitanica L. , Portuguese laurel; Rubus armeniacus Focke, Himalaya blackberry; Rubus spectabilis Pursh, salmonberry; Sambucus nigra L. , black elderberry; Sarcococca confusa Sealy, sweet box; Solanum dulcamara L. , bittersweet nightshade; and Symphoricarpos albus (L.) S.F. Blake, snowberry. High fruit infestations were observed in S. confusa during April—May and Lonicera spp. in June before most commercial fruits ripen. From both field and laboratory studies, there was no evidence of susceptibility during the estimated ripe period Crataegus L. ‘Autumn Glory,’ hawthorn; Ilex crenata Thunberg, Japanese holly; Nandina domestica Thunberg, sacred bamboo; Rhaphiolepis umbellata (Thunberg) Makino, yeddo hawthorne; Rosa acicularis Lindley, prickly rose; Skimmia japonica Thunberg, Japanese skimmia; and Viburnum davidii Franchet, David's viburnum. Lastly, laboratory choice tests identified that several fall-ripening alternative hosts were more susceptible than ‘Pinot noir’ or ‘Pinot gris’ wine grapes. By understanding host use, growers can identify high-risk areas where coordinated action may reduce infestation of D. suzukii in crops.
Transforming Opportunities

EVERYDAY LIFE OFFERS constant reminders of the powerlessness of the urban poor. In August 2001, an article in The Economist described attempts to move long-term residents from an area in Luanda under the pretext of unsafe and precarious conditions whilst at the same time plans were afoot to use the same area for highincome housing with the benefit of a sea view. By 1990, there were an estimated 600 million dwellers in Africa, Asia and Latin America living in areas such as the one described in Luanda and lacking a safe and secure living environment; and the numbers have increased since then. Despite UN conferences, bilateral aid programmes coordinated under a new pledge by the OECD nations to halve global poverty by 2015 and several years of strong global economic growth, the Global Report on Human Settlements 2001 quotes the World Bank as concluding that “. very little progress has been made in reducing income poverty levels in the last decade. ” One is forced to conclude that global and national government institutions have, for the most part, failed to address the needs of the poor in housing, just as they have failed to meet other basic needs. The struggles and suffering of low-income women and their families throughout the world form a background to the papers included here. Behind the determination, the commitment and the motivation of the community leaders that is described in the pages that follow are the illness and death of children as a result of living in damp and unhygienic conditions, the deaths and injuries as a result of shack fires that sweep rapidly through high density wood and cardboard housing, and the stress and depression as a result of living with the risks of violence, natural disasters and harassment by government officials and other people able and willing to exploit their power. Behind these pages live the stories of Munni from Apna Zopadpatti who burnt herself to death after years of struggles that seemed to be going nowhere, of Rosemary who struggled to bring up her family in the so-called “holding camps” 20 kilometres from the centre of Harare, and of Stella who died after a fire bomb was thrown into her sister ’s house, a community leader who was challenging the local authority to allow the community to use their subsidy to build for themselves.
Review of Human Injuries, Illnesses, and Economic Losses Caused by Wildlife in the United States

Wildlife cause a myriad of problems in the U.S. (e.g., deer-automobile collisions, disease, reduced agricultural productivity, and nuisances). Unfortunately, no national summaries are available on the extent of losses in human lives, property, and economic and agricultural productivity caused by wildlife. Hence, neither the total magnitude of the problems in the U.S. nor the magnitude of different types of wildlife problems is known. Thus, effective allocation of resources to solve wildlife-caused problems is hampered (Conover and Decker 1991). One reason for this lack of a national perspective is that most estimates of losses caused by wildlife have been limited to 1 species (e.g., Conover and Chasko 1985, Heinrich and Craven 1987, Wigley and Garner 1987), 1 crop (e.g., Dolbeer et al. 1978, Conover 1988), or 1 state or region (e.g., Woodward et al. 1985, Witmer and deCalesta 1992, Conover and Kessler 1994). However, wildlife damage problems are so diverse that single studies cannot assess the total problem. For instance, a survey of state agricultural and wildlife professionals found that 27 wildlife species were listed by at least 1 respondent as causing the greatest economic losses in the respondent's state (Conover and Decker 1991). However, some recent studies have examined wildlife damage on a national level (Conover and Decker 1991; U.S. Dep. of Agric. 1991, 1992; Conover 1994; Wywialowski 1994). We compiled published and unpublished data to examine the quality of our current data, to identify deficiencies in our knowledge, and to assess potential cost of wildlife problems in the U.S. in terms of economic losses and human illnesses, injuries, and fatalities.
Phenotypic changes in invasive species: roles of rapid adaptation and historical factors

Recently, there has been a growing interest for rapid evolution and its potential role in ecological processes. For example, it has been hypothesized that rapid adaptation is a factor favoring the establishment of invasive species in new environments. If this hypothesis is true, it could have implications in the management and prevention of biological invasions. In vertebrates, lots of studies report cases of rapid phenotypic changes in invasive species following their introduction in a novel environment. However, because of the difficulties of directly testing for adaptation, very few of them were able to prove that these phenotypic changes result from rapid adaptation. In this thesis, we were thus interested in assessing whether rapid adaptation can explain phenotypic changes observed in recently introduced populations. Instead of directly testing for adaptation, we tested for alternative hypotheses, which are easier to investigate. Indeed, a phenotypic difference observed between populations established in different environments can be caused by natural selection but also by phenotypic plasticity, by a different phylogenetic origin and by stochastic evolution (i.e. stochastic changes in allele frequencies in a population as the result of demographic processes such as founder effects and bottlenecks). Here, we studied two successful invasive bird species introduced in several kinds of environments. We described the morphology of individuals in these populations, and tested for the effects of historical factors (i.e. phylogenetic origin and recent demographic history) to explain morphological differences observed between populations. In both species, our results show that stochastic evolution resulting of recent demographic history is likely to be the cause of the morphological differences observed. This was true for all the cases we studied except one. In this last case, neither a difference in phylogenetic origin, nor stochastic evolution could explain de phenotypic differences observed between two environments. It is therefore possible that rapid adaptation occurred in this case but the hypothesis of phenotypic plasticity remains to be tested. In conclusion, with this work we highlighted that recent demographic processes can have an important role in causing morphological differentiation in invasive species. This role was probably underestimated in studies on rapid adaptation and should be taken into account in the future. We also showed that the comparative approach we used can allow identifying possible cases of rapid adaptation by first rejecting alternative hypotheses.
Study on the volatile compounds generated from lipid oxidation of Chinese bacon (unsmoked) during processing

In order to investigate the generation of aroma in Chinese bacon (unsmoked), the changes of lipolysis, lipid oxidation, and volatile compounds derived from lipid oxidation (VCDFLO) during processing were analyzed. The results showed that acid lipase activity decreased during the entire process, while neutral lipase and lipoxygenase (LOX) increased from raw meat to the 1 day of dry‐ripening then decreased. Phospholipase increased during dry‐curing then decreased during dry‐ripening. Thiobarbituric acid reactive substances increased from raw meat to the 7 days of dry‐ripening thereafter decreased. Total free fatty acids increased at the end of 1 day of dry‐ripening and decreased subsequently. Thirty‐five VCDFLO were identified; the total peak area of these compounds increased by almost double at the 4 days of dry‐ripening than raw meat and indicated 47.37–50.85% of total 78 volatile compounds in the final products. In conclusion, VCDFLO generation was attributed to lipid‐related enzymes and contributed mainly to the aroma. Practical applications: Chinese bacon (unsmoked) usually produced from high intramuscular fat pork has more intense and long‐lasting aroma, since intramuscular triglycerides are good precursors for most volatile compounds. Understanding the mechanism of aroma formation related to lipid oxidation could help us to improve the product quality and optimize the duration of processing. Therefore, the present work identified the characteristic flavor compounds and provided the changing regularity of these compounds at various stages to facilitate the generation of them by regulating lipases and lipoxygenase (LOX) activities. The work showed that neutral lipase and lipoxygenase (LOX) played important roles during dry‐curing and dry‐ripening. The regulation of lipases and LOX activities can facilitate the generation of volatile compounds of Chinese bacon (unsmoked).
A kernel-driven BRDF model to inform satellite-derived visible anvil cloud detection

Abstract. Satellites routinely observe deep convective clouds across the world. The cirrus outflow from deep convection, commonly referred to as anvil cloud, has a ubiquitous appearance in visible and infrared (IR) wavelength imagery. Anvil clouds appear as broad areas of highly reflective and cold pixels relative to the darker and warmer clear sky background, often with embedded textured and colder pixels that indicate updrafts and gravity waves. These characteristics would suggest that creating automated anvil cloud detection products useful for weather forecasting and research should be straightforward, yet in practice such product development can be challenging. Some anvil detection methods have used reflectance or temperature thresholding, but anvil reflectance varies significantly throughout a day as a function of combined solar illumination and satellite viewing geometry, and anvil cloud top temperature varies as a function of convective equilibrium level and tropopause height. This paper highlights a technique for facilitating anvil cloud detection based on visible observations that relies on comparative analysis with expected cloud reflectance for a given set of angles, thereby addressing limitations of previous methods. A 1-year database of anvil-identified pixels, as determined from IR observations, from several geostationary satellites was used to construct a bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) model to quantify typical anvil reflectance across almost all expected viewing, solar, and azimuth angle configurations, in addition to the reflectance uncertainty for each angular bin. Application of the BRDF model for cloud optical depth retrieval in deep convection is described as well.
Single Object Tracking for Dynamic Programming based on Fine-grained Network

Single target tracking has always been a key and challenging research field in computer vision. Currently, an increasing number of researchers are focusing on extracting better tracking features and designing the best tracker. This paper proposes a new single target tracking network that uses fine-grained features and dynamic programming (DPFNet). In order to extract superior features, we added an attention module to the regression network enabling us to extract finer-grained and discriminative features to achieve regression. Besides, we did observe that different objects have varying moving rates; for different moving targets, the magnitude of the changes in target position within two adjacent frames is not the same either. Although an area search of 4 times the target’s size can be applied to most objects, targets with large position changes may appear in other image areas outside the search area and the target would not be located as a result. Aiming at solving this problem, when designing the tracker, this paper analyzes some of the indicators for predicting the location and uses the analysis results to determine whether the search area is appropriate, so as to dynamically adjust the extent of the search area thereby significantly improving the tracking function. In other words, the size of the search area can be dynamically recalibrated for different images. Subsequent experiments prove that the method put forward in this paper achieves State-of-the-Art results.
CosMo: Conditional Seq2Seq-based Mixture Model for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering

Commonsense reasoning refers to the ability of evaluating a social situation and acting accordingly. Identification of the implicit causes and effects of a social context is the driving capability which can enable machines to perform commonsense reasoning. The dynamic world of social interactions requires context-dependent on-demand systems to infer such underlying information. However, current approaches in this realm lack the ability to perform commonsense reasoning upon facing an unseen situation, mostly due to incapability of identifying a diverse range of implicit social relations. Hence they fail to estimate the correct reasoning path. In this paper, we present Conditional Seq2Seq-based Mixture model (CosMo), which provides us with the capabilities of dynamic and diverse content generation. We use CosMo to generate context-dependent clauses, which form a dynamic Knowledge Graph (KG) on-the-fly for commonsense reasoning. To show the adaptability of our model to context-dependant knowledge generation, we address the task of zero-shot commonsense question answering. The empirical results indicate an improvement of up to +5.2% over the state-of-the-art models.
Assessment of Genetic Variability and Yield Stability in Chickpea Genotypes under Diverse Environments

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is an annual legume and the only cultivated species within genus Cicer. It is an important pulse crop in the world as a source of diet for human and livestock and ranks third after dry bean and dry pea. In pulses, chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is one of the important crops with high acceptability and wider use, its ability to use atmospheric nitrogen through biological nitrogen fixation is economically sounder and environmentally acceptable grown in Rabi season. It is valued for its nutritive seeds with high protein content, 25.3-28.9%, after dehulling (Hulse, 1991). Chickpea covers 11.7 mha area and 12.00mt production in over 55 countries of the world. The major chickpea producing countries include India, Australia, Pakistan, Turkey, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Iran, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. It is the most important pulse crop of India contributing to over 40% of countries total pulse production and largest chickpea The chickpea crop is highly sensitive to temperature and other climate condition. Genotype × environment interaction (G x E) is a major constraint to identify single superior genotype for a number of variable environments. Present study was undertaken for estimation of the impact of G x E interaction on seed yield of chickpea and to identify relatively stable genotypes across environments using 40 chickpea genotypes. Data were collected on twelve yield related traits. The variability analysis revealed that the PCV was higher in magnitude than its corresponding GCV for all the characters studied under three environments. This indicates the influence of the environment on the expression of these characters. Characters showing high heritability coupled and high genetic advance as percentage of mean were biological yield per plant (97.8% & 108.2%), seed yield per plant (97.3% & 104%) and total number of pod per plant (95.5% & 83%) in all the three environments and pooled analysis. The genotypes namely GG 2, ICC 4958, ICC 8474, ICCL 81248, ICCV 07102, ICCV 07109, ICCV 07110, ICC 1882, JG 1307, MP JG 2003115, MP JG 99-115, JG 130 and JAKI 9218 had the regression coefficients greater than one coupled with high mean values indicating specific adaptation of these genotypes for exploitation of character for seed yield per plant. The above results have provided the opportunity of growing chickpea under late planting condition in double cropping (after rice) and very late (after soybean-potato/garden pea). K e y w o r d s
Antioxidants in Cancer Research and Prevention: Assay Comparison, Structure-Function Analysis, and Food Product Analysis

Antioxidants in Cancer Research and Prevention: Assay Comparison, Structure-Function Analysis, and Food Product Analysis Andrew Robert Garrett Department of Microbiology and Molecular Biology, BYU Master of Science Recent epidemiological studies have suggested that the development and progression of several chronic diseases may be initiated or augmented by oxidative stress. Reactive oxygen species and reactive nitrogen species react readily with and can damage nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids. While biological systems are equipped antioxidant defenses to cope with oxidative stress, oxidative damage may still occur when oxidative stress overwhelms antioxidant defenses. This damage, if left unchecked, may lead to a variety of degenerative diseases, including heart disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease and cancer. Several assays have been designed to describe the antioxidant activity of various phytochemicals, vitamins, and other compounds. The ORAC and TOSC assays have emerged as industry standards for measuring antioxidant activity due to their high reliability and sensitivity. Until recently, however, little has been done to assess the relative correlation between these two assays. Furthermore, no assay has been developed to measure changes in antioxidant activities of cells in response to oxidative stress. The current work investigates the correlation between measured antioxidant activities of samples in the both the ORAC and TOSC assays. Recent antioxidant research also focuses on relating chemical structure to antioxidant activity. Previous research in this area has included a broad range of chemical groups, but no study has attempted to formulate a structure-function framework that has applicability to compounds of any group. The current work uses amino acids as a simplest-case model for studying the relationships between chemical structure and antioxidant activity. One particular area of emerging research has centered around comparing organic and conventionally grown food products. The impetus of these investigations lies in claims made by organic supporting groups that these food products are generally more beneficial than their conventional counterparts. Despite the rapid rise in popularity of organic foods, there remains a dearth of research investigating these claims. The current work compares the antioxidant activities of organic and conventionally grown blueberries and apples.
Phytic Acid: Properties and Potential Applications in Dentistry

Inositol hexaphosphate (IP6) is the most abundant inositol phosphate in nature and an essential molecule for different biological functions. IP6 has a unique structure granting it distinctive properties; a high negative charge density provides IP6 with an immense chelating ability and valuable antioxidant properties. IP6 is also simple and cost-effective to produce. These features have attracted researchers and entrepreneurs to further study IP6 for a wide variety of applications in areas such as pharmaceutical, food and chemical industries, medicine, pharmacy, nutrition, and dentistry. The interest in IP6 in the dental field unfolded many decades ago following identification of a cariostatic ability and a positive impact on reducing enamel dissolution. Subsequently, IP6’s anti-plaque, anti-calculus and cement-forming properties have been investigated. Despite encouraging findings, there was a phase of decreased attention to IP6 which slowed down research progress. However, the potential use of IP6 has recently been revisited through several publications that provided deeper understanding into its mechanisms of action in the aforementioned applications. Studies have also explored new applications in endodontics, adhesive, preventive and regenerative dentistry, and IP6’s role in improving the characteristics and performance of dental materials. Evidence of the merits of IP6 in dentistry is now substantial, and this narrative review presents and discusses the different applications proposed in the literature and gives insights of future use of IP6 in the fields of orthodontics, implant and pediatric dentistry.
Determination of the Risk-free Rate of Return on an Investment Efficiency Based on the Fractal Markets Hypothesis

In determining the economic efficiency of an investment project, the rationale and choice of the discount rate is the most difficult step. The methods of investment assessment are built on the rate of return used to discount future cash flows back to their present value. To increase the accuracy of calculations and reduce the subjective assessments of experts, statistical methods are used. The market process is known to be stochastic. Therefore, investors know that the application of statistical methods is not practical, and thus prefer to use their intuition and professional experience. The alternative group of methods such as the Fractal Markets Hypothesis is not widely used because it is difficult to carry out calculations according to the proposed formulas in practice. In this paper, the aim is to propose a method for determining the risk-free rate of return on an investment project based on the Fractal Markets Hypothesis for identifying long-term dependence and assessing the contribution to the total result of changes in inflation. The objective of the study is the determination of the risk-free rate of return on an investment project. The real risk-free rate is calculated as the existing inflation rate. The result of this paper is the definition of inflation boundaries for Poland, Ukraine and Russia, which may be used for determining the risk-free rate of return on an investment project.