Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ANTICANCER ACTIVITY OF ETHANOL EXTRACT OF YELLOW ROOT (Arcangelisia flava) ON HEPG2 HEPATOCELLULAR CANCER CELLS

This study aimed to evaluate anticancer activity and apoptosis induction of ethanolic extract of Arcalengisia flava (AF) roots on HepG2 cancer cell lines. The AF roots were extracted by maceration using ethanol 80%. MTT assay method was used to evaluate the anticancer activity and the proliferation of HepG2 cells. Flow cytometry method was used to assess the induction of HepG2 cells apoptosis. This study showed that the IC50 of AF ethanol extract against HepG2 cells was 109.14 μg/ml. With IC50 treatment, the apoptosis assay showed a significant decrease in intact cells (80.10±1.7%) and a significant increase in early apoptosis (7.9±0.7%) and late apoptosis cells of HepG2 cancer cells (4.9±0.35%) compared to control cells. Moreover, the proliferation of HepG2 cells was declined significantly in 48 and 72 hours after treatment with IC50 (77.5±5.76% and 64.3±5.37%, respectively) and 2xIC50 of the extract (75.9±1.79% and 70.5±4.27%, respectively). This research suggests that the ethanolic extract of AF roots can potentially be used for hepatocarcinoma treatment.
Design and Control of a Hand-Launched Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

In order to address the flexible requirements on load, flight speed, and maneuverability in actual flight conditions, a hand-launched fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is designed with high performance in portability, lightweight, and maneuverability. On this basis, a novel system-decomposition-based robust control method is proposed to achieve a satisfactory control performance for this designed UAV under internal/external uncertainties. First, considering the feature that the coupling terms are usually small in most flight conditions and may be regarded as disturbance, the complex flight system is decomposed into a group of simple subsystems with disturbance, namely, roll–yaw subsystem, pitch–altitude subsystem, and airspeed subsystem. Since the complexity of each subsystem is much smaller than the original system, this will reduce the difficulty of the controller design and complexity of the controller. Besides, to improve the tracking performance and robustness to disturbances, an extended state observer based robust control method is proposed for each subsystem. The stability and robustness of the proposed control method are effectively demonstrated by the theoretical analysis and the actual flight experiments on the designed UAV.
Silicon–Germanium: The Legacy Lives On

Alloy systems comprised of silicon with germanium, lead with tellurium, and bismuth with antimony have constituted a majority of thermoelectric applications during the last half-century. These legacy materials are primarily covalently bonded with a maximum ZT near one. Silicon–germanium alloys have provided the thermal to electrical conversion for many of NASA’s radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) configurations and for nearly all of its deep space and outer planetary flights, such as Pioneer I and II, Voyager I and 11, Ulysses, Galileo, and Cassini. The remarkable success of these materials and their respective devices is evidenced by the fact that there has never been a failure of the RTG systems even after over 1 billion cumulative mission-hours. The history of this alloy system as a thermoelectric conversion material spans over six decades and research to further improve its performance continues to this day. Si-Ge alloys have long been a mainstay of thermoelectric research because of a fortuitous combination of a sufficiently high melting temperature, reasonable energy band gap, high solubility for both n- and p-type dopants, and the fact that this alloy system exhibits complete miscibility in the solid state, which enable tuning of both electrical and thermal properties. This article reviews the history of silicon–germanium as a thermoelectric material and its use in NASA’s RTG programs. Since the device technology is also a critical operational consideration, a brief review of some of the unique challenges imposed by the use in an RTG is also discussed.
An Intra-Vehicular Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network for Smartphone-Based Low-Cost Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems

Advanced driver-assistance system(s) (ADAS) are more prevalent in high-end vehicles than in low-end vehicles. Wired solutions of vision sensors in ADAS already exist, but are costly and do not cater for low-end vehicles. General ADAS use wired harnessing for communication; this approach eliminates the need for cable harnessing and, therefore, the practicality of a novel wireless ADAS solution was tested. A low-cost alternative is proposed that extends a smartphone’s sensor perception, using a camera-based wireless sensor network. This paper presents the design of a low-cost ADAS alternative that uses an intra-vehicle wireless sensor network structured by a Wi-Fi Direct topology, using a smartphone as the processing platform. The proposed system makes ADAS features accessible to cheaper vehicles and investigates the possibility of using a wireless network to communicate ADAS information in a intra-vehicle environment. Other ADAS smartphone approaches make use of a smartphone’s onboard sensors; however, this paper shows the application of essential ADAS features developed on the smartphone’s ADAS application, carrying out both lane detection and collision detection on a vehicle by using wireless sensor data. A smartphone’s processing power was harnessed and used as a generic object detector through a convolution neural network, using the sensory network’s video streams. The network’s performance was analysed to ensure that the network could carry out detection in real-time. A low-cost CMOS camera sensor network with a smartphone found an application, using Wi-Fi Direct, to create an intra-vehicle wireless network as a low-cost advanced driver-assistance system.
Ultrasonic wave propagation of flexible piezoelectric polymer for tactile actuator: simulation and experiment

This study deals with ultrasonic wave propagation on a piezoelectric polymer substrate for tactile actuator. On the piezoelectric polymer substrate, a pair of interdigital transductor (IDT) electrodes is patterned by lift-off process and a resonator is made by exciting the IDTs. A standing wave is generated between the pair of IDT electrodes, of which the wavelength matches with the distance between two IDTs. The standing ultrasonic waves can give different textures to the users. The wave propagation in this periodic structure on the polymer substrate is studied by harmonic and transient analysis. Vertical displacement and induced voltage at the output IDT electrode are calculated and the ultrasonic wave generation is experimentally verified. The proposed concept of tactile actuator based on ultrasonic wave is explained.
Active Pregnancy: A Physical Exercise Program Promoting Fitness and Health during Pregnancy—Development and Validation of a Complex Intervention

Physical activity during pregnancy is a public health issue. In the view of reproducibility and the successful implementation of exercise interventions, reporting the quality of such study design must be ensured. The objective of this study was to develop and validate a physical exercise program promoting fitness and health during pregnancy. A qualitative methodological study was carried out. For the description of the exercise program, the Consensus on Exercise Reporting Template (CERT) was used. For the validation of the program, the revised guideline of the Criteria for Reporting the Development and Evaluation of Complex Interventions in Health Care (CReDECI2) was followed and went through three stages of development, piloting, and evaluation. The customizable exercise program was designed and validated by exercise and health specialists based on evidence-based, international recommendations and supported by different educational tools to be implemented by qualified exercise professionals in health and fitness settings. A 12-week testing intervention addressing a group of 29 pregnant women was carried out. The program’s feasibility was subsequently evaluated by all the pregnant women. The CReDECI2 process guides practitioners and researchers in developing and evaluating complex educational interventions. The presented intervention may assist exercise specialists, health professionals, and researchers in planning, promoting, and implementing a prenatal exercise program.
Contextual User-Centric Task Offloading for Mobile Edge Computing in Ultra-Dense Network

Integrating mobile edge computing (MEC) in ultra-dense network (UDN) is a key enabler to meet the service demand by allowing smart devices to perform uninterrupted task offloading via densely deployed MEC servers. In most cases, the smart devices randomly move around the whole network. Consequently, the popular “MEC-centralized decision” offloading approach could be inapplicable, as joint decision-making among multiple MEC servers becomes difficult due to time synchronization and information exchange overhead. In this paper, we take a user-centric approach to minimize a long-term delay for a given task duration under a price budget constraint. To address this problem, we develop a novel contextual sleeping bandit learning (CSBL) algorithm, which integrates contextual information and sleeping characteristic to accelerate the learning convergence and leverage Lyapunov optimization to deal with the price budget constraint. Furthermore, we extend to a multiple offloading scenario where multiple MEC servers can be selected in each offloading round and propose a CSBL-multiple (CSBL-M) algorithm to address the exponential increase of the offloading selections. For both CSBL and CSBL-M, we derive the upper bounds of learning regret and provide rigorous proofs that they asymptotically approach the Oracle algorithm within bounded deviations for finite task duration. Simulation results illustrate that our proposed algorithms significantly outperform existing algorithms in both single offloading and multiple offloading scenario.
Il designer di moda, «man-in-the-middle» e intermediario culturale

Thinking about fashion designers as cultural intermediaries seems to be useful to find new perspectives on this profession. In particular I sketches three areas in which designers works and mediates among actors and objects: inspiration, collection process and production of value. In inspiration, fashion designer works as a translator of cultural forms into garments, using a large variety of sources and assembling existing artifacts and representations into new products, according to the register of the post-production. During the collection process fashion designer mediates among a high number of different actors competing, sometimes strongly, for the definition of what the new collection will be and trying to impose their criteria and preferences. In this case, the designer provides not much the originality of creations but the unity of direction of the process. Producing the symbolic value of fashion product means that fashion designer mediates between her proposals and consumer's attitude in a kind of «reversed» marketing and creating a genuine belief in the goods. In the last two areas, strong competitors are emerging: apparel merchandisers and celebrities. If fashion design as a profession took about hundred years to consolidate, in a changing context the man-in-the-middle's historical pivotal position is endangered.
Mathematical Representation of Haptic Robotic Realization for Artifacts Maintenance

Originally generated from Greek world “haptikos”, haptic technology is used in many grasping and robotic applications. Commercially, it is widely known solution in videogames and mobile technology. Essentially, haptics is used in medical robots, where the surgeon is located outside of the sterile area and remotely operates vide a direct video connection the robot manipulators, which are holding endoscopes and working elements. Haptics has proven its worth especially for minimal and noninvasive surgical procedures, where the patient care coefficient has increased. As it is directly related to human existence, artifacts may be as sensitive as human life and need extreme care to last for the next generations. Here we could see a possibility to combine haptics with the maintenance of the monuments. In this paper we represent mathematically a haptic robotic concept for artefact maintenance purposes.
Applying an Intelligent Method to Estimate Air Passenger Demand: Theory and Computerized Implementation

Air travel demand estimation is vital for airlines and government authorities to make reasonable decisions. However, when estimating the demand, air passenger volume has been frequently employed as an instrumental variable, although there exists a big deviation between them. This inappropriate practice will lead to misleading conclusions and seriously perverse decisions. This paper, based on the partial adjustment theory, proposes a new method to distinguish and estimate air travel demand from air passenger volume. A multi-dimensional variable selection method is originally proposed and a new estimation method is advanced to solve the problem of endogeneity and serial correlation. The proposed model is finally applied to estimate and analyze the aggregate air travel demand in China, the results show that air travel demand in China is enjoying a big potential. The model may also be applied to study road, rail and ocean transportation demand.
A big data revolution for sustainable development

The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s High Level Panel has called for a “data revolution” for sustainable development; such a revolution has already arrived in the private sector. But forward-thinking companies can now lead a revolution in corporate social responsibility (CSR) to help us address some of the world’s most pressing issues.
The role of aromatherapy with lavender in reducing the anxiety of patients with cardiovascular diseases: A systematic review of clinical trials

Most studies have shown the positive effects of lavender inhalation in decreasing anxiety in patients with cardiovascular diseases. We aimed to systematically review the role of aromatherapy with lavender in these patients. By PRISMA standards, we explored the studies on the role of aromatherapy with lavender in reducing the anxiety of patients with cardiovascular diseases in English databases through the words and terms "aromatherapy", "lavender", "lavandula", "anxiety", "cardiovascular diseases". Out of 16 647 papers, 12 papers up to January 2022 encountered the inclusion criteria for involving in this systematic review. The majority of studies (7 studies, 70%) were used Spielberger Standard Questionnaire as a measurement scale for their studies. Lavender aromatherapy was mostly used for myocardial infarction (3 studies, 30%) and coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery (3 studies, 30%) patients. We concluded that aromatherapy with lavender essential oil significantly ameliorated the anxiety signs in some cardiovascular diseases, e.g., CABG surgery, myocardial infarction, and cardiac ischemia; however, more studies are required in this field to obtain more specific evidence.
Design and Integration of Beyond-10MHz High Switching Frequency DC-DC Converter

SUMMARY There are continuous and strong demands for the DC-DC converter to reduce the size of passive components and increase the system power density. Advances in CMOS processes and GaN FETs enabled the switching frequency of DC-DC converters to be beyond 10MHz. The ad-vancements of 3-D integrated magnetics will further reduce the footprint. In this paper, the overview of beyond-10MHz DC-DC converters will be provided ﬁrst, and our recent achievements are introduced focusing on 3D- integration of Fe-based metal composite magnetic core inductor, and GaN FET
Analysis of electrochemical noise signals with classical methods and methods based on fractal-like wavelets

The corrosion process of low carbon steel and stainless steel in natural aerated sulphuric acid was examined using electrochemical noise (EN). In the paper the comparison of classical Fourier/statistical methods for analysis and characterisation of EN were compared by wavelet based methods. The approximation properties of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) using smooth and fractal-like wavelets were compared for EN-signals. There were found very little differences in approximation rates for both corrosion processes EN-signals. It was shown that DWT enable additional time-frequency characterisation of broadband EN-signals.
Detection and Evaluation of the Inter-turn Short Circuit Fault in a BLDC-Based Hub Motor

A brushless DC (BLDC) motor with an outer rotor has great potential for emerging electric vehicle (EV) applications as an in-wheel hub motor. Inter-turn short circuit faults (ISCFs) are common electrical faults in these applications, and their fault diagnosis is of critical importance. This study proposes a signal analysis-based method to detect and quantitatively analyze the ISCF in a BLDC motor under a six-step commutation control strategy. The zero-sequence voltage component (ZSVC) and three-phase currents are simultaneously determined while the fundamental frequency amplitude of the ZSVC is developed as a fault indicator for diagnostic purposes. Thereafter, the faulty phase is identified, and the fault severity is estimated by jointly analyzing the ZSVC and faulted phase current. The proposed technique entails creating an analytical model, a simulation model, and experimental tests. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique has excellent accuracy, quick response, and real-time fault diagnosis for BLDC motors. This technique will accelerate the use of BLDC-based hub motors in EVs and the widespread application of EVs to reduce the carbon emissions.
The Isolation and Characterization of Antagonist Trichoderma spp. from the Soil of Abha, Saudi Arabia

Background: The genus Trichoderma is widely spread in the environment, mainly in soils. Trichoderma are filamentous fungi and are used in a wide range of fields to manage plant patho-genic fungi. They have proven to be effective biocontrol agents due to their high reproducibility, adaptability, efficient nutrient mobilization, ability to colonize the rhizosphere, significant inhibitory effects against phytopathogenic fungi, and efficacy in promoting plant growth. In the present study, the antagonist Trichoderma isolates were characterized from the soil of Abha region, Saudi Arabia. Methodology: Soil samples were collected from six locations of Abha, Saudi Arabia to isolate Trichoderma having the antagonistic potential against plant pathogenic fungi. The soil dilution plate method was used to isolate Trichoderma (Trichoderma Specific Medium (TSM)). Isolated Trichoderma were evaluated for their antagonistic potential against Fusarium oxysporum, Alternaria alternata and Helminthosporium rostratum. The antagonist activity was assessed by dual culture assay, and the effect of volatile metabolites and culture filtrate of Trichoderma. In addition, the effect of different temperature and salt concentrations on the growth of Trichoderma isolates were also evaluated. Results: The most potent Trichoderma species were identified by using ITS4 and ITS 5 primers. Total 48 Trichoderma isolates were isolated on (TSM) from the soil samples out of those six isolates were found to have antagonist potential against the tested plant pathogenic fungi. In general, Trichoderma strains A (1) 2.1 T, A (3) 3.1 T and A (6) 2.2 T were found to be highly effective in reducing the growth of tested plant pathogenic fungi. Trichoderma A (1) 2.1 T was highly effective against F. oxysporum (82%), whereas Trichoderma A (6) 2.2 T prevented the maximal growth of H. rostratum (77%) according to the dual culture data. Furthermore, Trichoderma A (1) 2.1 T volatile metabolites hindered F. oxysporum growth. The volatile metabolite of Trichoderma A (6) 2.2 T, on the other hand, had the strongest activity against A. alternata (45%). The Trichoderma A (1) 2.1 T culture filtrate was proven to be effective in suppressing the growth of H. rostratum (47%). The temperature range of 26 °C to 30 °C was observed to be optimum for Trichoderma growth. Trichoderma isolates grew well at salt concentrations (NaCl) of 2%, and with the increasing salt concentration the growth of isolates decreased. The molecular analysis of potent fungi by ITS4 and ITS5 primers confirmed that the Trichoderma isolates A (1) 2.1 T, A (3) 3.1 and A (6) 2.2 T were T. harzianum, T. brevicompactum, and T. velutinum, respectively. Conclusions: The study concludes that the soil of the Abha region contains a large population of diverse fungi including Trichoderma, which can be explored further to be used as biocontrol agents.
Protective Effect of a Water-Soluble Carotenoid-Rich Extract of Cordyceps militaris against Light-Evoked Functional Vision Deterioration in Mice

Light-evoked retinal photodamage is considered an important factor contributing to functional vision deterioration and can even lead to light maculopathy or dry age-related macular degeneration. Loss of visual acuity (VA) and visual contrast sensitivity function (VCSF) are the major symptoms of retinal degenerative diseases. Cordyceps militaris is a carotenoid-rich Chinese medicinal fungus with antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and immunomodulatory functions. C. militaris extract is a natural substance, and its bioactive constituents have been shown to confer health benefits, but their application in retinal tissue and functional vision protection in vivo remain incompletely understood. In the present study, we evaluated the influence of water-soluble, carotenoid-rich C. militaris extracts on the visual performance of light-damaged mouse retinas in vivo, using adult female CD-1® (ICR) albino mice. We showed that oral administration of this C. militaris extract (10 mg/kg, twice daily) protected the neural retina tissue against light-evoked photoreceptor cell death, reduced Müller cell hypertrophic gliosis, and elevated GSH levels and promoted the recovery of VA- and VCSF-thresholds, especially for high spatial frequency-characterized vision. These results suggest that, probably because of its water-soluble carotenoids, C. militaris extract has the potential to prevent or treat light-induced visual dysfunction.
Aviation policy instrument choice in Europe: high flying and crash landing? Understanding policy evolutions in the Netherlands and Germany

Abstract In the public debate on climate change in Europe, aviation transport has become a bone of contention and thus also a target of political regulation. While the actual available policy instruments, their designs and effects have been extensively studied, their political economy has remained a rather blind spot of research. Therefore, in this article we explore factors accounting for the instrument choice in aviation policy. Revealing most different evolutions in this matter, the Netherlands and Germany represent appropriately illustrative cases for a comparative exploration. Based on the Political Process-inherent Dynamics Approach, we shed light on a highly complex and limiting institutional environment for aviation policy-making and ultimately identify diverging conceptions of problem structures as well as different configurations of party competition as main explanatory factors for instrument choice and aviation policy evolution.
Trial of Q-Space Imaging using the Readout Segmented Echo Planar Imaging

Poster: "ECR 2014 / C-0361 / Trial of Q-Space Imaging using the Readout Segmented Echo Planar Imaging" by: "D. Iwase1, A. Fukuyama1, H. Isoda1, K. Maruyama2, Y. Komori2, Y. Sakurai1, S. Naganawa1; 1Nagoya/JP, 2Tokyo/JP"