Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Necessity of a Locally Active Antidote in the Clinical Practice of Botulinum Neurotoxin Therapy: Short Communication

Recently, it was demonstrated that copper complexes and 3,4-diaminopyridine can effectively reduce the activity of the botulinum neurotoxin light chain. The aim of the present study was to indicate that treatment with an antidote may have a major influence, not only on the extremely rare disease of botulism, but also on the much more frequently occurring side effects experienced during BoNT therapy. This was a retrospective chart review of patients who were regularly treated with BoNT for various indications. The percentage of patients with clinical signs of overdosing was determined. In patients with facial dystonia, double vision and ptosis occurred as side effects. In patients with cervical dystonia, neck weakness and dysphagia were observed as the most frequent side effects. In oromandibular and oropharyngeal dystonia, abnormal tongue movements and dysphagia occurred frequently. In writer’s cramp and mild post-stroke hand spasticity, severe paresis of the injected and non-injected finger muscles was observed. Additionally, in the BoNT treatment of pain syndromes (such as tension headaches or migraines), neck weakness may occur. Across all indications for clinical BoNT applications, clinical signs of BoNT overdosing may occur in up to 5% of the BoNT-treated patients. Therefore, the development of an antidote for BoNT overdoses would be very much appreciated and would have a major influence on the management of BoNT therapy.
Ecosystem benefits of adopting a whole‐site approach to MPA management

Globally, nations are designating marine protected areas to recover and protect habi - tats and species. With targets to protect 30% of marine areas by 2030, the effective - ness of MPAs to protect designated space is important. In Lyme Bay (south-west UK), two co-located MPAs have each adopted different management styles to exclude mobile demersal fishing: a Special Area of Conservation (SAC) protecting the known extent of sensitive reef habitat and an area including a mosaic of reef and sedimen - tary habitats where the whole site is protected from mobile demersal fishing under a statutory instrument (SI). Underwater videography, both towed (individuals m −2 ) and baited (MaxN), was used to enumerate change over time of reef species (number of taxa, total abundance, functional richness and functional redundancy) in the MPAs and nearby control areas (2008– 2019). Total abundance and functional redundancy of sessile taxa and functional richness of mobile taxa increased, while the number of ses - sile or mobile taxa, functional richness of sessile taxa, total abundance of mobile taxa or functional redundancy of mobile taxa did
Mapping microstructural gradients of the human striatum in normal aging and Parkinson’s disease

Mapping structural spatial change (i.e., gradients) in the striatum is essential for understanding the function of the basal ganglia in both health and disease. We developed a method to identify and quantify gradients of microstructure in the single human brain in vivo. We found spatial gradients in the putamen and caudate nucleus of the striatum that were robust across individuals, clinical conditions, and datasets. By exploiting multiparametric quantitative MRI, we found distinct, spatially dependent, aging-related alterations in water content and iron concentration. Furthermore, we found cortico-striatal microstructural covariation, showing relations between striatal structural gradients and cortical hierarchy. In Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients, we found abnormal gradients in the putamen, revealing changes in the posterior putamen that explain patients’ dopaminergic loss and motor dysfunction. Our work provides a noninvasive approach for studying the spatially varying, structure-function relationship in the striatum in vivo, in normal aging and PD.
Business Groups and Non-efficient Investments

This paper takes China's A-share listed companies from 2012 to 2019 as a sample to study the impact of business groups on non-efficient investments. The study found that business groups will reduce the degree of investment deviation of enterprises, alleviate insufficient investment, and reduce excessive investment. Further considering the nature of ownership, it is found that, compared with state-owned enterprises, the impact of business groups on inefficient investment is more obvious in non-state-owned enterprises. Specifically, firstly, business group can reduce information asymmetry through its internal capital market, improve resource allocation efficiency, ease financing constraints, and reduce investment shortages; secondly, group companies can strengthen internal monitoring by assigning managers and adopt relative performance evaluation. and other measures to reduce agency problems and reduce excessive investment behavior. And put forward the following suggestions: First of all, actively promote the development of business group, rationally use the internal capital market functions of business group, improve the governance mechanism, regulate its development, and then improve the corporate financing environment, alleviate agency problems, and reduce inefficient investment. Secondly, it is necessary to improve the independence of state-owned enterprises, so that the management decisions of state-owned enterprises are carried out under market regulation.
The Relationships between Caregivers’ Concern about Child Weight and Their Non-Responsive Feeding Practices: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: It is unclear whether caregivers’ concern about child weight impacts their non-responsive feeding practices. This systematic review aimed to examine their relationships. Methods: A systematic search of PubMed, Embase, PsycINFO, Web of Science core collection, CINAHL and grey literature was conducted from inception to March 2022, following PRISMA guidelines. Data synthesis was performed using a semi-quantitative approach and a meta-analysis. Results: A total of 35 studies with 22,933 respondents were included in the review for semi-quantitative analyses. Thirty-four studies examined 52 associations between concern about child weight and restriction with 40 statistically significant associations being observed. A total of 34 relationships between concern about child weight and pressure to eat were investigated, with 12 being statistically significant. The pooled regression coefficients (β) demonstrated that caregivers’ concern about child overweight was positively associated with restriction (β = 0.22; 95%CI: 0.12, 0.31), negatively associated with use of food as a reward (β = −0.06; 95%CI: −0.11, −0.01), and not statistically associated with pressure to eat (β = −0.05; 95%CI: −0.13, 0.04). The pooled odds ratios (ORs) indicated that caregivers who were concerned about child overweight were found to use restrictive feeding more often (OR = 2.34; 95%CI: 1.69, 3.23), while less frequently adopting pressure to eat (OR = 0.76; 95%CI: 0.59, 0.98) compared with those without concerns. The results also showed that caregivers who were concerned about child underweight were more likely to force their children to eat (OR = 1.83; 95%CI: 1.44, 2.33) than those without concerns. Conclusion: Caregivers’ concern about child weight may be an important risk factor for non-responsive feeding practices. Thus, interventions are needed to focus on managing and relieving caregivers’ excessive concern about child weight, especially overweight, which may optimize feeding practices and subsequently contribute to child health.
Power to Methane Technology for Energy Storage

Power to gas (P2G) is a technology that converts electricity into gases like H2 and O2 and is expected to meet future high-capacity energy storage needs. In this paper, we present an electric-gas system coupled with electricity and gas as well as an operational analysis to solve the energy dispatch problem in P2G technology. This paper introduces the principle of P2G technology and analyzes the advantages as well as the disadvantages of the technology. P2G technology allows for long-term, seasonal energy storage and a large amount of energy storage. However, the technology has low conversion efficiency and the risk of methane leakage when applied. A coupled electric-gas system consisting of gas-fired units and P2G facilities converts rich electricity into methane for transportation and transient storage with natural gas pipeline. Besides, natural gas power generation is economical and environmentally friendly, and the gas generator sets are responsive, which can better deepen the coupling between the power system and the natural gas system in the framework of the energy internet. This paper illustrates with examples that the P2G coupling technology has a good application prospect, and it has some implications for the future application of P2G technology.
Identification and Description of Outliers in the Densmore Collection of Native American Music

This paper presents a method for outlier detection in structured music corpora. Given a music collection organised into groups of songs, the method discovers contrast patterns which are significantly infrequent in a group. Discovered patterns identify and describe outlier songs exhibiting unusual properties in the context of their group. Applied to the collection of Native American music collated by Frances Densmore (1867–1957) during fieldwork among several North American tribes, and employing Densmore’s music content descriptors, the proposed method successfully discovers a concise set of patterns and outliers, many of which correspond closely to observations about tribal repertoires and songs presented by Densmore.
Enhancement of Seed Germination, Growth, Yield, and Nutritional Composition Using Low-Frequency Glow Discharge (LFGD) Plasma in Wheat (Triticum Aestivum)

Several factors affect germination and seedling growth for the successful establishment of crops. This study investigates the effect of medium pressure (~10 torr) low-frequency glow discharge (LFGD) (Ar+Air) plasma-treated seeds for different periods (1, 3, 6, 8, and 10 min) of wheat. The scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image of the seed surface showed notable changes due to plasma treatment. The germination results showed a significant increase of 4.35%, and the agronomical parameters exhibited a meaningful upgrade result in treated plants compared to control. The catalase (CAT) and superoxide dismutase (SOD) activities significantly improved in shoot and root of plants along with their expression candidate genes (TaCAT and TaSOD) in roots relative to control. Besides, 2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) scavenging activity substantially increased in shoots of plants. A dissimilarity effect was observed in ascorbate peroxidase (APX) and the candidate gene for Ta APX. Further, hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), soluble protein, and sugar content showed significant changes in the leaves and roots but not in nitric oxide (NO) due to plasma treatment. In addition, thousand grain mass (TGM) and nutritional compositions including iron grain, iron shoot, manganese grain, fat, fiber, and ash were significantly increased in contrast to controls. Also, zinc concentration showed no changes in plants, while the moisture content showed significant decreases. Thus, these findings unveil the potentialities of LFGD plasma to improve the germination and growth of wheat plants.
RGB-D Inertial Odometry for a Resource-Restricted Robot in Dynamic Environments

Current simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms perform well in static environments but easily fail in dynamic environments. Recent works introduce deep learning-based semantic information to SLAM systems to reduce the influence of dynamic objects. However, it is still challenging to apply a robust localization in dynamic environments for resource-restricted robots. This paper proposes a real-time RGB-D inertial odometry system for resource-restricted robots in dynamic environments named Dynamic-VINS. Three main threads run in parallel: object detection, feature tracking, and state optimization. The proposed Dynamic-VINS combines object detection and depth information for dynamic feature recognition and achieves performance comparable to semantic segmentation. Dynamic-VINS adopts grid-based feature detection and proposes a fast and efficient method to extract high-quality FAST feature points. IMU is applied to predict motion for feature tracking and moving consistency check. The proposed method is evaluated on both public datasets and real-world applications and shows competitive localization accuracy and robustness in dynamic environments. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, it is the best-performance real-time RGB-D inertial odometry for resource-restricted platforms in dynamic environments for now. The proposed system is open source at: https://github.com/HITSZ-NRSL/Dynamic-VINS.git
Capacitorless DC-DC Regulator as a Candidate Topology for Photovoltaic Solar Facilities

Linear-assisted DC/DC converters (or linear- switching hybrid DC/DC converters) consist of a voltage linear regulator (classic NPN or nMOS topologies and LDO) connected in parallel with a switching DC/DC converter. They are a good candidate for energy processing in photovoltaic solar facilities. In order to control these hybrid structures, different strategies exist, allowing fixing the switching frequency as a function of some parameters of the linear regulator. This article compares two control strategies that, although can be applied to the same circuital structure of linear-assisted converter, are sensibly different. The first one, reported in previous literature, cancels completely the average current through the linear regulator in steady state to achieve a reduction of the losses. Thus the efficiency of the whole system increases and almost equals the one of the standalone switching converter. The proposed approach, in spite of a slightly increment of linear regulator's losses, reduces the output ripple due to the crossover distortion of linear regulator output stage.
Spectroastrometry with photonic lanterns

New frontiers of astronomical science push the imaging capabilities of modern AO-equipped telescopes. However, precision measurement at the diffraction limit is made challenging by time-varying residual aberrations in AO-corrected wavefronts. Photonic lanterns (PLs) are a novel technology whose spatial filtering and coherence properties may be exploited to enable new capabilities in precision measurement at the diffraction limit. We aim to determine the potential of AO-fed PL fiber spectrometers for spectroastrometry. We define spectroastrometric signals for a 6-port PL and perform numerical simulations to calculate expected signals for a binary point source model, as a function of contrast, separation, and position angle. In addition, we simulate the effects of AO residual wavefront error on spectroastrometric signals. We also present simulated spectroastrometric signals for accreting planets, which are expected to show strong hydrogen emission lines.
Characterization of Bordetella pertussis Strains Isolated from India

Despite high level vaccination and the availability of two different types of vaccines, whole cell (wP) and acellular vaccines (aP), the resurgence of pertussis has been reported in many countries. Antigenic variation within circulating and vaccine strains is the most documented reason reported for the resurgence of pertussis. Research on genetic divergence among circulating and vaccine strains has largely been reported in countries using aP vaccines. There are inadequate data available for antigenic variation in B. pertussis from wP-using countries. India has used wP for more than 40 years in their primary immunization program. The present study reports five clinical isolates of B. pertussis from samples of pediatric patients with pertussis symptoms observed in India. Genotypic and phenotypic characterization of clinical isolates were performed by serotyping, genotyping, whole genome analyses and comparative genomics. All clinical isolates showed serotype 1, 2 and 3 based on the presence of fimbriae 2 and 3. Genotyping showed genetic similarities in allele types for five aP genes within vaccine strains and clinical isolates reported from India. The presence of the ptxP3 genotype was observed in two out of five clinical isolates. Whole-genome sequencing was performed for clinical isolates using the hybrid strategy of combining Illumina (short reads) and oxford nanopore (long reads) sequencing strategies. Clinical isolates (n = 5) and vaccine strains (n = 7) genomes of B. pertussis from India were compared with 744 B. pertussis closed genomes available in the public databases. The phylogenomic comparison of B. pertussis genomes reported from India will be advantageous in better understanding pertussis resurgence reported globally with respect to pathogen adaptation.
Buoy Analysis in a Point-Absorber Wave Energy Converter

In this paper, a single-body point absorber system is analyzed to enhance its power absorption performance. The wave energy converter consists of a single floating body coupled to a direct-drive power takeoff system placed on the seabed. The geometry of a cylindrical buoy with large draft is modified, obtaining a particular geometry that is used to enhance the power absorption of the wave converter at a given site and at a finite depth. A numerical analysis tool (NEMOH) is used to obtain the buoy's frequency-dependent hydrostatic parameters; in addition, the buoy's dimensions are parameterized to tune the natural frequency of the oscillating system toward the frequency of dominant incident waves, thus enhancing wave power absorption for a specific wave frequency range. Furthermore, the damping influence of the power takeoff system on the performance of the wave energy converter is also considered.
Expanded Space Vector Modulation of Direct Matrix Converters Including Hidden Rotating Pairs

A novel version of the traditional space vector modulation (SVM) technique, with the integration of the rotating vectors, hereinafter referred to as expanded SVM, is introduced in this paper. Although different ways to benefit from the rotating vectors’ configuration have already been proposed in the literature, the generalization of the SVM theory to include them has not been proposed so far. The rotating vectors are grouped in rotating pairs, which are demonstrated to behave, by all practical aspects, as any other stationary vector. As a consequence, a circular modulation style is developed, which comprises increased flexibility over the traditional approach, thus improving the direct matrix converter capabilities. The new technique is used to achieve safe commutation, even though it might have been also applied to improve the switching losses as well. Besides the theoretical analysis, simulation and experimental results are shown to support the feasibility of the approach.
Comparing Effect Sizes and their Confidence Intervals: A Primer on Equivalence Testing in Educational Research

This paper’s objective was to teach the Equivalence Testing applied to Educational Research to emphasize recommendations and to increase quality of research. Equivalence Testing is a technique used to compare effect sizes or means of two different studies to ascertain if they would be statistically equivalent. For making accessible Equivalence Testing, this technique was explained with two examples by conducting manual calculations, using an online calculator, the software R, the software SPSS, and a t table. Furthermore, the software R with an Equivalence Testing code was used, and its results were graphed and discussed with details. Among other recommendations given, Equivalence Testing can be a useful tool for comparing means and effects within certain bounds that could hopefully imply a practical significance to provide meaning to findings. The results of Equivalence Testing can indicate that two treatments´ effects are statistically equivalent or not. Thus, the Equivalence Testing can be a channel to replicate studies and observe if there is a possible pattern regarding the appearance of a phenomenon.
Aerobic post‐treatment of effluent from anaerobic reactors fed with residues from 1G and 2G sugarcane biorefineries

This study aimed to evaluate an activated sludge system as a post‐treatment step of anaerobic effluents from the co‐digestion of sugarcane vinasse and hemicelluloses hydrolysate. The system consisted, initially, of a two‐stage anaerobic system followed by a continuously fed activated sludge, all in bench scale. After adaptation of aerobic microorganisms to effluent conditions, the anaerobic digestion was conducted in a single‐stage anaerobic reactor, increasing the influent organic loading rate (OLR) of activated sludge from 0.73 to an average of 2.36 gCOD/L·day. Under optimal conditions (12‐h hydraulic retention time [HRT]), a 62 ± 9% efficiency was observed on the aerobic post‐treatment, resulting in effluent chemical oxygen demand (COD) of 414.3 ± 95 mg/L. Overall efficiency of the combined system (anaerobic + aerobic) averaged 88 ± 3%. Influent and effluent characteristics were then analyzed by Folin‐Ciocalteau method, UV–Vis spectrophotometry, and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) for identification of potentially toxic and recalcitrant compounds. Compounds that absorb light within the visible spectra were well removed by the combined treatment system. Most compounds identified by GC–MS in the influent were completely removed by aerobic microorganisms. Saturated fatty acids such as adipic acid, hexadecanoic acid, and octadecanoic acid were observed in the final effluent, as well as other potentially toxic compounds such as stigmasterol, di‐isobutyl phthalate, and benzene. Activated sludge proved to be an efficient post‐treatment for anaerobic co‐digestion, able to cope with changes of anaerobic effluent quality and providing a final effluent of stable organic load. However, phenol removal was not efficient and further studies could be performed to optimize its degradation.
Uncertainty Quantification for Molecular Models via Stochastic Gradient MCMC

: The quality of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations critically depends on the employed potential energy model. Accurate uncertainty quantiﬁcation (UQ) of these models could increase trust in MD simulation predictions and promote progress in the ﬁeld of active learning of neural network (NN) potentials. Bayesian methods promise reliable uncertainty estimates, but the high computational cost of training via classical Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) schemes has prevented their application to deep NN potentials. In this work, we propose stochastic gradient MCMC methods as a computationally eﬃcient option for Bayesian UQ of MD potentials. The stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics method yields promising results for a tabulated coarse-grained water model and could thus be a feasible approach for NN potentials. Additionally, we illustrate the inherent limit of Bayesian UQ imposed by the functional form of the employed model.