Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Resilience and Equity in a Time of Crises: Investing in Public Urban Greenspace Is Now More Essential Than Ever in the US and Beyond

The intersecting negative effects of structural racism, COVID-19, climate change, and chronic diseases disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities in the US and around the world. Urban populations of color are concentrated in historically redlined, segregated, disinvested, and marginalized neighborhoods with inadequate quality housing and limited access to resources, including quality greenspaces designed to support natural ecosystems and healthy outdoor activities while mitigating urban environmental challenges such as air pollution, heat island effects, combined sewer overflows and poor water quality. Disinvested urban environments thus contribute to health inequity via physical and social environmental exposures, resulting in disparities across numerous health outcomes, including COVID-19 and chronic diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases (CVD). In this paper, we build off an existing conceptual framework and propose another conceptual framework for the role of greenspace in contributing to resilience and health equity in the US and beyond. We argue that strategic investments in public greenspaces in urban neighborhoods impacted by long term economic disinvestment are critically needed to adapt and build resilience in communities of color, with urgency due to immediate health threats of climate change, COVID-19, and endemic disparities in chronic diseases. We suggest that equity-focused investments in public urban greenspaces are needed to reduce social inequalities, expand economic opportunities with diversity in workforce initiatives, build resilient urban ecosystems, and improve health equity. We recommend key strategies and considerations to guide this investment, drawing upon a robust compilation of scientific literature along with decades of community-based work, using strategic partnerships from multiple efforts in Milwaukee Wisconsin as examples of success.
Evaluating Ocular Response in the Retina and Optic Nerve Head after Single and Fractionated High-Energy Protons

There are serious concerns about possible late radiation damage to ocular tissue from prolonged space radiation exposure, and occupational and medical procedures. This study aimed to investigate the effects of whole-body high-energy proton exposure at a single dose on apoptosis, oxidative stress, and blood-retina barrier (BRB) integrity in the retina and optic nerve head (ONH) region and to compare these radiation-induced effects with those produced by fractionated dose. Six-month-old C57BL/6 male mice were either sham irradiated or received whole-body high energy proton irradiation at an acute single dose of 0.5 Gy or 12 equal dose fractions for a total dose of 0.5 Gy over twenty-five days. At four months following irradiation, mice were euthanized and ocular tissues were collected for histochemical analysis. Significant increases in the number of apoptotic cells were documented in the mouse retinas and ONHs that received proton radiation with a single or fractionated dose (p < 0.05). Immunochemical analysis revealed enhanced immunoreactivity for oxidative biomarker, 4-hydroxynonenal (4-HNE) in the retina and ONH following single or fractionated protons with more pronounced changes observed with a single dose of 0.5 Gy. BRB integrity was also evaluated with biomarkers of aquaporin-4 (AQP-4), a water channel protein, a tight junction (TJ) protein, Zonula occludens-1 (ZO-1), and an adhesion molecule, the platelet endothelial cell adhesion molecule-1 (PECAM-1). A significantly increased expression of AQP-4 was observed in the retina following a single dose exposure compared to controls. There was also a significant increase in the expression of PECAM-1 and a decrease in the expression of ZO-1 in the retina. These changes give a strong indication of disturbance to BRB integrity in the retina. Interestingly, there was very limited immunoreactivity of AQP-4 and ZO-1 seen in the ONH region, pointing to possible lack of BRB properties as previously reported. Our data demonstrated that exposure to proton radiation of 0.5 Gy induced oxidative stress-associated apoptosis in the retina and ONH, and changes in BRB integrity in the retina. Our study also revealed the differences in BRB biomarker distribution between these two regions. In response to radiation insults, the cellular response in the retina and ONH may be differentially regulated in acute or hyperfractionated dose schedules.
Profiles of eHealth Adoption in Persons with Multiple Sclerosis and Their Caregivers

(1) Background: Persons with multiple sclerosis (pwMS) are often characterized as ideal adopters of new digital healthcare trends, but it is worth thinking about whether and which pwMS will be targeted and served by a particular eHealth service like a patient portal. With our study, we wanted to explore needs and barriers for subgroups of pwMS and their caregivers when interacting with eHealth services in care and daily living. (2) Methods: This study comprises results from two surveys: one collecting data from pwMS and their relatives (as informal caregivers) and another one providing information on the opinions and attitudes of healthcare professionals (HCPs). Data were analyzed descriptively and via generalized linear models. (3) Results: 185 pwMS, 25 informal caregivers, and 24 HCPs in the field of MS participated. Nine out of ten pwMS used information technology on a daily base. Individual impairments like in vision and cognition resulted in individual needs like the desire to actively monitor their disease course or communicate with their physician in person. HCPs reported that a complete medication overview, additional medication information, overview of future visits and a reminder of medication intake would be very helpful eHealth features for pwMS, while they themselves preferred features organizing and enriching future visits. (4) Conclusions: A closer look at the various profiles of eHealth adoption in pwMS and their caregivers indicated that there is a broad and robust enthusiasm across several subgroups that does not exclude anyone in general, but constitutes specific areas of interest. For pwMS, the focus was on eHealth services that connect previously collected information and make them easily accessible and understandable.
Thermomagnetically Responsive γ‐Fe2O3@Wax@SiO2 Sub‐Micrometer Capsules

A three steps synthesis route is proposed to generate thermosensitive and magnetically responsive γ‐Fe2O3@Wax@SiO2 sub‐micrometer capsules with a paraffinic core and a solid and brittle shell. The process integrates Pickering‐based emulsions, inorganic and sol–gel chemistries to promote monodisperse in size wax droplets, γ‐Fe2O3 nanoparticles and mineralization of the wax/water interfaces. Hybrid capsules are obtained with an average size around 800 nm, representing the first example of sub‐micrometer capsules generated employing Pickering emulsions as templates. Cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) cationic surfactant added during mineralization at concentrations between 0.17 and 1.0 wt% impacts the shell density. The shell density seems to improve its mechanical strength while affording a low wax expansion volume without breaking for CTAB concentrations above 1.0 wt%. At lower CTAB concentration (0.17 wt%), the silica shell becomes less bulky and cannot resist the wax dilatation induced by the solid‐to‐liquid phase transition imposed by hyperthermia. The magnetically induced heating provided by the internal magnetic moments is sufficient to melt the wax core, expanding its volume, inducing thereby the surrounding silica shell rupture. Such γ‐Fe2O3@Stearic Acid@Wax@SiO2 sub‐micrometer capsules allow a sustained wax release with time, whereby 20% of the wax is released after 50 min of alternating magnetic field treatment.
Development and Evaluation of Gellan Gum/Silk Fibroin/Chondroitin Sulfate Ternary Injectable Hydrogel for Cartilage Tissue Engineering

Hydrogel is in the spotlight as a useful biomaterial in the field of drug delivery and tissue engineering due to its similar biological properties to a native extracellular matrix (ECM). Herein, we proposed a ternary hydrogel of gellan gum (GG), silk fibroin (SF), and chondroitin sulfate (CS) as a biomaterial for cartilage tissue engineering. The hydrogels were fabricated with a facile combination of the physical and chemical crosslinking method. The purpose of this study was to find the proper content of SF and GG for the ternary matrix and confirm the applicability of the hydrogel in vitro and in vivo. The chemical and mechanical properties were measured to confirm the suitability of the hydrogel for cartilage tissue engineering. The biocompatibility of the hydrogels was investigated by analyzing the cell morphology, adhesion, proliferation, migration, and growth of articular chondrocytes-laden hydrogels. The results showed that the higher proportion of GG enhanced the mechanical properties of the hydrogel but the groups with over 0.75% of GG exhibited gelling temperatures over 40 °C, which was a harsh condition for cell encapsulation. The 0.3% GG/3.7% SF/CS and 0.5% GG/3.5% SF/CS hydrogels were chosen for the in vitro study. The cells that were encapsulated in the hydrogels did not show any abnormalities and exhibited low cytotoxicity. The biochemical properties and gene expression of the encapsulated cells exhibited positive cell growth and expression of cartilage-specific ECM and genes in the 0.5% GG/3.5% SF/CS hydrogel. Overall, the study of the GG/SF/CS ternary hydrogel with an appropriate content showed that the combination of GG, SF, and CS can synergistically promote articular cartilage defect repair and has considerable potential for application as a biomaterial in cartilage tissue engineering.
Therapeutic Approaches Targeting Proteostasis in Kidney Disease and Fibrosis

Pathological insults usually disturb the folding capacity of cellular proteins and lead to the accumulation of misfolded proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), which leads to so-called “ER stress”. Increasing evidence indicates that ER stress acts as a trigger factor for the development and progression of many kidney diseases. The unfolded protein responses (UPRs), a set of molecular signals that resume proteostasis under ER stress, are thought to restore the adaptive process in chronic kidney disease (CKD) and renal fibrosis. Furthermore, the idea of targeting UPRs for CKD treatment has been well discussed in the past decade. This review summarizes the up-to-date literature regarding studies on the relationship between the UPRs, systemic fibrosis, and renal diseases. We also address the potential therapeutic possibilities of renal diseases based on the modulation of UPRs and ER proteostasis. Finally, we list some of the current UPR modulators and their therapeutic potentials.
Deep Learning (DL)-Enabled System for Emotional Big Data

Emotion care for human well-being is important for all ages. In this paper, we propose an emotion care system based on big data analysis for autism disorder patient training, where emotion is detected in terms of facial expression. The expression can be captured through a camera as well as Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled devices. The system works with deep learning techniques on emotional big data to extract emotional features and recognize six kinds of facial expressions in real-time and offline. A convolutional neural network (CNN) model based on MobileNet V1 structure is trained with two emotional datasets, FER-2013 dataset and a new proposed dataset named MCFER. The experiments on three strategies showed that the proposed system with deep learning model obtained an accuracy of 95.89%. The system can also detect and track multiple faces as well as recognize facial expressions with high performance on mobile devices with a speed of up to 12 frames per second.
GDAP1 Involvement in Mitochondrial Function and Oxidative Stress, Investigated in a Charcot-Marie-Tooth Model of hiPSCs-Derived Motor Neurons

Mutations in the ganglioside-induced differentiation associated protein 1 (GDAP1) gene have been associated with demyelinating and axonal forms of Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease, the most frequent hereditary peripheral neuropathy in humans. Previous studies reported the prevalent GDAP1 expression in neural tissues and cells, from animal models. Here, we described the first GDAP1 functional study on human induced-pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs)-derived motor neurons, obtained from normal subjects and from a CMT2H patient, carrying the GDAP1 homozygous c.581C>G (p.Ser194*) mutation. At mRNA level, we observed that, in normal subjects, GDAP1 is mainly expressed in motor neurons, while it is drastically reduced in the patient’s cells containing a premature termination codon (PTC), probably degraded by the nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) system. Morphological and functional investigations revealed in the CMT patient’s motor neurons a decrease of cell viability associated to lipid dysfunction and oxidative stress development. Mitochondrion is a key organelle in oxidative stress generation, but it is also mainly involved in energetic metabolism. Thus, in the CMT patient’s motor neurons, mitochondrial cristae defects were observed, even if no deficit in ATP production emerged. This cellular model of hiPSCs-derived motor neurons underlines the role of mitochondrion and oxidative stress in CMT disease and paves the way for new treatment evaluation.
Comparing Aerobic Exercise with Yoga in Anxiety Reduction: An Integrative Review

Abstract Anxiety is a common mental health disorder that affects many Americans yet often goes unrecognized or undertreated. The purpose of this article is to review the current literature to assist in determining which alternative and complimentary therapy, aerobic exercise or yoga, is most beneficial in reducing anxiety symptoms. The literature search process resulted in a total of 14 articles included in the review. Results indicate that yoga is more effective in decreasing anxiety symptoms than aerobic exercise. Health care providers can use this information to help recommend an alternative form of therapy for patients.
Potential Applications of Arthrospira platensis Lipid-Free Biomass in Bioremediation of Organic Dye from Industrial Textile Effluents and Its Influence on Marine Rotifer (Brachionus plicatilis)

Arthrospira platensis is one of the most important cultured microalgal species in the world. Arthrospira complete dry biomass (ACDB) has been reported as an interesting feedstock for many industries, including biodiesel production. The A. platensis by-product of biodiesel production (lipid-free biomass; LFB) is a source of proteins, functional molecules, and carbohydrates, and can also be reused in several applications. The current study investigated the efficiency of ACDB and LFB in bioremediation of dye (Ismate violet 2R, IV2R) from textile effluents. In addition, the potential of ACDB and LFB loaded by IV2R as a feed for Rotifer, Brachionus plicatilis, was examined. The surface of the adsorbents was characterized by SEM, FTIR, and Raman analysis to understand the adsorption mechanism. The batch sorption method was examined as a function of adsorbent dose (0.02–0.01 g L−1), solution initial concentration (10–100 mg L−1), pH (2–10), and contact time (15–180 min). The kinetic studies and adsorption isotherm models (Freundlich, Langmuir, Tempkin, and Halsey) were used to describe the interaction between dye and adsorbents. The results concluded that the adsorption process increased with increasing ACDB and LFB dose, contact time (120 min), initial IV2R concentration (10 mg L−1), and acidity pH (2 and 6, respectively). For the elimination of industrial textile wastewater, the ACDB and LFB sorbents have good elimination ability of a dye solution by 75.7% and 61.11%, respectively. The kinetic interaction between dye and adsorbents fitted well to Langmuir, Freundlish, and Halsey models for LFB, and Langmuir for ACDB at optimum conditions with R2 > 0.9. In addition, based on the bioassay study, the ACDB and LFB loaded by IV2R up to 0.02 g L−1 may be used as feed for the marine Rotifer B. plicatilis.
C-GCN: A Flexible CSI Phase Feature Extraction Network for Error Suppression in Indoor Positioning

Channel state information (CSI) provides a fine-grained description of the signal propagation process, which has attracted extensive attention in the field of indoor positioning. However, considering the influence of environment and hardware, the phase of CSI is distorted in most cases. It is difficult to extract effective location features in multiple scenes only through the determined artificial experience model. Graph neural network has performed well in many fields in recent years, but there is still a lot of room to explore in the field of indoor positioning. In this paper, a phase feature extraction network based on multi-dimensional correlation is proposed, named Cooperation-Graph Convolution Network (C-GCN). The purpose of C-GCN is to extract new features of multiple correlation and to mine the relationship between antenna and subcarrier as much as possible. C-GCN is composed of convolution layer and graph convolution layer. In the graph convolution layer, C-GCN regards each subcarrier of each antenna as a node in the graph network, constructs the connection by the correlation between the antenna and the subcarrier, and aggregates the node vectors by graph convolution. In the convolution layer, there is a natural corresponding structure between data packets, C-GCN extracts the fluctuation with convolution in Euclidean space. C-GCN combines these two layers, and applies end-to-end supervised training to obtain effective features. Extensive experiments are conducted in typical indoor environments to verify the superior performance of C-GCN in restraining error tailing. The average positioning error of C-GCN is 1.29 m in comprehensive office and 1.71 m in garage. Combined with the amplitude feature, the average positioning error is 0.99 m in comprehensive office and 1.14 m in garage.
Study on the Effect of Ni Addition on the Microstructure and Properties of NiTi Alloy Coating on AISI 316 L Prepared by Laser Cladding

This paper investigated 55 NiTi commercial alloy powder and 55 NiTi with 5% pure Ni mixed powder (55 NiTi + 5 Ni) coatings fabricated by laser cladding to study the effect of extra Ni addition on the microstructure and properties of the coating. The XRD and EDS results show that the major phases in the coatings were NiTi and Ni3Ti. Besides that, a second phase like Ni4Ti3, Fe2Ti, and NiTi2 was also detected, among which, NiTi2 was only found in 55 NiTi coating. The proportion of the phase composition in the coating was calculated via the software Image-Pro Plus. The hardness of the cladding layer reaches 770–830 HV, which was almost four times harder than the substrate, and the hardness of 55 NiTi + 5 Ni coating was around 8% higher than that of 55 NiTi coating. The wear resistance of the 55 NiTi + 5 Ni coating was also better; the wear mass loss decreased by about 13% and with a smaller friction coefficient compared with the 55 NiTi coating. These results are attributed to the solid solution strengthening effect caused by Ni addition and the second phase strengthening effect caused by the content increase of the Ni3Ti phase in the cladding layer.
Load Balancing in Heterogeneous Server Clusters: Insights From a Product-Form Queueing Model

Efficiently exploiting servers in data centers requires performance analysis methods that account not only for the stochastic nature of demand but also for server heterogeneity. Although several recent works proved optimality results for heterogeneity-aware variants of classical load-balancing algorithms in the many-server regime, we still lack a fundamental understanding of the impact of heterogeneity on performance in finite-size systems. In this paper, we consider a load-balancing algorithm that leads to a product-form queueing model and can therefore be analyzed exactly even when the number of servers is finite. We develop new analytical methods that exploit its product-form stationary distribution to understand the joint impact of the speeds and buffer lengths of servers on performance. These analytical results are supported and complemented by numerical evaluations that cover a large variety of scenarios.
Brain Anatomical Mediators of GRIN2B Gene Association with Attention/Hyperactivity Problems: An Integrated Genetic-Neuroimaging Study

This study aims to investigate the genetic and neural determinants of attention and hyperactivity problems. Using a proof-of-concept imaging genetics mediation design, we explore the relationship between the glutamatergic GRIN2B gene variants and inattention/hyperactivity with neuroanatomical measures as intermediates. Fifty-eight children and adolescents were evaluated for behavioral problems at three time points over approximately 7 years. The final assessment included blood drawing for genetic analyses and 3T magnetic resonance imaging. Attention/hyperactivity problems based on the Child Behavior Checklist/6-18, six GRIN2B polymorphisms and regional cortical thickness, and surface area and volume were estimated. Using general linear model (GLM) and mediation analyses, we tested whether GRIN2B exerted an influence on stable inattention/hyperactivity over development, and to what extent this effect was mediated by brain morphology. GLM results enlightened the relation between GRIN2B rs5796555-/A, volume in the left cingulate isthmus and inferior parietal cortices and inattention/hyperactivity. The mediation results showed that rs5796555-/A effect on inattention/hyperactivity was partially mediated by volume in the left isthmus of the cingulate cortex, suggesting a key role of this region in translating glutamatergic GRIN2B variations to attention/hyperactivity problems. This evidence can have important implications in the management of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders.
Recent Advances in the Molecular Effects of Biostimulants in Plants: An Overview

As the world develops and population increases, so too does the demand for higher agricultural output with lower resources. Plant biostimulants appear to be one of the more prominent sustainable solutions, given their natural origin and their potential to substitute conventional methods in agriculture. Classified based on their source rather than constitution, biostimulants such as humic substances (HS), protein hydrolysates (PHs), seaweed extracts (SWE) and microorganisms have a proven potential in improving plant growth, increasing crop production and quality, as well as ameliorating stress effects. However, the multi-molecular nature and varying composition of commercially available biostimulants presents challenges when attempting to elucidate their underlying mechanisms. While most research has focused on the broad effects of biostimulants in crops, recent studies at the molecular level have started to unravel the pathways triggered by certain products at the cellular and gene level. Understanding the molecular influences involved could lead to further refinement of these treatments. This review comprises the most recent findings regarding the use of biostimulants in plants, with particular focus on reports of their molecular influence.