Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of in vitro Digestibility of Wheat Straw

A lot of wheat straw is produced and used in the feeding of livestock. Among the limiting factors the nutritional value of agricultural byproducts are high lignin content and low quantity of easy accessible carbohydrates (Osorio and Cruz, 1990). In ruminants due to having special digestive system, feeds exposed to microbial fermentation, before digestive enzymes of animal. Since the main limitation for increasing the animal productions is deficiency of feedstuffs in developing country, production of livestock with ability to consume the low quality and fibrous materials is necessary. Buffalo has a high capacity to use the low quality fibrous feedstuffs and roughage. Advantage of rumen metabolism and function of buffalo than the cattle, especially in terms of the activity of cellulolytic microorganisms, is considered (Bahatia et al. 2004). The anaerobic rumen fungi have the necessary enzymes (mostly extra cellular) for degradation of plants cell wall. The fungi digest about 70% of cellulose in rumen, and their cellulase and xylanase activity are more than other cellulolytic microorganisms like bacteria and protozoa in rumen (Lee et al. 2004). Before rumen bacteria could degrade the forage, they must be attached and colonized on the plant tissues. Cuticle that covers the aerial parts of all plants, prevented from colonization of rumen bacteria. The rumen anaerobic fungi have ability to penetrate to the cuticle layer This study was conducted to compare digestibility of wheat straw (WS) by fungi and whole rumen microorganisms (WRM). Dry matter (DM), neutral and acid detergent fiber (NDF and ADF) digestibility of WS were compared with in vitro digestion (IVD), gas production (GP) and specific rumen anaerobic fungi culture (SRAFC). Dry matter, NDF and ADF digestibility of WS by WRM of buffalo (60.80, 49.93 and 17.45%, respectively) were more than cattle (53.00, 38.63 and 10.62%, respectively) (P<0.05). Regardless the type of microorganisms, digestibility of DM (P>0.05), NDF and ADF by buffalo (51.03, 44.41 and 12.09%) was more than cattle (48.04, 36.34 and 8.76) (P<0.05). Potential of GP (B) by fungi and WRM in cattle was more than buffalo (P<0.05). Rate of GP (C) for WRM and fungi of cattle was less than buffalo (P<0.05). Regardless the type of microorganisms, C in buffalo was more than cattle (P<0.05) and was vice versa for B (P<0.05). Regardless the type of animal species, WRM had higher digestibility and B than fungi (P>0.05), but rate of GP of them was same. In SRAFC, DM digestibility of WS by fungi of buffalo at days 3 and 12 was more than cattle (P<0.05). The number of fungi in cattle rumen was more than buffalo (P<0.05). The potential of fungi and WRM of buffalo were more than cattle. Therefore, the results were shown the advantage and supremacy of buffalo in usage the low quality roughages.
LiteWSEC: A Lightweight Framework for Web-Scale Spectral Ensemble Clustering

Spectral Clustering (SC) is an effective clustering method for its excellent performance in partitioning non-linearly distributed data. On the other hand, Ensemble Clustering (EC), a different clustering technology, can promote cluster quality by ensembling the results of base clusterings. In this work, we concentrate on an EC framework that utilizes SC as the base method. Nevertheless, SC suffers from scalability due to its high computational complexity in constructing the Laplacian graph and computing the corresponding eigendecomposition. In the past decades, many efforts have been made to it. However, SC suffers from the scalability issue in processing extensive data, especially in web-scale scenarios. Additionally, EC requires multiple clustering results as the ensemble bases, which further aggravates resource consumption. To address this issue, LiteWSEC, a simple yet efficient Lightweight Framework for Web-scale Spectral Ensemble Clustering, is proposed to cluster web-scale data with limited resource requirements. It adopts the Web-scale Spectral Clustering (WSC) as the base method, which has minimal space overhead without computing overall embedding explicitly. LiteWSEC is highly flexible in the memory requirement, which is adaptive to the available resource. It can partition web-scale data (e.g., <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n $</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mi>n</mml:mi></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="yang-ieq1-3267167.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> = 8,000 k) in an resource-limited host (e.g., memory is restricted to 1 GB). Experiments on real-world, large-scale, and web-scale datasets demonstrate both the efficiency and effectiveness of LiteWSEC over state-of-the-art SC and EC methods.
Leptospiral Proteins As Potential Immunity Targets To Protect Individuals Against Reinfection

Leptospirosis is a disease caused by pathogenic species of spirochetes of the genus Leptospira. The bacteria are widespread globally and can survive in the environment for weeks after being excreted through the urine of infected animals. Humans get infected through contact with contaminated water or soil. Leptospirosis is a life-threatening disease with a wide range of symptoms. It is believed that after infection, individuals acquire natural immunity against the same infecting serovar. However, there are over 300 serovars of Leptospira that can cause disease in humans and animals, and reinfections are common. Nevertheless, recent studies have shown that reinfection caused by the same serovar is frequent in highly endemic areas, indicating that antibodies in different individuals may be diverse. Our research has been focusing on trying to better understand the natural immunity against Leptospira. We conducted experiments to verify if antibodies against specific leptospiral proteins could induce immunity against secondary infection. Using mutants and recombinant proteins of the identified targets, we evaluated the role of those protein candidates on the pathogenesis of the bacteria and on the immunity of individuals living in an endemic area for leptospirosis. We identified proteins that have a role as a virulence factor and confirmed the overall role of specific targets as an immunogenic marker for protection. Our preliminary results indicate that those targets can be explored as potential diagnostic and/or prevention candidates against this important neglected disease.
The Privacy-Welfare Trade-off: Effects of Differential Privacy on Influence & Welfare in Social Choice

This work studies a fundamental trade-oﬀ between privacy and welfare in aggregation of privatized preferences of individuals. It presents the precise rate at which welfare decreases with increasing levels of privacy. Trade-oﬀs in achieving privacy while maintaining accuracy or more recently in maintaining fairness have been studied so far in prior works. Social choice functions help aggregate individual preferences while diﬀerentially private mechanisms provide formal privacy guarantees to release answers of queries operating on data. However, once diﬀerential privacy inducing noise is introduced into a voting system, the deterministic social choice function used to release an aggregated choice may not be ideal anymore. It might change the power balances between the voters. It could be the case that an alternate social choice function becomes more ideal to aggregate the preferences. There could be a constraint to operate the voting system at a speciﬁc level of either privacy or inﬂuence or welfare, and one would like to know the eﬀects on rest of the unconstrained choices. In this paper, we introduce notions of welfare and probabilistic inﬂuence of privatization mechanisms to help precisely answer such questions through the proposed results. Throughout the paper, we restrict our work to social choice functions where several voters vote for either of two candidates. We present two diﬀerent ways of proving each of our results that connects privacy with welfare & probabilistic inﬂuence: i. ) by using ﬁrst principles from combinatorics/probability, ii. ) by using Fourier analysis of Boolean functions. Finally, we analyze the accuracy of the privatization mechanism on various social choice functions. In particular, for the exact accuracy analysis of the Majority function, we derive a dynamic programming approach for eﬃcient computation of accuracy. The results in this paper thereby help bridge two prominent ﬁelds of social choice theory and diﬀerential privacy.
Algorithms for Weak "-nets

In the plane, we can nd a weak "-net for convex sets consisting of O(" ? 2) points, in time O(n" ? 2). We can determine the smallest " for which a given planar set is an "-net in time O(n 3). In IR d , we can nd weak "-nets of size O 1 " d log O(1) 1 " in time O(n (1=") O(1)) (both exponents depending on d).
Greffage d’un film mince de nano-TiO2 sur les fibres naturelles cellulosiques pour le renforcement de biocomposites polymériques

Natural materials have received a full attention in many applications because they are degradable and derived directly from earth. In addition to these benefits, natural materials can be obtained from renewable resources such as plants (i.e. cellulosic fibers like flax, hemp, jute, and etc). Being cheap and light in weight, the cellulosic natural fiber is a good candidate for reinforcing bio-based polymer composites. However, the hydrophilic nature -resulted from the presence of hydroxyl groups in the structure of these fibersrestricts the application of these fibers in the polymeric matrices. This is because of weak interfacial adhesion, and difficulties in mixing due to poor wettability of the fibers within the matrices. Many attempts have been done to modify surface properties of natural fibers including physical, chemical, and physico-chemical treatments but on the one hand, these treatments are unable to cure the intrinsic defects of the surface of the fibers and on the other hand they cannot improve moisture, and alkali resistance of the fibers. However, the creation of a thin film on the fibers would achieve the mentioned objectives. This study aims firstly to functionalize the flax fibers by using selective oxidation of hydroxyl groups existed in cellulose structure to pave the way for better adhesion of subsequent amphiphilic TiO2 thin films created by Sol-Gel technique. This method is capable of creating a very thin layer of metallic oxide on a substrate. In the next step, the effect of oxidation on the interfacial adhesion between the TiO2 film and the fiber and thus on the physical and mechanical properties of the fiber was characterized. Eventually, the TiO2 grafted fibers with and without oxidation were used to reinforce poly lactic acid (PLA). Tensile, impact, and
Improvement of Tumor Oxygenation by Mild Hyperthermia

Abstract Song, C. W. , Park, H. and Griffin, R. J. Improvement of Tumor Oxygenation by Mild Hyperthermia. There is now abundant evidence that oxygenation in rodent, canine and human tumors is improved during and for up to 1–2 days after heating at mild temperatures. An increase in tumor blood perfusion along with a decline in the oxygen consumption rate appears to account for the improvement of tumor oxygenation by mild hyperthermia. The magnitude of the increase in tumor pO2, determined with oxygen-sensitive microelectrodes, caused by mild hyperthermia is less than that caused by carbogen breathing. However, mild hyperthermia is far more effective than carbogen breathing in increasing the radiation response of experimental tumors, probably because mild hyperthermia oxygenates both (diffusion-limited) chronically hypoxic and (perfusion-limited) acutely hypoxic cells, whereas carbogen breathing oxygenates only the chronically hypoxic cells. Mild hyperthermia is also more effective than nicotinamide, which is known to oxygenate acutely hypoxic cells, in enhancing the radiation response of experimental tumors. The combination of mild hyperthermia with carbogen or nicotinamide is highly effective in reducing the hypoxic cell fraction in tumors and increasing the radiation response of experimental tumors. A primary rationale for the use of hyperthermia in combination with radiotherapy has been that hyperthermia is equally cytotoxic toward fully oxygenated and hypoxic cells and that it directly sensitizes both fully oxygenated and hypoxic cells to radiation. Such cytotoxicity and such a radiosensitizing effect may be expected to be significant when the tumor temperature is elevated to at least 42–43°C. Unfortunately, it is often impossible to uniformly raise the temperature of human tumors to this level using the hyperthermia devices currently available. However, it is relatively easy to raise the temperature of human tumors into the range of 39–42°C, which is a temperature that can improve tumor oxygenation for up to 1–2 days. The potential usefulness of mild hyperthermia to enhance the response of human tumors to radiotherapy by improving tumor oxygenation merits continued investigation.
Label‐Free Colorimetric Screening of Nuclease Activity and Substrates by Using Unmodified Gold Nanoparticles

Nucleic acids are the molecules responsible for the conveyance of genetic information and have paramount importance in biological systems. Nucleases are specific enzymes capable of cleaving the phosphodiester bonds of nucleic acids between nucleotides either from the ends or internally. Nucleases play key roles in many biological processes such as DNA replication, repair, recombination, maturation, and degradation. These enzymes are also widely used in various biosensing techniques to achieve exceptional detection selectivity and sensitivity. For example, RNase H, which specifically digests the RNA strands in RNA–DNA heteroduplexes and does not affect single-stranded (ss) DNA, double-stranded (ds) DNA, ssRNA, and dsRNA, was utilized in a novel surface enzymatic amplification RNA microarray to enhance the sensitivity of surface plasmon resonance (SPR) for DNA oligonucleotides down to 1 fm. Nuclease activity varies greatly between substrates and many biosensing techniques are based on the high selectivity of these enzymes. Detection of nuclease activity includes viscometry, radioactive labeling, 12] gel electrophoresis, and fluorescence-based approaches. 14] A majority of these techniques are labor intensive and time consuming. Of the methods outlined above, only the fluorescence-based assay is suitable for high-throughput screening. However, this approach is very expensive due to the requirement of fluorophore-modified substrates. Therefore, it is desirable to screen nuclease activity and substrates with label-free substrates and without the need to use sophisticated instruments. Recently, Chad Mirkin’s group has used DNA-modified gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) as signal reporters to directly screen for endonuclease activity and inhibition by unaided visual inspection. In their method, endonucleases cleaved dsDNA in the absence of inhibitors and allowed the crosslinked AuNPs to separate into single AuNPs. This cleavage process was indicated by the instant color change from blue to red. In contrast, the crosslinked network of AuNPs remained aggregated and blue in the presence of inhibitors. Their method exploits the selectivity of nucleases for substrates and takes advantage of the unique optical properties of AuNPs, namely, the ability to obtain results without a detector. However, this method requires cumbersome preparation of modified AuNPs and the formation of crosslinked AuNPs, and thus is not suitable for the high-throughput screening of substrates. In addition, their method is limited to nucleases that have dsDNA molecules as their substrates, and thus is not suitable for ssDNA digest nucleases such as S1 nuclease. We describe here a simple, straightforward and general colorimetric method to measure nuclease activity and screen substrate using unmodified AuNPs (Scheme 1). By taking advant-
Huffman Cache Trails

This paper presents an alternate cache design to reduce energy consumption by making the switched capacitance of these memory blocks inversely proportional to the access frequency of their data sets. Data sets tend to have skewed access frequencies. This trend is further amplified with the emergence of Big Data driven computing and deep learning. Such asymmetry presents an optimization opportunity. The memory hierarchy in the processor micro-architecture, however, is designed to switch the same amount of capacitance for any accessed data bit (byte, word, or block). In other words, it has a symmetric or oblivious switched capacitance structure. Such symmetric design for the memory organization, which is one of the more pronounced energy consumers, is not a good fit. The Huffman coding algorithm allocates code lengths inversely proportional to the event probability. Inspired by this idea, this paper develops a novel cache organization. A traditional cache is organized into non-uniformly sized banks called Trails. Data sets are allocated to a trail with size inversely proportional to their access frequency such that the smallest trail is occupied by the most frequently accessed data and larger trails are occupied by less frequently accessed data. This reduces the expected switched capacitance in the same way Huffman coding reduces expected code length. The proposed organization was modeled for the Level-1 Data (L1D) cache in the GEM5 simulator and was tested with the SPEC 2006 CPU benchmarks. It was found to reduce energy consumption of the L1D caches by 54% with 4% performance (latency cycles) overhead.
Energy- and cost-efficient ultra-high-capacity wireless access

Mobile communication networks alone today consume 0.5 percent of the global energy supply. Meeting the rapidly increasing demand for more capacity in wireless broadband access will further increase the energy consumption. Operators are now facing both investing in denser and denser networks as well as increased energy cost. Traditional design paradigms, based on assumptions of spectrum shortage and high cost base station sites, have produced current cellular systems based on 3G and 4G (LTE) standards. The latter ones are characterized by very high spectrum efficiency, but low energy efficiency. Deployment has favored strategies with few high-power bases stations with complex antenna systems. The key method for indoor coverage has so far been to literally "blast signals through walls" - a solution that is neither energy-efficient nor very sound from a radiation perspective. As environmental aspects may be perceived as important from a societal perspective, the cost remains the short- to medium-term concern for operators of future mobile broadband systems. What becomes evident now is that the so far mostly neglected energy cost will be a major concern. Future system deployment has to balance infrastructure deployment, spectrum, and energy cost components. Ongoing incremental improvements in electronics and signal processing are bringing down the power consumption in the base station. However, these improvements are not enough to match the orders-of-magnitude increase in energy consumption cause by demands for more capacity. It is clear that solutions to this problem have to be found at the architectural level, not just by increasing the efficiency of individual components. In this article we propose a framework for a total cost analysis and survey some recent, more radical, "clean slate" approaches exploiting combinations of new spectrum opportunities, energy-efficient PHY layers, and novel deployment and backhauling strategies that target minimizing overall system cost. The latter involve network deployment tightly tailored to traffic requirements, using low-power micro base stations tailored specifically to decrease the power consumption compared to today's highpower macro base station schemes. To illustrate our findings, a power consumption model for mobile broadband access networks taking backhaul into account is presented, and the main trade-offs between infrastructure, energy, and spectrum costs are analyzed. We demonstrate optimal deployment strategies in some simple scenarios where a certain capacity has to be provided in a dense interference-limited scenario.
SHP-1–Pyk2–Src Protein Complex and p38 MAPK Pathways Independently Regulate IL-10 Production in Lipopolysaccharide-Stimulated Macrophages

The role of tyrosine phosphatase Src homology region 2 domain-containing phosphatase (SHP)-1 in LPS-activated cytokine production and inflammation was investigated by determining TNF-α and IL-10 production in splenic macrophages employing SHP-1–null (me/me) mouse model. LPS-stimulated me/me splenic macrophages secreted significantly less IL-10 with concomitantly elevated levels of TNF-α compared with wild-type (WT) macrophages irrespective of LPS dose and duration of stimulation. IL-10 significantly inhibited LPS-induced TNF-α production in both me/me and WT macrophages. The critical requirement for SHP-1 in regulating LPS-induced IL-10 and TNF-α production was confirmed by interfering with SHP-1 expression in WT macrophages and by reconstituting me/me macrophages with the SHP-1 gene. To delineate the role of SHP-1 in positive regulation of LPS-induced IL-10 production, signaling proteins representing SHP-1 targets were examined. The results reveal that tyrosine kinases Src and proline-rich tyrosine kinase 2 (Pyk2) regulate SHP-1–dependent LPS-induced IL-10 production and infer that optimal LPS-induced IL-10 production requires an assembly of a protein complex consisting of SHP-1–Pyk2–Src proteins. Moreover, LPS-induced IL-10 production also requires activation of the p38 MAPK independent of SHP-1 function. Overall, to our knowledge our results show for the first time that SHP-1 acts as a positive regulator of LPS-induced IL-10 production in splenic macrophages through two distinct and independent SHP-1–Pyk2–Src and p38 MAPK pathways.
Biochemical, Genetic, and Serological Characterization of Two Capsule Subtypes among Streptococcus pneumoniae Serotype 20 Strains

Background: Structural and molecular investigations of Streptococcus pneumoniae serotype 20 have revealed inconsistencies. Results: We discovered structurally divergent capsule structures that antigenically behave like serotype 20. Conclusion: Serotype 20 strains can be segregated into serotypes 20A and 20B based on their distinct capsule structures. Significance: Discovery and characterization of subtypes within this historically significant serogroup are essential for vaccine efficacy studies. The bacterial pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae expresses one of over 90 structurally distinct polysaccharide (PS) capsule serotypes. Prior PS structural analyses of the vaccine-associated serotype 20 do not agree with reports describing the genes that mediate capsule synthesis. Furthermore, using immunized human sera-based assays, serological differences were recently noted among strains typed as serotype 20. We examined the capsule structures of two serologically dissimilar serotype 20 strains, 20α and 20β, by extensive biochemical analysis. 20α PS was composed of the previously described serotype 20 hexasaccharide repeat unit, whereas the 20β PS was composed of a novel heptasaccharide repeat unit containing an extra branching α-glucose residue. Genetic analysis of the subtypes revealed that 20α may have arisen from a 20β progenitor following loss of function mutation to the glycosyltransferase gene whaF. Conventional serotyping methods using rabbit polyclonal or mouse monoclonal antibodies were unable to distinguish the subtypes. However, genetic analysis of multiple “serotype 20” clinical isolates revealed that all strains contain the 20β genotype. We propose naming bacteria that express the previously described 20α capsule structure 20A and bacteria that express the novel 20β capsule structure 20B, a new pneumococcal serotype.