Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Long-term effects of chloropicrin fumigation on soil microbe recovery and growth promotion of Panax notoginseng

Introduction Panax notoginseng is a precious Chinese medicinal material. Soil fumigation can control soil-borne disease and overcome the continuous cropping obstacles of P. notoginseng. However, chloropicrin (CP) fumigation can kill non-target soil microorganisms and reduce microbial diversity, but the long-time impacts of CP fumigation on soil microbial are less reported. Methods We studied the long-term effects of CP fumigation on soil microbes with high-throughput gene sequencing, and correlated the changes in the composition of microbial communities with environmental factors like soil physicochemical properties and soil enzyme activities. This study mainly focuses on the recovery characteristics of soil microbe after soil fumigation by evaluating the ecological restoration of P. notoginseng soil, its sustained control effect on plant diseases, and its promotion effect on crop growth by focusing on the CP fumigation treatment. Results The results showed that CP fumigation significantly increased soil available phosphorus (P) to 34.6 ~ 101.6 mg/kg and electrical conductivity (EC) by 18.7% ~ 34.1%, respectively. High-throughput gene sequencing showed that soil fumigation with CP altered the relative abundance of Trichoderma, Chaetomium, Proteobacteria, and Chloroflexi in the soil while inhibiting a lot of Fusarium and Phytophthora. The inhibition rate of Phytophthora spp. was still 75.0% in the third year after fumigation. Fumigation with CP enhanced P. notoginseng’s survival rate and stimulated plant growth, ensuring P. notoginseng’s healthy in the growth period. The impact of fumigation on microbial community assembly and changes in microbial ecological niches were characterized using normalized stochasticity ratio (NST) and Levins’ niche breadth index. Stochasticity dominated bacterial community assembly, while the fungal community was initially dominated by stochasticity and later by determinism. Fumigation with CP reduced the ecological niches of both fungi and bacteria. Conclusion In summary, the decrease in microbial diversity and niche caused by CP fumigation could be recovered over time, and the control of soil pathogens by CP fumigation remained sustainable. Moreover, CP fumigation could overcome continuous cropping obstacles of P. notoginseng and promote the healthy growth of P. notoginseng.
Anti-inflammatory and hemostatic Activities of Methanolic Extract from ATRIPLEX HALIMUS Leaves collected in east of Algeria

Chenopodiaceae family species are known for their important biological activity, in which Atriplex halimus belongs. However, the inflammatory effect of this plant leaves has not been studied. This work aimed at assessing the anti-inflammatory and hemostatic activities of the methanolic extract AHMeOH of Atriplex halimus’s leaves. The extract was obtained using sonication of leaves powder in 80 % methanol. The analysis of phenolic compounds was carried out using thin-layer chromatography (TLC). The anti-inflammatory activity was determined by studying the plasmic membrane stabilization and albumin denaturation inhibition, the hemostatic activity was evaluated by measuring the plasma level in blood. Quantitative determination of total flavonoids reveals that AHMeOH is rich in flavonoids (16 ± 0.88 μg Q / mg extract) and polyphenols (20 ± 0.20 μg AG / mg extract). About anti-inflammatory activity, the tests show that AHMeOH has a significant effect (P≤0.05) of inhibiting hypotonic-induced hemolysis with concentrations (100 and 200 μg / ml) with 77.55 and 90% respectively, and heat-induced hemolysis with percentages 81.75% and 87.44% respectively with significant difference (P ≤0.05). The obtained results reveal that the inhibition of albumin denaturation is with a dose dependent. The concentration of 400 μg / ml gives denaturation inhibition effect of 81.00 ± 17.70% and the concentration of 600 μg / ml gives an effect of 82.95 ± 17.40%. Regarding the hemostatic activity our extract with the doses 10 mg / ml, 20 mg / ml and 30 mg / ml confer a decrease of the plasma recalcification time in the tube, these concentrations could prolong the time of coagulation significantly compared to the control (P≤0.001). This result is an interesting indication in favour of hemostatic activity of AHMeOH. Atriplex halimus has a strong anti-inflammatory activity and constitutes a potential source for the development of new treatments.
The EarthCARE mission – science and system overview

Abstract. The Earth Cloud, Aerosol and Radiation Explorer (EarthCARE) is a satellite mission implemented by the European Space Agency (ESA), in cooperation with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), to measure global profiles of aerosols, clouds and precipitation properties together with radiative fluxes and derived heating rates. The simultaneous measurements of the vertical structure and horizontal distribution of cloud and aerosol fields, together with outgoing radiation, will be used in particular to evaluate their representation in weather forecasting and climate models and to improve our understanding of cloud and aerosol radiative impact and feedback mechanisms. To achieve the objective, the goal is that a retrieved scene with footprint size of 10 km × 10 km is measured with sufficiently high resolution that the atmospheric vertical profile of short-wave (solar) and long-wave (thermal) flux can be reconstructed with an accuracy of 10 W m−2 at the top of the atmosphere. To optimise the performance of the two active instruments, the platform will fly at a relatively low altitude of 393 km, with an equatorial revisit time of 25 d. The scientific payload consists of four instruments: an atmospheric lidar, a cloud-profiling radar with Doppler capability, a multi-spectral imager and a broadband radiometer. Co-located measurements from these instruments are processed in the ground segment, which produces and distributes a wide range of science data products. As well as the Level 1 (L1) product of each instrument, a large number of multiple-instrument L2 products have been developed, in both Europe and Japan, benefiting from the data synergy. An end-to-end simulator and several test scenes have been developed that simulate EarthCARE observations and provide a development and test environment for L1 and L2 processors. Within this paper the EarthCARE observational requirements are addressed. An overview is given of the space segment with a detailed description of the four science instruments, demonstrating how the observational requirements will be met. Furthermore, the elements of the space segment and ground segment that are relevant for science data users are described and the data products are introduced.
REVIEW OF CLUSTERING UNCERTAIN DATA

Clustering on uncertain data, one of the essential tasks in mining uncertain data, posts significant challenges on both modeling similarity between uncertain objects and developing efficient computational methods. The previous methods extend traditional partitioning clustering methods like k-means and density-based clustering methods like DBSCAN to uncertain data, thus rely on geometric distances between objects. Such methods cannot handle uncertain objects that are geometrically indistinguishable, such as products with the same mean but very different variances in customer ratings. Surprisingly, probability distributions, which are essential characteristics of uncertain objects, have not been considered in measuring similarity between uncertain objects. In this project, we systematically model uncertain objects in both continuous and discrete domains, where an uncertain object is modeled as a continuous and discrete random variable, respectively. We use the well-known Kullback-Leibler divergence to measure similarity between uncertain objects in both the continuous and discrete cases, and integrate it into partitioning and density-based clustering methods to cluster uncertain objects.
Open-Ocean Tides Simulated by ICON-O

This paper evaluates barotropic tides simulated by a newly developed ocean general circulation - ICON-O and assesses processes and model configurations that can impact the quality of the simulated tides. Such an investigation is crucial for applications addressing internal tides that are much more difficult to evaluate than the barotropic tides. Although not specially tuned for tides and not constrained by any observations, ICON-O is capable of producing the main features of the open-ocean barotropic tides as described by the geographical distributions of amplitude, phase, and amphidromic points. An 5 error analysis shows however that the open-ocean tides simulated by ICON-O are less accurate than those simulated by two other OGCMs. Using a suite of tidal experiments we show that an increase in horizontal resolution improves only tides in shallow waters. Relevant for using ICON-O with its telescoping grid capacity, we show that spatial inhomogeneity does not deteriorate the quality of the simulated tides. We show further that implementing a parameterization of tidal bottom drag improves the quality of simulated tides, independent of model configuration used. 10
Evaluating phonological status: significance of paradigm uniformity vs. prosodic grouping effects

A central concern of linguistic phonetics is to define criteria for determining the phonological status of sounds or sound properties observed in phonetic surface form. Based on acoustic measurements we show that the occurrence of syllabic sonorants vs. schwa-sonorant sequences in German is determined exclusively by segmental and prosodic structure, with no paradigm uniformity effects. We argue that these findings are consistent with a uniform representation of syllabic sonorants as schwa sonorant sequences in the lexicon. The stability of schwa in CVC-suffixes (e.g. the German diminutive suffix -chen), as opposed to its phonetic absence in a segmentally comparable underived context, is argued to be conditioned by the prosodic organisation of such suffixes external to the phonological word of the stem.
CLOSE-Guided Pulmonary Vein Isolation to Treat Persistent Atrial Fibrillation: 1-Year Outcome

Background: CLOSE-guided pulmonary vein isolation (PVI) is based on contiguous and optimized (Ablation Index-guided) radiofrequency lesions. The efficacy of CLOSE-guided PVI in persistent atrial fibrillation (AF) treatment has been poorly evaluated. Methods: In two centers, 50 patients eligible for persistent AF ablation underwent CLOSE-guided PVI (Ablation Index ≥ 450 at the anterior wall, ≥300 at posterior wall, intertag distance ≤ 6 mm). If PVI failed to restore sinus rhythm (SR), electrical cardioversion (ECV) was performed. Atrial substrate modification (ASM) was performed only if PVI and ECV failed to restore SR. Recurrence was defined as any recorded episode of AF, atrial tachycardia (AT) or atrial flutter (AFL) > 30 s on Holter electrocardiographs at 3, 6 and 12 months. Results: From the 50 patients (64 ± 10 years, 14% long-standing persistent AF), SR was restored by ECV in 34 patients (68%) 56 ± 38 days prior to ablation. On the day of ablation, 42 patients (84%) were on class I-III anti-arrhythmic drug therapy (ADT) and the rhythm was AF in 23/50 patients. PVI was achieved in all patients; after PVI, ECV was required in 21 patients and ASM in 1 patient. The mean procedure time, radiofrequency time and fluoroscopy time were 141 ± 33 min, 23 ± 7 min and 7 ± 6 min, respectively. At 12 months, single-procedure freedom from AF/AT/AFL was 80%, with 19 patients (38%) receiving class I-III ADT. Conclusions: In a population of patients with persistent AF monitored with intermittent cardiac rhythm recordings, CLOSE-guided PVI resulted in high single-procedure arrhythmia-free survival at 1 year. Future large-scale studies involving continuous cardiac monitoring are necessary.
Can explicit processes support implicit category learning?: The effect of relevant rule-oriented selective attention on implicit learning

Categorization is a crucial component of human cognition. Multiple systems theories suggest categories can be learned by explicit or implicit processes/systems depending on the type of category (e.g., Ashby & Valentin, 2017). Research examining the interaction between these systems found that explicit learning impairs implicit performance (Ashby & Crossley, 2010; Crossley & Ashby, 2015; Sanchez et al., 2020). The nature of this impairment remains unclear. The current study examined the effect of selective attention to rule dimensions that were either relevant or irrelevant to a later implicit categorization task to better understand how this impairment occurs. The results suggested that attention to relevant dimensions is crucial for implicit learning. Both systems can learn in parallel as long as the relevant category information is attended. This suggests the primary mechanism of implicit impairment by the explicit system may be drawing attention away from relevant information rather than rule-based strategy perseveration. INDEX WORDS: Categorization, Multiple systems, COVIS, Explicit learning, Implicit learning Copyright by Andres Sanchez 2023 Can explicit processes support implicit category learning? : The effect of relevant ruleoriented selective attention on implicit learning
Braille Character Recognition Using Deep Learning Techniques

: Braille Character Recognition (BCR) is a technique for finding and identifying Braille documents that are saved in images like jpeg, jpg, tiff, or gif files, and then converting the text into a machine-readable form like a text file. BCR transforms an image’s pixel representation into its corresponding character representation. Numerous advantages of braille recognition make working at institutions and schools for the blind and visually impaired easier on a daily basis. Since it would take a very long time to look through, read, or rewrite all of the paper forms and documents that are used in many schools to educate blind pupils by hand, it makes sense to try to automate this process. OCR is a technology that transforms scanned, printed, and handwritten image files into legible, editable text documents. The OCR system converted the file from the image it got by comparing the characters. using the collection of OCR-stored databases. Character recognition is being employed in many significant applications, such as speed track, which the government has used to monitor speeding vehicles. It is possible for blind persons to read text using character recognition. It has given the community’s blind members new hope.
Magnetic fraction of the atmospheric dust in

It is well established that airborne, magnetic nano and microparticles accumulate in human organs (e.g. brain) rising risk of various civilization diseases (e.g. cancer, neurodegenerative diseases). Therefore, precise characterization of that materials, including its origins, is a key factor to prevent their further, uncontrolled emission and circulation. Magnetic fraction of the atmospheric dust was collected in Kraków using a static sampler and analysed using several methods (scanning electron 15 microscopy with energy dispersive spectrometry, transmission electron microscopy with energy dispersive spectrometry, X-ray diffraction, Mössbauer spectroscopy, and vibrating sample magnetometry (VSM) measurements). The magnetic fraction contains magnetite, hematite and  -Fe, as well as quartz, feldspar and pyroxene often attached to the magnetic particles. The magnetic particles vary in size from above 20  m to nanoparticles below 100 nm, as well as in morphology (irregular or spherical). Their chemical composition is dominated by Fe, often with Mn, Zn, Cr, Cu, Si, Al, S, Ca and other elements.
Kalisphera: an analytical tool to reproduce the partial volume effect of spheres imaged in 3D

In experimental mechanics, where 3D imaging is having a profound effect, spheres are commonly adopted for their simplicity and for the ease of their modeling. In this contribution we develop an analytical tool, ‘kalisphera’, to produce 3D raster images of spheres including their partial volume effect. This allows us to evaluate the metrological performance of existing image-based measurement techniques (knowing a priori the ground truth). An advanced application of ‘kalisphera’ is developed here to identify and accurately characterize spheres in real 3D x-ray tomography images with the objective of improving trinarization and contact detection. The effect of the common experimental imperfections is assessed and the overall performance of the tool tested on real images.
AN INEXACT PROXIMAL-INDEFINITE STOCHASTIC ADMM WITH APPLICATIONS IN 3D CT RECONSTRUCTION

In this paper, we develop an Inexact Proximal-indeﬁnite Stochastic ADMM (abbreviated as IPS-ADMM) for solving a class of separable convex optimization problems whose objective functions consist of two parts: one is an average of many smooth convex functions and another is a convex but possibly nonsmooth function. The involved smooth subproblem is tackled by an inexact accelerated stochastic gradient method based on an adaptive expansion step to avoid the case that the sample size can be huge so that computing the objective function value or its gradient is much expensive. The restulting nonsmooth subproblem is solved inexactly under a relative error criterion to avoid the case that the proximal operator is potentially unavailable. Since the dual variable updates twice, it allows a more ﬂexible and larger stepsize region compared with standard deterministic and stochastic ADMMs. By a variational analysis, we characterize the generated iterates as a variational inequality and ﬁnally establish the sublinear convergence rate of this IPS-ADMM in terms of the objective function gap and constraint violation. The eﬃcacy of our IPS-ADMM is demonstrated by comparing with several state-of-the-art methods for solving the three-dimensional (3D) CT reconstruction problem in medical imaging.
Effective determination of long-acting oxytetracycline treatment in the growth of sequestra in contagious bovine pleuropneumonia-infected cattle

The effect of long-acting oxytetracycline treatment in the development of sequestra in contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP)-infected animals was determined. Thirty five clinically healthy zebu cattle, negative for CBPP antibodies (as tested by a competitive ELISA), were infected with Mycoplasma mycoides subsp. mycoides small colony variant - field isolate. All the animals were monitored for clinical signs of illness and regularly sampled for serological and bacteriological analysis. Nine animals were treated with long-acting tetracycline upon the first evidence of clinical signs of illness. The 26 remaining animals were left untreated and served as control animals. Post-mortem examinations were performed to assess the presence or absence of CBPP gross lesions. The experimentation lasted for 10 months during which, 13 animals (all untreated) died with acute lung lesions. When the 22 surviving animals (13 untreated and 9 treated) were slaughtered at the end of experimentation, chronic lesions were observed in all of them. Among the 13 untreated animals, 10 had visible lung sequestra and 3 had cicatrical lesions indicative of resolved lung lesions. Conversely, among the 9 treated animals, only 1 had a small lung sequestrum and the remaining 8 had pulmonary adhesions. The results presented demonstrate that, under the experimental conditions used, treatment with oxytetracycline did not result in significant sequestra formation in CBPP-infected animals. Full field validation is required in order to confirm these findings.
Measurements of VOCs in ambient air by Vocus PTR-TOF-MS: calibrations, instrument background corrections, and introducing a PTR Data Toolkit

Volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions and subsequent oxidation contribute to the formation of secondary pollutants and poor air quality in general. As more VOCs at lower mixing ratios have become the target of air quality 10 investigations, their quantification has been aided by technological advancements in proton-transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometry (PTR-TOF-MS). However, such quantification requires appropriate instrument background measurements and calibrations, particularly for VOCs without calibration standards. This study utilized a Vocus-PTR-TOF-MS to measure ambient VOCs in Boulder, Colorado during spring 2021. Fast, frequent calibrations were made every 2 h in addition to daily multipoint calibrations. Sensitivities derived from 15 the fast calibrations were 5±6% (average and one standard deviation) lower than those derived from the multipoint calibrations due to an offset between the calibrations and instrument background measurement. This offset was caused, in part, by incomplete mixing of the standard with diluent. These fast calibrations were used in place of a normalization correction to account for variability in instrument response and accounted for non-constant reactor conditions caused by a gradual obstruction of the sample inlet. One symptom of these non-constant conditions was a trend in fragmentation, although the 20 greatest observed variability was 6% (one relative standard deviation) for isoprene. A PTR Data Toolkit (PTR-DT) was developed to assess instrument performance and rapidly estimate the sensitivities of non-standard VOCs on the timescale of the fast calibrations using the measured sensitivities
Paralytic shellﬁsh poison outbreaks in the Penzé estuary: Environmental factors affecting toxin uptake in the oyster, Crassostrea gigas

– Several experiments using a self-regulated system were conducted to deﬁne the factors likely to inﬂuence the uptake of paralytic shellﬁsh poison (PSP) by oysters in the Penzé estuary (France, Brittany). Each 4-day experiment was carried out in a recirculated sea water system using 15 Paciﬁc oysters ( Crassostrea gigas ) separated from each other and supplied with unﬁltered natural seawater containing alternatively toxic ( Alexandrium minutum ) or non-toxic ( Skeletonema costatum ) algal diets. The food supply and exposure times to toxic diets were determined according to ﬁeld studies of the upstream and downstream movement of patches containing A. minutum . The experimental parameters corresponded roughly to the hydrological conditions generally observed in June when tidal coe ﬃ cients are lowest and blooms occur: (i) A. minutum concentrations in sea water of 200, 5000 and 10 000 cellml − 1 ; (ii) inorganic matter consisting of 5 and 15 mg L − 1 of calcinated muddy sediments; and (iii) low and high tide salinities of 25 and 35% (cid:2) , respectively. Signiﬁcant experimental contamination (greater than the 80 µ g STX equiv. 100 g − 1 sanitary threshold) oc-curred after 4 days of exposure for the monospeciﬁc A. minutum diet (20 − 200 cellml − 1 ) and alternated A. minutum and S. costatum diets (5000 and 20 000 cell ml − 1 , respectively). Contamination levels were less than the sanitary threshold for alternated A. minutum / S. costatum diets of 200 and 20 000 cellml − 1 , respectively, and for a monospeciﬁc A. minutum diet (1000 − 10 000 cellml − 1 ). In the last case, the accumulation rate was quite low, possibly because of inhibition of the ﬁltration rate related to a lower biodeposit production rate and decreased feeding time activity. The addition of inorganic matter appeared to play a signiﬁcant role in the observed increase of toxin uptake, whereas salinity was not a determining factor for toxin accumulation rates. These last observations were corroborated by statistical analysis and stepwise multiple linear regressions integrating all or some of the experimental parameters.