bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A new radio-frequency acoustic method for remote study of liquids
Authors: Kramarenko Alexander V. , Kramarenko Andrey V. , Savenko Oksana 
Published: March 2021

AbstractIn the present work, a novel study method of conductive liquids has been proposed. It is based on a discovered phenomenon of radiofrequency anisotropy of electrolyte solution, which arises in response to mechanical excitation of the solution. The phenomenon was observed during the development of a radiofrequency polarimetric contactless cardiograph. The electric field vector rotates after its transition through the pericardial region due to the acceleration changes of blood. Numerous in vitro experiments with monochromatic and impulse acoustic waves always induced the polarization rotation of the RF wave passing through an electrolyte solution. The response obtained from the solutions on acoustic excitation of the Heaviside function form demonstrates the effect of a solution “memory”. The dynamics of this process resembles the spin glasses magnetization. We hypothesized that there was a magnetic moment change within the solution, and the possible reason for it is an appearance of electromagnetic impulse caused by the same acoustic excitation. In a further experiment, we really captured a suspected electrical potential. Given that, we can declare at least three new physical effects never observed before for an electrolyte solution. The study method itself may provide broad options for remote measurement of the electrolyte solution parameters.
Local adaptation to continuous mowing makes the noxious weed Solanum elaeagnifolium a superweed candidate by improving fitness and defense traits
Authors: Chavana Jesus , Singh Sukhman , Vazquez Alejandro , Christoffersen Bradley , Racelis Alexis , Kariyat Rupesh R. 
Published: March 2021

AbstractThe role of disturbance in accelerating weed growth is well understood. While most studies have focused on soil mediated disturbance, mowing can also impact weed traits. Using silverleaf nightshade (Solanum elaeagnifolium), a noxious and invasive weed, through a series of field, laboratory, and greenhouse experiments, we asked whether continuous mowing influences growth and plant defense traits, expressed via different avenues, and whether they cascade into offspring. We found that mowed plants produced significantly less number of fruits, and less number of total seeds per plant, but had higher seed mass, and germinated more and faster. When three herbivores were allowed to feed, tobacco hornworm (Manduca sexta) caterpillars, gained more mass on seedlings from unmowed plants, while cow pea aphid (Aphis craccivora), a generalist, established better on mowed seedlings; however, leaf trichome density was higher on unmowed seedlings, suggesting possible negative cross talk in defense traits. Texas potato beetle (Leptinotarsa texana), a co-evolved specialist on S. elaeagnifolium, did not show any differential feeding effects. We also found that specific root length, an indicator of nutrient acquisition, was significantly higher in first generation seedlings from mowed plants. Taken together, we show that mowing is a selective pressure that enhances some fitness and defense traits and can contribute to producing superweeds.
Molecular characterisation of rare loss-of-function NPAS3 and NPAS4 variants identified in individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders
Authors: Rossi Joseph J. , Rosenfeld Jill A. , Chan Katie M. , Streff Haley , Nankivell Victoria , Peet Daniel J. , Whitelaw Murray L. , Bersten David C. 
Published: March 2021

AbstractAberrations in the excitatory/inhibitory balance within the brain have been associated with both intellectual disability (ID) and schizophrenia (SZ). The bHLH-PAS transcription factors NPAS3 and NPAS4 have been implicated in controlling the excitatory/inhibitory balance, and targeted disruption of either gene in mice results in a phenotype resembling ID and SZ. However, there are few human variants in NPAS3 and none in NPAS4 that have been associated with schizophrenia or neurodevelopmental disorders. From a clinical exome sequencing database we identified three NPAS3 variants and four NPAS4 variants that could potentially disrupt protein function in individuals with either developmental delay or ID. The transcriptional activity of the variants when partnered with either ARNT or ARNT2 was assessed by reporter gene activity and it was found that variants which truncated the NPAS3/4 protein resulted in a complete loss of transcriptional activity. The ability of loss-of-function variants to heterodimerise with neuronally enriched partner protein ARNT2 was then determined by co-immunoprecipitation experiments. It was determined that the mechanism for the observed loss of function was the inability of the truncated NPAS3/4 protein to heterodimerise with ARNT2. This further establishes NPAS3 and NPAS4 as candidate neurodevelopmental disorder genes.
New understanding of electrical activity brought by surface potential of cardiomyocytes
Authors: Zhou Ying , Hao Yanfei , Sun Pei , Li Guang , Dong Mengqi , Fan Xuehui , He Xiuyun 
Published: March 2021

AbstractAiming at the problem encountered in the previous research: during the electrical activity of cardiomyocytes, the influent ions do not seem to be directly derived from the extracellular fluid. We chose to cut in from the colloidal properties of the cells, follow the basic principles of physical chemistry, and establish hypotheses along the derivation of the structural characteristics of cardiomyocytes. Through the surface ion adsorption experiment and patch clamp experiment of living cells, under the condition of sequentially reducing the concentration of Na+ in the extracellular fluid, we observed the exchange and diffusion of adsorbed ions on the cell surface; the changes of inflow INa, ICa-L and action potential; and correlation between results. The results showed that the hypothesis is true. The observed parameter changes were consistent with the fact that during depolarization of cardiomyocytes, the ions of influx were derived from the inference of adsorbed ions on the cell surface; at the same time, it also provided an objective and realistic explanation for the generation of electrocardiogram.
Astaxanthin protects against early acute kidney injury in severely burned rats by inactivating the TLR4/MyD88/NF-κB axis and upregulating heme oxygenase-1
Authors: Guo Songxue , Guo Linsen , Fang Quan , Yu Meirong , Zhang Liping , You Chuangang , Wang Xingang , Liu Yong , Han Chunmao 
Published: March 2021

AbstractEarly acute kidney injury (AKI) contributes to severe morbidity and mortality in critically burned patients. Renal inflammation plays a vital role in the progression of early AKI, acting as a therapeutic target. Astaxanthin (ATX) is a strong antioxidant widely distributed in marine organisms that exerts many biological effects in trauma and disease. ATX is also suggested to have anti-inflammatory activity. Hence, we attempted to explore the role of ATX in protecting against early postburn AKI via its anti-inflammatory effects and the related mechanisms. A severely burned model was established for histological and biochemical assessments based on adult male rats. We found that oxidative stress-induced tissue inflammation participated in the development of early AKI after burn injury and that the MyD88-dependent TLR4/NF-κB pathway was activated to regulate renal inflammation. The TLR4 and NF-κB inhibitors TAK242 and PDTC showed similar effects in attenuating burn-induced renal inflammation and early AKI. Upon ATX treatment, the release of inflammatory mediators in the kidneys was downregulated, while the TLR4/MyD88/NF-κB axis was inhibited in a dose-related manner. TAK242 and PDTC could enhance the anti-inflammatory effect of high-dose ATX, whereas lipopolysaccharide (LPS) reversed its action. Furthermore, the expression of heme oxygenase (HO)-1 was upregulated by ATX in a dose-related manner. Collectively, the above data suggest that ATX protects against renal inflammation in a dose-related manner by regulating the TLR4/MyD88/NF-κB axis and HO-1 and ultimately prevents early AKI following severe burns.
Incidence and management patterns of alcohol-related liver disease in Korea: a nationwide standard cohort study
Authors: Kim Ha Il , Park Seo Young , Shin Hyun Phil 
Published: March 2021

AbstractThe recent incidence and management patterns of alcohol-related liver disease (ARLD) are not well defined in Korea. We sought to evaluate the epidemiology of ARLD with regard to disease severity and alcohol cessation management after diagnosis. We performed an observational cohort study of standardized Common Data Model data from the Health Insurance Review and Assessment-National Patient Samples database between 2012 and 2016. The incidence and demographic properties of ARLD were extracted and divided into non-cirrhotic alcoholic liver disease (ALD) and alcoholic liver cirrhosis (ALC). ALC was compared with non-alcoholic cirrhosis by severity at diagnosis. The management patterns were captured by the initiation of pharmaco- and behavioral therapy for alcohol cessation. We analyzed data from 72,556 ALD to 7295 ALC patients. The ALD incidence was stable from 990 to 1025 per 100,000 people. In ALD, the proportion of patients who were ≥ 65 years old, the proportion of female patients, and the comorbidity index increased significantly during the study period (all P values < 0.001). ALC accounted for > 20% of all cirrhosis, with decompensation occurring twice as often as in non-alcoholic cirrhosis. The initiation of alcoholism management was stationary in ARLD, remaining at < 10% for both pharmacotherapy and behavioral therapy, regardless of severity or the site of diagnosis. The incidence of ARLD did not decrease during the study period. Moreover, an increasing trend in the proportion of people vulnerable to drinking was observed. Unfortunately, management for the cessation of alcohol use remains very low. The best way to manage ARLD should be evaluated in further study.
Virtual 2-D map of the fungal proteome
Authors: Mohanta Tapan Kumar , Mishra Awdhesh Kumar , Khan Adil , Hashem Abeer , Abd-Allah Elsayed Fathi , Al-Harrasi Ahmed 
Published: March 2021

AbstractThe molecular weight and isoelectric point (pI) of the proteins plays important role in the cell. Depending upon the shape, size, and charge, protein provides its functional role in different parts of the cell. Therefore, understanding to the knowledge of their molecular weight and charges is (pI) is very important. Therefore, we conducted a proteome-wide analysis of protein sequences of 689 fungal species (7.15 million protein sequences) and construct a virtual 2-D map of the fungal proteome. The analysis of the constructed map revealed the presence of a bimodal distribution of fungal proteomes. The molecular mass of individual fungal proteins ranged from 0.202 to 2546.166 kDa and the predicted isoelectric point (pI) ranged from 1.85 to 13.759 while average molecular weight of fungal proteome was 50.98 kDa. A non-ribosomal peptide synthase (RFU80400.1) found in Trichoderma arundinaceum was identified as the largest protein in the fungal kingdom. The collective fungal proteome is dominated by the presence of acidic rather than basic pI proteins and Leu is the most abundant amino acid while Cys is the least abundant amino acid. Aspergillus ustus encodes the highest percentage (76.62%) of acidic pI proteins while Nosema ceranae was found to encode the highest percentage (66.15%) of basic pI proteins. Selenocysteine and pyrrolysine amino acids were not found in any of the analysed fungal proteomes. Although the molecular weight and pI of the protein are of enormous important to understand their functional roles, the amino acid compositions of the fungal protein will enable us to understand the synonymous codon usage in the fungal kingdom. The small peptides identified during the study can provide additional biotechnological implication.
Reading Abilities Post Traumatic Brain Injury in Adolescents and Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Authors: Pei Yalian , O'Brien Katy H. 
Published: March 2021

PurposePeople with traumatic brain injury (TBI) often struggle with complex reading, limiting participation in work and educational settings. This systematic review and meta-analysis examined studies of reading conducted with adolescents and adults with TBI to describe reading problems post TBI and investigate underlying factors for the effects of TBI on reading abilities.MethodThe search was conducted in EBSCO (including MEDLINE, PsycINFO, etc.), BIOSIS, ProQuest, and Web of Science. Empirical studies that used samples with a mean age greater than 10 years, reported injury characteristics, and investigated complex reading abilities (defined as greater than single-word reading) were eligible for this review. Study quality was evaluated using QualSyst. Study and sample characteristics, measures, and outcomes of interest were extracted and synthesized in the review. Studies that compared reading abilities between people with and without TBI were included in the meta-analysis.ResultsTwenty-four studies met inclusion criteria, six of which addressed reading in pediatric samples. Findings from heterogeneous samples supported the existence of reading deficits post TBI, including mild TBI. In studies of children, comprehension was examined most frequently, whereas reading speed was the focus of most adult studies. Oculomotor functions and processing speed were related to reading speed; cognitive functions, such as attention and memory, were associated with reading comprehension. Intervention studies were limited, but most reported positive effects. The meta-analysis confirmed the impact of TBI on reading with a large effect size (g= 1.23). Demographic, injury, and study variables did not moderate overall reading outcomes, but male sex was a significant moderator of impairment in reading speed.DiscussionGlobal reading ability, including both comprehension and speed, is negatively impacted by TBI. Future research should continue to explore reading after TBI, including its underlying mechanisms, effects on complex reading activities such as inferencing, development of screening and assessment tools that address a range of functional reading needs, and efficacy of reading-related interventions.
Phantom motion intent decoding for transhumeral prosthesis control with fused neuromuscular and brain wave signals
Authors: Nsugbe Ejay , Samuel Oluwarotimi Williams , Asogbon Mojisola Grace , Li Guanglin 
Published: March 2021

AbstractIn recent years, the electroencephalography (EEG) brain–computer interface (BCI) has been researched in the area of upper‐limb prosthesis control due to the promise of being able to record neurological signals which follow activation patterns in the cortex directly from the brain with non‐invasive electrodes. This is seen as a way of bypassing the limitation posed by acquiring neuromuscular signals predominantly with electromyography (EMG) directly from the stump, which possesses residual limb anatomy post‐amputation. In this study, the sequential forward selection algorithm to form a 10‐optimal‐channel representation, alongside an extended signal feature vector was applied, to investigate the motion intent decoding performance of EMG‐only, EEG‐only, and a fused EMG–EEG sensing configuration for four transhumeral amputees with varying stump lengths. The results showed a considerable improvement for the EMG‐only configuration with the advanced feature vector, but only a small increase for the EEG‐only, and thus a marginal improvement when information from both signals was fused together. This is likely due to the EEG requiring a greater number of channels spread across the skull to provide a reliable intent decoding. Further work will now involve optimisation studies to find a greater representation of electrode representation and parsimony, to minimise the number of channels while boosting motion intent decoding accuracy.
Two novel approaches of adaptive finite‐time sliding mode control for a class of single‐input multiple‐output uncertain nonlinear systems
Authors: Alinaghi Hosseinabadi Pooyan , Soltani Sharif Abadi Ali , Mekhilef Saad , Pota Hemanshu Roy 
Published: March 2021

AbstractSome systems, in spite of having multiple outputs, have only one control input, which makes their control a challenge. Two novel controllers are proposed that utilise an adaptive finite‐time sliding mode control (AFSMC) scheme for a class of single‐input multiple‐output (SIMO) nonlinear systems in the presence of unknown mismatched uncertainties. To alleviate the inherent chattering phenomenon of sliding mode control, new forms of the two designed controllers are suggested by using new sliding surfaces. Not only can the proposed AFSMC scheme stabilise the system in a finite time, but also it can provide estimated data of the uncertainty upper bound in the controller. Lyapunov stability theory is used to obtain finite‐time stability analysis of the closed‐loop system. Finally, simulation results are carried out in Simulink/MATLAB for a four‐dimensional autonomous hyper‐chaotic system with mismatched uncertainties as an example of SIMO uncertain nonlinear systems to reveal the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.
Adaptive learning cost‐sensitive convolutional neural network
Authors: Hou Yun , Fan Hong , Li Li , Li Bailin 
Published: March 2021

AbstractReal‐world classification often encounters a problem called class imbalance. When the data of some classes are redundant than that of other classes, traditional classifiers usually bias their decision boundaries to the redundant majority classes. Most proposed cost‐sensitive strategies often ignore the hard‐to‐learn examples or have a large amount of hyper‐parameters. This article proposes an adaptive learning cost‐sensitive convolutional neural network to solve this problem. During the training process, the proposed method embeds a class‐dependent cost to each class in the global error, making the decision boundary bias to the minority classes. Meanwhile, a distribution weight is assigned to each example to enhance the learning of the hard‐to‐learn examples. Both the class‐dependent costs and distribution weights are learnt automatically in the net. This cost‐sensitive approach makes the algorithm focus on the examples in the minority classes as well as the hard‐to‐learn examples in each class. Besides, this approach can be applied to both binary and multi‐class image classification problems without any modification. Experiments are conducted on four image classification datasets to evaluate this algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better performance than the baseline algorithms and some other algorithms.
How important is motion in sign language translation?
Authors: Rodriguez Jefferson , Martínez Fabio 
Published: March 2021

AbstractMore than 70 million people use at least one sign language (SL) as their main channel of communication. Nevertheless, the absence of effective mechanisms to translate massive information among sign, written and spoken languages is the main cause of a negligible inclusion of deaf people into society. Therefore, SL automatic recognition systems have widely proposed to support the characterisation of the sign structure. Today, natural and continuous SL recognition is an open research problem due to multiple spatio‐temporal shape variations, challenging visual sign characterisation, as well as the non‐linear correlation among signs to express a message. A compact sign is introduced to text architecture that explores motion as an alternative to support sign translation. Such characterisation results are robust to appearance variance with relative support to geometrical variations. The proposed representation focuses on the main spatio‐temporal regions to each corresponding word. The proposed architecture was evaluated in a built SL data set (LSCDv1) dedicated to motion study and also in the state‐of‐the‐art RWTH‐Phoenix. From the LSCDv1 data set, the best configuration reports a BLEU‐4 score of 63.04 in a testing set. Regarding RWTH‐Phoenix, the proposed strategy achieved a BLEU‐4 score in a test of 4.56, improving the results under similar reduced conditions.
Effect of DC electric field on moisture migration characteristics in oil‐pressboard
Authors: Yuan Qing , Qi Bo , Zhao Jianshe , Gao Chunjia , Yang Xiao , Zhang Shuqi , Li Chengrong 
Published: March 2021

AbstractThe moisture content has a great influence on the electric insulation strength of oil‐pressboard. Therefore, it is very important to assess the moisture content in power transformers. There is lack of research about the effect of DC electric field on moisture migration. Here, the authors analyse the moisture migration characteristics of oil‐pressboard under DC electric field. The DC electric field has a greater influence on the moisture content in the oil. Compared with no DC electric field, the moisture content in oil is reduced by 22.91 mg/L at 50°C, while it is reduced by 17.63 mg/L at 70°C. Under the same moisture content in the oil, the moisture content in the pressboard which affected by the DC electric field is higher than the Oommen curve, the maximum difference is 0.88% at 50°C, and 0.05% at 70°C. This result can provide a reference for the revision of existing moisture assessment methods.
Static dielectric constant and dielectric loss of cellulose insulation: Molecular dynamics simulations
Authors: Hou Wei , Yang Lijun , Mo Yang , Yin Fei , Huang Youyu , Zheng Xiaoling 
Published: March 2021

AbstractReducing the dielectric constant and loss of cellulose insulation can make the electric field distribution uniform in oil‐paper insulation systems and decrease the heat generation in dielectric materials, thus ensuring a reliable transformer operation. To guide the experimental design from the molecular level, the fluctuation method was introduced into the molecular dynamics simulation to evaluate the static permittivity of cellulose insulation, εs. The correlation between the dynamics parameter mean square displacement (MSD) and dielectric loss induced by orientational polarization, was investigated. The simulation results and experimental values of five types of cellulose insulation were compared to verify the rationality of the proposed method. The results indicated that the simulation values of εs for five models were agreed well with the experimental values in terms of both the magnitude and the variation trend. The simulation time and permittivity of the surrounding medium εRF are two key parameters, which determine the accuracy of the simulation results of εs. Considering the convergence, 15 ns was chosen as the lower limit of simulation time. The reaction field approximation was adopted to calculate the dipole‐dipole interaction instead of true interaction, that is, εRF→∞. The MSD results reproduced the experimental trend in dielectric loss, indicating that the method can qualitatively predict the dielectric loss of cellulose insulation. Hence, these methods are sufficient to guide design experiments and provide a route to understand the mechanism of the change in dielectric properties at the molecular level.