gebhart/patrepeval huggingface dataset:
Sources and Fates of Lead and Cadmium in Municipal Solid Waste (1990)

Lead and cadmium enter the municipal solid waste stream as components of a variety of consumer products. Average empirical data from several resource recovery plants were analyzed to obtain an estimate of the source and fate of the subject elements. The total amounts of lead and cadmium found in municipal solid waste, determined from empirical data sources, were found to agree closely with those based on materials flow data. It was determined that most of the cadmium enters the waste stream in the combustible fraction and can account for a major share of the cadmium observed in fly ash and in atmospheric particulates. The most likely sources of cadmium are plastics and pigments. The lead emissions appeared to be derived from both combustible and noncombustible discards of batteries, plastics, and pigments. The data suggests that it would be useful to perform mass balance studies to provide primary data for the determination of the most effective methods for managing discards containing lead and cadmium. The purpose of the suggested research is the reduction of lead and cadmium emissions into the environment from resource recovery plants.
The <i>eto1</i>, <i>eto2</i>, and <i>eto3</i> Mutations and Cytokinin Treatment Increase Ethylene Biosynthesis in Arabidopsis by Increasing the Stability of ACS Protein (2003)

The Arabidopsis ethylene-overproducing mutants eto1, eto2, and eto3 have been suggested to affect the post-transcriptional regulation of 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylic acid synthase (ACS). Here, we present the positional cloning of the gene corresponding to the dominant eto3 mutation and show that the eto3 phenotype is the result of a missense mutation within the C-terminal domain of ACS9, which encodes one isoform of the Arabidopsis ACS gene family. This mutation is analogous to the dominant eto2 mutation that affects the C-terminal domain of the highly similar ACS5. Analysis of purified recombinant ACS5 and epitope-tagged ACS5 in transgenic Arabidopsis revealed that eto2 does not increase the specific activity of the enzyme either in vitro or in vivo; rather, it increases the half-life of the protein. In a similar manner, cytokinin treatment increased the stability of ACS5 by a mechanism that is at least partially independent of the eto2 mutation. The eto1 mutation was found to act by increasing the function of ACS5 by stabilizing this protein. These results suggest that an important mechanism by which ethylene biosynthesis is controlled is the regulation of the stability of ACS, mediated at least in part through the C-terminal domain.
Wheat Canopy Resistance Determined by Energy Balance Techniques<sup>1</sup> (1985)

Abstract Canopy resistances are important to evaluate plant environmental responses and difficult to measure in situ. This study was designed to evaluate a residual energy balance method for obtaining canopy resistances. A field study was conducted under natural rainfall conditions at Davis, CA during 1980 to 1981 on the Yolo silt loam soil (fine‐silty, mixed, nonacid, thermic Typic Xerorthent) with Anza wheat ( Triticum aestivum L.) seeded at 120 kg ha −1 with 80 kg ha −1 N supplied prior to planting. One‐half of the plots received unobstructed solar radiation, the other half had solar radiation reduced by a 55% shadecloth. From shortly after emergence to maturity, net radiation, air temperature, canopy temperature, incoming solar radiation, vapor pressure deficit, and windspeed were continually recorded. Canopy resistances were calculated from a residual of the energy balance. Canopy resistances obtained under optimal available soil water for both radiation treatments exhibited exponential decline with increasing solar radiation. Midday values of canopy resistance in the unshaded area were typically 20 to 25 s m −1 and 40 to 50 s m −1 in the shaded plot. Canopy resistance was 20 s m −1 under conditions which would be considered near potential evapotranspiration and, increased linearly with decreasing available soil water with a change in canopy resistance of 0.4 and 2.1 s m −1 /% available soil water for the unshaded and shaded, respectively. These were normalized by computing the ratio of canopy resistance under non‐optimal soil water contents to the canopy resistance influenced only by solar radiation. This allowed both solar radiation treatments to fit the same relationship and revealed that canopy resistance was not affected until 20% of the available soil water was removed. The residual energy balance method provides a valuable tool to quantify canopy resistance and will be useful to compare genotypes or management practices.
A computer vision approach for the assessment of autism-related behavioral markers (2012)

The early detection of developmental disorders is key to child outcome, allowing interventions to be initiated that promote development and improve prognosis. Research on autism spectrum disorder (ASD) suggests behavioral markers can be observed late in the first year of life. Many of these studies involved extensive frame-by-frame video observation and analysis of a child's natural behavior. Although non-intrusive, these methods are extremely time-intensive and require a high level of observer training; thus, they are impractical for clinical purposes. Diagnostic measures for ASD are available for infants but are only accurate when used by specialists experienced in early diagnosis. This work is a first milestone in a long-term multidisciplinary project that aims at helping clinicians and general practitioners accomplish this early detection/measurement task automatically. We focus on providing computer vision tools to measure and identify ASD behavioral markers based on components of the Autism Observation Scale for Infants (AOSI). In particular, we develop algorithms to measure three critical AOSI activities that assess visual attention. We augment these AOSI activities with an additional test that analyzes asymmetrical patterns in unsupported gait. The first set of algorithms involves assessing head motion by facial feature tracking, while the gait analysis relies on joint foreground segmentation and 2D body pose estimation in video. We show results that provide insightful knowledge to augment the clinician's behavioral observations obtained from real in-clinic assessments.
Robustness enhancement for proximal support vector machines (2005)

Proximal support vector machine (PSVM) is a new version of SVM, which involves equality instead of inequality constraints, and works with a square error function. In this way, the solution follows from a linear Karush-Kuhn-Tucker system instead of a quadratic programming problem. The linear PSVM can easily solve the classification problems of extremely large datasets. However, according to the experiments below, PSVM is sensitive to noise. To overcome the drawback, this note proposes a weighted version of PSVM. The distance between each point and the center of corresponding class is used to calculate the weight value associated with the related point. In this way, the effect of noise is reduced greatly. The experiments indicate that the new SVM, weighted proximal support vector machine (WPSVM), is much more robust to noise than PSVM without loss of computationally attractive feature of PSVM.
On-Farm Batch Pasteurization Destroys Mycobacterium paratuberculosis in Waste Milk (2001)

A recent dairy survey conducted in 1996 by the National Animal Health Monitoring System suggests between 20 and 40% of dairy herds in the United States have some level of Johne's disease. This figure will continue to increase unless producers implement management regimes that will help control the spread of this disease within their herds. The neonatal calf is the target for infection with Mycobacterium paratuberculosis, the causative agent of Johne's disease. Calves become infected via exposure to the bacterium through contaminated feces, bedding, colostrum, and milk. Shedding of viable M. paratuberculosis has been documented in the colostrum and milk of infected dams. This study evaluated the efficacy of on-farm pasteurization to destroy M. paratuberculosis in waste milk fed to calves to circumvent this mode of transmission. In three replicate experiments, waste milk was experimentally inoculated with M. paratuberculosis and heated at 65.5 degrees C for 30 min. No viable bacteria were recovered after 28 wk of incubation. These results suggest that batch pasteurization of waste milk contaminated with M. paratuberculosis was effective at generating a clean product to feed to young calves.
Small Molecule Inhibitors of Ab-Aggregation and Neurotoxicity (2009)

Alzheimer disease (AD) is characterized pathologically by extracellular amyloid deposits composed of Ab peptide, neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs) made up of hyperphosphorylated tau, and a deficit of cholinergic neurons in the basal forebrain. Presently, only symptomatic therapies are available for the treatment of AD and these therapies have a limited time frame of utility. Amyloid disorders represent the effects of chronic Ab production and are not a secondary pathological effect caused by a distant trigger; therefore targeting Ab is a viable pursuit. In this review, we will discuss the various small molecule anti- aggregation inhibitors that have been reported in the literature, with emphasis on compounds that are presently being investigated in clinical trials. Drug Dev Res 70:111-124, 2009. r 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
On-Line Focusing of Flavin Derivatives Using Dynamic pH Junction-Sweeping Capillary Electrophoresis with Laser-Induced Fluorescence Detection (2002)

Simple yet effective methods to enhance concentration sensitivity is needed for capillary electrophoresis (CE) to become a practical method to analyze trace levels of analytes in real samples. In this report, the development of a novel on-line preconcentration technique combining dynamic pH junction and sweeping modes of focusing is applied to the sensitive and selective analysis of three flavin derivatives: riboflavin, flavin mononucleotide (FMN) and flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD). Picomolar (pM) detectability of flavins by CE with laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) detection is demonstrated through effective focusing of large sample volumes (up to 22% capillary length) using a dual pH junction-sweeping focusing mode. This results in greater than a 1,200-fold improvement in sensitivity relative to conventional injection methods, giving a limit of detection (S/N = 3) of approximately 4.0 pM for FAD and FMN. Flavin focusing is examined in terms of analyte mobility dependence on buffer pH, borate complexation and SDS interaction. Dynamic pH junction-sweeping extends on-line focusing to both neutral (hydrophobic) and weakly acidic (hydrophilic) species and is considered useful in cases when either conventional sweeping or dynamic pH junction techniques used alone are less effective for certain classes of analytes. Enhanced focusing performance by this hyphenated method was demonstrated by greater than a 4-fold reduction in flavin bandwidth, as compared to either sweeping or dynamic pH junction, reflected by analyte detector bandwidths <0.20 cm. Novel on-line focusing strategies are required to improve sensitivity in CE, which may be applied toward more effective biochemical analysis methods for diverse types of analytes.
Motifs and structural fold of the cofactor binding site of human glutamate decarboxylase (1998)

The pyridoxal-P binding sites of the two isoforms of human glutamate decarboxylase (GAD65 and GAD67) were modeled by using PROBE (a recently developed algorithm for multiple sequence alignment and database searching) to align the primary sequence of GAD with pyridoxal-P binding proteins of known structure. GAD's cofactor binding site is particularly interesting because GAD activity in the brain is controlled in part by a regulated interconversion of the apo- and holoenzymes. PROBE identified six motifs shared by the two GADs and four proteins of known structure: bacterial ornithine decarboxylase, dialkylglycine decarboxylase, aspartate aminotransferase, and tyrosine phenol-lyase. Five of the motifs corresponded to the alpha/beta elements and loops that form most of the conserved fold of the pyridoxal-P binding cleft of the four enzymes of known structure; the sixth motif corresponded to a helical element of the small domain that closes when the substrate binds. Eight residues that interact with pyridoxal-P and a ninth residue that lies at the interface of the large and small domains were also identified. Eleven additional conserved residues were identified and their functions were evaluated by examining the proteins of known structure. The key residues that interact directly with pyridoxal-P were identical in ornithine decarboxylase and the two GADs, thus allowing us to make a specific structural prediction of the cofactor binding site of GAD. The strong conservation of the cofactor binding site in GAD indicates that the highly regulated transition between apo- and holoGAD is accomplished by modifications in this basic fold rather than through a novel folding pattern.
Down/down deconvolution (2020)

Summary Images constructed from up-coming wavefields can be very effectively deconvolved using up/down deconvolution, however, they have geometry related drawbacks that reduce the quality of the shallower zones. In contrast, the down-going wavefield, which is imaged using mirror imaging, does not suffer from such geometry related disadvantages, however, it lacks a powerful deconvolution technique akin to up/down deconvolution. We use a modified Delft feedback model to describe the up- and down-going scattered wavefields. Using these results, we illustrate how up/down deconvolution works and then go on to introduce a new idea called down/down deconvolution. This new technique inverts the down-going wavefield for the Earth’s response in the absence of a free-surface. The free-surface multiples are removed and the 3D source wavefield is deconvolved to produce a result that is theoretically the same as up/down deconvolution. As a result we can combine the geometrical advantages of the down-going wavefield and the benefits of a powerful deconvolution technique. We illustrate this new idea using a synthetic dataset and a real 3D OBN dataset from the North Sea.
Potential protective role of the heat shock response in sepsis. (1998)

The heat shock response, a primitive and highly conserved cellular defense mechanism, has broad protective effects against sepsis-induced injury. In various models of sepsis, induction of the heat shock response protects against sepsis-induced mortality, organ injury, cardiovascular dysfunction, and apoptosis. The mechanisms by which the heat shock response protects against sepsis-induced injury are currently under investigation. One potential mechanism involves the ability of the heat shock response to inhibit proinflammatory responses. The heat shock response has been demonstrated to inhibit expression of the cytokines tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha and interleukin (IL)-1beta. The heat shock response has also been demonstrated to inhibit cytokine-mediated expression of inducible nitric oxide synthase. Recent studies demonstrated that the heat shock response inhibits nuclear translocation of nuclear factor-kappaB (NF-kappaB), a transcription factor involved in the regulation of many proinflammatory responses. Heat shock response-mediated inhibition of NF-kappaB nuclear translocation involves stabilization of an NF-kappaB inhibitory protein called I-kappaBalpha. The heat shock response also increases expression of I-kappaBalpha, thus providing another potential mechanism by which the heat shock response can modulate proinflammatory responses. Future studies designed to further understand the protective role of the heat shock response against sepsis-induced injury may allow for the development of rational pharmacologic agents or gene therapy methods to safely induce the heat shock response as a strategy to treat patients with sepsis.
A process for microbial hydrocarbon synthesis: Overproduction of fatty acids in <i>Escherichia coli</i> and catalytic conversion to alkanes (2010)

The development of renewable alternatives to diesel and jet fuels is highly desirable for the heavy transportation sector, and would offer benefits over the production and use of short-chain alcohols for personal transportation. Here, we report the development of a metabolically engineered strain of Escherichia coli that overproduces medium-chain length fatty acids via three basic modifications: elimination of beta-oxidation, overexpression of the four subunits of acetyl-CoA carboxylase, and expression of a plant acyl-acyl carrier protein (ACP) thioesterase from Umbellularia californica (BTE). The expression level of BTE was optimized by comparing fatty acid production from strains harboring BTE on plasmids with four different copy numbers. Expression of BTE from low copy number plasmids resulted in the highest fatty acid production. Up to a seven-fold increase in total fatty acid production was observed in engineered strains over a negative control strain (lacking beta-oxidation), with a composition dominated by C(12) and C(14) saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. Next, a strategy for producing undecane via a combination of biotechnology and heterogeneous catalysis is demonstrated. Fatty acids were extracted from a culture of an overproducing strain into an alkane phase and fed to a Pd/C plug flow reactor, where the extracted fatty acids were decarboxylated into saturated alkanes. The result is an enriched alkane stream that can be recycled for continuous extractions. Complete conversion of C(12) fatty acids extracted from culture to alkanes has been demonstrated yielding a concentration of 0.44 g L(-1) (culture volume) undecane.
Dispersibility of Fumed Silica in Simple Media (1993)

Dispersion of fumed silica powders having specific surface areas (SBET) of 50-500m2⋅g-1 was investigated based on the optical absorption (τ) in the wavelength (λ) range of 460-700nm. Light scattering index (n) was evaluated by using the equation τ=αλ-n. In the fumed silica-water disperse system, n and τ at λ=700nm changed rapidly to reach n* and τ*700nm, respectively, in the steady state under strong ultrasonic agitation conditions. n* and τ*700nm were found to be more useful than SBET as a dispersibility index of fumed silica. In general n* tended to increase as SBET increased, indicating that aggregated silica particles became finer in water as the size of primary silica particles dccreased. Dispersion behavior of fumed silica was also well correlated with τ*700nm. The fumed silica having a larger τ*700nm easily reached an ultimate dispersion state in water under mild ultrasonic agitation, while that having small τ*700nm started dispersion as rather grossy particles, which were subsequently divided into finer pieces to reach a very fine dispersion state eventually. Fumed silica was dispersed similarly in other polar media such as methanol and acetone but not in nonpolar or poorly polar media such as n-hexane and toluene.
Deciphering the hunting strategy of a bacterial wolfpack (2009)

Myxococcus xanthus is a common soil bacterium with an intricate multicellular lifestyle that continues to challenge the way in which we conceptualize the capabilities of prokaryotic organisms. Myxococcus xanthus is the preferred laboratory representative from the Myxobacteria, a family of organisms distinguished by their ability to form highly structured biofilms that include tentacle-like packs of surface-gliding cell groups, synchronized rippling waves of oscillating cells and massive spore-filled aggregates that protrude upwards from the substratum to form fruiting bodies. But most of the Myxobacteria are also predators that thrive on the degradation of macromolecules released through the lysis of other microbial cells. The aim of this review is to examine our understanding of the predatory life cycle of M. xanthus. We will examine the multicellular structures formed during contact with prey, and the molecular mechanisms utilized by M. xanthus to detect and destroy prey cells. We will also examine our understanding of microbial predator-prey relationships and the prospects for how bacterial predation mechanisms can be exploited to generate new antimicrobial technologies.
Design and tuning techniques for a 100 MHz CMOS continuous-time narrow-bandwidth bandpass filter (2002)

This paper discusses design and tuning techniques for a narrow-bandwidth sixth-order Chebyshev bandpass continuous-time filter at very-high-frequencies. The direct simulation of a doubly terminated LC ladder filter formed by three capacitor-coupled grounded resonator sections employs capacitors and operational transconductance amplifiers for implementation in a standard digital 1.2 /spl mu/m CMOS process. The automatic adjustment of both the center frequency and quality factor is based on the successive approximation tuning algorithm.
Oct-3/4: Not Just a Gatekeeper of Pluripotency for Embryonic Stem Cell, a Cell Fate Instructor through a Gene Dosage Effect (2007)

Oct-3/4 encoded by Pou5f1 has been longwise recognised as a gatekeeper for embryonic stem (ES) cell pluripotency. Recently, it was suggested that Oct-3/4 one of the earliest transcription factor of the embryo might feature some functions in differentiation of cell lineages. We recently uncovered a key role of Oct-3/4 in both ES cell specification toward a cardiac lineage and in mesodermal commitment of the embryonic epiblast. Our findings demonstrated a gene dosage effect of Oct-3/4, a factor at the cross-road between cell self-renewal and cell lineage specification. What is the genetic and/or epigenetic mechanism underlying this process is still questionable. The extraview presents some hypotheses that might account for the pleiotropic dose-dependent functions of Oct-3/4.
Effect of CO<sub>2</sub> sorption and desorption on the creep response of polycarbonate (2005)

Abstract In this article, experimental results on the effect of CO 2 sorption and desorption on the creep response of polycarbonate (PC) are presented. Tensile specimens machined from PC sheets were exposed to CO 2 and the absorbed gas mass fraction ranged from 0.045 to 0.12. The creep/creep recovery response of as‐received PC, saturated PC, and saturation‐cycled PC was characterized. It was found that the saturated PC showed a creep behavior similar to heating the PC to its glass transition temperature. The creep compliance of saturation‐cycled PC was found to change with the desorption or aging time. The tests on PC saturated and then desorbed for up to 60 days showed that the effects of exposure to CO 2 on PC creep properties persist long after the gas has left the polymer, and could be permanent. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 45:1639–1644, 2005. © 2005 Society of Plastics Engineers
GROUND VEGETATION—AN INDEX OF SITE QUALITY (1929)

F ORESTERS of Finland, under the leadership of Mr. A
Detection and tracking of a landing platform for aerial robotics applications (2018)

It is expected that autonomous aerial vehicles or drones will be integral part of transportation and surveying robotic systems in the near future. For ensuring its strong adoption, such aerial vehicles should not only be fast and reliable, they should also be energy efficient. Energy efficiency can be obtained by exploiting the efficiency of another means of transportation such as ground vehicles. In order to take advantage of the intrinsic energy efficiency of ground vehicles, drones have to be endowed with the capability of accurately localizing a landing platform. This paper presents the development and evaluation of an embedded vision-based landing platform detection a tracking system. The system extends the capabilities of a popular SURF-based feature detector, descriptor and matcher so observations about template detections can be obtained. These detections are then feed into a Kalman filter-based estimation module tailored especially for the task at hand. The experimental evaluation shows that the approach is capable of robustly localizing a landing platform on the ground.