nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
The McEwan Lake fault: gravity evidence for a new structural element of the Kapuskasing zone

The Chapleau block, the largest uplifted crustal block within the Kapuskasing zone, continues, after sinistral offset of about 20 km, for a further 60 km to the southwest of Chapleau. This newly discovered extension, referred to as the Pineal Lake block, terminates to the west in a north-south-trending, west-verging thrust, named the McEwan Lake fault. New gravity data suggest that the fault has a vertical displacement of at least 5 km, a dip of about 25°E, and a length of at least 30 km. It is not known whether the fault crosscuts the Kapuskasing structure, in which case it may represent a younger thrusting event, or represents a southerly extension of the Saganash Lake fault that bounds the northwestern side of the Kapuskasing zone in the Chapleau area.

Field of study: Environmental science
Chemical modification of silica support to improve the branching ability of Phillips catalyst

A variety of modified Phillips catalysts were synthesized by employing three kinds of chemical modifiers for silica support: (1) organic modification with silane coupling agents, (2) Lewis acidic modification with typical metal alkyl or alkoxide, and (3) modification with transition-metal alkoxide. The activity and branching ability of these catalysts were investigated for ethylene polymerization. It was revealed that the chemical modification of silica support was a good methodology for controlling the catalyst activity as well as the branching level in resultant polyethylene.

Field of study: Chemistry
Asymptotic non-null distribution for the locally most powerful invariant test for sphericity

The asymptotic non-null distribution of the locally most powerful invariant test for sphericity is derived under local alternatives and the power is compared with that of the likelihood ratio test, which is admissible (Kiefe and Schwartz (1965)) and has a monotone power function (Carter and Srivastava (1977)). Up to 0(n -3/2) the powers are essentially the same.

Field of study: Mathematics
Enhanced light output power of GaN-based vertical-injection light-emitting diodes with a 12-fold photonic quasi-crystal by nano-imprint lithography

GaN-based thin-film vertical-injection light-emitting diodes (VLEDs) with a 12-fold photonic quasi-crystal (PQC) by nano-imprint lithography (NIL) are fabricated and presented. At a driving current of 20 mA and with a chip size of 350 μm × 350 μm, the light output power of our thin-film LED with a 12-fold PQC structure reaches 41 mW. This result is an enhancement of 78% when compared with the output power of a VLED without a PQC structure. In addition, the corresponding light radiation pattern shows a narrower beam shape due to the strong guided light extraction effect by the formed PQC structure in the vertical direction. (Some figures in this article are in colour only in the electronic version)

Field of study: Materials science
The Status of Visual Art Apprenticeship Training in Ghana

This study examines the traditional apprenticeship of the visual art vocations in the wake of several attempts at formalizing apprenticeship in Ghana. The descriptive survey design was employed with questionnaire as the main instrument for data collection complemented with published literature. With the use of survey questionnaire and published literature this study took on the combined qualitative and quantitative approach of research. Purposive and simple random sampling techniques were used to sample 270 master crafts-persons and 300 apprentices respectively across the major crafts production centres. The study revealed that traditional apprenticeship with reference to visual arts vocations is still characterized by significant weaknesses and challenges in terms of relevance and quality of training. In spite of the weaknesses, the traditional apprenticeship provides greater opportunities and exposure to many youth in the area of entrepreneurial skills and self- employment. It was also revealed that greater number of both apprentices and master craftspersons have good educational background, a development likely to raise the status of apprenticeship and a requirement for the upgrade of the training content. The study recommends a comprehensive review of policy, legislative and regulatory framework for apprenticeship with the view of making it workable, and COTVET should be assisted and supported to deliver on its mandate. It is also recommended that the content of the training programme should be strengthened by incorporating essential topics missing in the visual arts apprenticeship programme.  apprentice, master craftsperson, traditional apprenticeship, visual arts, training

Field of study: Education
Matrine Inhibits Breast Cancer Growth Via miR-21/PTEN/Akt Pathway in MCF-7 Cells

Matrine is one of the major alkaloids extracted from Sophora flavescens and has been used clinically for breast cancer with notable therapeutic efficacy in China. However, the mechanisms are still largely unknown.  Cell viability was analyzed by MTT assay. After MCF-7 cells were treated with matrine for 48h, apoptosis was detected by flow cytometry, TUNEL assay and transmission electron microscopy, and the cell cycle distribution was also analyzed by flow cytometry. Further, the expression of PTEN, pAkt, Akt, pBad, Bad, p21/WAF1/CIP1 , and p27/KIP1 was determined by Western blot. Changes of miR-21 level were quantified by real-time RT-PCR. After miR-21 was transfected in MCF-7 cells, PTEN protein level was measured by Western blot.  Matrine inhibited MCF-7 cell growth in a concentration-and time-dependent manner, by inducing apoptosis and cell cycle arrest at G1/S phase. Matrine up-regulated PTEN by downregulating miR-21 which in turn dephosphorylated Akt, resulting in accumulation of Bad, p21/WAF1/CIP1 and p27/KIP1.  Our study unraveled, for the first time, the ability of matrine to suppress breast cancer growth and elucidated the miR-21/PTEN/Akt pathway as a signaling mechanism for the anti-cancer action of matrine. Our findings also reinforce the notion that miRNAs can act as mediators of the therapeutic efficacy of natural medicines.

Field of study: Biology, Chemistry
Seizures and sensory stimulation result in different patterns of brain derived neurotrophic factor protein expression in the barrel cortex and hippocampus.

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is important for the development and trophic support of neurons, and may be involved in controlling axonal sprouting and synaptic plasticity. In order to investigate the activity-dependent regulation of the BDNF gene, BDNF expression was examined within the rat somatosensory cortex (SSC) and hippocampus following vibrissae stimulation, kainic acid induced seizure, and pentylenetetrazol (PTZ) induced seizure. The specific goals of this study were to determine the time course and magnitude of BDNF's activity-dependent expression, and to compare the expression patterns of three commonly used neuronal activation paradigms. Our results demonstrate three novel observations. First, the patterns of BDNF protein expression are dependent upon the neuronal stimulation model used. Both unilateral whisker stimulation (a model of experience dependent plasticity) and kainic acid induced seizure were able to increase the levels of BDNF protein within the SSC and hippocampus. In contrast, PTZ induced seizure did not increase BDNF protein levels in either tissue. Second, there is a dissociation between BDNF mRNA and protein levels following PTZ induced seizure. PTZ seizures resulted in strong increases of BDNF mRNA levels without corresponding increases of the protein. Finally, whisker stimulation resulted in an unexpected increase in BDNF mRNA and protein levels within the hippocampus. These results suggest specific types of neuronal activity can regulate gene expression differently. Furthermore, temporal and spatial differences between the expression of BDNF protein and mRNA levels suggest that the BDNF gene is regulated at the level of translation as well as transcription.

Field of study: Biology
Thermophilic biotrickling filtration of ethanol vapors.

The treatment of ethanol vapors in biotrickling filters for air pollution control was investigated. Two reactors were operated in parallel, one at ambient temperature (22 degrees C) and one at high temperature (53 degrees C). After a short adaptation phase, the removal of ethanol was similar in both reactors. At a bed contact time of 57 s, the elimination capacity exceeded 220 g m(-3) h(-1) at both temperatures. The experiments performed revealed that the process was most likely limited by biodegradation in the biofilm. The high-temperature biotrickling filter exhibited a higher degree of ethanol mineralization to CO2 (60 vs 46% at ambient temperature); hence, a lower rate of biomass accumulation was observed. Plating and cultivation of biofilm samples revealed that the high-temperature biotrickling filter hosted a process culture composed of both mesophilic and thermotolerant or thermophilic microorganisms, whereas the ambient-temperature reactor lacked microorganisms capable of growing at high temperature. Consequently, the performance of the control biotrickling filter was significantly affected by a short incursion at 53 degrees C. The upper temperature limit for treatment was 62 degrees C. Overall, the results of this study open new possibilities for biotrickling filtration of hot gases.

Field of study: Environmental science
Numerical evaluation of ejector-assisted mechanical compression systems for refrigeration applications

A study of the conjugate effects of ejector performance characteristics, the activation pressure–temperature conditions at the generator and the interaction with the compressor on refrigeration systems was performed. Besides the conventional compression cycle which was used as a reference, three more configurations were selected for this study: a hybrid ejector–compressor booster and two cascade compressor–ejector cycles. The modelling methodology developed to handle such systems was based on the principles of thermodynamics and fluid dynamics and included two separate sub-cycles in constant interaction: a loop driven mechanically by a compressor, coupled with a thermally activated ejector loop. This cycle model was combined with a validated ejector model and manufacturer's compressor performance maps. A performance analysis and a parametric optimization were performed to select promising cycles. For given working conditions, substantial improvement in COP of the selected cycles over the conventional mechanical compression cycle was found.

Field of study: Engineering
Geological book-keeping

So long as a geologist is in the field for a short and continuous period and in a restricted and comparatively simple district, no more elaborate and systematic system of notes is needed than is afforded by a map and a book. But when the district becomes complex and difficult, as in many metamorphic areas, and when the field work extends through several seasons, often with intervals of a year or two between, some method of indexing and compiling becomes absolutely necessary. The best of memories can not carry the endless details involved, and during office work time can not be spared for the discouraging search through a number of note books. A system that will work almost automatically is as essential to the geologist as is double-entry book-keeping to a large commercial house, and it fills very much the same field. If, moreover, a teacher has to give . . .

Field of study: Geology
Simultaneous Determination of 22 Sulfonamides in Cosmetics by Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography Tandem Mass Spectrometry

A comprehensive analytical method based on ultra-performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry has been developed for the simultaneous determination of 22 sulfonamides(sulfaguanidine,sulfanilamide,sulfadiazine,sulfisomidine,sulfacetamide,sulfathiazole,sulfapyridine,sulfamerazine,sulfameter,sulfamoxole,sulfamethazine,sulfamethizole,sulfamethoxypyridazine,succinylsulfathiazole,sulfachloropyridazine,sulfamethoxazole,sulfamonomethoxine,sulfadoxine,sulfisoxazole,sulfadimethoxine,sulfaquinoxaline and sulfanitran).Various cosmetic samples,including cream,lotion,powder,shampoo and lipstick,were extracted under ultrasonication.Qualitative and quantitative analysis was carried out for the analyte under the MRM mode after the chromatographic separation on Waters ACQUITY UPLC BEH C18(50 mm×2.1 mm,1.7 μm) column.The limits of detection for the 22 sulfonamides were 3.5-14.1 μg/kg.The mean recoveries at the three spiked levels were 80.3%-103.6%,with the intra-day precision less than 12% and the inter-day precision less than 15%.

Field of study: Chemistry
Recent advances in measurement techniques for atmospheric carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide observations

Carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrous oxide ( N2O ) are two
key parameters in the observation of the atmosphere, relevant to air
quality and climate change, respectively. For CO, various analytical
techniques have been in use over the last few decades. In contrast, N2O 
was mainly measured using gas chromatography (GC) with an electron capture
detector (ECD). In recent years, new spectroscopic methods have become
available which are suitable for both CO and N2O . These include
infrared (IR) spectroscopic techniques such as cavity ring-down
spectroscopy (CRDS), off-axis integrated cavity output spectroscopy
(OA-ICOS) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). Corresponding
instruments became recently commercially available and are increasingly used
at atmospheric monitoring stations. We analysed results obtained through
performance audits conducted within the framework of the Global Atmosphere
Watch (GAW) quality management system of the World Meteorology Organization
(WMO). These results reveal that current spectroscopic measurement
techniques have clear advantages with respect to data quality objectives
compared to more traditional methods for measuring CO and N2O . Further,
they allow for a smooth continuation of historic CO and N2O time series.
However, special care is required concerning potential water vapour
interference on the CO amount fraction reported by near-IR CRDS instruments.
This is reflected in the results of parallel measurement campaigns, which
clearly indicate that drying the sample air leads to an improved accuracy
of CO measurements with such near-IR CRDS instruments.

Field of study: Environmental science
Partial AUC Maximization via Nonlinear Scoring Functions

We propose a method for maximizing a partial area under a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (pAUC) for binary classification tasks. In binary classification tasks, accuracy is the most commonly used as a measure of classifier performance. In some applications such as anomaly detection and diagnostic testing, accuracy is not an appropriate measure since prior probabilties are often greatly biased. Although in such cases the pAUC has been utilized as a performance measure, few methods have been proposed for directly maximizing the pAUC. This optimization is achieved by using a scoring function. The conventional approach utilizes a linear function as the scoring function. In contrast we newly introduce nonlinear scoring functions for this purpose. Specifically, we present two types of nonlinear scoring functions based on generative models and deep neural networks. We show experimentally that nonlinear scoring fucntions improve the conventional methods through the application of a binary classification of real and bogus objects obtained with the Hyper Suprime-Cam on the Subaru telescope.

Field of study: Computer science
Inventory Management for One Warehouse Multi-Port Systems with Free Storage Periods

We consider a two-echelon supply chain network with one centralized warehouse and a set of ports, in which the sea cargo ports offer such kind of service that allows the in-transit inventory to stay in their ports for free for a certain time period. In the replenishment of the warehouse and ports, we take into account of the free storage period to minimize the two-echelon inventory cost. Focusing on stationary and integer-ratio policies, we formulate this problem as a mathematical model with a convex objective function and a set of integer-ratio constraints. We present an algorithm to solve the corresponding relaxed problem in () time, and prove that the objective function value of the relaxed problem (relaxing the integer-ratio constraints) is a lower bound on the average cost of all feasible policies (containing dynamic policies).Then we construct a stationary and integer-ratio inventory policy, i.e., the power-of-two policy, via the solution of the relaxed problem, and we also prove the optimality of the power-of-two policy.

Field of study: Engineering
The expression of growth hormone and it's effection of activation in the T lymphocytes expressing HTLV-1 Tax

To study the effects of the adult T cell leukemia virus type 1(HTLV-1) Tax protein on T lymphocytes self-reactive growth hormone(GH).  The expression of the growth hormone protein was measured by Western blot in TaxP and TaxN cells, which expresses HTLV-1 Tax or no. The location of growth hormone in the TaxP and TaxN cells were detected by LSCM(laser scanning confocal microscope). The level of growth hormone mRNA in TaxP and TaxN cells was measured by RT-PCR. The pGL2-GH-luc was transfected in TaxN and TaxP cells by Tfx-50-mediated transfection to assay transcriptional activity. The pNF-κB-luc, pAP-1-luc and pNFAT-luc was transfected into TaxP cells with pcDNA3.0-GH by Tfx50 to test bioactivity of the nuclear transcription factors.  The mRNA and protein expression of GH could be promoted significantly by Tax. Relative to the TaxN cells, the transcriptional activity of GH was significantly increased about 6.37 times in TaxP cells(P＜0.05). Overexpression of GH can increase the activity of NF-κB about 1.7 times in TaxP cells (P＜0.05).  GH maybe involve in adult T-cell leukemia(ATL) through activating NF-κB. 
 
 
HTLV-1;  Tax protein;  T Lymphocytes;  Growth hormone;  NF-κB

Field of study: Biology
Conglomérats polygéniques ophiolitiques: anciens éboulis de talus de fond océanique?

Field observations on the polygenetic conglomerates associated with the ophiolitic complexes in the Eastern Townships are comparable to those on the common slope facies in the present-day ocean bottom. Sedimentary processes (submarine erosion, deposition) are probably responsible for the internal structures of the conglomerates. This working hypothesis replaces the explosion-origin interpretation previously proposed.

Field of study: Environmental science
Explore Africa's own : management

Research at Outeniqua Research Farm has shown that the strategic incorporation of different ryegrass species and clovers into kikuyu can increase the seasonal dry matter (DM) production and quality of kikuyu pasture. The management of such pasture systems is based on optimum utilisation, with the focus on production of adequate, high-quality, palatable dry matter and the highest possible DM intake.

Field of study: Agricultural and Food sciences
Relational Dose-Response Modeling for Cancer Drug Studies.

Exploratory cancer drug studies test multiple tumor cell lines against multiple candidate drugs. The goal in each paired (cell line, drug) experiment is to map out the dose-response curve of the cell line as the dose level of the drug increases. The level of natural variation and technical noise in these experiments is high, even when multiple replicates are run. Further, running all possible combinations of cell lines and drugs may be prohibitively expensive, leading to missing data. Thus, estimating the dose-response curve is a denoising and imputation task. We cast this task as a functional matrix factorization problem: finding low-dimensional structure in a matrix where every entry is a noisy function evaluated at a set of discrete points. We propose Bayesian Tensor Filtering (BTF), a hierarchical Bayesian model of matrices of functions. BTF captures the smoothness in each individual function while also being locally adaptive to sharp discontinuities. The BTF model can incorporate many types of likelihoods, making it flexible enough to handle a wide variety of data. We derive efficient Gibbs samplers for three classes of likelihoods: (i) Gaussian, for which updates are fully conjugate; (ii) binomial and related likelihoods, for which updates are conditionally conjugate through Polya-Gamma augmentation; and (iii) non-conjugate likelihoods, for which we develop an analytic truncated elliptical slice sampling routine. We compare BTF against a state-of-the-art method for dynamic Poisson matrix factorization, showing BTF better reconstructs held out data in synthetic experiments. Finally, we build a dose-response model around BTF and apply it to real data from two multi-sample, multi-drug cancer studies. We show that the BTF-based dose-response model outperforms the current standard approach in biology. Code is available at this https URL.

Field of study: Computer science
Re-examination of the EA rosette assay (Ripley) for Fc receptor leucocytes.

Numerous investigations has utilized rosette formation with Ripley antibody-coated human erythrocytes (EA) to identify or deplete Fc receptor-bearing K lymphocytes in whole mononuclear cell preparations. This study examines the interaction between Ripley EA and purified preparations of human lymphocytes, monocytes and neutrophils and demonstrates that this technique is not specific for K lymphocytes. Indeed, 100% of blood monocytes rosette these EA target cells. Moreover, data from both rosetting studies and antibody-dependent cytotoxicity (ADCC) reactions suggest that the avidity of Ripley EA is actually greater for monocytes than for lymphocytes. In contrast to previous reports, 100% human neutrophils were found to possess Fc receptors, as determined by their ability to rosette Ripley EA. Thus, the extent of rosetting and ADCC by all three Fc receptor-bearing leucocytes depends significantly on the degree of antibody sensitization with neutrophils requiring the greatest, and monocytes the least, amount of target-bound antibody for Fc receptor-mediated interaction.

Field of study: Biology, Medicine
Quantum dots in a strong magnetic field: Quasi-classical consideration

The electron motion in strong magnetic fields (when only the lowest Landau level is populated) is considered. In this case the electron kinetic energy is frozen out and the electrons are guided by a slowly varied potential. Using the adiabatic procedure and expansion in magnetic length series an approximate description is developed. In zeroth order this approximation leads to the classical equations of motion describing the Larmor circle driiPt in the potential gradient. In the second order the special quantum mechanical description where the electron potential energy plays the role of the total Hamiltonian is constructed. Simple examples of a single and two electrons in the parabolic dot demonstrates that the proposed approximate description gives the main features of the electron system spectrum and the collective phenomena.

Field of study: Physics