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Paramyxoviruses, negative-sense single-stranded RNA viruses, pose a critical threat to human public health. Currently, 78 species, 17 genera, and 4 subfamilies of paramyxoviruses are harbored by multiple natural reservoirs, including rodents, bats, birds, reptiles, and fish. Henipaviruses are critical zoonotic pathogens that cause severe acute respiratory distress and neurological diseases in humans. Using reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction, 115 Crocidura species individuals were examined for the prevalence of paramyxovirus infections. Paramyxovirus RNA was observed in 26 (22.6%) shrews collected at five trapping sites, Republic of Korea. Herein, we report two genetically distinct novel paramyxoviruses (genus: Henipavirus): Gamak virus (GAKV) and Daeryong virus (DARV) isolated from C. lasiura and C. shantungensis, respectively. Two GAKVs and one DARV were nearly completely sequenced using next-generation sequencing. GAKV and DARV contain six genes (3′-N-P-M-F-G-L-5′) with genome sizes of 18,460 nucleotides and 19,471 nucleotides, respectively. The phylogenetic inference demonstrated that GAKV and DARV form independent genetic lineages of Henipavirus in Crocidura species. GAKV-infected human lung epithelial cells elicited the induction of type I/III interferons, interferon-stimulated genes, and proinflammatory cytokines. In conclusion, this study contributes further understandings of the molecular prevalence, genetic characteristics and diversity, and zoonotic potential of novel paramyxoviruses in shrews.

Background The discovery of viruses in small mammalian populations, particularly rodents, has expanded the family Paramyxoviridae . The overlap in habitats between rodents and humans increases the risk of zoonotic events, underscoring the importance of active surveillance. Rodent species, such as Apodemus agrarius , are natural hosts for Paramyxoviridae in the Republic of Korea (ROK). However, it is unknown whether Paramyxoviridae is present in Micromys minutus , another common rodent. Method Here, we screened M. minutus collected from the Gangwon Province in the ROK for paramyxoviruses using nested polymerase chain reaction and confirm positive samples by next-generation metagenomic sequencing. Complete paramyxovirus genomes were further characterized by phylogenetic analysis, amino acid similarity, secondary structure, and cophylogeny. Result Overall, 57 of 145 (39.3%) M. minutus kidney samples tested positive for paramyxoviruses. Among them, four whole genome sequences were identified and clustered within the genus Jeilongvirus . One sequence was determined as Samak Micromys paramyxovirus 1 (SMPV-1; 19,911 nucleotides long) and three sequences as Samak Micromys paramyxovirus 2 (SMPV-2; 18,199 nucleotides long). SMPV-1 has a smaller hydrophobic gene and a longer glycoprotein gene than SMPV-2. Cophylogenetic analysis suggests that SMPV-1 evolved through co-divergence, whereas SMPV-2 was inferred to have undergone transfer events. Conclusion These findings highlight the prevalence of paramyxoviruses in the wild and the potential of M. minutus as a natural viral reservoir. The discovery of SMPV-1 and SMPV − 2 also reveals the genetic diversity and evolutionary history of the genus Jeilongvirus in the Paramyxoviridae.

In this paper, we propose a high-performance audio fingerprinting system used in real-world query-by-example applications for acoustic audio-based content identification, especially for use in heterogeneous portable consumer devices or on-line audio distributed system. In the proposed method, audio fingerprints are generated using a modulated complex lapped transform-based non-repeating foreground audio extraction and an adaptive thresholding method for prominent peak detection. Effective matching is performed using a robust peak-pair-based hash function of non-repeating foreground audio to protect against noise, echo, artifacts from pitch-shifting, time-stretching, resampling, equalization, or compression. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method is quite robust in various distorted conditions and achieves preliminarily promising accuracy results.

This study aims to explore the issues and challenges of implementation of global citizenship education (GCE) in South Korea. Through analyzing in-depth interviews with 19 educators who are in charge or who implement GCE, such as teachers, non- governmental organization (NGO) workers, and international organization (IO) staff, this study presents three major challenges: a partial understanding of GCE, contradictory values between GCE and social norms, and structural constraints regarding the government’s top-down approach. Based on findings, this study argues that existing contextual restraints must be reviewed in developing and implementing GCE, because GCE is shaped by these contextual factors. With consideration of these conceptual and structural limitations in Korean society, GCE could truly contribute to actualizing individual and social transformation.

The discovery of viruses in small mammalian populations, particularly rodents, has expanded the family Paramyxoviridae. The overlap in habitats between rodents and humans increases the risk of zoonotic events, underscoring the importance of active surveillance. Rodent species, such as Apodemus agrarius, are natural hosts for Paramyxoviridae in the Republic of Korea (ROK). However, it is unknown whether Paramyxoviridae is present in Micromys minutus, another common rodent. Here, we screened M. minutus collected from the Gangwon Province in the ROK for paramyxoviruses using nested polymerase chain reaction and confirm positive samples by next-generation metagenomic sequencing. Complete paramyxovirus genomes were further characterized by phylogenetic analysis, amino acid similarity, secondary structure, and cophylogeny. Overall, 57 of 145 (39.3%) M. minutus kidney samples tested positive for paramyxoviruses. Among them, four whole genome sequences were identified and clustered within the genus Jeilongvirus. One sequence was determined as Samak Micromys paramyxovirus 1 (SMPV-1; 19,911 nucleotides long) and three sequences as Samak Micromys paramyxovirus 2 (SMPV-2; 18,199 nucleotides long). SMPV-1 has a smaller hydrophobic gene and a longer glycoprotein gene than SMPV-2. Cophylogenetic analysis suggests that SMPV-1 evolved through co-divergence, whereas SMPV-2 was inferred to have undergone transfer events. These findings highlight the prevalence of paramyxoviruses in the wild and the potential of M. minutus as a natural viral reservoir. The discovery of SMPV-1 and SMPV - 2 also reveals the genetic diversity and evolutionary history of the genus Jeilongvirus in the Paramyxoviridae.

The ability of deep networks to learn superior representations hinges on leveraging the proper inductive biases, considering the inherent properties of datasets. In tabular domains, it is critical to effectively handle heterogeneous features (both categorical and numerical) in a unified manner and to grasp irregular functions like piecewise constant functions. To address the challenges in the self-supervised learning framework, we propose a novel pretext task based on the classical binning method. The idea is straightforward: reconstructing the bin indices (either orders or classes) rather than the original values. This pretext task provides the encoder with an inductive bias to capture the irregular dependencies, mapping from continuous inputs to discretized bins, and mitigates the feature heterogeneity by setting all features to have category-type targets. Our empirical investigations ascertain several advantages of binning: capturing the irregular function, compatibility with encoder architecture and additional modifications, standardizing all features into equal sets, grouping similar values within a feature, and providing ordering information. Comprehensive evaluations across diverse tabular datasets corroborate that our method consistently improves tabular representation learning performance for a wide range of downstream tasks. The codes are available in https://github.com/kyungeun-lee/tabularbinning.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, which determines whether a given sample is part of the in-distribution (ID), has recently shown promising results through training with synthetic OOD datasets. Nonetheless, existing methods often produce outliers that are considerably distant from the ID, showing limited efficacy for capturing subtle distinctions between ID and OOD. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework, Semantic Outlier generation via Nuisance Awareness (SONA), which notably produces challenging outliers by directly leveraging pixel-space ID samples through diffusion models. Our approach incorporates SONA guidance, providing separate control over semantic and nuisance regions of ID samples. Thereby, the generated outliers achieve two crucial properties: (i) they present explicit semantic-discrepant information, while (ii) maintaining various levels of nuisance resemblance with ID. Furthermore, the improved OOD detector training with SONA outliers facilitates learning with a focus on semantic distinctions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, achieving an impressive AUROC of 88% on near-OOD datasets, which surpasses the performance of baseline methods by a significant margin of approximately 6%.

A novel and effective method was devised for synthesizing a vertically aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) forest on a substrate using waste plastic obtained from commercially available water bottles. The advantages of the proposed method are the speed of processing and the use of waste as a raw material. A mechanism for the CNT growth was also proposed. The growth rate of the CNT forest was ∼2.5 μm min −1 . Transmission electron microscopy images indicated that the outer diameters of the CNTs were 20-30 nm on average. The intensity ratio of the G and D Raman bands was 1.27 for the vertically aligned CNT forest. The Raman spectrum showed that the wall graphitization of the CNTs, synthesized via the proposed method was slightly higher than that of commercially available multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs). We expect that the proposed method can be easily adapted to the disposal of other refuse materials and applied to MWCNT production industries.