Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cross-linking tendency and photo-oxidation degradation in Silane-grafted LDPE insulation under accelerated cyclic weathering aging

Si-g-LDPE (Silane-grafted LDPE) is the based material of silane-crosslinked polyethylene (Si-XLPE) nominated to be used in renewable energy (photovoltaic) structures for the reason of its good behavior under weathering circumstances. The present study has an attempt to follow up the cross-linking process of Si-g-LDPE under cyclic accelerated weathering aging and to track its photo and thermo-oxidative degradation at both microscopic and macroscopic scales. The realized experiments consist to carry out cyclic accelerated weathering aging of 1152 hours, using QUV chamber, on films of Si-g-LDPE. The process of cross-linking is checked by using Hot-Set-Test measurements and Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy. Evolution of mechanical properties and carbonyl index are used as relevant precursors of photo and thermo-oxidation degradation. Additional information on the microstructural changes (crystallinity) and on the optical properties is gained by using X-ray difractometry and UV-visible measurements. Our findings lead to a result that Si-g-LDPE has a big ability to crosslink under cyclic weathering aging. The elastic behavior of the material was enhanced gradually with increasing aging time. The elastic behavior enhancement is a consequence of crosslink network density increase. FTIR results support perfectly the Hot-Set-Test results by the increase of single or multi-siloxane linkages absorption bands. These linkages modify the digital fingerprint of the material. Our results ascertained also that we can relate the elongation at break and tensile strength changes to the changes in the carbonyl index. Both characteristics are related to the photo and thermo-oxidation degradation. Photo-oxidation degradation leads to the decrease of mechanical properties and to the increase of carbonyl index. An abrupt and sharp increase at the beginning of aging in the crystallinity of the material followed by a level-off state was observed. Finally, the optical properties (band gaps, Urbach energy and dielectric constant) are greatly affected by the weathering aging process.
Research on the water hammer protection of the air vessel caused by underground pipe burst in long distance water supply system

The conventional air vessel installation is usually installed behind the check valve at the upstream end of the pipeline to effectively control the water hammer pressure due to pump trip. However, the water hammer pressure caused by underground pipe burst has been neglected. The water hammer protection of air vessel due to pipe burst in long distance water supply system was discussed in this paper. According to analysis of the process of the pipe burst, the mathematical model of underground pipe burst and air vessel were established. A new air vessel installation that was installed in the middle of the pipeline was proposed. The new air vessel installation was simulated by method of characteristics. Then it was compared with the conventional air vessel when the pump trip and the pipe burst occur respectively. The results show that both the conventional air vessel and the new air vessel can effectively protect the water hammer duo to the pump trip. Moreover, when pipe burst occurs, the conventional air vessel cannot achieve the safe operation of the long distance water supply system. However, under the same air vessel type parameters, the new air vessel installation can effectively protect the water hammer pressure.
SYMBIOSIS BETWEEN DEVONIAN CORALS AND OTHER INVERTEBRATES

Abstract: Corals formed at least 15 symbiotic associations in the Devonian. Tabulates formed symbiotic associations more often than rugose corals, with the largest number of different taxa involved in stromatoporoid-syringoporid and brachiopod-auloporid symbioses. Eight of fifteen symbiotic associations first appeared in the Devonian, all of which except for the crinoid-tabulate association went extinct by the end of the Devonian. The general increase in symbiotic interactions involving corals in the Devonian can be explained by the increase in number of coral taxa. The influence of Ordovician/Silurian and Frasnian/Famennian mass extinctions on coral symbiosis was different: the Ordovician/Silurian mass extinction did not terminate coral symbiosis, whereas the Frasnian/Famennian mass extinction almost entirely terminated symbiotic interactions between the corals and other invertebrates.
Coast formation in an Arctic area due to glacier surge and retreat: The Hornbreen–Hambergbreen case from Spistbergen

Glacierised coasts undergo faster geomorphic processes than unglaciated ones. We have studied changes of the coastal area in southern Svalbard with the glacier bridge between Torell Land and Sørkapp Land since the beginning of the 20th century. The existence of a continuous subglacial depression beneath the Hornbreen–Hambergbreen glacier system has been debated since the 1960s, with inconclusive results. In this study we assess both the subglacial topography and the bathymetry of Hornsund Fjord and Hambergbukta bay. This included ~40 km of radar surveys over the glacial system and sea depth sounding. The extent of the glaciers from maps and satellite images together with digital terrain models and surface elevation data based on GPS profiling were used to analyse geometry changes of the glacier surfaces. The results confirm the existence of a continuous subglacial depression below sea level (c. 40 m deep) between Hornsund and the Barents Sea. The Hornbreen‐Hambergbreen system has changed in shape over the past century, reflecting its dynamic origin and activity, also exemplified by the sequential surges identified since 1899. There was a pre‐surge build‐up event of Flatbreen causing a surge and subsequent lowering of the Hornbreen‐Hambergbreen frontal parts by the 1960s. After, the entire surface lowered, albeit with a delay in the Hornbreen terminal zone. Since the year 2000, Hornbreen terminus has retreated at an average rate of 106 m a−1; ~50% faster than that of Hambergbreen. If the retreat continues at the 2000–2015 average rate, the ice bridge between Hornsund and Hambergbukta will be broken sometime between 2055 and 2065 and the Hornsund strait will separate Sørkapp Land from the Spitsbergen island. The processes and events described in this study, particularly the effects of the glacier surge, may provide a model for changes likely to occur in other coastal glaciated regions experiencing rapid change. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Population Structure and Genetic Diversity of the Toona ciliata (Meliaceae) Complex Assayed with Chloroplast DNA Markers

Toona ciliata is a deciduous or semi-deciduous tree species and belongs to the Toona genus of the Meliaceae family. Owing to low natural regeneration and over-exploitation, the species is listed as an endangered species at level II in China and its conservation has received increasing concern. Here, we sampled 447 individuals from 29 populations across the range-wide distribution of the T. ciliata complex in China and assessed their genetic variation using two chloroplast DNA markers. The results showed that the overall haplotype diversity and nucleotide diversity per site were high at h = 0.9767 and π = 0.0303 for the psbA-trnH fragment and h= 0.8999 and π = 0.0189 for the trnL-trnL fragment. Phylogenetic analysis supported the division of the natural distribution of T. ciliata complex into western and eastern regions. The genetic diversity was higher in the western region than in the eastern region, showing significant phylogeographic structure. Genetic differentiation among populations was moderate (Φst=42.87%), and the effects of isolation by distance (IBD) were significant. A neutrality test and mismatch distribution analysis indicated that the distribution of the T. ciliata complex generally did not expand, although a few local populations could likely expand after bottleneck effects. The overall results were complementary to and consolidated previous studies using mitochondrial and nuclear DNA markers. We finally discussed strategies for the genetic conservation of the T. ciliata complex.
Population genetics of the invasive tick Rhipicephalus microplus in Benin and Burkina Faso (West Africa)

Rhipicephalus microplus, is an invasive tick species associated with the highest economic losses where it occurs. Invasion of West Africa, where breeding is in 95% of case with low input, started in 2000s and was followed by breeder’s complaints of acaricide resistance. Since understanding of population structure could help tick control, this study aimed to investigate processes which influence R. microplus invasion in Benin and Burkina Faso. Thus, seven microsatellites (SSRs) markers were applied to analyse 436 ticks from Benin and Burkina Faso. Subsequently, determination of population limits, population size, and investigation on isolation by distance pattern were achieved. Analyses revealed that herd is the relevant level of population limit in Benin and with the whole dataset. Significant differentiation was highlighted between herds and between R. microplus population from Benin and Burkina Faso. Migration occurred between herds, as indicated by assignment results and migration rates. Furthermore, any bottleneck was not evidenced within dataset. Results suggested that the origin of R. microplus population of Burkina Faso could be Côte d’Ivoire. The limit of population being the herd has obviously to be considered in tick control strategies. Thus, to be efficient, tick control programs should primarily focus on the cattle coming back north after transhumance.
Peer victimization and social anxiety in adolescence: a comparison between migrant and native students in Italy

The first aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between bullying victimization and social anxiety in native and migrant adolescents in Italy. Specifically, it was hypothesized that migrant adolescents (in comparison with natives) experience more frequent episodes of bullying victimization, which in turn, may be a risk factor for the development of social anxiety symptoms. The second aim of the study is to explore the relationships from reflected minority categorization to perceived ethnic discrimination at school and social anxiety symptoms, in the subgroup of migrant students. Results showed that the migrant (vs. native) status was predictive of higher scores in social anxiety dimensions (Fear of Negative Evaluation, Social Avoidance and Distress in New Situations, and General Social Avoidance Distress), via the mediating effect of increased peer victimization. Moreover, in the subgroup of migrant participants, an indirect effect of reflected minority categorization on social anxiety was observed, mediated by perceived ethnic discrimination at school. These findings may contribute to the understanding of health inequalities among migrant and native people in the Italian context. Limitations and practical implications of the study were discussed.
µ-calculus Pushdown Module Checking with Imperfect State Information.

A decanting centrifuge particularly useful for clinical laboratory procedures requiring the washing and packing of red cells or other particles. An electromagnet having upper and lower planar pole faces rotates to drive a removable rotor head assembly and, during the decant cycle, holds a plurality of magnetically-attractable tube carriers in substantially vertical positions against its planar pole faces so that supernatant liquid is centrifugally discharged from the open upper ends of the tubes. Each tube carrier comprises a tube-holding member and a contact member, both of which have their upper end portions pivotally suspended from a support ring which is provided by the rotor assembly and which is coaxial with the rotatable magnet. The planar surfaces of the contact members engage the planar pole faces when the centrifuge is at rest and also when the electromagnet is energized and the rotor assembly is rotated to decant the liquid contents of the centrifuge tubes. Each tube-holding member has two outer side walls which meet along converging planes so that such walls will engage a centrifuge tube along a pair of spaced parallel lines during centrifuge operation, thereby permitting centrifuge tubes of different selected outside dimensions to be supported within the open-topped cavity of such tube-holding member.
Automated Rock Detection From Mars Rover Image via Y-Shaped Dual-Task Network With Depth-Aware Spatial Attention Mechanism

Extracting rocks from Mars rover images using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is a semantic segmentation problem gaining increasing attention in planetary science and artificial intelligence. However, this task still faces the challenges of inaccurate extraction of rock boundaries and small rocks. An important reason is that the textural features of the Mars rover images are not discriminative enough between the target and the background. To obtain 3-D information to enhance the rock extraction without introducing additional data, we designed a dual-task branch network with a Y-shaped encoder–decoder structure. In our network, the primary semantic segmentation task branch is used to decode textural features into semantic features and output rock extraction results; the auxiliary task depth estimation branch decodes textural features into depth features in 3-D and transmits them to the primary branch through the spatial attention module to enhance the identification ability of semantic features for boundaries and small targets. In addition, another reason that impedes accurate Mars rock extraction is the lack of high-quality annotated training datasets. Therefore, we created a dataset containing 6325 image pairs with corresponding annotations and depth information, SimMars6K. Ablation and comparison experiments based on this dataset and two actual datasets show that our method achieves 83.1% IoU and $90.8~F_{1}$ -score on the simulated dataset and outperforms other methods on actual datasets with 2% improvement in recall. Transfer learning experiment shows that the pretraining on our simulated data can bring up to an additional 5% gain on mean intersection over union (mIoU) and 6% gain on mean pixel accuracy (mPA) for the general model.
Performance Assessment of Spatial Interpolation of Precipitation for Hydrological Process Simulation in the Three Gorges Basin

Accurate assessment of spatial and temporal precipitation is crucial for simulating hydrological processes in basins, but is challenging due to insufficient rain gauges. Our study aims to analyze different precipitation interpolation schemes and their performances in runoff simulation during light and heavy rain periods. In particular, combinations of different interpolation estimates are explored and their performances in runoff simulation are discussed. The study was carried out in the Pengxi River basin of the Three Gorges Basin. Precipitation data from 16 rain gauges were interpolated using the Thiessen Polygon (TP), Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW), and Co-Kriging (CK) methods. Results showed that streamflow predictions employing CK inputs demonstrated the best performance in the whole process, in terms of the Nash–Sutcliffe Coefficient (NSE), the coefficient of determination (R2), and the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) indices. The TP, IDW, and CK methods showed good performance in the heavy rain period but poor performance in the light rain period compared with the default method (least sophisticated nearest neighbor technique) in Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). Furthermore, the correlation between the dynamic weight of one method and its performance during runoff simulation followed a parabolic function. The combination of CK and TP achieved a better performance in decreasing the largest and lowest absolute errors compared to any single method, but the IDW method outperformed all methods in terms of the median absolute error. However, it is clear from our findings that interpolation methods should be chosen depending on the amount of precipitation, adaptability of the method, and accuracy of the estimate in different rain periods.
Detecting Anomalies in Time Series Using Kernel Density Approaches

This paper introduces a novel anomaly detection approach tailored for time series data with exclusive reliance on normal events during training. Our key innovation lies in the application of kernel-density estimation (KDE) to scrutinize reconstruction errors, providing an empirically derived probability distribution for normal events post-reconstruction. This non-parametric density estimation technique offers a nuanced understanding of anomaly detection, differentiating it from prevalent threshold-based mechanisms in existing methodologies. In post-training, events are encoded, decoded, and evaluated against the estimated density, providing a comprehensive notion of normality. In addition, we propose a data augmentation strategy involving variational autoencoder-generated events and a smoothing step for enhanced model robustness. The significance of our autoencoder-based approach is evident in its capacity to learn normal representation without prior anomaly knowledge. Through the KDE step on reconstruction errors, our method addresses the versatility of anomalies, departing from assumptions tied to larger reconstruction errors for anomalous events. Our proposed likelihood measure then distinguishes normal from anomalous events, providing a concise yet comprehensive anomaly detection solution. The extensive experimental results support the feasibility of our proposed method, yielding significantly improved classification performance by nearly 10% on the UCR benchmark data.
Light-Emitting Devices Attaining Theoretical Outcoupling Efficiency Exceeding 60% via Scattering Particles

The high efficiency of the light-emitting devices is pivotal for its successful application in any lighting system. Nevertheless, most of luminous devices grapple with the challenge of suboptimal luminous efficiency due to the notably low light extraction efficiency (LEE) even the internal quantum efficiency (IQE) can reach 100%. In this study, we have deeply investigated the impact of the dense scattering layer with particle-embedded (DSL) on the LEE of light-emitting devices theoretically and experimentally. The particle concentration in DSL is so high that the effective refractive index of the film layer can be tuned by varying the concentration. Therefore, in addition to the scatterance <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${S}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, asymmetry factor <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${g}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, and absorption coefficient <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${k}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, the effective refractive index has also been emphasized. According to theoretical calculation, an LEE of 62% can be achieved by placing DSL between the substrate (Sub) and electrode in the organic light-emitting diode (OLED). The internal waveguide (WG) and Sub modes are effectively extracted by optimizing the key parameters of DSL. The bottom emissive OLED based on DSL achieves 12.8% external quantum efficiency (EQE), roughly 1.91 times higher than the reference device, which is consistent with the simulation results. The findings may promote light-emitting diode (LED) devices to reach over 60% LEE levels and provide practical guidance for device implementation.
Molecular Detection and Isolation of Lumpy Skin Disease Virus during an Outbreak in West Hararghe Zone, Eastern Ethiopia

Lumpy skin disease (LSD) is a highly contagious viral disease that causes significant economic losses in cattle populations globally. This study aimed to isolate and detect the LSD virus responsible for an outbreak in selected areas (Daaroo Labuu, Hawwii Guddina, and Gumbi Bordede district) of the West Hararghe Zone in Ethiopia between January 2020 and December 2021. Out of the 625 animals examined for the presence of LSD, only 73 animals showed clinical signs, and skin scrapes were collected from these animals for further analysis. Among those, 12 animals (1.9%) succumbed to the disease. Skin biopsy samples from 45 animals displaying clinical signs of LSD were inoculated in Vero cell lines because of limited equipment. After three blind passages, all samples developed cytopathic effects (CPEs). The presence of the LSD virus was confirmed using real-time PCR. Conventional PCR detected LSDV in 47 (64.4%) of the skin scrap samples, while high-resolution melt qPCR detected it in 49 (67.1%) samples. The study revealed a morbidity rate of 11.68%, a mortality rate of 1.92%, and a case fatality rate of 16.44% based on clinical data. The findings suggest that LSD causes significant economic losses, even in vaccinated animals prior to an outbreak. To effectively control and eradicate LSD, the government should develop new strategic policies. Community awareness campaigns are necessary to improve vector control measures and drainage systems. In addition, the present vaccination policy and strategy should be re-evaluated for effectiveness. This study focused on a specific region and timeframe, limiting generalizability. Factors such as environmental conditions and management practices were not extensively explored. Similar studies should be conducted in different regions to assess the prevalence and genetic diversity of LSDV. The effectiveness of control measures and vaccination strategies should be investigated. The impact of environmental factors and management practices on LSD transmission and disease severity warrants further exploration. This study provides insights into the detection and isolation of the LSD virus during an outbreak in the West Hararghe Zone of Ethiopia. The results highlight the need for continued surveillance and monitoring of emerging infectious diseases in the region. Furthermore, the importance of using molecular methods for detecting and characterizing viral outbreaks in livestock populations is emphasized.
TESTING CARTOGRAPHIC PROPOSALS ON LOCALITY EFFECTS IN V2: A QUANTITATIVE STUDY

In this paper, we explore quantitative and computational methods to compare two theories of locality effects in non-subject fronting in V2 environments. We test the predictions in locality effects in grammatical clauses of (i) a ”bottleneck effect” model and (ii) a ”standard” featural Relativized Minimality effect model. By using theory-driven frequencies, we aim to observe the generalisation ability of the two models. We explored ten morpho-syntactically annotated treebanks for seven Germanic languages and one treebank for Old French. Our results support the predictions of a model stipulating standard featural Relativized Minimality effects in non-subject fronting.
Orography Drives the Semistationary West Australian Summer Trough

During the summer months, there is a semipermanent trough in the low‐level easterlies over the west coast of Australia. This “West Coast Trough” plays an important role in summer severe weather in western Australia including thunderstorms and severe heat waves. The land‐sea contrast is believed to be the driver of the location of this trough. As land masses are warming more quickly than their surrounding oceans, it is timely to readdress the drivers of the location and intensity of this important climatological feature. Using a 20‐year regional climate modeling simulation, we show that Australian orography is critical to the accurate representation of the trough in climate models, in contrast to earlier low‐resolution studies.