Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Biomimetic Synthesis and Characterization of Hydroxyapatite Crystal with Low Phase Transformation Temperature

Hydroxyapatite (HA) with a low phase transformation temperature was synthesized via a biomimetic route using ovalbumin as a natural biosurfactant. The resulting materials were characterized by means of X-ray diffraction (XRD), differential thermal analysis (DTA), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The results show that needle-like HA nanocrystals can be obtained at room temperature. The HA crystals can transform to β-tricalcium phosphate (β-TCP) nanocrystals as low as about 550 °C. Furthermore, it is proved using the electrophoretic method that there are superfluous positive charges on the surface of the HA particles. The substitution of PO43− ions by CO32− ions in the HA crystal is the predominant factor in affecting the low phase transformation and the surface electrical charges of the particles. A schematic illustration was used to depict the protein-medicated crystallization of HA crystals with positive charges.
Optimizing treatment for reduction of disinfection by-product (DBP) formation

Recent studies in communities in greater Cairo, Egypt have identified trihalomethanes (THMs) and haloacetic acids (HAAs) at levels that exceed regulatory limits depending upon the season. The objective of this study was to better understand the formation of DBPs in Nile River source water with a view toward optimizing conventional treatment, focusing on enhanced coagulation, to achieve reduction in DBP formation potential (FP) in a cost-effective scheme. To this end, characterisation of natural organic matter (NOM) in Nile raw water and after treatment by fractionating according to hydrophobic-hydrophilic properties was included in the analysis. Seasonal variations in raw water quality were found to be important for achieving optimum reduction of turbidity and DBP formation. In summer, alkalinity is lower; therefore, enhanced coagulation with 30 mg/L alum can be done at pH 6 without excessive additions of acid, and satisfactory reductions in turbidity and DBPs attained. During the remainder of the year, high alkalinity results in enhanced coagulation at about pH 6.5 and notably lower reduction of NOM, THMFP, and HAAs versus summer conditions. Supplementing enhanced coagulation with 10 mg/L PAC is highly recommended for these conditions as it improves removal of all DBP indicators. The transphilic fraction was the main contributor to DBP formation and the primary fraction removed by enhanced coagulation for achieving gains in THMFP reduction.
Gas from the pyrolysis of scrap tires in a fluidized bed reactor

A fluidized sand bed reactor was used to study the production of gases from scrap tires at four nominal temperatures (ranging from 600 to 900 °C). Yields of 17 pyrolysis products (methane, ethane, ethylene, propane, propylene, acetylene, butane, butylene, 1,3-butadiene, pentane, benzene, toluene, xylenes + styrene, hydrogen, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide) were analyzed as a function of the operating conditions. The results are compared with the data obtained by pyrolysis of tires in a Pyroprobe 1000, where secondary tar cracking is small. Correlations between the products analyzed with those of methane are discussed.
Mono- and Di-Pyrene [60]Fullerene and [70]Fullerene Derivatives as Potential Components for Photovoltaic Devices

In the present work, we report the successful synthesis and characterization of six (two new) fullerene mono- and di-pyrene derivatives based on C60 and C70 fullerenes. The synthesized compounds were characterized by spectral methods (ESI-MS, 1H-NMR, 13C-NMR, UV-Vis, FT-IR, photoluminescence and photocurrent spectroscopy). The energy of HOMO and LUMO levels and the band gaps were determined from cyclic voltammetry and compared with the theoretical values calculated according to the DFT/B3LYP/6-31G(d) and DFT/PBE/6-311G(d,p) approach for fully optimized molecular structures at the DFT/B3LYP/6-31G(d) level. Efficiency of solar cells made of PTB7: C60 and C70 fullerene pyrene derivatives were analyzed based on the determined energy levels of the HOMO and LUMO orbitals of the derivatives as well as the extensive spectral results of fullerene derivatives and their mixtures with PTB7. As a result, we found that the electronic and spectral properties, on which the efficiency of a photovoltaic cell is believed to depend, slightly changes with the number and type of pyrene substituents on the fullerene core. The efficiency of constructed solar cells largely depends on the homogeneity of the photovoltaic layer, which, in turn, is a derivative of the solubility of fullerene derivatives in the solvent used to apply these layers by spincoating.
A Comprehensive Detection System for Track Geometry Using Fused Vision and Inertia

The track line suffers from track irregularity, subgrade settlement, rail surface defects, and gauge distortion. Measuring the track geometry quality plays an important role in rail administrations to safe operation and track maintenance. In order to meet the requirements of track daily inspection, this article describes a comprehensive detection system for the track geometry, which is designed by four cameras, an inclinometer, and an inertial measurement unit. Moreover, the detection system has the characteristics of simple structure, automatic detection, and multiple measurement parameters. First, to measure track alignment and irregularity, a multisensing calibration method is established to fuse visual sensors and inertial sensors. An accelerometer and a Kalman filter are used to eliminate accumulated unrealistic drifts of accelerometer and gyroscope. Second, to measure the rail surface defects and gauge, the model of laser and machine vision is deduced to obtain the coordinate values in a unified coordinate system, and an improved iterative closest point method is developed to improve the matching accuracy. Finally, a series of experiments is carried out to validate the measuring performance. The results indicate that the proposed method can accurately measure the track geometry, with the maximum deviations of track alignment, track irregularity, rail defects, and gauge that are less than 0.5, 0.4, 0.3, and 0.1 mm, respectively. The detection system is not only simple in structure but also has multiple detection parameters, which is especially suitable for track daily maintenance.
Effects of treated poultry litter on potential greenhouse gas emission and field agronomic performance

A study was conducted to evaluate the effects of different treatments of poultry faecal waste on potential greenhouse gas emission and inherent agronomic potentials. Sugar solution at 100g/l salt solution at 350g/l and oven-drying were the various faecal treatments examined using a completely randomized design. The experiment was conducted for eight weeks. Salt treatment had significantly lower nitrogen content (1.70%; p 0.05) in microbial count across all treatments, as was observed up till the 8 th week. By the 4 th week oven-dried faeces was lower (p<0.05) in fungal count (0.33×10 3 cfu/ml) compared to other treatments, and completely devoid of Fungi by the end of the 8 th week. On agronomic performance test, maize planted using sugar treatments had a 40% germination percentage (GP) after two weeks, oven-dry treatment and the control had mean GP of 65% and 75% respectively. The Sorghum plot attained 100% GP with the control and oven-dry treatments, sugar treatment recorded 88% GP. In both cases, germination was nil on salt treatment. By the third week ending, maize stands on control treatment were averagely 48cm tall, 19cm on oven-dried treatment and10cm on sugar treated pots. This trend persisted on sorghum plots with oven-dry treatment showing superiority to other treatments, averaging a plant height of 28cm after 21days. Key Words: Sugar, Salt, Oven-drying, Germination, Faecal waste, Fungal count
Effect of Methyl–β–Cyclodextrin and Trehalose on the Freeze–Drying and Spray–Drying of Sericin for Cosmetic Purposes

Sericin is a protein extracted from Bombyx mori silk cocoons. Over the last decade, this wastewater product of the textile industry has shown many interesting biological properties. This protein is widely used in the cosmetic and biomedical fields. In this study, sericin has been obtained via a High–Temperature High–Pressure degumming process, and was dried using the freeze–drying (fd) and spray–drying (sd) techniques. Proteins tend to collapse during drying, hence, sericin has been dried in the presence of two selected carrier agents: methyl–β–cyclodextrin and trehalose. The obtained powders have been analyzed using thermal investigation, microscopy (optical, SEM), and granulometric and spectroscopic analyses. Moreover, the percentage yield of the spray–drying process has been calculated. Both the agents were able to significantly improve the drying process, without altering the physico–chemical properties of the protein. In particular, the co–spray–drying of sericin with methyl–β–cyclodextrin and trehalose gave good process yields and furnished a powder with low moisture content and handling properties that are better than those of the other studied dried products. These characteristics seem to be appropriate and fruitful for the manufacturing of cosmetic raw materials.
Approaches to energy and resource recovery from municipal wastewater

The activated sludge process is regarded by many as a remarkable engineering development of the 20th Century which has made a great contribution to wastewater treatment. But after more than 100 years of successful application, the conventional activated sludge (CAS) process has recently been receiving an increasing number of critiques due to the high energy consumption and excessive sludge generation associated with it. Increasing efforts have been devoted to energy recovery in the form of biogas produced from waste sludge through anaerobic digestion (AD). However, the recoverable electrical energy generated from the AD of waste sludge can only offset about 50–60% of the total input energy of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) with CAS as the core process, while energy efficiency could be increased further to about 75% with upgraded AD equipped with pre-treatment of thickening sludge and a combined heat and power (CHP) process (Cao, 2011). Moreover, process upgrading and retrofitting are urgently needed in more and more WWTPs around the world to meet the tightened effluent discharge standards applied in recent years which inevitably lead to a rising trend of in-plant energy consumption. For example, it has been reported that the effluent discharge standards in China have been gradually migrated to quasi Class IV for surface water bodies with very low discharge limits. Consequently, it appears almost impossible or highly challenging to
Effect of the presence of bacterial surfaces during the synthesis of Fe oxides by oxidation of ferrous ions

Natural iron-oxides are often found in close association with bacterial cells in aquatic environments, but the effect of bacteria on their formation is still under investigation. The present study was undertaken to assess the effect of two common bacteria, Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli , on the morphology and mineralogy of Fe oxides. All Fe oxides were synthesised by oxidation of Fe(II) (2 × 10 −4 M) at pH = 7. Three systems were studied, i.e. , abiotic Fe oxides, Fe oxides formed in the presence of bacteria (which we call “biogenic” Fe oxides) and abiotic Fe oxides mixed with bacterial cells. Samples were analysed by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Fe oxide particles in all systems showed a needle-like morphology, with many needles seeming to be attached to a sheet, and were identified as lepidocrocite. However, the biogenic lepidocrocite crystals were generally shorter than the abiotic ones, and the crystals were found in association with the bacterial cell-wall, especially with B. subtilis , a Gram-positive bacterium. Biogenic lepidocrocite crystals also displayed an attenuation of the XRD 120 line, which is indicative of a low crystallinity. Growth limitation and poor crystalline order are then likely to affect the surface area of Fe oxides and indirectly, their sorptive capacity.
Photodynamic Therapy as a Potent Radiosensitizer in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Simple Summary Despite the advances in multimodality treatment strategies, more than 30% of patients with advanced head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) experience recurrence of the disease that is usually derived from the residual tumor. The goal of our study is to understand the molecular basis underlying radiotherapy resistance in advanced HNSCC and to identify a mechanism-based radiosensitizer. We found that the autophagic cell survival pathway is upregulated in therapy-resistant HNSCC. Photodynamic therapy (PDT) directed at the endoplasmic reticulum (ER)/mitochondria induces programmed cell death such as paraptosis and apoptosis in an autophagic adaptor p62-dependent manner, promoting radiotoxicity. Abstract Despite recent advances in therapeutic modalities such as radiochemotherapy, the long-term prognosis for patients with advanced head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), especially nonviral HNSCC, remains very poor, while survival of patients with human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated HNSCC is greatly improved after radiotherapy. The goal of this study is to develop a mechanism-based treatment protocol for high-risk patients with HPV-negative HNSCC. To achieve our goal, we have investigated molecular mechanisms underlying differential radiation sensitivity between HPV-positive and -negative HNSCC cells. Here, we found that autophagy is associated with radioresistance in HPV-negative HNSCC, whereas apoptosis is associated with radiation sensitive HPV-positive HNSCC. Interestingly, we found that photodynamic therapy (PDT) directed at the endoplasmic reticulum (ER)/mitochondria initially induces paraptosis followed by apoptosis. This led to a substantial increase in radiation responsiveness in HPV-negative HNSCC, while the same PDT treatment had a minimal effect on HPV-positive cells. Here, we provide evidence that the autophagic adaptor p62 mediates signal relay for the induction of apoptosis, promoting ionizing radiation (XRT)-induced cell death in HPV-negative HNSCC. This work proposes that ER/mitochondria-targeted PDT can serve as a radiosensitizer in intrinsically radioresistant HNSCC that exhibits an increased autophagic flux.
Preparation and Evaluation of Panax ginseng syrup

The heed on natural medications and their usage have been expanding quickly as of late, even in regions where present day medication is accessible. Plant derived substances and herbal drugs ,recently attracted great interest towards their unique & vast applications. As medicinal herbs, have bioactive compounds in abundance & can be utilized in conventional and current medication. There has been an increasing demand for plant based medicines, health products, pharmaceuticals, food supplements. The Objective of this Study is to enlighten the various immune enhancing properties of ginseng & to deliver these immune strengthening properties of ginseng it has been formulated into a syrup dosage form. Formulation of syrup was designed by utilizing extracts of Panax Ginseng, Sucrose, Benzoin & required quantity of Distilled water. The prepared herbal syrup was evaluated for different physicochemical parameters like pH, color, odour, taste, density, specific gravity, viscosity and stability. A review of Panax ginseng chemical constituents present in various parts of Panax ginseng is given in the present article. This may be useful in discovering potential therapeutic effects & developing new formulations.
Edge and Corner Awareness-Based Spatial–Temporal Tensor Model for Infrared Small-Target Detection

Infrared (IR) small-target detection has been a widely studied task in IR search and tracking systems. It remains a challenging problem, especially in heterogeneous scenarios, where it is very difficult to discriminate true targets from sparse residuals in the background. A novel edge and corner awareness-based spatial–temporal tensor (ECA-STT) model is presented in this article. First, we construct an STT based on a spatial–temporal correlation analysis of the IR video background. Then, we propose an indicator to highlight the target through adjustable importance measurements of the edge and corner. The tensor-based nonlocal total variation is also adopted to describe the edges in the background. The target–background separation problem is modeled as a tensor robust principal component analysis (TRPCA) problem with the tensor rank function replaced by the tensor truncated nuclear norm. The proposed model is solved by an effective optimization algorithm derived from the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Extensive experiments verify the superior abilities of the proposed model in target enhancement and background suppression.
Food Safety in Post-COVID-19 Pandemic: Challenges and Countermeasures

Understanding food safety hazard risks is essential to avoid potential negative heath impacts in the food supply chain in a post-COVID-19 pandemic era. Development of strategies for virus direction in foods plays an important role in food safety and verification. Early warning, tracing, and detection should be implemented as an integrated system in order to mitigate thecoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, in which the detection of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is critical as it not only concerns screening of populations but also monitoring of possible contaminated sources such as the food supply chain. In this review, we point out the consequences in different aspects of our daily life in the post-COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of the food supply chain and the food industry. We summarize the possible transmission routes of COVID-19 in the food supply chain before exploring the development of corresponding detection tools of SARS-CoV-2. Accordingly, we compare different detection methods for the virus in foods, including different pretreatments of food matrices in the virus detection. Finally, the future perspectives are proposed.
Experimental Inoculation of Young Calves with SARS-CoV-2

The host range of SARS-CoV-2 and the susceptibility of animal species to the virus are topics of great interest to the international scientific community. The angiotensin I converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) protein is the major receptor for the virus, and sequence and structural analysis of the protein has been performed to determine its cross-species conservation. Based on these analyses, cattle have been implicated as a potential susceptible species to SARS-CoV-2 and have been reported to have increased ACE2 receptor distribution in the liver and kidney, and lower levels in the lungs. The goal of the current study was to determine the susceptibility of cattle to SARS-CoV-2 utilizing inoculation routes that facilitated exposure to tissues with increased ACE2 receptor distribution. For this, colostrum-deprived calves approximately 6 weeks of age were inoculated via the intratracheal or intravenous routes. Nasal and rectal swab samples, as well as blood and urine samples, were collected over the course of the study to evaluate viral shedding, viremia, and seroconversion. Pyrexia was used as the primary criteria for euthanasia and tissue samples were collected during necropsy. Importantly, SARS-CoV-2 RNA was detected in only two nasal swab samples collected on days 3 and 10 post-inoculation (pi) in two calves; one calf in the intratracheal group and the other calf in the intravenous group, respectively. Additionally, the calf in the intratracheal group that was positive on the nasal swab on day 3 pi also had a positive tracheobronchial lymph node on day 9 pi. Viral nucleic acid load on these samples, based on PCR cycle threshold values, were low and infectious virus was not recovered from the samples. These results suggest that there was no productive replication of SARS-CoV-2 in calves following intratracheal and intravenous inoculation.
Agglomerative Info-Clustering: Maximizing Normalized Total Correlation

We show that, under the info-clustering framework, correlated random variables can be clustered in an agglomerative manner. While the existing divisive approach successively segregates the random variables into subsets with increasing multivariate mutual information, our agglomerative approach successively merges subsets of random variables sharing a large amount of normalized total correlation. We show that both approaches result in the same hierarchy of clusters, but the agglomerative approach is an order of magnitude faster than the divisive one. The uniqueness of the hierarchy produced by the two approaches is due to a fundamental connection that we uncover between the well-known total correlation and the recently proposed measure of multivariate mutual information. We implement the new algorithm and provide a data structure for efficient storage and retrieval of the hierarchical clustering solution.
On the Ring Resonator-Based Dispersion Compensation Method for Analog 5G/B5G Mobile Fronthauling

We present a novel technique for dispersion compensation by exploiting the filtering properties of a fully reconfigurable serially coupled microring resonator (MRR) structure in analog intermediate frequency-over-fiber/mmWave (IFoF/mmWave) fiber/wireless 5G and beyond 5G(B5G)-oriented mobile fronthaul. To this extend, we demonstrate simulation and experimental results on analog photonic processing of 1 Gbaud quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulated radio signal. By tuning filter's bandwidth in the range of 14–69 GHz, and resonance within a resonance free spectral range (FSR) range, dispersion induced power fading mitigation was achieved, for a set of widely adopted intermediate frequencies (IFs) and transmission distances. Analytical calculations carried out in MATLAB environment, highlighting significant improvement of transmission system output power, whereas are verified via transmission system simulations, resulting to error vector magnitude (EVM) improvement up to ∼ 30%. Experimental results verified both analytical and transmission simulation results for a series of IFoF downlink transmission system configurations. For widely used wireless transmission configuration at 8.5 GHz IF, by tuning the filter to appropriate bandwidth of 14 GHz and resonance peak properly, successful fiber wireless transmission for over 25 km of fiber was demonstrated, achieving 16.9% EVM for QPSK, below the 3GPP (<17.5%) requirements for 5G NR.
How Customers Continue to Use Digital Innovation on e-Commerce Platforms?

This study describes how the users of e-commerce tend to re-use the platforms in consideration of digital innovation. Several factors that influence the continuity of the user’s intention towards digital innovation in e-commerce platform are described. Primary data were obtained by distributing questionnaires to respondents who meet the criteria. The population of the study are the active users of e-commerce aplication. This study found that several factors, such as perceived system quality, perceived radicalness, expectarion fulfillment, skepticism, slowness of adaptation, social influence, trust, and satisfaction are considered by users to re-use the e-commerce platforms.