Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analysis of field-grown Panax ginseng rhizosphere microbiome provides clues for preventing red skin root syndrome

Background Ginseng red skin root syndrome (GRS) is one of the most common ginseng diseases. It leads to a severe decline in ginseng quality and seriously affects the ginseng industry in China. However, as a root disease, the characteristics of GRS rhizosphere microbiome are still unclear. Methods The amplicon sequencing technology, combined with bioinformatics analysis, was used to explore the relationship between soil ecological environment and GRS. Results There were significant differences in the diversity and richness of soil microorganisms between the rhizosphere with different degrees of disease, especially between healthy ginseng (HG) and heavily diseased groups. We also found that bacterial communities underwent multiple changes between complex stability and simple instability in different ginseng rhizospheres through the established interaction networks. The GRS group also had more competition with each other and ecological niche separation than the HG group. The fungal community's stability decreased significantly in the early stages of the disease, followed by the formation of a stable and complex fungal community. The GRS groups significantly increased interspecies cooperation and ecological niche overlap in the fungal network than the HG group. Microbes closely related to potential pathogenic fungi were also identified according to the interaction network, which provided clues for looking for biological control agents. Finally, the Distance-based redundancy analysis (dbRDA) results indicated that total P (TP), available K (AK), available P (AP), catalase (CAT), invertase (INV) are the key factors that influence the microbial communities. Conclusions This study collectively analyzed the changing characteristics in ginseng rhizosphere and provided the basis for soil improvement and biological control of field-grown ginseng.
The Relationship between Resilience Resources and Long-Term Deployment-Related PTSD Symptoms: A Longitudinal Study in Dutch Veterans

Abstract Veterans may report PTSD symptoms, years after their deployment. The aim of this study was to examine whether the presence of resilience resources before deployment, and the potential loss of these resources over time, are associated with the risk of PTSD symptoms five years post-deployment. The study focused on Dutch service members, deployed to Afghanistan or the Gulf of Aden. Pre-deployment resilience resources (i.e. coping self-efficacy, team cohesion, and perceived organizational support) were measured in 2012–2013 (n = 786). Five years after deployment a follow-up study (n = 148) measured the same resources as well as PTSD symptoms. Hierarchical regression analysis showed that fewer resources before deployment as well as a post-deployment decline in resources predicted PTSD. Low coping self-efficacy and low perceived organizational support before deployment as well as a decline in these resources over time were significantly related to PTSD symptoms five years post-deployment. This study therefore provides initial support for a relationship between a resource loss process and PTSD symptoms in veterans five years post-deployment.
Emission characteristics of refractory black carbon aerosols from fresh biomass burning: a perspective from laboratory experiments

Abstract. The emission characteristics of refractory black carbon (rBC) from biomass burning are essential information for numerical simulations of regional pollution and climate effects. We conducted combustion experiments in the laboratory to investigate the emission ratio and mixing state of rBC from the burning of wheat straw and rapeseed plants, which are the main crops cultivated in the Yangtze River Delta region of China. A single particle soot photometer (SP2) was used to measure rBC-containing particles at high temporal resolution and with high accuracy. The combustion state of each burning case was indicated by the modified combustion efficiency (MCE), which is calculated using the integrated enhancement of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide concentrations relative to their background values. The mass size distribution of the rBC particles showed a lognormal shape with a mode mass equivalent diameter (MED) of 189 nm (ranging from 152 to 215 nm), assuming an rBC density of 1.8 g cm−3. rBC particles less than 80 nm in size (the lower detection limit of the SP2) accounted for ∼ 5 % of the total rBC mass, on average. The emission ratios, which are expressed as ΔrBC ∕ ΔCO (Δ indicates the difference between the observed and background values), displayed a significant positive correlation with the MCE values and varied between 1.8 and 34 ng m−3 ppbv−1. Multi-peak fitting analysis of the delay time (Δt, or the time of occurrence of the scattering peak minus that of the incandescence peak) distribution showed that rBC-containing particles with rBC MED = 200 ± 10 nm displayed two peaks at Δt = 1.7 µs and Δt = 3.2 µs, which could be attributed to the contributions from both flaming and smoldering combustion in each burning case. Both the Δt values and the shell / core ratios of the rBC-containing particles clearly increased as the MCE decreased from 0.98 (smoldering-dominant combustion) to 0.86 (flaming-dominant combustion), implying the great importance of the rapid condensation of semi-volatile organics. This laboratory study found that the mixing state of rBC particles from biomass burning strongly depends on its combustion processes, and overall MCE should be taken carefully into consideration while the climate effect of rBC particles from open biomass burning is simulated.
Watered Down: Market Growth, Authenticity, and Evaluation in Craft Beer

Research in organizational theory suggests that category-spanning organizations typically suffer penalties in evaluations, as consumers downgrade producers they see as violating authenticity norms. We challenge this view by linking two heretofore separate insights: first, that categorical boundaries erode as categories become taken for granted and, second, that consumers in a given category tend to become more heterogeneous as their numbers increase. We argue that newer consumers employ diverse evaluative schemata and rely less on established conceptions of authenticity than do veterans, leading to more generous evaluations as the ranks of consumers grow. Using the canonical case of craft beer, we test the effect of audience growth on consumer evaluations, particularly when producers violate categorical authenticity norms. Our analysis of an original dataset of more than 1.2 million unique ratings of craft beers from a popular online forum finds both that overall beer ratings increase and that penalties to authenticity norm violations attenuate as the number of new reviewers participating in the evaluative process rises. These results refine our understanding of shifting demands for categorical purity, conceptions of authenticity, and consumer evaluations as functions of market growth.
A Review on the Electrodeposition of Aluminum and Aluminum Alloys in Ionic Liquids

Aluminum plays an essential role as an excellent coating material in diversified applications due to its better corrosion resistance and physicochemical properties. Employing such a material as a coating on different metallic substrates such as carbon steel would benefit many industries such as the automotive, aviation, shipbuilding, construction, electronics etc. Amongst the various available coating techniques, electrodeposition of aluminum (Al) Al alloys have gained significant attention in the last 10 years as a metallic protection coating for various commercial substrates and has become the industry’s choice owing to being lightweight, corrosion-resistant, and cost-effective. This paper shall provide a detailed review covering electrochemical deposition of Al and Al alloys using ionic liquids with various cations, anions, and additives, and reports on progress in development thus far. It shall also cover the challenges in the electrodepositing aluminum, its alloys on light weight metal substrates viz., magnesium (Mg), commercial substrates such as low carbon steel, spring steel, and their pretreatments. The factors that play an important role in electroplating on an industrial scale, along with future challenges, are discussed.
Toward Global Comparability in Renewable Energy Procurement

Prices from the competitive procurement of renewable energy sources are increasingly used for the comparative evaluation of financial and technology performance. Comparing prices from auctions or power purchase agreements at their face value is often not meaningful, particularly across jurisdictions or over time. Differences in support regimes and the market, tax, and regulatory environment can make a like-for-like comparison convoluted and result in misleading conclusions. Here, we estimate project revenue and value holistically for eight global offshore wind projects. Using a cash flow model, we consider applicable support regimes; market sales; and the monetized value of tax incentives, depreciation, and transmission. We find considerable variation in the absolute levels and relative composition of project revenue and value streams, which must be considered when cost estimates are to be deducted from procurement prices. The resulting metric enables decision makers and research to compare the total cost of procurement on equal footing and supplements established cost metrics.
A Cloud Game-Based Educative Platform Architecture: The CyberScratch Project

The employment of modern technologies is widespread in our society, so the inclusion of practical activities for education has become essential and useful at the same time. These activities are more noticeable in Engineering, in areas such as cybersecurity, data science, artificial intelligence, etc. Additionally, these activities acquire even more relevance with a distance education methodology, as our case is. The inclusion of these practical activities has clear advantages, such as (1) promoting critical thinking and (2) improving students’ abilities and skills for their professional careers. There are several options, such as the use of remote and virtual laboratories, virtual reality and game-based platforms, among others. This work addresses the development of a new cloud game-based educational platform, which defines a modular and flexible architecture (using light containers). This architecture provides interactive and monitoring services and data storage in a transparent way. The platform uses gamification to integrate the game as part of the instructional process. The CyberScratch project is a particular implementation of this architecture focused on cybersecurity game-based activities. The data privacy management is a critical issue for these kinds of platforms, so the architecture is designed with this feature integrated in the platform components. To achieve this goal, we first focus on all the privacy aspects for the data generated by our cloud game-based platform, by considering the European legal context for data privacy following GDPR and ISO/IEC TR 20748-1:2016 recommendations for Learning Analytics (LA). Our second objective is to provide implementation guidelines for efficient data privacy management for our cloud game-based educative platform. All these contributions are not found in current related works. The CyberScratch project, which was approved by UNED for the year 2020, considers using the xAPI standard for data handling and services for the game editor, game engine and game monitor modules of CyberScratch. Therefore, apart from considering GDPR privacy and LA recommendations, our cloud game-based architecture covers all phases from game creation to the final users’ interactions with the game.
Estimating Fatality and Injury Savings Because of Deployment of Advanced Wrong-Way Driving Countermeasures on a Toll Road Network

Limited access facility wrong-way driving (WWD) crashes are typically more severe than other crashes. Deploying advanced WWD countermeasures, such as rectangular flashing beacon (RFB) and light-emitting diode (LED) technologies, at exit ramps can reduce WWD crashes, injuries, and fatalities. No previous research has developed a methodology to quantify the potential fatality and injury savings because of future countermeasure deployments. This paper developed such a methodology and applied it to Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise (FTE) toll road network. From 2011–2016, there were 53 FTE WWD crashes, resulting in 16 fatalities and annual injury costs of $37 million. The proportion of these crashes occurring during night-time was 87%. RFB and LED life-cycle injury savings and costs were determined for all 216 FTE exits. The total savings were $424 million for RFBs (benefit–cost [B/C] ratio of 23.20) and $144 million for LEDs (B/C ratio of 13.13). Deploying countermeasures at the 103 exits with the highest B/C ratios would provide 70% of the total possible savings by equipping 40% of the ramps. For the same capital investment, RFBs provide more savings than LEDs. Spending $1 million to deploy RFBs will provide similar savings as spending $3.4 million to deploy LEDs. Evaluating the existing FTE RFB and LED ramps shows that RFBs are more effective at night-time and can provide three times the savings of LEDs. The results of this paper show the improved performance of RFBs over LEDs and provide an example that other agencies could follow to identify savings and cost-effectively deploy advanced WWD countermeasures.
Electronic Health Records and its Acceptance by Stakeholders: General Discussion

There is a definite need of complete health information of a patient. Medical history of the patient should be maintained in prescribed format. It is definitely required to identify information about patient’s medical interactions, allergies, laboratory tests, medication, and so on. Patient’s all such record should be kept at secured place. Instead of keeping record in conventional paper form, it is definitely feasible to maintain it in digital form. In this paper there is detailed discussion of EHR system, historical perspective of EHR, EHR Challenges in India. This paper also has an overview towards adoption of Information and communication Technology (ICT) in healthcare. There are various strategies towards implementation of successful EHR system. EHR system and its acceptance of use is mapped with universal theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT). Patient’s record can be maintained in EHR standards that are recommended by health information authorities.
Handwritten Arabic numerals recognition system using probabilistic neural networks

This paper presents a system for the recognition of the handwritten Arabic numerals zero to nine (0–9) using a probabilistic neural network (PNN) approach. This system can recognize handwritten input and externally imported Arabic numerals in real time, including two processes of image pre-processing and recognition. Image pre-processing involved normalization and expansion to enlarge the characteristics of the picture for easy recognition. Recognition process involves the calculation of mode distance, which can help obtain the similarity match between sample matrix and learning matrix. According to similarity matching the input feature matrix will be classified into one of the ten numbers. This study uses MATLAB to establish a graphical interface that is easy to operate. The system has good performance and strong scalability, which established a simple experimental platform for a more in-depth study of the recognition of handwritten Arabic numerals.
Micropillar Compression Deformation of Single Crystals of Fe 3Ge with the L1 2 Structure

The plastic deformation behavior of single crystals of Fe3Ge with the L12 structure has been investigated at room temperature as a function of crystal orientation by micropillar compression tests. In addition to slip on (010), slip on (111) is observed to occur in Fe3Ge for the first time. The CRSS (critical resolved shear stress) for (111)[10‾1] slip, estimated by extrapolating the size-dependent strength variation to the ‘bulk’ size, is ~240 MPa, which is almost 6 times that (~40 MPa) for (010)[101] slip similarly estimated. The dissociation scheme for the superlattice dislocation with b=[10‾1] is confirmed to be of the APB (anti-phase boundary)-type both on (010) and on (111), in contrast to the previous prediction for the SISF (superlattice intrinsic stacking fault) scheme on (111) because of the expected APB instability. While superlattice dislocations do not have any preferential directions to align when gliding on (010) (indicative of low frictional stress at room temperature), the alignment of superlattice dislocations along their screw orientation is observed when gliding on (111). This is proved to be due to thermally-activated cross-slip to form Kear-Wilsdorf locks, indicative of the occurrence of yield stress anomaly that is observed in many other L12 compounds such as Ni3Al. Some important deformation characteristics expected to occur in Fe3Ge (such as the absence of SISF-couple dissociation and the occurrence of yield stress anomaly) will be discussed in the light of the experimental results obtained (APB energies on (111) and (010) and CRSS values for slip on (111) and (010)).
Design and Simulation of a Hydrogen Micromix Combustor

Globally, the decrease in fossil fuel reserves and the advent of a climate emergency are pushing society towards different energy sources. Due to renewable power sources not being adapted for aerospace propulsion by way of insufficient energy density, another solution is required. Compressed hydrogen has a high specific energy and energy density, making it a good candidate for powering gas turbines. Various hydrogen gas turbine injection technologies exist to date; micromix burners have shown the most promising results with respect to nitrogen oxide emissions. This work presents the review of existing hydrogen combustors, the design of a hydrogen micromix combustor, and the analysis of its performance at various equivalence ratios using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods. The Eddy-Dissipation model was used to model the combustion of hydrogen for a single injector; the Zeldovich mechanism was used to model nitrogen oxide production. Findings include that for an Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) application, the burner is capable of generating 11.95 ppmV of nitric oxide per injector with an outlet temperature of 1272 K at an equivalence ratio of 0.3. Selecting a higher operating equivalence ratio yields higher per-injector power output at the expense of increasing nitrogen oxide production. Recommendations include implementing more accurate combustion, chemical reactions, and chemical kinetics models, increasing the momentum flux ratio of the hydrogen jet, as well as exploring the possibility of using a lower equivalence ratio to further reduce NOx production.
Extraction and characterization of Polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) from Bacillus flexus MHO57386.1 isolated from marine sponge Oceanopia arenosa (Rao, 1941)

Polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) is the most widely studied biodegradable plastic that does not release any toxins or residues in the environment like petroleum based plastics. This work has been undertaken to screen PHB accumulating microorganisms from marine sponges and a total of sixteen isolates were collected and purified. Screening of isolated strains was done by Nile blue staining and observed under Leica LSCM to confirm the production of PHB. Yellow pigmented AB8a isolate from Oceanopia arenosa scored positive for PHB accumulation and subjected to morphological, biochemical and phylogenetic characterization. The biopolymer was extracted by dispersion of sodium hypochlorite and chloroform solution and characterized by FT-IR and 1H NMR for the confirmation as PHB. The highest PHB production (70.25% /100 ml) was achieved at pH 7.0 by applying dextrose as medium at incubation temperature 30°C and 150 rpm agitation speed. The FTIR spectrum of the PHB sample showed major peaks at 3457, 1692, 1550, 1454, 1420, 1190 and 1050 cm-1, whereas the remaining peaks are closely laid between 3450 cm-1 and 600 cm-1. 1H NMR spectrum of PHA isolated from dextrose media indicated characteristic signals of PHB. The spectrum also revealed the presence of three groups of signals characteristic of PHB by the doublet at 1.3 ppm attributed to the methyl group coupled to one proton; and the spectrum of the quadruplet at 2.57 ppm, the methylene group adjacent to an asymmetric carbon atom bearing a single proton and the multiplet at 5.28 ppm indicated signals of PHB. The PHB accumulated bacterium identified as Bacillus flexus strain based on characterization studies and 16S rRNA sequence analysis and confirmed the presence of intracellular accumulated polymer substantiated as PHB. Please cite this paper as follows: Aryaraj, D. , Pramitha, V. S. (2021). Extraction and characterization of Polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) from Bacillus flexus MHO57386.1 isolated from marine sponge Oceanopia arenosa (Rao, 1941). Marine Science and Technology Bulletin, 10(2): 170185. * Corresponding author E-mail address: aaryarajendran96@gmail.com (D. Aryaraj) Aryaraj and Pramitha (2021) Marine Science and Technology Bulletin 10(2): 170-185
Optimal Peak Shaving Control Using Dynamic Demand and Feed-In Limits for Grid-Connected PV Sources With Batteries

Peak shaving of utility grid power is an important application, which benefits both grid operators and end users. In this article, an optimal rule-based peak shaving control strategy with dynamic demand and feed-in limits is proposed for grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) systems with battery energy storage systems. A method to determine demand and feed-in limits depending on the day-ahead predictions of load demand and PV power profiles is developed. Furthermore, an optimal rule-based control strategy that determines day-ahead charge/discharge schedules of battery for peak shaving of utility grid power is proposed. The rules are formulated such that the peak utility grid demand and feed-in powers are limited to the corresponding demand and feed-in limits of the day, respectively, while ensuring that the state-of-charge (SoC) of the battery at the end of the day is the same as the SoC of the start of the day. The optimal inputs required for applying the proposed rule-based control strategy are determined using a genetic algorithm for minimizing peak energy drawn from the utility grid. The proposed control algorithm is tested for various PV power and load demand profiles using MATLAB.
Research on Active Dustproof of Coal Handling System

Coal handling system of Power plant(CHP) is easy to produce dust, which is the most serious place of coal dust pollution in thermal power plant. With the gradual improvement of national environmental protection requirements, the control of coal dust becomes more and more important. The author believes that we should not wait for the pollution caused by coal dust to be treated, but should take the initiative to attack, and should take the initiative to prevent dust, starting from the source of coal transportation. In the process of designing coal conveying of thermal power plant for many years, the author has carried out on-site investigation on many coal handling systems, summarized experience and obtained relevant data. Through further analysis, the main causes of coal dust are mastered, and the relevant measures of active dust control are put forward from the technical point of view, in order to provide help for the comprehensive control of coal dust in power industry.