Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Phase Separation Mechanism of Polybutadiene/Polyisoprene Blends under Oscillatory Shear Flow

Viscoelastic polymer blends of polybutadiene (PB)/low vinyl content polyisoprene (LPI), with a lower critical solution temperature (LCST), show interesting rheological behaviors in temperature ramp measurements. In this report, a systematic study has been carried out, and the underlying physics has been investigated for the storage modulus G′ at various temperatures and shear frequencies as the system passes through the binodal and the spinodal phase boundary lines. We considered the nucleation mechanism, spinodal fluctuations, shear induced mixing, and rheological models in the interpretation of these interesting phenomena. Shear induced mixing is varied in our system, and the frequency dependence is obvious. Competition between the kinetics of the nucleation process and the droplet growth process has a prominent effect on the storage modulus for samples of noncritical compositions, while for samples with near-critical compositions the morphological evolution is responsible for the viscoelastic changes.
The Contribution of Village Owned Enterprises in Improving Rural Economy in Nagan Raya Regency

This study aims to analyze the influence of the contribution of Village-Owned Enterprises (BUMDes) in Improving the Economy and welfare of rural communities in Nagan Raya district. Nagan Raya, with a wealth of potential villages, owned such as agriculture, plantations, animal husbandry, and small industries. However, the management of BUMDes in Nagan Raya Regency has not been maximized. The research sample in ten sub-districts in Nagan Raya that has a Village-Owned Enterprises (BUMDes) is selected BUMDes that are already running or active in each district. The research sample locations were taken by Gampong Langkak, Gampong Purworejo, Gampong Cot Kumbang, Gampong Alue Peusaja, Gampong Alue Gajah, Gampong Krueng Itam, Gampong Garu, And Gampong Simpang Peut. This study uses a quantitative approach and uses descriptive statistical estimates, to the contribution of BUMDes to economic improvement in Nagan Raya district. The dependent variable used is the Village Growth Percentage (Y), while the independent variable used is Social Capital (X1), Regional Potential (X2), Human Resources (X3). The results showed the influence of the three Social Capital Variables (Log_X1), and Regional potential (Log_X2) influencing the contribution of BUMDes in improving the economy in the village. While Human Resources (Log_X3) does not significantly influence the contribution of BUMDes in improving the economy in Kabupaten Nagan Raya. From the F test results obtained F-count = 3.648 with p-value = 0.026 <0.05 so it can be concluded that H1 is accepted.
Optimization of photocatalytic process parameters for the degradation of acrylonitrile using Box Behnken Design

AbstractThe present study involves the photocatalytic degradation of aqueous solution of acrylonitrile (ACN) which was carried out in a batch reactor under UV light. The degradation efficiency was evaluated with ZnO as a photocatalyst and hydrogen peroxide as an oxidant for a period of 5 h. The variables examined in this study included ZnO dose (0.5–3.0 g/L), pH (2–12), and H2O2 concentration (2.5–10 m mol/L). The rate of degradation was studied in terms of changes in concentration of the pollutant using spectrophotometry. The optimal values of operational parameters leading to degradation of ACN were obtained using Box Behnken design (BBD) under response surface methodology (RSM). The optimum conditions were found to be ZnO dose of 1.48 g/L; pH 7.0 and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) concentration of 4.22 m mol/L. Under optimum condition, the degradation efficiency of ACN was found to be 89.6%. Optimization of photocatalytic process parameters for the degradation of ACN by BBD under RSM effectively copes with i.
Enzymatic Conjugation of RGD Peptides on the Surface of Fibroin Microspheres

Biomaterials are frequently functionalized with Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD) peptides to provide cell adhesion sites. In this study, RGD peptides were enzymatically coupled on to the surface of fibroin microspheres. Papain exhibited a strong preference for dansyl phenylalanine for the peptide formation with fibroin microspheres. Thus, RGD1 peptide was designed to carry cysteine to both sides of the sequence, glycine as a spacer and two residues of phenylalanine at the C-terminal (CRGDCGFF). The enzymatic modification facilitated by an increasing amount of substrate and by the presence of organic solvent, dimethylsulfoxide at 25% (v/v). Microspheres coupled with RGD1, showed a significantly different precipitation property and an increased apparent volume, possibly due to the steric hindrance of RGD peptides on the surface. Transmission electron microscopy also confirmed the presence of cysteine residues in RGD1 coupled on the surface of microspheres stained with gold nanoparticles. RGD1-microspheres significantly facilitated the growth of murine fibroblast 3T3 cells even under non-adhesion culture conditions.
Nonlocal Tensor-Based Sparse Hyperspectral Unmixing

Sparse unmixing is an important technique for analyzing and processing hyperspectral images (HSIs). Simultaneously exploiting spatial correlation and sparsity improves substantially abundance estimation accuracy. In this article, we propose to exploit nonlocal spatial information in the HSI for the sparse unmixing problem. Specifically, we first group similar patches in the HSI, and then unmix each group by imposing simultaneous a low-rank constraint and joint sparsity in the corresponding third-order abundance tensor. To this end, we build an unmixing model with a mixed regularization term consisting of the sum of the weighted tensor trace norm and the weighted tensor $\ell _{2,1}$ -norm of the abundance tensor. The proposed model is solved under the alternating direction method of multipliers framework. We term the developed algorithm as the nonlocal tensor-based sparse unmixing algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is illustrated in experiments with both simulated and real hyperspectral data sets.
Unidirectional Three-Phase Voltage-Doubler SEPIC PFC Rectifier

This article reports the theoretical analysis and experimental results for a three-phase high power factor SEPIC-type rectifier operating in discontinuous conduction mode (DCM). The topology, steady-state analysis, dynamic model, control strategy, and experimental verification are reported herein. The operation in DCM naturally provides input currents with low harmonic content that are in phase with input voltages without the need for current control, due to the converter operation as a voltage follower. Thus, the control system and the PWM modulator are simplified, when compared to other three-phase high power factor rectifiers. The proposed three-phase SEPIC rectifier employs the voltage-doubler concept, which means it may reduce the voltage stress on the switches and diodes or it may supply double voltage gain with the same voltage stress. It also uses a three-state switch, and four different implementations are approached in this article, including bridgeless structures. The theoretical study was corroborated by experimental results obtained with a prototype built using the following design specifications: 220 V input voltage, 400 V output voltage, 3000 W output power, and 50 kHz switching frequency. Peak efficiency of 95.85%, THD of 3.1%, and power factor of 0.9991 were achieved.
SEED SOAKING WITH SODIUM SILICATE PRIMES SALT TOLERANCE IN RICE (ORYZA SATIVA L.) SEEDLINGS WITHOUT ANY NEGATIVE EFFECT ON GROWTH

Rice is one of the most important cereal crops and is susceptible to salinity stress. To enhance biotic and abiotic stress tolerance in crops, the application of silicon (Si) during seedling culture and seed priming are two effective approaches. However, whether seed priming with silicon can enhance salinity stress tolerance in rice seedlings, and what the optimal concentration of Si treatment is largely unclear. In this study, rice seeds were pretreated with sodium silicate, and the hydroponically grown rice seedlings were exposed to sodium chloride. Our results show that seed soaking with Si can significantly improve the growth of rice seedlings under salinity-stress, as evidenced by enhanced fresh weight, dry weight, leaf relative water content, photosynthetic pigment level, soluble protein content, as well as the activities of POD and SOD enzymes. Moreover, Si-pretreated seeds showed accelerated seed germination, increased seedling height and reduced root length. Furthermore, qRT-PCR analysis showed that seed soaking with Si induced the transcription of genes encoding Na/H exchangers and H-pyrophosphatase. Our results imply that seed priming with Si enhances seedling tolerance to salinity stress without negative effect on growth and it can be used as an effective strategy.
Bioremediation potential of Ganoderma lucidum (Curt:Fr) P. Karsten to remove toxic metals from abandoned battery slag dumpsite soil and immobilisation of metal absorbed fungi in bricks

Abstract Open disposal of battery slag is a major cause of heavy metals (HMs) pollution in soil. The current decontamination option is soil washing with chemicals whose efficiency is limited owing to high cost of reagents. This prompted the need for an environmentally friendly approach to remediate the contaminated soil. Therefore, the potential of Ganoderma lucidum to remediate heavy metals from an abandoned battery slag was investigated in this study. The heavy metals absorbed fungi were immobilised in bricks. The battery slag contaminated and control soil samples were analysed for HM concentrations before and after incubation with G. lucidium for 1–3 months. The harvested rice straw and mycelia were processed and analysed for HMs concentrations. For immobilizing heavy metals absorbed in mycelia, 5 to 30 g of pulverized mycelia were homogenized with a virgin soil, extruded into moulds and fired in a tunnel kiln for making bricks. The leachability of HMs from the bricks was carried out using TLCP. The concentrations (mg/kg) of Pb(4490 ± 14), Zn(147 ± 11), Ni(27.7 ± 0.2), Cu(19.4 ± 0.1) and Cd(2.18 ± 0.06) in dumpsite soil were significantly higher than the corresponding concentrations in the control soil samples. The G. lucidum inoculated on contaminated soil accumulated 138, 29.8, 3.48, 3069 and 1.01 mg/kg of Pb, Zn, Ni, Cu and Cd, respectively. This reveals the strong affinity of G. lucidum for toxic metals. The Pb, Zn, Ni, Cu and Cd immobilised after leaching procedure ranged from 45.3 to 98.10%. Immobilisation of toxic metals hosted by G. lucidum in red bricks can reduce environmental contamination by metals.
THE EFFECTS OF ARSENIC AND SILICON ON THE OXIDATIVE AND NON-OXIDATIVE ENZYMES IN THE SEEDLINGS OF THREE DIFFERENT RICE (ORYZA SATIVA L.) VARIETIES IN DIFFERENT GROWTH PERIODS

Silicon plays an important role in reducing the damage done to plans by environmental stress. Arsenic is an important stress factor, and silicon can reduce arsenic-induced stress on plants. In this study, we examined the affection of silicon on different enzymatic, and non-enzymatic antioxidants in the roots and shoots of different rice that exposed to arsenic at different time periods. The rice varieties studied during this experiment included LE-WT, LE-OE, and LE-R. This study showed addition of silicon increased APX, CAT, GSH, and GST in the first and second weeks after treatment, while it also significantly decreased MDA, POD, and SOD in roots and shoots of three varieties of rice. Addition of arsenic increased MDA content the all rice, but also decreased the rest of enzymes compared to control. Treatment of seedlings with As + Si significantly decreased APX, CAT, GSH, GST, POD, and SOD in rice shoots and roots compared to control in the first and second weeks after treatment. The results indicated the effect on enzymes activity in rice roots and shoots, which are attributable to arsenic, and silicon levels in the culture
An Overview of Methods and a New Three-Dimensional FEA and Analytical Hybrid Technique for Calculating AC Winding Losses in PM Machines

This article proposes a new hybrid analytical and numerical finite element (FE) based method for calculating ac eddy current losses in wire windings and demonstrates its applicability for axial flux permanent magnet electric machines. The method takes into account three-dimensional (3-D) field effects in order to achieve accurate results and yet greatly reduce computational efforts. The new 3-D FE-based method is advantageous as it employs minimum simplifications and considers the end turns in the eddy current path, the magnetic flux density variation along the effective length of coils, and the field fringing and leakage, which ultimately increases the accuracy of simulations. This study is one of the first ones to compare meticulous 3-D finite element analysis (FEA) models with more approximate, but faster solution methods, which can be employed in the optimization process. The accuracy of the 3-D FEA calculations has been confirmed through tests on a prototype axial flux permanent magnet machine. The proposed method is applicable for cases with majority of ac copper losses induced due to external magnetic flux sources, such as permanent magnets. Examples of such machines designs are coreless or open slot PM machines with conductors sizes smaller than skin depth.
Improving Positioning Accuracy of UWB in Complicated Underground NLOS Scenario Using Calibration, VBUKF, and WCA

Accurate localization of the shearer is key to achieving efficient, automated, unmanned mining. Unfortunately, the existing positioning algorithms usually yields low-precision, insufficient applicability, and unreliable final estimation due to the existence of non-line-of-sight (NLOS) error and also because they ignore the position error of anchor nodes (ANs). To bridge this technology gap, we developed a novel localization strategy by incorporating calibration, variational Bayesian unscented Kalman filter (VBUKF), total least squares (TLS), and water cycle algorithm (WCA) to enhance the location estimation accuracy of ultrawideband (UWB) positioning system in a complicated underground environment. First, calibration was implemented based on the selection of appropriate reference nodes (RNs) in line-of-sight (LOS) scenarios to estimate the scale-factor error, bias, and position errors for each AN; then the VBUKF smoothing with the consideration of time-variant measurement noise was used to reduce the interference of NLOS owing to the difficult separation of bias and NLOS error. Second, the TLS method was implemented to calculate the target node’s position based on the smoothed distances and calibrated positions of ANs. Lastly, the WCA embedded scheme was executed to further ameliorate estimation accuracy. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed TLS-WCA approach, after the implementation of calibration and VBUKF, was best able to improve the localization accuracy remarkably, and outperformed the other compared methods, which can efficiently attain higher estimation accuracy, highlighting the outstanding localization performance.
Evaluation of Venipuncture Techniques Based on Measurements of Haptic Sense and Finger Motion

Accurate and trouble-free blood collection reduces the physical and mental risk of patients. Visualization of expert venipuncture techniques is important when conducting blood collection training. Fine motions such as needle insertion for venipuncture should be evaluated by measuring both finger motion and haptic sense. This paper proposes a method for evaluating the needle insertion process in blood collection. Blood collection technique of expert medical staff was measured and analyzed experimentally. A winged blood collection needle was inserted into a forearm model used for venipuncture training. A motion capture system was used to detect finger motions during needle insertion. Furthermore, haptic measurements were made by applying a thin and flexible sensor at the contact interface of the grip to measure both contact pressure and shear stress. The haptic sensor measured contact pressure at the fingers while holding a winged needle, and detected changes in stress components along the directions of needle insertion and skin compression during the venipuncture process. During needle insertion, characteristic changes in stress profiles were observed along with the process of puncturing the component layers of the forearm model. The blood collection procedure could be visualized using haptic sensing throughout the experiment. The proposed haptic sensing system may be useful in enhancing blood collection technique and developing automation of the process.
A classroom-based physical activity intervention for adolescents: Is there an effect on self-efficacy, physical activity, and on-task behavior?

Classroom-based physical activity is a newly explored avenue for providing physical activity opportunities to children within the school, but it is one that is showing academic gains in areas such as on-task behavior. The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of pedal desks placed in high school classrooms. Three main objectives were examined: 1) the possible increase in physical activity self-efficacy among high school students in the classroom, 2) the effectiveness of pedal desks on increased physical activity among high school students, and 3) the impact of pedal desks on increasing classroom on-task behavior. to a treatment or control group. The study included a baseline and 2 waves. Researchers gathered demographic information of students, as well as pre- and post-data on self-efficacy and physical activity participation. On-task behavior of students was also recorded daily by researchers via momentary time sampling. The results indicated significance for self-efficacy confidence but not barriers to physical activity participation. When examining whether self-efficacy could be connected to student heart rate, no significance was found. However, treatment students did improve their mean heart rates from baseline to treatment. This increase was significantly greater when compared to the control group. This study indicates that pedal desks may be one means for feasibly increasing light physical activity during the school day. This study suggests that self-efficacy for exercise can be increased and that light intensity physical activity levels may be raised through placing pedal desks in a high school classroom. Limitations are discussed.
Uninterruptible Power Supply Improves Precision and External Validity of Telomere Length Measurement via qPCR

Abstract Technical challenges associated with telomere length (TL) measurements have prompted concerns regarding their utility as a biomarker of aging. Several factors influence TL assessment via qPCR, the most common measurement method in epidemiological studies, including storage conditions and DNA extraction method. Here, we tested the impact of power supply during the qPCR assay. Momentary fluctuations in power can affect the functioning of high-performance electronics, including real-time thermocyclers. We investigated if mitigating these fluctuations by using an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) influenced TL assessment via qPCR. Samples run with a UPS had significantly lower standard deviation (p < 0.001) and coefficient of variation (p < 0.001) across technical replicates than those run without a UPS. UPS usage also improved exponential amplification efficiency at the replicate, sample, and plate levels. Together these improvements translated to increased performance across metrics of external validity including correlation with age, within-person correlation across tissues, and correlation between parents and offspring.
Role of National Health Mission in Health Spending of States: Achievements and Issues

The current phase of the National Health Mission is scheduled to end by 2021, and the next phase of the scheme is around the corner. This paper undertakes an analysis of the contributions of the scheme in health spending of States, and highlights specific factors affecting them. The analysis suggests that the scheme contributed to reduction of inequality in health spending across states and added funds to the lower tiers of the health pyramid. The contribution of the scheme was however, limited in strengthening health systems in relatively poor performing `high-focus' states. Lack of complementary inputs in states, capacity issues and weak public financial management affected the performance of the scheme. The paper throws light on some of the issues that need attention in the next phase of the scheme.
How do food safety knowledge and trust affect individual’s green considerations during the covid-19 pandemic in malaysia?

Coronavirus disease 2019, henceforth abbreviated as COVID-19, was declared as a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on 11th March 2020, leading to the emergence of a ‘new normal’ life throughout the society and business practices alike However, a full understanding of consumer preferences and purchasing decisions of products and services remains untouched till date Therefore, this study aimed to address consumer purchase intentions of organic food in the ‘new normal’ practice, wherein a total of 320 valid surveys were received for further analysis It was conducted in Malaysia using an online questionnaire approach due to the current social distancing practices and concerns The finding subsequently revealed that food safety knowledge influenced the elements of personal attitude, perceived social pressure, perceived autonomy, and perceived green trust embedded in study respondents Meanwhile, personal attitude, perceived social pressure, and perceived autonomy were specifically found to correspondingly impact customer purchase intention of organic food However, perceived green trust did not mediate the relationship between personal attitude, perceived social pressure, and perceived autonomy with organic food purchase intention during the pandemic and ‘new normal’ life Accordingly, the study is notably useful for market players in understanding the ‘new normal’ of one’s life post-COVID-19 Thus, it is hoped that much more efforts to disseminate knowledge on food safety among consumers will be encouraged in promoting consumer’s purchase intention of organic food, besides opening up more opportunities for related research to be conducted in the future © 2020, Malaysian Consumer and Family Economics Association All rights reserved
Spectroscopically Probing Microscopic Solvent Properties of Room-Temperature Ionic Liquids with the Addition of Carbon Dioxide

Room-temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) provide an alternative for elimination of solvent emissions to the atmosphere for many reactions, but the subsequent separation of the products by conventional methods can be a challenge. However, the use of supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) as an extractant offers potential for a novel class of environmentally benign media for chemical reaction and downstream separation. We have investigated the solvent properties of mixtures of 1-butyl-3-methyl imidazolium hexafluorophosphate ([bmim][PF6]) and CO2 as functions of temperature (35−50 °C) and CO2 pressure (0−230 bar). We report the Kamlet−Taft dipolarity/polarizability parameter, volume expansion, and microviscosity. The results are consistent with a picture of local enhancement of RTIL composition around a chromophore, maintaining solvent strength even at fairly high loadings of CO2, whereas the microviscosity in the vicinity of the solute is dramatically reduced, leading to enhanced mass transport and facilitated.