Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
16S and 18S rDNA Amplicon Sequencing Analysis of Aesthetically Problematic Microbial Mats on the Walls of the Petralona Cave: The Use of Essential Oils as a Cleaning Method

The presence of microbial communities on cave walls and speleothems is an issue that requires attention. Traditional cleaning methods using water, brushes, and steam can spread the infection and cause damage to the cave structures, while chemical agents can lead to the formation of toxic compounds and damage the cave walls. Essential oils (EOs) have shown promising results in disrupting the cell membrane of bacteria and affecting their membrane permeability. In this study, we identified the microorganisms forming unwanted microbial communities on the walls and speleothems of Petralona Cave using 16S and 18S rDNA amplicon sequencing approaches and evaluated the efficacy of EOs in reducing the ATP levels of these ecosystems. The samples exhibited a variety of both prokaryotic and eukaryotic microorganisms, including Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Chloroflexi, Firmicutes, the SAR supergroup, Opisthokonta, Excavata, Archaeplastida, and Amoebozoa. These phyla are often found in various habitats, including caves, and contribute to the ecological intricacy of cave ecosystems. In terms of the order and genus taxonomy, the identified biota showed abundances that varied significantly among the samples. Functional predictions were also conducted to estimate the differences in expressed genes among the samples. Oregano EO was found to reduce ATP levels by 87% and 46% for black and green spots, respectively. Consecutive spraying with cinnamon EO further reduced ATP levels, with reductions of 89% for black and 88% for green spots. The application of a mixture solution caused a significant reduction up to 96% in ATP levels of both areas. Our results indicate that EOs could be a promising solution for the treatment of microbial communities on cave walls and speleothems.
Trauma Quality Improvement Program: A Retrospective Analysis from A Middle Eastern National Trauma Center

Background: The Trauma Quality Improvement Program (American College of Surgery (ACS-TQIP)) uses the existing infrastructure of the Committee on Trauma programs and provides feedback to participating hospitals on risk-adjusted outcomes. This study aimed to analyze and compare the performance of the Level I Hamad Trauma Centre (HTC) with other TQIP participating centers by comparing TQIP aggregate database reports. The primary goal was to pinpoint the variations in adult trauma outcomes and quality measures, identify areas that need improvement, and leverage existing resources to facilitate quality improvement. Methods: A retrospective analysis was performed for the TQIP data from April 2019–March 2020 to April 2020–March 2021. We used the TQIP methodology, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and outcomes. Results: There were 915 patients from Fall 2020 and 884 patients from Fall 2021 that qualified for the TQIP database. The HTC patients’ demographics differed from the TQIP’s aggregate data; they were younger, more predominantly male, and had significantly different mechanisms of injury (MOI) with more traffic-related blunt trauma. Penetrating injuries were more severe in the other centers. During the TQIP Fall 2020 report, the HTC was a low outlier (good performer) in one cohort (all patients) and an average performer in the remaining cohorts. However, during Fall 2021, the HTC showed an improvement and was a low outlier in two cohorts (all patients and severe TBI patients). Overall, the HTC remained an average performer during the report cycles. Conclusions: There was an improvement over time in the risk-adjusted mortality, which reflects the continuous and demanding effort put together by the trauma team. The ACS-TQIP for the external benchmarking of quality improvement could be a contributor to better monitored patient care. Evaluating the TQIP data with emphases on appropriate methodologies, quality measurements, corrective measures, and accurate reporting is warranted.
Hydrological sustainability of international virtual water trade

International virtual water (VW) trade helps to balance water stress across regions. However, it can be questioned whether such trade can remain sustainable as water resources are redistributed across regions resulting from changes in our climate. A conceptual framework to compare VW trade volumes with water fluxes within the water cycle is introduced. We evaluate the distribution of traded water surpluses and deficits associated with crop, animal, and industrial products over 157 countries and 182 global watersheds. About 7% of the countries are identified to conduct VW trade unsustainably. Regions within Africa, North America, central Asia, and Europe exhibit unfeasible VW trading resulting from higher appropriation of freshwater resources than availability influenced by precipitation and evaporation. Assessment at the watershed scale captures overexploitation at finer resolution, generally overlooked in country level analysis. An evaluation into the future reveals more watersheds becoming vulnerable to water storage depletion under future climate trends.
Supersonic gas jet stabilization in laser–plasma acceleration

Abstract Supersonic gas jets generated via a conical nozzle are widely applied in the laser wakefield acceleration of electrons. The stability of the gas jet is critical to the electron injection and the reproducibility of the wakefield acceleration. Here we discussed the role of the stilling chamber in a modified converging–diverging nozzle to dissipate the turbulence and to stabilize the gas jets. By the fluid dynamics simulations and the Mach–Zehnder interferometer measurements, the instability originating from the nonlinear turbulence is studied and the mechanism to suppress the instability is proposed. Both the numerical and experimental results prove that the carefully designed nozzle with a stilling chamber is able to reduce the perturbation by more than 10% compared with a simple-conical nozzle.
Early faint fault diagnosis of wheelset axlebox bearings in urban rail trains based on ICiSSA-MOMEDA

Circulant Singular Spectrum Analysis (CiSSA) performs well in the decomposition and extraction of the periodic components of nonstationary signals. However, the decomposition of signals in complex environments suffers from spectral aliasing and difficulties in extracting feature information. Therefore, based on CiSSA, an improved CiSSA and multipoint optimal minimum entropy deconvolution adjustment (ICiSSA-MOMEDA) is proposed and applied to the early faint fault diagnosis of axlebox bearings of urban rail train wheelsets. First, the optimal embedding dimension was computed adaptively and accurately using an improved Cao’s method. Then, the initial components obtained from the decomposition were reorganized using the K-ARs method. ICiSSA effectively solves the problems of spectrum confusion and fault-information dispersion. Finally, ICiSSA was combined with MOMEDA to improve its ability to detect weak fault information. The superiority of ICiSSA-MOMEDA was verified based on the analysis of the actual bearing data and comparison with other methods.
Financial Technology, Transaction Efficiency and Financial Satisfaction: The Mediating Role of Financial Achievement

Financial technology has emerged as a powerful platform for financial activities and transactions. This study aims to investigate the role of financial technology in explaining financial satisfaction and transaction efficiency. This research also highlights the mediating role of financial achievement in its relation to financial technology, transaction efficiency, and financial satisfaction. This study adopted a quantitative study undergoing a path analysis. The research sample was approximately 250 students, which was determined purposively at the Islamic Economics Department of IAIN Tulungagung. The underlying rationale is that the course provided in the department focused on the micro and macroeconomics and the financial industry today. The findings of this study indicate that financial technology plays a crucial role in affecting transaction efficiency, financial achievement, and financial satisfaction. The study also confirms the act of financial achievement in mediating the relationship between financial technology and financial satisfaction as well as financial technology and transaction efficiency.
Chemistry of waters sampled from oceanic basement boreholes, 1979–1988

Waters have been sampled from the basement section of four Deep Sea Drilling Project holes (395A, 396B, 418A, and 504B) since 1979, in an attempt to determine the composition of oceanic basement formation waters. Samples have been obtained by two methods: active, in which water is drawn under negative pressure from the interstices of the wall rocks, and passive, in which it is collected from the open borehole. The most successful sampling has been done on re-entering the holes months to years after they were last disturbed by drilling and/or pumping of surface seawater downhole. Most of the samples show large changes in composition from seawater that are consistent with alteration of basalts at the in situ temperatures of 10° to 146°C. The samples are typically depleted in Mg2+, K+, Na+, sulfate, and 87Sr, and enriched in Ca2+ and Si. However, all of the samples are contaminated to some extent, mainly by seawater which is either introduced during drilling or sampling, flows downhole due to underpressure in the upper basement, or mixes downhole due to convective overturn in the hole itself. The latter process is apparently common and dilutes any formation water which may enter the hole via diffusion and horizontal convection. In hole 504B, the tritium content of the waters indicates that 24 to 35% of the surface seawater which originally filled the hole is still present after periods of 470 to 1233 days. The more general problem of what has displaced the surface seawater and produced the large chemical changes observed in the borehole waters, whether exchange with formation water or simply reaction of seawater with the wall rocks of the hole, remains unsolved. As a result, no component of true basement formation water has been identified unambiguously in any of the holes. This problem may be solved by (1) compartmentalizing a hole with a series of plugs to limit downhole mixing or (2) using a straddle packer to draw a series of samples from the interstices of the wall rocks of a hole, either shortly after drilling or later following re-entry. In either case, an array of chemical tracers will have to be measured, either in situ or in the laboratory, to infer the nature of the waters obtained.
Analysis of Light Intensity and Charge Holding Time Dependence of Pinned Photodiode Full Well Capacity

In this paper, the light intensity and charge holding time dependence of pinned photodiode (PD) full well capacity (FWC) are studied for our pixel structure with a buried overflow path under the transfer gate. The formulae for PDFWC derived from a simple analytical model show that the relation between light intensity and PDFWC is logarithmic because PDFWC is determined by the balance between the photo-generated current and overflow current under the bright condition. Furthermore, with using pulsed light before a charge holding operation in PD, the accumulated charges in PD decrease with the holding time due to the overflow current, and finally, it reaches equilibrium PDFWC. The analytical model has been successfully validated by the technology computer-aided design (TCAD) device simulation and actual device measurement.
Optimal Design and Analysis of a Hybrid Hydrogen Energy Storage System for an Island-Based Renewable Energy Community

Installations of decentralised renewable energy systems (RES) are becoming increasing popular as governments introduce ambitious energy policies to curb emissions and slow surging energy costs. This work presents a novel model for optimal sizing for a decentralised renewable generation and hybrid storage system to create a renewable energy community (REC), developed in Python. The model implements photovoltaic (PV) solar and wind turbines combined with a hybrid battery and regenerative hydrogen fuel cell (RHFC). The electrical service demand was derived using real usage data from a rural island case study location. Cost remuneration was managed with an REC virtual trading layer, ensuring fair distribution among actors in accordance with the European RED(III) policy. A multi-objective genetic algorithm (GA) stochastically determines the system capacities such that the inherent trade-off relationship between project cost and decarbonisation can be observed. The optimal design resulted in a levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of 0.15 EUR/kWh, reducing costs by over 50% compared with typical EU grid power, with a project internal rate of return (IRR) of 10.8%, simple return of 9.6%/year, and return on investment (ROI) of 9 years. The emissions output from grid-only use was reduced by 72% to 69 gCO2e/kWh. Further research of lifetime economics and additional revenue streams in combination with this work could provide a useful tool for users to quickly design and prototype future decentralised REC systems.
Joint Pre-Equalization and Receiver Combining Design for Federated Learning With Misaligned Over-the-Air Computation

With the growth of terminal devices and data traffic, privacy concerns have inspired an innovative edge learning framework, called federated learning (FL). Over-the-air computation (OAC) has been introduced to reduce communication overhead for FL, however, requires stringent time alignment. Misaligned OAC has been proposed by recent research where the symbol-timing misaligned superimposed signal can be recovered via whitening matched filtering and sampling (WMFS), followed by maximum likelihood (ML) estimation. Similarly to aligned OAC, misaligned OAC also suffers from the straggler issue, leading to FL’s poor performance under low EsN0. To solve this issue, we propose a novel framework of misaligned OAC FL for accurate model aggregation on wireless networks. First, we analyze the effect of aggregation error on the convergence of FL. Then, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the distortion of the aggregation measured by mean square error (MSE) w.r. t. the transmitter equalization and receiver combining. Finally, a successive convex approximation (SCA)-based optimization algorithm is further developed to solve the resulting quadratic constrained quadratic programming. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed algorithm achieves substantial learning performance improvement compared to existing baseline schemes and achieves the near-optimal performance of the ideal benchmark with aligned and noiseless aggregation.
RuX: A Novel, Flexible, and Sensitive Mifepristone-Induced Transcriptional Regulation System

Inducible gene regulation methods are indispensable in diverse biological applications, yet many of them have severe limitations in their applicability. These include inducer toxicity, a limited variety of organisms the given system can be used in, and side effects of the induction method. In this study, a novel inducible system, the RuX system, was created using a mutant ligand-binding domain of the glucocorticoid receptor (CS1/CD), used together with various genetic elements such as the Gal4 DNA-binding domain or Cre recombinase. The RuX system is shown to be capable of over 1000-fold inducibility, has flexible applications, and is offered for use in cell cultures.
Study on the non-enzymatic electrochemical glucose quantitative detection method in Na2S2O3 neutral solution environment

ABSTRACT In order to find a green and safe solution as the base solution for the quantitative detection of glucose, the neutral solution Na2S2O3 was selected as the base solution. A three-electrode electrochemical system was designed. In this system, the working electrode was copper sheet, the counter electrode was platinum electrode, and the reference electrode was saturated KCl calomel solution electrode. Cyclic voltammetry (CV) and chronoamperometry(i-t) methods were used for the experiment. CV scanning results showed that glucose could produce the oxidation-reduction reaction on the surface of the copper electrode, and the parameters of i-t were adjusted. According to the results of i-t scanning, the quantitative detection model of glucose was established. The model was $x = {e^{\left [{{ - \sqrt {0.3305} * \ln {{\left({y - 0.1039} \right) * \sqrt {2\pi } * 0.4065} \over {8.3459 * {{10}^{ - 4}}}} + \ln 7.3672 * {{10}^{ - 4}}} \over {1 + \sqrt {0.3305} }}\right ]}}$x=e−0.3305∗lny−0.1039∗2π∗0.40658.3459∗10−4+ln7.3672∗10−41+0.3305. The regression parameter R2 was 0.99672. Glucose was tested with different base solutions. Results showed that Na2S2O3 solution was a good base solution. The i-t control experiments showed that the proposed method were effective in Na2S2O3 solution.
Car-following model of vehicular traffic

Car-following model is a microscopic simulation model of vehicular traffic, which describes the one-by-one following process of vehicles on the same lane. As a common traffic phenomenon, following behavior is important in the micro-study of traffic. In consequence, the car-following has been paid great attention. Compared with other traffic-flow models, car-following model embodies the human factors and reflects the real traffic situation in a better way. This paper, which introduces and analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of GHR model, OV model, CA model, and fuzzy-logic model in detail, gives a systematic review of the development and actuality of car-following model. In final, it discusses two types of stability analytic theory: local stability and asymptotic stability, to some extent.
Snowmelt runoff modelling in a Himalayan basin with the aid of satellite data

The Himalayan basins have runoff contributions from rainfall as well as from snow and ice. In the present study a snowmelt runoff model (SRM) was applied to estimate the streamflow for Satluj basin located in the western Himalayan region. This model uses the direct input of remotely sensed snow-cover area (SCA) data for calibration and simulation. The SCA in the basin was determined using remote sensing data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) onboard the Terra-Aqua satellite. In addition, daily precipitation and temperature data, as well as a Shuttle Radar Topography Mission digital elevation model (SRTM-DEM), were used to prepare the area elevation curves. The model was calibrated using the dataset for a period of 3 years (1996–1997, 1997–1998 and 1998–1999) and model parameters for streamflow routing were optimized. Using the optimized parameters, streamflow simulations were made for four years of data (i.e. 2000–2003 and 2004–2005). The accuracy of the streamflow verification was determined using different criteria such as shape of the outflow hydrograph, efficiency and difference in volume. The seasonal temperature lapse rates (TLRs) estimated from land surface temperature (LST) maps were used in the model and considerable improvement in simulation was observed. It was found that the overall efficiency increased when using varying TLRs.
Gellan Gum and Polyvinyl Alcohol Based Triple-Layer Films Enriched with Alhagi sparsifolia Flower Extract: Preparation, Characterization, and Application of Dried Shrimp Preservation

To meet the demand for biobased packaging and minimize the oxidation of dried aquatic goods during storage, we created a triple-layer film (TF) with antioxidant capacity. The film was produced using polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) as the protective layer, gellan gum (GG)/PVA composite incorporating Alhagi sparsifolia flower extract (AFE) as the anti-oxidative capability layer, and GG as the anti-oxidative capacity slow-release control layer. The TFs with different AFE additions were characterized and compared to a single-layer film (SF) made of the same material. The results demonstrate that adding AFE to films degraded their water vapour and oxygen barrier properties as well as their tensile strength, but increased their light barrier properties, elongation at break, and anti-oxidative capability. The three-layer structure increased the light, water vapour, and oxygen barrier qualities of films, as well as their slow-release anti-oxidative capability. The application experiment revealed that the inclusion of AFE might aid in the preservation of dried prawn quality. Using TF supplemented with 5 (w/v) AFE to package the dried shrimps reduced the TBARS value by 47.5%. Our research indicated that TFs containing AFE have a wide range of possible applications in dried shrimp preservation.
SCAN10: A REPRODUCIBLE AND STANDARDIZED 1 PIPELINE FOR PROCESSING 10X SINGLE CELL RNASEQ 2 DATA

18 The recent explosion of single cell transcriptomics has led to the challenge of 19 developing data analysis pipelines that are both fully reproducible and mod-20 ular while allowing interoperability across multiple systems and institutions. 21 We present scAN10, a processing pipeline of 10X single cell RNAseq data, 22 that inherits the ability to be executed on most computational infrastruc-23 tures, thanks to Nextflow DSL2. The modular nature of Nextflow pipelines 24 allows to easily integrate and assess different blocks for a given analysis step. 25 We illustrate the benefit of using scAN10 by showing its ability to assess 26 the impact of the mapping step on the resulting output using a clinical 10X 27 scRNAseq analysis of a human pituitary gonadotroph tumour. 28
Landscape position effect on selected soil physical properties of reconstructed prairies in southcentral Iowa

Changes in land use and alteration of the ecosystem can significantly affect soil physical, chemical, and biological properties. In this study, changes in soil organic carbon (SOC), root biomass, bulk density (ρb), water stable aggregates (WSA), and infiltration rates were examined in reconstructed prairies varying in age and landscape position. The objective of the study was to determine the potential of landscape position effect on these selected soil properties in reconstructed prairies. Findings show that SOC increased as years since prairie establishment increased and had a positive correlation with infiltration rate and WSA. The opposite was true for ρb, where it decreased as prairie age increased and negatively correlated with SOC. However, the effects of SOC and ρb on infiltration rates varied by landscape slope position and age of prairie establishment. Root biomass, SOC, and WSA had decreased, while ρb increased at the midslope compared to the summit and toe-slope positions resulting in lower infiltration rates. Although the summit and the toe-slope positions had similar soil properties, infiltration rates were much greater in the toe-slope position. This was ascribed to the toe-slope position's superior WSA, due to greater SOC concentrations. In general, this study shows that over time, increases in SOC did promote aggregate formation and lower ρb, creating more permeable soil surfaces in these reconstructed prairies. However, better soil conservation practices that reduce soil surface water runoff in the midslope in particular are needed during the first few years of prairie establishment.