Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
RO Membrane Performance when Reclaiming Produced Water from the Oil Extraction Process

Produced water brought to the surface as part of the oil and gas extraction process is typically disposed of through deep well injection. Unfortunately, oil production may be limited by the deep well’s capacity to receive the produced water. To remove this limitation, a combination of technologies is used to treat produced water for environmental, industrial, or agricultural reuse. Among these technologies is desalination by reverse osmosis. Specifically, reverse osmosis membranes are used as one of the final treatment steps after oil, grease, solids and hardness removal, and pH elevation. The RO step is designed to remove the remaining dissolved salts and organics, including sodium, chloride, silica, boron, benzene and xylene. The performance of the RO membrane when treating produced water at an elevated pH can be distinctive from performance on more common RO feeds at a neutral pH. This unusual condition requires a better understanding of the salt passage, flow, and membrane durability at high pH / high temperature conditions associated with the treatment of produced water. The purpose of this paper is to asses the performance of RO membranes treating high pH/high temperature produced water during its first year of operation. The assessment will be based on actual plant performance as well as the analysis of an element extracted from the plant. At startup, overall performance of the RO system was as expected. Both silica and boron were rejected as well as or better than expected. However, the passage of sodium ion was higher than expected. The permeate pH also gave mixed results when compared to theoretical predictions. Instead of seeing a decrease in permeate pH relative to feed pH as is typical in RO systems operating at neutral pH, the permeate pH increased relative to the high feed pH. In addition to better understanding the effect of the produced water on membrane permeability and salt passage, the membrane’s durability was also analyzed. Exposure to high pH and high temperatures can adversely affect the integrity of the membrane and element construction. For this reason, an element was extracted from the RO system after six months of operation. The strength of the membrane’s backing and the membrane glue lines were found to have weakened. However, the integrity of the elements was preserved and the polyamide separating layer of the membrane showed no sign of degradation and no significant increase in salt passage.
Interconnected Adaptive Responses: A Way Out for Cancer Cells to Avoid Cellular Demise

Simple Summary One of the major obstacles to anti-cancer therapy is the development of drug resistance that allows the cancer cell to adapt to the treatments and keep surviving. In this mini-review we attempt to give an overview of the adaptive responses and the cross-talk between them that could be targeted to counteract cancer resistance to stress and improve the outcome of cancer treatment. Abstract Different from normal cells, cancer cells must hyperactivate a variety of integrated responses in order to survive their basal stress or its exacerbation caused by exposure to anti-cancer agents. As cancer cells become particularly dependent on these adaptive responses, namely UPR, DDR autophagy, anti-oxidant and heat shock responses, this turns out to be an Achille’s heel, which allows them to be selectively killed while sparing normal unstressed cells. Better knowledge of the cross-talk between these adaptive processes and their impact on the immune system is needed to design more effective anti-cancer therapies, as reviewed in this paper.
An Inhalation Device With Inertial Measurement Unit for Monitoring Inhaler Technique

Inhalers are commonly used to treat asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Regular and correct usage of inhalers is necessary for effective use. However, approximately 70% of patients do not use their inhalers as directed. This is due to a lack of understanding about the medication and misunderstanding of directions. Assessment of patients’ inhaler techniques are usually conducted in person. However, doctors or pharmacists have no objective information regarding how patients use their inhalers at home. Therefore, monitoring daily inhaler use is necessary for precise medical treatment. This article proposes an inhalation monitoring device using an inertial measurement unit (IMU). The IMU is used to measure a patient’s inhalation motion. Incorrect inhalation usage can be determined by comparing the measurement data against data that indicate correct usage. The experimental results show the utility of the proposed device.
Sagittal Cervical Spine Landmark Point Detection in X-Ray Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Sagittal cervical spine alignment measured on X-Ray is a key objective measure for clinicians caring for patients with a multitude of presenting symptoms. Despite its applications, there has been no research available in this field yet. This paper presents a framework for automatic detection of the Sagittal cervical spine landmark point. Inspired by UNet, we propose an encoder-decoder Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) called PoseNet. In developing our model, we first review the weaknesses of widely used regression loss functions such as the L1, and L2 losses. To address these issues, we propose a novel loss function specifically designed to improve the accuracy of the localization task under challenging situations (extreme neck pose, low or high brightness and illumination, X-Ray noises, etc.) We validate our model and loss function on a dataset of X-Ray images. The results show that our framework is capable of performing precise sagittal cervical spine landmark point detection even for challenging X-Ray images.
Survey on Current Methodology of Sensor Virtualization in Smart Home

Smart home is the concept used for Home automation. Today one of the technologies used to implement Smart home is Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Wireless sensor networks are gaining importance for their broad range of commercial applications such as home automation, health care and industrial automation. In WSN heterogeneous sensor nodes are deployed to serve this purpose. But Due to strict administrative control over the WSN domains, communication barrier, conflicting goal & economic interest different vendors of sensor node in WSN make it difficult to introduce a large scale federated WSN. By enabling heterogeneous wireless sensor Networks to coexist on a shared physical substrate, virtualization in sensor network may provide increased manageability, flexibility and security. In this survey paper we discuss current Smart Home Technologies involved and how sensor virtualization provides cost effective implementation of Smart home.
Reliability Measurement of Control and Instrumentation Systems of Nuclear Power Plants

Control and instrumentation (C&I) systems are used to measure the critical parameters to take decisions and, hence, such systems do have high reliability target. Therefore, it is essential to measure the reliability of such systems with high accuracy. Petri net (PN) is a mathematical tool that can model the stochastic behavior of the systems. The research work is devoted to propose a framework to measure the reliability of these systems using PN. The proposed framework contains three phases: 1) state-space identification, 2) probability of a system being in each state, and 3) reliability measurement. The proposed approach has been applied to 21 C&I systems of nuclear power plant (NPP) and is demonstrated on a case study of NPP to prove its effectiveness.
MPMABP: A CNN and Bi-LSTM-Based Method for Predicting Multi-Activities of Bioactive Peptides

Bioactive peptides are typically small functional peptides with 2–20 amino acid residues and play versatile roles in metabolic and biological processes. Bioactive peptides are multi-functional, so it is vastly challenging to accurately detect all their functions simultaneously. We proposed a convolution neural network (CNN) and bi-directional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM)-based deep learning method (called MPMABP) for recognizing multi-activities of bioactive peptides. The MPMABP stacked five CNNs at different scales, and used the residual network to preserve the information from loss. The empirical results showed that the MPMABP is superior to the state-of-the-art methods. Analysis on the distribution of amino acids indicated that the lysine preferred to appear in the anti-cancer peptide, the leucine in the anti-diabetic peptide, and the proline in the anti-hypertensive peptide. The method and analysis are beneficial to recognize multi-activities of bioactive peptides.
The RGG motif proteins: Interactions, functions, and regulations

Proteins with motifs rich in arginines and glycines were discovered decades ago and are functionally involved in a staggering range of essential processes in the cell. Versatile, specific, yet adaptable molecular interactions enabled by the unique combination of arginine and glycine, combined with multiplicity of molecular recognition conferred by repeated di‐, tri‐, and multiple peptide motifs, allow RGG motif proteins to interact with a broad range of proteins and nucleic acids. Furthermore, posttranslational modifications at the arginines in the motif extend the RGG protein's capacity for a fine‐tuned regulation. In this review, we focus on the biochemical properties of the RGG motif, its molecular interactions with RNAs and proteins, and roles of the posttranslational modification in modulating their interactions. We discuss current knowledge of the RGG motif proteins involved in mRNA transport and translation, highlight our merging understanding of their molecular functions in translational regulation and summarize areas of research in the future critical in understanding this important family of proteins.
The need for an institution-specific normal pressure hydrocephalus management protocol

Background: Despite the publication of international guidelines, the management of normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH) varies due to clinician preference and varying clinical evidence. An audit was performed to review the current pathways used in clinical practice with the aim of formulating an institution-specific protocol to optimize and standardize care. Methods: An internal audit was performed on the management of patients with NPH who presented to the Princess Alexandra Hospital, Brisbane between January 2016 and February 2019. Results: Forty-one patients were included in the study. Lumbar puncture (LP) was the main diagnostic test used (63.4%). About 14.6% underwent lumbar drain (LD) insertion instead. About 12.2% did not undergo either LP or LD before definitive treatment. Only 60% of all patients underwent ventriculoperitoneal shunt insertion. Overall, five treatment pathways were noted. LP + VP shunt showed the greatest average improvement in Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) or Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) (+3.8 ± 3.18), followed by LD + VP shunt (+3.25 ± 3.52) and sole treatment with LP (+1.83 ± 1.18). Both pre and post intervention assessment of gait and cognition were only performed in 31% and 48.8% of patients, respectively. Four types of cognitive assessment were used (MOCA 46.4%, MMSE 46.4%, Rowland Universal Dementia Assessment Scale 3.6%, and Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination-III 3.6%). MoCA showed greater cognition improvement (2.07) compared to MMSE (1.3) post intervention. There was no consistent objective gait assessment test used. Conclusion: The multiple NPH treatment pathways, low rate of pre and post objective symptom assessment, and lack of standardized gait and cognitive assessment tests demonstrate a clear need for an institution-specific NPH management protocol to standardize diagnostic workup, definitive management, and allied health assessment.
HLB: Toward Load-Aware Load Balancing

The purpose of network load balancers is to optimize quality of service to the users of a set of servers– basically, to improve response times and to reducing computing resources– by properly distributing workloads. This paper proposes a distributed, application-agnostic, Hybrid Load Balancer (HLB) that– without explicit monitoring or signaling– infers server occupancies and processing speeds, which allows making optimised workload placement decisions. This approach is evaluated both through simulations and extensive experiments, including synthetic workloads and Wikipedia replays on a real-world testbed. Results show significant performance gains, in terms of both response time and system utilisation, when compared to existing load-balancing algorithms.
Churchite and Florencite ( Nd ) from Sausalito , California

Rare earth phosphate minerals occur in association with manganese oxides slightly over half a mile south of Sausalito, Marin County, California, at the base of a roadcut on the north side of the lateral to Highway 101. Churchite (weinschenkite) 1 was first found here by Leo Rosenhahn of San Anselmo and identified by E. B. Gross, then of the California Division of Mines. The minerals are found in the weathering zone on fracture surfaces in a chert unit of the Jurassic and Cretaceous Franciscan formation that consists of alternating beds of radiolarian chert, 5 to 10 cm thick, and shale, 1 or 2 cm thick. A basalt unit of the Franciscan crops out about a hundred meters away. The minerals occur near a fault (Fig. 1), which probably favored downward percolation of ground water. Before excavation the occurrence was probably 5 or 10 meters below ground level on a steep hillside. Clay minerals, hematite, and lithiophorite are the most abundant minerals on the fracture surfaces; todorokite and the two rare earth minerals churchite and florencite are moderately abundant. Lithiophorite occurs as dark-brown or black botryoidal crusts up to several millimeters thick, composed of very thin shells. The X-ray diffraction pattern is almost identical with pattern 3 of Fleischer and Faust (1963). A spectrographic analysis is given in table 1. Despite the name and the accepted formula (AI,Li)Mn02(OH)2 of lithiophorite (Wadsley, 1952), the low content of lithium is not unusual. Lithiophorite from some occurrences contains only trace amounts of lithium. Copper, barium and other elements perhaps fill the role, assigned by Wadsley to lithium, of expanding the bond lengths in the (AI) (OH)6 octahedra some 3 percent over normal AI-OH bond lengths, allowing a match to the Mn(OH)6 octa-
Nanoparticulate Carriers of Anticancer Drugs and Therapeutics

Nanoscale drug delivery platforms have been developed over the past four decades that have shown promising clinical results in several types of cancer and inflammatory disorders. Nanoparticles have special characteristics of high surface to volume ratio, size controllability, and can be easily functionalized during synthesis [1]. Biodegradable polymer nanoparticles have been used as carriers for drugs, peptides, proteins, vaccines, and nucleotides [2]. Nanoparticles (NPs) can protect drug moieties from degradation and provide sustained drug release. NPs are sometimes effective in facilitating intracellular delivery of bioactive materials. Polylactideco-glycolic acid (PLGA) NPs have been used for various applications in vaccination, cancer therapy, and the treatment of cerebral disorders [3].
A topologically consistent representation for image analysis: The Frontiers Topological Graph

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. A topologically consistent representation for image analysis: The Frontiers Topological Graph Christophe Fiorio
Designing a highly e ffi cient polysul fi de conversion catalyst with paramontroseite for high-performance and long-life lithium-sulfur batteries

Numerous efforts have been made to design the cathode of Li–S batteries to enhance reversible capacity and long-term cycling stability. However, challenges remain in achieving high electronic/ionic conductivity and suppressing the shuttle effect, especially for cathodes with high sulfur loading. Here we report a 3D free-standing hierarchical structure of VO2(P) (paramontroseite VO2) nanoparticles grown on nitrogen-doped carbon nanotube (NCNT) arrays as a catalytic host for high-performance sulfur cathodes. In this architecture, the VO2(P) nanoparticles function as catalysts to oxidize the LiPS to produce thiosulfate due to the strong chemical interaction. Furthermore, thiosulfates act as a mediator to catenate long-chain LiPS together and convert short-chain Li2S2/ Li2S and surface-bound polythionate complexes. Accordingly, the VO2(P)-NCNT/S cathode exhibits excellent performance with high discharge capacity output (≈1200mA h g at 0.2 C), stable long-term cycling (≈67% retention at 2 C for 500 cycles), and high sulfur loading cycling (initial areal capacity of 10.2 mA h cm at 0.2 C for 200 cycles). This nanostructure catalytic cathode with high sulfur loadings, as well as stable cycling performances, is attractive for developing practically useable Li-S batteries.
Multi-constraints based deep learning model for automated segmentation and diagnosis of coronary artery disease in X-ray angiographic images

Background The detection of coronary artery disease (CAD) from the X-ray coronary angiography is a crucial process which is hindered by various issues such as presence of noise, insufficient contrast of the input images along with the uncertainties caused by the motion due to respiration and variation of angles of vessels. Methods In this article, an Automated Segmentation and Diagnosis of Coronary Artery Disease (ASCARIS) model is proposed in order to overcome the prevailing challenges in detection of CAD from the X-ray images. Initially, the preprocessing of the input images was carried out by using the modified wiener filter for the removal of both internal and external noise pixels from the images. Then, the enhancement of contrast was carried out by utilizing the optimized maximum principal curvature to preserve the edge information thereby contributing to increasing the segmentation accuracy. Further, the binarization of enhanced images was executed by the means of OTSU thresholding. The segmentation of coronary arteries was performed by implementing the Attention-based Nested U-Net, in which the attention estimator was incorporated to overcome the difficulties caused by intersections and overlapped arteries. The increased segmentation accuracy was achieved by performing angle estimation. Finally, the VGG-16 based architecture was implemented to extract threefold features from the segmented image to perform classification of X-ray images into normal and abnormal classes. Results The experimentation of the proposed ASCARIS model was carried out in the MATLAB R2020a simulation tool and the evaluation of the proposed model was compared with several existing approaches in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, revised contrast to noise ratio, mean square error, dice coefficient, Jaccard similarity, Hausdorff distance, Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), segmentation accuracy and ROC curve. Discussion The results obtained conclude that the proposed model outperforms the existing approaches in all the evaluation metrics thereby achieving optimized classification of CAD. The proposed method removes the large number of background artifacts and obtains a better vascular structure.
Peer effects and school design: An analysis of efficiency and equity

This paper estimates educational peer effects at the lower secondary level in Switzerland where different tracking systems coexist. Using a cross-sectional survey based on standardized questionnaires, the structure and magnitude of social interactions among classmates are analyzed. The results are used to find out if grouping students in a completely non-selective way could increase efficiency and equality of opportunity. Empirical findings suggest that mixing students in reading and science classes could enhance efficiency and equity while a similar practice in mathematics courses could only improve equity without any gain in efficiency.
A practical method to solve an optimization problem with constraints

Some economic models need constraints imposed on control and/or state-space constraints. In most cases, nonetheless, the use of constraints is avoided because it brings significant technical difficulties to a model. This paper offers a new practical technique to solve control and state-space constraints in optimal control problems when the constraint variable appears in the utility function. We do this by integrating the constraint into the optimization problem. It is shown that the technique works for both control and state constraints.
Acute neuromuscular responses to a resistance exercise session performed using the DeLorme and Oxford techniques

Purpose. The purpose of this study was to examine and compare acute neuromuscular behavior during a resistance exercise session (RES) conducted with the DeLorme and Oxford techniques. Methods. Seven healthy and trained participants volunteered to carry out two RES, one week apart, of unilateral elbow flexion. Each session was conducted with the DeLorme or Oxford techniques in a counterbalanced order. Electromyographic (EMG) data were recorded from the biceps brachii (BB) and triceps brachii (TRIC) during a maximal isometric voluntary contraction. Normalized EMG amplitude from BB and TRIC and the co-contraction ratio (CCR) during the concentric and eccentric phases were calculated. Results. The EMG amplitude from BB and TRIC as well as the CCR of both the concentric and eccentric phases were similar in both techniques. Additionally, normalized EMG amplitude from BB was higher during the concentric phase when compared with the eccentric phase for both techniques, supporting the hypotheses of distinct neural control for concentric and eccentric phases of movement. The DeLorme and Oxford techniques induced similar acute neuromuscular responses during the RES. Conclusions. Our results may support previous findings on similar strength gains after resistance training performed with both analyzed techniques.