bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Photoprotective and antioxidant properties of scytonemin isolated from Antarctic cyanobacterium Nostoc commune Vaucher ex Bornet & Flahault and its potential as sunscreen ingredient
Authors: Ručová Dajana , Vilková Mária , Sovová Simona , Vargová Zuzana , Kostecká Zuzana , Frenák Richard , Routray Deepti , Bačkor Martin 
Published: October 2023

AbstractIn the cosmetic industry there is an increasing demand for substances obtained from natural sources that can replace synthetic ones. Due to consumer demand for a protective filter with (SPF) labels in sunscreens, moisturizers, face make-up, and lipsticks worldwide, they produce tonnes of such products every year. Many species of cyanobacteria live in extreme environments, including sites with excessive doses of sunlight and drought. To survive in such extreme conditions, they produce compounds that allow both protection against ultraviolet radiation (UV), as well as the substances that are responsible for reducing oxidative stress. The aim of this study was to isolate, identify, and test the biological potential of the secondary metabolite scytonemin from the cyanobacterium Nostoc commune Vaucher ex Bornet et Flahault collected in Antarctica. The photoprotective effect was evaluated by the measurement of the sun protection factor (SPF) and the antioxidant activity was determined by two different assays including superoxide anion scavenging activity and free radical scavenging activity based on the amount of substance. An estimated SPF value of 33.34 ± 0.02 demonstrated that scytonemin might serve as a topically applicable ingredient for natural UV sunscreen cream.
Performance Enhancement of Indoor Cellular Visible Light Communication through Cell Size and Wavelength Reuse Pattern
Authors: Elsayed Rania A. , Diab Youssef A. , Hussein Khalid F. A. , Farahat Asmaa E. A. , Hamdi Azhar A. 
Published: October 2023

AbstractThe emerging technology of visible light communication (VLC) has become a promising solution for the requirements of wide-bandwidth, high-speed, and infinite-capacity wireless communication networks. A novel design of high-performance multi-user indoor visible light communication (VLC) based on hexagonal-cell arrangement is introduced in the present paper. The wavelength division multiple access (WDMA) is used to enable multiple users to communicate through the network of access point (APs) by assigning a unique wavelength division channel (WDC) to each user. A wavelength reuse scheme is utilized to increase the maximum number of users in the system and to enhance the VLC system capacity. The on–off keying (OOK) is used as the modulation technique for light signaling. The intercell interference (ICI) caused by the wavelength reuse is evaluated and its dependence on the cell radius and the wavelength reuse pattern size is numerically investigated. Both the received power density and the ICI at the location of the moving user are evaluated and the resulting signal-to-ICI ratio (SICIR) is calculated at every point over the indoor area. The VLC system capacity is evaluated and its dependence on the design parameters including the cell radius, the size of the wavelength reuse pattern, and the user data rate is numerically investigated. A design procedure is proposed to minimize the bit-error rate (BER) resulting from the ICI and to maximize the system capacity and the maximum allowable number of users in the system by selecting the optimal radius of the hexagonal cells and the most appropriate size of the frequency reuse pattern. The effect of the data rate per user on the system capacity is numerically investigated. It is shown that a SICR of greater than 21 dB and BER of less than 1 × 10−15is achieved. Also, a system capacity of more than 4 bps/Hz is achieved by the application of the proposed VLC design optimization procedure.
Environmental impacts of industrial activities on floral coverage with special emphasis on detoxification enzyme activities in Cataglyphis savignyi as pollution biomarker
Authors: Hamza Yasser I. , Bream Ahmed S. , Mahmoud Mohammed A. , El-Tabakh Mohamed A. M. 
Published: October 2023

AbstractThe present study investigates the environmental impact of industrial activities on floral coverage within the major industrial district of Borg El-Arab City, Egypt. Additionally, it aims to evaluate the detoxification enzymatic activity of Cataglyphis savignyi as a pollution biomarker. To achieve this objective, seasonal soil samples were collected from the studied sites to determine soil properties and heavy metal concentrations. Furthermore, a seasonal specimen of C. savignyi was collected to study the enzymatic activity of acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and glutathione-S-transferase (GST). Heavy metal contamination pollution indices were calculated, and fourteen plant species were identified at the investigated sites for four successive seasons from 2020 to 2021. The soil physicochemical parameters significantly varied in the industrial sites compared to the control site. The accumulation of heavy metal contamination in soil for investigated sites followed the order Ni > As > Pb > Hg. Calculated Cdeg and PLI for industrial 3 revealed a very high degree of contamination, attributed to increased industrial activity from the chemical and silicate factories that characterize this region. The current results highlight the inhibition of GST levels in C. savignyi at the industrial site compared to the control site. In contrast, AChE increases, which might be due to heavy metals enhancing acetylcholine activity at synapses. Consequently, the antioxidant enzymatic activities are useful as biomarkers for assessing and monitoring environmental contamination. In conclusion, this study underscores insects as potent biomarkers for heavy metal contamination, marking a significant advancement in environmental monitoring. These bioindicators offer crucial insights into the impacts of climate change and industrial pollution. The research reveals distinct plant diversity variations and higher heavy metal content in industrial sites, indicating pronounced contamination. Additionally, the study highlights altered enzyme activities in insects, emphasizing their utility as biomarkers for assessing environmental contamination. This work represents a substantial leap forward in comprehending the complex dynamics between contamination and ecological balance.
Increasing temporal resolution in greenhouse gas accounting of electricity consumption divided into Scopes 2 and 3: case study of Germany
Authors: Blizniukova Daria , Holzapfel Peter , Unnewehr Jan Frederick , Bach Vanessa , Finkbeiner Matthias 
Published: October 2023

Abstract
Purpose
As renewable energy sources (RES) experience short-term variability, electricity greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions also fluctuate. Increasing temporal resolution in electricity emissions accounting allows capturing these fluctuations. However, existing time-resolved models either neglect indirect impacts, adopt a generation perspective, or are based on non-public country-specific data. We provide an approach for calculating time-resolved GHG emission factors (EFs) of electricity consumption based on open access data for European countries and examine the temporal variability of German EFs.

Methods
Time-resolved electricity GHG EFs are calculated within the framework of attributional life cycle assessment (LCA) with up to quarter-hourly resolution. The approach involves top-down calculation of annual combustion emissions, validation and scaling of time-resolved electricity generation data, as well as calculation of inland consumption EFs for each interval throughout a year. The EFs are divided by the stages of net generation, consumption by hydro-pumped storage (HPS), and transmission and distribution (T&D) losses, as well as Scopes 2 and 3, enabling GHG Protocol Corporate Standard-compliant reporting. The approach is exemplarily applied to Germany and its transmission system operator zones at quarter-hourly resolution for the years from 2017 to 2020 to investigate the relation between grid mix composition and temporal variability of EFs.

Results and discussion
The annual average EF of the German consumption mix, encompassing direct and upstream emissions, declined from 499 (2017) to 377 g CO2e/kWh (2020), while quarter-hourly variability increased by 12%. Neglecting upstream emissions and intermediate steps between generation and consumption in Germany in 2020 resulted in an underestimation of 13% on an annual level, while quarter-hourly Scope 3 EFs reached up to 100 g CO2e/kWh. On a sub-national level, annual average EFs varied between 157 g CO2e/kWh (TenneT zone) and 505 g CO2e/kWh (50Hertz zone) in 2020. Temporal variability is the greatest in electricity systems with both fossil-fuel and renewable capacity sufficient to dominate short-term electricity generation. At an advanced level of RES integration, the fluctuations of EFs start declining, as demonstrated by the TenneT case.

Conclusion
An increased temporal resolution in electricity emissions accounting can enhance a posteriori LCA results’ accuracy during the energy transition phase. The provided EFs link the life cycle-based perspective with time-resolved emissions accounting. With increasing reliance on RES, indirect emissions, including those related to energy storage, will gain in significance. The next step should focus on integrating physical cross-border electricity exchanges to complete the consumption perspective, as well as examining practical implementation to other countries.
Technology and Civic Virtue
Authors: Reijers Wessel 
Published: October 2023

AbstractToday, a major technological trend is the increasing focus on the person: technical systems personalize, customize, and tailor to the person in both beneficial and troubling ways. This trend has moved beyond the realm of commerce and has become a matter of public governance, where systems for citizen risk scoring, predictive policing, and social credit scores proliferate. What these systems have in common is that they may target the person and her ethical and political dispositions, her virtues. Virtue ethics is the most appropriate approach for evaluating the impacts of these new systems, which has translated in a revival of talk about virtue in technology ethics. Yet, the focus on individual dispositions has rightly been criticized for lacking a concern with the political collective and institutional structures. This paper advocates a new direction of research into civic virtue, which is situated in between personal dispositions and structures of governance. First, it surveys the discourse on virtue ethics of technology, emphasizing its neglect of the political dimension of impacts of emerging technologies. Second, it presents a pluralist conception of civic virtue that enables us to scrutinize the impact of technology on civic virtue on three different levels of reciprocal reputation building, the cultivation of internal goods, and excellence in the public sphere. Third, it illustrates the benefits of this conceptions by discussing some paradigmatic examples of emerging technologies that aim to cultivate civic virtue.
Cytotoxic phenazine and antiallergic phenoxazine alkaloids from an arctic Nocardiopsis dassonvillei SCSIO 502F
Authors: Song Yue , Li Qi-Yang , Cong Meng-Jing , Pang Xiao-Yan , Chen Bo , Liu Yong-Hong , Liao Li , Wang Jun-Feng 
Published: October 2023

AbstractMicrobes well-adapted to the Arctic Ocean are promising for producing novel compounds, due to their fancy strategies for adaptation and being under-investigated. Two new phenazine alkaloids (1 and 2) and one new phenoxazine (3) were isolated from Nocardiopsis dassonvillei 502F, a strain originally isolated from Arctic deep-sea sediments. AntiSMASH analysis of the genome of Nocardiopsis dassonvillei 502F revealed the presence of 16 putative biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs), including a phenazine BGC. Most of the isolated compounds were evaluated for their antibacterial, antiallergic, and cytotoxic activities. Among them, compounds 4 and 5 exhibited potent in vitro cytotoxic activities against osteosarcoma cell line 143B with IC50 values 0.16 and 20.0 μM, respectively. Besides, the results of antiallergic activities of compounds 6–8 exhibited inhibitory activities with IC50 values of 10.88 ± 3.05, 38.88 ± 3.29, and 2.44 ± 0.17 μg/mL, respectively (IC50 91.6 μM for the positive control loratadine).
Graphical Abstract
A hierarchical multi-agent allocation-action learning framework for multi-subtask games
Authors: Li Xianglong , Li Yuan , Zhang Jieyuan , Xu Xinhai , Liu Donghong 
Published: October 2023

AbstractGreat progress has been made in the domain of multi-agent reinforcement learning in recent years. Most work concentrates on solving a single task by learning the cooperative behaviors of agents. However, many real-world problems are normally composed of a set of subtasks in which the execution order follows a certain procedure. Cooperative behaviors should be learned on the premise that agents are first allocated to those subtasks. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical framework for learning the dynamic allocation of agents among subtasks, as well as cooperative behaviors. We design networks corresponding to agents and subnetworks, respectively, which constitute the whole hierarchical network. For the upper layer, a novel allocation learning mechanism is devised to map an agent network to a subtask network. Each agent network could only be assigned to only one subtask network at each time step. For the lower layer, an action learning module is designed to compute appropriate actions for each agent with the allocation result. The agent networks together with the subtask networks are updated by a common reward obtained from the environment. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we conduct experiments in two challenging environments, i.e., Google Research Football and SAVETHECITY. Empirical results show that our framework achieves much better performance than other recent methods.
NH3-Induced In Situ Etching Strategy Derived 3D-Interconnected Porous MXene/Carbon Dots Films for High Performance Flexible Supercapacitors
Authors: Wang Yongbin , Chen Ningjun , Zhou Bin , Zhou Xuefeng , Pu Ben , Bai Jia , Tang Qi , Liu Yan , Yang Weiqing 
Published: October 2023

Abstract2D MXene (Ti3CNTx) has been considered as the most promising electrode material for flexible supercapacitors owing to its metallic conductivity, ultra-high capacitance, and excellent flexibility. However, it suffers from a severe restacking problem during the electrode fabrication process, limiting the ion transport kinetics and the accessibility of ions in the electrodes, especially in the direction normal to the electrode surface. Herein, we report a NH3-induced in situ etching strategy to fabricate 3D-interconnected porous MXene/carbon dots (p-MC) films for high-performance flexible supercapacitor. The pre-intercalated carbon dots (CDs) first prevent the restacking of MXene to expose more inner electrochemical active sites. The partially decomposed CDs generate NH3 for in situ etching of MXene nanosheets toward 3D-interconnected p-MC films. Benefiting from the structural merits and the 3D-interconnected ionic transmission channels, p-MC film electrodes achieve excellent gravimetric capacitance (688.9 F g−1 at 2 A g−1) and superior rate capability. Moreover, the optimized p-MC electrode is assembled into an asymmetric solid-state flexible supercapacitor with high energy density and superior cycling stability, demonstrating the great promise of p-MC electrode for practical applications.
A review on graphene and graphene composites for application in electromagnetic shielding
Authors: Jovanović Svetlana , Huskić Miroslav , Kepić Dejan , Yasir Muhammad , Haddadi Kamel 
Published: October 2023

AbstractAs wireless solutions for communication, information, and sensing in modern society, electromagnetic waves (EMWs) have contributed considerably to the increase in the quality of people’s everyday lives. At the same time, EMWs produce electromagnetic pollution, issues with electromagnetic interference (EMI), and radio frequency (RF) signal leakage. These circumstances lead to high demand for efficient EMI shielding materials.To design an EMI shielding product, a compromise must be achieved between the electromagnetic shielding efficiency, the thickness of shielding materials, durability, mechanical strength, reduced volume and weight, and elasticity. Due to its ability to block EMWs, flexibility, lightweight, and chemical resistivity, graphene has been identified as a promising candidate material for efficient EMI shielding. Herein, we reviewed the studies that investigated various graphene-based composites as potential EMI shielding materials, with a focus on the composites based on graphene and silver nanowires due to their high EMI shielding efficiency, low production price, and favorable mechanical properties.
Cultural Developments Between the Final MSA and the Robberg at Umbeli Belli, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Authors: Blessing Matthias A. , Conard Nicholas J. , Bader Gregor D. 
Published: October 2023

AbstractThe Early Later Stone Age (ELSA) in southern Africa is one of the most poorly understood periods in the subcontinent. This is due to a lack of sites covering the time between the final MSA and the Robberg, but also due to a lack of agreement on what the ELSA actually is. In this paper, we present the lithic evidence from the site Umbeli Belli (KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa), covering the period between ~29,000 and 17,000 years ago. We find the changes which happen over the 12,000 years in between the final Middle Stone Age (MSA) and the Robberg at this site to be gradual and identify continuous technological and typological shifts. We compare these results to the lithic assemblages on a regional and supra-regional level, and in doing so, we find the patterns evident at Umbeli Belli to be repeated across southern Africa. Linking this to the research historical development of the term ELSA, we conclude that the MSA/LSA boundary is highly artificial and has become more of a hindrance than a means of structure in current archaeological research.
Mapping review of pain management programmes and psychological therapies for community-dwelling older people living with pain
Authors: Lam Natalie , Green John , Hallas Sarah , Forster Anne , Crocker Thomas F. , Andre Deirdre , Ellwood Alison , Clegg Andrew , Brown Lesley 
Published: October 2023

Abstract
Purpose
Persistent pain is common in older people and people living with frailty. Pain or the impact of pain on everyday life is potentially modifiable. We sought to map research evidence and information from randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of pain management programmes and psychological therapies targeting community-dwelling older people, and explore appropriate strategies and interventions for managing or reducing the negative impact of pain for older people, particularly those with frailty.

Method
A mapping review of pain management programmes and psychological therapies for community-dwelling older people living with chronic pain. We searched for systematic reviews of randomised controlled trials and for individual randomised controlled trials and extracted data from eligible studies.

Results
Searches resulted in 3419 systematic review records and 746 RCT records from which there were 33 eligible interventions identified in 31 eligible RCTs (48 reports). Broad aims of the interventions were to: improve physical, psychological, or social functioning; adjust the effects or sensation of pain psychologically; enhance self-care with self-management skills or knowledge. Common mechanisms of change proposed were self-efficacy enhanced by self-management tasks and skills, using positive psychological skills or refocusing attention to improve responses to pain, and practising physical exercises to improve physiological well-being and reduce restrictions from pain. Content of interventions included: skills training and activity management, education, and physical exercise. Interventions were delivered in person or remotely to individuals or in groups, typically in 1–2 sessions weekly over 5–12 weeks.

Conclusion
All the evaluated interventions appeared to show potential to provide some benefits to older people. None of the included studies assessed frailty. However, some of the included interventions appear appropriate for community-dwelling older people living with both frailty and pain.
Determination of the seismic vulnerability of infilled RC buildings according to the Quadrants assessment method
Authors: Shendkar Mangeshkumar R. , Kontoni Denise-Penelope N. , Işık Ercan 
Published: October 2023

AbstractThe earthquake vulnerability of the buildings has become more important after significant structural damages due to seismic events. The Quadrants assessment method is one of the effective procedures for the determination of the earthquake performance of the buildings. In this study, the impact of the infill walls on the structural vulnerability of reinforced concrete (RC) buildings was investigated using this method. Five different building models are designed such as bare RC frame, RC frame with strut infill as per field test (open ground story), RC frame with strut infill as per ASCE-41-06 (open ground story), full RC frame with strut infill as per field test (fully infilled), and full RC frame with strut infill as per ASCE-41-06 (fully infilled). All structural analyses were performed using an adaptive pushover analysis in the SeismoStruct software. The infills in the studied RC buildings were modeled as an equivalent strut as per field test or ASCE-41-06 code. The influence of different building models on the performance point, overstrength factor, response reduction factor, and ductility reduction factor was evaluated. The performance point is calculated as per the ASCE-41-06 code which is based on the “displacement coefficient method” and the application of the performance point is used to decide on the intervention/retrofit of RC structures through the “Quadrants assessment method”. In this study, the results depict that the strut width of the infill as per ASCE-41-06 is underestimated as compared to field test. Thus, the impact of the strut width is quantified on the seismic design parameters. It is concluded that there is a need for intervention/retrofit of the bare frame and open ground story RC infilled frame based on the “Quadrants assessment method” due to the absence of infills and the calculated values of the response reduction factor (R) obtained for the infilled RC building models are higher than the bare frame structure due to presence of infills.