bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Monitoring the thermal behavior of polyethylene 2,5‐furandicarboxylate using Raman spectroscopy
Authors: Bouita Mouad , Tinnes Jean‐Philippe , Ponçot Marc 
Published: April 2023

AbstractThis study investigates the thermal behavior of polyethylene 2,5‐furandicarboxylate using Raman spectroscopy. The study finds that multiple changes in the Raman spectrum at two different heating rates of 1 and 0.5 K/min provide different information about the thermal behavior of the sample. The study also shows that the derivative of the half‐width of the band at 1737 cm−1, which characterizes the stretching of the C=O double bond of the ester group, allows us to trace back to the DSC thermogram. The crystallinity was followed with quite a good precision and using two different spectral zones around 1029 and 1737 cm−1. The calculated crystallinity rate could be compared with the crystallinity rates obtained by integrating the total heat flow by DSC and that obtained by wide angle X‐ray scattering (WAXS). As a result, this study also allows us to understand the conformational changes that take place during heating, and especially those responsible for crystallization, which is the great advantage of Raman spectroscopy compared with other standard methods.
Ocean acidification has a strong effect on communities living on plastic in mesocosms
Authors: Zhang Xu , Zhang Ping , Deng Zichao , Huang Ruiping , Zhang Di , Tian Yang , Wang Na , Li He , Wang Xuyang , Jiang Xiaowen , Sun Jiazhen , Fu Qianqian , Yi Xiangqi , Qu Liming , Zhou Cong , Rao Yuming , Zeng Xiaorong , Hall‐Spencer Jason M. , Gao Guang , Gao Kunshan , Lin Xin 
Published: April 2023

AbstractWe conducted a mesocosm experiment to examine how ocean acidification (OA) affects communities of prokaryotes and eukaryotes growing on single‐use drinking bottles in subtropical eutrophic waters of the East China Sea. Based on 16S rDNA gene sequencing, simulated high CO2 significantly altered the prokaryotic community, with the relative abundance of the phylum Planctomycetota increasing by 49%. Under high CO2, prokaryotes in the plastisphere had enhanced nitrogen dissimilation and ureolysis, raising the possibility that OA may modify nutrient cycling in subtropical eutrophic waters. The relative abundance of pathogenic and animal parasite bacteria also increased under simulated high CO2. Our results show that elevated CO2 levels significantly affected several animal taxa based on 18S rDNA gene sequencing. For example, Mayorella amoebae were highly resistant, whereas Labyrinthula were sensitive to OA. Thus, OA may alter plastisphere food chains in subtropical eutrophic waters.
Automated optimization of spatial resolution for single‐sided NMR
Authors: Kiple Lyndi , Ballenger John , Keating Kristina , Balachandra Anagi M. , Meldrum Tyler 
Published: April 2023

AbstractSingle‐sided NMR instruments utilize inhomogeneous magnetic fields with strong gradients to nondestructively probe physical properties of materials. The sensitive region of this type of magnet is often a thin slice above the magnet's surface; measuring planar samples with high spatial resolution requires coplanarity between the sensitive region of the magnet and the sample region of interest. We developed an algorithmic approach to position flat samples coplanar with the magnet's sensitive region. The efficient and objective positioning process utilizes an adjustable stage that offers control over three degrees of freedom, and the optimal position for each sample is found with a quadtree algorithm. We show this algorithm is effective for positioning samples with various relaxation behaviors. We report resolution values that describe position optimization, acquisition constraints, and final spatial resolution for each sample. Measurements after optimized positioning had appropriate spatial resolution to distinguish physical regions of layered samples with different physical properties, namely, relaxation behavior. Our algorithmic positioning process can be implemented for planar samples in research and industrial settings to enhance spatial resolution of single‐sided NMR measurements.
Outcome of patients with undifferentiated embryonal sarcoma of the liver treated according to European soft tissue sarcoma protocols
Authors: Guérin Florent , Martelli Hélène , Rogers Timothy , Zanetti Ilaria , van Scheltinga Sheila Terwisscha , De Corti Federica , Burrieza Gabriella Guillen , Minard‐Colin Véronique , Orbach Daniel , van Noesel Max M. , Karanian Marie , Fajardo Raquel Dávila , Merks Johannes H. M. , Ferrari Andrea , Bisogno Gianni 
Published: April 2023

AbstractBackgroundTo assess the outcomes of pediatric patients with undifferentiated embryonal sarcoma of the liver (UESL) and treatment including at least surgery and systemic chemotherapy.MethodsThis study included patients aged up to 21 years with a pathological diagnosis of UESL prospectively enrolled from 1995 to 2016 in three European trials focusing on the effects of surgical margins, preoperative chemotherapy, use of radiotherapy (RT), and chemotherapy.ResultsOut of 65 patients with a median age at diagnosis of 8.7 years (0.6–20.8), 15 had T2 tumors, and one had lymph node spread, 14 were Intergroup Rhabdomyosarcoma Study (IRS) I, nine IRS II, 38 IRS III, and four IRS IV. Twenty‐eight upfront surgeries resulted in five operative spillages and 11 infiltrated surgical margins, whereas 37 delayed surgeries resulted in no spillages (p = .0119) and three infiltrated margins (p = .0238). All patients received chemotherapy, including anthracyclines in 47. RT was administered in 15 patients. With a median follow‐up of 78.6 months, 5‐year overall and event‐free survivals (EFS) were 90.1% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 79.2–95.5) and 89.1% (95% CI: 78.4–94.6), respectively. Two out four local relapses had previous infiltrated margins and two out of three patients with metastatic relapses received reduced doses of alkylating agents. Infiltrated margins (p = .1607), T2 stage (p = .3870), use of RT (p = .8731), and anthracycline‐based chemotherapy (p = .1181) were not correlated with EFS.ConclusionsMultimodal therapy improved the outcome of UESL. Neoadjuvant chemotherapy for pediatric patients increases the probability of complete surgical resection. The role of anthracyclines and RT for localized disease remains unclear.
Information overdose: Student performance and perceptions of pharmacology resources on exams
Authors: Kruidering‐Hall Marieke , Tuan Rupa Lalchandani 
Published: April 2023

AbstractPhysicians of the future will be expected to synthesize new knowledge and appropriately apply it in patient care. Here, we report on the effects of and student attitudes towards resource‐enhanced exams by comparing student performance on closed‐book exams with or without access to pharmacology flashcards. Setting: the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine (SOM), class of 2021 (N = 149), followed over 4 years. We provided pharmacology flashcards for studying purposes in all blocks; flashcards were only accessible during closed‐book exams in 2 of 5 blocks. We collected pharmacology open‐ended question (OEQ) scores and analyzed results using repeated measures ANOVA (SPSS). We collected MS4 survey data using Qualtrics and conducted a thematic content analysis. Performance on pharmacology questions on exams was not higher with access to pharmacology flashcards during exams. The number of students who passed pharmacology questions without flashcards on exams was as follows: 137 ± 3.7, 132 ± 5.0, and 134 ± 7.9 (average ± SEM). The number of students who passed pharmacology questions with flashcards on exams was as follows: 132 ± 6.6 and 120 ± 7.5. Survey comments revealed several themes. Access to pharmacology flashcards during exams allowed learners to focus on understanding the bigger picture and reduced stress. A subset of students reported having access to flashcards on pre‐clerkship exams hurt their preparation for clerkships. Flashcards as exam resources were received well by approximately half the class, who reported benefits including more time to focus on understanding bigger picture concepts and reduced stress.
Evaluation of the antimicrobial activity of sodium alginate films integrated with cinnamon essential oil and citric acid on sliced cooked ham
Authors: Lee Melissa , Rüegg Nadine , Yildirim Selçuk 
Published: April 2023

AbstractBio‐based antimicrobial films have been developed using sodium alginate and 6 wt% of cinnamon essential oil (CEO) as a volatile antimicrobial substance and 4 and 6 wt% of citric acid (CA) as a non‐volatile antimicrobial substance. Antimicrobial activity of the films was tested in in vitro tests against Escherichia coli and Listeria innocua by disc diffusion or vapour diffusion assay. Sodium alginate films containing CA exhibited a zone of inhibition between 30.86 ± 2.55 and 45.87 ± 1.90 against E. coli and L. innocua in the disc diffusion assays. Films containing CEO also showed significant antimicrobial activities in the vapour diffusion assays that resulted in a log reduction of 5.3 for E. coli and 3.2 for L. innocua after 6 days. Antimicrobial activities of all films were also tested against L. innocua on sliced cooked ham. Films containing CEO did not prevent the growth of L. innocua inoculated on ham. On the other hand, sodium alginate films with CA fully inhibited the growth of L. innocua on ham during storage at 7.5°C for 12 days resulting in a bacterial count below the detection limit after 12 days. The addition of antimicrobial substances in sodium alginate films resulted in a slight colour change (but significant) and reduced the tensile strength of the films significantly. Adding CA to sodium alginate films increased the moisture content (from 24.81% to 35.41–48.02%) as well as the elongation at break (from 11.3% to 22.6–33.2%) of the films.
Memory‐type control charts for censored reliability data
Authors: Ali Sajid , Shamim Rimsha , Shah Ismail , Alrweili Hleil , Marcon Giulia 
Published: April 2023

AbstractControl charts are commonly used to monitor a process to detect undesirable changes. The main goal of this work is to propose exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) and cumulative sum (CUSUM) control charts to track a process by utilizing type‐I censored generalized exponential (GE) distributed data. In particular, the censored data are replaced with the conditional expected value (CEV). A comparison between CUSUM and CUSUM ignoring unobserved covariates (CUSUM‐IUC) charts is also a part of this study. The GE distribution is considered due to its application in reliability analysis. The performance of the charts is evaluated by using the average run length along with the standard deviation of the run length. Furthermore, the study also examines the effect of smoothing parameters, censoring rate, and shifts on the proposed methodologies. The results indicate that the EWMA chart performs better than other schemes (CUSUM and CUSUM‐IUC) for shifts in the shape parameter of the GE distribution. Finally, the proposed schemes are also applied to a real‐life data set.
A model for measuring multi‐concern assurance of critical infrastructure control systems
Authors: Scalco Aleksandra , Simske Steve 
Published: April 2023

AbstractDigital transformation of engineering practice, paradigms, processes, and workforce engender agreement uncertainty among professionals, particularly in the critical industry control system field. Control systems are susceptible to cyber‐mediated changes that can uniquely affect the control of the physical world from data‐centric information systems. Change to the system can be introduced by any proposed or forced alteration that affects the acceptability, suitability, feasibility, or resiliency to perform its intended mission, either positively or negatively. The potential impact of the cybersecurity threat on control systems is difficult to quantify. Agreement among professionals about decision authority and Command and Control (C2) over this threat is even more challenging to quantify. Understanding what cybersecurity entails still needs to be widely understood by the critical infrastructure control system workforce, and the control system assets are not widely understood by the Information Technology (IT) workforce. This research introduces a model and methodology for measuring multi‐concern assurance through the statistical uncertainty analysis of Likert semantic differential scales. The model addresses agreement in priority, the lack of which means there might be competing aims, competing spending, and competing focus on different aspects of the cybersecurity governance or policy as examples. The outcome identifies where different types of professionals do not agree about cybersecurity readiness and best practices for critical infrastructure control systems.
Carcara: An Efficient Proof Checker and Elaborator for SMT Proofs in the Alethe Format
Authors: Andreotti Bruno , Lachnitt Hanna , Barbosa Haniel 
Published: April 2023

AbstractProofs from SMT solvers ensure correctness independently from implementation, which is often a requirement when solvers are used in safety-critical applications or proof assistants. Alethe is an established SMT proof format generated by the solvers veriT and cvc5, with reconstruction support in the proof assistants Isabelle/HOL and Coq. The format is close to SMT-LIB and allows both coarse- and fine-grained steps, facilitating proof production. However, it lacks a stand-alone checker, which harms its usability and hinders its adoption. Moreover, the coarse-grained steps can be too expensive to check and lead to verification failures. We presentCarcara, an independent proof checker and elaborator for Alethe, implemented in Rust. It aims to increase the adoption of the format by providing push-button proof-checking for Alethe proofs, focusing on efficiency and usability; and by providing elaboration for coarse-grained steps into fine-grained ones, increasing the potential success rate of checking Alethe proofs in performance-critical validators, such as proof assistants. We evaluateCarcaraover a large set of Alethe proofs generated from SMT-LIB problems and show that it has good performance and its elaboration techniques can make proofs easier to check.
The Packing Chromatic Number of the Infinite Square Grid is 15
Authors: Subercaseaux Bernardo , Heule Marijn J. H. 
Published: April 2023

AbstractA packing k-coloring is a natural variation on the standard notion of graph k-coloring, where vertices are assigned numbers from $$\{1, \ldots , k\}$$

{
1
,
…
,
k
}

, and any two vertices assigned a common color $$c \in \{1, \ldots , k\}$$

c
∈
{
1
,
…
,
k
}

need to be at a distance greater than c (as opposed to 1, in standard graph colorings). Despite a sequence of incremental work, determining the packing chromatic number of the infinite square grid has remained an open problem since its introduction in 2002. We culminate the search by proving this number to be 15. We achieve this result by improving the best-known method for this problem by roughly two orders of magnitude. The most important technique to boost performance is a novel, surprisingly effective propositional encoding for packing colorings. Additionally, we developed an alternative symmetry breaking method. Since both new techniques are more complex than existing techniques for this problem, a verified approach is required to trust them. We include both techniques in a proof of unsatisfiability, reducing the trusted core to the correctness of the direct encoding.
Inferring Needless Write Memory Accesses on Ethereum Bytecode
Authors: Albert Elvira , Correas Jesús , Gordillo Pablo , Román-Díez Guillermo , Rubio Albert 
Published: April 2023

AbstractEfficiency is a fundamental property of any type of program, but it is even more so in the context of the programs executing on the blockchain (known assmart contracts). This is because optimizing smart contracts has direct consequences on reducing the costs of deploying and executing the contracts, as there are fees to pay related to their bytes-size and to their resource consumption (calledgas). Optimizing memory usage is considered a challenging problem that, among other things, requires a precise inference of the memory locations being accessed. This is also the case for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode generated by the most-widely used compiler, , whose rather unconventional and low-level memory usage challenges automated reasoning. This paper presents a static analysis, developed at the level of the EVM bytecode generated by , that infers write memory accesses that are needless and thus can be safely removed. The application of our implementation on more than 19,000 real smart contracts has detected about 6,200 needless write accesses in less than 4 hours. Interestingly, many of these writes were involved in memory usage patterns generated by that can be greatly optimized by removing entire blocks of bytecodes. To the best of our knowledge, existing optimization tools cannot infer such needless write accesses, and hence cannot detect these inefficiencies that affect both the deployment and the execution costs of Ethereum smart contracts.
Non-invertible symmetries from discrete gauging and completeness of the spectrum
Authors: Arias-Tamargo Guillermo , Rodríguez-Gómez Diego 
Published: April 2023

Abstract
We study global 1- and (d − 2)-form symmetries for gauge theories based on disconnected gauge groups which include charge conjugation. For pure gauge theories, the 1-form symmetries are shown to be non-invertible. In addition, being the gauge groups disconnected, the theories automatically have a ℤ2 global (d − 2)-form symmetry. We propose String Theory embeddings for gauge theories based on these groups. Remarkably, they all automatically come with twist vortices which break the (d − 2)-form global symmetry. This is consistent with the conjectured absence of global symmetries in Quantum Gravity.
Tunable lipid-coated nanoporous silver sheet for characterization of protein-membrane interactions by surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS)
Authors: Zhu Hongni , Zhang Jianing , Dai Xin , Mesias Vince St. Dollente , Chi Huanyu , Wang Congcheng , Yeung Chi Shun , Chen Qing , Liu Wei , Huang Jinqing 
Published: April 2023

AbstractMembrane environments affect protein structures and functions through protein-membrane interactions in a wide range of important biological processes. To better study the effects from the lipid’s hydrophilic and hydrophobic interaction with protein on different membrane regions, we developed the lipid-coated nanoporous silver sheets to provide tunable supported lipid monolayer/bilayer environments for in situ surface-enhanced Raman vibrational spectroscopy (SERS) characterizations. Under the controllable surface pressure, lipid monolayer/bilayer was coated along the microscopic curved surface of nanoporous silver sheets to serve as a cell membrane mimic as well as a barrier to avoid protein denaturation while empowering the high SERS enhancements from the underlying metallic bases allowing detection sensitivity at low physiological concentrations. Moreover, we fine-tuned the lipid packing density and controlled the orientation of the deposited lipid bilayers and monolayers to directly monitor the protein structures upon interactions with various membrane parts/positions. Our results indicate that lysozyme adopted the α-helical structure in both hydrophilic and hydrophobic interaction with lipid membrane. Interestingly, alpha-synuclein folded into the α-helical structure on the negatively charged lipid heads, whereas the hydrophobic lipid tails induced the β-sheet structural conversion of alpha-synuclein originated from its unstructured monomers. These direct observations on protein hydrophilic and hydrophobic interaction with lipid membrane might provide profound insights into the formation of the β-sheet-containing alpha-synuclein oligomers for further membrane disruptions and amyloid genesis associated with Parkinson’s disease. Hence, with the controllability and tunability of lipid environments, our platform holds great promise for more general applications in investigating the influences from membranes and the correlative structures of proteins under both hydrophilic and hydrophobic effects.
Graphical Abstract
Safety and Efficacy of Mitoxantrone Hydrochloride Injection for Identification of Axillary Sentinel Lymph Nodes in Patients with Primary Breast Cancer
Authors: Elzayat Ibrahim , Abdelaal Mohamed , Monib Sherif 
Published: April 2023

AbstractBackgroundThe dual technique using blue dye in combination with a radioisotope is considered the gold standard for identifying sentinel lymph nodes (SLNs) in patients with breast cancer. Unfortunately, not all cancer centres have access to radioactive material, which jeopardizes the SLN identification rate and patient safety.AimWe aimed to assess the safety and efficacy of mitoxantrone hydrochloride injection (MHI) for identifying axillary SLNs in patients with primary breast cancer.Patients and methodsWe have conducted a prospective non‐randomized analysis of patients diagnosed with invasive breast cancer who agreed to participate in the study between December 2019 and December 2022. We have used the patient's medical records to collect the data. We have used the SLN intraoperative identification rate as a marker for the efficacy of the technique and both the immediate and delayed complication rates and routine blood tests as markers for the safety of the technique.ResultsOut of the 296 patients, 289 (97.6%) had their SLNs identified using MHI, while seven patients (2.3%) had four‐node sampling carried out because the SLNs were not identified. Liver functions were not significantly affected by MHI, and there was no technique‐related readmission or reported morbidity or mortality.ConclusionWe have found that the MHI technique is still inferior to the combined radioactive directed technique and patent blue V dye in SLN identification. Yet, it may serve as a safe and reliable alternative in cases where the radioactive technique is unavailable.