The magnetoelectrochemical switch

In the field of spintronics, the archetype solid-state two-terminal device is the spin valve, where the resistance is controlled by the magnetization configuration. We show here how this concept of spin-dependent switch can be extended to magnetic electrodes in solution, by magnetic control of their chemical environment. Appropriate nanoscale design allows a huge enhancement of the magnetic force field experienced by paramagnetic molecular species in solutions, which changes between repulsive and attractive on changing the electrodes' magnetic orientations. Specifically, the field gradient force created within a sub-100-nm-sized nanogap separating two magnetic electrodes can be reversed by changing the orientation of the electrodes' magnetization relative to the current flowing between the electrodes. This can result in a breaking or making of an electric nanocontact, with a change of resistance by a factor of up to 103. The results reveal how an external field can impact chemical equilibrium in the vicinity of nanoscale magnetic circuits

Nanotrench for nano and microparticle electrical interconnects

We present a simple and versatile patterning procedure for the reliable and reproducible fabrication of high aspect ratio (10 4 ) electrical interconnects that have separation distances down to 20 nm and lengths of several hundreds of microns. The process uses standard optical lithography techniques and allows parallel processing of many junctions, making it easily scalable and industrially relevant. We demonstrate the suitability of these nanotrenches as electrical interconnects for addressing micro and nanoparticles by realizing several circuits with integrated species. Furthermore, low impedance metal-metal low contacts are shown to be obtained when trapping a single metal-coated microsphere in the gap, emphasizing the intrinsic good electrical conductivity of the interconnects, even though a wet process is used. Highly resistive magnetite-based nanoparticles networks also demonstrate the advantage of the high aspect ratio of the nanotrenches for providing access to electrical properties of highly resistive materials, with leakage current levels below 1 pA. © 2010 IOP Publishing Ltd

Effect of the Ammonium Nitrate Levels on Intercropped Barley (Hordeum Vulgare L.) and Vetch (Vicia Villosa) under Weed Competition Manag

IntroductionIntensive agriculture, despite high production, has adverse environmental effects, mainly due to the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Therefore, we need alternative agricultural systems that are more economically and environmentally sustainable to produce crops. One of the sustainable methods in the production of agricultural products is intercropping. Intercropping of two or more species in a plot of land can increase biodiversity and resource utilization as agricultural perspective, which in turn can lead to increased yield stability. Intercropping uses resources more efficiently than monoculture, preventing the growth and spread of weeds by shading and suffocating weeds, and in some cases with allelopathic. Intercropping of cereals and legumes is recommended for the development of sustainable food production systems, especially in planting systems based on reduced consumption of foreign inputs. The importance of these systems depends on the nitrogen stabilized by the legumes. The aim of this experiment was to study the effects of row intercropping of barley and vetch and different levels of ammonium nitrate fertilizer on weed biomass, yield components and yield of two species in Karaj climatic condition.Materials and MethodsThis experiment was performed as a factorial split plot based on randomized complete block design in 2019-2020 cropping year in the research farm of the Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of Tehran. Main plots included three levels of ammonium nitrate fertilizer (0, 35 and 70 kg.ha-1) and sub-plots include different ratios of barley and vetch (100% barley, 80% barley: 20% vetch, 80% barley: 45% vetch, 80% barley: 70% vetch, 100% vetch, 80% vetch: 20% barley, 80% vetch: 45% barley, 80% vetch: 70% barley) weeding and non-weeding were in three replications. Plant density in sole barley and vetch were 250 plants per square meter. The method of cultivation in this study was additive intercropping. Seeds were sown on November 6th. The first stage of fertilization was done simultaneously with planting and one third was added to each plot and the second and third stages of fertilization were performed in two stages of stem emergence and spike emergence, respectively from ammonium nitrate fertilizer source. The final harvest was done on July 28th. Data were analyzed using SAS 9.1 software. The least significant difference test (P≤0.05) was used to compare the means.Results and DiscussionThe highest barley grain yield (432.44 g) was related to sole barley, 70 kg ammonium nitrate and weed control, which was not significantly different with 80% B: 45%V, 70 kg ammonium nitrate and weed control. Also, the highest yield of vetch grain (161.47 g) was obtained in sole vetch, application of 70 kg ammonium nitrate and weed control treatment, which was not significantly different with 80%V: 20%B intercropping, application of 70 kg ammonium nitrate and weed control treatment. Weeds in this experiment include: Wild oats (Avena fatua), ryegrass (Lolium temulentum), Bromus (Bromus tectorum), Fox tail (Alopecurus myosuroides), Wild mustard (Sinapis arvensis), Creeping Thistle (Cirsium arvense), London rocket (Sisymbrium irio), Cockspur grass (Echinochloa crus-galli) and Cornflower (Centaurea cyanus). The highest dry weight of weed (231.62 g) was observed in sole vetch, application of 70 kg.ha-1 ammonium nitrate fertilizer treatment. The highest land equivalent ratio LER (1.68) is related to 80% V: 70%B, non-application of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in weed control condition. Intercropping was successful in controlling weeds and using resources, thereby increasing the yield of plants in the experiment.ConclusionThe results obtained from the experiment showed that all different systems of barley and vetch intercropping had land equivalent ratio higher than one, which indicates the superiority of intercropping over pure crops in the land use and crop production. Intercropping treatments were also able to control weeds. Intercropping with high ability to suppress weeds were able to use more resources. On the other hand, vetch biologically stabilized nitrogen was able to reduce the need for fertilizer in plants

Deriving a dataset for agriculturally relevant soils from the Soil Landscapes of Canada (SLC) database for use in Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) simulations

The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model has been commonly used in Canada for hydrological and water quality simulations. However, preprocessing of critical data such as soils information can be laborious and time-consuming. The objective of this work was to preprocess the Soil Landscapes of Canada (SLC) database to offer a country-level soils dataset in a format ready to be used in SWAT simulations. A two-level screening process was used to identify critical information required by SWAT and to remove records with information that could not be calculated or estimated. Out of the 14&thinsp;063 unique soil records in the SLC, 11&thinsp;838 records with complete information were included in the dataset presented here. Important variables for SWAT simulations that are not reported in the SLC database (e.g., hydrologic soils groups (HSGs) and erodibility factor (K)) were calculated from information contained within the SLC database. These calculations, in fact, represent a major contribution to enabling the present dataset to be used for hydrological simulations in Canada using SWAT and other comparable models. Analysis of those variables indicated that 21.3&thinsp;%, 24.6&thinsp;%, 39.0&thinsp;%, and 15.1&thinsp;% of the soil records in Canada belong to HSGs 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively. This suggests that almost two-thirds of the soil records have a high (i.e., HSG 4) or relatively high (i.e., HSG 3) runoff generation potential. A spatial analysis indicated that 20.0&thinsp;%, 26.8&thinsp;%, 36.7&thinsp;%, and 16.5&thinsp;% of soil records belonged to HSG 1, HSG 2, HSG 3, and HSG 4, respectively. Erosion potential, which is inherently linked to the erodibility factor (K), was associated with runoff potential in important agricultural areas such as southern Ontario and Nova Scotia. However, contrary to initial expectations, low or moderate erosion potential was found in areas with high runoff potential, such as regions in southern Manitoba (e.g., Red River Valley) and British Columbia (e.g., Peace River watershed). This dataset will be a unique resource to a variety of research communities including hydrological, agricultural, and water quality modelers and is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.877298.</p

Microwave Swing Regeneration of Aqueous Monoethanolamine for Post-Combustion CO2 Capture

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grants EP/N024672/1, EP/J019720/1 and EP/J019704/1. Andrew MacDonald (University of Edinburgh) is thanked for contributions to some of the experimental work.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Global, regional, and national incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability for 354 diseases and injuries for 195 countries and territories, 1990-2017 : a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017

Background: The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2017 (GBD 2017) includes a comprehensive assessment of incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability (YLDs) for 354 causes in 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2017. Previous GBD studies have shown how the decline of mortality rates from 1990 to 2016 has led to an increase in life expectancy, an ageing global population, and an expansion of the non-fatal burden of disease and injury. These studies have also shown how a substantial portion of the world's population experiences non-fatal health loss with considerable heterogeneity among different causes, locations, ages, and sexes. Ongoing objectives of the GBD study include increasing the level of estimation detail, improving analytical strategies, and increasing the amount of high-quality data. Methods: We estimated incidence and prevalence for 354 diseases and injuries and 3484 sequelae. We used an updated and extensive body of literature studies, survey data, surveillance data, inpatient admission records, outpatient visit records, and health insurance claims, and additionally used results from cause of death models to inform estimates using a total of 68 781 data sources. Newly available clinical data from India, Iran, Japan, Jordan, Nepal, China, Brazil, Norway, and Italy were incorporated, as well as updated claims data from the USA and new claims data from Taiwan (province of China) and Singapore. We used DisMod-MR 2.1, a Bayesian meta-regression tool, as the main method of estimation, ensuring consistency between rates of incidence, prevalence, remission, and cause of death for each condition. YLDs were estimated as the product of a prevalence estimate and a disability weight for health states of each mutually exclusive sequela, adjusted for comorbidity. We updated the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a summary development indicator of income per capita, years of schooling, and total fertility rate. Additionally, we calculated differences between male and female YLDs to identify divergent trends across sexes. GBD 2017 complies with the Guidelines for Accurate and Transparent Health Estimates Reporting. Findings: Globally, for females, the causes with the greatest age-standardised prevalence were oral disorders, headache disorders, and haemoglobinopathies and haemolytic anaemias in both 1990 and 2017. For males, the causes with the greatest age-standardised prevalence were oral disorders, headache disorders, and tuberculosis including latent tuberculosis infection in both 1990 and 2017. In terms of YLDs, low back pain, headache disorders, and dietary iron deficiency were the leading Level 3 causes of YLD counts in 1990, whereas low back pain, headache disorders, and depressive disorders were the leading causes in 2017 for both sexes combined. All-cause age-standardised YLD rates decreased by 3·9% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 3·1–4·6) from 1990 to 2017; however, the all-age YLD rate increased by 7·2% (6·0–8·4) while the total sum of global YLDs increased from 562 million (421–723) to 853 million (642–1100). The increases for males and females were similar, with increases in all-age YLD rates of 7·9% (6·6–9·2) for males and 6·5% (5·4–7·7) for females. We found significant differences between males and females in terms of age-standardised prevalence estimates for multiple causes. The causes with the greatest relative differences between sexes in 2017 included substance use disorders (3018 cases [95% UI 2782–3252] per 100 000 in males vs s1400 [1279–1524] per 100 000 in females), transport injuries (3322 [3082–3583] vs 2336 [2154–2535]), and self-harm and interpersonal violence (3265 [2943–3630] vs 5643 [5057–6302]). Interpretation: Global all-cause age-standardised YLD rates have improved only slightly over a period spanning nearly three decades. However, the magnitude of the non-fatal disease burden has expanded globally, with increasing numbers of people who have a wide spectrum of conditions. A subset of conditions has remained globally pervasive since 1990, whereas other conditions have displayed more dynamic trends, with different ages, sexes, and geographies across the globe experiencing varying burdens and trends of health loss. This study emphasises how global improvements in premature mortality for select conditions have led to older populations with complex and potentially expensive diseases, yet also highlights global achievements in certain domains of disease and injury. Funding: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Diminishing benefits of urban living for children and adolescents’ growth and development

Optimal growth and development in childhood and adolescence is crucial for lifelong health and well-being1–6. Here we used data from 2,325 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight from 71 million participants, to report the height and body-mass index (BMI) of children and adolescents aged 5–19 years on the basis of rural and urban place of residence in 200 countries and territories from 1990 to 2020. In 1990, children and adolescents residing in cities were taller than their rural counterparts in all but a few high-income&nbsp;countries. By 2020, the urban height advantage became smaller in most countries, and in many high-income western countries it reversed into a small urban-based disadvantage. The exception was for boys in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa and in some countries in Oceania, south Asia and the region of central Asia, Middle East and north Africa. In these countries, successive cohorts of boys from rural places either did not gain height or possibly became shorter, and hence fell further behind their urban peers. The difference between the age-standardized mean BMI of children in urban and rural areas was &lt;1.1 kg m–2 in the vast majority of&nbsp;countries. Within this small range, BMI increased slightly more in cities than in rural areas, except in south Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and some countries in central and eastern Europe. Our results show that in much of the world, the growth and developmental advantages of living in cities have diminished in the twenty-first century, whereas in much of sub-Saharan Africa they have amplified

Repositioning of the global epicentre of non-optimal cholesterol

High blood cholesterol is typically considered a feature of wealthy western countries1,2. However, dietary and behavioural determinants of blood cholesterol are changing rapidly throughout the world3 and countries are using lipid-lowering medications at varying rates. These changes can have distinct effects on the levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol and non-HDL cholesterol, which have different effects on human health4,5. However, the trends of HDL and non-HDL cholesterol levels over time have not been previously reported in a global analysis. Here we pooled 1,127 population-based studies that measured blood lipids in 102.6 million individuals aged 18 years and older to estimate trends from 1980 to 2018 in mean total, non-HDL and HDL cholesterol levels for 200 countries. Globally, there was little change in total or non-HDL cholesterol from 1980 to 2018. This was a net effect of increases in low- and middle-income countries, especially in east and southeast Asia, and decreases in high-income western countries, especially those in northwestern Europe, and in central and eastern Europe. As a result, countries with the highest level of non-HDL cholesterol—which is a marker of cardiovascular risk—changed from those in western Europe such as Belgium, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Malta in 1980 to those in Asia and the Pacific, such as Tokelau, Malaysia, The Philippines and Thailand. In 2017, high non-HDL cholesterol was responsible for an estimated 3.9 million (95% credible interval 3.7 million–4.2 million) worldwide deaths, half of which occurred in east, southeast and south Asia. The global repositioning of lipid-related risk, with non-optimal cholesterol shifting from a distinct feature of high-income countries in northwestern Europe, north America and Australasia to one that affects countries in east and southeast Asia and Oceania should motivate the use of population-based policies and personal interventions to improve nutrition and enhance access to treatment throughout the world

Volcano eruption algorithm for solving optimization problems

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer in Neural Computing and Applications on 30/06/2020, available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-020-05124-x The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Meta-heuristic algorithms have been proposed to solve several optimization problems in different research areas due to their unique attractive features. Traditionally, heuristic approaches are designed separately for discrete and continuous problems. This paper leverages the meta-heuristic algorithm for solving NP-hard problems in both continuous and discrete optimization fields, such as nonlinear and multi-level programming problems through extensive simulations of volcano eruption process. In particular, a new optimization solution named Volcano Eruption Algorithm (VEA) proposed in this paper, which is inspired from the nature of volcano eruption. The feasibility and efficiency of the algorithm are evaluated using numerical results obtained through several test problems reported in the state-of-theart literature. Based on the solutions and number of required iterations, we observed that the proposed meta-heuristic algorithm performs remarkably well to solve NP-hard problem. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is applied to solve some large-size benchmarking LP and Internet of Vehicles (IoV) problems efficiently

The unfinished agenda of communicable diseases among children and adolescents before the COVID-19 pandemic, 1990-2019: a systematic analysis of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

BACKGROUND: Communicable disease control has long been a focus of global health policy. There have been substantial reductions in the burden and mortality of communicable diseases among children younger than 5 years, but we know less about this burden in older children and adolescents, and it is unclear whether current programmes and policies remain aligned with targets for intervention. This knowledge is especially important for policy and programmes in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We aimed to use the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study 2019 to systematically characterise the burden of communicable diseases across childhood and adolescence. METHODS: In this systematic analysis of the GBD study from 1990 to 2019, all communicable diseases and their manifestations as modelled within GBD 2019 were included, categorised as 16 subgroups of common diseases or presentations. Data were reported for absolute count, prevalence, and incidence across measures of cause-specific mortality (deaths and years of life lost), disability (years lived with disability [YLDs]), and disease burden (disability-adjusted life-years [DALYs]) for children and adolescents aged 0-24 years. Data were reported across the Socio-demographic Index (SDI) and across time (1990-2019), and for 204 countries and territories. For HIV, we reported the mortality-to-incidence ratio (MIR) as a measure of health system performance. FINDINGS: In 2019, there were 3·0 million deaths and 30·0 million years of healthy life lost to disability (as measured by YLDs), corresponding to 288·4 million DALYs from communicable diseases among children and adolescents globally (57·3% of total communicable disease burden across all ages). Over time, there has been a shift in communicable disease burden from young children to older children and adolescents (largely driven by the considerable reductions in children younger than 5 years and slower progress elsewhere), although children younger than 5 years still accounted for most of the communicable disease burden in 2019. Disease burden and mortality were predominantly in low-SDI settings, with high and high-middle SDI settings also having an appreciable burden of communicable disease morbidity (4·0 million YLDs in 2019 alone). Three cause groups (enteric infections, lower-respiratory-tract infections, and malaria) accounted for 59·8% of the global communicable disease burden in children and adolescents, with tuberculosis and HIV both emerging as important causes during adolescence. HIV was the only cause for which disease burden increased over time, particularly in children and adolescents older than 5 years, and especially in females. Excess MIRs for HIV were observed for males aged 15-19 years in low-SDI settings. INTERPRETATION: Our analysis supports continued policy focus on enteric infections and lower-respiratory-tract infections, with orientation to children younger than 5 years in settings of low socioeconomic development. However, efforts should also be targeted to other conditions, particularly HIV, given its increased burden in older children and adolescents. Older children and adolescents also experience a large burden of communicable disease, further highlighting the need for efforts to extend beyond the first 5 years of life. Our analysis also identified substantial morbidity caused by communicable diseases affecting child and adolescent health across the world. FUNDING: The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council Centre for Research Excellence for Driving Investment in Global Adolescent Health and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation