Graphene-based Microbial Fuel Cell Studies with Starch in sub-Himalayan Soils

Microbial fuel cells with graphene based cathode and anode is the study of interest. Present work shows the capacity of sub-himalayan soil of Dehradun region of Uttarakhand, India holds potential to cater to power production from soil and organic waste matter. This can be speculated to power less energy intensive devices at the smallest level. Peak voltage of 0.69 V and current density datas are reported.Renewable energy utilization with such samples represents a sustainable usage. The soil bacterias are capable to metabolize the metal substances in the soil through symbiosis. Electric bacteria create conductive pili called nanowires enabling them to transfer electron and this can be utilized effectively.Direct electron transfer mechanisms have been investigated for this work. The biofilm developed by soil bacterias represent the central idea in making value from waste matter

Parameterized Complexity of Two-Interval Pattern Problem

A 2-interval is the union of two disjoint intervals on the real line. Two 2-intervals D? and D? are disjoint if their intersection is empty (i.e., no interval of D? intersects any interval of D?). There can be three different relations between two disjoint 2-intervals; namely, preceding (<), nested (?) and crossing (?). Two 2-intervals D? and D? are called R-comparable for some R?{<,?,?}, if either D?RD? or D?RD?. A set ? of disjoint 2-intervals is ?-comparable, for some ??{<,?,?} and ???, if every pair of 2-intervals in ? are R-comparable for some R??. Given a set of 2-intervals and some ??{<,?,?}, the objective of the {2-interval pattern problem} is to find a largest subset of 2-intervals that is ?-comparable. The 2-interval pattern problem is known to be W[1]-hard when |?|=3 and NP-hard when |?|=2 (except for ?={<,?}, which is solvable in quadratic time). In this paper, we fully settle the parameterized complexity of the problem by showing that it is W[1]-hard for both ?={?,?} and ?={<,?} (when parameterized by the size of an optimal solution). This answers the open question posed by Vialette [Encyclopedia of Algorithms, 2008]

Boundary Labeling for Rectangular Diagrams

Given a set of n points (sites) inside a rectangle R and n points (label locations or ports) on its boundary, a boundary labeling problem seeks ways of connecting every site to a distinct port while achieving different labeling aesthetics. We examine the scenario when the connecting lines (leaders) are drawn as axis-aligned polylines with few bends, every leader lies strictly inside R, no two leaders cross, and the sum of the lengths of all the leaders is minimized. In a k-sided boundary labeling problem, where 1 <= k <= 4, the label locations are located on the k consecutive sides of R. In this paper we develop an O(n^3 log n)-time algorithm for 2-sided boundary labeling, where the leaders are restricted to have one bend. This improves the previously best known O(n^8 log n)-time algorithm of Kindermann et al. (Algorithmica, 76(1):225-258, 2016). We show the problem is polynomial-time solvable in more general settings such as when the ports are located on more than two sides of R, in the presence of obstacles, and even when the objective is to minimize the total number of bends. Our results improve the previous algorithms on boundary labeling with obstacles, as well as provide the first polynomial-time algorithms for minimizing the total leader length and number of bends for 3- and 4-sided boundary labeling. These results settle a number of open questions on the boundary labeling problems (Wolff, Handbook of Graph Drawing, Chapter 23, Table 23.1, 2014)

Sugarcane Bagasse-Derived Activated Carbon- (AC-) Epoxy Vitrimer Biocomposite: Thermomechanical and Self-Healing Performance

Vitrimeric materials have emerged as fascinating and sustainable materials owing to their malleability, reprocessability, and recyclability. Sustainable vitrimeric materials can be prepared by reinforcing polymeric matrix with bioderived fillers. In the current work, a sustainable vitrimer is prepared by incorporating biomass-derived activated carbon (AC) filler into the epoxy matrix to achieve enhanced thermal and mechanical properties. Thus, prepared biocomposite vitrimers demonstrate a lower-temperature self-healing (70°C for 5 min) via disulfide exchanges, compared to the pristine epoxy vitrimers (80°C for 5 min). Significantly, the self-healing performances have been studied extensively with the flexural studies; and changes in material healing efficiency have been demonstrated based on the observed changes in modulus

Flavour Structure of R-violating Neutralino Decays at the LHC

We study signatures of R-parity violation in the production of supersymmetric particles at the LHC, and the subsequent decay of the lightest neutralino being the end product of a supersymmetric cascade decay. In doing so, we pay particular attention to the possible flavour structure of the operators, and how one may discriminate between different possibilities. A neutralino LSP would couple to all quarks and leptons and a comparative study of its decays provides an optimal channel for the simultaneous study of all 45 R-violating operators. By studying the expected signals from all these operators, we demonstrate the ability to understand whether more than one coupling dominates, and to map the experimental signatures to operator hierarchies that can then be compared against theoretical models of flavour. Detailed comparisons with backgrounds, including those from MSSM cascade decays are made, using the PYTHIA event simulator.Comment: 47 pages, 22 figures; v2 matches JHEP versio

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License