Recovering low molecular weight extractives from degraded straw by oyster mushroom at the farm scale for high value use

The cultivation of mushrooms on wheat straw can be considered a solid state fermentation, yet following harvest the residual, partially degraded straw is discarded. During cultivation, the degradation of lignocellulose in the straw takes place by the fungus under the action of enzymes releasing degradation products with small molecular weight, some of which are potentially valuable. These compounds may be extracted from straw after mushroom cultivation in two stages: an aqueous extraction followed by a solvent extraction. The present work is focused on the first stage of the process. The aqueous extraction releases water soluble compounds, such as sugars and phenolics with lower molecular weight, which are easily obtained. The partially degraded straw may then be treated with organic solvents to release water insoluble lignin breakdown products, such as fatty acids, phenolics and other aromatics. It is important to conduct scale-up experiments at a scale that would reflect the amount of waste straw generated by a mushroom farm. A study was performed using a vessel of 300 L capacity with mixing impeller, by observing the influence of the temperature (20oC, 25oC, 40oC, 60oC and 80oC) and water-to-dry straw ratio (from 40:1 to 90:1) on the total extracted matter and especially on sugar and phenolic compounds yields. A microbial study of the aqueous extract was also performed at 20oC and 25oC to explain the high concentration of organic carbon in the extract under certain circumstances. The optimum extraction conditions were determined by taking into account the yield and the energy consumption of the process. The conclusion was that the extraction temperature can be conducted between 20oC and 25oC with good results for obtaining liquor which can be used in a biogas installation. The extraction should be conducted at 80oC to obtain greater yields of sugars and phenolics

The Physical Properties and Effective Temperature Scale of O-type Stars as a Function of Metallicity. III. More Results from the Magellanic Clouds

In order to better determine the physical properties of hot, massive stars as a function of metallicity, we obtained very high SNR optical spectra of 26 O and early B stars in the Magellanic Clouds. These allow accurate modeling even in cases where the He I 4471 line has an equivalent width of only a few tens of mA. The spectra were modeled with FASTWIND, with good fits obtained for 18 stars; the remainder show signatures of being binaries. We include stars in common to recent studies to investigate possible systematic differences. The "automatic" FASTWIND modeling method of Mokiem and collaborators produced temperatures 1100 K hotter on the average, presumably due to the different emphasis given to various temperature-sensitive lines. More significant, however, is that the automatic method always produced some "best" answer, even for stars we identify as composite (binaries). The temperatures found by the TLUSTY/CMFGEN modeling of Bouret, Heap, and collaborators yielded temperatures 1000 K cooler than ours, on average. Significant outliers were due either to real differences in the data (some of the Bouret/Heap data were contaminated by moonlight continua) or the fact we could detect the HeI line needed to better constrain the temperature. Our new data agrees well with the effective temperature scale we presented previously. We confirm that the "Of" emission-lines do not track luminosity classes in the exact same manner as in Milky Way stars. We revisit the the issue of the "mass discrepancy", finding that some of the stars in our sample do have spectroscopic masses that are significantly smaller than those derived from stellar evolutionary models. We do not find that the size of the mass discrepancy is simply related to either effective temperature or surface gravity.Comment: ApJ, in pres

Thigh fat and muscle each contribute to excess cardiometabolic risk in South Asians, independent of visceral adipose tissue.

OBJECTIVE: To compare fat distribution and associations between fat depots and cardiometabolic traits in South Asians and Europeans. METHODS: Five hundred and fourteen South Asians and 669 Europeans, aged 56-86. Questionnaires, record review, blood testing, and coronary artery calcification scores provided diabetes and clinical plus subclinical coronary heart disease (CHD) diagnoses. Abdominal visceral (VAT) and subcutaneous adipose tissue, thigh subcutaneous adipose tissue (TSAT), intermuscular and intramuscular thigh fat and thigh muscle were measured by CT. RESULTS: Accounting for body size, South Asians had greater VAT and TSAT than Europeans, but less thigh muscle. Associations between depots and disease were stronger in South Asians than Europeans. In multivariable analyses in South Asians, VAT was positively associated with diabetes and CHD, while TSAT and thigh muscle were protective for diabetes, and thigh muscle for CHD. Differences in VAT and thigh muscle only partially explained the excess diabetes and CHD in South Asians versus Europeans. Insulin resistance did not account for the effects of TSAT or thigh muscle. CONCLUSIONS: Greater VAT and TSAT and lesser thigh muscle in South Asians contributed to ethnic differences in cardiometabolic disease. Effects of TSAT and thigh muscle were independent of insulin resistance

Invariants of Artinian Gorenstein Algebras and Isolated Hypersurface Singularities

We survey our recently proposed method for constructing biholomorphic invariants of quasihomogeneous isolated hypersurface singularities and, more generally, invariants of graded Artinian Gorenstein algebras. The method utilizes certain polynomials associated to such algebras, called nil-polynomials, and we compare them with two other classes of polynomials that have also been used to produce invariants.Comment: 13 page

Is treatment for alcohol use disorder associated with reductions in criminal offending? A national data linkage cohort study in England.

BACKGROUND: This is the first English national study of change in criminal offending following treatment for alcohol use disorder (AUD). METHODS: All adults treated for AUD by all publicly funded treatment services during April 2008-March 2009 (n=53,017), with data linked to the Police National Computer (April 2006-November 2011). Pre-treatment offender sub-populations were identified by Latent Profile Analysis. The outcome measure was the count of recordable criminal offences during two-year follow-up after admission. A mixed-effects, Poisson regression modelled outcome, adjusting for demographics and clinical information, the latent classes, and treatment exposure covariates. RESULTS: Twenty-two percent of the cohort committed one or more offences in the two years pre-treatment (n=11,742; crude rate, 221.5 offenders per 1000). During follow-up, the number of offenders and offences fell by 23.5% and 24.0%, respectively (crude rate, 69.4 offenders per 1000). During follow-up, a lower number of offences was associated with: completing treatment (adjusted incident rate ratio [IRR] 0.82; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.79-0.85); receiving inpatient detoxification (IRR 0.84; CI 0.80-0.89); or community pharmacological therapy (IRR 0.89; CI 0.84-0.96). Reconviction was reduced in the sub-population characterised by driving offences (n=1,140; 11.7%), but was relatively high amongst acquisitive (n=768; 58.3% reconvicted) and violent offending sub-populations (n=602; 77.6% reconvicted). CONCLUSIONS: Reduced offending was associated with successful completion of AUD treatment and receiving inpatient and pharmacological therapy, but not enrolment in psychological and residential interventions. Treatment services (particularly those providing psychological therapy and residential care) should be alert to offending, especially violent and acquisitive crime, and enhance crime reduction interventions

Source-Free Adaptation to Measurement Shift via Bottom-Up Feature Restoration

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to adapt a model trained on labelled data in a source domain to unlabelled data in a target domain without access to the source-domain data during adaptation. Existing methods for SFDA leverage entropy-minimization techniques which: (i) apply only to classification; (ii) destroy model calibration; and (iii) rely on the source model achieving a good level of feature-space class-separation in the target domain. We address these issues for a particularly pervasive type of domain shift called measurement shift which can be resolved by restoring the source features rather than extracting new ones. In particular, we propose Feature Restoration (FR) wherein we: (i) store a lightweight and flexible approximation of the feature distribution under the source data; and (ii) adapt the feature-extractor such that the approximate feature distribution under the target data realigns with that saved on the source. We additionally propose a bottom-up training scheme which boosts performance, which we call Bottom-Up Feature Restoration (BUFR). On real and synthetic data, we demonstrate that BUFR outperforms existing SFDA methods in terms of accuracy, calibration, and data efficiency, while being less reliant on the performance of the source model in the target domain.Comment: ICLR 2022 (Spotlight

`Island Surfing' Mechanism of Electron Acceleration During Magnetic Reconnection

One of the key unresolved problems in the study of space plasmas is to explain the production of energetic electrons as magnetic field lines `reconnect' and release energy in a exposive manner. Recent observations suggest possible roles played by small scale magnetic islands in the reconnection region, but their precise roles and the exact mechanism of electron energization have remained unclear. Here we show that secondary islands generated in the reconnection region are indeed efficient electron accelerators. We found that, when electrons are trapped inside the islands, they are energized continuously by the reconnection electric field prevalent in the reconnection diffusion region. The size and the propagation speed of the secondary islands are similar to those of islands observed in the magnetotail containing energertic electrons.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, submitted to J. Geophys. Res

Cell organization in soft media due to active mechanosensing

Adhering cells actively probe the mechanical properties of their environment and use the resulting information to position and orient themselves. We show that a large body of experimental observations can be consistently explained from one unifying principle, namely that cells strengthen contacts and cytoskeleton in the direction of large effective stiffness. Using linear elasticity theory to model the extracellular environment, we calculate optimal cell organization for several situations of interest and find excellent agreement with experiments for fibroblasts, both on elastic substrates and in collagen gels: cells orient in the direction of external tensile strain, they orient parallel and normal to free and clamped surfaces, respectively, and they interact elastically to form strings. Our method can be applied for rational design of tissue equivalents. Moreover our results indicate that the concept of contact guidance has to be reevaluated. We also suggest that cell-matrix contacts are upregulated by large effective stiffness in the environment because in this way, build-up of force is more efficient.Comment: Revtex, 7 pages, 4 Postscript files include

Twistor theory on a finite graph

We show how the description of a shear-free ray congruence in Minkowski space as an evolving family of semi-conformal mappings can naturally be formulated on a finite graph. For this, we introduce the notion of holomorphic function on a graph. On a regular coloured graph of degree three, we recover the space-time picture. In the spirit of twistor theory, where a light ray is the more fundamental object from which space-time points should be derived, the line graph, whose points are the edges of the original graph, should be considered as the basic object. The Penrose twistor correspondence is discussed in this context