Suitability of anthropogeomorphic materials as soil amendments: a biogeochemical study

In recent decades, the amount of waste produced by humans has increased greatly. Society demands increasingly high standards of production and quality, leading to the production of greater volumes of waste and consequent increases in the associated risks of contamination. There is international concern regarding the management of all types of wastes and the consequent environmental degradation and public health risks. Land application of wastes, such as animal excrement or vegetable residues, has been carried out since long time ago. However, many environmental problems have now appeared primary because the final goal of the addition of wastes to soils is often the elimination of wastes rather than the enhancement of soil fertility or improvement of soil physical properties. The objective of this thesis was to evaluate the suitability of anthropogeomorphic wastes as soil amendment or fertilizer. For this, different studies have been carried out and described in six chapters: four of them describe the study of Technosols and the other two describe the geochemical accelerated weathering study of biochar and biomass fly ash

‘He Sang the Story’ Narrative and Poetic Identity in Keats’s Work

Story-telling is a mode central to the practice and achievement of John Keats. In ‘Sleep and Poetry’, he refers to life as ‘The reading of an ever-changing tale’. This line suggests his sense of the centrality of narrative to human experiences. Yet the Keatsian narrative is as a medium for Keats to investigate the nature and development of his poetic identity. His idea of poetry and of the poet, and his narrative figuring of himself as a poet are my subject, as they are his, when in the phrase the thesis takes for its title Keats writes of a poet in Endymion, ‘He sang the story up into the air’ (II, 838). Recent scholarship has interpreted Keats’s narrative techniques in different ways. Critical approaches have modified the Bloomian concept of the anxiety of influence by using a reader response approach, or have taken on board or swerved from a McGannian New Historicist perspective. In the process Keats’s formal achievement, once celebrated by critics such as Walter Jackson Bate and Helen Vendler, has received comparatively little attention. This thesis, adopting ideas and approaches associated with narratology (including its application to lyric poetry), analyses Keats’s poetic career, focusing on the poetry’s narrative techniques and its treatment of the narrator’s role. My approach might be described as aiming to accomplish a ‘poetics of attention’. This thesis consists of eight chapters. Chapter one discusses ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’ and ‘Sleep and Poetry’, poems that are crucial in understanding Keats’s use of narrative to explore his poetic identity. In chapter two, concentrating on Endymion’s enactment of imaginative struggle, I attempt to show the purposeful function of the poem’s ‘wandering’ and complex narrative structure, which allows Keats space to develop and examine his beliefs about mythology, beauty, and visionary quest. Chapters three and four examine narrative techniques and the narrator’s role in ‘Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil’ and ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ as Keats questions the nature and function of ‘old Romance’, even as he employs it, thus bringing a modern self-consciousness to bear on his task. Chapters five and six are devoted to the narrativity shown in the odes. Such an exploration of the ‘lyric narrative’ seeks to shed new light on our understanding of Keats’s odes. Chapter seven considers the ambivalence that Keats creates in ‘Lamia’. Lamia’s enigmatic identity as a woman and a serpent makes the narrative complex and the narrator perplexed. Chapter eight analyses ‘Hyperion: A Fragment’ and ‘The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream’, arguing that Keats uses these two poems as narratives to explore his idea of poetry and of the poet. In his short creative life, Keats demonstrates different and various narrative skills. These narrative skills shape his ideas and ideals of poetry as well as of the poet. Via his use of narrative, we are able to see the evolution of his poetic identity. He presents himself as what he recommended a poet should be, a shape-changing figure, who might be best described as a ‘camelion Poet’

Associated production of the charged Higgs boson and single top quark at the LHC

The left-right twin Higgs(LRTH) model predicts the existence of the charged Higgs $\phi^{\pm}$. In this paper, we study the production of the charged Higgs boson $\phi^{-}$ with single top quark via the process $bg\to t\phi^{-}$ at the $CERN$ Large Hadron Collider(LHC). The numerical results show that the production cross section can reach the level of $10 pb$ in the reasonable parameter space of the LRTH model. We expect that, as long as it is not too heavy, the possible signatures of the heavy charged Higgs boson $\phi^{-}$ might be detected via the decay mode $\phi^{-}\to \bar{t}b$ at the LHC experiments.Comment: This paper has been withdrawn by the author(s) due to some mistakes in this pape

Twin Pregnancy with Gastroschisis in Both Twins

SUMMARYObjectiveGastroschisis is a congenital malformation characterized by an abdominal wall defect located laterally to a normal umbilicus. The cause of gastroschisis is unknown, but most authors consider it exogenous. We describe the case of a woman with a twin pregnancy in which both twins had gastroschisis.Case ReportA 17-year-old primiparous female was referred to our institution because of a twin pregnancy, with one twin diagnosed with gastroschisis at 34 weeks of gestation. Unfortunately, gastroschisis was noted in both twins, but no other anomalies were observed under level II sonographic evaluation. The twins were delivered by cesarean section at 36+weeks of gestation because of preterm labor and breech presentation of one fetus. Both twins presented with a 3-cm abdominal wall defect located to the right side of the umbilicus and a large portion of the bowel protruding that was not covered by membrane. Histopathology of the placenta revealed that the twins were diamniotic monochorionic. Chromosomal analysis of cord blood showed normal karyotype (46, XX) in both newborns.ConclusionThe cause of gastroschisis is unknown, although possible exogenous causes have been studied. The diagnosis of gastroschisis in twin pregnancy is always in late gestation. Therefore, maternal serum alpha feto-protein screening and a detailed prenatal ultrasound evaluation are recommended in multifetal pregnancies

(R)-1,1′-Binaphthalene-2,2′-diyl dicinnamate

In the title compound, C38H26O4, two cinnamo­yloxy groups are linked in a trans fashion to the two O atoms of optically active (R)-1,10-bi-2-naphthol. The dihedral angle between the mean planes of the two naphthyl groups is 71.8 (1)°. The crystal structure contains inter­molecular C—H⋯O and C—H⋯π inter­actions

Electronic Structures of Graphene Layers on Metal Foil: Effect of Point Defects

Here we report a facile method to generate a high density of point defects in graphene on metal foil and show how the point defects affect the electronic structures of graphene layers. Our scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) measurements, complemented by first principle calculations, reveal that the point defects result in both the intervalley and intravalley scattering of graphene. The Fermi velocity is reduced in the vicinity area of the defect due to the enhanced scattering. Additionally, our analysis further points out that periodic point defects can tailor the electronic properties of graphene by introducing a significant bandgap, which opens an avenue towards all-graphene electronics.Comment: 4 figure

2-Amino­benzimidazolium hydrogen sulfate

In the title salt, C7H8N3 +·HSO4 −, the benzimdazole ring system is planar [mean deviation 0.0086 (1) Å]. In the crystal, N—H⋯O and O—H⋯O hydrogen-bond inter­actions give rise to a layer motif

Sulforaphane induces adipocyte browning and promotes glucose and lipid utilization

Scope: Obesity is closely related to the imbalance of white adipose tissue storing excess calories, and brown adipose tissue dissipating energy to produce heat in mammals. Recent studies revealed that acquisition of brown characteristics by white adipocytes, termed “browning,” may positively contribute to cellular bioenergetics and metabolism homeostasis. The goal was to investigate the putative effects of natural antioxidant sulforaphane (1-isothiocyanate-4-methyl-sulfonyl butane; SFN) on browning of white adipocytes. Methods and Results: 3T3-L1 mature white adipocytes were treated with SFN for 48 h, and then the mitochondrial content, function, and energy utilization were assessed. SFN was found to induce 3T3-L1 adipocytes browning based on the increased mitochondrial content and activity of respiratory chain enzymes, whereas the mechanism involved the upregulation of nuclear factor E2-related factor 2/ sirtuin1/ peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma coactivator 1 alpha signaling. SFN enhanced uncoupling protein 1 expression, a marker for brown adipocyte, leading to the decrease in cellular ATP. SFN also enhanced glucose uptake and oxidative utilization, lipolysis and fatty acid oxidation in 3T3-L1 adipocytes. Conclusion: SFN-induced browning of white adipocytes enhanced the utilization of cellular fuel, and the application of SFN is a promising strategy to combat obesity and obesity-related metabolic disorder

Denoising Relation Extraction from Document-level Distant Supervision

Distant supervision (DS) has been widely used to generate auto-labeled data for sentence-level relation extraction (RE), which improves RE performance. However, the existing success of DS cannot be directly transferred to the more challenging document-level relation extraction (DocRE), since the inherent noise in DS may be even multiplied in document level and significantly harm the performance of RE. To address this challenge, we propose a novel pre-trained model for DocRE, which denoises the document-level DS data via multiple pre-training tasks. Experimental results on the large-scale DocRE benchmark show that our model can capture useful information from noisy DS data and achieve promising results.Comment: EMNLP 2020 short pape