Operationalization of the best available techniques and best environmental practices in deep seabed mining regime: a regulatory perspective

Best Practices, including Best Available Techniques (BAT) and Best Environmental Practices (BEP), are typically included to provide for or promote particular practices, methods, measures, or standards in respect of the efficient recovery of a resource and the level of environmental protection. Deep seabed mining (DSM) is an activity to obtain mineral resources from the deep sea, which may have certain adverse impacts on the marine environment. International Seabed Authority (ISA), the regulator of DSM activities in the Area authorized by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), has introduced those terms in its Mining Code as critical tools for the reduction in environmental risks arising from DSM. Terms that are not included by the UNCLOS, such as BAT and BEP, are commonly invoked, yet often without specification in the regulatory discourse for DSM. In the absence of precise definitions and operational details, the terms BAT and BEP may not be able to function as anticipated in the DSM domain. Against this backdrop, this paper attempts to explore possible means by which the ISA might enable the contractor to operationalize the BAT and BEP, including providing definitions, their placement in the exploitation regulations, and the criteria for its operationalization in the Standards and Guidelines. This paper cites the existing international instruments that incorporate the terms BAT and BEP and takes particular note of DSM into account to highlight specific considerations for their practical implementation for DSM

Lattice Signature can be as Simple as Lattice Encryption

Existing lattice signature schemes are much less efficient than encryption schemes due to the rejection sampling paradigm. We give a new construction which avoids rejection sampling by using temporary public keys and structured secrets in a Bliss type scheme. Structured secrets also improve existing lattice encryption schemes to nearly the same extreme efficiency. Our signing algorithm is comparative with this optimized encryption efficiency. Our signature scheme allows the same key pair work as an encryption scheme. For lightweight implementation, our techniques allow integrating of public-key encryption and signature in a simple circuit which only needs to do small integer additions as the main part of computation

Specific structure and unique function define the hemicentin

Hemicentin has come a long way from when it was first identified in C. elegans as him-4 (High incidence of males). The protein is now a recognized player in maintaining the architectural integrity of vertebrate tissues and organs. Highly conserved hemicentin sequences across species indicate this gene’s ancient evolutionary roots and functional importance. In mouse, hemicentin is liberally distributed on the cell surface of many cell types, including epithelial cells, endothelial cells of the eye, lung, and uterus, and trophectodermal cells of blastocyst. Recent discoveries have uncovered yet another vital purpose of hemicentin 1. The protein also serves a unique function in mitotic cytokinesis, during which this extracellular matrix protein plays a key role in cleavage furrow maturation. Though understanding of hemicentin function has improved through new discoveries, much about this protein remains mysterious

Characteristics of prefrontal activity during emotional and cognitive processing in patients with bipolar disorder: A multi-channel functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

Bipolar disorder (BD) is a recurrent chronic mental disorder with a broad profile of functional deficits including disturbed emotional processing and cognitive impairments. The goal of the current study was to further explore the underlying neural mechanism of dysfunction in patients with BD from a comprehensive perspective of both cognition and emotion. Forty-six clinical patients with BD and forty-five healthy controls performed emotion induction task and verbal fluency task (VFT), with frontal activity measured by functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Our results show distinct hemodynamic activity in the prefrontal region during emotional and cognitive processing between patients with BD and healthy controls. Patients with BD exhibit valence-dependent prefrontal cortex (PFC) hemodynamic response to emotional stimuli, with bilateral frontal hypoactivity indicating decreased positive reactivity and left frontal hyperactivity indicating increased negative reactivity. On the other hand, patients with BD showed impaired performance with bilateral frontal hypoactivity during VFT. Taken together, frontal dysfunction of cognition and emotionality in patients with BD probed by fNIRS would be a potential biomarker in clinical assessment

High strength mullite-bond SiC porous ceramics fabricated by digital light processing

Fabricating SiC ceramics via the digital light processing (DLP) technology is of great challenge due to strong light absorption and high refractive index of deep-colored SiC powders, which highly differ from those of resin, and thus significantly affect the curing performance of the photosensitive SiC slurry. In this paper, a thin silicon oxide (SiO2) layer was in-situ formed on the surface of SiC powders by pre-oxidation treatment. This method was proven to effectively improve the curing ability of SiC slurry. The SiC photosensitive slurry was fabricated with solid content of 55 vol% and viscosity of 7.77 Pa s (shear rate of 30 s-1). The curing thickness was 50 μm with exposure time of only 5 s. Then, a well-designed sintering additive was added to completely convert low-strength SiO2 into mullite reinforcement during sintering. Complexshaped mullite-bond SiC ceramics were successfully fabricated. The flexural strength of SiC ceramics sintered at 1550 °C in air reached 97.6 MPa with porosity of 39.2 vol%, as high as those prepared by spark plasma sintering (SPS) techniques.</p

Information theory-based algorithm for in silico prediction of PCR products with whole genomic sequences as templates

BACKGROUND: A new algorithm for assessing similarity between primer and template has been developed based on the hypothesis that annealing of primer to template is an information transfer process. RESULTS: Primer sequence is converted to a vector of the full potential hydrogen numbers (3 for G or C, 2 for A or T), while template sequence is converted to a vector of the actual hydrogen bond numbers formed after primer annealing. The former is considered as source information and the latter destination information. An information coefficient is calculated as a measure for fidelity of this information transfer process and thus a measure of similarity between primer and potential annealing site on template. CONCLUSION: Successful prediction of PCR products from whole genomic sequences with a computer program based on the algorithm demonstrated the potential of this new algorithm in areas like in silico PCR and gene finding

Large Subcapsular Splenic Hematoma with a Large Pancreatic Pseudocyst Was Successfully Treated with Splenic Arterial Embolization and Ultrasound-Guided Percutaneous Drainage of Pancreatic Pseudocyst

Subcapsular splenic hematoma is a rare complication of pancreatitis. The management for subcapsular splenic hematoma remains controversial. We herein report a case of a large subcapsular splenic hematoma with a large pancreatic pseudocyst, which was successfully treated with splenic arterial embolization and ultrasound- (US-) guided percutaneous drainage of pancreatic pseudocyst, for the first time. A 44-year-old male suffered from recurrent abdominal pain for more than two years. He had previous 3 episodes of pancreatitis. A subcapsular splenic hematoma (16.0 × 16.0 × 7.6 cm) with pancreatic pseudocyst (13.5 × 10.0 × 8.0 cm) was shown on abdominal computed tomography (CT). He underwent splenic arterial embolization to decrease the blood supply of the spleen and then ultrasound-guided percutaneous drainage of the large pancreatic pseudocyst. After 2 weeks, the repeated CT-Abdomen showed the disappearance of pancreatic pseudocyst and multiple areas of infarction on the spleen, while the splenic subcapsular hematoma had also significantly reduced. The patient was discharged after almost a month of his hospital admission with the drainage tube attached, and about 2 weeks later the drainage tube was removed upon CT scan confirmation of decrease in the volume of the subcapsular hematoma. Patient had no abdominal symptoms at the 1.5-year follow-up

Iterative Energy-Efficient Stable Matching Approach for Context-Aware Resource Allocation in D2D Communications

Energy efficiency (EE) is critical to fully achieve the huge potentials of device-to-device (D2D) communications with limited battery capacity. In this paper, we consider the two-stage EE optimization problem, which consists of a joint spectrum and power allocation problem in the first stage, and a context-aware D2D peer selection problem in the second stage. We provide a general tractable framework for solving the combinatorial problem, which is NP-hard due to the binary and continuous optimization variables. In each stage, user equipments (UEs) from two finite and disjoint sets are matched in a two-sided stable way based on the mutual preferences. First, the preferences of UEs are defined as the maximum achievable EE. An iterative power allocation algorithm is proposed to optimize EE under a specific match, which is developed by exploiting nonlinear fractional programming and Lagrange dual decomposition. Second, we propose an iterative matching algorithm, which first produces a stable match based on the fixed preferences, and then dynamically updates the preferences according to the latest matching results in each iteration. Finally, the properties of the proposed algorithm, including stability, optimality, complexity, and scalability, are analyzed in detail. Numerical results validate the efficiency and superiority of the proposed algorithm under various simulation scenarios

Graphene oxide mediated self-sacrificial synthesis of LaCO 3 OH-Ni(OH) 2 @graphene hierarchical composite for photocatalytic H 2 evolution and supercapacitor

Abstract(#br)Herein, we designed a one-step lattice-confined etching perovskite nanoparticles and self-sacrificing graphene oxide (GO) induced self-assembly strategy to synthesize novel 3D nest-like LaCO 3 OH and flower-like Ni(OH) 2 @graphene (RGO) hierarchical composite as a high performance photocatalyst and electrode material. The lattice-confined effect regulates the concentration and distribution of nickel ions migrating from perovskite to GO and thus constructs a homogeneous Ni(OH) 2 @RGO nanostructure. La(OH) 3 formed by residual lattice frames react with CO 3 2− from self-sacrificing of GO self-assembly to form nest-like LaCO 3 OH, which is embedded in the Ni(OH) 2 @RGO nanosheets. GO was utilized as both morphology control reagent and self-sacrificed carbon source. Benefit from the extremely rapid transfer of electron on the homogeneous Ni(OH) 2 @RGO nanosheets and high light-harvesting capacity of 3D nest and flower-like composite of LaCO 3 OH-Ni(OH) 2 @RGO, the properties of photocatalysis and supercapacitor are greatly enhanced. The H 2 production rate of 1.3807 mmol h −1 g −1 has been achieved which is 13 times higher than pure LaCO 3 OH. Electrochemical studies showed that a specific capacitance of 572.47 F g −1 was obtained at a scan rate of 10 mv/s with 80% capacitance retention even after 20,000 cycles. This composite synthesized from GO mediated etching solid phase perovskite surface ion migration under lattice-confined action provides a novel technical route for the direct self-assembly of solid nanoparticles and GO to synthesize new functional materials