The effect of the ion beam energy on the properties of indium tin oxide thin films prepared by ion beam assisted deposition

Indium tin oxide (ITO) thin films have been deposited onto polycarbonate substrates by ion beam assisted deposition technique at room temperature. The structural, optical and electrical properties of the films have been characterized by X-ray diffraction, atomic force microscopy, optical transmittance, ellipsometric and Hall effect measurements. The effect of the ion beam energy on the properties of the films has been studied. The optical parameters have been obtained by fitting the ellipsometric spectra. It has been found that high quality ITO film (low electrical resistivity and high optical transmittance) can be obtained at low ion beam energy. In addition, the ITO film prepared at low ion beam energy gives a high reflectance in IR region which is useful for some electromagnetic wave shielding applications.Fundação Calouste Gulbenkia

Occurrence and molecular characterization of Cryptosporidium in dogs in Henan Province, China

BACKGROUND: Cryptosporidiosis in dogs has been reported worldwide, involving both asymptomatic and diarrheic dogs. Large-scale surveys of Cryptosporidium infection in dogs have been performed in some countries using differents diagnostic methods. But, few data are available on the infection rate and molecular characteristics of Cryptosporidium spp. in dogs in China. RESULT: In this study, 770 fecal samples from 66 locations in Henan Province were examined. The average Cryptosporidium infection rate was 3.8%, with dogs in kennels having the highest rate of 7.0% (χ(2) = 14.82, P < 0.01). The infection rate was 8.0% in dogs younger than 90 days, which was significantly higher than that in the other age groups (1.1–3.8%;χ(2) = 18.82, P < 0.01). No association was noted between the infection rate and the sex of the dogs. Twenty-nine Cryptosporidium-positive samples were amplified at the small subunit rRNA (SSU rRNA), 70-kDa heat shock protein (HSP70), and actin loci using PCR. Sequence analysis of these amplicons identified only Cryptosporidium canis, which showed 100% identity with the published sequences of the SSU rRNA, HSP70, and actin genes. CONCLUSIONS: Our results confirm that C. canis is popular in the dog population in China, considering the large number of dogs in China and the close contact between dogs and humans, the role of C. canis in the transmission of human cryptosporidiosis warrants attention

Phase-Specific Augmented Reality Guidance for Microscopic Cataract Surgery Using Long-Short Spatiotemporal Aggregation Transformer

Phacoemulsification cataract surgery (PCS) is a routine procedure conducted using a surgical microscope, heavily reliant on the skill of the ophthalmologist. While existing PCS guidance systems extract valuable information from surgical microscopic videos to enhance intraoperative proficiency, they suffer from non-phasespecific guidance, leading to redundant visual information. In this study, our major contribution is the development of a novel phase-specific augmented reality (AR) guidance system, which offers tailored AR information corresponding to the recognized surgical phase. Leveraging the inherent quasi-standardized nature of PCS procedures, we propose a two-stage surgical microscopic video recognition network. In the first stage, we implement a multi-task learning structure to segment the surgical limbus region and extract limbus region-focused spatial feature for each frame. In the second stage, we propose the long-short spatiotemporal aggregation transformer (LS-SAT) network to model local fine-grained and global temporal relationships, and combine the extracted spatial features to recognize the current surgical phase. Additionally, we collaborate closely with ophthalmologists to design AR visual cues by utilizing techniques such as limbus ellipse fitting and regional restricted normal cross-correlation rotation computation. We evaluated the network on publicly available and in-house datasets, with comparison results demonstrating its superior performance compared to related works. Ablation results further validated the effectiveness of the limbus region-focused spatial feature extractor and the combination of temporal features. Furthermore, the developed system was evaluated in a clinical setup, with results indicating remarkable accuracy and real-time performance. underscoring its potential for clinical applications

Greenhouse gas balances and yield-scaled emissions for storage and field application of organic fertilizers derived from cattle manure

Manure treatment such as anaerobic digestion and solid-liquid separation has shown a potential to abate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but few studies have considered GHG emissions from both storage and field application regarding crop yield. In this study, four different organic fertilizers were studied: untreated cattle manure (CA); digestate of cattle manure anaerobically co-digested with grass-clover (DD); a liquid fraction from the separation of DD (LF); and a liquid fraction derived from a biogas desulfurization biofilter enriched with sulfur and ammonium (NS). The CH4, N2O and NH3 emissions during storage of CA, DD and LF between August and November 2020 (11 weeks) were quantified. Storage continued until April 2021 when these materials, as well as the NS fertilizer and a mineral NKS fertilizer, were applied at a rate of 100 kg total N/ ha to spring barley. N2O emissions and soil mineral N content were monitored during the growing season. Overall, CH4 emissions during storage were the main source of GHG emissions independent of treatments, accounting for 85 %, 40 % and 11 % of total GHG emissions (based on field application of 100 kg/ ha total N) from treatments CA, DD and LF, respectively. Anaerobic digestion and separation significantly reduced CH4 emissions during storage due to the diminished content of degradable organic matter available for methanogens. The N2O emissions from treatments CA, DD, and LF during storage were not significantly different. Treatments DD and LF emitted more NH3 than CA during storage, presumably because of higher pH and ammonium content. In the field experiment, the dilute solution of NS emitted the most N2O, while emissions from treatments CA, DD and LF were comparable. Yield-scaled GHG emissions for treatments CA, DD, LF and NS during both periods of storage and field were 44.4, 17.1, 8.5 and 24.3 kg CO2 eq/ hkg grain yield, respectively. Anaerobic digestion with or without separation were thus effective strategies for the mitigation of GHG emissions from cattle manure in this study. Yields and nitrogen use efficiencies of the processed manure materials were not significantly different from those observed with the same N application rate as inorganic fertilizer, and hence anaerobic digestion with or without separation were promising GHG mitigation strategie

Multi-Objective Personalized Product Retrieval in Taobao Search

In large-scale e-commerce platforms like Taobao, it is a big challenge to retrieve products that satisfy users from billions of candidates. This has been a common concern of academia and industry. Recently, plenty of works in this domain have achieved significant improvements by enhancing embedding-based retrieval (EBR) methods, including the Multi-Grained Deep Semantic Product Retrieval (MGDSPR) model [16] in Taobao search engine. However, we find that MGDSPR still has problems of poor relevance and weak personalization compared to other retrieval methods in our online system, such as lexical matching and collaborative filtering. These problems promote us to further strengthen the capabilities of our EBR model in both relevance estimation and personalized retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Objective Personalized Product Retrieval (MOPPR) model with four hierarchical optimization objectives: relevance, exposure, click and purchase. We construct entire-space multi-positive samples to train MOPPR, rather than the single-positive samples for existing EBR models.We adopt a modified softmax loss for optimizing multiple objectives. Results of extensive offline and online experiments show that MOPPR outperforms the baseline MGDSPR on evaluation metrics of relevance estimation and personalized retrieval. MOPPR achieves 0.96% transaction and 1.29% GMV improvements in a 28-day online A/B test. Since the Double-11 shopping festival of 2021, MOPPR has been fully deployed in mobile Taobao search, replacing the previous MGDSPR. Finally, we discuss several advanced topics of our deeper explorations on multi-objective retrieval and ranking to contribute to the community.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, submitted to the 28th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Minin

Greenhouse gas balance of new organic fertilizers derived from anaerobic digestion

Anaerobic digestion is an environmental technology that not only produces biogas to substitute fossil fuel, but also digestate that can serve as organic fertilizer. In this project, post-digestion treatment processes produced new fertilizer materials with contrasting characteristics. The nitrogen use efficiency and nutrient value to crops, and environmental impacts such as GHG emissions, of both traditional and post-digestion products were studied to find solutions towards sustainable agriculture. The study quantifies 1) emissions of N2O, CH4, CO2 and NH3 from untreated manure and digestate products during storage and N2O emissions after field application, 2) yield performance and N use efficiency; and 3) overall greenhouse gas emissions intensity of manure and digestate products at field and farm level. Digestate products showed 70-90% less CH4 emissions during 11 weeks of storage compared to untreated manure, though higher potential for NH3 losses. Since CH4 emission during storage is the largest component of the GHG balance for both untreated manure and digestates (Baral et al., 2018), the processing of digestates looks promising as strategy for GHG mitigation. The field study will demonstrate if the new treatment technologies also show improvements in N use efficiency. Given that no synthetic chemicals are involved in digestate procesing, the strategy is potentially available to organic farms, where N is typically limiting productivity. Biogas technologies depend on subsidies to compete with fossil fuel, but compared with other GHG mitigation options for agriculture, strategies based on biogas treatment may be cost-effective

CHINESE HERBAL MEDICINE SHENQI DETOXIFICATION GRANULE INHIBITS FIBROSIS IN ADENINE INDUCED CHRONIC RENAL FAILURE RATS

The progressive fibrosis accompanies all chronic renal disease, connective tissue growth factor (CTGF,) and platelet-derived growth factor-B, (PDGF-B,) play important roles in extra-cellular matrix abnormal accumulation, while endothelin -1 (ET-1) nitric oxide (NO,) are related to endothelial dysfunction, which mediates the progression of renal fibrosis. Shenqi Detoxification Granule (SDG), a traditional Chinese herbal formula, has been used for treatment of chronic renal failure in clinic for many years. In order to evaluate the efficacy, and explore the mechanism of SDG to inhibit the progression of renal fibrosis, study was carried out using the adenine-induced Wister rats as the CRF model, and losartan as postive control drug. Levels of serum creatinine [Scr], and blood urea nitrogen (BUN), albumin (ALB), 24hrs, urine protein (24hUP), triacylglycerol (TG), and cholesterol (CHO), together with ET-1, and NO were detected. Pathological changes of renal tissues were observed by HE, staining. In addition, CTGF and PDGF-B expression were analyzed by immuno-histo-chemistry. The results indicated that SDG can effectively reduce Scr, BUN, 24hUP, TG, and CHO levels, increase ALB levels, inhibit renal tissue damage in CRF rats, and the mechanism maybe reduce PDGF-B, CTGF expression and ET-1/NO. Shenqi Detoxification Granule is a beneficial treatment for chronic renal failure

Grass-clover and biogas fertilizers as a climate efficient nutrient supply.

There is a need to take care of the nutrients in the system. Anaerobic digestion is a valuable way to convert the nutrients and produce renewable energy. A model is presented that use grass-clover as feedstock for anaerobic digestion and separate the digestate in 3 fractions. Anaerobic digestion and separation have positive effect on N2O-emissions. But a very dilute solution of ammonia and sulfur generated high emissions when applied to the soil with 100 kg N per hectare