Low Temperature Synthesis of Hexagonal Shaped α

This study demonstrates the low temperature synthesis of α-Al2O3 by solvothermal method using gibbsite alumina precursor in 1, 4-butanediol solvent according to various pH conditions. In acidic solution, an orthorhombic boehmite (AlOOH) structure was obtained after solvothermal reaction. A significant result in this study was that the solvothermally synthesized alumina in pH=9 at 300 °C for 36 h represented a rhombohedral α-Al2O3 structure hexagonal shaped with about 1.5~2.0 μm of particle size. Otherwise, the α-Al2O3 structure was rather changed to the mixture of a boehmite and α-Al2O3 structures above pH=11. In the case of α-Al2O3 synthesized at pH=9, the specific surface area was 26.18 m2/g, and the particles that were stable in acidic solution resulted in 61.80 mV of zeta potential

Standardization of Terminology in Laboratory Medicine II

Standardization of medical terminology is essential in data transmission between health care institutes and in maximizing the benefits of information technology. The purpose of this study was to standardize medical terms for laboratory observations. During the second year of the study, a standard database of concept names for laboratory terms that covered those used in tertiary health care institutes and reference laboratories was developed. The laboratory terms in the Logical Observation Identifier Names and Codes (LOINC) database were adopted and matched with the electronic data interchange (EDI) codes in Korea. A public hearing and a workshop for clinical pathologists were held to collect the opinions of experts. The Korean standard laboratory terminology database containing six axial concept names, components, property, time aspect, system (specimen), scale type, and method type, was established for 29,340 test observations. Short names and mapping tables for EDI codes and UMLS were added. Synonym tables were prepared to help match concept names to common terms used in the fields. We herein described the Korean standard laboratory terminology database for test names, result description terms, and result units encompassing most of the laboratory tests in Korea

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Inedible vegetable oils and their derivatives for alternative diesel fuels in CI engines: A review

The use of inedible vegetable oils as an alternative fuel for diesel engine is accelerated by the energy crisis due to depletion of resources and increased environmental problems including the great need for edible oil as food and the reduction of biodiesel production cost, etc. Of a lot of inedible vegetable oils which can be exploited for substitute fuel as diesel fuel, seven vegetable oils, i.e., jatropha, karanja, mahua, linseed, rubber seed, cottonseed and neem oils were selected for discussion in this review paper. The application of jatropha oil as a liquid fuel for CI engine can be classified with neat jatropha oil, engine modifications such as preheating, and dual fuelling, and fuel modifications such as jatropha oil blends with other fuels, mostly with diesel fuel, biodiesel, biodiesel blends and degumming. Therefore, jatropha oil is a leading candidate for the commercialization of non-edible vegetable oils. There exists a big difference in the fuel properties of seven inedible vegetable oils and its biodiesels considered in this review. It is clear from this review that biodiesel generally causes an increase in NOx emission and a decrease in HC, CO and PM emissions compared to diesel. It was reported that a diesel engine without any modification would run successfully on a blend of 20% vegetable oil and 80% diesel fuel without damage to engine parts. This trend can be applied to the biodiesel blends even though particular biodiesel shows 40% blend. In addition, the blends of biodiesel and diesel can replace the diesel fuel up to 10% by volume for running common rail direct injection system without any durability problems.Inedible vegetable oils Alternative fuel Biodiesel CI engine Performance and emission characteristics

Using MODIS Data to Predict Regional Corn Yields

A simple approach was developed to predict corn yields using the MoDerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data product from two geographically separate major corn crop production regions: Illinois, USA and Heilongjiang, China. The MOD09A1 data, which are eight-day interval surface reflectance data, were obtained from day of the year (DOY) 89 to 337 to calculate the leaf area index (LAI). The sum of the LAI from early in the season to a given date in the season (end of DOY (EOD)) was well fitted to a logistic function and represented seasonal changes in leaf area duration (LAD). A simple phenology model was derived to estimate the dates of emergence and maturity using the LAD-logistic function parameters b1 and b2, which represented the rate of increase in LAI and the date of maximum LAI, respectively. The phenology model predicted emergence and maturity dates fairly well, with root mean square error (RMSE) values of 6.3 and 4.9 days for the validation dataset, respectively. Two simple linear regression models (YP and YF) were established using LAD as the variable to predict corn yield. The yield model YP used LAD from predicted emergence to maturity, and the yield model YF used LAD for a predetermined period from DOY 89 to a particular EOD. When state/province corn yields for the validation dataset were predicted at DOY 321, near completion of the corn harvest, the YP model, including the predicted phenology, performed much better than the YF model, with RMSE values of 0.68 t/ha and 0.66 t/ha for Illinois and Heilongjiang, respectively. The YP model showed similar or better performance, even for the much earlier pre-harvest yield prediction at DOY 257. In addition, the model performance showed no difference between the two study regions with very different climates and cultivation methods, including cultivar and irrigation management. These results suggested that the approach described in this paper has potential for application to relatively wide agroclimatic regions with different cultivation methods and for extension to the other crops. However, it needs to be examined further in tropical and sub-tropical regions, which are very different from the two study regions with respect to agroclimatic constraints and agrotechnologies