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Impedance source interlinking converter for microbial electrosynthesis energy storage applications

In this paper, a new type of single-stage interlinking converters for Microbial Electrosynthesis (MES) energy storage applications connected to the three-phase grid is presented, in which impedance source network (ZSN) is employed to reduce cost and volume, and meanwhile improve the efficiency. Impedance source converter (ISC) with buck-boost characteristic is able to feed MES with a wide range of voltages in DC side, also, converter grid distortion in AC side is reduced because there is no need to dead time for switching. Different ZSNs are studied and discussed for MES energy application. The applicable ones are selected and a comprehensive comparison is presented. Also, the proposed efficient control for ISC consists of two parts, first ZSN capacitor control plus reactive power control are done by controlling modulation index, and second the objective of tracking active power reference can be achieved by means of controlling shoot-through duty cycle. Simulation results are presented to certify the comparison between ZSNs and to verify the merit of the proposed control scheme.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Diversity and seasonal composition of the scorpiofauna (Arachnida: Scorpiones) of the Choros archipelago (Coquimbo Region, Chile)

Se estudió la composición taxonómica, la abundancia y la estructura espacial y temporal de la escorpiofauna presente en el archipiélago de Los Choros (Región de Coquimbo, Chile). Se registró la presencia de cuatro especies: Bothriurus coriaceus Pocock 1893, Brachistosternus (Brachistosternus) roigalsinai Ojanguren-Affi lastro 2002, Brachistosternus (Brachistosternus) cepedai Ojanguren-Affi lastro et al. 2007a (Bothriuridae) y Caraboctonus keyserlingi Pocock 1893 (Caraboctonidae). Se registraron diferencias entre las especies de escorpiones en sus niveles de abundancia total, presencia y abundancia tanto estacional como en los diferentes ambientes pedológicos. El 53,1% del total de la abundancia correspondió a B. coriaceus, que estuvo presente en ocho de los nueve ambientes pedológicos analizados y mostró actividad en las tres estaciones del año muestreadas, al igual que Br. roigalsinai, el cual representó el 30,3 % de la abundancia total y fue registrado en siete ambientes pedológicos. La especie Br. cepedai tuvo baja abundancia (4,1 %) y su distribución estuvo restringida a los ambientes dunarios, en los meses de primavera y verano. Por otra parte, Caraboctonus keyserlingi representó la situación opuesta, con un 12,5% de la abundancia, restringida a los ambientes de la isla Choros y a los meses de primavera. No existe una estructuración temporal, pero es reconocible un patrón de estructuración espacial. En base a estos antecedentes proponemos que las diferencias en las especies, tanto en su densidad, como en las estrategias de uso y ocupación de los ambientes podrían explicar los patrones observados.We studied the taxonomic composition, abundance and degree of spatial and temporal structure of the scorpion fauna present in Los Choros Archipelago (Coquimbo Region, Chile). We recorded the presence of four species: Bothriurus coriaceus Pocock 1893, Brachistosternus (Brachistosternus) roigalsinai Ojanguren-Affi lastro 2002, Brachistosternus (Brachistosternus) cepedai Ojanguren-Affi lastro et al. 2007a (Bothriuridae) and Caraboctonus keyserlingi Pocock 1893 (Caraboctonidae). Among scorpion species we found differences in the levels of total abundance, seasonal presence and abundance as well as in the different pedological environments. Bothriurus coriaceus accounted for 53.1% of the total abundance, it was recorded in eight of the nine pedological environments studied and showed activity in the three sampled seasons. Likewise, Br. roigalsinai, accounted for 30.3 % of the total abundance and it was recorded in seven pedological environments. The species Br. cepedai had low abundance (4.1 %) and its distribution was restricted to dune environments and to spring–summer seasons. The species Caraboctonus keyserlingi accounted for 12.5% of the abundance and its distribution was spatially restricted to the Los Choros island and spring season months. There is not a temporal structure but a spatial structure pattern is recognized. Based on this background we propose that differences in species adaptability to temporal density as well as their strategies of use and environment occupation could explain the observed patterns.Fil: Pizarro Araya, Jaime. Universidad de la Serena; ChileFil: Ojanguren Affilastro, Andres Alejandro. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales "Bernardino Rivadavia"; ArgentinaFil: López Cortés, José Fernando. Universidad de la Serena; ChileFil: Agusto, Pablo. Universidad de la Serena; ChileFil: Briones, Raul. Programa Conservación de Fauna; ChileFil: Cepeda Pizarro, Jorge. Universidad de la Serena; Chil

Experimental neutron capture data of 58Ni from the CERN n_TOF facility

CGS15 – Capture Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy and Related TopicsThe neutron capture cross section of 58Ni was measured at the neutron time of flight facility n_TOF at CERN, from 27 meV to 400 keV neutron energy. Special care has been taken to identify all the possible sources of background, with the so-called neutron background obtained for the first time using high-precision GEANT4 simulations. The energy range up to 122 keV was treated as the resolved resonance region, where 51 resonances were identified and analyzed by a multilevel R-matrix code SAMMY. Above 122 keV the code SESH was used in analyzing the unresolved resonance region of the capture yield. Maxwellian averaged cross sections were calculated in the temperature range of kT = 5 – 100 keV, and their astrophysical implications were investigate

Recreational Drugs and the Risk of Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Hepatocellular carcinoma represents an important contributor to the global cancer-related burden, and liver cirrhosis is the main risk factor for its development. Conventional or illegal drug consumption is a potential but infrequent cause of cirrhosis. However, the causal relationship between recreational drugs and the risk of developing liver cancer has not been studied in detail thus far. The aim of this review is to synthesize the available published evidence on legal and illegal recreational drug use and the risk of hepatocellular carcinoma and other liver tumors. Expanding our knowledge about the contributions of these substances to the appearance of liver cancers is important for combatting this preventable cause of cancer. Abstract Recreational or aesthetic drug use is a distinctive behavior of humans, principally attested in the last century. It is known that recreational and illegal drugs are major contributors to the universal morbidity rate worldwide. Many of these substances have a well-established hepatotoxic potential, causing acute or chronic liver injury, liver fibrosis and cirrhosis, but their implications for hepatocellular carcinoma or other varieties of liver tumors are little known. In this article, we perform an extensive literature review, aiming to provide updated information about recreational drug use and the risk of developing liver tumors. Khat use and pyrrolizidine alkaloid consumption (present in some natural plants) have been linked to liver cirrhosis. Kava intake is associated with different liver tumors in animal models but not in humans. Cannabis’ potential to accelerate liver fibrosis in chronic hepatitis is controversial according to the existing data. Cigarette smoking is an important contributor to hepatocellular carcinoma, and anabolic androgen steroids are well-defined causes of a variety of liver cancers and other hepatic tumors. (...)This research was supported by grants from Instituto de Salud Carlos III, cofounded by the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional—FEDER (contract numbers: FIS 21_01248; PI18/00901; UMA18-FEDERJA-193). CIBEREHD is funded by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII). All authors are members of the COST ACTION “CA-17112”, Prospective European Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology), www.cost.eu. JMPB holds a Rio Hortega contract from ISCIII. ASZ holds a Jaume Bosch Training Action 2022 from CIBEREHD (ISCIII)

PARSECSs: Evaluating the impact of task parallelism in the PARSEC benchmark suite

In this work, we show how parallel applications can be implemented efficiently using task parallelism. We also evaluate the benefits of such parallel paradigm with respect to other approaches. We use the PARSEC benchmark suite as our test bed, which includes applications representative of a wide range of domains from HPC to desktop and server applications. We adopt different parallelization techniques, tailored to the needs of each application, to fully exploit the task-based model. Our evaluation shows that task parallelism achieves better performance than thread-based parallelization models, such as Pthreads. Our experimental results show that we can obtain scalability improvements up to 42% on a 16-core system and code size reductions up to 81%. Such reductions are achieved by removing from the source code application specific schedulers or thread pooling systems and transferring these responsibilities to the runtime system software.This work has been partially supported by the European Research Council under the European Union 7th FP, ERC Grant Agreement number 321253, by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant TIN2012-34557, by the Severo Ochoa Program, awarded by the Spanish Government, under grant SEV-2011-00067 and by the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. M. Moreto has been partially supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Juan de la Cierva post-doctoral fellowship number JCI-2012-15047, and M. Casas is supported by the Secretary for Universities and Research of the Ministry of Economy and Knowledge of the Government of Catalonia and the Co-fund programme of the Marie Curie Actions of the 7th R&D Framework Programme of the European Union (Contract 2013 BP B 00243). Finally, the authors are grateful to the reviewers for their valuable comments, to the people from the Programming Models Group at BSC for their technical support, to the RoMoL team, and to Xavier Teruel, Roger Ferrer and Paul Caheny for their help in this work.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Photo-induced enhanced Raman spectroscopy for universal ultra-trace detection of explosives, pollutants and biomolecules

Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy is one of the most sensitive spectroscopic techniques available, with single-molecule detection possible on a range of noble-metal substrates. It is widely used to detect molecules that have a strong Raman response at very low concentrations. Here we present photo-induced-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, where the combination of plasmonic nanoparticles with a photo-activated substrate gives rise to large signal enhancement (an order of magnitude) for a wide range of small molecules, even those with a typically low Raman cross-section. We show that the induced chemical enhancement is due to increased electron density at the noble-metal nanoparticles, and demonstrate the universality of this system with explosives, biomolecules and organic dyes, at trace levels. Our substrates are also easy to fabricate, self-cleaning and reusable

Evaluating the impact of OpenMP 4.0 extensions on relevant parallel workloads

OpenMP has been for many years the most widely used programming model for shared memory architectures. Periodically, new features are proposed and some of them are finally selected for inclusion in the OpenMP standard. The OmpSs programming model developed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) aims to be an OpenMP forerunner that handles the main OpenMP constructs plus some extra features not included in the OpenMP standard. In this paper we show the usefulness of three OmpSs features not currently handled by OpenMP 4.0 by deploying them over three applications of the PARSEC benchmark suite and showing the performance benefits. This paper also shows performance trade-offs between the OmpSs/OpenMP tasking and loop parallelism constructs and shows how a hybrid implementation that combines both approaches is sometimes the best option.This work has been partially supported by the European Research Council under the European Union's 7th FP, ERC Grant Agreement number 321253, by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant TIN2012-34557 and by the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. It has been also supported by the Severo Ochoa Program awarded by the Spanish Government (grant SEV-2011-00067) M. Moreto has been partially supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellowship number JCI- 2012-15047. M. Casas is supported by the Secretary for Universities and Research of the Ministry of Economy and Knowledge of the Government of Catalonia and the Co- fund programme of the Marie Curie Actions of the 7th R&D Framework Programme of the European Union (Contract 2013 BP_B 00243).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Lymphocyte Profile and Immune Checkpoint Expression in Drug-Induced Liver Injury: An Immunophenotyping Study

The identification of specific HLA risk alleles in drug-induced liver injury (DILI) points toward an important role of the adaptive immune system in DILI development. In this study, we aimed to corroborate the role of an adaptive immune response in DILI through immunophenotyping of leukocyte populations and immune checkpoint expressions. Blood samples were collected from adjudicated DILI (n = 12), acute viral hepatitis (VH; n = 13), acute autoimmune hepatitis (AIH; n = 9), and acute liver injury of unknown etiology (n = 15) at day 1 (recognition), day 7, and day >30. Blood samples from patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD; n = 20) and healthy liver controls (HLCs; n = 54) were extracted at one time point. Leukocyte populations and immune checkpoint expressions were determined based on cell surface receptors, except for CTLA-4 that was determined intracellularly, using flow cytometry. At recognition, DILI demonstrated significantly higher levels of activated helper T-cell (P < 0.0001), activated cytotoxic T-cells (P = 0.0003), Th1 (P = 0.0358), intracellular CTLA-4 level in helper T-cells (P = 0.0192), and PD-L1 presenting monocytes (P = 0.0452) than HLC. These levels approached those of HLC over time. No significant differences were found between DILI and VH. However, DILI presented higher level of activated helper T-cells and CTLA-4 than NAFLD and lower PD-L1 level than AIH. Our findings suggest that an adaptive immune response is involved in DILI in which activated CD4+ and CD8+ play an important role. Increased expression of negative immune checkpoints is likely the effect of peripheral tolerance regulation.The present study has been supported by grants of Instituto de Salud Carlos III cofounded by Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional – FEDER (contract numbers: PI19/00883, PI16/01748, P18-RT-3364-2020, and PT20/000127). CIBERehd and Plataforma ISCiii Ensayos Clínicos are funded by Instituto de Salud Carlos III. Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málaga/CBUA. The funding sources had no involvement in the study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report, or in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication

Incidence and prevalence of acute hepatitis E virus infection in patients with suspected Drug-Induced Liver Injury in the Spanish DILI Registry

Background and Aims: Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) presents with a wide phenotypic spectrum requiring an extensive differential diagnosis. Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is not systematically ruled out during acute hepatitis assessment in Spain. The aims of this study were to establish the role of HEV infection and its phenotypic presentation in patients initially suspected of DILI and to determine the anti-HEV seroprevalence rate. Methods: An analysis of 265 patients with suspected DILI and considered for enrolment in the Spanish DILI Registry and 108 controls with normal liver profiles was undertaken. Anti-HEV Immunoglobulin (Ig) G antibodies were analyzed in serum from all subjects. In those with serum samples extracted within 6 months from liver damage onset (n=144), HEV antigen (Ag) and anti- HEV IgM antibodies were tested in duplicate by ELISA. In addition, RT-PCR was performed externally in 8 patients. Results: Out of 144 patients, 12 (8%) were positive for anti-HEV IgM, mean age 61 years. Underlying hepatic diseases (OR=23.4, p20 folds upper limit of normal (OR=10.9, p=0.002) were associated with the diagnosis of acute hepatitis E. The overall anti-HEV IgG seroprevalence rate was 35%, evenly distributed between patients with suspected DILI (34%), and controls (39%). Conclusions: HEV seroprevalence and acute hepatitis E rates are relatively high in Spain. A search for active HEV infection is therefore advised in patients assessed for suspicion of DILI, particularly in patients with underlying liver diseases and high transaminase levels.The present study has been supported by grants of the Instituto de Salud Carlos III cofounded by Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional FEDER (contract numbers: FIS PI0274-2016, PI-0285- 2016, PI 18-01804, PI 18-00901, PT17/0017/0020, CM17/00243, JR16/00015, B-0002-2019, UMA-18-FEDERJA-193 and by the Agencia Española del Medicamento. SCReN and CIBERehd are funded by Instituto de Salud Carlos III. European Cooperation in Science & Technology (COST) ACTION CA17112 Prospective European Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network, IMI2-Translational Safety Biomarker Pipeline (TransBioLine). The funding sources had no involvement in the study design, in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, in the writing of the report or in the decision to submit the manuscript for publicatio