High-voltage pulse generator based on sequentially charged MMC-SMs operating in a voltage-boost mode

Pulse forming networks and Marx generators are the classical rectangular waveform pulse generators (PGs). They are inflexible and their capacitors must be fully charged to the required voltage from 0V before delivering each high-voltage (HV) pulse. They are only able to generate unipolar pulses; if bipolar pulses are sought another generator fed from a negative supply voltage is added. Recently, several power electronics based PGs have been proposed. This paper presents an HV power electronics based PG, which is based on Half-Bridge Modular Multilevel Converter (HB-MMC) sub-modules (SMs) charged sequentially in a voltage boost mode. Each SM capacitor and main switch form a boost converter with the charging input supply and inductor. As a result, all SM capacitors are charged to a voltage greater than the input. During the discharging process the SM capacitors are connected in series, producing a rectangular HV pulse across the load. The proposed charging method allows a reduction in the converter footprint in comparison with recently proposed MMC sequentially charged PG topologies. Although only rectangular pulse waveforms are sought in this paper, a SM capacitor voltage balance method allows multilevel pulse generation. The viability of the proposed converter is confirmed by MATLAB/Simulink simulation and scaled-down experimentation

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License

Oxidative Stress Tolerance by Calcium and Histidine in Two Tomato Cultivars Under Nickel Stress

We investigated calcium (Ca) and L-histidine (His) interaction on nickel (Ni)-induced oxidative stress tolerance in two tomato (Solanum lycopersicum Mill.) cultivars including Cal-J N3 and Petoearly CH. CaCl2 (0 and 300 µM) and L-histidine (0 and 300 µM) effects on the oxidative responses in these cultivars cultured were compared in the hydroponic media under Ni stress (NiSO4; 0,150 and 300 µM). The activities of antioxidative enzymes including catalase (CAT), guaiacol peroxidase (GPX), ascorbate peroxidase (APX), superoxide dismutase (SOD) and total content of proteins, malondialdehyde (MDA), other aldehydes, H2O2, Ca2+, Ni2+, ascorbate (ASC), dehydroascorbate (DHA) and electrolytes leakage (EL) were determined. The obtained results indicated that the application of Ca and His generally reduced oxidative markers such as the contents of EL, H2O2, MDA and activity of CAT as well as the Ni2+content of root and shoot organs under nickel toxicity, while application of Ni treatment without Ca+His increased these oxidative parameters and accumulation of Ni2+, compared to the control. Applying Ni without Ca and His has resulted in reduction of GPX, APX and SOD activities as well as concentrations of root and shoot Ca2+and ASC in the two mentioned cultivars. Application of Ca and His lead to the elevated contents of Ca2+ and ASC, increased activities of GPX, APX and SOD as well as inhibition of Ni2+ accumulation differently in both cultivars. Ca and His also alleviated the adverse effects of Ni stress on the selected investigated parameters especially in Petoearly CH cultivar. Thus, interaction of Ca and His appeared to improve adaptive responses to Ni stress leading to decreasing Ni-induced oxidative stress in the tomato plants. Therefore, our results suggest that Ca+His alleviated nickel-induced oxidative stress by uptake and inhibition of translocation of Ni2+ plus Ni chelating mechanism improvement in the tomato cultivars

GAMMA-IRRADIATED ROSEMARY (ROSMARINUS OFFICINALIS) DIPS TREATMENT EFFECT ON QUALITY OF RAINBOW TROUT (ONCORHYNCHUS MYKISS) FILLETS DURING REFRIGERATED STORAGE

The effect of the gamma-irradiated extract of rosemary and butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) antioxidant on sensory, chemical and microbiological changes of rainbow trout fillets stored at 4 ± 1°C was investigated for 16 days. The fillets were divided into: control (C), 750 and 1500 rosemary extract (RE) (immersed in 750 and 1500 ppm rosemary extract); 250 and 500 gamma-irradiated rosemary (GIR), (immersed in 250 and 500 ppm gamma-irradiated rosemary) and 250 and 500 BHA (immersed in 250 and 500 ppm BHA). The shelf life of fillets was reported to be 8 days for C, and 12 days for 500 GIR group according sensory, microbiological and chemical parameters. The pH, peroxide value (PV), total volatile basic nitrogen (TVB-N), free fatty acid (FFA), thiobarbituric acid (TBA), psychrotrophic counts (PTC), and total viable aerobic bacterial counts (TVC) values were 7.62 ± 0.21, 17.17 ± 1.6, 51.07 ± 1.1, 6.05 ± 0.13, 3.42 ± 0.18, 12.03 ± 0.19, and 13.16 ± 0.16 respectively for C group and also, 7.42 ± 0.16, 15.2 ± 1.7, 42.5 ± 1.5, 4.48 ± 0.39, 2.59 ± 0.15, 9.98 ± 0.15, and 10.5 ± 0.15 respectively for 500 GIR group. Finally, the following trend in effectiveness was reported: gamma-irradiated rosemary PBS extract > BHA > rosemary PBS extract. © 2022, Trakia University. All rights reserved

Optimization of wave energy converters in the OPWEC project

International Conference on Maritime Technology and Engineering (MARTECH) (4th, 2018, Lisbon, Portugal

Reinforcing one-carbon metabolism via folic acid/Folr1 promotes β-cell differentiation

Regeneration of insulin-producing beta-cells may become a future alternative treatment of diabetes. Here the authors report a genetic screen in a zebrafish model that mimics the loss of beta-cells in diabetes, and identified that the folate receptor Folr1 or folinic acid treatment can stimulate beta-cell regeneration