Charcoal does not change the decomposition rate of mixed litters in a mineral cambisol: a controlled conditions study

It has been recently shown that the presence of charcoal might promote humus decomposition in the soil. We investigated the decomposition rate of charcoal and litters of different biochemical quality mixed together in a soil incubation under controlled conditions. Despite the large range of organic substrate quality used in this study, we did not find any difference in the decomposition between the average of two individual substrates decomposing separately and the same substrates mixed together. We concluded that charcoal does not always promote other organic matter decomposition and that its particular effect might depend on various factors, for example, soil properties

Towards a Reliable and Rapid Automated Grading System in Facial Palsy Patients: Facial Palsy Surgery Meets Computer Science

Background: Reliable, time- and cost-effective, and clinician-friendly diagnostic tools are cornerstones in facial palsy (FP) patient management. Different automated FP grading systems have been developed but revealed persisting downsides such as insufficient accuracy and cost-intensive hardware. We aimed to overcome these barriers and programmed an automated grading system for FP patients utilizing the House and Brackmann scale (HBS). Methods: Image datasets of 86 patients seen at the Department of Plastic, Hand, and Reconstructive Surgery at the University Hospital Regensburg, Germany, between June 2017 and May 2021, were used to train the neural network and evaluate its accuracy. Nine facial poses per patient were analyzed by the algorithm. Results: The algorithm showed an accuracy of 100%. Oversampling did not result in altered outcomes, while the direct form displayed superior accuracy levels when compared to the modular classification form (n = 86; 100% vs. 99%). The Early Fusion technique was linked to improved accuracy outcomes in comparison to the Late Fusion and sequential method (n = 86; 100% vs. 96% vs. 97%). Conclusions: Our automated FP grading system combines high-level accuracy with cost- and time-effectiveness. Our algorithm may accelerate the grading process in FP patients and facilitate the FP surgeon’s workflow

Tropospheric water vapour isotopologue data (H₂¹⁶O, H₂¹⁸O, and HD¹⁶O) as obtained from NDACC/FTIR solar absorption spectra

We report on the ground-based FTIR (Fourier transform infrared) tropospheric water vapour isotopologue remote sensing data that have been recently made available via the database of NDACC (Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change; ftp://ftp.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/ndacc/MUSICA/) and via doi:10.5281/zenodo.48902. Currently, data are available for 12 globally distributed stations. They have been centrally retrieved and quality-filtered in the framework of the MUSICA project (MUlti-platform remote Sensing of Isotopologues for investigating the Cycle of Atmospheric water). We explain particularities of retrieving the water vapour isotopologue state (vertical distribution of H216O, H218O, and HD16O) and reveal the need for a new metadata template for archiving FTIR isotopologue data. We describe the format of different data components and give recommendations for correct data usage. Data are provided as two data types. The first type is best-suited for tropospheric water vapour distribution studies disregarding different isotopologues (comparison with radiosonde data, analyses of water vapour variability and trends, etc.). The second type is needed for analysing moisture pathways by means of H2O, δD-pair distributions

The Fire Within: Microbes Inflame Tumors

The immune system and the microbiota mutually interact to maintain homeostasis in the intestine. However, components of the microbiota can alter this balance and promote chronic inflammation, promoting intestinal tumor development. We review recent advances in understanding the complex interactions between the microbiota and the innate and adaptive immune systems and discuss their potential to lead us in new directions for understanding cancer biology and treatment

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

Optimization of leak testing of valves

Nordhydraulic är ett företag i Kramfors som tillverkar hydrauliska ventiler. Hydrauliska ventiller används inom en mängd olika områden för att styra hydrauliska maskiner. För att hydrauliska ventiler ska fungera korrekt måste dessa vara täta. På Nordhydraulic används en täthetsprovare av modell Nolek S9 N för att göra täthetstester. Täthetsprovaren fyller upp ventilerna med ett förbestämt tryck och mäter sedan flödet av luft in till ventilen som krävs för att bibehålla trycket. Idag har denna metod stora problem med falskt negativa resultat i monteringslinan, vilket innebär att täta ventiler ibland ger ett resultat som visar läckage och därför bildar en flaskhals i monteringen. Detta beror på att det finns många utrymmen i ventilen där luften har svårt att ta sig in. Syftet med det här arbetet var att ta fram ett bättre testprogram, alltså tidsinställningar av de olika parametrarna som används, till Nolek S9 N för att användas i täthetsprovningen för att minska stopp i monteringen. Framtagningen av detta program gjordes genom att göra mätningar med olika tidsinställningar samt anslutningsmetoder för att hitta de viktigaste parametrarna till programmet. Därefter gjordes mätningar på ventiler med monterings- och gjutfel för att se vilket flöde läckaget har vid dessa fel.  Arbetet resulterade i tre olika program för ventilen RS210 som vid tester i monteringen uppnådde godkäna resultat snabbare än det tidigare programmet som användes och med färre falskt negativa resultat. Slutsatsen är att de program som har tagits fram bör ge en förbättring av täthetsprovningen samt att den nuvarande gräns för godkända läckage kan höjas till 50 mm^3/s utan att missa de monteringsfel som kan uppstå.Nordhydraulic is a company in Kramfors that manufactures hydraulic valves. Hydraulic valves are used in a variety of areas to control hydraulic machines. For hydraulic valves to function properly, they must be tight. At Nordhydraulic, a leak tester called Nolek S9 N is used to determine if valves are tight. The leak tester fills the valves with a predetermined pressure and then measures the flow of air into the valve required to maintain the pressure. Today, this method has major problems with false negative results in the assembly line, which means that tight valves may give a result that indicates leakage and thus can lead to a bottleneck in the assembly. This is because there are many spaces in the valve that are difficult to reach by the air. The purpose of this work was to develop a better program for the Nolek S9 N to be used in the leak test to reduce assembly stops. The development of this program is done by making measurements with different time settings as well as connection methods to find the most important parameters of the program. Then, measurements are made on valves assembly errors and casting errors to see what flow the leakage has at these errors. The work resulted in three different programs for the RS210 valve, which in tests in the assembly achieved approved results faster than the previous program and with fewer false negative results. The conclusion is that the developed program could provide an improvement of the leak test and that the current limit for approved leakage can be increased to 50 mm^3/s  without missing the assembly errors that may occur

Optimization of leak testing of valves

Nordhydraulic är ett företag i Kramfors som tillverkar hydrauliska ventiler. Hydrauliska ventiller används inom en mängd olika områden för att styra hydrauliska maskiner. För att hydrauliska ventiler ska fungera korrekt måste dessa vara täta. På Nordhydraulic används en täthetsprovare av modell Nolek S9 N för att göra täthetstester. Täthetsprovaren fyller upp ventilerna med ett förbestämt tryck och mäter sedan flödet av luft in till ventilen som krävs för att bibehålla trycket. Idag har denna metod stora problem med falskt negativa resultat i monteringslinan, vilket innebär att täta ventiler ibland ger ett resultat som visar läckage och därför bildar en flaskhals i monteringen. Detta beror på att det finns många utrymmen i ventilen där luften har svårt att ta sig in. Syftet med det här arbetet var att ta fram ett bättre testprogram, alltså tidsinställningar av de olika parametrarna som används, till Nolek S9 N för att användas i täthetsprovningen för att minska stopp i monteringen. Framtagningen av detta program gjordes genom att göra mätningar med olika tidsinställningar samt anslutningsmetoder för att hitta de viktigaste parametrarna till programmet. Därefter gjordes mätningar på ventiler med monterings- och gjutfel för att se vilket flöde läckaget har vid dessa fel.  Arbetet resulterade i tre olika program för ventilen RS210 som vid tester i monteringen uppnådde godkäna resultat snabbare än det tidigare programmet som användes och med färre falskt negativa resultat. Slutsatsen är att de program som har tagits fram bör ge en förbättring av täthetsprovningen samt att den nuvarande gräns för godkända läckage kan höjas till 50 mm^3/s utan att missa de monteringsfel som kan uppstå.Nordhydraulic is a company in Kramfors that manufactures hydraulic valves. Hydraulic valves are used in a variety of areas to control hydraulic machines. For hydraulic valves to function properly, they must be tight. At Nordhydraulic, a leak tester called Nolek S9 N is used to determine if valves are tight. The leak tester fills the valves with a predetermined pressure and then measures the flow of air into the valve required to maintain the pressure. Today, this method has major problems with false negative results in the assembly line, which means that tight valves may give a result that indicates leakage and thus can lead to a bottleneck in the assembly. This is because there are many spaces in the valve that are difficult to reach by the air. The purpose of this work was to develop a better program for the Nolek S9 N to be used in the leak test to reduce assembly stops. The development of this program is done by making measurements with different time settings as well as connection methods to find the most important parameters of the program. Then, measurements are made on valves assembly errors and casting errors to see what flow the leakage has at these errors. The work resulted in three different programs for the RS210 valve, which in tests in the assembly achieved approved results faster than the previous program and with fewer false negative results. The conclusion is that the developed program could provide an improvement of the leak test and that the current limit for approved leakage can be increased to 50 mm^3/s  without missing the assembly errors that may occur