Is exponential gravity a viable description for the whole cosmological history?

Here we analysed a particular type of $F(R)$ gravity, the so-called exponential gravity which includes an exponential function of the Ricci scalar in the action. Such term represents a correction to the usual Hilbert-Einstein action. By using Supernovae Ia, Barionic Acoustic Oscillations, Cosmic Microwave Background and $H(z)$ data, the free parameters of the model are well constrained. The results show that such corrections to General Relativity become important at cosmological scales and at late-times, providing an alternative to the dark energy problem. In addition, the fits do not determine any significant difference statistically with respect to the $\Lambda$CDM model. Finally, such model is extended to include the inflationary epoch in the same gravitational Lagrangian. As shown in the paper, the additional terms can reproduce the inflationary epoch and satisfy the constraints from Planck data.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures, analysis extended, version published in EPJ

From Decolonial to the Postcolonial: Trauma of an Unfinished Agenda

Expression stability of the candidate reference genes under different conditions. (DOCX 13 kb

Workload Prediction and Resource Management for Energy Efficiency in Cloud Data Centres

Given the increasing deployments of Cloud datacentres and the excessive usage of server resources, their associated energy and environmental implications are also increasing at an alarming rate. This necessitates the need for promoting sustainable computing approaches for achieving environment-friendly and energy-efficient datacentre execution. One of the direct causes of excess energy consumption of the datacentre includes running servers at a low level of workloads and over-provisioning of server resources to the arriving workloads during execution. Another cause of excess energy consumption of the datacentre is the lack of an efficient energy-aware workloads scheduling paradigm that is able to allocate optimal execution resources to various workloads. With this in mind, a novel energy-efficient Cloud resource management approach is proposed in this thesis, which is enabled by highly reliable workload prediction and scheduling models. Firstly, a classification-aware workloads forecasting model named K-RVLBPNN has been developed for predicting the future workload arrival trend, by exploiting the latency sensitivity characteristics of Cloud workloads, based on a combination of improved K-means and BPNN algorithms. This prediction model achieves reliable prediction accuracy at a high level. Furthermore, it is found stragglers within Cloud workload executions are obvious energy consumers and will heavily influence prediction accuracy. To improve the prediction accuracy, the IGRU-SD model is presented in this thesis, which is based on big data analytics and Recurrent Neural Networks. The proposed model exploits an improved GRU neural network integrated with a resource straggler detection module to classify tasks based on their resource intensity, and further predicts the expected level of resource requests. Finally, to further improve the energy efficiency of Cloud datacentres, an energy-efficient Cloud-edge collaboration scheduling framework has been designed to reduce energy consumption while improving the efficiency of workload processing. The collaboration framework encompasses a task classification module to judge the type of incoming workload, a meta-heuristic Cloud scheduler (DSGA) for scheduling Cloud tasks, and a light-weighted edge scheduler (EA-DFPSO) for scheduling edge tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of the prediction results and energy saving for the Cloud datacentres.</p

data about intrinsic viscosity, API fluid loss and setting time

data about intrinsic viscosity, API fluid loss and setting tim

Affinity-Guided Covalent Conjugation Reactions Based on PDZ–Peptide and SH3–Peptide Interactions

Specific protein–peptide interactions are prevalent in the living cells and form a tightly regulated signaling network. These interactions, many of which have structural information revealed, provide ideal templates for affinity-guided covalent bioconjugation. Here we report the development of a set of four new reactions that covalently and site-specifically link nonenzymatic scaffolding domains (two PDZ and two SH3 domains) and their ligands through thiol-chloroacetyl S_N2 reaction. Guided by the three-dimensional structure of the wild type complex, a selected position of the protein was mutated to cysteine, and at the same time, an α-chloroacetyl group was installed at a corresponding position of the peptide. Specific binding interaction between the two brings the reactive groups into close proximity, converts the nonreactive cysteine residue into a content-dependent reactive site, and induces the nucleophilic reaction that is inert in the absence of the binding event. The specificity, orthogonality, and modularity of the four reactions were characterized, the reaction was applied to label proteins <i>in vitro</i> and receptor on the surface of mammalian cells, and the system was utilized to assemble covalent protein complexes with unnatural geometries

Image2_Oral anticoagulants increased 30-day survival in sepsis patients complicated with atrial fibrillation: a retrospective analysis from MIMIC-IV database.tif

BackgroundThe severity of sepsis is associated with systemic clotting activation. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most commonly observed arrhythmia in patients with sepsis and can lead to a poor prognosis. The aim of this study is to elucidate the association between oral anticoagulants and survival from septic patients complicated with AF.MethodsThe data of 8,828 septic patients, including 2,955 AF and 5,873 without AF, were all originated from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care IV (MIMIC-IV) database. Patients with sepsis and AF are divided into OAC- group (n = 1,774) and OAC+ group (n = 1,181) based on OAC therapy. Septic patients with no AF were considered as the control group (n = 5,873, sepsis and no AF group). The main outcome endpoint was the survival rate of 30 day. The secondary outcome endpoint was the length of stay (LOS) from intensive care unit and hospital. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to adjust the influence of superfluous factors, and a restricted mean survival time (RMST) analysis was used for calculating the benefit of survival time and survival rate. Analysis including univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis was conducted to find prognosis-related predictors.ResultsAfter PSM, the OAC+group had a higher 30-day survival rate compared to the OAC- group (81.59% vs. 58.10%; P ConclusionThis study demonstrated that oral anticoagulants may increase the 30-day survival rate of patients with sepsis and AF.</p

Image1_Oral anticoagulants increased 30-day survival in sepsis patients complicated with atrial fibrillation: a retrospective analysis from MIMIC-IV database.tif

BackgroundThe severity of sepsis is associated with systemic clotting activation. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most commonly observed arrhythmia in patients with sepsis and can lead to a poor prognosis. The aim of this study is to elucidate the association between oral anticoagulants and survival from septic patients complicated with AF.MethodsThe data of 8,828 septic patients, including 2,955 AF and 5,873 without AF, were all originated from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care IV (MIMIC-IV) database. Patients with sepsis and AF are divided into OAC- group (n = 1,774) and OAC+ group (n = 1,181) based on OAC therapy. Septic patients with no AF were considered as the control group (n = 5,873, sepsis and no AF group). The main outcome endpoint was the survival rate of 30 day. The secondary outcome endpoint was the length of stay (LOS) from intensive care unit and hospital. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to adjust the influence of superfluous factors, and a restricted mean survival time (RMST) analysis was used for calculating the benefit of survival time and survival rate. Analysis including univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis was conducted to find prognosis-related predictors.ResultsAfter PSM, the OAC+group had a higher 30-day survival rate compared to the OAC- group (81.59% vs. 58.10%; P ConclusionThis study demonstrated that oral anticoagulants may increase the 30-day survival rate of patients with sepsis and AF.</p

Bacterial community analysis of anoxic/aeration (A/O) system in a combined process for gibberellin wastewater treatment

<div><p>Gibberellin wastewater cannot be directly discharged without treatment due to its high concentrations of sulfate and organic compounds and strong acidity. Therefore, multi-stage anaerobic bioreactor + micro-aerobic+ anoxic/aeration (A/O) + biological contact oxidation combined processes are used to treat gibberellin wastewater. However, knowledge of the treatment effects of the A/O process and bacterial community structure in the aeration tank reactors of such systems is sparse. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate the treatment effects and operation of the A/O process on gibberellin wastewater, as well as changes in the bacterial community structure of activated sludge in the aeration tank during treatment. Moreover, removal was examined based on evaluation of effluent after A/O treatment. Although influent chemical oxygen demand (COD), NH₃-N and total phosphorus (TP) fluctuated, effluent COD, NH₃-N and TP remained stable. Moreover, average COD, NH₃-N and TP removal efficiency were 68.41%, 93.67% and 45.82%, respectively, during the A/O process. At the phylum level, <i>Proteobacteria</i> was the dominant phylum in all samples, followed by <i>Chloroflexi</i>, <i>Bacteroidetes</i> and <i>Actinobacteria</i>. <i>Proteobacteria</i> played an important role in the removal of organic matter. <i>Chloroflexi</i> was found to be responsible for the degradation of carbohydrates and <i>Bacteroidetes</i> also had been found to be responsible for the degradation of complex organic matters. <i>Actinobacteria</i> are able to degrade a variety of environmental chemicals. Additionally, <i>Anaerolineaceae_</i>uncultured was the major genus in samples collected on May 25, 2015, while <i>Novosphingobium</i> and <i>Nitrospira</i> were dominant in most samples. <i>Nitrosomonas</i> are regarded as the dominant ammonia-oxidizing bacteria, while <i>Nitrospira</i> are the main nitrite-oxidizing bacteria. Bacterial community structure varied considerably with time, and a partial Mantel test showed a highly significant positive correlation between bacterial community structure and DO. The bacterial community structure was also positively correlated with temperature and SO₄^2-.</p></div

Table3_Oral anticoagulants increased 30-day survival in sepsis patients complicated with atrial fibrillation: a retrospective analysis from MIMIC-IV database.docx

BackgroundThe severity of sepsis is associated with systemic clotting activation. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most commonly observed arrhythmia in patients with sepsis and can lead to a poor prognosis. The aim of this study is to elucidate the association between oral anticoagulants and survival from septic patients complicated with AF.MethodsThe data of 8,828 septic patients, including 2,955 AF and 5,873 without AF, were all originated from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care IV (MIMIC-IV) database. Patients with sepsis and AF are divided into OAC- group (n = 1,774) and OAC+ group (n = 1,181) based on OAC therapy. Septic patients with no AF were considered as the control group (n = 5,873, sepsis and no AF group). The main outcome endpoint was the survival rate of 30 day. The secondary outcome endpoint was the length of stay (LOS) from intensive care unit and hospital. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to adjust the influence of superfluous factors, and a restricted mean survival time (RMST) analysis was used for calculating the benefit of survival time and survival rate. Analysis including univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis was conducted to find prognosis-related predictors.ResultsAfter PSM, the OAC+group had a higher 30-day survival rate compared to the OAC- group (81.59% vs. 58.10%; P ConclusionThis study demonstrated that oral anticoagulants may increase the 30-day survival rate of patients with sepsis and AF.</p

Table1_Oral anticoagulants increased 30-day survival in sepsis patients complicated with atrial fibrillation: a retrospective analysis from MIMIC-IV database.docx

BackgroundThe severity of sepsis is associated with systemic clotting activation. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most commonly observed arrhythmia in patients with sepsis and can lead to a poor prognosis. The aim of this study is to elucidate the association between oral anticoagulants and survival from septic patients complicated with AF.MethodsThe data of 8,828 septic patients, including 2,955 AF and 5,873 without AF, were all originated from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care IV (MIMIC-IV) database. Patients with sepsis and AF are divided into OAC- group (n = 1,774) and OAC+ group (n = 1,181) based on OAC therapy. Septic patients with no AF were considered as the control group (n = 5,873, sepsis and no AF group). The main outcome endpoint was the survival rate of 30 day. The secondary outcome endpoint was the length of stay (LOS) from intensive care unit and hospital. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to adjust the influence of superfluous factors, and a restricted mean survival time (RMST) analysis was used for calculating the benefit of survival time and survival rate. Analysis including univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis was conducted to find prognosis-related predictors.ResultsAfter PSM, the OAC+group had a higher 30-day survival rate compared to the OAC- group (81.59% vs. 58.10%; P ConclusionThis study demonstrated that oral anticoagulants may increase the 30-day survival rate of patients with sepsis and AF.</p