Microbial Properties Depending on Fertilization Regime in Agricultural Soils with Different Texture and Climate Conditions: A Meta-Analysis

Over-fertilization has a significant impact on soil microbial properties and its ecological environment. However, the effects of long-term fertilization on microbial properties on a large scale are still vague. This meta-analysis collected 6211 data points from 109 long-term experimental sites in China to evaluate the effects of fertilizer type and fertilization duration, as well as soil and climate conditions, on the effect sizes on various microbial properties and indices. The organic fertilizers combined with straw (NPKS) and manure (NPKM) had the highest effect sizes, while the chemical fertilizers N (sole N fertilizer) and NPK (NPK fertilizer) had the lowest. When compared with the control, NPKM treatment had the highest effect size, while N treatment had the lowest effect size on MBN (111% vs. 19%), PLFA (110% vs. −7%), fungi (88% vs. 43%), Actinomycetes (97% vs. 44%), urease (77% vs. 25%), catalase (15% vs. −11%), and phosphatase (58% vs. 4%). NPKM treatment had the highest while NPK treatment had the lowest effect size on bacteria (123% vs. 33%). NPKS treatment had the highest while N treatment had the lowest effect sizes on MBC (77% vs. 8%) and invertase (59% vs. 0.2%). NPKS treatment had the highest while NPK treatment had the lowest effect size on the Shannon index (5% vs. 1%). The effect sizes of NPKM treatment were the highest predominantly in arid regions because of the naturally low organic carbon in soils of these regions. The effect sizes on various microbial properties were also highly dependent on soil texture. In coarse-textured soils the effect sizes on MBC and MBN peaked sooner compared with those of clayey or silty soils, although various enzymes were most active in silty soils during the first 10 years of fertilization. Effect sizes on microbial properties were generally higher under NPKM and NPKS treatments than under NPK or N treatments, with considerable effects due to climate conditions. The optimal field fertilizer regime could be determined based on the effects of fertilizer type on soil microorganisms under various climate conditions and soil textures. This will contribute to the microbial biodiversity and soil health of agricultural land. Such controls should be used for adaptation of fertilization strategies to global changes

Anonymous privacy-preserving task matching in crowdsourcing

With the development of sharing economy, crowdsourcing as a distributed computing paradigm has become increasingly pervasive. As one of indispensable services for most crowdsourcing applications, task matching has also been extensively explored. However, privacy issues are usually ignored during the task matching and few existing privacy-preserving crowdsourcing mechanisms can simultaneously protect both task privacy and worker privacy. This paper systematically analyzes the privacy leaks and potential threats in the task matching and proposes a single-keyword task matching scheme for the multirequester/multiworker crowdsourcing with efficient worker revocation. The proposed scheme not only protects data confidentiality and identity anonymity against the crowd-server, but also achieves query traceability against dishonest or revoked workers. Detailed privacy analysis and thorough performance evaluation show that the proposed scheme is secure and feasible

A framework for cardiac arrhythmia detection from IoT-based ECGs

Cardiac arrhythmia has been identified as a type of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) that causes approximately 12% of all deaths globally. The development of Internet-of-Things has spawned novel ways for heart monitoring but also presented new challenges for manual arrhythmia detection. An automated method is highly demanded to provide support for physicians. Current attempts for automatic arrhythmia detection can roughly be divided as feature-engineering based and deep-learning based methods. Most of the feature-engineering based methods are suffering from adopting single classifier and use fixed features for classifying all five types of heartbeats. This introduces difficulties in identification of the problematic heartbeats and limits the overall classification performance. The deep-learning based methods are usually not evaluated in a realistic manner and report overoptimistic results which may hide potential limitations of the models. Moreover, the lack of consideration of frequency patterns and the heart rhythms can also limit the model performance. To fill in the gaps, we propose a framework for arrhythmia detection from IoT-based ECGs. The framework consists of two modules: a data cleaning module and a heartbeat classification module. Specifically, we propose two solutions for the heartbeat classification task, namely Dynamic Heartbeat Classification with Adjusted Features (DHCAF) and Multi-channel Heartbeat Convolution Neural Network (MCHCNN). DHCAF is a feature-engineering based approach, in which we introduce dynamic ensemble selection (DES) technique and develop a result regulator to improve classification performance. MCHCNN is deep-learning based solution that performs multi-channel convolutions to capture both temporal and frequency patterns from heartbeat to assist the classification. We evaluate the proposed framework with DHCAF and with MCHCNN on the well-known MIT-BIH-AR database, respectively. The results reported in this paper have proven the effectiveness of our framework

Energy and Economic Analysis of Life Cycle Zero Energy Building in the Temperate Region

Life cycle zero energy buildings (LCZEBs) can present energy use more accurately than net zero energy buildings (NZEBs). Economic benefits are crucial for residents to accept LCZEBs. However, few relevant case studies have been conducted. A comparative analysis between a NZEB and a LCZEB with a multi-story apartment in a temperate region that meets the requirements of local building energy codes as the reference building was conducted in this study to ascertain economic feasibility of LCZEB. First, a building model and an energy model were established on the basis of site test, survey, and monitoring data. Then, the energy balances of the NZEB and LCZEB were calculated on the basis of the results of energy simulation and the foregoing data. Finally, the LCZEB and NZEB were realized on the condition that high thermal performance materials and high energy efficiency building equipment were adopted in accordance with the principle of maximizing net present value (NPV) and solar energy was fully utilized. Results demonstrate that solar hot water and photovoltaic systems are critical to the NZEB and LCZEB. Annual net energy (ANE) and annual NPV per square meter of thermal collector are −571.11 kWh and $455.5, respectively, and ANE and annual NPV per square meter of photovoltaic panel are −115.62 kWh and$13.2. The NZEB and LCZEB are economically feasible in the temperate region although the NZEB is superior to the LCZEB in terms of economic benefits. Their NPVs for the calculation period (20 years) are $15369.64 and$4718.77, and their payback periods are 11 and 16 years. This study can provide references for energy and economic optimization of NZEBs and LCZEBs

Assessing Heavy Metal Pollution of the Largest Nature Reserve in Tianjin City, China

Embargo until June 10, 2023Beidagang Wetland (BW) Nature Reserve is centrally situated in Tianjin City, experiencing an extreme industrial development. This study uses index characteristic analysis systems for assessing the individual and combined heavy metal pollution loading in the water during the spring and autumn seasons. By combining the pollution level of single pollutant, a more comprehensive evaluation of water quality in BW was achieved. Water quality was worst during autumn due to high level of Cd and Pb, which indicate the type of anthropogenic activities have a serious effect on heavy metal pollution in BW. In addition, high exchangeable amounts of Cd (> 40%) were found in the sediments of BW, indicating Cd pollution has emerged. There is a need for appropriate abatement actions curbing heavy metal loading and improving water quality of the BW Nature Reserve, thereby ensuring a sustainable management of its ecosystem services.acceptedVersio

SybMatch: Sybil detection for privacy-preserving task matching in crowdsourcing

The past decade has witnessed the rise of crowdsourcing, and privacy in crowdsourcing has also gained rising concern in the meantime. In this paper, we focus on the privacy leaks and sybil attacks during the task matching, and propose a privacy-preserving task matching scheme, called SybMatch. The SybMatch scheme can simultaneously protect the privacy of publishers and subscribers against semi-honest crowdsourcing service provider, and meanwhile support the sybil detection against greedy subscribers and efficient user revocation. Detailed security analysis and thorough performance evaluation show that the SybMatch scheme is secure and efficient

Porous titanium manufactured by a novel powder tapping method using spherical salt bead space holders: characterisation and mechanical properties

Porous Ti with open porosity in the range of 70–80% has been made using Ti powder and a particulate leaching technique using porous, spherical, NaCl beads. By incorporating the Ti powder into a pre-existing network of salt beads, by tapping followed by compaction, salt dissolution and “sintering”, porous structures with uniform density, pore and strut sizes and a predictable level of connectivity have been produced, showing a significant improvement on the structures made by conventional powder mixing processes. Parts made using beads with sizes in the range of 0.5-1.0 mm show excellent promise as porous metals for medical devices, showing structures and porosities similar to those of commercial porous metals used in this sector, with inter-pore connections that are similar to trabecular bone. The elastic modulus (0.86GPa) is lower than those for commercial porous metals and more closely matches that of trabecular bone and good compressive yield strength is retained (21MPa). The ability to further tailor the structure, in terms of the density and the size of the pores and interconnections has also been demonstrated by immersion of the porous components in acid

Newcastle Disease Virus V Protein Inhibits Cell Apoptosis and Promotes Viral Replication by Targeting CacyBP/SIP

Newcastle disease virus (NDV) has been classified by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) as a notable disease-causing virus, and this virus has the ability to infect a wide range of birds. V protein is a non-structural protein of NDV. V protein has been reported to inhibit cell apoptosis (Park et al., 2003a) and promote viral replication (Huang et al., 2003), however, the mechanisms of action of V protein have not been elucidated. In the present study, a yeast two-hybrid screen was performed, and V protein was found to interact with the CacyBP/SIP protein. The results of co-immunoprecipitation and immuno-colocalization assays confirmed the interaction between V protein and CacyBP/SIP. The results of quantitative-PCR and viral plaque assays showed that overexpression of CacyBP/SIP inhibited viral replication in DF-1 cells. Overexpression of CacyBP/SIP in DF-1 cells induced caspase3-dependent apoptosis. The effect of knocking down CacyBP/SIP by siRNA was the opposite of that observed upon overexpression. Moreover, it is known that NDV induces cell apoptosis via multiple caspase-dependent pathways. Furthermore, V protein inhibited cell apoptosis and downregulated CacyBP/SIP expression in DF-1 cells. Taken together, the findings of the current study indicate that V protein interacts with CacyBP/SIP, thereby regulating cell apoptosis and viral replication