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A mounting number of individuals engage in the simultaneous learning of multiple foreign languages. Prior research has underscored the advantages of bilingualism on foreign language aptitude (FLA). However, the impact of multilingual experience on the constituents of FLA, namely explicit language aptitude (ELA) and implicit language aptitude (ILA), along with the cognitive mechanisms underlying these effects, remain less explored. This study seeks to fill this gap by examining the potential multilingual influence on FLA constituents and the possible mediating role of cognitive abilities such as selective attention and working memory. Our research involved 82 Chinese college students, aged between 17 and 24, equally distributed into two cohorts: Chinese-English bilinguals and Chinese-English-Japanese trilinguals (41 per group). The results showed that bilinguals outperformed trilingual learners in terms of ILA performance, with selective attention fully mediating the relationship between multilingualism and ILA. This work is pioneering in identifying the crucial role of selective attention in linking multilingualism and ILA, thereby advancing our understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of the relative bilingual efficiency in language aptitude. The insights are invaluable for educational practice, suggesting that language learning programmes should be designed to optimise cognitive resources in multilingual learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • LCA-LCC-TNSBM methodology was established for the assessment. • Treatment costs can be reduced by 43.99% when WDRI was implemented. • Electricity in UF-RO increases GWP while CaCl 2 in FWW treatment increases ecotoxicity. • Coupling upgraded pretreatment with UF-RO is the best available technique. Integrated circuit industry was featured by huge amount of freshwater consumption and pollutant discharge containing TMAH, fluorides, and heavy metals, making it a global challenge for wastewater reuse. A number of previous literatures focused on deep treatment and reuse techniques, while less attention was paid to a sustainable reuse of the wastewater at industrial scale. This paper took a leading integrated circuit enterprise in China as a case, using its pilot experiment on wastewater reuse and derivative waste recovery, which considering innovative technologies like in-situ Fenton autoxidation technique and coupling A/O-MBR with enhanced hydraulic acidification by weak current. Seven scenarios were designed and LCA-LCC-TNSBM methodology was constructed to assess environmental impact, life cycle cost, and efficiency. It was proved that the potential for integrated circuit wastewater reuse can reach up to 92.3 % in the pilot experiment, and LCA results showed that, compared to the scenario that was at original treatment condition, carbon emissions would be increased by 15.58 % when wastewater reuse and derivative waste recovery was implemented, interestingly, while its cost can be reduced by 43.99 %. The impact of electricity, CaCl 2 and NaOH consumption should be concerned in some wastewater streams. Results of TNSBM showed that, treatment of derivative waste contributed mostly to total efficiency of wastewater reuse system. Moreover, recovery of fluoride sludge could reduce environmental impact while cutting total costs by 5.90 %. This study suggested EPCO (engineering, procurement, construction, and operation) business model, and government incentive mechanism to improve the sustainability of wastewater reuse systems. However, EPCO faces challenge of large investment, and more flexible payment ways should be considered in actual application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that soil fertility is poor in most newly reclaimed land, which has been developed as an effective way to compensate farmland occupation. In order to ameliorate the soil quality of the newly reclaimed land, this study investigated the effect of commercial organic fertilizer (COF) (0.45, 0.90, 1.35 and 1.80 kg/m2), sheep manure (SM) (0.45, 0.75, 1.05 and 1.35 kg/m2), mushroom residue (MR) (1.50, 2.25, 3.00 and 3.75 kg/m2), and chemical compound fertilizer (CCF) (0.075 kg/m2) on the growth of sweet potato, soil pH, organic matter content (OMC), available phosphate, total nitrogen, available potassium, exchangeable Ca and Mg, as well as bacterial and fungal microbial composition during 2019–2021. The results from this study indicated that the COF, SM, MR, and CCF did not significantly change the soil pH, but significantly increased the OMC, which has been regarded as the most significant soil quality parameter. This suggests that the soil amendments used in this study have great potential to improve the soil quality in newly reclaimed land. However, these soil amendments exhibited a differential effect on sweet potato biomass, nutrient elements and the microbial community of the newly reclaimed soil, which depend on the kind and concentration of organic/chemical fertilizer, the application time, as well as the plant and soil parameters. The change was also observed on the bacterial and fungal soil microbial community, which provides us with a microbial basis to understand why organic fertilizer has a great effect on soil improvement. Overall, our results suggest that soil amended with organic fertilizers has great potential for the production of sweet potato in immature soil from the new reclamation land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video super-resolution converts low-resolution videos to sharp high-resolution ones. In order to make better use of temporal information in video super-resolution, we design inverse recurrent net and hybrid local fusion. We concatenate the original low-resolution input sequence and its inverse sequence repeatedly. The new sequence is viewed as a combination of different stages, and is processed sequentially by using orent net. The outputs of the last two stages in opposite directions are fused to generate the final images. Our inverse recurrent net can extract more bidirectional temporal information in the input sequence, without adding parameter to the corresponding unidirectional recurrent net. We also propose a hybrid local fusion method which uses parallel fusion and cascade fusion for incorporating sliding-window-based methods into our inverse recurrent net. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed inverse recurrent net and hybrid local fusion, in terms of visual quality and quantitative evaluations. The code will be released at https://github.com/5ofwind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thin Bi films, especially noncentrosymmetric α-phase Bi films (α-Bi), have attracted considerable attention in recent years due to their intriguing physical properties such as ferroelectricity, nonlinear optical response, and coherent spin transport. However, the current experimental preparation of α-Bi films still presents substantial challenges, resulting in only isolated α-Bi islands being achieved. In this study, α-Bi/SrTiO3 (α-Bi/STO) was synthesized from a Bi2O2Se/STO (BOS/STO) heterostructure by depositing a Eu layer and reducing a BOS film. The so-formed α-Bi/STO interface features metallic conductivity with electron mobility of 7.7 × 104 cm2/V s and ultralow resistivity of 1 nΩ cm at 2 K, as well as high residual resistance ratios R300 K/R2 K up to 2353. Furthermore, we observed a complex weak antilocalization–weak localization–weak antilocalization crossover with increasing magnetic field at temperatures below 10 K. Our work presents the synthesis of α-Bi films, which could potentially serve as a valuable platform for experimental validation of diverse theoretical predictions associated with α-Bi heterostructures. Furthermore, this special synthesis method provides valuable insights into the preparation of other metastable films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Introduced multi-tiered method to identify ecological protection priority areas. • Incorporated ecological lands with excellent ecosystem integrity into EPPAs. • The width of ecological corridors was identified based on the proportion of land use. • Aggregate Polygons tool was utilized to aggregate fragmented areas. • An ecological protection method was developed for medium-sized city. Identifying ecological protection priority areas (EPPAs) in municipal areas is essential for accurate ecological restoration and ensuring sustainable regional development. Xianyang represents a typical medium-sized city that is currently grappling with the dual challenges of ecological restoration and urban development. This study employed a multi-criteria method to evaluate ecological importance, considering both ecosystem services and ecological vulnerability. Based on this, ecological corridors and pinch points that enhance ecological connectivity were delineated using the circuit theory. Subsequently, the integrity of ecosystems is assessed from structural and functional perspectives to ensure their health and stability. With the support of Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, the three important areas for ecological protection were integrated to designate EPPAs. The results showed that: (1) the extremely important area spans 1956.44 km2, primarily made up of forests and grasslands. (2) There were found to be 19 ecological sources, 26 ecological corridors, and 23 ecological pinch points. (3) With excellent ecosystem integrity, the region was dominated by eco-lands, which accounted for 2692.71 km2. (4) In the end, this study identified 3328.83 km2 of EPPAs, 32.65 % of the study area. These are primarily located in the northern mountains and major watersheds. Human activities are found as the most important factor for the overall spatial variations in the area. A multi-level framework was developed to establish a continuous, comprehensive, and systematic method for identifying EPPAs, thereby enhancing ecological restoration, protection, and the sustainable use of regional ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Horizontal well (HW) has been widely applied to enhance well productivity and prevent water coning in the anisotropic reservoir subject to bottom-water drive. However, the water-cut increases quickly after only one or two years’ production in China while oil recovery still keeps at a very low level. It becomes a major challenge to effectively estimate production distribution and diagnose water-influx locations. Ignoring the effect of nonuniform production distribution along wellbore on pressure response may cause erroneous results especially for water-influx location determination. This paper developed an analytical method to determine nonuniform production distribution and estimate water-influx sections through well-testing analysis. Each HW is divided into multiple producing segments (PS) with variable parameters (e.g., location, production, length, and skin factor) in this model. By using Green’s functions and the Newman-product method, the novel transient pressure solutions of an HW can be obtained in the anisotropic reservoir with bottom-water drive. Secondly, the influences of nonuniform production-distribution on type curves are investigated by comparing the multisegment model (MSM) with the whole-segment model (WSM). Results indicate that the method proposed in this paper enables petroleum operators to interpret parameters of reservoir and HW more accurately by using well-testing interpretation on the basis of bottom-hole pressure data and further estimate water-influx sections and nonproducing segments. Additionally, relevant measures can be conducted to enhance oil production, such as water controlling for water-breakthrough segments and stimulation treatments for nonproducing locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widely used application of horizontal well makes it significant to effectively evaluate rate performance of horizontal well in oil and gas reservoir. However, most models in previous work only focus on rate decline analysis (RDA) of horizontal well with single section (HWSS); they hardly address the problem that production rate distributes nonuniformly along horizontal wellbore in analyzing rate transient behaviors. However, only some horizontal segments contribute to the total production rates, and the production of each section along horizontal wellbore is not the same in fact, which may be caused by reservoir heterogeneity, selective completion, and nonuniform formation damage along horizontal wellbore. Therefore, the effect of these phenomena on rate decline characteristics cannot be ignored. The aim of this paper is to propose an analytical model to investigate transient rate response of a horizontal well with multiple sections (HWMS). The compound type curves, including the normalized production curve, the normalized production integral curve, and the production integral derivative curve, are developed to distinguish the different cases. The influences of some sensitive parameters on decline curves are further discussed. Results show obvious differences on the decline curves between the HWMS and HWSS. The parameters are sensitive on decline curves, which explore the feasible application on production performance evaluation and parameters interpretation through history matching the production data with the compound type curves in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although technical advances in hydraulically fracturing and drilling enable commercial production from tight reservoirs, oil/gas recovery remains at a low level. Due to the technical and economic limitations of well-testing operations in tight reservoirs, rate-transient analysis (RTA) has become a more attractive option. However, current RTA models hardly consider the effect of the non-uniform production on rate decline behaviors. In fact, PLT results demonstrate that production profile is non-uniform. To fill this gap, this paper presents an improved RTA model of multi-fractured horizontal wells (MFHWs) to investigate the effects of non-uniform properties of hydraulic fractures (production of fractures, fracture half-length, number of fractures, fracture conductivity, and vertical permeability) on rate transient behaviors through the diagnostic type curves. Results indicate obvious differences on the rate decline curves among the type curves of uniform properties of fractures (UPF) and non-uniform properties of fractures (NPF). The use of dimensionless production integral derivative curve magnifies the differences so that we can diagnose the phenomenon of non-uniform production. Therefore, it's significant to incorporate the effects of NPF into the RDA models of MFHWs, and the model proposed in this paper enables us to better evaluate well performance based on long-term production data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]