Search

[Abstract:] Grasslands play a crucial role in European agriculture and ecology, but are often underutilized due to low-value end-products. The utilisation of late-harvest grass for biochar and heat generation on farm-level is being studied as a potential negative emissions technology. Technical (energy provision and carbon sink), economic (cost vs. benefit), political (regulatory framework) and social (SWOT) perspectives are being evaluated. Technical feasibility has been demonstrated with three different farm-scale technologies and the energetic and carbon-sink potential evaluated. When a continuously operating allothermal unit is evaluated, 35 % of the input biomass energy content can be utilized for heating a farm, in combination with the potential to provide a carbon sink. The cost-benefit analysis shows important monetary savings when including the agronomic value (based on the market price) of the produced biochar. An assessment of the regulatory framework of biochar production in Germany presents a multitude of regulations applying to such technologies some of which provide a hurdle to navigate and may incur excessive costs for farmers as small-scale biochar producers. A SWOT analysis of a case in Brandenburg, Germany highlights strengths and opportunities, but also obstacles such as lack of infrastructure and regulatory support. This study highlights the need for further development of suitable technology and research on the long-term economic and carbon sink potential of biochar. This work was performed within the GO-GRASS project and has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 862674. We thank all the partners who collaborated with the data collection. We would also like to thank Philipp Grundmann for the coordination of the GO-GRASS project.

Single wall carbon nanotubes (SWNT) have been a significant research topic as active layers for thin film transistors (TFTs) due to their high charge carrier mobility beyond that of crystalline silicon. In this study, we report an effective approach to achieve a very high field-effect mobility and on/off ratio for solution processed semiconducting SWNT TFTs, by selective doping through contact with a thin ferric chloride (FeCl3) dopant layer. The semiconducting layer is formed by a double spin coating of the highly purified (>99%) high pressure carbon mono oxide (HiPCO) SWNT sorted by wrapping of poly (3-dodecylthiophene-2,5-diyl) (P3DDT). In order to achieve effective hole injection from the top Au source electrode without increasing the off-state drain current, less purified (98-99%) SWNTs produced by the plasma discharge process sorted by wrapping of poly (9,9-di-n-dodecylfluorene) (PFDD) are formed on the top of HiPCO film. Significantly improved TFT performance is achieved by the insertion of a few nanometers of a FeCl3 dopant layer at the semiconductor-contact interface. A significant high hole field-effect of 48.35 ± 3.11 cm2V−1s−1 (bare: 6.18 ± 0.87 cm2V−1s−1) with a reasonable on/off current ratio of 105, and low off current of ∼80 pA, are obtained by controlling the concentration of FeCl3 dopant (thickness = 1.5 nm) at the contact. Mobility is improved further at 2.5 nm thickness of the FeCl3 dopant layer resulting in a hole mobility of 177 ± 13.2 cm2 V−1s−1, an on/off ratio of 7.4 × 103, and off state current of 1.2 × 10−9 A.

On behalf of the Working Group Sustainability of the Leibniz PhD and PostDoc Networks. Order of authorship: First the current WG coordinator, then the three other members who contributed the most to the position paper, and last the other contributing members in alphabetical order.

Terrestrial radiative cooling is an intriguing way to mitigate the accelerating cooling demands in the residential and commercial sectors by offering zero-energy cooling. However, the ultra-white or mirror-like appearance of radiative coolers can be visually sterile and raise safety issues when broadly applied to building facades and vehicles. To overcome the fundamental trade-off between color diversity and cooling performance, we propose a radiatively integrated, conductively insulated system that exploits thermal non-equilibrium between colorants and thermal emitters. This allows such radiative coolers to be cooled below the ambient temperature at all times of the day while exhibiting any desired exterior color including black. We experimentally demonstrate that even black coolers, absorbing 646 Wm-2 of solar power under AM1.5 conditions, cools down to a maximum of 6.9 K (average of 3.5 K) below the ambient temperature during the daytime. These systems can potentially be used in outdoor applications, especially in commercial buildings and residential houses, where carbon-free thermal management is in high demand but diversity of colors is also important for visual appeal and comfort.

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-jcb-10.1177_0271678X221103006 for Cerebrovascular reactivity and deep white matter hyperintensities in migraine: A prospective CO2 targeting study by Mi Ji Lee, Bo-yong Park, Soohyun Cho, Seonwoo Kim, Hyunjin Park, Sung Tae Kim and Chin-Sang Chung in Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-jcb-10.1177_0271678X221103006 for Cerebrovascular reactivity and deep white matter hyperintensities in migraine: A prospective CO2 targeting study by Mi Ji Lee, Bo-yong Park, Soohyun Cho, Seonwoo Kim, Hyunjin Park, Sung Tae Kim and Chin-Sang Chung in Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism

Grassland is an important type of land use in Europe, covering a large area and providing ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, enhancing biodiversity and protecting water. To boost the development of a bio-based economy and contribute to the EU’s goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2050, there is a need for business models that can be replicated in a variety of locations and contexts, with relatively low levels of investment, risk and technical sophistication. A wider range of rural entrepreneurs need to get involved in the emerging bio-based business sector, including farmers and forest owners (and their associations), policy makers, small rural businesses, and advisors. This is key to diversifying and revitalising the rural economies and creating quality jobs in rural areas.

이 연구는 베트남인 한국어 학습자의 운율을 분석하고 교육적 제언을 하는 데에 목적이 있다. 한국인과 베트남인 한국어 학습자의 운율 차이를 살펴보기 위해 베트남인 학문 목적 한국어 학습자 12명이 낭독한 음성 자료를 토대로 강세구 억양과 억양구 경계 성조를 중심으로 운율을 살펴보았다. Praat를 통해 베트남인의 음높이와 음절 길이를 분석한 결과 1) 베트남인의 음높이가 한국인보다 전체적으로 높았다. 그러나 문장 첫 어절의 강세구 억양이나 문미 억양구 경계 성조의 억양은 한국인 발화와 통계적으로 유의미한 차이를 보이지 않았다. 2) 음절 길이는 베트남인의 음절 발화 길이가 한국인의 2배에 가까웠다. 특히 문장 첫 음절의 길이가 길었다. 이러한 차이는 베트남어의 성조가 한국어 발음에 영향을 미쳤기 때문으로 보인다. 음절 단위로 끊어 읽는 베트남어의 운율적 특징이 한국어 발화를 부자연스럽게 만들 수 있다는 것이다. 따라서 이 연구에서는 개별 음절 사이의 음높이 차이가 크게 나지 않도록 하며, 문장의 마지막 억양이 갑자기 하향곡선을 그리지 않도록 교육할 필요가 있다고 보았다. 특히 베트남인이 조사를 발음할 때 조사마다 음절 길이 차이가 커지지 않으려면 의미 단위로 인식하게 할 것을 제언했다. 이 연구는 베트남인 학부생 중 중급 수준 학습자의 운율 요소에만 집중한 연구이다. 학문 목적 학습자를 대상으로 한 만큼, 그들이 가지는 발음에 대한 요구를 충족시키는 데에 기초 연구로서의 역할을 할 수 있을 것이다.

Determining the stage of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is important for treatment and prognosis. Staging includes a professional interpretation of imaging, thus we aimed to build an automatic process with deep learning (DL). We proposed an end-to-end DL method that uses pre-treatment computer tomography images to classify the early- and advanced-stage of NSCLC. DL models were developed and tested to classify the early- and advanced-stage using training (n = 58), validation (n = 7), and testing (n = 17) cohorts obtained from public domains. The network consists of three parts of encoder, decoder, and classification layer. Encoder and decoder layers are trained to reconstruct original images. Classification layers are trained to classify early- and advanced-stage NSCLC patients with a dense layer. Other machine learning-based approaches were compared. Our model achieved accuracy of 0.8824, sensitivity of 1.0, specificity of 0.6, and area under the curve (AUC) of 0.7333 compared with other approaches (AUC 0.5500 ─ 0.7167) in the test cohort for classifying between early- and advanced-stages. Our DL model to classify NSCLC patients into early-stage and advanced-stage showed promising results and could be useful in future NSCLC research.

Additional file 1: Supplementary Table 1. Definition of extracted radiomics features. Supplementary Methods. Patients and imaging datasets. Imaging differences at the organ level. Supplementary Results. Fig. S1. The Kaplan-Meier plots using the radiomics score based on test set2 (kidney). Fig. S2. The Kaplan-Meier plots using the radiomics score based on test set2 (brain).

Background Recently, molecular classifications of gastric cancer (GC) have been proposed that include TP53 mutations and their functional activity. We aimed to demonstrate the correlation between p53 immunohistochemistry (IHC) and TP53 mutations as well as their clinicopathological significance in GC. Methods Deep targeted sequencing was performed using surgical or biopsy specimens from 120 patients with GC. IHC for p53 was performed and interpreted as strong, weak, or negative expression. In 18 cases (15.0%) with discrepant TP53 mutation and p53 IHC results, p53 IHC was repeated. Results Strong expression of p53 was associated with TP53 missense mutations, negative expression with other types of mutations, and weak expression with wild-type TP53 (p

Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text, To evaluate the ability of a radiomics signature based on 3T dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to distinguish between low and non-low Oncotype DX (OD) risk groups in estrogen receptor (ER)-positive invasive breast cancers. Between May 2011 and March 2016, 67 women with ER-positive invasive breast cancer who performed preoperative 3T MRI and OD assay were included. We divided the patients into low (OD recurrence score [RS]

Quantification of cerebral white matter hyperintensities (WMH) of presumed vascular origin is of key importance in many neurological research studies. Currently, measurements are often still obtained from manual segmentations on brain MR images, which is a laborious procedure. Automatic WMH segmentation methods exist, but a standardized comparison of the performance of such methods is lacking. We organized a scientific challenge, in which developers could evaluate their method on a standardized multi-center/-scanner image dataset, giving an objective comparison: the WMH Segmentation Challenge (https://wmh.isi.uu.nl/). Sixty T1+FLAIR images from three MR scanners were released with manual WMH segmentations for training. A test set of 110 images from five MR scanners was used for evaluation. Segmentation methods had to be containerized and submitted to the challenge organizers. Five evaluation metrics were used to rank the methods: (1) Dice similarity coefficient, (2) modified Hausdorff distance (95th percentile), (3) absolute log-transformed volume difference, (4) sensitivity for detecting individual lesions, and (5) F1-score for individual lesions. Additionally, methods were ranked on their inter-scanner robustness. Twenty participants submitted their method for evaluation. This paper provides a detailed analysis of the results. In brief, there is a cluster of four methods that rank significantly better than the other methods, with one clear winner. The inter-scanner robustness ranking shows that not all methods generalize to unseen scanners. The challenge remains open for future submissions and provides a public platform for method evaluation.

Background: Model-based compartmental analysis of data on plasma retinol kinetics after administration of labeled retinol provides unique information about whole-body vitamin A metabolism. If labeled β-carotene is coadministered, its bioefficacy relative to the retinol reference dose can also be estimated. Objectives: The objectives were to model plasma retinol kinetics after administration of labeled preformed vitamin A and provitamin A β-carotene and to determine relative β-carotene bioefficacy. Methods: We used the Simulation, Analysis and Modeling software (WinSAAM version 3.0.8; http://www.WinSAAM.org) to analyze previously collected data on plasma [13C10]- and [13C5]retinol kinetics for 14 d after oral administration of 1 mg [13C10]retinyl acetate and 2 mg [13C10]β-carotene in oil to 30 healthy young adults of European ancestry [13 men, 17 women; mean ± SD age: 24.5 ± 4.2 y; mean ± SD body weight: 65.2 ± 10 kg; mean ± SD body mass index (in kg/m2): 22.5 ± 1.9] with moderate vitamin A intakes. Results: A 6-component model provided the best fit to the data, including compartments for initial metabolism of vitamin A, plasma retinol, and extravascular vitamin A storage. The disposal rate was 6.7 ± 3.1 μmol/d, fractional catabolic rate was 6.0% ± 2.3%/d, and vitamin A stores were 123 ± 71 μmol. Relative β-carotene bioefficacy, based on the ratio of the areas under the fraction of dose curves calculated by WinSAAM, averaged 13.5% ± 6.02% (retinol activity equivalents = 7.7:1.0 μg). Interindividual variation in relative β-carotene bioefficacy was high (CV: 44%). Conclusions: Vitamin A kinetics in these young adults were best described by essentially the same model that had been previously developed by using data for older adults with higher vitamin A stores; differences in parameter values reflected differences in vitamin A status. Estimated β-carotene bioefficacy was relatively low but similar to previously reported estimates obtained by graphical methods. This trial was registered at the UK Clinical Research Network as UKCRN 7413.

International audience

Background: Model-based compartmental analysis of data on plasma retinol kinetics after administration of labeled retinol provides unique information about whole-body vitamin A metabolism. If labeled β-carotene is coadministered, its bioefficacy relative to the retinol reference dose can also be estimated. Objectives: The objectives were to model plasma retinol kinetics after administration of labeled preformed vitamin A and provitamin A β-carotene and to determine relative β-carotene bioefficacy. Methods: We used the Simulation, Analysis and Modeling software (WinSAAM version 3.0.8; http://www.WinSAAM.org) to analyze previously collected data on plasma [13C10]- and [13C5]retinol kinetics for 14 d after oral administration of 1 mg [13C10]retinyl acetate and 2 mg [13C10]β-carotene in oil to 30 healthy young adults of European ancestry [13 men, 17 women; mean ± SD age: 24.5 ± 4.2 y; mean ± SD body weight: 65.2 ± 10 kg; mean ± SD body mass index (in kg/m2): 22.5 ± 1.9] with moderate vitamin A intakes. Results: A 6-component model provided the best fit to the data, including compartments for initial metabolism of vitamin A, plasma retinol, and extravascular vitamin A storage. The disposal rate was 6.7 ± 3.1 μmol/d, fractional catabolic rate was 6.0% ± 2.3%/d, and vitamin A stores were 123 ± 71 μmol. Relative β-carotene bioefficacy, based on the ratio of the areas under the fraction of dose curves calculated by WinSAAM, averaged 13.5% ± 6.02% (retinol activity equivalents = 7.7:1.0 μg). Interindividual variation in relative β-carotene bioefficacy was high (CV: 44%). Conclusions: Vitamin A kinetics in these young adults were best described by essentially the same model that had been previously developed by using data for older adults with higher vitamin A stores; differences in parameter values reflected differences in vitamin A status. Estimated β-carotene bioefficacy was relatively low but similar to previously reported estimates obtained by graphical methods. This trial was registered at the UK Clinical Research Network as UKCRN 7413. Refereed/Peer-reviewed