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In this study, 17 deoxynivalenol (DON) contaminated wheat samples were assessed for safety and quality index such as unit weight, water absorption of gluten, crude protein content, unsound kernel content, sprouted kernel content, gibberella damaged kernel content and insect infested kernel content as well as the pollution status of DON and heavy metals. Furthermore, the relationship between the content of DON in wheat grains and other parameters was analyzed. The impact of the processing of gluten and starch in the break and reduction systems on the level of DON contamination was examined. The results showed that the pollution level of DON in wheat samples had a good linear correlation with unit weight, water absorption of gluten, crude protein content, unsound kernel content, sprouted kernel content, gibberella damaged kernel content and insect infested kernel content. The correlation between gluten water absorption and the content of DON was not significant, indicating that DON content could not affect the storage quality of wheat. Additionally, it was found that the heavy metals As and Cd as well as the elements Ca and P were not significantly correlated with DON content, but only Ca in whole wheat flour was correlated with the content of DON. The levels of DON in gluten and starch from the break and reduction systems, respectively were both lower than 200 µg/kg, indicating that wheat with DON over-standard can be used commercially for the preparation of gluten or starch.

The Tsiolkovsky crater is located on the farside of the Moon. It formed in the late Imbrian epoch and was filled with a large area of mare basalts. Multisource remote sensing data are used to interpret the geological features of the Tsiolkovsky area. Compared with previous studies, new remote sensing data and a chronological model based on crater size–frequency distribution are used to further refine the stratigraphic units and determine the absolute ages of the mare basalt units. The evolution of volcanic activity in this crater is discussed. The results are as follows: Abundances of major elements, Th, and silicate minerals suggest that the mare basalt in the crater floor is not a uniform unit but rather nine units with different compositions. The nine basalt units are divided into two episodes of volcanic activity: The first occurred at 3.5–3.7 Ga, when highly evolved lava erupted at the crater floor at a large scale; the second occurred at ~3.4 Ga, when a small area of more primitive lava extended to the northern portion of the crater floor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovative business models are emerging to promote the popularization of electric vehicles. This study investigates a firm's service innovation strategy and the choice between sales and rental business models in the presence of consumer behavioral preferences and service innovation subsidies within a given supply chain. The optimal price and service quality decisions are unique and determined by a profit-maximization model. We find that when customers have an obvious preference for high quality service or a relatively low preference for traditional sales model, the firm will profitably invest in service innovation. The firm will choose the rental model and offer a higher level of service rather than the sales model when the customer preference for traditional sales is relatively low or customers are more constrained by the initial purchase price. We also examine the efficiency of service innovation subsidy policy and find that service innovation subsidy will promote the adoption of electric vehicles and improve service quality. Our analysis also suggests that policy makers should set the appropriate service innovation subsidy rather than the higher the better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cytochrome P450s (CYPs) play crucial roles in regulating plant growth, development, and stress tolerance. In this study, a perennial ryegrass (Lolium perenne) CYP gene, LpCYP72A15, was identified as a candidate gene regulating plant osmotic stress tolerance based on a cDNA library screening in the background of yeast ∆hog1 mutant. LpCYP72A15 is localized in the plastids, and its expression was regulated by osmotic stress and ABA treatment. Overexpressing LpCYP72A15 significantly enhanced plant drought tolerance in both Arabidopsis and perennial ryegrass. Under drought stress, the transgenic ryegrass showed significant lower reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels, higher ROS‐scavenging enzymatic activities, and higher soluble sugar contents than the wildtype plants. Transient over‐expressing the gene also enhanced survival rates of ryegrass mesophyll protoplasts under H2O2‐induced oxidative or mannitol‐enforced osmotic stresses. Taken together, LpCYP72A15 confers oxidative‐ and osmotic‐stress tolerances that positively regulates plant drought tolerance in perennial ryegrass. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The daily home-office commute of millions of people in crowded cities strains air quality and increases travel time, which motivates the generation of ridesharing. Ridesharing offers many benefits, such as reducing travel costs, congestion, and pollution. Commuter ridesharing is an important theme of urban transportation. This paper studies a ridesharing problem aiming at enlarging the ridesharing market at a limited cost, which enlighten the decision-making problem in city logistics. We establish a novel multi-objective optimisation model based on cumulative prospect theory (CPT) to address the preferred travel mode of commuters. The commuters' perceived value influences their choice of travel mode. Meanwhile, the perceived value changes with the commuters' experience of travel mode choice. We give the NP-hardness proof of the ridesharing scheduling problem and develop a heuristic algorithm to solve it in a small-scale scenario. For large-scale problems, a hybrid VNS-NSGAII algorithm combining variable neighbourhood search (VNS) with NSGAII (Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II) is proposed to generate an approximate optimal Pareto front. A series of computational experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm based on the actual traffic data in Beijing, China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprises in China are extensively involved in collaborative virtual enterprise (VE) supported by the internet of things (IoT). This paper investigates the effects of member enterprises' resource occupation on performance of the IoT-based VE, and examines how such effects are moderated by decision authority decentralisation. We obtained the research data from a survey administered to 141 small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that participate in IoT-based VEs. Hierarchical regression analysis was adopted to test the proposed hypotheses. Our findings suggest that information and operational resources are positively associated with both business and market performance. Strategic decision authority decentralised to SMEs with superior information or operational resources enhances the overall performance, whereas decentralisation of operational decision authority facilitates the positive effects of operational resource on performance. Our study provides directive guidance for IoT-based VEs to cultivate and acquire specific superior resources, and allocate decision authorities reasonably for effective resource utilisation and collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dark excitons are fascinating for condensed matter physics, quantum information processing, and optoelectronics due to their long lifetimes. However, direct optical access to dark excitons is still challenging due to the violation of the spin selection rule. Here, a new scheme for the brightening of spin‐forbidden dark exciton in WS2 monolayers by creating artificial out‐of‐plane shear strain that induces an effective in‐plane pseudo‐magnetic field is proposed. To reveal dark excitons, low‐temperature magneto‐photoluminescence experiments on the strained WS2 monolayers are performed. It is found that the dark excitons appear at 59 meV below the bright ones and exhibit an asymmetric magnetic field dependence, which is in agreement with the model taking into account the effect of the out‐of‐plane shear strain on spin‐flip processes of exciton states. The fieldless scheme has great potential in the application of dark excitons for new quantum information processing devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate a coordinated optimization problem of production and maintenance where the machine reliability decreases with the use of the machine. Lower reliability means the machine is more likely to fail during the production stage. In the event of a machine failure, corrective maintenance (CM) of the machine is required, and the CM of the machine will cause a certain cost. Preventive maintenance (PM) can improve machine reliability and reduce machine failures during the production stage, but it will also cause a certain cost. To minimize the total maintenance cost, we must determine an appropriate PM plan to balance these two types of maintenance. In addition, the tardiness cost of jobs is also considered, which is affected not only by the processing sequence of jobs but also by the PM decision. The objective is to find the optimal job processing sequence and the optimal PM plan to minimize the total expected cost. To solve the proposed problem, an improved grey wolf optimizer (IGWO) algorithm is proposed. Experimental results show that the IGWO algorithm outperforms GA, VNS, TS, and standard GWO in optimization and computational stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product quality is the lifeline of enterprise survival and development. With the rapid development of information technology, the semiconductor manufacturing process produces multitude of quality features. Due to the increasing quality features, the requirement on the training time and classification accuracy of quality prediction methods becomes increasingly higher. Aiming at realizing the quality prediction for semiconductor manufacturing process, this paper proposes a modified support vector machine (SVM) model based on feature selection, considering the high dimensional and nonlinear characteristics of data. The model first improves the Radial Basis Function (RBF) in SVM, and then combines the Duelist algorithm (DA) and variable neighborhood search algorithm (VNS) for feature selection and parameters optimization. Compared with some other SVM models that are based on DA, genetic algorithm (GA), and Information Gain algorithm (IG), the experiment results show that our DA-VNS-SVM can obtain higher classification accuracy rate with a smaller feature subset. In addition, we compare the DA-VNS-SVM with some common machine learning algorithms such as logistic regression, naive Bayes, decision tree, random forest, and artificial neural network. The results indicate that our model outperform these machine learning algorithms for the quality prediction of semiconductor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering information security insurance, this paper investigates an information security investment game between two firms with complementary information assets. Each firm's information security investment and expected profit in Nash equilibrium (i.e., firms make decisions individually) and social optimum (i.e., firms make decisions jointly) are analyzed through rigorous theoretical analyses and numerical examples. We find that making decisions jointly will make the two firms as a whole obtain more profits than when they make decisions alone, whereas this does not mean that each firm will benefit from the joint decision‐making process. Our results show that a firm yields a smaller expected profit in the joint decision game than the individual decision game under some conditions. In addition, the impacts of a higher insurance price and a higher investment efficiency on a firm's information security investment and expected profit are explored. The results indicate that, for a single firm, a higher insurance price does not necessarily result in smaller profit, and a higher investment efficiency does not always lead to larger profit. Then we design a compensation‐based contract to coordinate the two firms' information security investments when they make decisions individually. The contract will make the two firms achieve social optimum and ensure that each firm yields more profits than firms without the contract. Finally, we extend our research by setting the insurance amount as a decision variable to verify the above analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In present work, the creep rupture life of 9% Cr heat-resistant steel (P91) was evaluated based on the creep cavitation modelling. At 873 K, a series of creep rupture tests were carried out under the stresses of 140–190 MPa to achieve several sets of ruptured specimens. The constrained and unconstrained models of cavity growth were introduced to investigate the creep behaviour of P91 steel. The obtained results showed that the rupture mechanism of these specimens was mainly attributed to the ductile rupture under the present creep conditions. Besides, reasonable extrapolations were calculated to predict the creep rupture life of P91 steel by combining different constitutive equations with the cavity growth model. It suggested that the model predictions with constraints were better than those with unconstrained conditions. In particular, the Sinh equation based constrained cavity model shows greater potential in predicting the long-term creep life of P91 steel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The response of root development and nodule formation of the manure crop Chinese milk vetch to different levels of soil moisture and phosphorous (P) fertilizer remains unclear. In this study, a pot experiment was performed to trace the root growth and nodule formation of Chinese milk vetch at the seedling, branching and full-flowering stages, under various soil moisture gradients [25% (W1), 50% (W2), 75% (W3), and 100% (W4) of the maximum field water-holding capacity] and P levels [0 (P0), 30 (P1), 60 (P2), and 90 (P3) kg hm–2]. The root/shoot ratio, root vitality, number of nodules, nodule weight, and nitrogenase activity were affected remarkably by soil moisture or the level of added P across the whole stage. Differences were found in the interaction effect between soil moisture and added P on the characteristic indices of the root and nodule at the different growth stages. There were obvious differences in root activity and nitrogenase activity at seedling stage, but no evident differences were found in other indices. Certain differences were also found in the indicators mentioned above at the branching stage. W1P0 and W2P0 showed the highest root/shoot ratio, W2P2 and W3P2 resulted in the highest root activity; W3P3 and W3P2 had the highest number and weight of nodules; and W3P2, W2P2, and W3P1 had higher nitrogenase activity than the other treatments at the full-flowering stage. The application of P at 60 kg hm–2 and the relative soil moisture of 75% was the best P-water combination suitable for the root development, nodule formation, and nitrogen fixation of Chinese milk vetch. This study will provide a theoretical basis for the production of this plant by managing the synergistic interaction between P fertilizer and soil moisture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding hot carrier dynamics between plasmonic nanomaterials and its adsorbate is of great importance for plasmon‐enhanced photoelectronic processes such as photocatalysis, optical sensing and spectroscopic analysis. However, it is often challenging to identify specific dominant mechanisms for a given process because of the complex pathways and ultrafast interactive dynamics of the photoelectrons. Here, using CO2 reduction as an example, the underlying mechanisms of plasmon‐driven catalysis at the single‐molecule level using time‐dependent density functional theory calculations is clearly probed. The CO2 molecule adsorbed on two typical nanoclusters, Ag20 and Ag147, is photoreduced by optically excited plasmon, accompanied by the excitation of asymmetric stretching and bending modes of CO2. A nonlinear relationship has been identified between laser intensity and reaction rate, demonstrating a synergic interplay and transition from indirect hot‐electron transfer to direct charge transfer, enacted by strong localized surface plasmons. These findings offer new insights for CO2 photoreduction and for the design of effective pathways toward highly efficient plasmon‐mediated photocatalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on phase space reconstruction (PSR) and hybrid VNS-SVR model, a remaining useful life (RUL) prediction method for aircraft engines is proposed. The proposed hybrid model combines support vector regression (SVR), which has been successfully adopted for regression problems, with the variable neighborhood search (VNS). First, the phase space reconstruction is used to transform the selected one-dimensional performance sequences of aircraft engines into matrix forms, which increases the data information and improve the learning efficiency of the model effectively. Then, SVR is used to construct the prediction model. Meanwhile, a VNS algorithm is proposed to optimize the kernel parameters. Finally, the hybrid model is used to RUL prediction of the aircraft engines. The experimental results show that the method has a good prediction performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Green tide outbreaks caused by overgrowth of Ulva prolifera in the Yellow Sea of China can cause serious ecological stress with concomitant economic hardships, especially to marine fisheries. In this study, short-term effects (14 days) were evaluated using fresh algae U. prolifera (FU), and a 7-day assessment of the effects of decomposing U. prolifera (DU) algal effluent was conducted to determine the effects on the environmental and intestinal microbiota, intestinal transcriptome and mortality of the commercial marine benthic fish, Japanese flounder (Paralichthys olivaceus). The results revealed that algal degradation altered the microbial community structure of fish farm water and fish intestines and increased the relative abundance of the pathogens Flavobacteriaceae in water and Vibrio in fish intestines. Fish intestinal tissue structure appeared to be damaged, as indicated in pathological sections, and transcriptome analysis showed intestinal inflammation after exposure, which may have caused an increase in fish mortality. The degradation of U. prolifera led to a bloom of potential pathogenic bacteria and the inflammation of fish intestines, which resulted in disease in the flounder population that reduced fish harvests and might pose a potential health threat. [Display omitted] • U. prolifera decomposition affected the microbiota in the water and fish intestines. • Potential pathogens Flavobacteriaceae in water significantly increased. • The conditional pathogen Vibrio increased significantly in the intestine of Japanese flounder. • U. prolifera exposure damaged fish intestinal structure and increased mortality. • DEGs related to immunity and inflammation in the intestine changed significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grazing exclusion has been proposed as an effective practice to enhance ecosystem carbon stocks in arid-semiarid degraded grasslands. However, in humid regions, the effects of grazing exclusion on ecosystem carbon stocks and their components in degraded grasslands remain largely unknown. Here, the effects of enclosure on ecosystem carbon stocks and their components were explored using four enclosure ages, each paired with adjacent grazed areas. Moreover, the results were synthesized with previous studies to test if enclosure's effects in semihumid-humid regions differed from those in arid-semiarid regions. The field experiment found that six months to 1 year of grazing exclusion sequestrated 14.6 % higher carbon in the enclosed grasslands than in paired-grazed grasslands as a consequence of increased carbon storage of plants and topsoils. However, compared to grazed areas, enclosures over 3–6 years contained 14.4 % less ecosystem carbon stocks, primarily due to markedly decreased soil carbon sequestration, despite increased plant carbon stocks. Structural equation models further suggested that the decrease in soil carbon stock might be owing to the decomposition of organic matter induced by low phosphorus. Additionally, compared with the northern slope of the mountain, ecosystem carbon stocks on the southern slope showed a lagged and weak response to grazing exclusion. The results, combined with a meta-analysis, revealed that plant and soil carbon stocks in semihumid-humid grasslands were more sensitive to enclosure than in arid-semiarid grasslands. These results highlight that short-term fencing (e.g., six months to 1 year), rather than long-term, is a practical strategy to foster degraded grassland ecosystem carbon sequestration in semihumid-humid regions, thus contributing to climate change mitigation. • Six months to 1 year of grazing exclusion promoted ecosystem carbon stocks • 3–6 years' fencing reduced ecosystem carbon stocks as the decrease in soil stock • The decrease in soil carbon stock was mainly owing to the imbalance of soil nutrients • Northern slope' carbon stock responded strongly compared to southern slope • Carbon stocks in humid grasslands was more sensitive than in arid grasslands [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elucidating the mechanism of photoinduced water splitting on TiO 2 is important for advancing the understanding of photocatalysis and the ability to control photocatalytic surface reactions. However, incomplete experimental information and complex coupled electron-nuclear motion make the microscopic understanding challenging. Here we analyse the atomic-scale pathways of photogenerated charge carrier transport and photoinduced water dissociation at the prototypical water-rutile TiO 2 (110) interface using first-principles dynamics simulations. Two distinct mechanisms are observed. Field-initiated electron migration leads to adsorbed water dissociation via proton transfer to a surface bridging oxygen. In the other pathway, adsorbed water dissociation occurs via proton donation to a second-layer water molecule coupled to photoexcited-hole transfer promoted by in-plane surface lattice distortions. Two stages of non-adiabatic in-plane lattice motion-expansion and recovery-are observed, which are closely associated with population changes in Ti3d orbitals. Controlling such highly correlated electron-nuclear dynamics may provide opportunities for boosting the performance of photocatalytic materials., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.)