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This experimental study aims to assess the water sensitivity and fracture toughness of asphalt Mixtures subjected to thermal cycling, using different types of aggregates and incorporating hydrated lime as an additive. To achieve this, two types of aggregates were used: limestone and schist aggregates, each with distinct characteristics. These aggregates were mixed with pure grade 35–50 bitumen to create two asphalt Mixtures. In addition, 2 % hydrated lime was added to both Mixtures as a filler to assess its impact on asphalt mixture properties.The water sensitivity of the asphalt Mixtures was assessed using the water resistance test, in accordance with NM EN 12697-12, method B. A total of 40 samples were tested, divided into ''dry specimens'' and ''humid specimens''. The former were kept under controlled conditions (temperature 18 °C and 50 % humidity) for 7 days, while the latter were subjected to a water saturation process beforehand, then kept immersed in water at a temperature of 18 °C for the same period. Water resistance was calculated by comparing the compressive strength of the two types of specimens.To evaluate the specimens' fracture toughness, the Semi-Circular Bending (SCB) test was employed. Cracks were introduced into the center of each semicircular specimen to measure their resistance to crack propagation. This test was carried out after the samples had been subjected to a water-saturated degassing process and the application of thermal cycles.Thermal cycles were applied using temperatures based on Moroccan climatic conditions to simulate actual road conditions. Three conditioning methods were used: freeze-thaw cycles (-5–20 °C), heating-cooling cycles (20–40 °C) and a combination of both. SCB samples were tested at a temperature of 20 °C after a number of thermal cycles, ranging from 15 to 120. A total of 160 SCB samples were tested for resistance to temperature-induced cracking.The results showed that asphalt Mixtures based on schist were generally more sensitive to thermal cycling than those based on limestone. However, the inclusion of hydrated lime as an additive has proved to be beneficial for both types of asphalt mixtures, particularly for those based on schist by attenuating the decrease in their strength and sensitivity to water. The primary goal is to enhance the durability of Moroccan roads while minimizing maintenance costs.

Road pavements undergo various environmental factors such as temperature changes, precipitation, and traffic exposure, which can lead to cracks in asphalt pavements compromising road user safety and necessitating costly repairs. To gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind asphalt pavement cracking, this study proposes the utilization of the electrical resistivity tomography method to measure the electrical resistivity of soil-supporting road pavements. Electrical resistivity measurements were conducted on soil-supporting road pavements at various times, both before and during the winter season, in four different road sections. Two of these sections were located on Regional Road N707 in the Ifrane region, while the other two were located on National Road N13 in the Azrou and Timahdite regions. The results of the geophysical campaign provided valuable insights into the impact of the winter season on soil resistance and the formation of cracks in asphalt pavements. To achieve this, electrical tomography was employed to generate 2D images of the electrical resistivity of the soil, which were subsequently compared to asphalt cracking data collected in the field through visual surveys and/or asphalt cores. The 2D analysis of the electrical resistivity images of the road pavements under study revealed a decrease in electrical resistivity values during the winter season. This decrease can be attributed to a combination of factors including asphalt pavement cracking, water infiltration during winter, and soil characteristics supporting the asphalt pavement. These findings offer valuable insights intro targeted maintenance and repair efforts.

BackgroundDuring Ramadan, many patients with diabetes, renal, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal diseases, headaches, and epilepsy choose to fast even against their doctor's advice. The impact of this intermittent fasting on health and disease could be different in men and women. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of sex as a factor in diseases outcomes of patients who opt to fast during Ramadan.Main BodyThe articles included in this study reported data on six diseases: diabetes, renal, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal diseases, headaches, and epilepsy. A systematic search was performed on PubMed and Scopus for observational and clinical studies mentioning Ramadan, diabetes, renal, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal diseases, headaches, and epilepsy in both men and women. Data was extracted by two independent reviewers using a standardized data-collection form. From 381 original articles, 38 studies were selected, including 25,023 patients of which 44.4% were women. Sex-based differences were reported by 18 studies for several variables such as body mass index, blood glucose, the frequency of hypoglycemia, renal colic, mortality, thrombosis, and gastrointestinal diseases in patients fasting during Ramadan. Most of the differences between men and women were reported both in the baseline period before Ramadan and during Ramadan. Indeed, during the period outside Ramadan, the frequency of renal colic, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal diseases, were higher in men; while body mass index, Thrombosis, and headache were higher in women. In the remaining 21 studies, it was reported that the sex factor was not associated with the effect of Ramadan fasting in the frequency and other outcomes of these diseases.ConclusionCurrently, small attention is paid to sex as a determinant factor in patients while fasting during Ramadan. There appeared to be differences in the frequency and incidence of diseases in men and women during Ramadan. Closer attention to sex differences regarding the frequency and the progression of the diseases during fasting may help to improve patient care, especially to benefit those patients willing to fast during Ramadan.

The design of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) requires the fulfillment of several design requirements. The most important one is optimizing the battery’s lifetime, which is tightly coupled to the sensor lifetime. End-users usually avoid replacing sensors’ batteries, especially in massive deployment scenarios like smart agriculture and smart buildings. To optimize battery lifetime, wireless sensor designers need to delineate and optimize active components at different levels of the sensor’s layered architecture, mainly, (1) the number of data sets being generated and processed at the application layer, (2) the size and the architecture of the operating systems (OS), (3) the networking layers’ protocols, and (4) the architecture of electronic components and duty cycling techniques. This paper reviews the different relevant technologies and investigates how they optimize energy consumption at each layer of the sensor’s architecture, e.g., hardware, operating system, application, and networking layer. This paper aims to make the researcher aware of the various optimization opportunities when designing WSN nodes. To our knowledge, there is no other work in the literature that reviews energy optimization of WSN in the context of Smart Energy-Efficient Buildings (SEEB) and from the formerly four listed perspectives to help in the design and implementation of optimal WSN for SEEB.

Design and hierarchical control of three phase parallel Voltage Source Inverters are developed in this paper. The control scheme is based on synchronous reference frame and consists of primary and secondary control levels. The primary control consists of the droop control and the virtual output impedance loops. This control level is designed to share the active and reactive power correctly between the connected VSIs in order to avoid the undesired circulating current and overload of the connected VSIs. The secondary control is designed to clear the magnitude and the frequency deviations caused by the primary control. The control structure is validated through dynamics simulations.The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the control structure.

Severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) is the most severe form of primary immunodeficiency (PID), characterized by fatal opportunistic infections. The ADA gene encodes adenosine deaminase, an enzyme that catalyzes the irreversible deamination of adenosine and deoxyadenosine in the catabolic pathway of purine. Mutations of the ADA gene have been identified in patients with severe combined immunodeficiency. In this study, we performed a bioinformatics analysis of the human ADA gene to identify potentially harmful nonsynonymous SNPs and their effect on protein structure and stability. Using eleven prediction tools, we identified 15 nsSNPs (H15D, H15P, H17Q, H17Y, D19N, T26I, G140E, C153F, A183D, G216R, H258Y, C262Y, S291L, S291W, and K34OE) as harmful. The results of ConSurf’s analysis revealed that all these nsSNPs are localised in the highly conserved positions and affect the structure of the native proteins. In addition, our computational analysis showed that the H15D, G140E, G216R, and S291L mutations identified as being associated with severe combined immunodeficiency affect protein structure. Similarly, the results of the analyses of Rmsd, Rmsf, and Rg showed that all these factors influence protein stability, flexibility, and compaction with different levels of impact. This study is the first comprehensive computational analysis of nsSNPs of the ADA gene. However, functional analyses are needed to elucidate the biological mechanisms of these polymorphisms in severe combined immunodeficiency.

Energy Management Systems (EMS) are indispensable for Smart Energy-Efficient Buildings (SEEB). This paper proposes a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)-based EMS deployed and tested in a real-world smart building on a university campus. The at-scale implementation enabled the deployment of a WSN mesh topology to evaluate performance in terms of routing capabilities, data collection, and throughput. The proposed EMS uses the Context-Based Reasoning (CBR) Model to represent different types of buildings and offices. We implemented a new energy-efficient policy for electrical heaters control based on a Finite State Machine (FSM) leveraging on context-related events. This demonstrated significant effectiveness in minimizing the processing load, especially when adopting multithreading in data acquisition and control. To optimize sensors’ battery lifetime, we deployed a new Energy Aware Context Recognition Algorithm (EACRA) that dynamically configures sensors to send data under specific conditions and at particular times to avoid redundant data transmissions. EACRA increases the sensors’ battery lifetime by optimizing the number of samples, used modules, and transmissions. Our proposed EMS design can be used as a model to retrofit other kinds of buildings, such as residential and industrial, and thus converting them to SEEBs.

L'objectif était de déterminer la prévalence des mutations du gène NOD2/CARD15 dans un groupe de patients Marocains atteint de Maladie de Crohn et étudier sa corrélation génotype-expression phénotypique. Etude transversale cas témoin menée sur une durée de 16 mois. Ont été inclus 101 patients atteints de la maladie de Crohn, entre Janvier 2012 et Avril 2013 ainsi qu'un groupe contrôle de 107 patients. L'analyse génétique a consisté à rechercher 3 variants du gène NOD2: p.Arg702Trp, p.Gly908Arg et p.Leu1007fsins. Puis une étude de corrélation génotype-expression phénotypique a été menée. L'analyse génétique des patients atteint de maladie de crohn a mis en évidence la présence de la mutation NOD2 chez 14 patients (13,77%) contre 7 patients (6,53%) du groupe témoin. L'étude de la fréquence des différents allèles a retrouvé la mutation de p.Gly908Arg dans 6,43%, p.Leu1007fsins dans 0,99% et p.Arg702Trp dans 0,49% contre respectivement 2,80%, 0% et 0,46% dans le groupe témoin. L'étude de la corrélation génotype, expression phénotypique a démontré que la mutation CARD15 est corrélée à une localisation iléo-caecale de la maladie, à une présentation fistulisante et sténosante ainsi qu'à une évolution sévère avec recours fréquent à la chirurgie et aux immunosuppresseurs. La prévalence de la mutation NOD2/ CARD15 dans notre série est faible. Cette mutation est corrélée à une forme grave de la maladie.

The real-time operation of the energy management system (RT-EMS) is one of the vital functions of Microgrids (MG). In this context, the reliability and smooth operation should be maintained in real time regardless of load and generation variations and without losing the optimum operation cost. This paper presents a design and implementation of a RT-EMS based on Multiagent system (MAS) and the fast converging T-Cell algorithm to minimize the MG operational cost and maximize the real-time response in grid-connected MG. The RT-EMS has the main function to ensure the energy dispatch between the distributed generation (DG) units that consist in this work on a wind generator, solar energy, energy storage units, controllable loads and the main grid. A modular multi-agent platform is proposed to implement the RT-EMS. The MAS has features such as peer-to-peer communication capability, a fault-tolerance structure, and high flexibility, which make it convenient for MG context. Each component of the MG has its own managing agent. While, the MG optimizer (MGO) is the agent responsible for running the optimization and ensuring the seamless operation of the MG in real time, the MG supervisor (MGS) is the agent that intercepts sudden high load variations and computes the new optimum operating point. In addition, the proposed RT-EMS develops an integration of the MAS platform with the Data Distribution Service (DDS) as a middleware to communicate with the physical units. In this work, the proposed algorithm minimizes the cost function of the MG as well as maximizes the use of renewable energy generation; Then, it assigns the power reference to each DG of the MG. The total time delay of the optimization and the communication between the EMS components were reduced. To verify the performance of our proposed system, an experimental validation in a MG testbed were conducted. Results show the reliability and the effectiveness of the proposed multiagent based RT-EMS. Various scenarios were tested such as normal operation as well as sudden load variation. The optimum values were obtained faster in terms of computation time as compared to existing techniques. The latency from the proposed system was 43% faster than other heuristic or deterministic methods in the literature. This significant improvement makes this proposed system more competitive for RT applications.

Energy management system (EMS) is one of the pillars of next generation of power system called Smart Grid. More distributed generation (DG) produced from renewable energy (RE) will be injected into the distribution power system. EMS has the responsibility to manage this RE generation and conventional one to keep the power balance between generation and consumption. Different architectures of EMS could be found in literature: the centralized, decentralized and distributed. As the centralized architecture is becoming outdated, the decentralized one is the most promising step before implementing a fully distributed system. In this context, development of multiagent systems (MAS) and their tested proprieties increase researchers' interest in applying them in Microgrid (MG) context. This paper implements a decentralized multiagent EMS (DMA-EMS) that manages a MG cluster with fault tolerance feature. Within a single MG, a dedicated multiagent EMS that performs power dispatch with the objective of minimizing power exchange with the grid is implemented. Within the MG cluster, another dedicated EMS is implemented to share power between different MGs. Moreover, the DMA-EMS can manage active power support for the distribution feeder when needed. The implemented management system has proven its reliability and the effectiveness of the proposed management scheme in normal operation as well as in fault conditions through the multiagent JADE platform and Simulink model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observing Ramadan intermittent fasting (RIF) is associated with different behavioral, dietary, and health-related outcomes among healthy and unwell people. Sex is a major biological determinant that affects various health outcomes and impacts the effectiveness of dietary and lifestyle modifications. This systematic review aimed to identify differences in health-related outcomes following the practice of RIF by the sex of study participants. A systematic search was conducted across several databases to qualitatively identify studies focused on dietary, anthropometric, and biochemical outcomes associated with RIF in females and males. Of 3870 retrieved studies, sex-based differences were reported in 29 studies that included 3167 healthy people (females n = 1558, 49.2%). Most differences between males and females were reported both before and during RIF. Sex differences were examined for 69 outcomes following RIF and included dietary factors (17 outcomes), anthropometrics (13 outcomes), and biochemical factors (39 outcomes), with the latter including metabolic, hormonal, regulatory, inflammatory, and nutrition-related biochemical markers. Sex-based differences were observed in the examined dietary, anthropometric, and biochemical outcomes associated with the observance of RIF. More attention needs to be directed toward including both sexes in studies focused on the impact of observing RIF and differentiating outcomes based on sex. • Sex is a basic biological determinant for human's health and disease. • Males and females exhibit significant biological, behavioral, physical, and psychological differences. • Sex-based differences are observed in the dietary, anthropometric and biochemical outcomes associated with Ramadan fasting. • Sex differences should be considered when interpreting the outcomes of observing Ramadan fasting by healthy people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the selection of prey size by the Eurasian otters Lutra lutra at River Jajrood in Tehran, Iran. The species of the fishes found in the river are the Alburnoides bipunctatus, Capoeta ssp. and Leuciscus cephalus. At all the river sites selected for the study, the otters prefer to feed on fishes that are from 3-15 centimeters in length. The size of the fish in the diet of the otter reflects the average size of the fishes in the river.