A semi-batch pyrolysis process was used to recover samples carbon fibre and glass fibre from their respective wastes. The mechanical properties of the recovered fibres were tested and compared to ...those of virgin fibres, showing good retention of the fibre properties. The recovered fibres were then used to prepare new LDPE composite materials with commercial and laboratory-synthesized compatibilizers. Mild oxidation of the post-pyrolysis recovered fibres and the use of different compatibilizers gave significant improvements in the mechanical properties of the LDPE composites; however some of the manufactured composites made from recovered fibres had properties similar to those made from virgin fibres.
Objective
Psychotic‐like experiences (PLEs) are unusual experiences such as perceptual abnormalities and delusional‐like thoughts that resemble the symptoms of psychosis at the sub‐clinical level. ...PLEs are associated with sleep complaints in healthy and clinical samples; however, evidence for day‐to‐day associations between poor sleep and subsequent PLEs under naturalistic conditions is scarce. We hypothesized that poor sleep quality would predict next days’ PLEs, and vice versa, daytime PLEs would be associated with worse subsequent sleep quality.
Method
Seventy‐three university students with moderate to high levels of positive schizotypy participated in an experience sampling study. Participants rated their sleep each morning, as well as PLEs and affective states during the day over 3 weeks.
Results
Multilevel regression models indicated that poor sleep quality predicted increased PLEs the following day. Poor sleep was linked to negative daytime mood that partially mediated the associations between sleep quality and next days’ PLEs. Furthermore, PLEs were enhanced in the evening as compared to daytime reports. The prediction of poor sleep quality by previous days’ PLEs was negligible.
Conclusions
The results are consistent with the position that sleep‐related interventions might reduce the risk of psychosis, especially in individuals that tend to experience psychotic‐like phenomena and negative affect.
The aim of the study was to examine the determining factors of students' video usage and their learning satisfaction relating to the supplementary application of educational videos, accessible in a ...Moodle environment in a Business Mathematics Course. The research model is based on the extension of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), in which the core TAM constructs – perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, attitude – and internet self-efficacy were included as the explanatory factors of video usage. As regards the determinants of learning satisfaction, beside the core TAM constructs, the role of learning performance, learner-learner interaction, and learner-teacher interaction was examined. Data were collected from 89 students using a questionnaire, on which the partial least-squares structural equation modelling approach was used to evaluate the research model. The results confirmed that perceived usefulness, attitude, and internet self-efficacy had a direct effect on the video usage. Learning satisfaction was directly influenced by learner-learner interaction, perceived ease of use, and learning performance. Furthermore, the results indicated that video usage had a significant effect both on learning performance and on learning satisfaction. The findings show that the extended TAM model can be applied for predicting the university students' video technology usage and their learning satisfaction regarding the usage.
Helicobacter pylori infection causes gastric cancer, the third leading cause of cancer death worldwide. More than half of the world's population is infected, making universal eradication impractical. ...Clinical trials suggest that antibiotic treatment only reduces gastric cancer risk in patients with non-atrophic gastritis (NAG), and is ineffective once preneoplastic lesions of multifocal atrophic gastritis (MAG) and intestinal metaplasia (IM) have occurred. Therefore, additional strategies for risk stratification and chemoprevention of gastric cancer are needed. We have implicated polyamines, generated by the rate-limiting enzyme ornithine decarboxylase (ODC), in gastric carcinogenesis. During H. pylori infection, the enzyme spermine oxidase (SMOX) is induced, which generates hydrogen peroxide from the catabolism of the polyamine spermine. Herein, we assessed the role of SMOX in the increased gastric cancer risk in Colombia associated with the Andean mountain region when compared with the low-risk region on the Pacific coast. When cocultured with gastric epithelial cells, clinical strains of H. pylori from the high-risk region induced more SMOX expression and oxidative DNA damage, and less apoptosis than low-risk strains. These findings were not attributable to differences in the cytotoxin-associated gene A oncoprotein. Gastric tissues from subjects from the high-risk region exhibited greater levels of SMOX and oxidative DNA damage by immunohistochemistry and flow cytometry, and this occurred in NAG, MAG and IM. In Mongolian gerbils, a prototype colonizing strain from the high-risk region induced more SMOX, DNA damage, dysplasia and adenocarcinoma than a colonizing strain from the low-risk region. Treatment of gerbils with either α-difluoromethylornithine, an inhibitor of ODC, or MDL 72527 (N(1),N(4)-Di(buta-2,3-dien-1-yl)butane-1,4-diamine dihydrochloride), an inhibitor of SMOX, reduced gastric dysplasia and carcinoma, as well as apoptosis-resistant cells with DNA damage. These data indicate that aberrant activation of polyamine-driven oxidative stress is a marker of gastric cancer risk and a target for chemoprevention.
•The adjacency matrix associated with the discretized Preisach model is self-similar.•The eigenvalue distribution follows a Devils staircase in the limit.•Eigenvectors are expressed explicitly in ...terms of Chebyshev polynomials.•This defines convergence to the stationary distribution of associated Markov chains.
We consider the adjacency matrix associated with a graph that describes transitions between the states of the discrete Preisach memory model. This matrix can also be associated with the “last-in-first-out” inventory management rule. We present an explicit solution for the spectrum by showing that the characteristic polynomial is the product of Chebyshev polynomials. The eigenvalue distribution (density of states) is explicitly calculated and is shown to approach a scaled Devil’s staircase. The eigenvectors of the adjacency matrix are also expressed analytically.
DNA barcoding Madagascar's amphibian fauna Perl, R.G. Bina; Nagy, Zoltán T; Sonet, Gontran ...
Amphibia-Reptilia/Amphibia-reptilia,
2014, Letnik:
35, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We provide a DNA barcoding survey of Malagasy amphibians, including 251 of the 292 nominal species known to date, by complementing previous data with 280 newly determined barcoding sequence fragments ...of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) gene. Amplification success for the newly determined sequences was highest (94%) with one set of universal COI primers (dgLCO1490-dgHCO2198) while other primer sets had distinctly lower success rates. By and large, we observed relatively high average interspecific genetic distances of 25-27% within the Mantellidae and Microhylidae, and genetic distances of 13-21% within the Hyperoliidae. Lower values of 6-7% were observed between some sister species in all families, with extreme lows of 0.2-0.3% between a few sister species pairs in microhylids and mantellids for which we postulate mitochondrial introgression or yet unsettled taxonomy. Within-species divergences were relatively high especially in mantellids where they averaged 5.3%, due to the inclusion of numerous deep conspecific lineages (by definition with high divergences to other specimens) in our study. Above this, the degree of polymorphism was difficult to establish owing to limited sampling per population in our assessment. Compared to a previous assessment from 2009 based on 16S rDNA sequences, we identify 14 additional undescribed candidate species and raise the maximum estimate of species in the island's batrachofauna to well over 500.
A new species reduction method called the Simulation Error Minimization Connectivity Method (SEM-CM) was developed. According to the SEM-CM algorithm, a mechanism building procedure is started from ...the important species. Strongly connected sets of species, identified on the basis of the normalized Jacobian, are added and several consistent mechanisms are produced. The combustion model is simulated with each of these mechanisms and the mechanism causing the smallest error (i.e. deviation from the model that uses the full mechanism), considering the important species only, is selected. Then, in several steps other strongly connected sets of species are added, the size of the mechanism is gradually increased and the procedure is terminated when the error becomes smaller than the required threshold. A new method for the elimination of redundant reactions is also presented, which is called the Principal Component Analysis of Matrix F with Simulation Error Minimization (SEM-PCAF). According to this method, several reduced mechanisms are produced by using various PCAF thresholds. The reduced mechanism having the least CPU time requirement among the ones having almost the smallest error is selected. Application of SEM-CM and SEM-PCAF together provides a very efficient way to eliminate redundant species and reactions from large mechanisms. The suggested approach was tested on a mechanism containing 6874 irreversible reactions of 345 species that describes methane partial oxidation to high conversion. The aim is to accurately reproduce the concentration–time profiles of 12 major species with less than 5% error at the conditions of an industrial application. The reduced mechanism consists of 246 reactions of 47 species and its simulation is 116 times faster than using the full mechanism. The SEM-CM was found to be more effective than the classic Connectivity Method, and also than the DRG, two-stage DRG, DRGASA, basic DRGEP and extended DRGEP methods.
Despite the increasing number of personalized nutrition services available on the market, nutrigenomics-based level of personalization is still the exception rather than a mainstream activity. This ...can be partly explained by various factors of consumer acceptance of the new technology. While consumer attitudes toward genetic tests aiming to reveal the risks of a predisposition to various illnesses have already been examined by several research studies worldwide; consumer acceptance of nutrigenomics-based personalized nutrition has only been examined by a significantly lower number of papers, especially in the Central and Eastern European region.
The purpose of this paper is to examine consumer acceptance of genetic-based personalized nutrition in Hungary. Therefore a national representative survey was conducted involving 1000 individuals. The starting point of the model used is the assumption that the consumer acceptance of personalized nutrition is influenced by its consumer perceptions, which are affected by psychological processes that, in a more general sense, determine acceptance of food innovations.
The results show that 23.5% of respondents accept genetic test-based personalized nutrition. Women were found to reject the new technology in a significantly smaller proportion than men. The relationship between other demographic variables (i.e. age groups, education and subjective income level) and the perception of genetic-based personalized nutrition is also significant. Our results indicate that it is perceived cost/benefit that is most strongly related to genetically based personalized dietary preferences, followed by perceived risk and subjective norms. Perceived uncertainty and perceived behavioural control, however, have only a weak relationship with genetic-based personalized dietary preferences.
Compared with the magnitude of the effect of socio-demographic criteria, it can be concluded that, on the whole, psychological processes in the individual have a greater influence on the development of preferences for genetic-based personalized nutrition than any socio-demographic factor. This also confirms the trend that there are more and more value-added products or value propositions (where a significant part of the value added is to be found in product innovation), for which psychological characteristics are/should be given more emphasis among the segmentation criteria.
We classify the isometry equivalence classes and determine the isometry groups of connected and simply connected Riemannian nilmanifolds on filiform Lie groups of arbitrary dimension and on five ...dimensional nilpotent Lie groups of nilpotency class >2. To achieve this classification we prove that up to one exceptional class the five dimensional non two-step nilmanifolds and the filiform nilmanifolds have isometry groups of the same (minimal) dimension as the nilmanifold. We give a detailed description of the exceptional case.
The Kéromnès et al. (2013) mechanism for hydrogen combustion has been optimized using a large set of indirect experimental data, consisting of ignition measurements in shock tubes (566 datapoints in ...43 datasets) and rapid compression machines (219/19), and flame velocity measurements (364/59), covering wide ranges of temperature (800K–2300K), pressure (0.1bar–65bar) and equivalence ratio (φ=0.2–5.0). According to the sensitivity analysis carried out at each experimental datapoint, 30 Arrhenius parameters and 3 third body collision efficiency parameters of 11 elementary reactions could be optimized using these experimental data. 1749 directly measured rate coefficient values in 56 datasets belonging to the 11 reaction steps were also utilized. Prior uncertainty ranges of the rate coefficients were determined from literature data. Mechanism optimization has led to a new hydrogen combustion mechanism, a set of newly recommended rate parameters with their covariance matrix, and temperature-dependent posterior uncertainty ranges of the rate coefficients. The optimized mechanism generated here was tested together with 13 recent hydrogen combustion mechanisms and proved to be the best one.
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