A dedicated analysis of the muon-induced background in the EDELWEISS dark matter search has been performed on a data set acquired in 2009 and 2010. The total muon flux underground in the Laboratoire ...Souterrain de Modane (LSM) was measured to be \(\Phi_{\mu}=(5.4\pm 0.2 ^{+0.5}_{-0.9})\)\,muons/m\(^2\)/d. The modular design of the muon-veto system allows the reconstruction of the muon trajectory and hence the determination of the angular dependent muon flux in LSM. The results are in good agreement with both MC simulations and earlier measurements. Synchronization of the muon-veto system with the phonon and ionization signals of the Ge detector array allowed identification of muon-induced events. Rates for all muon-induced events \(\Gamma^{\mu}=(0.172 \pm 0.012)\, \rm{evts}/(\rm{kg \cdot d})\) and of WIMP-like events \(\Gamma^{\mu-n} = 0.008^{+0.005}_{-0.004}\, \rm{evts}/(\rm{kg \cdot d})\) were extracted. After vetoing, the remaining rate of accepted muon-induced neutrons in the EDELWEISS-II dark matter search was determined to be \(\Gamma^{\mu-n}_{\rm irred} < 6\cdot 10^{-4} \, \rm{evts}/(\rm{kg \cdot d})\) at 90%\,C.L. Based on these results, the muon-induced background expectation for an anticipated exposure of 3000\,\kgd\ for EDELWEISS-3 is \(N^{\mu-n}_{3000 kg\cdot d} < 0.6\) events.
•Camera-derived FOG layer dynamics can inform pump cleaning operations.•This study presents an edge-AI computing device system for the detection of FOG layers.•A first high-frequency long-term ...dataset of FOG layers in sumps of pumping stations.•Surface velocity/vorticity fields and water level data can be derived from sump video.
Accumulation of fat, oil and grease (FOG) in the sumps of wastewater pumping stations is a common failure cause for these facilities. Floating solids are often not transported by the pump suction inlets and the individual solids can accumulate to stiff and thick FOG layers. The lack of data about the dynamics in FOG layer formation still hampers the design of effective measures towards its mitigation. In this article, we present a low-cost camera-based automated system for the observation of FOG layer dynamics in wastewater pumping stations at high-frequency (minutes) over extended time windows (months). Optical imagery is processed through a deep-learning computer vision routine that allows describing FOG layer dynamics (e.g. accumulation rate and changes in shape) and various hydraulic processes in the pump sump (e.g. the water level, surface flow velocity fields, vorticity, or circulation). Furthermore, the system can perform in-camera image processing, thus allowing the transfer of compressed-processed datasets when deployed in remote locations (Edge AI computing), which could be of great utility for the hydro-ecological monitoring community. In this study, the technology applied is illustrated with a dataset (six months, two-minute frequency) collected at a wastewater pumping station at the municipality of Rotterdam, The Netherlands. This monitoring system represents a source of information for the management of (waste)water pumping stations (e.g. detection of free-surface vortices and scheduling of sump cleaning operations) and facilitates the collection of standardized high-frequency FOG layer dynamics data for a detailed description of FOG build-up and transport processes.
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Background
The pathophysiology of infantile colic is poorly understood, though various studies report gut microbiota dysbiosis in colicky infants. We aimed to test the hypothesis that colic‐related ...dysbiosis is associated with visceral hypersensitivity triggered by an altered luminal milieu.
Methods
Fecal samples from seven colicky and seven non‐colicky infants were studied. Fecal supernatants (FS) were infused into the colons of C57/Bl6 mice (n=10/specimen). Visceral sensitivity was subsequently assessed in the animals by recording their abdominal muscle response to colorectal distension (CRD) by electromyography (EMG). Serine and cysteine protease activities were assessed in FS with specific substrates. Infant fecal microbiota composition was analyzed by DNA extraction and 16S rRNA gene pyrosequencing.
Key Results
FS from colicky infants triggered higher EMG activity than FS from non‐colicky infants in response to both the largest CRD volumes and overall, as assessed by the area under the curve of the EMG across all CRD volumes. Infant crying time strongly correlated with mouse EMG activity. Microbiota richness and phylogenetic diversity were increased in the colicky group, without showing prominent microbial composition alterations. Only Bacteroides vulgatus and Bilophila wadsworthia were increased in the colicky group. Bacteroides vulgatus abundance positively correlated with visceral sensitivity. No differences were found in protease activities.
Conclusions & Inferences
Luminal contents from colicky infants trigger visceral hypersensitivity, which may explain the excessive crying behavior of these infants. Additional studies are required to determine the nature of the compounds involved, their mechanism of action, and the potential implications of intestinal microbiota in their generation.
The infant colic pathophysiology is poorly understood. In this study, luminal contents from colicky infants triggered visceral hyperalgesia in an animal model known to mimic IBS colonic hypersensitivity. Visceral hypersensitivity could be an important etiological factor involved in the prototypical colic crying behavior.
Receiving water quality simulation in highly urbanised areas requires the integration of several processes occurring at different space-time scales. These integrated catchment models deliver results ...with a significant uncertainty level associated. Still, uncertainty analysis is seldom applied in practice and the relative contribution of the individual model elements is poorly understood. Often the available methods are applied to relatively small systems or individual sub-systems, due to limitations in organisational and computational resources. Consequently this work presents an uncertainty propagation and decomposition scheme of an integrated water quality modelling study for the evaluation of dissolved oxygen dynamics in a large-scale urbanised river catchment in the Netherlands. Forward propagation of the measured and elicited uncertainty input-parametric distributions was proposed and contrasted with monitoring data series. Prior ranges for river water quality-quantity parameters lead to high uncertainty in dissolved oxygen predictions, thus the need for formal calibration to adapt to the local dynamics is highlighted. After inferring the river process parameters with system measurements of flow and dissolved oxygen, combined sewer overflow pollution loads became the dominant uncertainty source along with rainfall variability. As a result, insights gained in this paper can help in planning and directing further monitoring and modelling efforts in the system. When comparing these modelling results to existing national guidelines it is shown that the commonly used concentration-duration-frequency tables should not be the only metric used to select mitigation alternatives and may need to be adapted in order to cope with uncertainties.
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•Prior ranges for river water parameters dominate the uncertainty in DO predictions.•The biggest contributor to DO statistical uncertainty are CSO pollutant loads.•Variance decomposition is successfully applied on a large scale ICM.
The EDELWEISS collaboration is performing a direct search for WIMP dark matter in a low-background environment in the Laboratoire Souterrain de Modane. Two series of results obtained with 320 g ...heat-and-ionization detectors are presented. During the 4.53 effective exposure of the year 2000 run, no nuclear events are observed in the fiducial volume in the 30–200 keV energy range. The central value of the signal reported by the DAMA experiment NaI1–4 is thus excluded at 90% CL. The present 2002 setup with three detectors is described and improved calibration performances are presented. The R&D program and the EDELWEISS-II stage of the experiment are also briefly described.
Bioelectrochemical systems (BESs) are a novel, promising technology for the recovery of metals. The prerequisite for upscaling from laboratory to industrial size is that high current and high power ...densities can be produced. In this study we report the recovery of copper from a copper sulfate stream (2 g L(-1) Cu(2+)) using a laboratory scale BES at high rate. To achieve this, we used a novel cell configuration to reduce the internal voltage losses of the system. At the anode, electroactive microorganisms produce electrons at the surface of an electrode, which generates a stable cell voltage of 485 mV when combined with a cathode where copper is reduced. In this system, a maximum current density of 23 A m(-2) in combination with a power density of 5.5 W m(-2) was produced. XRD analysis confirmed 99% purity in copper of copper deposited onto cathode surface. Analysis of voltage losses showed that at the highest current, most voltage losses occurred at the cathode, and membrane, while anode losses had the lowest contribution to the total voltage loss. These results encourage further development of BESs for bioelectrochemical metal recovery.
This work presents a method to emulate the flow dynamics of physically based hydrodynamic simulators under variations of time-dependent rainfall and parametric scenarios. Although surrogate modelling ...is often employed to deal with the computational burden of this type of simulators, common techniques used for model emulation as polynomial expansions or Gaussian processes cannot deal with large parameter space dimensionality. This restricts their applicability to a reduced number of static parameters under a fixed rainfall process. The technique presented combines the use of a modified Unit Hydrograph (UH) scheme and a polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) to emulate flow from physically based hydrodynamic models. The novel element of the proposed methodology is that the emulator compensates for the errors induced by the assumptions of proportionality and superposition of the UH theory when dealing with non-linear model structures, whereas it approximates properly the behaviour of a physically based simulator to new (spatially-uniform) rainfall time-series and parametric scenarios. The computational time is significantly reduced, which makes the practical use of the model feasible (e.g. real time control, flood warning schemes, hydraulic structures design, parametric inference etc.). The applicability of this methodology is demonstrated in three case studies, through the emulation of a simplified non-linear tank-in-series routing structure and of the 2D Shallow Water Equations (2D-SWE) solution (FLOW-R2D) in two computational domains. Results indicate that the proposed emulator can approximate with a high degree of accuracy the behaviour of the original models under a wide range of rainfall inputs and parametric values.
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•The presented emulator links rainfall/parameters to model-based flow estimations.•Emulators can extend the range of application of physically based flow simulators.•The conventional form of Unit hydrograph fails to represent non-linear processes.•A dedicated sampling scheme can be used to learn non-linear model responses.
Personal and environmental radiation monitoring services are widely used through luminescent techniques. In this paper, we practiced performance testing on thermoluminescent and optically stimulated ...luminescent dosimeters by assessing their homogeneity, linearity, energy, and angular dependence tests. The IEC and ICRP requirements were used to compare the performance response of dosimeters. Based on the experimental results, we realized that both detectors comply with the international criteria. The homogeneity percentage was 8.9% and 13.7% for TL and OSL detectors, respectively. The percentage deviation of the linearity test does not exceed 10% for both dosimeters except for the TL dosimeters at low irradiation dose. For the angular dependence, deviations were less than 2% for TLDs and 5% for OSLDs. These detectors display mean values of the relative energy response of −15.29% and −6.51% for OSL and TL detectors. Generally, TL materials manifested low sensitivity to radiation dose levels. On the other hand, the OSLDs demonstrated a more pronounced under-response to energy beam qualities than TLDs. Regarding COV tests, TL and OSL dosimeters have passed the c2 test.
•TL and OSL dosimeters characteristics were tested.•Nine radiation qualities and eleven angles of incidence were used to test homogeneity, non-linearity, energy, and angular dependence.•The Hp(10) measurement accuracy was evaluated by both the ICRP trumpet curve analysis and IEC 62387 covariance test.
Primary graft dysfunction (PGD) is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality early after heart transplantation (HT). The International Consortium on PGD is a multicenter collaboration dedicated to ...identifying the clinical risk factors for PGD in the contemporary era of HT. The objectives of the current report were (1) to assess the incidence of severe PGD in an international cohort; (2) to evaluate the performance of the most strongly validated PGD risk tool, the RADIAL score, in a contemporary cohort; and (3) to redefine clinical risk factors for severe PGD in the current era of HT.
This is a retrospective, observational study of consecutive adult HT recipients between 2010 and 2020 in 10 centers in the United States, Canada and Europe. Patients with severe PGD were compared to those without severe PGD (comprising those with no, mild and moderate PGD). The RADIAL score was calculated for each transplant recipient. The discriminatory power of the RADIAL score was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, and its calibration was assessed by plotting the percentage of PGD predicted vs that which was observed. To identify clinical risk factors associated with severe PGD, we performed multivariable mixed-effects logistic regression modeling to account for among-center variability.
A total of 2746 patients have been enrolled in the registry to date, including 2015 (73.4%) from North America, and 731 (26.6%) from Europe; 215 participants (7.8%) met the criteria for severe PGD. There was an increase in the incidence of severe PGD over the study period (P value for trend by difference sign test = 0.004). The Kaplan-Meier estimate for 1-year survival was 75.7% (95% CI 69.4–80.9%) in patients with severe PGD as compared to 94.4% (95% CI 93.5–95.2%) in those without severe PGD (log-rank P value < 0.001). The RADIAL score performed poorly in our contemporary cohort and was not associated with severe PGD; it had an AUC of 0.53 (95% CI 0.48–0.58). In the multivariable regression model, acute preoperative dialysis (OR 2.41, 95% CI 1.31–4.43), durable left ventricular assist device support (OR 1.77, 95% CI 1.13–2.77), and total ischemic time (OR 1.20 for each additional hour, 95% CI 1.02–1.41) were associated with an increased risk of severe PGD.
Our consortium has identified an increasing incidence of PGD in the modern transplant era. We identified contemporary risk factors for this early post-transplant complication, which confers a high mortality risk. These results may enable the identification of patients at high risk for developing severe PGD in order to inform peri-transplant donor and recipient management practices.
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