Ballast water is essential for maintaining the balance and integrity of a ship. However, exchanging ballast water resulted in discharging water of different origins in vessel recipient ports, and ...this may have caused ecosystem disturbance or aquatic pollution. The ballast water management (BWM) system is essential for the purification and disinfection of the ballast water that is taken up. Because current BWM systems widely use biocides for the treatment of aquatic organisms, the biocides may result in unintended toxicity of the discharged ballast water. In this study, we suggested thymol and carvacrol as chemical biocides for BWM systems and investigated their effectiveness using Artemia salina and Escherichia coli. Thymol and carvacrol showed biocidal effects in our study. A combination of these substances showed a synergistic increase in the biocidal effects. Moreover, carvacrol naturally degrades after disinfection, which indicates that natural substances may be promising candidates to increase the efficacy and reduce unwanted side effects of the BWM system.
•Thymol showed specifically high biocidal effect on Artemia salina•Carvacrol showed specifically high biocidal effect on Escherichia coli•Combination treatment of thymol and carvacrol showed synergistic biocidal effects•Carvacrol naturally degraded and lost biocidal effect in 4 days
A Wireless body area network (WBAN) is a communication network that provides both medical and consumer electronics services by using sensors in/on/around a human body. In general, a WBAN environment ...suffers from frequent link loss due to interferences among sensors scattered over a body. In addition, the channel condition can frequently change by postural body movement, which increases packet drops, retransmissions, and eventually power consumption. This paper presents an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP)-based flexible relay node selection scheme that considers a multitude of decision factors, such as average SNR, remaining energy ratio, and traffic load. Moreover, the proposed scheme can adaptively satisfy the requirements of WBAN in various scenarios. Our simulation study shows that the proposed method provides high communication reliability and low power consumption.
The cytotoxic response of natural killer (NK) cells in a microreactor to surface acoustic waves (SAWs) is investigated, where the SAWs produce an acoustic streaming flow. The Rayleigh‐type SAWs form ...by an interdigital transducer propagated along the surface of a piezoelectric substrate in order to allow the dynamic stimulation of functional immune cells in a noncontact and rotor‐free manner. The developed acoustofluidic microreactor enables a dynamic cell culture to be set up in a miniaturized system while maintaining the performance of agitating media. The present SAW system creates acoustic streaming flow in the cylindrical microreactor and applies flow‐induced shear stress to the cells. The suspended NK cells are found to not be damaged by the SAW operation of the adjusted experimental setup. Suspended NK cell aggregates subjected to an SAW treatment show increased intracellular Ca
2+
concentrations. Simultaneously treating the NK cells with SAWs and protein kinase C activator enhances the lysosomal protein expressions of the cells and the cell‐mediated cytotoxicity against target tumor cells. These have important implications by showing that acoustically actuated system allows dynamic cell culture without cell damages and further alters cytotoxicity‐related cellular activities.
A microreactor system is presented, which employs surface acoustic waves to agitate fluid in a contact‐free manner. The acoustically actuated microreactor enables dynamic cell culture without cell damage by applying fluid shear stress. Reported findings reveal functional cellular changes such as elevated intracellular Ca
2+
influx and enhanced cell‐mediated cytotoxicity in the copresence of the protein kinase C activator.
•Two PARK2 SNPs are associated with fasting blood glucose and insulin secretion.•The Park2-depleted rat β-cells exhibit decreased insulin production and secretion.•Knockdown of Park2 gene by RNAi ...causes mitochondrial alterations in rat INS-1 β-cells.•PARK2 gene plays an important role in the maintenance of pancreatic β-cell function.
Several association studies have implicated the PARK2 gene that encodes parkin – the key molecule orchestrating the mitochondrial quality control system – as a candidate susceptibility gene for diabetes. A total of 7551 unrelated Korean KARE cohort subjects were analyzed to investigate the association between the PARK2 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) and quantitative glycemic traits. Two SNPs, rs10455889 and rs9365294, were significantly associated with fasting plasma glucose level (p=∼1.2×10−4) and insulin secretion indices (p=∼7.4×10−5) in male KARE subjects. Parkin was expressed predominantly in the rat pancreatic islets. Downregulation of the Park2 gene in rat INS-1 β-cells resulted in a significant decrease in the glucose-stimulated insulin secretion, intracellular insulin gene expression, and intracellular ATP level. The Park2-depleted β-cells also exhibited increased mitochondrial fragmentation and ROS production and decreased mitochondrial membrane potential. Both population-based statistical evaluation and experimental evidence demonstrated a fundamental role of the PARK2 gene in the maintenance of β-cell function.
In this work, we explore opportunities to design shared storage systems that leverage the distance connectivity of NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF). NVMe-oF enables the use of NVMe storage devices in a ...shared storage environment, where multiple servers can access the same storage device via RDMA. Leveraging the distance connectivity of NVMe-oF, we develop a shared file system called EXT4-oF by extending the EXT4 file system. EXT4-oF uses RDMA to enable a local file system to function as a shared file system without requiring remote daemon processes. EXT4-oF employs a novel NVMe-driven lazy cache coherence to maintain cache coherence of file system metadata across multiple compute nodes upon creating new files, all achieved without the need for any daemon processes. To ensure cache coherence, NVMe-driven lazy cache coherence mechanism requires compute nodes to perform a re-read of NVMe-oF to avoid false negative file open errors. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that EXT4-oF improves the performance of MinIO by minimizing network traffic between compute and storage nodes and eliminating the need for TCP/IP communication during remote reads.
In droplet microfluidics, precise droplet manipulation is required in numerous applications. This study presents ultrasonic surface acoustic wave (USAW)-based microfluidic device for label-free ...droplet separation based on size. The proposed device is composed of a slanted-finger interdigital transducer on a piezoelectric substrate and a polydimethylsiloxane microchannel placed on the substrate. The microchannel is aligned in the cross-type configuration where the USAWs propagate in a perpendicular direction to the flow in the microchannel. When droplets are exposed to an acoustic field, they experience the USAW-induced acoustic radiation force (ARF), whose magnitude varies depending on the droplet size. We modeled the USAW-induced ARF based on ray acoustics and conducted a series of experiments to separate different-sized droplets. We found that the experimental results were in good agreement with the theoretical estimation. We believe that the proposed method will serve as a promising tool for size-based droplet separation in a label-free manner.
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