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Identification, Occurrence, and Cytotoxicity of Haloanilines: A New Class of Aromatic Nitrogenous Disinfection Byproducts in Chloraminated and Chlorinated Drinking Water
No full textIdentifying disinfection byproducts (DBPs) with high health risk is an unresolved challenge. In this study, six members of a new class of aromatic nitrogenous DBPs─2-chloroaniline, 2-bromoaniline, 2,4-dichloroaniline, 2-chloro-4-bromoaniline, 4-chloro-3-nitroaniline, and 2-chloro-4-nitroaniline─are reported as DBPs in drinking water for the first time. Haloanilines completely degraded within 1 h in the presence of chlorine (1 mg/L), while about 20% remained in the presence of chloramine (1 mg/L) after 120 h. Haloanilines showed high stability in the absence of disinfectants, with <30% degradation at pH 5-9 over 120 h. Eight haloanilines were determined in chloraminated finished water and tap water at total concentrations of up to 443 ng/L. The most abundant was 2-bromoaniline, with a median concentration of 104 ng/L. The cytotoxicity of eight haloanilines and regulated trichloromethane and dichloroacetic acid (DCAA) was evaluated using Hep G2 cell assay. The ECvalues of eight haloanilines were 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than those of the regulated DBPs. The lowest toxic concentration of 2-chloro-4-nitroaniline was 1 μM, 500 times lower than that of DCAA. The formation and control of haloanilines in drinking water warrant further investigation
Metagenomic investigation of the equine faecal microbiome reveals extensive taxonomic diversity
Get PDFBackgroundThe horse plays crucial roles across the globe, including in horseracing, as a working and companion animal and as a food animal. The horse hindgut microbiome makes a key contribution in turning a high fibre diet into body mass and horsepower. However, despite its importance, the horse hindgut microbiome remains largely undefined. Here, we applied culture-independent shotgun metagenomics to thoroughbred equine faecal samples to deliver novel insights into this complex microbial community.ResultsWe performed metagenomic sequencing on five equine faecal samples to construct 123 high- or medium-quality metagenome-assembled genomes from Bacteria and Archaea. In addition, we recovered nearly 200 bacteriophage genomes. We document surprising taxonomic diversity, encompassing dozens of novel or unnamed bacterial genera and species, to which we have assigned new Candidatus names. Many of these genera are conserved across a range of mammalian gut microbiomes.ConclusionsOur metagenomic analyses provide new insights into the bacterial, archaeal and bacteriophage components of the horse gut microbiome. The resulting datasets provide a key resource for future high-resolution taxonomic and functional studies on the equine gut microbiome
ECMS: An Edge Intelligent Energy Efficient Model in Mobile Edge Computing
No full textWith the increasing popularity of mobile edge computing (MEC) for processing intensive and delay sensitive IoT applications, the problem of high energy consumption of MEC has become a significant concern. Energy consumption prediction and monitoring of edge servers are crucial for reducing MEC's carbon footprint in accordance with green computing and sustainable development. However, predicting energy consumption of edge servers is a nontrivial problem due to the fluctuation and variation of different loads. To address this problem, we propose ECMS, a new edge intelligent energy modeling approach that jointly adopts Elman Neural Network (ENN) and feature selection to optimize the consumption of energy on edge servers. ECMS considers 29 parameters relevant to edge server energy consumption and uses the ENN to develop an energy consumption model. Unlike other energy consumption models, ECMS can successfully deal with load fluctuation and various sorts of tasks, such as CPU-intensive, online transaction-intensive, and I/O-intensive. We have validated ECMS through extensive experiments and compared its performance in terms of accuracy and training time to several baseline approaches. The experimental results show the superiority of ECMS to the baseline models. We believe that the proposed model can be used by the MEC resource providers to forecast and optimize energy use
Membrane Attack Complex C5b-9 Promotes Renal Tubular Epithelial Cell Pyroptosis in Trichloroethylene-Sensitized Mice
Get PDFTrichloroethylene (TCE), a commonly used organic solvent, is known to cause trichloroethylene hypersensitivity syndrome (THS), also called occupational medicamentosa-like dermatitis due to TCE (OMDT) in China. OMDT patients presented with severe inflammatory kidney damage, and we have previously shown that the renal damage is related to the terminal complement complex C5b-9. Here, we sought to determine whether C5b-9 participated in TCE-induced immune kidney injury by promoting pyroptosis, a new form of programed cell death linked to inflammatory response, with underlying molecular mechanisms involving the NLRP3 inflammasome. A BALB/c mouse-based model of OMDT was established by dermal TCE sensitization in the presence or absence of C5b-9 inhibitor (sCD59-Cys, 25μg/mouse) and NLRP3 antagonist (MCC950, 10 mg/kg). Kidney histopathology, renal function, expression of inflammatory mediators and the pyroptosis executive protein gasdermin D (GSDMD), and the activation of pyroptosis canonical NLRP3/caspase-1 pathway were examined in the mouse model. Renal tubular damage was observed in TCE-sensitized mice. GSDMD was mainly expressed on renal tubular epithelial cells (RTECs). The caspase-1-dependent canonical pathway of pyroptosis was activated in TCE-induced renal damage. Pharmacological inhibition of C5b-9 could restrain the caspase-1-dependent canonical pathway and rescued the renal tubular damage. Taken together, our results demonstrated that complement C5b-9 plays a central role in TCE-induced immune kidney damage, and the underlying mechanisms involve NLRP3-mediated pyroptosis
Destabilizing the food regime “from within”: Tools and strategies used by urban food policy actors
Get PDFIn the context of food transition studies scant attention has been given to the role of state authorities (be they local or national) in destabilizing the dominant food regime. Specifically, little is known about how state-based regime actors use the power at their disposal to bring about change “from within”. Using a political economy approach and data from qualitative research with local government actors in 10 European cities, this paper explores the different power instruments utilized by (local) government authorities to undermine the material, organizational and discursive base of the (conventional) agri-food regime. What emerges from our research is that local authorities have used a mix of discursive, material and organizational tools to alter the dominant narrative around food and have reoriented material resources towards activities that support a new approach to food. Obstacles in this transition pathway lie in ensuring internal coordination within cities and vertical alliances with higher administrative levels
The role of the private sector in subnational governance: Learning lessons from England’s local enterprise partnerships
No full textThis paper seeks to learn lessons about the role of the private sector in subnational governance by analysing the UK’s Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). The paper outlines the public justifications for LEPs using documentary analysis, and then considers these against findings from interviews and network analysis, concluding that the justifications are problematic. LEPs were established on the assumption that civic and business leaders needed to be brought together in business-led institutions. However, network analysis shows most civic leaders also hold private sector roles, undermining the assumed need for a ‘bringing together’. Three further justifications of the LEP model are also challenged. Firstly, business leaders were supposed to enable knowledge flows, but analysis shows that this knowledge is skewed by unrepresentative LEP boards. Secondly, it was assumed that LEPs would catalyse networks, but the networks have been built around individual interests, without transparency. Finally, LEPs were meant to mirror business structures, but this has undermined democratic accountability. Taken together, these findings suggest that the creation of LEPs has attempted to solve the wrong problem in the wrong way. The paper concludes by proposing guiding principles for the role of the private sector in the Levelling Up agenda: representation, transparency and accountability
Wireless Communication Systems Based on DCT-OFDM with Index Modulation
Get PDF"Conventional DFT-based OFDM has been widely used in the industry from wired communications to wireless communications, providing higher and higher data through- put together with other techniques. However, along with emerging of a new territory called vertical market, where low power, low costs, robustness to imperfections and huge amount of connected devices etc., become the new critical focus and challenges, DFT-OFDM may not be the most efficient solution to handle these challenges. Instead, a new variant which is DCT based seems more suitable for the demands while holding inherited advantages of DFT-OFDM as one of multi-carrier modulation forms. The variant needs to be constructed where both prefix and suffix are added at the transmitter in order to keep circular property of the transmit signal, and an optimum receiver can be designed with a prefilter to enable a one-tap equalizer and followed by a maximum-likelihood (ML) receiver, resulting in the so-called EDCT-OFDM. And several benefits of the EDCT-OFDM are justified compared with its conventional counterpart, such as doubled number of the subcarriers in the same bandwidth, better BER performance, lower complexity, and robustness to frequency offset etc.And the variant can be further improved by exploiting the so-called index modulation techniques, i.e., EDCT-OFDM-IM, by creating a new dimension to convey information. In addition to the advantages of EDCT-OFDM over the conventional OFDM systems, EDCT-OFDM-IM reduces its PAPR and achieves a robust performance enhancement. These merits enable its perfect application scenario, i.e., machine-type communications in the vertical market. Due to its special structure, it is difficult to derive the accurate bit error probability upper bound, which is the essential for the performance evaluation. However, we cross the hurdle by using a method called the moment-generating-function (MGF) and a tight upper bound is derived theoretically. The analysis is validated by simulation results and proven to be very accurate.Since the main potential target application scenarios of the DCT-based OFDM variant is for machine-type communication in the vertical market, low cost and low power consumption at the end devices is the main focus and most critical demand. However, at the downlink direction, a bit more complex scheme may be exploited in the BS transmitter because the pressure from a long battery life and a low cost is set to the devices, therefore, employing transmit diversity is desirable at the downlink direction, and this motivates us to study on enhancements such as the transmit diversity applied to EDCT-OFDM-IM. Our studies have identified a harmonised combination of index modulation and transmit diversity, resulting in a novel supplementary index bit aided transmit diversity (SIB-TD) approach. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is capable of providing significant performance gains over the conventional EDCT-OFDM-IM, even under the imperfect channel estimation.
Improving teamwork in maternity services: a rapid review of interventions
No full textBackgroundTeamwork is essential for providing safe, effective and women-centred maternity care and several high profile investigations have highlighted the adverse conseqences of dysfuntional teamwork. Maternity teams may need support to identify the most relevant intervention(s) for improving teamwork.ObjectiveTo identify and describe current ‘off-the-shelf’ teamwork interventions freely or commercially available to support improvements to teamworking in UK maternity services and conduct a gap analysis to identify areas for future development.DesignRapid scoping reviewMethodsA multi-component search process was used to identify teamwork interventions, comprising: (1) bibliographic database search (Medline, PsycINFO, CINAHL, MIDRS, NICE evidence research database); (2) identification of relevant policies and UK reports; and (3) expert input from key stakeholders (e.g., maternity service clinicians, managers, policymakers, and report authors). Data were extracted including the scope and content of each intervention and a gap analysis used to map interventions to the integrated team effectiveness model (ITEM) and structure level (macro, meso, micro) and results presented narratively.FindingsTen interventions were identified. Interventions were heterogeneous in their purpose and scope; six were classified as training courses, three were tools involving observational or diagnostics instruments, and one was a programme involving training and organisational re-design. Interventions were focused on teamwork in the context of obstetric emergencies (n=5), enhancement of routine care (n=4) or understanding workplace cultures (n=1). Users of interventions could vary, from whole organisations, to departments, to individual team members. All interventions focused on micro (e.g., team leadership, communication, decision-making, cohesion, and problem solving), with two also focused on meso aspects of teamwork (resources, organisational goals). Evidence for intervention effective on objective outcomes was limited.ConclusionsInterventions that address key aspects of teamworking are available, particularly for improving safety in obstetric emergency situations. Most interventions, however, are focused on micro features, ignoring the meso (organisational) and macro (systems) features that may also impact on team effectiveness. Evidence-based team improvement interventions that address these gaps are needed. Such interventions would support team ownership of quality improvement, leading to improvements in outcomes for service users, staff and organisations
The utility of distributed practice in curriculum design and effective learning strategies
Get PDFDistributed practice, a learning strategy that can inform curriculum design, deliberately spaces out opportunities or memory storage and retrieval of taught information to develop deep, robust and long-term learning for students Dunlosky et al., 2013). Massed practice (better known to students as ‘cramming’), in contrast, involves material being studied for similar periods but without (or with little) spacing between such memory-storage-retrieval opportunities. In such cases, knowledge and skill competency are often forgotten. This translates clearly into assessment, where those who have learned in a ‘distributed curriculum’ compared to a ‘massed curriculum’ can show significant learning gains (Hattie, 2008) from the longer-lasting and deeper learning offered by spacing learning opportunities out, leading to what is referred to as the ‘distributed practice’, ‘spacing’ or ‘lag’ effect (Dunlosky et al., 2013). This effect is well documented in cognitive psychology (Latimier et al., 2020), having been demonstrated for students across ages and abilities, inside and outside of classroom environments (Agarwal, 2019; Nazari and Ebersbach, 2019), and is noted as one of the interventions that leads to the greatest learning gains for students (Hattie, 2008). Why does distributed practice work, what does it look like and where does it happen in the curriculum
Remote Production for Live Holographic Teleportation Applications in 5G Networks
Get PDF—Holographic Teleportation is an emerging media application allowing people or objects to be teleported in a real-time and immersive fashion into the virtual space of the audience side. Compared to the traditional video content, the network requirements for supporting such applications will be much more challenging. In this paper, we present a 5G edge computing framework for enabling remote production functions for live holographic Teleportation applications. The key idea is to offload complex holographic content production functions from end user premises to the 5G mobile edge in order to substantially reduce the cost of running such applications on the user side. We comprehensively evaluated how specific network-oriented and application-oriented factors may affect the performances of remote production operations based on 5G systems. Specifically, we tested the application performance from the following four dimensions: (1) different data rate requirements with multiple content resolution levels, (2) different transport-layer mechanisms over 5G uplink radio, (3) different indoor/outdoor location environments with imperfect 5G connections and (4) different object capturing scenarios including the number of teleported objects and the number of sensor cameras required. Based on these evaluations we derive useful guidelines and policies for future remote production operation for holographic Teleportation through 5G systems
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