Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (Switzerland)
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Tunable SiC-Based Photocatalysts for Hydrogen Generation and Environmental Remediation
No full textSilicon carbide (SiC) has emerged as a robust and tunable semiconductor for advanced photocatalytic applications. This review provides a comprehensive overview of recent progress in the development of SiC-based materials for environmental remediation and solar-driven hydrogen production. Key aspects discussed include morphological engineering, heterostructure design, doping strategies, and plasmonic enhancement. Emphasis is placed on structure–activity relationships, insights from density functional theory (DFT) and machine learning (ML) models, and synergistic effects in composite systems. This review concludes with a critical analysis of current challenges and future research directions, highlighting the potential of SiC implementation as a sustainable platform for next-generation photocatalytic technologies
Circular Economy in Rammed Earth Construction: A Life-Cycle Case Study on Demolition and Reuse Strategies of an Experimental Building in Pasłęk, Poland
No full textThis study aims to evaluate the potential of circular economy principles in earth-based construction using an experimental rammed earth building located in Pasłęk, Poland as a case study. The research focuses on end-of-life scenarios for earth materials, with particular emphasis on rammed earth, adobe, and compressed earth blocks stabilized with Portland cement. A scenario-based life-cycle assessment (LCA) was conducted to compare alternative demolition and reuse strategies, including manual and mechanical deconstruction, as well as on-site and off-site material reuse. Greenhouse gas emissions associated with demolition (Module C1) and transport (Module C2) were estimated for each scenario. The results indicate that manual deconstruction combined with local, on-site reuse leads to the lowest carbon footprint, whereas off-site reuse involving long-distance transport significantly increases greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, qualitative reuse pathways were identified for wood, glass, ceramics, and insulation materials. The study reveals a lack of standardized technical procedures for the recovery and reuse of stabilized earthen materials after demolition and highlights the importance of integrating end-of-life planning into the early design phase using digital tools such as material passports and BIM. The findings demonstrate that properly designed rammed earth systems can provide a viable low-tech solution for reducing construction waste and supporting circular material flows in the built environment
No Free Lunch in Language Model Bias Mitigation? Targeted Bias Reduction Can Exacerbate Unmitigated LLM Biases
No full textLarge Language Models (LLMs) inherit societal biases from their training data, potentially leading to harmful outputs. While various techniques aim to mitigate these biases, their effects are typically evaluated only along the targeted dimension, leaving cross-dimensional consequences unexplored. This work provides the first systematic quantification of cross-category spillover effects in LLM bias mitigation. We evaluate four bias mitigation techniques (Logit Steering, Activation Patching, BiasEdit, Prompt Debiasing) across ten models from seven families, measuring impact on racial, religious, profession-, and gender-related biases using the StereoSet benchmark. Across 160 experiments yielding 640 evaluations, we find that targeted interventions cause collateral degradations to model coherence and performance along debiasing objectives in 31.5% of untargeted dimension evaluations. These findings provide empirical evidence that debiasing improvements along one dimension can come at the cost of degradation in others. We introduce a multi-dimensional auditing framework and demonstrate that single-target evaluations mask potentially severe spillover effects, underscoring the need for robust, multi-dimensional evaluation tools when examining and developing bias mitigation strategies to avoid inadvertently shifting or worsening bias along untargeted axes
Fontan Route Remodeling over Time: A Longitudinal Quantitative 3D Case Series
No full textFontan patients experience anatomical remodeling over time, yet the mechanisms driving these changes remain unclear. This study aimed to characterize full-route Fontan remodeling and evaluate whether observed morphological changes arise from somatic growth alone or from the combined influence of conduit properties, surgical design, thoracic anatomy, and mechanical forces. Five Fontan patients (four extracardiac, one lateral tunnel) underwent analysis using two MRI-derived 3D models obtained between 1 and 4 years apart. Directional displacement was assessed using 3D shape overlays, surface geometry was quantified using the Koenderink Shape Index (KSI), and patient-specific growth mapping estimated localized tissue dynamics. Statistical analyses included a one-sample t-test for mean anterior displacement, the Grubbs’ test for outlier detection, and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test for KSI comparisons across time points. All patients exhibited anterior displacement of the Fontan route, with a mean shift of 0.29″ ± 0.33″ and one significant outlier (lateral tunnel, 0.87″). Four of five patients showed increased convexity over time. Growth mapping revealed minimal, heterogeneous native-tissue expansion, with localized growth up to 0.2 mm/year. Individual remodeling trajectories varied and did not consistently align with localized anterior growth, indicating that Fontan route remodeling is highly individualized and cannot be explained by somatic growth alone. This retrospective longitudinal case series study highlights the value of quantitative 3D geometric tools for assessing subtle Fontan route remodeling and supports the feasibility of growth-aware, patient-specific modeling frameworks in single-ventricle physiology
The Accuracy of Maxillary Canines’ Rotation with Different Attachment Designs: A Retrospective Study
No full textBackground/Objectives: The rotation of maxillary canines represents one of the least predictable movements with clear aligners, particularly in cases requiring rotations greater than 10°, due to the rounded crown morphology and limited aligner grip. The aim of this retrospective study was to compare three different crescent-shaped attachment designs (vertical, horizontal, and oblique) for maxillary canine rotations greater than 10° with clear aligners. Methods: Seventy-eight maxillary canines were retrospectively selected and allocated into three equal groups (n = 26) according to the orientation of the applied attachment: vertical, horizontal, or oblique crescent-shaped attachments. Digital STL models (initial, predicted, and final) were imported into Dolphin 3D software 12.0.63 to assess the accuracy of maxillary canine’s rotation through the comparison between planned and achieved values. Results: Mean rotational accuracy was 55.10% ± 15.60 for the vertical group, 62.40% ± 16.10 for the horizontal group, and 64.60% ± 19.40 for the oblique group. One-way ANOVA showed no statistically significant differences among groups (p = 0.09). Pairwise analysis revealed a statistically significant difference between the oblique and vertical designs (p = 0.05). Conclusions: Attachment orientation may influence the accuracy of maxillary canine rotation with clear aligners, with oblique crescent-shaped attachments showing a trend toward improved rotational control
Film Mulching Mitigates Yield Loss by Enhancing Growth and Nitrogen Uptake in Late-Sown Winter Wheat on the Guanzhong Plain
No full textDelayed sowing has become a key constraint on winter wheat production in the Guanzhong Plain, Shaanxi Province, China, due to the widespread adoption of late-maturing maize and the delayed harvest of preceding crops. A two-year field experiment was conducted on the Guanzhong Plain to elucidate the physiological mechanisms behind yield reduction under delayed sowing and to explore potential mitigation strategies. The study examined the effects of sowing time (normal, 10-day delay, and 20-day delay) and plastic film mulching on yield components, crop development, and water and nitrogen uptake and use in winter wheat. Compared to normal sowing, delayed sowing significantly reduced grain yield (7.64–17.19%), spike number (11.65–21.3%), 1000-grain weight (5.2–9.05%), growth duration (7–16 d), dry matter accumulation (21.79–58.07%), and partial factor productivity of nitrogen fertilizer (7.64–17.2%). Late sowing slowed overall growth and development, shortened the growth cycle, and suppressed root system expansion and plant height, particularly under the 20-day delay. However, plastic film mulching under delayed sowing improved seedling emergence, root growth, tiller number (8.42–51.23%), water use efficiency (10.15–18.15%), and nitrogen productivity, thereby mitigating the adverse effects of delayed sowing on resource capture. Mulching enabled wheat sown with a 10-day delay to achieve yields comparable to normal-sown crops and alleviated 9.1–10.3% of the yield loss under a 20-day delay, although it did not fully restore yields to the non-delayed level. These findings provide practical insights for managing winter wheat under delayed sowing conditions
TRACE: Topical Reasoning with Adaptive Contextual Experts
No full textRetrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely used for long-text summarization due to its efficiency and scalability. However, standard RAG methods flatten documents into independent chunks, disrupting sequential flow and thematic structure, resulting in significant loss of contextual information. This paper presents MOEGAT, a novel graph-enhanced retrieval framework that addresses this limitation by explicitly modeling document structure. MOEGAT constructs an Orthogonal Context Graph to capture sequential discourse and global semantic relationships—long-range dependencies between non-adjacent text spans that reflect topical similarity and logical associations beyond local context. It then employs a query-aware Mixture-of-Experts Graph Attention Network to dynamically activate specialized reasoning pathways. Experiments conducted on three public long-text summarization datasets demonstrate that MOEGAT achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, on the WCEP dataset, it outperforms the previous state-of-the-art Graph of Records (GOR) baseline by 14.9%, 18.1%, and 18.4% on ROUGE-L, ROUGE-1, and ROUGE-2, respectively. These substantial gains, especially the 14.9% improvement in ROUGE-L, reflect significantly better capture of long-range coherence and thematic integrity in summaries. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of the orthogonal graph and Mixture-of-Experts components. Overall, this work introduces a novel structure-aware approach to RAG that explicitly models and leverages document structure through an orthogonal graph representation and query-aware Mixture-of-Experts reasoning
A Note on Tutz’s Pairwise Separation Estimator
No full textThe Rasch model has the desirable property that item parameter estimation can be separated from person parameter estimation. This implies that no assumptions about the ability distribution are required when estimating item difficulties. Pairwise estimation approaches in the Rasch model exploit this principle by estimating item difficulties solely from sample proportions of respondents who answer item i correctly and item j incorrectly. A recent contribution by Tutz introduced Tutz’s pairwise separation estimator (TPSE) for the more general class of homogeneous monotone (HM) models, extending the idea of pairwise estimation to this broader setting. The present article examines the asymptotic behavior of the TPSE within the Rasch model as a special case of the HM framework. It should be emphasized that both analytical derivations and a numerical illustration show that the TPSE yields asymptotically biased item parameter estimates, rendering the estimator inconsistent, even for a large number of items. Consequently, the TPSE cannot be recommended for empirical applications
B Cell Levels in Centenarians, Semi-Supercentenarians, and Supercentenarians: Descriptive Analysis by Age, Sex, Cytomegalovirus Status, and Interleukin-6
No full textThis study aims to characterise the B cell compartment in a cohort of Sicilian centenarians by analysing absolute CD3−CD19+ lymphocyte counts, in association with age, sex, cytomegalovirus (CMV) serostatus, related to immune ageing, and interleukin (IL)-6 levels, representative of inflamm-ageing. It also investigates age-related changes in the CD4+/CD19+ ratio as a marker of immune ageing, reflecting shifts in immune homeostasis. B cell counts were assessed by flow cytometry on 53 Sicilians aged 19–110 years: 20 Adults, 15 Older adults, 11 long-living individuals, and 7 oldest centenarians. A multiple negative binomial regression was applied to evaluate the effects of age, sex, CMV serostatus, and Il-6 levels on values of B cells. The results showed a non-significant trend toward age-related decline without sex-based differences. A significant reduction in B cell count was observed in individuals with high anti_CMV titres, while IL-6 levels showed a borderline inverse correlation. CD4+/CD19+ ratio values showed an age-related increase. Our findings suggest that the age-related decline in B cell numbers may be mostly related to CMV infection and IL-6 values, without sex contribution. The age-related increase in the CD4+/CD19+ ratio, most pronounced in oldest centenarians, may represent a compensatory adaptation promoting immune regulation and chronic inflammation control
Study on Microstructure and Properties of Micron Copper Powder-Liquid Metal Gallium Composite Interconnect Joint
No full textLiquid gallium (Ga) enables low-temperature transient liquid phase bonding (TLPB), but optimizing microstructure and joint performance remains challenging. Here, we developed a copper (Cu)-powder/liquid-Ga composite paste for Cu/Cu interconnects and systematically studied the effects on the interconnect joint performance of Cu powder particle size (CuPS, 10–20, 20–30 and 30–40 μm) and Cu mass fraction (CuMF, 10–30 wt%). The microstructure, electrical conductivity, and shear strength of the joint were evaluated, followed by an assessment of bonding temperature, pressure, and time. Under bonding conditions of 220 °C, 5 MPa and 720 min, a dense intermetallic compound (IMC) microstructure predominantly composed of Cu9Ga4 and CuGa2 was formed, yielding an electrical conductivity of approximately 1.1 × 107  S·m−1 and a shear strength of 52.2 MPa, thereby achieving a synergistic optimization of electrical and mechanical properties; even under rapid bonding conditions of 220 °C, 5 MPa and 1 min, the joint still attained a shear strength of 39.2 MPa, demonstrating the potential of this process for high-efficiency, short-time interconnection applications. These results show that adjusting the composite paste formulation and dosage enables Cu–Ga TLPB joints that combine high conductivity with robust mechanical integrity for advanced packaging