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Effects of selenium on the model cnidarian Exaiptasia diaphana and its symbiotic algae.
Get PDFCharacterising toxicity thresholds for coral reefs is essential for understanding and safeguarding these ecosystems. Coral reefs are highly sensitive to environmental changes, including pollutants and increased trace element concentrations. Corals and other cnidarians form symbiotic associations with photosynthetic algae (Symbiodiniaceae) allowing for diverse nutrient acquisition methods and effective nutrient transformation and recycling between the host animal and their Symbiodiniaceae. Selenium (Se), an essential element, supports crucial physiological functions in marine taxa but it can become toxic at elevated concentrations. Currently, Se exposure thresholds for cnidarians and Symbiodiniaceae remain unknown. To assess the impact of high inorganic Se concentrations on cnidarians and Symbiodiniaceae, we conducted toxicity tests using the model sea anemone, Exaiptasia diaphana, exposing individuals to Se-enriched seawater using Na2SeO3 (76 - 1100 µg Se/L) for 96 h. Mortality occurred in the highest concentration of Se (1100 µg/L) for all replicates, but 100 % survival was recorded in all lower concentrations, including 570 µg/L. This latter concentration exceeded environmentally relevant levels, negating the need to acquire more refined mortality data. In addition, decreases in oral disk and reduced tentacle length at higher Se exposures indicated potential sublethal effects and physiological stress where E. diaphana exposed to concentrations ranging from 245- 570 µg/L decreasing in size by ∼15-20 %. These findings contribute to our understanding of cnidarian physiology and stress responses, highlighting the importance of trace elements in coral reef environments. This knowledge is crucial for developing effective management strategies to protect and preserve vital ecosystems in the face of environmental challenges
Magneto-optic fiber-coupled tuneable optical attenuation.
No full textTuneable, variable, optical attenuation through an optical circulator with a broad, linear attenuation range of Δα ∼ (30-40) dB is demonstrated using non-reciprocal Faraday rotation in a double-pass configuration with a combination of permanent magnets and an electromagnet. A fiber-coupled magneto-optical variable optical attenuator (MVOA) operates over the near IR with an attenuation tuning range of Δα > 30 dB, a resolution of Δα ∼ 0.02 dB, a response time of t < 2 ms, and a temperature dependence over T = 25-70°C of Δα / ΔT = -8 × 10-4 dB/°C. At λ = 1550 nm, the calculated Faraday material effective Verdet constant is (1/A)V eff = 109 × 103 dB/(T.m)
Measuring and Benchmarking Incident Response Readiness
No full textSmall-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) remain disproportionately vulnerable to cyber incidents due to constrained resources and underdeveloped operational practices. While many maintain incident response plans (IRPs) to meet regulatory requirements, these plans are often untested and poorly integrated into operational workflows, resulting in delayed containment, unclear escalation, and inconsistent response actions. This disconnect between documentation and execution representing a critical readiness gap that can significantly increase the impact and duration of cyber events. To address this challenge, this paper introduces the Incident Response Readiness Score (IRRS); a scenario-based assessment framework designed to empirically evaluate an organisation's incident response capability under simulated conditions. The IRRS applies a structured scoring rubric calibrated through a Scenario Risk Index, enabling proportional evaluation of performance across diverse incident types. By transforming qualitative incident response actions into a reproducible and risk-weighted metric, the IRRS offers a practical and scalable means of assessing and improving cybersecurity readiness for different type organisations
An Ensemble Learning Model Based on Three-Way Decision for Concept Drift Adaptation
Get PDFThe ensemble learning model can effectively detect drift and utilize diversity to improve the performance of adapting to drift. However, local concept drift can occur in different types at different time points, causing basic learners are difficult to distinguish the drift of local boundaries, and the drift range is difficult to determine. Thus, the ensemble learning model to adapt local concept drifts is still challenging problem. Moreover, there are often differences in decision boundaries after drift adaptation, and employing overall diversity measurement is inappropriate. To address these two issues, this paper proposes a novel ensemble learning model called instance-weighted ensemble learning based on the three-way decision (IWE-TWD). In IWE-TWD, a divide-and-conquer strategy is employed to handle uncertain drift and to select base learners; Density clustering dynamically constructs density regions to lock drift range; Three-way decision is adopted to estimate whether the region distribution changes, and the instance is weighted with the probability of region distribution change; The diversities between base learners are determined with three-way decision also. Experimental results show that IWE-TWD has better performance than the state-of-the-art models in data stream classification on ten synthetic data sets and seven real-world data sets
Agreement Between Child Self-Report With Parent Proxy Report on the Quality of Life of Children With Medical Complexity: A Cross-Sectional Study.
No full textOBJECTIVE: This is the first study to investigate the agreement between children's self-reports and parents' proxy reports on the quality of life (QoL) of children with medical complexity in the Chinese context. We further examined if there were differences in the concordance between children's self-reports and parents' proxy reports. METHODS: A cross-sectional study of 113 parent-child dyads was conducted on parents and their children aged 10-18 years with a diagnosis of medical complexity. The intra-class correlation coefficients between the scores of children and parents were excellent in total PedsQL and physical functioning, good in school functioning, and fair in social functioning and emotional functioning. RESULTS: Children rated themselves better than their parents for emotional, social, school, and physical functioning. Discordance between the emotional and social components was observed from parent-reported and child-reported. There are some discrepancies in interpretation on pediatric QoL between children with medical complexity and their parents. CONCLUSION: The study suggested both parents and children's voices should be taken into account during health assessments and health-decision making to ensure tailor-made and appropriate nursing care is provided to the CMC
Newly established forests dominated global carbon sequestration change induced by land cover conversions.
Get PDFLand cover conversions (LCC) have substantially reshaped terrestrial carbon dynamics, yet their net impact on carbon sequestration remains uncertain. Here, we use the remote sensing-driven BEPS model and high-resolution HILDA+ data to quantify LCC-induced changes in net ecosystem productivity (NEP) from 1981 to 2019. Despite global forest loss and cropland/urban expansion, LCC led to a net carbon gain of 229 Tg C. Afforestation and reforestation increased NEP by 1559 Tg C, largely offsetting deforestation-driven losses (-1544 Tg C), with newly established forests in the Northern Hemisphere driving gains that counterbalanced emissions from tropical deforestation. Regional carbon gains were concentrated in East Asia, North America, and Europe, while losses occurred mainly in the Amazon and Southeast Asia. Although smaller in area, newly established forests exhibited higher sequestration efficiency than degraded older forests, emphasizing the role of forest age in shaping global carbon sink dynamics. These findings highlight the critical importance of afforestation, forest management, and spatially informed land-use strategies in strengthening carbon sinks and supporting global carbon neutrality goals
The Ethical and Legal Implications of Commercial Surrogacy for Healthcare A Global Perspective
No full textIn this groundbreaking work, the authors explore the intricate interplay between commercial surrogacy and the global healthcare system, challenging conventional views with fresh insights into ethical, legal, and medical dimensions
Hydration behaviour of binary and ternary blended calcined clay-based cement binders with different chemical admixtures
No full textAs Australia transitions towards net-zero emissions, the availability of supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) like fly ash (FA) and ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS) is expected to decline due to the phase-out of coal-fired power plants and the shift to green steel technologies. Therefore, identifying alternative SCMs that meet Australian building and construction standards is crucial. Calcined clay (CC) is a promising alternative as suitable clays with a kaolinite content > 40% are abundant in Australia. However, CC increases water demand, requiring the use of chemical admixtures to improve dispersion. Understanding the compatibility of locally available chemical admixtures, particularly in terms of their influence on hydration behaviour, is therefore crucial. This study investigates the hydration kinetics of binary and ternary cement blends incorporating CC, alongside GGBFS and FA, with total SCM replacement levels of ≤ 50%. Various locally available admixtures were assessed for their compatibility and impact on hydration behaviour through isothermal calorimetry. In addition, setting time tests were conducted to assess whether the formulated blends comply with Australian standards. The results demonstrate how different admixture dosages affect sulphate balance and early-age heat release in calcined clay-based blends, providing guidance for optimising these lower-carbon binder formulations within the Australian context
Perception of Audio-Visual Synchrony is Modulated by Walking Speed and Step-Cycle Phase.
Get PDFInvestigating sensory processes in active human observers is critical for a holistic understanding of perception. Recent research shows that locomotion can rhythmically alter visual detection performance, illustrating how natural behaviours influence sensory processing. Here, we tested whether the speed and phase of locomotion also modulate temporal perception, focusing on the perceived synchrony of supra-threshold audio-visual stimuli. Participants made synchrony judgements over a range of stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) while walking at either slow or natural walking speeds. Slow walking decreased temporal sensitivity and increased reaction times compared to when walking at a natural pace. Further analysis of the shortest SOAs revealed that perceived synchrony was also biased by the relative phase of the step-cycle: with an increased bias to perceive synchrony during the swing phase, and decreased bias at the start and end of each step. Together, these results extend recent evidence that walking dynamically modulates near-threshold visual detection to include the modulation of supra-threshold audio-visual timing judgements
Ranking on Dynamic Graphs: An Effective and Robust Band-Pass Disentangled Approach
No full textRanking is an essential and practical task on dynamic graphs, which aims to prioritize future interaction candidates for given queries. While existing solutions achieve promising ranking performance, they leverage a single listwise loss to jointly optimize candidate sets, which leads to the gradient vanishing issue; and they employ neural networks to model complex temporal structures within a shared latent space, which fails to accurately capture multi-scale temporal patterns due to the frequency aliasing issue. To address these issues, we propose BandRank, a novel and robust band-pass disentangled ranking approach for dynamic graphs in the frequency domain. Concretely, we propose a band-pass disentangled representation (BPDR) approach, which disentangles complex temporal structures into multiple frequency bands and employs non-shared frequency-enhanced multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) to model each band independently. We prove that our BPDR approach ensures effective multi-scale learning for temporal structures by demonstrating its multi-scale global convolution property. Besides, we design a robust Harmonic Ranking (HR) loss to jointly optimize candidate sets and continuously track comparisons between real and virtual candidates, where we theoretically guarantee its ability to alleviate the gradient vanishing issue. Extensive experimental results show that our BandRank achieves an average improvement of 21.31% against eight baselines while demonstrating superior robustness across different learning scenarios
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