Search Results (133)

In fish, increasing the crude lipid level of feed can save protein and improve feed utilization. Mirror carp (Cyprinus carpio) is one of the most widely farmed fish species in the world. In this study, mirror carp larvae were fed isonitrogenous diets with different lipid levels (3%, 5%, 7%, 9%, 11%, and 13%). The rearing trial lasted for eight weeks. The results revealed that when the fat content was 9%, the AWGR, WGR, and FCR were highest, whereas FCR was lowest. The AWGR was correlated with the dietary lipid level, and the regression equation was y = −2.312x² + 45.01x + 214.49. Compared with those in the control group, the T-CHO and TG contents were significantly greater in the 13% lipid content groups and significantly lower in the 9% lipid content groups (p < 0.05). In terms of muscle quality, the contents of MUFAs, PUFAs, and DHA + EPA were significantly greater than those in the other experimental groups (p < 0.05). Oil red O staining revealed a lipid content of 13% with severe fat deposition. In addition, the results of the analysis of antioxidant enzyme activity revealed that the activities of GSH, CAT and T-AOC were significantly greater at the 9% lipid content, and that the MDA content was significantly greater at the 13% lipid content (p < 0.05). Similarly, the mRNA levels of GH, IGF-I, FAS, and LPL were significantly highest at a lipid level of 9% (p < 0.05). The above results revealed that the optimal dietary lipid requirement for the fast growth of mirror carp (6.86 ± 0.95 g) was 9.74% on the basis of nonlinear regression analysis of the AWGR. The dietary lipid level (9%) improved the growth, stress resistance, and lipid utilization of mirror carp to a certain extent. Full article

This study advances the field of infectious disease forecasting by introducing a novel approach to micro-level contact modeling, leveraging human movement patterns to generate realistic temporal-dynamic networks. Through the incorporation of human mobility models and parameter tuning, this research presents an innovative method for simulating micro-level encounters that closely mirror infection dynamics within confined spaces. Central to our methodology is the application of Bayesian optimization for parameter selection, which refines our models to emulate both the properties of real-world infection curves and the characteristics of network properties. Typically, large-scale epidemiological simulations overlook the specifics of human mobility within confined spaces or rely on overly simplistic models. By focusing on the distinct aspects of infection propagation within specific locations, our approach strengthens the realism of such pandemic simulations. The resulting models shed light on the role of spatial encounters in disease spread and improve the capability to forecast and respond to infectious disease outbreaks. This work not only contributes to the scientific understanding of micro-level transmission patterns but also offers a new perspective on temporal network generation for epidemiological modeling. Full article

Digital transformation has emerged as a significant driver of innovation globally, with Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations actively participating in this evolution. This systematic review provides a comprehensive assessment of the digital transformation in the GCC’s oil and gas sector over the past decade. Through a rigorous bibliometric analysis of 505 documents sourced from the SCOPUS database, this study examines trends in research outputs, affiliations, and publication types. The analysis reveals dynamic trends in research outputs, with the GCC showing a substantial growth in publications in recent years, particularly mirroring global trends, albeit on a smaller scale. Despite this progress, GCC publications in 2023 represent approximately 30% of the decade’s total, reflecting opportunities for increased research investment and international collaboration to enhance scientific output. Key findings highlight the United Arab Emirates as a leading contributor with (35%) of publications, followed by Saudi Arabia (29%) and Kuwait (26%). Oman, Bahrain, and Qatar exhibit comparatively fewer publications, suggesting potential areas for increased research focus. Conference papers dominate the scholarly output, comprising 92% of the publications, underscoring their role in disseminating research findings effectively. The top six world-leading research centers in digital transformation in oil and gas were analyzed and found to represent approximately 26% of global publications in the research field. This review contributes to the global discourse on technological adoption, innovation, and sustainable development by synthesizing the existing literature. It emphasizes the imperative of sustained research investment and strategic initiatives to strengthen scientific output in the GCC’s digital transformation of the oil and gas sector. By providing robust analysis and insights into regional contributions, this study informs policymakers, industry leaders, and researchers aiming to advance digital initiatives across the GCC. Full article

This work proposes for the first time protecting–reflecting on both sides of plated mirrors and a solution to polycarbonate surface vulnerability to weathering and scratching using tungsten disulfide (WS₂) by mechanical polishing. The ability of the dynamic chemical plating (DCP) technique to deposit Ag films at the nanometer scale on a polycarbonate (PC) substrate and its characteristics to be metallized is also shown. These deposits hold significant promise for concentrated solar power (CSP) applications. Complementarily, the application of WS₂ as a reflective film for CSP by mechanical polishing on smooth polycarbonate surfaces is both novel and practical. This technique is innovative and scalable without needing reactants or electrical potential, making it highly applicable in real-world scenarios, including, potentially, on-site maintenance. The effects of surface morphology and adhesion, and the reflectivity parameters of the silver metallic surfaces were investigated. Wettability was investigated because it is important for polymeric surfaces in the activation and metal deposition immediately after redox reactions. The flame technique improved wettability by modifying the surface with carbonyl and carboxyl functional groups, with PC among the few industrial polymers that resisted such a part of the process. The change in the chemical composition, roughness, and wettability of the surfaces effectively improved the adhesion between the Ag film and the PC substrate. However, it did not significantly affect the adhesion between PC and WS₂ and showed its possible implementation as a first surface mirror. Overall, this work provides a scalable, innovative method for improving the durability and reflectivity of polycarbonate-based mirrors, with significant implications for CSP applications. Full article

Cases of historical and contemporary social movements suggest that among activists, reading texts together is a valuable learning experience. However, less research exists on the specific texts youth activists seek out in their work and the role these texts play in shaping their understanding of themselves as activists. Drawing on Rudine Sims Bishop’s classic formulation of books as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors, this study explores the under-appreciated role texts may play in drawing young people to activism and shaping their identities as activists. Coupled with interview data from six youth activists engaged in the climate justice movement, survey data from 237 self-identifying youth activists suggest that the texts youth activists name as influential serve a “through the looking glass” function: they often reflect problematic aspects of the social world and one’s place within it, while also revealing new and aspirational roles readers might take on to address social problems. The texts the youth identified as influential were diverse; there were few commonalities among titles, underscoring the importance of ongoing access to a broad range of reading materials. Ultimately, findings suggest that texts work to bind together the various internal and external, micro, meso, and macro influences that collectively shape youth activists’ narratives of becoming. Full article

Monitoring battery aging is crucial for maintaining reliability and performance. This study investigates Frequency Domain Reflectometry (FDR) as a tool for monitoring lithium-ion battery State-of-Health (SoH). While FDR has been applied in battery research, the existing literature fails to address SoH assessment and lacks studies on larger battery samples to provide more meaningful results. In this work, nineteen cells initially underwent Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) to assess their degradation levels during cyclic aging. This work evaluates FDR’s effectiveness in monitoring battery health indicators, such as capacity and equivalent series resistance (ESR), by correlating these with FDR-measured impedance between 300 kHz and 1 GHz. Analytical comparison between impedance measured before and after de-embedding processes were presented. The results show FDR reactance within 300 kHz–40 MHz correlates with EIS-measured ESR, suggesting its potential as a SoH indicator. However, reduced sensitivity and accuracy, particularly after de-embedding, may limit practical applicability. Additionally, resonance-based analysis was conducted to explore the relationship between changes in circuit resonance and cell dielectric permittivity. Despite having the lowest sensitivity, the method showed that the resonance frequencies of cells remain relatively constant, mirroring behaviours associated with changes in resistive properties. Overall, this study provides insights into FDR’s potential for battery diagnostics while highlighting avenues for future research to enhance effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Full article

A spatial turn is increasingly being recognised across education, the humanities, and social sciences to critique Western Cartesian assumptions treating space as either empty or a diametric opposition bringing dualistic splits between reason/emotion and mind/body. Bacon’s vision of human subjugation of nature as a tool for human progress is examined as a diametric spatial projection, where humans are above and apart from nature, in a mirror-image inverted symmetry of above/below hierarchy and side-by-side assumed separation as diametric space. Building on an interdisciplinary synthesis between an aspect of the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, De Beauvoir’s othering, and Bronfenbrenner’s social-ecological systems in psychology, allied with a Heideggerian critique of being as needing a mode of ‘being alongside the world’, a shift in experiential and conceptual space is proposed in this conceptual review article for education. This shift is towards a framework of concentric spatial systems of sustainability. Concentric relational spaces of assumed connection and relative openness and away from diametric spaces of splitting and closure have been developed recently for sustainability concerns regarding inclusion in education. This article goes further to interrogate systems of concentric relational space for belonging with and encountering the natural world for environmental sustainability. Full article

The Middle Ages and Early Modern periods saw the interpretation of reality through symbols, connecting the natural world to the divine using symbolic thinking and images. The idea of a correspondence between the human and universal macrocosm was prominent in various fields such as medicine, philosophy, and religion. Symbolism played a crucial role in approaching divine matters, with symbols serving as a means of direct presence and embodiment. Plato’s influence on Neoplatonist and Hermetic thinkers emphasized the role of dreams and eidola (images) for interpreting the divine. Contemplation of art and nature was an epistemological tool, seeking hidden cosmic harmony and understanding. Christianity embraced worshiping images as representations of the divine, granting believers a way to understand religious concepts. Icons were considered mirrors reflecting the spiritual and divine aspects. The medieval concept of speculum books as mirrors containing all knowledge offered instructional and subjective insights on various subjects. Speculum humanae salvationis illuminated books demonstrated the interplay between the Old and New Testaments, influencing artists like Rogier van der Weyden. Full article

Autonomous navigation within airport environments presents significant challenges, mostly due to the scarcity of accessible and labeled data for training autonomous systems. This study introduces an innovative approach to assess the performance of vision-based models trained on synthetic datasets, with the goal of determining whether simulated data can train and validate navigation operations in complex airport environments. The methodology includes a comparative analysis employing image processing techniques and object detection algorithms. A comparative analysis of two different datasets was conducted: a synthetic dataset that mirrors real airport scenarios, generated using the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020®video game, and a real-world dataset. The results indicate that models trained on a combination of both real and synthetic images perform much better in terms of adaptability and accuracy compared to those trained only on one type of dataset. This analysis makes a significant contribution to the field of autonomous airport navigation and offers a cost-effective and practical solution to overcome the challenges of dataset acquisition and algorithm validation. It is thus believed that this study lays the groundwork for future advancements in the field. Full article

Climate change poses severe consequences, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where poverty rates may escalate by 2050 without significant climate and development action. The health impacts are diverse, encompassing communicable and non-communicable diseases. Mozambique, a climate-vulnerable nation, has experienced significant natural disasters in the past 42 years, impacting its health system. This study aims to assess Mozambique’s health sector’s vulnerability and adaptation needs to climate change. Following a methodology proposed by the World Health Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, a six-step vulnerability and adaptation assessment was conducted to conduct the Health Vulnerability Index (HVI) for Mozambique’s regions $(n=161)$. The HVI integrates historical climate, epidemiological, and socio-economic data at the district level, and was computed using exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity dimensions. The results revealed spatial patterns in exposure to climate variables, extreme weather events, and variations in sensitivity and adaptive capacity across the country. The HVI mirrored the exposure findings. Notably, high vulnerability was observed in several districts, while major urban centers displayed lower vulnerability. These findings highlight the country’s vulnerability to climate change and underscore the potential for adverse impacts on livelihoods, the economy, and human health. The study provides a foundation for developing strategies and adaptation actions. Full article

Current methods for assessing individual well-being in team collaboration at the workplace often rely on manually collected surveys. This limits continuous real-world data collection and proactive measures to improve team member workplace satisfaction. We propose a method to automatically derive social signals related to individual well-being in team collaboration from raw audio and video data collected in teamwork contexts. The goal was to develop computational methods and measurements to facilitate the mirroring of individuals’ well-being to themselves. We focus on how speech behavior is perceived by team members to improve their well-being. Our main contribution is the assembly of an integrated toolchain to perform multi-modal extraction of robust speech features in noisy field settings and to explore which features are predictors of self-reported satisfaction scores. We applied the toolchain to a case study, where we collected videos of 20 teams with 56 participants collaborating over a four-day period in a team project in an educational environment. Our audiovisual speaker diarization extracted individual speech features from a noisy environment. As the dependent variable, team members filled out a daily PERMA (positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment) survey. These well-being scores were predicted using speech features extracted from the videos using machine learning. The results suggest that the proposed toolchain was able to automatically predict individual well-being in teams, leading to better teamwork and happier team members. Full article

This article puts forward the argument for the acute and urgent need to move from ecclesial self-sufficiency to ecclesial interdependency in the ecumenical process. The difficulties in ecumenical cooperation mirror those in the climate crisis, as despite a global crisis of relevance for Christianity and for the ecumenical movement, individual Churches, much like individual states, fail to work together effectively as they negotiate their own internal challenges. Not dissimilar to the ecological climate breakdown, what we understand as the history-bound reality of the Church will not be safeguarded and will not be made relevant in today’s globalised, pluralistic, interconnected, and dominantly secular, in many contexts, world, except by concerted action from all Churches. Full article

Overwhelming astronomical evidence for dark matter and absence of any laboratory evidence for it despite many dedicated searches have fueled speculation that dark matter may reside in a parallel universe interacting with the familiar universe only via gravitational interactions as well as possibly via some ultra-weak forces. In this scenario, we postulate that the visible universe co-exists with a mirror world consisting of an identical duplicate of forces and matter of our world, obeying a mirror symmetry. This picture, motivated by particle physics considerations, not only provides a natural candidate for dark matter but also has the potential to explain the matter dark matter coincidence problem, i.e., why the dark matter content of the universe is only a few times the visible matter content. One requirement for mirror models is that the mirror world must be colder than our world to maintain the success of big bang nucleosynthesis. After a review of the basic features of the model, we present several new results: first is that the consistency between the coldness of the mirror world and the explanation of the matter dark matter coincidence implies an upper bound on the inflation reheat temperature of the universe to be around ${10}^{6.5}$ GeV. We also argue that the coldness implies the mirror world consists mainly of mirror Helium and very little mirror hydrogen, which is the exact opposite of what we see in the visible world. Full article

We propose a quantum-mechanical model that represents a human system of beliefs as the quantised energy levels of a physical system. This model represents a novel perspective on opinion dynamics, recreating a broad range of experimental and real-world data that exhibit an asymmetry of opinion radicalisation. In particular, the model demonstrates the phenomena of pronounced conservatism versus mild liberalism when individuals are exposed to opposing views, mirroring recent findings on opinion polarisation via social media exposure. Advancing this model, we establish a robust framework that integrates elements from physics, psychology, behavioural science, decision-making theory, and philosophy. We also emphasise the inherent advantages of the quantum approach over traditional models, suggesting a number of new directions for future research work on quantum-mechanical models of human cognition and decision-making. Full article

Climate change education is crucial for fostering informed and engaged future generations. However, traditional pedagogies often fail to engage learners fully and provide real-world, experiential learning. This paper presents a novel approach to climate change education through a three-day virtual reality (VR) hackathon. The hackathon focused on four United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—Quality Education, Affordable and Clean Energy, Sustainable Cities and Communities, and Climate Action. Using VR technology and game design software, engineering students worked in teams. They competed against each other in designing immersive environments that demonstrated their understanding of these SDGs and climate change. Our goal was to encourage the development of empathy, education, and awareness around these critical global issues. The hackathon also integrated authentic assessments, mirroring real-world engineering tasks and providing a more practical and relevant learning experience. Our findings suggest that this VR hackathon has significantly enhanced students’ understanding of the SDGs and climate change issues, their competency with VR technologies, as well as their teamwork and problem-solving skills. This paper discusses the hackathon’s design, implementation, and outcomes, highlighting the potential of such innovative approaches in tackling climate change education and awareness. Full article