Search Results (10,901)

This paper presents a dual-purpose LED driver system that functions as both a lighting source and a Visible Light Communication (VLC) transmitter integrated with a Powerline Communication (PLC) network under the PRIME G3 standard. The system decodes PLC messages from the powerline grid and transmits the information via LED light to an optical receiver under a binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation. The load design targets a light flux of 800 lumens, suitable for LED light bulb applications up to 10 watts, ensuring practicality and energy efficiency. The Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter (UART) module enables communication between the PLC and VLC systems, allowing for an LED driver with dynamic control and real-time operation. Key signal processing stages are commented and developed, including a hybrid buck converter with modulation capabilities and a nonlinear optical receiver to regenerate the BPSK reference signal for VLC. Results show a successful prototype working under a laboratory environment. Experimental validation shows successful transmission of bit streams from the PLC grid to the VLC setup. A design guideline is presented in order to dictate the design of the electronic devices involved in the experiment. Finally, this research highlights the feasibility of integrating PLC and VLC technologies, offering an efficient and cost-effective solution for data transmission over existing infrastructure. Full article

Background: Increased screen time in children is significantly associated with lower adherence to the Mediterranean diet (MD). The purpose of this study was to explore the association between different types of media use and the adherence to the MD in children. Methods: The study sample included 332 children aged 10–11 years attending the fifth year of primary school in Veneto, north-east Italy. The children’s mothers were surveyed on their children’s adherence to the MD, using the KidMed questionnaire, and on the time of media use, using the Media Activity Form-Parent (MAF-P). A multivariable backward stepwise linear regression was applied, adjusting the association for other potential confounding factors. Results: Children’s primary digital activities were watching TV or streaming platforms (5.0 h/week) and video content (2.5 h/week), followed by digital games (2.3 h/week). Lower adherence to the Mediterranean diet was associated with digital games (regression coefficient −0.65, SE 0.29, p = 0.026) and time spent watching TV or streaming platforms (regression coefficient −0.60, SE 0.29, p = 0.04). Conclusion: Interventions to promote healthier diets justify an approach that includes media education. Providing parents with recommendations on children's use of digital media devices can empower them to improve their children's well-being. Full article

Based on the properties of Rossby waves at the tropopause resonantly forced by solar declination in harmonic modes, which was the subject of a first article, case studies of heatwaves and extreme precipitation events are presented. They clearly demonstrate that extreme events only form under specific patterns of the amplitude of the speed of modulated airflows of Rossby waves at the tropopause, in particular period ranges. This remains true even if extreme events appear as compound events where chaos and timing are crucial. Extreme events are favored when modulated cold and warm airflows result in a dual cyclone-anticyclone system, i.e., the association of two joint vortices of opposite signs. They reverse over a period of the dominant harmonic mode in spatial and temporal coherence with the modulated airflow speed pattern. This key role could result from a transfer of humid/dry air between the two vortices during the inversion of the dual system. Finally, focusing on the two period ranges 17.1–34.2 and 8.56–17.1 days corresponding to 1/16- and 1/32-year period harmonic modes, projections of the amplitude of wind speed at 250 mb, geopotential height at 500 mb, ground air temperature, and precipitation rate are performed by extrapolating their amplitude observed from January 1979 to March 2024. Projected amplitudes are regionalized on a global scale for warmest and coldest half-years, referring to extratropical latitudes. Causal relationships are established between the projected amplitudes of modulated airflow speed and those of ground air temperature and precipitation rate, whether they increase or decrease. The increase in the amplitude of modulated airflow speed of polar vortices induces their latitudinal extension. This produces a tightening of Rossby waves embedded in the polar and subtropical jet streams. In the context of climate change, this has the effect of increasing the efficiency of the resonant forcing of Rossby waves from the solar declination, the optimum of which is located at mid-latitudes. Hence the increased or decreased vulnerability to heatwaves or extreme precipitation events of some regions. Europe and western Asia are particularly affected, which is due to increased activity of the Arctic polar vortex between longitudes 20° W and 40° E. This is likely a consequence of melting ice and changing albedo, which appears to amplify the amplitude of variation in the period range 17.1–34.2 days of poleward circulation at the tropopause of the Arctic polar cell. Full article

Understanding the driving mechanisms of diversity across multiple dimensions is a fundamental task in biodiversity conservation. Here, we examined the alpha and beta diversity of macroinvertebrates in the taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic dimensions in mountain streams of northwestern Hubei Province, China. We also assessed how much local environmental, land use, climatic, and spatial variables affected these diversities. We found that (1) there were generally weak or no correlations of alpha and beta diversity between taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic dimensions; (2) compared to both functional and phylogenetic beta diversity, which was mainly determined by nestedness, taxonomic beta diversity was mostly molded by turnover and was much higher; and (3) local environmental variables predominantly influenced taxonomic and functional dimensions of alpha and beta diversity, while spatial factors primarily drove phylogenetic dimension. These results suggest that regulating local habitats is crucial for lotic biodiversity conservation efforts, though spatial processes cannot be overlooked. Furthermore, our findings verify the supplemental role of functional and phylogenetic data in enriching insights provided by taxonomic data alone. This underscores the importance of a multidimensional approach for a more nuanced understanding of community assembly mechanisms, which is crucial for efficient ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation. Full article

Biofouling, the accumulation of marine organisms on submerged surfaces, presents significant operational challenges across various marine industries. Traditional detection methods are labor intensive and costly, necessitating the development of automated systems for efficient monitoring. The study presented in this paper focuses on detecting biofouling on tidal stream turbine blades using camera-based monitoring. The process begins with dividing the video into a series of images, which are then annotated to identify and select the bounding boxes containing objects to be detected. These annotated images are used to train YOLO version 8 to detect biofouled and clean blades in the images. The proposed approach is evaluated using metrics that demonstrate the superiority of this YOLO version compared to previous ones. To address the issue of misdetection, a data augmentation approach is proposed and tested across different YOLO versions, showing its effectiveness in improving detection quality and robustness. Full article

Background/Objective: Medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) is a rare yet aggressive form of thyroid cancer comprising a disproportionate share of thyroid cancer-related mortalities, despite its low prevalence. MTC differs from other differentiated thyroid malignancies due to its heterogeneous nature, presenting complexities in both hereditary and sporadic cases. Traditional management guidelines, which are designed primarily for papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC), fall short in providing the individualized care required for patients with MTC. In recent years, the sheer volume of data generated from clinical evaluations, radiological imaging, pathological assessments, genetic mutations, and immunological profiles has made it humanly impossible for clinicians to simultaneously analyze and integrate these diverse data streams effectively. This data deluge necessitates the adoption of advanced technologies to assist in decision-making processes. Holomics, which is an integrated approach that combines various omics technologies, along with artificial intelligence (AI), emerges as a powerful solution to address these challenges. Methods: This article reviews how AI-driven precision oncology can enhance the diagnostic workup, staging, risk stratification, management, and follow-up care of patients with MTC by processing vast amounts of complex data quickly and accurately. Articles published in English language and indexed in Pubmed were searched. Results: AI algorithms can identify patterns and correlations that may not be apparent to human clinicians, thereby improving the precision of personalized treatment plans. Moreover, the implementation of AI in the management of MTC enables the collation and synthesis of clinical experiences from across the globe, facilitating a more comprehensive understanding of the disease and its treatment outcomes. Conclusions: The integration of holomics and AI in the management of patients with MTC represents a significant advancement in precision oncology. This innovative approach not only addresses the complexities of a rare and aggressive disease but also paves the way for global collaboration and equitable healthcare solutions, ultimately transforming the landscape of treatment and care of patients with MTC. By leveraging AI and holomics, we can strive toward making personalized healthcare accessible to every individual, regardless of their economic status, thereby improving overall survival rates and quality of life for MTC patients worldwide. This global approach aligns with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3, which aims to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being at all ages. Full article

The effects of climate change in the forms of rising sea levels and increased frequency of storms and storm surges are being noticed across many coastal communities around the United States. These increases are impacting the timing and frequency of tidal and rainfall influenced compound groundwater flooding events. These types of events can be exemplified by the recent and ongoing occurrence of groundwater flooding within building basements at the historic Strawbery Banke Museum (SBM) living history campus in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Fresh water and saline groundwater intrusion within basements of historic structures can be destructive to foundations, mortar, joists, fasteners, and the overlaying wood structure. Although this is the case, there appears to be a dearth of research that examines the use of wireless streaming sensor networks to monitor and assess groundwater inundation within historic buildings in near-real time. Within the current study, we designed and deployed a three-sensor latitudinal network at the SBM. This network includes the deployment and remote monitoring of water level sensors in the basements of two historic structures 120 and 240 m from the river, as well as one sensor within the river itself. Groundwater salinity levels were also monitored within the basements of the two historic buildings. Assessments and model results from the recorded sensor data provided evidence of both terrestrial rainfall and tidal influences on the flooding at SBM. Understanding the sources of compound flooding within historic buildings can allow site managers to mitigate better and adapt to the effects of current and future flooding events. Data and results of this work are available via the project’s interactive webpage and through a public touchscreen kiosk interface developed for and deployed within the SBM Rowland Gallery’s “Water Has a Memory” exhibit. Full article

Yak behavior is a valuable indicator of their welfare and health. Information about important statuses, including fattening, reproductive health, and diseases, can be reflected and monitored through several indicative behavior patterns. In this study, an improved YOLOv7-pose model was developed to detect six yak behavior patterns in real time using labeled yak key-point images. The model was trained using labeled key-point image data of six behavior patterns including walking, feeding, standing, lying, mounting, and eliminative behaviors collected from seventeen 18-month-old yaks for two weeks. There were another four YOLOv7-pose series models trained as comparison methods for yak behavior pattern detection. The improved YOLOv7-pose model achieved the best detection performance with precision, recall, mAP0.5, and mAP0.5:0.95 of 89.9%, 87.7%, 90.4%, and 76.7%, respectively. The limitation of this study is that the YOLOv7-pose model detected behaviors under complex conditions, such as scene variation, subtle leg postures, and different light conditions, with relatively lower precision, which impacts its detection performance. Future developments in yak behavior pattern detection will amplify the simple size of the dataset and will utilize data streams like optical and video streams for real-time yak monitoring. Additionally, the model will be deployed on edge computing devices for large-scale agricultural applications. Full article

The fish fauna of Rio de Janeiro has been extensively studied, resulting in a comprehensive database of species collected over more than three centuries. This study aimed to provide a checklist of species, to identify patterns of diversity and the distribution of freshwater ichthyofauna, to delineate biogeographic units, and to explore changes in faunal composition among different areas. Analyzing data from ichthyological collections and the literature on original species descriptions revealed 206 freshwater fish species: 183 native and 23 allochthonous. The checklist includes updated species names. The sampling effort in Rio de Janeiro is extensive, especially in coastal lowlands. The findings indicate that inventory work is still needed in some areas, particularly within the Rio Paraíba do Sul basin. Seven bioregions of freshwater ichthyofauna were identified, including a major region of higher species richness and smaller areas with higher endemism of restricted-range species. This biogeographic assessment underscores the diverse and distinctive freshwater fish fauna in the basins of Rio de Janeiro, with well-defined biogeographic units. Full article

The real-time data collected by wearable devices enables personalized health management and supports public health monitoring. However, sharing these data with third-party organizations introduces significant privacy risks. As a result, protecting and securely sharing wearable device data has become a critical concern. This paper proposes a local differential privacy-preserving algorithm designed for continuous data streams generated by wearable devices. Initially, the data stream is sampled at key points to avoid prematurely exhausting the privacy budget. Then, an adaptive allocation of the privacy budget at these points enhances privacy protection for sensitive data. Additionally, the optimized square wave (SW) mechanism introduces perturbations to the sampled points. Afterward, the Kalman filter algorithm is applied to maintain data flow patterns and reduce prediction errors. Experimental validation using two real datasets demonstrates that, under comparable conditions, this approach provides higher data availability than existing privacy protection methods for continuous data streams. Full article

Microexpressions are subtle facial movements that occur within an extremely brief time frame, often revealing suppressed emotions. These expressions hold significant importance across various fields, including security monitoring and human–computer interaction. However, the accuracy of microexpression recognition is severely constrained by the inherent characteristics of these expressions. To address the issue of low detection accuracy regarding the subtle features present in microexpressions’ facial action units, this paper proposes a microexpression action unit detection algorithm, Attention-embedded Dual Path and Shallow Three-stream Networks (ADP-DSTN), that incorporates an attention-embedded dual path and a shallow three-stream network. First, an attention mechanism was embedded after each Bottleneck layer in the foundational Dual Path Networks to extract static features representing subtle texture variations that have significant weights in the action units. Subsequently, a shallow three-stream 3D convolutional neural network was employed to extract optical flow features that were particularly sensitive to temporal and discriminative characteristics specific to microexpression action units. Finally, the acquired static facial feature vectors and optical flow feature vectors were concatenated to form a fused feature vector that encompassed more effective information for recognition. Each facial action unit was then trained individually to address the issue of weak correlations among the facial action units, thereby facilitating the classification of microexpression emotions. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method achieved great performance across several microexpression datasets. The unweighted average recall (UAR) values were 80.71%, 89.55%, 44.64%, 80.59%, and 88.32% for the SAMM, CASME II, CAS(ME)³, SMIC, and MEGC2019 datasets, respectively. The unweighted F1 scores (UF1) were 79.32%, 88.30%, 43.03%, 81.12%, and 88.95%, respectively. Furthermore, when compared to the benchmark model, our proposed model achieved better performance with lower computational complexity, characterized by a Floating Point Operations (FLOPs) value of 1087.350 M and a total of 6.356 × 10⁶ model parameters. Full article

This article explores the pervasive influence of conspiracy theories, specifically the New World Order (NWO) and Golden Billion theories, within the context of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. These theories form key narrative frameworks in Russian state media and global conspiracy communities, shaping perceptions of geopolitical events. This study dissects four pivotal episodes within the Russia–Ukraine conflict to illustrate how conspiracy theories shape public perception and policy direction, further entrenching ideological divides. In the first episode of the 2022 full-scale invasion, narratives of the Golden Billion were utilised to justify the attack, presenting Russia as a bastion against the Western elite’s plans to dominate the global economy and resources. The second episode examines the attack on Mariupol in 2022, framed by Russian propaganda as a necessary act to thwart the supposed expansion of NATO and the EU, underpinned by the NWO agenda aiming to dilute Russian influence in Eastern Europe. The third episode analyses the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage in 2022, interpreted by some conspiracy theorists as an act by the NWO to destabilise Europe’s energy security, thus consolidating control over energy routes and resources. The fourth episode delves into the 2024 Moscow terrorist attacks, which were seen by some as either a false flag operation conducted by Western powers or as a legitimate repercussion of Western encroachment orchestrated to weaken Russia’s resolve and international standing. Each episode is contextualised within a broader conspiratorial framework, highlighting the dualistic nature of the NWO and Golden Billion theories that paint the conflict not merely as territorial disputes but as a clash between fundamentally opposing worldviews and global orders. This narrative analysis not only underscores the role of conspiracy theories in shaping geopolitical discourse but also demonstrates their utility in mobilising domestic support, framing international criticism, and justifying military actions. Our findings suggest that these conspiratorial narratives provide a resilient, albeit misleading, lens through which supporters of the Kremlin’s policies can rationalise the war, attributing complex sociopolitical dynamics to the malevolent machinations of a global elite. This study contributes to understanding how modern conflicts are interpreted through ancient conspiratorial lenses, impacting national and international policy and public opinion. Full article

Using the bibliometric software VOSviewer^® version 1.6.20 and Scopus as a bibliographic database, this paper aims to investigate the research streams in terms of the co-occurrence network of authors, terms extracted from the title field, countries, keywords, and organizations researching on IM from publications between 1974 and 2024. Retrieved from Scopus and using science mapping bibliometric techniques with VOSviewer^®, 4756 documents published on IM from 1974 to 2024 were analyzed, divided in three phases (1974–1995, 1996–2019, and 2020–2024), and limited to BMA (Business, Management, and Accounting), EEF (Economics, Econometrics, and Finance), and SOC (Social Sciences). The main findings are as follows: (a) there is a tendency for a minimal relationship between authors from different organizations and countries to collaborate in research on IM; (b) almost half (45.12%) of the publications on IM were published by authors from the European Union, which rises to 55.24% in Europe if the United Kingdom is included. These results are far ahead of those of the United States (13.4%), China (7.6%), the Russian Federation (3.6%), and Japan (2.3%). (c) While the first publications on IM deal with aspects related to product development, management, technology, R&D, and competition, there is a recent trend to link IM to sustainable development, open innovation, ecosystems, stakeholders’ engagement, and entrepreneurship. Full article

Snakes can move freely on land, in lakes, and in other environments. During movement, the scales are in long-term contact with the external environment, providing protection to the body. In this study, we evaluated the mechanical properties and scratching performance of the ventral and dorsal scales from Dinodon rufozonatum, a generalist species that moves on both land and in streams under wet and dry conditions. The results showed that the elastic modulus and hardness of the dry scales were greater than those of the wet scales. The average scale friction coefficient under wet conditions (0.1588) was 9.3% greater than that under dry conditions (0.1453). The scales exhibit brittle damage in dry environments, while in wet environments, ductile damage is observed. This adaptation mechanism allows the scales to protect the body by dissipating energy and reducing stress concentration, ensuring efficient locomotion and durability in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. Understanding how this biomaterial adapts to environmental changes can inspire the development of bionic materials. Full article

City manufacturing has once again become one of the priority areas for the sustainable development of smart cities thanks to the use of a wide range of green technologies and, first of all, additive technologies. Shortening the supply chain between producers and consumers has significant effects on economic, social, and environmental dimensions. Zoning of city multifloor manufacturing (CMFM) in areas with a compact population in large cities in the form of clusters with their own city logistics nodes (CLNs) creates favorable conditions for promptly meeting the needs of citizens for goods of everyday demand and for passenger and freight transportation. City multifloor manufacturing clusters (CMFMCs) have been already studied quite a lot for their possible uses; nevertheless, an identified research gap is related to supply chain design efficiency concerning CMFMCs. Thus, the main objective of this study was to explore the possibilities of lean supply chain management (LSCM) as the integrated application of lean manufacturing (LM) approaches and I4.0 technologies for customer-centric value stream management based on eliminating all types of waste, reducing the use of natural and energy resources, and continuous improvement of processes related to logistics activities. This paper presents a decision support model for LSCM in CMFMCs, which is a mathematical deterministic model. This model justifies the minimization of the number of road transport transfers within the urban area and the amount of stock that is stored in CMFMC buildings and in CLNs, and also regulating supplier lead time. The model was verified and validated using appropriately selected test data based on the case study, which was designed as a typical CMFM manufacturing system with various parameters of CMFMCs and urban freight transport frameworks. The feasibility of using the proposed model for value stream mapping (VSM) and managing logistics processes and inventories in clusters is discussed. The findings can help decisionmakers and researchers improve the planning and management of logistics processes and inventory in clusters, even in the face of unexpected disruptions. Full article