New food safety challenges of viral contamination from a global perspective: Conventional,emerging, and novel methods of viral control

Food- and waterborne viruses, such as human norovirus, hepatitis A virus, hepatitis E virus, rotaviruses, astroviruses, adenoviruses, and enteroviruses, are major contributors to all foodborne illnesses. Their small size, structure, and ability to clump and attach to inanimate surfaces make viruses challenging to reduce or eliminate, especially in the presence of inorganic or organic soils. Besides traditional wet and dry methods of disinfection using chemicals and heat, emerging physical nonthermal decontamination techniques (irradiation, ultraviolet, pulsed light, high hydrostatic pressure, cold atmospheric plasma, and pulsed electric field), novel virucidal surfaces, and bioactive compounds are examined for their potential to inactivate viruses on the surfaces of foods or food contact surfaces (tools, equipment, hands, etc.). Every disinfection technique is discussed based on its efficiency against viruses, specific advantages and disadvantages, and limitations. Structure, genomic organization, and molecular biology of different virus strains are reviewed, as they are key in determining these techniques effectiveness in controlling all or specific foodborne viruses. Selecting suitable viral decontamination techniques requires that their antiviral mechanism of action and ability to reduce virus infectivity must be taken into consideration. Furthermore, details about critical treatments parameters essential to control foodborne viruses in a food production environment are discussed, as they are also determinative in defining best disinfection and hygiene practices preventing viral infection after consuming a food product.     

Phase-field approach to simulate BCC-B2 phase separation in the AlnCrFe2Ni2 medium-entropy alloy

Journal of Materials Science - Phase separation is a relevant mode of transformation for microstructure development in multicomponent alloys. Its occurrence can drastically alter the composition...     

How scientific research incorporates policy: an examination using the case of China’s science and technology evaluation system

Scientometrics - Governments typically formulate sets of policies to guide the direction of scientific research. And the possible effects of these policies on scientific research have been...     

Benchmark value determination of energy efficiency indexes for coal-fired power units based on data mining methods

The operational optimisation of coal-fired power units is important for saving energy and reducing losses in the electric power industry. One of the key issues is how to determine the benchmark values of the energy efficiency indexes of the units. Therefore, a new framework for determining these benchmark values is proposed, based on data mining methods. First, the energy efficiency key performance indicators (KPIs) associated with the net coal consumption rate (NCCR) were selected based on the domain knowledge. Second, the decision-making samples with minimal NCCR were acquired with the fuzzy C-means (FCM) clustering algorithm, and the corresponding clustering centres were employed as the benchmark values. Finally, based on the support vector regression (SVR) algorithm, the target values of the NCCR were obtained with the KPIs as input, and the energy saving potential was evaluated by comparing the target values with the historical values of the NCCR. An actual on-duty 1000 MW unit was taken as study unit, and the results show that the energy saving potential is remarkable when the operators adjust the KPIs based on the calculated benchmark values.     

Full-chip wire-oriented back-end-of-line TDDB hotspot detection and lifetime analysis

Time-dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB) has become an important cause of failure for inter-metal dielectrics (IMD) in integrated circuits as feature sizes continue to shrink and novel materials are introduced. Although many studies have been conducted to understand the underlying physics of this issue, not enough work has been focused on evaluating TDDB lifetime of practical chip designs in the physical design stage. This paper proposes a full-chip TDDB failure analysis methodology to evaluate lifetime and identify TDDB hotspots in VLSI layouts, which are essentially interconnect wires that have high failure risk due to TDDB. The proposed method features three new techniques compared to existing methods. First, we have developed a partitioning-based scheme to deal with scaling of full-chip analysis by partitioning the full chip layout into small tiles. Second, for each tile, the new method calculates a newly-introduced TDDB failure metric called TDDB Damage for vulnerable wires. Such a wire-oriented TDDB analysis is the first of its kind and is very amenable for physical design as the wires can be easily adjusted or re-routed for TDDB-aware optimization. Third, the new method considers the impact of the non-uniform electric field calculated using the finite element method (FEM), which significantly improves the accuracy of TDDB risk evaluation. Experimental results show that the proposed new TDDB analysis method is more accurate than a recently proposed full-chip TDDB analysis method in which electrical field is treated as a constant value. Additionally, the proposed method can analyze a practical VLSI layout in a few hours.     

Capitalizing on the Koran to fuel online violent radicalization: A taxonomy of Koranic references in ISIS’s Dabiq

The current study set out to investigate to what extent ISIS is bolstering its jihadist ideology on a ‘cut-and-paste’ or ‘cherry-picked’ version of Islam in their renowned online propaganda magazine Dabiq. The main objective was to examine in a systematic and quantitative way to what extent ISIS utilizes the Koran in an atomistic, truncated and tailored manner to bolster its religious legitimacy. A total of 15 issues of Dabiq and 700 Koranic references were scrutinized. By means of a quantitative analysis we developed an innovative taxonomy of Koranic chapters and verses (i.e. surahs and ayat, respectively) on the basis of their appearance in Dabiq. Our large-scale data analysis provide consistent empirical evidence for severe decontextualization practices of the Koran in three ways: (1) a thin, Medinan-dominated religious layer, (2) ayah mutilation, and (3) clustered versus exclusive mentions. Limitations and implications for future research, policy makers and CVE initiatives are discussed.     

Use of locality sensitive hashing (LSH) algorithm to match Web of Science and Scopus

Scientometrics - A novel hashing algorithm is applied to match two prominent and important bibliographic databases at the paper level. In the literature, such tasks have been studied and conducted...     

On international renewable cooperation mechanisms: The impact of national RES-E support schemes

The deployment of renewable cooperation mechanisms within the European Union (via statistical transfers, joint support schemes and joint projects) is expected to increase in the near future. Such cooperation mechanisms can significantly reduce the compliance cost for meeting renewable energy targets. Nevertheless, as it is known that ill-designed national support instruments distort renewable investment and production decisions, it can also be expected that these impact the performance of cooperation mechanisms. In this paper, we develop a bi-level two-country competitive equilibrium model that analyzes the impact of national RES-E support instruments on the performance of renewable cooperation mechanisms. Furthermore, we assess the efficiency of two international cooperation mechanisms (statistical transfers and joint support schemes) and compare it to the situation without renewable cooperation. Based on an analytical derivation and a numerical example, we first confirm that fixed feed-in premiums are the globally most efficient instrument, given production-based quotas (in MWh). Other national instruments (feed-in tariffs and capacity-based subsidies) can distort renewable investment decisions, and are sub-optimal. Second, the employment of statistical transfers always outperforms the no-renewable cooperation case, independent of the national support instruments. Third, statistical transfers are preferred over joint support schemes when employing sub-optimal national policy instruments. In fact, it even is possible that sub-optimal joint support schemes (i.e. not based on the fixed feed-in premium) perform worse than no renewable cooperation at all. Finally, we also consider the country-level distributional effects and conclude that country-level incentives for renewable cooperation may not align with the global optimum, i.e. national policy makers might be incentivized to constrain their cooperation levels.     

Microstructure and physical-mechanical properties evolution of pure tantalum processed with hard cyclic viscoplastic deformation

The techniques of equal channel angular pressing and hard cyclic viscoplastic deformation were used to make changes in the microstructure and physical-mechanical properties of commercially pure tantalum. For the experiments, we used double electron beam melted oligocrystalline tantalum billet that was previously heat treated at 1100 °C for 1 h and processed by equal channel angular pressing with a wide range of equivalent von Mises strain (ℇ_VM = 0÷13.8) imposed on materials. At follows, the samples with stepped cross sections were tested on a materials testing setup Instron-8516 at room temperature. These changes in tantalum were determined depending on the tension-compression strain amplitude, strain rate, cycling frequency and number of cycles. The effects of processing routines on changes in the microstructure were investigated using scanning electron microscope and X-ray techniques. The mechanical and physical properties changes were characterized using hardness, density and electrical conduction measure techniques. The fracture mechanics change was studied by mini samples tensile testing up to fracture. The results show that during hard cyclic viscoplastic deformation of equal channel processed samples, with different processing histories, the tensile strength, hardness, plasticity, density, electrical conductivity, Young's modulus, etc. are changed. These changes in tantalum were characterized and analyzed.     

Effect of Al2O3 Addition on Mineralogical Modification and Crystallization Kinetics of a High Basicity BOF Steel Slag

Metallurgical and Materials Transactions B - Basic oxygen furnace (BOF) steel slag is a main byproduct that is produced during the converter steelmaking process. The volume instability and fast...