Personalized surgery is not just a new trend but rather a patient-specific approach to therapy that makes it possible to adopt a targeted approach for a specific patient and closely mirrors the approach of personalized medicine. However, the application of tailored surgery in the context of cardiovascular replacement surgery was not systematically reviewed. The ability to customize a device is highly dependent on the collection of radiological image data for precise prosthesis modelling. These facts are essential to "tailor-made" device design for precise prosthesis implantation. According to this study, computed tomography (CT) was the most prominent imaging modality; however, transoesophageal echocardiography and echocardiography were also found to be helpful. Additionally, a dynamic finite element simulation is also an attractive alternative to the finite element analysis for an in-silico experiment. Nonetheless, there is a paucity of relevant publications and sporadic evidence. More clinical studies have been warranted, notwithstanding that the derived data and results from the insight into the use of therapeutic interventions may be of multiple directives in clinical practices and beyond. This study may help the integration of personalized devices for better comprehending predicted clinical outcomes, thus leading towards enhanced performance gains.

Market air quality is very important to the economic lives of the people which is rarely researched, however, market activities particularly pedestrian traffic releases particulates which is detrimental to the health of the users and stakeholders. Thermo scientific MIE pDR-1500 particulate was used to monitor the quality of air within the market for eight (8) weeks, air pollutant of concern is PM2.5. ten (10) sample points were located in the market which covers ten (10) sample points for pedestrian traffic to represent the entire market environment spectrum. The analysis of PM2.5 measured daily during dry and wet season shows a clear seasonal variation of this particular pollutant as elevated concentration was measured during the dry season than the wet season. The assessment of PM2.5 concentration shows exceedances of the standards stated by WHO and NAAQS during the dry season which ranges from 47.9 μg/m3- 231.88 μg/m3 in the morning and 65.17 μg/m3- 1806.33 μg/m3 in the afternoon. From the findings, pedestrian traffic contributes immensely to air pollution in an open market, with this elevated concentration, prolonged exposure is highly detrimental to health. This study creates awareness to the pedestrians in an open market about air pollution and informs policy changes.

Background and Objectives: The aim of this study is to investigate the diagnostic-therapeutic prob-lem of pelvic recurrence of rectum cancer, highlighting current surgical standards and the possi-ble role of the minimally invasive approach. This retrospective analysis of our surgical case study wishes to enter this debate while suggesting a possible line of action, based on the site of recur-rence. Materials and Methods: We examined, retrospectively, all the patients diagnosed, between 2008 and 2018, with cancer of the rectum at the "Pietro Valdoni" Department of Surgery and monitored their follow-up for 5 years. The sample consisted of 368 patients with rectal neoplasm, 136 females and 232 males, with an average age of 65.8 (ranging from 37 to 86). In 103 of the cases, the neo-plasm was located in the upper rectum (28%), in 119 cases in the middle rectum (32.3%), in 102 cases in the lower rectum (27.7%), in 31 cases (8.4%) at the level of the right/sigma junction and in 13 cases it was not possible to define the site with certainty (3.5%). Results: We examined all patients diagnosed with cancer of the rectum between 2008 and 2018 at the "Pietro Valdoni" Department of Surgery retrospectively and monitored their follow-up for 5 years. The sample consists of 368 patients with rectal neoplasm, 136 females and 232 males. Conclusions: The discussion remains open as to which approach is best at surgical level, whether laparoscopic, robotic or open-air. Our experience informs us that the most dangerous site remains on the anastomotic site.

Background: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy has gained popularity. The goal of this study was to evaluate outcome differences between open vs laparoscopic cholecystectomy. Method: Using a large NIS database and ICD-9 coding for open vs laparoscopic cholecystectomy, we compared inpatient outcomes for these two procedures regarding the occurrence of myocardial infarctions and mortality using uni- and multivariate analysis by studying 5 years of data from 2010 to 2015. Results: Open cholecystectomy was inferior to laparoscopic procedure with a higher occurrence of non-ST-elevation myocardial infarction (Non-STEMI), ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), and mortality in comparison to laparoscopic cholecystectomy. For example, using 2010 database, the occurrence of STEMI was 0.2 vs 0% (OR 3.1, CI 1.7-5.5, p<0.001), for Non-STEMI 1 vs 0.4% (OR 2.5 CI 2.0-3.0, p<0001) and for mortality 0.4 vs 0.4% (OR 9.2, CI 7.9-10.6, p<0001). After adjustment for age, obesity, diabetes, and hypertension, the occurrence of STEMI, Non-STEMI, and mortality remained higher in the open cholecystectomy cohort (mortality multivariate OR 6.4, CI 5.5-7.4, p<0001). Conclusion: Open cholecystectomy is associated with a higher rate of STEMI, Non-STEMI, and a markedly higher rate of mortality in comparison to the laparoscopic approach. Our study suggests that laparoscopic cholecystectomy should remain the first choice for patients needing gallbladder surgery.

Rehabilitation following anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction with hamstring graft allows the patient to regain his functional capacities and to support him in the resumption of sports activities. Rehabilitation also aims to minimize the risk of recurrence, which is why it ensures that the patient's muscular capacities develop properly until they return to sport. Isokinetics helps strengthen and assess the strength of muscle groups in the thigh, but controversy exists as to its use by resistance to the open kinetic chain knee extension that would cause the transplant to distend. The objective of this study is to determine the influence of isokinetic muscle strengthening on the possible laxity of the anterior cruciate ligament and to be able to determine risk factors. The study relates to a population having benefited from anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction with hamstring graft from 3 to 6 months after surgery. Two groups are differentiated, one group exposed to isokinetism during rehabilitation, the other group, named unexposed, undergoes rehabilitation without the use of isokinetism. An anterior knee laxity test is performed 6 months postoperatively using the GNRB® machine for all subjects according to the same protocol. The test results were statistically analyzed to determine a relative risk of transplant distension for each group in the study. Comparison of the results of each group by univariate analysis did not reveal any significant result. Multivariate analysis showed interactions in the two strata of the study. It was argued that the use of isokinetics seems to have no effect on the risk of developing distension for the majority of subjects in the exposed group. A tendency towards transplant protection was perceived for each variable except the age under 25 years (RRa = 1.07). The use of isokinetics does not appear to be a cause of transplant distension in patients undergoing an anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction when this method is introduced 3 months postoperatively.

The oncologic merits of laparoscopic technique for colorectal cancer surgery remain debatable. Eligible patients with non-metastatic colorectal cancer who were scheduled for an elective resection by only one surgeon in a medical institution were randomized to either laparoscopic or open treatment. During this period, total 188 patients received laparoscopic surgery and other 163 patients to open approach. The primary endpoint was cancer-free 5-year survival after operative treatment and secondary endpoint was the tumor recurrence incidence. We found there was no statistically significant difference between open and laparoscopic groups regarding average number of lymph nodes dissected, overall mortality rate, cancer recurrence rate or cancer-free 5-year survival. Nevertheless, laparoscopic approach was more effective for colorectal cancer treatment with shorter hospital stay and less blood loss despite operation time was significantly longer. Meanwhile fewer patients receiving laparoscopic approach developed postoperative urinary tract infection, wound infection, pneumonia or anastomosis leakage, which reached statistical significance. For non-metastatic colorectal cancer patients, laparoscopic surgery resulted in better short-term outcomes whether in total complications and intra-operative blood loss. Though there was no significant statistical difference in terms of cancer-free 5-year survival and tumor recurrence, we favor patients receiving laparoscopic surgery if not contraindicated.

Vacuum drying can dehydrate materials further than dry heat methods while protecting sensitive materials from thermal degradation. Many industries have shifted to vacuum drying as cost- or time-saving measures. Small-scale vacuum drying, however, has been limited by high costs of specialty scientific tools. To make vacuum drying more accessible, this study provides design and performance information for a small-scale open source vacuum oven, which can be fabricated from off-the-shelf and 3-D printed components. The oven is tested for drying speed and effective-ness on both waste plastic polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and a consortium of bacteria developed for bioprocessing of terephthalate wastes to assist in distributed recycling of PET for both additive manufacturing as well as potential food. Both materials can be damaged when exposed to high temperatures, making vacuum drying a desirable solution. The results showed the open source vacuum oven was effective at drying both plastic and biomaterials, drying at a higher rate than a hot-air dryer for small samples or for low volumes of water. The system can be constructed for less than 20% of commercial vacuum dryer costs for several laboratory-scale applications including dehydration of bio-organisms, drying plastic for distributed recycling and additive manufacturing, and chemical processing.

The global context of research for new sustainable energy storage technologies makes it a very active sector with significant scientific and economic challenges. Indeed, due to the irregular development of renewable energies and the shutdown of traditional power facilities, it is difficult to maintain a stable balance in terms of supply and demand: energy storage can help in particular for substantial changes in the latter. Metal air batteries have a higher energy density and are safer than other available energy storage devices. Based on the existing and proven lead-acid battery technology, this paper proposed an open cell foam manufactured by the Excess Salt Replication process for use as an anode for lead-air battery cellsies with sulphuric acid as the electrolyte. This will save lead and reduce the battery weight. A 25% antimonial lead alloy was used to produce open cell foams with a cell diameter between 2 mm and 5 mm for the antimonial lead-air battery. Preliminary results of the effective electrical conductivity of self-discharged primary battery cells, measured experimentally, showed that all antimonial lead foam-air battery cellsies performed better than that made from the same dense non porous antimonial lead alloy. This is generally due to their important specific surface area where oxidation-reduction reactions took place. A correlation between the effective electrical conductivity and the cell diameter has been established and the highest conductivity was obtained with a cell diameter of 5mm. The feasibility of such an electrical system has been demonstrated.

A common motivation for increasing open access to research findings and data is the potential to create economic benefits – but evidence is patchy and diverse. This study systematically reviewed the evidence on what kinds of economic impacts (positive and negative) open science can have, how these comes about, and how benefits could be maximized. Use of open science outputs often leaves no obvious trace, so most evidence of impacts is based on interviews, surveys, inference based on existing costs, and modelling approaches. There is indicative evidence that open access to findings/data can lead to savings in access costs, labour costs and transaction costs. There are examples of open science enabling new products, services, companies, research and collaborations. Modelling studies suggest higher returns to R&D if open access permits greater accessibility and efficiency of use of findings. Barriers include lack of skills capacity in search, interpretation and text mining, and lack of clarity around where benefits accrue. There are also contextual considerations around who benefits most from open science (e.g. sectors, small vs larger companies, types of dataset). Recommendations captured in the review include more research, monitoring and evaluation (including developing metrics), promoting benefits, capacity building and making outputs more audience-friendly.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the degree of openness of scientific articles on bioeconomy. Based on a WoS corpus of 2,489 articles published between 2015 and 2019, we calculated bibliometric indicators, explored the openness of each paper and assessed the share of journals, countries and research areas of these articles. The results show a sharp increase and diversification of articles in the field of bioeconomy, with a beginning long tail distribution. 45.6% of the articles are freely available, and the share of OA papers is steadily increasing, from 31% in 2015 to 52% in 2019. Gold is the most important variant of OA. Open access is low in the applied research areas of chemical, agricultural and environmental engineering but higher in the domains of energy and fuels, forestry, and green and sustainable science and technology. The UK and the Netherlands have the highest rates of OA papers, followed by Spain and Germany. The funding rate of OA papers is higher than of non-OA papers. This is the first bibliometric study on open access to articles on bioeconomy. The results can be useful for the further development of OA editorial and funding criteria in the field of bioeconomy.

The digital format opens up new possibilities for interaction with monographic publications. In particular, annotation tools make it possible to broaden the discussion on the content of a book, to suggest new ideas, to report errors or inaccuracies, and to conduct open peer reviews. However, this requires the support of the users who might not yet be familiar with the annotation of digital documents. This paper will give concrete examples and recommendations for exploiting the potential of annotation in academic research and teaching. After presenting the annotation tool of Hypothesis, the article focuses on its use in the context of HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science Infrastructure), a project aimed to improve the Open Access digital monograph. The general line and the aims of a post-peer review experiment with the annotation tool, as well as its usage in didactic activities concerning monographic publications are presented and proposed as potential best practices for similar annotation activities.

During the last years, significant initiatives have been launched for the dissemination of Open Access as part of the Open Science movement. Nevertheless, the other major pillars of Open Science such as Open Research Data (ORD) and Open Peer Review (OPR) are still in an early stage of development among the communities of researchers and stakeholders. The present study sought to unveil the perceptions of a medical and health sciences community about these issues. Through the investigation of researchers’ attitude, valuable conclusions can be drawn, especially in the field of medicine and health sciences, where an explosive growth of scientific publishing exists. A quantitative survey was conducted based on a structured questionnaire, with 51.8% response rate (215 responses out of 415 electronic invitations). The participants in the survey agreed with the ORD principles However they ignored basic terms like FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and appeared incentive to permit the exploitation of their data. Regarding OPR, participants expressed their agreement, implying their interest for a trustworthy evaluation system. Conclusively, researchers urge to receive proper training for both ORD principles and OPR processes which combined with a reformed evaluation system will enable them to take full advantage of the opportunities that arise from the new scholar publishing and communication landscape.

Urban air quality is increasingly becoming a cause for concern for the health of the human population. The poor air quality is already wreaking havoc in major cities of the world, where serious health issues and reduction of average human life by a factor of years are reported. The air quality in developing countries can become worse as they undergo development. The urban air quality varies non-linearly depending upon the various factors such as land use, industrialization, waste disposal, traffic volume, etc. To address this problem, it is necessary to look at the plethora of available literature from multiple perspectives such as types and sources of pollutants, meteorology, urban mobility, urban planning and development, health care, economics, etc. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art in urban air quality. We first review the fundamental background on air quality and present the emerging landscape of urban air quality. We then explore the available literature from multiple urban air quality measurement projects and provides the insights uncovered in them. We then take a look at the sources that are significantly contributing to polluting the air quality. Finally, we highlight open issues and research challenges in dealing with urban air pollution.

Agricultural production needs technologies that assist the management of natural resources, for example, the collection of real-time data on soil, water, weather, crops, and biodiversity conditions. Sensor technology solutions and open-source software are appropriate for promoting more sustainable agricultural production. Among the advantages of using open-source technologies and software is its potential for extension, collaboration, customization, flexibility, maintenance cost, transparency, speed, and better security. Given the above, the objective of this research was to find, in different electronic databases, exclusively open-source software for precision agriculture, offering a systematic review, and addressing considerations and challenges. This survey considers up-to-date open-source software available in repositories such as GitHub and GitLab, to understand its characteristics and application formats.

(1) Background: The 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative recommended on self-archiving of scientific articles in open repositories as the “green road” to open access. Twenty years later, only one part of the researchers deposits their publications in open repositories; moreover, one part of the repositories’ content is not based on self-archived deposits but on mediated nonfaculty contributions. The purpose of the paper is to provide more empirical evidence on this situation and to assess the impact on the future of the green road. (2) Methods: We analyzed the contributions on the French national HAL repository from more than 1,000 laboratories affiliated to the ten most important French research universities, with a focus on 2020, representing 14,023 contributor accounts and 166,939 deposits. (3) Results: We identified seven different types of contributor accounts, including deposits from nonfaculty staff and import flows from other platforms. Mediated nonfaculty contribution accounts for at least 48% of the deposits. We also identified difference between institutions and disciplines. (4) Conclusions: Our empirical results reveal a transformation of open repositories from self-archiving and direct scientific communication towards research information management. Repositories like HAL are somewhere in the middle of the process. The paper describes data quality as the main issue and major challenge of this transformation.

The automotive industry is continuously seeking innovative solutions to improve the energy efficiency and sustainability of vehicles. Among the various energy-consuming systems in automobiles, air conditioning plays a crucial role. However, conventional vapour compression-based air conditioning systems are known for their high energy consumption and environmental impact. In recent years, adsorption technology has gained significant attention as a promising alternative due to its potential for higher energy efficiency and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. This review paper presents a comprehensive analysis of advancements in adsorption air conditioning technology specifically designed for automotive applications. The paper examines the recent research and development efforts in enhancing the performance and practicality of these systems, encompassing areas such as advanced materials selection, and system integration strategies. Furthermore, this review highlights the benefits and challenges associated with implementing adsorption air conditioning systems in vehicles. The environmental impact and potential for waste heat recovery are also discussed. Additionally, emerging trends, such as hybridization with conventional vapour compression systems, are explored to further optimize the energy efficiency and sustainability of automotive air conditioning. By critically evaluating the existing literature and research advancements, this review provides insights into the state-of-the-art thermally driven technologies for automotive applications.

Open-source devices are nowadays used in a vast number of research fields like medicine, education, agriculture, and sports among others. In this work, an open-source, portable, low cost pH logger, appropriate for in situ meas-urements was designed and developed to assist in experiments on agricultural produce manufacturing. Τhe device was calibrated manually using pH buffers for values of 4.01 and 7.01. Then it was tested by manually measuring pH from the juice of citrus fruits. A waterproof temperature sensor was added to the device for temperature compen-sation when measuring pH. A formal method comparison process between the open-source device and a Hanna HI9024 Waterproof pH Meter was designed to assess their agreement. We derived indices of agreement and graph-ical assessment tools using mixed-effects models. Advantages and disadvantages for interpreting agreement through the proposed procedure are discussed. In our illustration, indices reported mediocre agreement and the subsequent similarity analysis revealed a fixed bias of 0.22 pH units. After recalibration, agreement between the devices im-proved to excellent levels. The process can be followed in general to avoid misleading or over-simplistic results of studies reporting solely correlation coefficients for formal comparison purposes.

Industrial pilot projects often rely on proprietary and expensive electronic hardware to control and monitor experiments. This raises costs and retards innovation. Open-source hardware tools exist for implementing these processes individually, however, they are not easily integrated with other designs. The Broadly Reconfigurable and Expandable Automation Device (BREAD) framework provides many open-source devices which can be connected to create more complex data acquisition and control systems. This article explores the feasibility of using BREAD plug-and-play open hardware to quickly design and test monitoring and control electronics for an industrial materials processing prototype pyrolysis reactor. Generally, pilot-scale pyrolysis plants are expensive custom designed systems. The plug-and-play prototype approach is first tested by connecting it to the pyrolysis reactor and ensuring it can measure temperature and actuate heaters and a stirring motor. Next, a single circuit board system was created and tested using the designs from the BREAD prototype to reduce the number of microcontrollers required. Both open-source control systems were capable of reliably running the pyrolysis reactor continuously and the overall cost of control was reduced by more than 10X. Open-source, plug-and-play hardware provides a reliable avenue for researchers to quickly develop data acquisition and control electronics for industrial-scale experiments.

Abstract: Metal-air batteries provide a most promising battery technology given their outstanding potential energy densities, which are desirable for both stationary and mobile applications in a ‘beyond lithium-ion’ battery market. Silicon- and iron-air batteries underwent less research and development compared to lithium- and zinc-air batteries. Nevertheless, in the recent past, the two also-ran battery systems made considerable progress and attracted rising research interest due to the excellent resource-efficiency of silicon and iron. Silicon and iron are among the top five of the most abundant elements in the earth’s crust, which ensures almost infinite material supply of the anode materials, even for large scale applications. Furthermore, primary silicon-air batteries are set to provide one of the highest energy densities among all batteries, while iron-air batteries are frequently considered as a highly rechargeable system with decent performance characteristics. Considering fundamental aspects for the anode materials, i.e., the metal electrodes, in this review, we will first outline the challenges, which explicitly apply to silicon- and iron-air batteries and prevented them from a broad implementation so far. Afterwards, we provide an extensive literature survey regarding state-of-the-art experimental approaches, which are set to resolve the aforementioned challenges and might enable the introduction of silicon- and iron-air batteries into the battery market in the future.

Preprints is a multidisciplinary preprint platform that makes scientific manuscripts from all fields of research immediately available at www.preprints.org. Preprints is a free (not-for-profit) open access service supported by MDPI in Basel, Switzerland.

We are witnessing a dramatic transformation in the way we do science. In recent years, significant flaws with existing scientific methods have come to light, including lack of transparency, insufficient involvement of stakeholders, disconnection from the public, and limited reproducibility of research findings. These concerns have sparked a global movement to revolutionize scientific practice and the emergence of Open Science. This new approach to science extends principles of openness to the entire research cycle, from hypothesis generation to data collection, analysis, replication, and translation from research to practice. Open Science seeks to remove all barriers to conducting high quality, rigorous, and impactful scientific research by ensuring that the data, methods, and opportunities for collaboration are open to all. Emerging digital technologies and "big data" (see "Ten simple rules for responsible big data research") have further accelerated the Open Science movement by affording new approaches to data sharing, connecting researcher networks, and facilitating the dissemination of research findings. Open scientific practices are also having a profound impact on the health sciences and medical research, and specifically how we conduct clinical research with human participants. Human health research necessitates careful considerations for practicing science in an ethical manner. There is also a particular urgency to human health research since the goal is to help people, so doing good science takes on a different meaning than simply doing science well. It also implores the scientist to reassess the conventional view of human health research as a pursuit conducted by scientists on human subjects, and lays a greater emphasis on inclusive and ethical practices to ensure that the research takes into account the interests of those who would be most impacted by the research. Openness in the context of human health research also raises greater concerns about privacy and security and presents more opportunities for people, including participants of research studies, to contribute in every capacity. At the core of open health research, scientific discoveries are not only the product of collaboration across disciplines, but must also be owned by the community that is inclusive of researchers, health workers, and patients and their families. To guide successful open health research practices, it is essential to carefully consider and delineate its guiding principles. This editorial is aimed at individuals participating in health science in any capacity, including but not limited to people living with medical conditions, health professionals, study participants, and researchers spanning all types of disciplines. We present ten simple rules that, while not comprehensive, offer guidance for conducting health research with human participants in an open, ethical, and rigorous manner. These rules can be difficult, resource-intensive, and can conflict with one another. They are aspirational and are intended to accelerate and improve the quality of human health research. Work that fails to follow these rules is not necessarily an indication of poor quality research, especially if the reasons for breaking the rules are considered and articulated (see rule 6: document everything). While most of the responsibility of following these rules falls on researchers, anyone involved in human health research in any capacity can apply them.

We present a discussion and analysis regarding the benefits and limitations of open and non-anonymized peer review based on literature results and responses to a survey on the reviewing process of alt.chi, a more or less open-review track within the CHI conference, the predominant conference in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). This track currently is the only implementation of an open-peer-review process in the field of HCI while, with the recent increase in interest in open science practices, open review is now being considered and used in other fields. We collected 30 responses from alt.chi authors and reviewers and found that, while the benefits are quite clear and the system is generally well liked by alt.chi participants, they are reluctant to see it used in other venues. This concurs with a number of recent studies that suggest a divergence between support for a more open review process and its practical implementation. The data and scripts are available on https://osf.io/vuw7h/, and the figures and follow-up work on http://tiny.cc/OpenReviews.

Distributed digital manufacturing offers a solution to medical supply and technology shortages during pandemics. To prepare for the next pandemic, this study reviews the state-of-the-art for open hardware designs needed in a COVID-19-like pandemic. It evaluates the readiness of the top twenty technologies requested by the Government of India. The results show that the majority of the actual medical products have had some open source development, however, only 15% of the supporting technologies that make the open source device possible are freely available. The results show there is still considerable work needed to provide open source paths for the development of all the medical hardware needed during pandemics. Five core areas of future work are discussed that include: i) technical development of a wide-range of open source solutions for all medical supplies and devices, ii) policies that protect the productivity of laboratories, makerspaces and fabrication facilities during a pandemic, as well as iii) streamlining the regulatory process, iv) developing Good-Samaritan laws to protect makers and designers of open medical hardware, as well as to compel those with knowledge that will save lives to share it, and v) requiring all citizen-funded research to be released with free and open source licenses.

A review of desiccant dehumidification technologies for improving air-quality has been presented, especially focusing on alternatives for air conditioning systems for minimizing the Sick Building Syndrome. The principles and types of desiccant wheels, as well as the existing selection software for these types of equipment, were reviewed and comparatively evaluated. The study focuses on the Brazilian context, therefore, information about air condition systems and laws of this country were evaluated. Possible applications of desiccant wheels are also analyzed, such as their integration into cooling cycles and the sensible heat wheel. Finally, several commercial desiccant wheel selection software were evaluated, which are useful in many situations. Nevertheless, it was evidenced that the available softwares are not capable of performing an operation analysis for only a specific period. Therefore, it is essential to create computational tools to select desiccant wheels, considering the data from the different Brazilian regions for a year.

To assist firefighters and other first responders to use their existing equipment for respiration during the COVID-19 pandemic without using single-use, low-supply, masks, this study outlines an open source kit to convert a 3M-manufactured Scott Safety self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) into a powered air-purifying particulate respirator (PAPR). The open source PAPR can be fabricated with a low-cost 3-D printer and widely available components for less than $150, replacing commercial conversion kits saving 85% or full-fledged proprietary PAPRs saving over 90%. The parametric designs allow for adaptation to other core components and can be custom fit specifically to fire-fighter equipment, including their suspenders. The open source PAPR has controllable air flow and its design enables breathing even if the fan is disconnected or if the battery dies. The open source PAPR was tested for air flow as a function of battery life and was found to meet NIOSH air flow requirements for 4 hours, which is 300% over expected regular use.

Open-source 3-D printing has played a pivotal role in revolutionizing the additive manufacturing (AM) landscape, by making distributed manufacturing economic, democratizing access, and fostering far more rapid innovation than antiquated proprietary systems. Unfortunately, some 3-D printing manufacturing companies began deviating from open-source principles and violating licenses for the detriment of the community. To determine if a pattern has emerged of companies patenting clearly open-source innovations, this study presents three case studies from the three primary regions of open-source 3-D printing development (EU, U.S. and China) as well as three aspects of 3-D printing technology (AM materials, an open-source 3-D printer, and core open-source 3-D printing concepts used in most 3-D printers). The results of this review have shown that non-inventing entities called patent parasites are patenting open-source inventions already well-established in the open source community and in the most egregious cases commercialized by one (or several) firms at the time of the patent filing. Patent parasites are able to patent open-source innovations by using a different language, vague patent titles and broad claims that encompass enormous swaths of widely diffused open-source innovation space. This practice poses a severe threat to innovation and several approaches to irradicate the threat are discussed.

Most people living in Europe's cities are still exposed to levels of air pollution deemed harmful by the World Health Organization. In the modern world, air pollution is the foremost concern because of its impact in human health and economy. This strong connection appears gaining a lot of concern, driven by new installed low-cost electrochemical sensors monitoring systems. Highly accuracy, real-time monitoring, daily and yearly statistics, data access from experts or simple users, low-cost equipment and forecasting needs, enforce the market to develop new air quality monitoring systems using advanced technologies and protocols. In this study, a comparison via low-cost electrochemical sensors and of static, fixed site measurement monitoring station, is taking place in Athens, Greece, along with the data quality and Air Quality Index (AQI) including data accuracy and quality of data concerning adverse health effects due to air pollution. The findings presented in this work, relate to different flexible and affordable alternatives adopted during the evaluation and calibration of low-cost gas sensors for the monitoring. The significance of the positive results is particularly useful, especially considering the founding for interference, environmental conditions affections and air quality information including indexes and health recommendations for a specific location.

Mechanical ventilation systems, which are used for breathing support when a person is not able to do it by their own, requires a device for measuring the air flow to the patient in order to monitoring and a assure the magnitude establish by a medical staff. Flow sensors are the conventional devices used for the air flow measuring; however, there were not available in Peru, because of the international demand during COVID-19 pandemic. In this sense, a novel air flow sensor based on orifice plate and an intelligent transducer stage were developed as an integrated design. Advanced methodologies in simulations and experiments using specially designed equipment for this application were carried out. The obtained data was used for a mathematical characterization and dimensions validation of the integrated design. The device was tested in its real working conditions, it was implemented in a breathing circuit connected to a low-cost mechanical ventilation system based on cams. Results indicate that the designed air flow sensor/transducer is a low-cost complete medical device for mechanical ventilators able to provide satisfactorily all the ventilation parameters air flow, pressure and volume over time by measuring the air flow and calculating the others. Furthermore, this device provides directly a filtered equivalent electrical signal for a display or a computer.

This study provides designs for a low-cost, easily replicable open source lab-grade digital scale that can be used as a precision balance. The design is such that it can be manufactured for use in most labs throughout the world with open source RepRap-class material extrusion-based 3-D printers for the mechanical components and readily available open source electronics including the Arduino Nano. Several versions of the design were fabricated and tested for precision and accuracy for a range of load cells. The results showed the open source scale was found to be repeatable within 0.1g with multiple load cells, with even better precision (0.01g) depending on load cell range and style. The scale tracks linearly with proprietary lab-grade scales, meeting the performance specified in the load cell data sheets, indicating that it is accurate across the range of the load cell installed. The smallest loadcell tested(100g) offers precision on the order of a commercial digital mass balance. The scale can be produced at significant cost savings compared to scales of comparable range and precision when serial capability is present. The cost savings increase significantly as the range of the scale increases and are particularly well-suited for resource-constrained medical and scientific facilities.

Research results of the relationships between air-volume in air-entrained cement paste, mortar and concrete, all designed according to PN-EN 480-1 guidelines are presented in the paper. The cement paste, mortar and concrete, with w/c=0,5 ratio, were prepared using innovative air-entraining cement CEM II/B-V. The air-entraining cement CEM II/B-V was produced using two methods: mixed together with natural or synthetic aerated admixture. The air volume test of the volumetric method was carried out in case of fresh cement paste, mortar and concrete mix. Fresh concretes were evaluated in terms of stability of air entrainment and consistency for 5, 20 and 40 min. The porosity structure parameters, like summarized air-content, specific surface of air voids, air-voids spacing factor and micropores content of hardened concrete, were estimated using computed tomography with a resolution of 2-5 μm. The aim of the research was to determine the dependence between air-content of cement paste, mortar and concrete on the measurement of air-entrainment of cement paste or mortar with the same w/c ratio and type of cement, all designed according to PN-EN 480-1 guidelines. Test results proved that there is a good correlation between the measured air-content of the cement paste, mortar and concrete. Therefore, it is possible to predict the aeration of concrete on the air-entrainment of the mortar.

The Upper Hunter Valley is a major coal mining area in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Due to the ongoing increase of mining activities, PM10 (air-borne particle with an aerodynamic diameter less than 10 micrometres) pollution has become a major air quality concern in local communities. The early part of this study identified two air quality subregions in the valley. This paper aims to provide a holistic summarisation of the relationships between elevated PM10 pollution in two subregions and the local- and synoptic-scale meteorological conditions for spring and summer, when PM10 pollution is relatively high. A catalogue of twelve synoptic types and a set of six local meteorological patterns have been quantitatively derived and linked to each other using the self-organising map (SOM) technique. The complex meteorology-air pollution relationships have been visualised/interpretated on the SOM planes for two representative locations. It was found that the influence of local meteorological patterns differed significantly for mean PM10 levels vs the occurrence of elevated pollution events and between air quality subregions. In contrast, synoptic types showed generally similar relationships with mean vs elevated PM10 pollution in the valley. Two local meteorological patterns, the hot-dry-northwesterly wind conditions and the hot-dry-calm conditions, were found most PM10 pollution conducive in the valley when combined with a set of synoptic counterparts. These synoptic types are featured with the influence of eastward migrating continental high pressure system and westerly troughs, or a ridge extending northwest towards coastal northern NSW or southern Queensland from the Tasman Sea. The method and results can be used in air quality research for other locations of NSW, or similar regions elsewhere.

Leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) is associated with access and use of public open spaces. The “President João Goulart Elevated Avenue” and current denominated “Minhocão” is a facility for leisure activities that are open for people during the night/weekends. The aim of this study was to examine if the prevalence of LTPA among individuals living in the surroundings of Minhocão is different according to proximity to, and use of, the facility. We conducted a cross-sectional study with cluster sampling with people aged ≥18 years who lived in households until 500m and between 501m to 1500m of Minhocão. The survey was conducted between December/2017 until March/2019 with an electronic questionnaire self-responded. We conducted bivariate analysis and Poisson regression to examine possible differences in LTPA according to the proximity of residences and use of Minhocão. The analysis used post-stratification weights. A total of 12,030 telephone numbers of people were drawn (≤500m = 6,942; and &gt;500m to ≤1500m = 5,088). The final sample analyzed were of 235 residents who returned the questionnaires. There was a higher prevalence of individuals engaging in at least 150 minutes per week of LTPA among users than non-users (Prevalence Ratio=2.23, IC95%1.72-2.90). People who used the park had higher prevalence of all types of LTPA than non-users. The results can serve to inform government decision-making on the future of Minhocão.

Air traffic congestion is caused by the unbalance between increasing traffic demand and saturating capacity. Flight delay not only causes huge economical lost, but also has very negative environmental impact in the whole air transportation system. In order to identify the impact of extended TMA on airport capacity, an airspace capacity assessment method based on augmented cell transmission model was proposed. Firstly, the airspace structure was modeled with points, segments, layers, and cells. Secondly, mixed integer linear programming model was built up with maximum throughput or capacity as the objective function. Finally, genetic algorithm was used to find the optimal result, and the results were validated by comparing with the fast-time simulation results generated by total airspace and airport modeler (TAAM) software. It is found that the proposed method could achieve a relatively accurate result in a much affordable and fast way. The numerical results could be very helpful for air traffic controllers to analyze the dynamic traffic flow entering and exiting TMA, so as to make decisions via reasonable analysis and do planning in advance by referring to the airport capacity.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic caused by spreading rapidly a severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has imposed a unique situation for the humanity. Sao Paulo has reported 124,105 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 5,623 deaths up to June 14th, being considered the epicenter of the pandemic in Brazil and in South America. Due to the measures for social distancing, there was a drop in the air pollution concentration in Sao Paulo. Starting on March 16th, 2020, we broke 90 days of social distancing into 13 weeks and compared to an equivalent period in 2019. We investigated the air quality improvement during the quarantine period and compared the associated avoided deaths to COVID-19 burden deaths. Nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) was the best indicator of air quality in the analyzed weeks, since its reduction reached 58 %. Our study showed that the 5,623 deaths occurred during the analyzed weeks of quarantine represents an economic health loss of US$ 10.5 billion. In opposite, we observed a significant air quality improvement due to pollutants concentrations’ reductions during the analyzed weeks. Considering PM₁₀, PM_2.5 and NO₂, the decrease of concentration levels respectively avoided 78, 337 and 387 premature deaths and prevented up to US$ 1.5 billion on health costs. These results highlight the importance of continuing to enforce existing air pollution regulations and measures to protect human health both during and after COVID-19 pandemic.

In order to deal with imprecision, ambiguity, and uncertainty in data analysis, Pawlak introduced rough set theory in 1982. This paper aims to expand the scope of basic set theory developed by presenting the notions of δP-upper and δP-lower approximations, that are based on the notion of δP-open sets, we additionally examine a few of their fundamental characteristics.

The terms 'open' and 'openness' are widely used across the current higher education environment particularly in the areas of repository services and scholarly communications. Open-access licensing and open-source licensing are two prevalent manifestations of open culture within higher education research environments. As theoretical ideals, open-licensing models aim at openness and academic freedom. But operating as they do within the context of global neoliberalism, to what extent are these models constructed by, sustained by, and co-opted by neoliberalism? In this paper, we interrogate the use of open-licensing within scholarly communications and within the larger societal context of neoliberalism. Through synthesis of various sources, we will examine how open access licensing models have been constrained by neoliberal or otherwise corporate agendas, how open access and open scholarship have been reframed within discourses of compliance, how open-source software models and software are co-opted by politico-economic forces, and how the language of 'openness' is widely misused in higher education and repository services circles to drive agendas that run counter to actually increasing openness. We will finish by suggesting ways to resist this trend and use open-licensing models to resist neoliberal agendas in open scholarship.

The research field of energy system analysis is dealing with increasingly complex energy systems and their respective challenges. Moreover, the requirement for open science has become a focal point of public interest. Both drivers have triggered the development of a broad range of (open) energy models and frameworks in recent years. However, there are hardly any approaches on how to evaluate these tools in terms of their capabilities to tackle energy system modelling challenges. This paper describes a first step towards a flexible evaluation of software to model energy systems. We propose a qualitative approach as an useful supplementary to existing model fact sheets and transparency checklists. We demonstrate the applicability by evaluating the newly developed “Open Energy Modelling Framework” with respect to existing challenges in energy system modelling. The case study results highlight that challenges related to complexity and scientific standards can be tackled to a large extent while the challenges of model utilization and interdisciplinary modelling are only tackled partially. However, the challenge of uncertainty remains for the most part unaddressed at present. Advantages of the evaluation approach lie in its simplicity, flexibility and transferability to other tools. Disadvantages mostly stem from its qualitative nature. Our analysis reveals that some challenges in the field of energy system modelling cannot be addressed by a software as they are on meta level like model result communication and interdisciplinary modelling.

Environment pollution is the major problem for all the sectors. In environment pollution there are different types of pollution is included such as air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution etc. In these types of pollution most of it is air pollution. There are many reasons for pollution of air. Human advance in science but one of the major draw backs of science is the pollution of air rapidly. Air pollution is injurious to health. Every year a large number of people died for the effects of air pollution. It can be improved in many ways among these ways technology upgradation plays a major role here. There are various method that prevent air pollution. Many researchers tried and is trying to prevent the air pollution in many ways. In this review paper I summarise the existing research on different ways for preventing air pollution in addition I will discuss the gaps and future aspect on this topic.

Purpose: This study aimed to focus on the design and development of low-cost DIY air purifiers, using a ventilating fan, air pump, water pump, and an ultrasonic generator, with regard to filtration efficacy and also cost-effectiveness that can be used during the COVID-19 pandemic and haze pollution. Methods: Six types of household air purifiers, incorporating a HEPA filter, a HEPA filter & electrostatic fiber, an air pump, an air pump & ultrasonic wave, a water pump, and a water pump & ultrasonic wave, were fabricated. The amount of particulate matter (PM) and CO₂ levels were recorded at 0, 10, 20, 30, and 60 min, then, repeated 3 times. After 10 min of the 3^rd experiment of each study, the last measurement of air pollution would be recorded. Results: At 60 min, the HEPA filter & electrostatic fiber showed the best performance regarding reduction of PM and CO₂ levels. The highest PM reduction rate had occurred at 30 min using an air pump procedure (99.330 to 100%). The CO₂ levels of all experiments had fluctuated at different times. After 10 min of a closed machine, HEPA filter & electrostatic fiber revealed the highest rate of PM elevation, while PM levels of all water-based purifier systems were decreased. A water pump and air pump were the cheapest air cleaners, when taking into account maintenance expenses and electricity charges. Conclusion: An air pump is the optimum method for reducing particulate matter at minimum cost but without the benefit of reduced humidity, while the HEPA filter & electrostatic fiber is the best system to decrease PM levels, but this requires an enclosed structure at the inlet to prevent dust coming back into the room. As filtration efficiency is increased by the use of filters & electrostatic fiber mechanisms, the more expensive the system becomes.

The rural communities are affected by gaseous emissions from intensive livestock production. Practical mitigation technologies are needed to minimize emissions from stored manure and improve air quality inside barns. In our previous research, the one-time surficial application of biochar to swine manure significantly reduced emissions of NH3 and phenol. We observed that the mitigation effect decreased with time during the 30-day trials. In this research, we hypothe-sized that bi-weekly reapplication of biochar could improve the mitigation effect on a wider range of odorous compounds using larger scale and longer trials. The objective was to evaluate the effectiveness of biochar dose and reapplication on mitigation of targeted gases (NH3, odor-ous VOCs, odor, GHGs) from stored swine manure on a pilot-scale setup over 8-weeks. The bi-weekly reapplication of the lower biochar dose (2 kg/m2) showed much higher significant percent reductions of emissions for NH3 (33% without & 53% with reapplication) and skatole (42% without & 80% with reapplication), respectively. In addition, the reapplication resulted in the emergence of statistical significance to the mitigation effect for all other targeted VOCs. Spe-cifically, for indole, the % reduction improved from 38% (p=0.47, without reapplication) to 78% (p=0.018, with reapplication). For phenol, the % reduction improved from 28% (p=0.71, without reapplication) to 89% (p=0.005, with reapplication). For p-cresol, the % reduction improved from 31% (p=0.86, without reapplication) to 74% (p=0.028, with reapplication). For 4-ethyl phenol, the percent emissions reduction improved from 66% (p=0.44, without reapplication) to 87% (p=0.007, with reapplication). The one-time 2 kg/m2 and 4 kg/m2 treatments showed similar effectiveness in mitigating all targeted gases, and no statistical difference was found between the dosages. The one-time treatments showed significant % reductions of 33% & 42% and 25% & 48% for NH3 and skatole, respectively. The practical significance is that the higher (one-time) biochar dose may not necessarily result in improved performance over the 8-week manure storage, but the bi-weekly reapplication showed significant improvement in mitigating NH3 and odorous VOCs. The lower dosages and the frequency of reapplication on the larger-scale should be explored to optimize biochar treatment and bring it closer to on-farm trials.

The physical environment plays an important role in the transmission of respiratory infections like Covid-19. To find relevant articles on environmental factors influencing respiratory infection outbreaks, we searched Pub med Central on the following topics: 1. Environmental pollution causing coronavirus fatality- 73 results, relevant 1 article, 2. Environmental factors affecting Covid-19, 149 results from which there were 6 relevant articles, 3. Impact of air pollution on Covid-19 fatality, 10 results, relevant 3 articles, 4. Environmental factors affecting respiratory viruses- 10646 results were obtained, 2 relevant articles. We searched Google scholar on environmental factors affecting Covid-19 transmission and found 7 relevant papers. We excluded the duplicates in each of the key words search. Date of search was on 20^th April 2020. All articles included in results were scrutinized and relevance of articles was based on their content that discussed meteorological and physical environment factors in the spread and severity of Covid-19. We have discussed factors like air pollution, smoking, air temperature, humidity and air velocity as contributing factors. If meteorological factors are conducive to spread in a particular area, we need protective measures way before a respiratory infection outbreak occurs. Covid-19 is a lesson learnt the hard way, and we must enable people to practice hygienic practices with limited resources but high level of protection that it provides. Air pollution control can prevent priming of respiratory system which shall further protect from pulmonary infections.

Shenzhen is China’s top ten clean air city and the cleanest air megacity. Even so, epidemiologic studies have shown ambient air pollution had significant adverse impacts on human health in this less polluted city. In this study, the concentrations of six criteria air pollutants (PM2.5, PM10, O3, NO2, SO2, and CO) from 2014 to 2017 were analyzed and compared to thresholds of both national and international air quality standards. The results showed concentrations of all air pollutants were below target values of current national air quality standard, but levels of particulate matter (PM) and O3 were still much higher than the recommended levels by the World Health Organization. Within national air quality standards, the number of over-limit days was rare with few variations between highly polluted and low pollution areas. The air quality improvement was slowing down recently. Our results suggest annual and daily thresholds for PM are too loose for air quality improvement in Shenzhen. Hence, we call for evaluation and establishment of tougher air quality standard.

The landscape of medical education has witnessed significant transformations over the past decades, particularly with the advent of active teaching methodologies. However, despite these advancements, the traditional theoretical assessment methods have remained largely unchanged. This lack of evolution in assessment systems poses a challenge, as it is crucial for assessment methods to evolve in tandem with teaching approaches to ensure a comprehensive and effective learning process in medical education. This paper reviews the integration and effectiveness of open-book examinations (OBEs) in medical education, reflecting their growing significance. An integrative review of the literature was conducted, drawing from a range of relevant publications over the last decade, sourced from databases such as PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and ERIC. The inclusion criteria focused on full-text articles in English, with search terms including "medicine," "assessment," "open book examination," "open book exam," and "open book assessment," combined using Boolean operators. Thirteen publications were selected and critically appraised using The Critical Appraisal Skills Program checklist. The analysis identified three primary thematic categories: ' Teaching Strategy for Pandemic and Challenging Conditions,” Tool of Learning & Educational Impact” and “Operational Challenges & Future Directions”. These themes were explored to understand the role and impact of OBEs in medical education. The findings indicate that open-book examinations are a crucial component in the evolving landscape of medical education. While certain reservations remain, OBEs have shown significant potential in fostering critical thinking, argumentation skills, and lifelong learning among medical students. They reflect the ongoing evolution of knowledge in the medical field and contribute to the development of professionals’ adept at navigating and applying complex information. Further research is recommended to solidify these findings and to expand the understanding of OBEs in medical education.

We introduce Get Free Copy (getfreecopy.com), a web-based platform designed to streamline the search for biomedical literature across major repositories like arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and PubMed Central (PMC). Addressing challenges posed by paywalls and fragmented databases, it offers a unified interface for efficient retrieval of free, legitimate copies of biomedical literature. The platform's implementation involves a Node.js backend and dynamic front-end display, enhancing accessibility and research efficiency. As an open-source project, Get Free Copy represents a significant contribution to the open-access movement, inviting global researcher collaboration for further development.

The acoustic conditions of open-plan office spaces influence wellbeing and productivity perceived by users, but with an inadequate evaluation for workspace, acoustic design in open-plan offices can be a factor that alters user performance. Such is the case in Mexico, where there are no adequate standards to evaluate specific acoustic conditions such as intelligibility. For this reason, this case study aims to evaluate different types of measurement methods for intelligibility. This study was carried out in a university in northern Mexico. The sound measurements were based on the Mexican standard for noise analysis and the ISO 3382- part 3 standards for acoustic measurements for open-plan offices. The psychoacoustic parameters evaluated were Reverberation and Intelligibility, using objective methods determined on S/N and subjective methods based on loss of consonant; where it was analyzed distance between sound source and zones classified by building design characteristics. The results indicated in which points the intelligibility effects increased, observing that Reverberation remained stable in this office, and that the subjective methods presented greater size of the measured sound effect than the objective methods. This finding establishes that subjective methods conformed to Lognormal behavior, which is applicable to other linguistic elements describing speech behavior.

Forest recreation can be successfully used for the psychological relaxation of respondents and can be used as a remedy for common problems with stress. The special form of forest recreation intended for restoration is forest bathing. These activities might be distracted by some factors, such as viewing buildings in the forest or using a computer in nature, which interrupt psychological relaxation. One factor that might interrupt psychological relaxation is the occurrence of an open dump in the forest during an outdoor experience. To test the hypothesis that an open dump might decrease psychological relaxation, a case study was planned that used a randomized, controlled crossover design. For this purpose, two groups of healthy young adults viewed a control forest or a forest with an open dump in reverse order and filled in psychological questionnaires after each stimulus. A pretest was used. Participants wore oblique eye patches to stop their visual stimulation before the experimental stimulation, and the physical environment was monitored. The results were analyzed using the two-way repeated measures ANOVA. The measured negative psychological indicators significantly increased after viewing the forest with waste, and the five indicators of the Profile of Mood States increased: Tension-Anxiety, Depression-Dejection, Anger-Hostility, Fatigue, and Confusion. In addition, the negative aspect of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule increased in comparison to the control and pretest. The measured positive indicators significantly decreased after viewing the forest with waste, the positive aspect of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule decreased, and the Restorative Outcome Scale and Subjective Vitality scores decreased (in comparison to the control and pretest). The occurrence of an open dump in the forest might interrupt a normal restorative experience in the forest by reducing psychological relaxation. Nevertheless, the mechanism of these relevancies is not known, and thus, it will be further investigated. In addition, in a future study, the size of the impact of these open dumps on normal everyday experiences should be investigated. It is proposed that different mechanisms might be responsible for these reactions; however, the aim of this manuscript is to only measure this reaction. The identified psychological reasons for these mechanisms can be assessed in further studies.

In December 2012, DOAJ’s parent company, IS4OA, announced they would introduce new criteria for inclusion in DOAJ [1] and that DOAJ would collect vastly more information from journals as part of the accreditation process – and that journals already included, would need to reapply in order to be kept in the registry. My hypothesis was that the journals removed from DOAJ on May 9th 2016 would chiefly be journals from small publishers (mostly single journal publishers) and that DOAJ journal metadata information would reveal that they were journals with a lower level of publishing competence than those that would remain in the DOAJ. Among indicators of publishing competence could be the use of APCs, permanent article identifiers, journal licenses, article level metadata deposited with DOAJ, archiving policy/solutions and/or having a policy in SHERPA/RoMEO. The analysis shows my concerns to be correct.

Chemistry is the last natural science discipline to embrace prepublishing, namely the publication of non-peer reviewed scientific articles on the internet. After a brief insight into the origins and the purpose of prepublishing in science, we conduct a concrete analysis of the concrete situation, aiming at providing an answer to several questions. Why the chemistry community has been late in embracing prepublishing? Is this in relation with the slow acceptance of open access publishing by the same community? Will prepublishing become a common habit also for chemistry scholars?

Due to resource constraints, most Diamond Open Access journals publish less than 25 articles per year, and 75% of journals are not able to provide their content in XML and HTML, primarily providing only PDFs (Bosman et al., 2021, p. 7-8). In order to keep up with larger commercial publishers, a high degree of automation and streamlining of processes is necessary. The Open Source Academic Publishing Suite (OS-APS) project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research aims to achieve this. OS-APS automatically extracts the underlying XML from Word manuscripts and offers optimization and export options in various formats (PDF, HTML, EPUB). The professional corporate design, e.g., of the PDFs, is managed automatically by using templates or creating one's own using a Template Development Kit. OS-APS will also connect to scholarly-led and community-driven publishing platforms such as Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Monograph Press (OMP), and DSpace: the software will be able to be integrated into a wide range of publication processes, whether at small, low-resource commercial Open Access Publishers, or institutional and Diamond Open Access Publishers. References: Bosman, J., Frantsvåg, J. E., Kramer, B., Langlais, P.‑C., &amp; Proudman, V. (2021). Oa Diamond Journals Study. Part 1: Findings. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4558703

Abstract: This article explores the intricate relationship between environmental degradation, specifically air pollution, and economic growth in the Sultanate of Oman spanning the period from 1990 to 2022. We employ cointegration and vector error correction models to uncover both short- and long-term dynamics in the association between air pollution and economic growth. Fur-thermore, Granger causality analysis is utilized to investigate the causal links between these crucial variables. This data encompasses factors related to environmental quality and various control variables. The empirical results unveil a sustained long-term cointegration connection between the variables. Additionally, our findings highlight a statistically significant positive impact of economic growth and energy consumption on CO2 emissions. Furthermore, the short-term analysis reveals an annual adjustment of approximately 14.1% in N2O emissions dis-equilibrium. The Granger causality study indicates unidirectional causal relationships involving N2O emissions, economic growth, and CO2 emissions. The implications of these findings for Oman's policy landscape are substantial. To effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it is imperative for Oman to establish robust climate change policies. Additionally, the government can play a pivotal role in encouraging and endorsing the use of renewable energy sources, such as green hydrogen, as a promising alternative to traditional oil and gas resources.

As the haze engulfed the Delhi NCR after Diwali there is a panic in public about its causes and consequences. Here are some facts and figures to know the truth behind the scene. Temperature fell down from 24’C on October 31 to 21’C on November 2 as recorded at UPPCB station at sector-125, Noida which is adjacent to Delhi a very strategic location and can be considered as reference point for Delhi-NCR. The details of the study conducted is given below.

This publication aims to disseminate a step-by-step process that walks through the conceptualization and building of a low-cost (~ $150 monitoring device for airborne fine particulate matter (PM2.5), based on miniaturized sensors and components. Details on the implementation of the hardware and software are provided which facilitate the data acquisition, capture and analysis. The central components and their setup discussed in what follows include: the sensor device (called “P.ALP” – Ph.D. Air quality Low-cost Project), Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and R code (open-access software). A monitoring device for PM2.5, using low-cost sensors and technologies was successfully conceptualized, designed, and implemented. The P.ALP monitoring system was designed and developed to be a basic device, which can be further customized and implemented using the wide range of low-cost sensors available on the market.

Elevated indoor CO2 levels might have adverse effects on human health. However, the introduction of outdoor air to lower indoor CO2 concentrations results in significant HVAC energy consumption. Aligning with office hours and the natural light cycle, the utilization of photosynthesis in living walls offers an energy-efficient and sustainable solution for the mitigation of high CO2 levels in office spaces. This study experimentally investigates the impacts of the carbon fixation pathways, light intensity, and substrate moisture content on the CO2 removal rate of living walls at the room scale. Furthermore, the fresh air energy-saving effects of living walls under different scenarios are accurately simulated in EnergyPlus. The results demonstrate that choosing C3 plants over CAM plants in living walls yields higher CO2 removal efficiency. In a 30-m2 office room accommodating 2-3 occupants, living walls can reduce the demand for fresh air by 12.3%-27.8% and decrease fresh air energy consumption by 11.2%-28.2%. The city with the highest energy savings has energy savings that are 4.5 times greater than those of the city with the lowest energy savings. The findings of this research promote the application and development of living walls, thus providing a viable solution for improving indoor air quality.

This case study investigates the effects of ventilation intervention on measured and perceived indoor air quality (IAQ) in a repaired school where occupants reported IAQ problems. Occupants´ symptoms were suspected to be related to the impurities leaked indoors through the building envelope. The study’s aim was to determine whether a positive pressure of 5-7 Pa prevents the infiltration of harmful chemical and microbiological agents from structures, thus decreasing symptoms and discomfort. Ventilation intervention was conducted in a building section comprising 12 classrooms and was completed with IAQ measurements and occupants´ questionnaires. After intervention, the concentration of total volatile organic compounds (TVOC) and fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) decreased, and occupants´ negative perceptions became more moderate compared to those for other parts of the building. The indoor mycobiota differed in species composition from the outdoor mycobiota, and changed remarkably with the intervention, indicating that some species may have emanated from an indoor source before the intervention.

Marine cold air outbreaks (MCAOs) are large-scale events in which cold air masses are advected over open ocean. It is well-known that these events are linked to the formation of polar lows and other mesoscale phenomena associated with high wind speeds, and that they therefore in some cases represent a hazard to maritime activities. However, it is still unknown whether MCAOs are generally conducive to higher wind speeds than normal. Here this is investigated by comparing ocean near-surface wind speeds during MCAOs in atmospheric reanalysis products with different horizontal grid spacings, along with two case studies using a convection-permitting numerical weather prediction model. The study regions are the Labrador Sea and the Greenland–Iceland–Norwegian (GIN) Seas, where MCAOs have been shown to be important for air–sea interaction and deep water formation. One of the main findings is that wind speeds during the strongest MCAO events are higher than normal and higher than wind speeds during less severe events. Limited evidence from the case studies suggests that reanalyses with grid spacings of more than 50 km underestimate winds driven by the large ocean–atmosphere energy fluxes during MCAOs. The peak times of MCAO usually occur when baroclinic waves pass over the regions. Therefore, the strong wind episodes during MCAOs generally last for just a few days. However, MCAOs can persist for 50 days or more.

The study investigated the usage of open data in public organizations, focusing on the motives, preferences, and governance ideals that determine their quality. The study shed light on how open data platforms are created and improved, as well as their influence on government operations. The primary goal was to understand the motivations behind the usage of open data, evaluate gov-ernance ideals, and examine institutions' efforts to standardize data formats. Hierarchical regres-sion analysis divides variables into core reasons and different preferences, demonstrating a need for "diversification" in order to use open data effectively. Efficiency, accountability, community impact, knowledge, and high-quality service delivery are all emphasized in governance value analysis. The institution's dedication to standardizing open data formats is evidenced by legislative measures and the integration of many technologies. The findings illustrate the institution's dual strategy of em-ploying traditional techniques and new technologies for effective data management. The report suggests increasing data openness and standardization, investing in ongoing training, upgrading alerting and awareness systems, and adopting specific regulations for open data use. Monitoring and feedback techniques are critical for adjusting and refining open data services to satisfy de-velopment needs. This study adds to the scientific knowledge of open data use by highlighting important motives, preferences, and governance ideals. The offered guidelines provide practical insights for public organizations looking to improve their open data platforms by promoting openness, efficiency, and community participation.

To stabilize the Earth’s climate a large-scale transition is needed to non-carbon emitting renewable energy technologies like wind and solar energy. Although these renewable energy sources are now lower-cost than fossil fuels, their inherent intermittency make them unable to supply a constant load without storage. To address these challenges rechargeable electric batteries are currently the most promising option; however, their high capital costs limit current deployment velocities. To both reduce the cost as well as improve performance 3D printing technology has emerged as a promising solution. This literature review provides the state-of-the-art enhancements of battery properties with 3D printing including efficiency, mechanical stability, energy and power density, customizability and sizing, production process efficiency, material conservation and environmental sustainability as well as the progress in solid-state batteries. The principles, advantages, limitations, and recent advancements associated with the most common types of 3D printing are reviewed focusing on their contributions to the battery field. 3D printing batteries offer design flexibility, material flexibility, reduces pack weight, minimizes material waste, increases the range of applications and has the potential to reduce costs. As 3D printing technologies become more accessible, the prospect of cost-effective production for customized batteries is extremely promising.

Thermal sterilization is generally avoided for 3-D printed components because of the relatively low deformation temperatures for common thermoplastics used for material extrusion-based additive manufacturing. 3-D printing materials required for high-temperature heat sterilizable components for COVID-19 and other applications demands 3-D printers with heated beds, hot ends that can reach higher temperatures than polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) hot ends and heated chambers to avoid part warping and delamination. There are several high temperature printers on the market, but their high costs make them inaccessible for full home-based distributed manufacturing required during pandemic lockdowns. To allow for all these requirements to be met for under $1,000, the Cerberus – an open source three-headed self-replicating rapid prototyper (RepRap) was designed and tested with the following capabilities: i) 200^oC-capable heated bed, ii) 500^oC-capabel hot end, iii) isolated heated chamber with 1kW space heater core and iv) mains voltage chamber and bed heating for rapid start. The Cereberus successfully prints polyetherketoneketone (PEKK) and polyetherimide (PEI, ULTEM) with tensile strengths of 77.5 and 80.5 MPa, respectively. As a case study, open source face masks were 3-D printed in PEKK and shown not to warp upon widely home-accessible oven-based sterilization.

Exploring effective oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) electrocatalysts is crucial for progress in solid-state alkaline zinc-air batteries (ZAB). In this paper, silver-manganese dioxide-carbon nanotubes (SMC) ternary composites, which function as Electrocatalyst for air Electrodes, was produced via the pyrolysis of silver permanganate under microwave irradiation in one step. A scanning electron microscope (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and an energy dispersion spectrometer (EDS) have consistently determined that SMC consists of silver and alpha-manganese dioxide, which anchored on the surface of CNTs. Through polarization and chronoamperometery curves, the electrocatalytic activity of SMC for ORR was examined. The results reveal that SMC has higher catalytic activity than the chemically produced electrocatalyst for ORR in alkaline condition. Finally, a solid-state zinc-air cell with an electrocatalyst was constructed and tested. Constant current discharge curve of the zinc-air cell with SMC has a long discharge voltage plateau and a 60.03 mAh capacity at 30 mA · cm−2 . The mechanism of improvement in electrocatalytic activity was also discussed. In a summary, the strategy described in this study and the electrocatalyst produced can be regarded as an effective method for making a robust oxygen reduction catalyst toward solid-state zinc-air batteries.

Air corridors are an integral part of the advanced air mobility infrastructure. They are the virtual highways in the sky for transportation of people and cargo in the controlled airspace at an altitude of around 1000 ft. to 2000 ft. above the ground level. This paper presents fundamental insights into the design of air corridors with high operational efficiency as well as zero collisions. It begins with the definitions of air cube, skylane or track, intersection, vertiport, gate, and air corridor. Then, a multi-layered air corridor model is proposed. Traffic at intersections is analyzed in detail with examples of vehicles turning in different directions. The concept of capacity of an air corridor is introduced along with the nature of distribution of locations of vehicles in the air corridor and collision probability inside the corridor are discussed. Finally, the results of simulations of traffic flows are presented.

Air pollution is responsible for any adverse effects on human beings. Thermal discomfort, on the other hand, is able to overload the human body and eventually provoke health implications due to the heat imbalance. Methods: The aim of the present work is to study the behavior of two bio-climatic indexes and statistical characteristics of the air quality index for Sofia city - the capital of Bulgaria for the period 2008 - 2014. The study is based on WRF-CMAQ model system simula-tions with a spatial resolution of 1 kilometer. The air quality is estimated by the air quality index, taking into account the influence of different pollutants and the thermal conditions by two indi-ces, respectively, for hot and cold weather. Results: It was found that half of the heat and cold index categories are present in the simulations. Their distribution has some spatial features. All air quality categories are present in the domain, with dominance only of the O3 and PM10. Conclu-sions: It was found that Sofia is not so hot and air polluted place, but in some situations, people have to have some concerns when intend to be outdoors for a prolonged time.

The building sector is the largest consumer of energy and there are still major scientific challenges in this field. The façade, being the interface between the exterior and interior space, plays a key role in the energy efficiency of a building. In this context, this paper focuses on a ventilated bioclimatic wall for NZEB zero energy buildings. The objective of this study is to investigate an experimental set-up based on a Hot Box allowing characterizing the thermal performances of the ventilated wall. A specific ventilated prototype and an original thermal metrology has been developed. This paper presents the ventilated prototype, the experimental set-up and experimental results on the thermal performances of the ventilated wall. The influence of the air space thickness and the air flow rate on the thermal performances of the ventilated wall is studied.

Livestock production systems generate nuisance odor and gaseous emissions affecting local communities and regional air quality. Also, there are concerns about the occupational health and safety of farm workers. Proven mitigation technologies that are consistent with the socio-economic challenges of animal farming are needed. We have been scaling up the photocatalytic treatment of emissions from lab-scale, aiming at farm-scale readiness. In this paper, we present the design, testing, and commissioning of a mobile laboratory for on-farm research and demonstration of performance in real farm conditions. The mobile lab is capable of treating up to 1.2 m3·s-1 of air with TiO2-based photocatalysis and adjustable UV-A dose based on LED lamps. We summarize the main technical requirements, constraints, approach, and performance metrics for the mobile laboratory, such as the effectiveness (measured as the percent reduction) and cost of photocatalytic treatment of air. The commissioning of all systems with standard gases resulted in ~9% and 34% reduction of NH3 and butan-1-ol, respectively. We demonstrated that as the percent reduction of standard gases increased with increased light intensity and treatment time. These results show that the mobile laboratory was ready for on-farm deployment and evaluating the effectiveness of UV treatment.

Walking of humanoid robots is dependent on precise tracking of the center of gravity and foot trajectories. Trajectory tracking is achieved by mobilizing the robot joints to produce the correct trajectory. Errors are being occurred because of assumptions on tracking the center of gravity and the foot trajectories. In this study, a numerical algorithm has been developed that produces an exact and single kinematic solution in which the center of gravity and foot trajectories can be tracked with the desired precision. The effectiveness of the algorithm was examined with a dynamic simulation and compared with the method given in the literature The main highlight of this study, using the presented algorithm, the robot can walk even if the position of its center of gravity is lower than its hips, resulting tracking error was smaller than reported in the literature.

This study aimed to identify the most beneficial attitudes adopted by enterprise participants during their engagement in open-source software (OSS) activities. For this purpose, we selected repositories from GitHub, featuring the top 10 with the highest stars and forks, classified the participants according to their sentiment states, and compared their productivity. The results indicated that participants with positive sentiments were more productive than those with negative sentiments. Consequently, it can be inferred that encouraging organizations to express positive sentiments towards their developers publicly may stimulate OSS community activities and enhance productivity, thereby potentially leading to increased open innovation and sustainability.

This proposal describes the design and development of an interoperable application that supports green open access with long-term sustainability and improved user experience of article deposit. Introduction: The lack of library resources and unfriendly repository user interface are two significant barriers that hinder green open access. Tasked to implement the open access mandate, librarians at an American research university developed a comprehensive system called Easy Deposit 2 to automate the support workflow of green open access. Implementation: Easy Deposit 2 is a web application that is able to harvest newly publications, outreach for manuscript on behalf of the library, and facilitate self-archiving to IR. It is developed and maintained by the library and integrated with the IR. Results and Discussion: The article deposit rate is about 25% with Easy Deposit 2, which increases significantly comparing to the previous period. It also serves as a local database for faculty publications with open access status. The lesson learned is that library cannot rely on a single commercial provider for publication data due to mismatched priorities. Conclusion: Recent IT developments provides new opportunities of innovation like Easy Deposit 2 in supporting open access. Academic librarians are vital in promoting "openness" in scholarly communication such as transparency and diversity in the sharing of publication data.

The number of documents published on the Web other languages than English grows every year. As a consequence, it increases the necessity of extracting useful information from different languages, pointing out the importance of researching Open Information Extraction (OIE) techniques. Different OIE methods have been dealing with features from a unique language. On the other hand, few approaches tackle multilingual aspects. In such approaches, multilingual is only treated as an extraction method, which results in low precision due to the use of general rules. Multilingual methods have been applied to a vast amount of problems in Natural Language Processing achieving satisfactory results and demonstrating that knowledge acquisition for a language can be transferred to other languages to improve the quality of the facts extracted. We state that a multilingual approach can enhance OIE methods, being ideal to evaluate and compare OIE systems, and as a consequence, to applying it to the collected facts. In this work, we discuss how the transfer knowledge between languages can increase the acquisition from multilingual approaches. We provide a roadmap of the Multilingual Open IE area concerning the state of the art studies. Additionally, we evaluate the transfer of knowledge to improve the quality of the facts extracted in each language. Moreover, we discuss the importance of a parallel corpus to evaluate and compare multilingual systems.

Universities, like cities, have embraced novel technologies and data-based solutions to improve their campuses with ‘smart’ becoming a welcomed concept. Campuses in many ways are small-scale cities. They increasingly seek to address similar challenges and to deliver improved experiences to their users. How can data be used in making this vision a reality? What can we learn from smart campuses that can be scale up to smart cities? A short research study was conducted over a three-month period at a public university in the United Kingdom employing stakeholder interviews and user surveys, aiming at gaining insight into these questions. Based on the study, the authors suggest that making data publicly available could bring many benefits to different groups of stakeholders and campus users. These benefits come with risks and challenges such as data privacy and protection and infrastructure hurdles. However, if these challenges can be overcome, open data could contribute significantly to improving campuses and user experiences, and potentially set an example for smart cities.

This paper explores whether preprints can better support open science by providing links to other early-stage research outputs. This potentially has benefits for transparency and discoverability of research projects. By looking at preprint submission systems, online preprints and surveying those who run preprint servers, I examined to what extent this is currently possible. No preprints server provided a complete service, however many allowed the linking of several open science elements from the abstract page. I looked at variation based on subject, age, and size of preprint server. In conclusion, authors posting preprints should consider the options provided by different preprint servers. It appears that open science is just one focus of preprint servers and further improvements will be dependent on preprint server policies and priorities rather than overcoming any technical difficulties.

The implementation of the European Cohesion Policy aiming at fostering regions competitiveness, economic growth and creation of new jobs is documented over the period 2014–2020 in the publicly available Open Data Portal for the European Structural and Investment funds. On the base of this source, this paper aims at describing the process of data mining and visualization for information production on regional programmes performace in achieving effective expenditure of resouces.

Network effects, economies of scale, and lock-in-effects increasingly lead to a concentration of digital resources and capabilities, hindering the free and equitable development of digital entrepreneurship (SDG9), new skills, and jobs (SDG8), especially in small communities (SDG11) and their small and medium-sized enterprises (“SMEs”). To ensure the affordability and accessibility of technologies, promote digital entrepreneurship and community well-being (SDG3), and protect digital rights, we propose data cooperatives [1,2] as a vehicle for secure, trusted, and sovereign data exchange [3,4]. In post-pandemic times, community/SME-led cooperatives can play a vital role by ensuring that supply chains to support digital commons are uninterrupted, resilient, and decentralized [5]. Digital commons and data sovereignty provide communities with affordable and easy access to information and the ability to collectively negotiate data-related decisions. Moreover, cooperative commons (a) provide access to the infrastructure that underpins the modern economy, (b) preserve property rights, and (c) ensure that privatization and monopolization do not further erode self-determination, especially in a world increasingly mediated by AI. Thus, governance plays a significant role in accelerating communities’/SMEs’ digital transformation and addressing their challenges. Cooperatives thrive on digital governance and standards such as open trusted Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that increase the efficiency, technological capabilities, and capacities of participants and, most importantly, integrate, enable, and accelerate the digital transformation of SMEs in the overall process. This policy paper presents and discusses several transformative use cases for cooperative data governance. The use cases demonstrate how platform/data-cooperatives, and their novel value creation can be leveraged to take digital commons and value chains to a new level of collaboration while addressing the most pressing community issues. The proposed framework for a digital federated and sovereign reference architecture will create a blueprint for sustainable development both in the Global South and North.

In the pursuit of energy efficiency and reduced environmental impact, adequate ventilation in enclosed spaces is essential. This study presents a hybrid neural network model designed for real-time monitoring and prediction of environmental variables. The system comprises two phases: An IoT hardware-software platform for data acquisition and decision-making, and a hybrid model combining short-term memory and convolutional recurrent structures. The results are promising and hold potential for integration into parallel processing AI architectures.

Human factors are the things that go wrong in the interactions between a team of people and a system of technology. This is part of a broader transdisciplinary field called engineering psychology, which as the name suggests, draws from both engineering and psychology. Many, if not most, catastrophic accidents involve a socio-technical interaction, i.e. are not solely due to technology failure. Hence, there is a need to consider human factors in the development or deployment of any technical system. This article is about the human factors involved in an aviation accident in New Zealand between a Yak and a cherry picker. The types of human error are identified, and the barrier bowtie method is used to represent them. The analysis gives different insights into the accident compared to the formal accident report, and better represents the human error characteristics.

(1) Background: Environmental and public health research has given considerable attention to the impact of air quality on brain health, with systematic reviews widespread. No literature review has been done for cognitive frailty – a multidimensional syndrome combining physical frailty and cognitive impairment and their apparent co-dependence, linked to increased vulnerability and adverse health outcomes, including dementia. Instead, cognitive decline and frailty is implicitly explored through research on air quality and comorbid cognitive and physical decline in elderly populations. (2) Methods: A scoping review was conducted to explore the need for a systematic review. Combining Arksey and O’Malley [1] and PRISMA-ScR checklist [2], a scoping review of SCOPUS using ‘cogniti*’ + ‘resilience’ + ‘air quality’ or ‘cogniti*’ + ‘ageing’ + ‘air quality’ resulted in N=2503 articles, screened and reduced using inclusion and exclusion criteria, to N=16 articles. (3) Results: Air quality appears to be a critical risk factor for cognitive decline, even at air quality levels below WHO targets. Moderate long-term ambient air pollution appears linked to increased risk of cognitive frailty, suggesting earlier and more active interventions to protect older people. There are varied effects on cognition across the life course, with both emotional and functional impacts. Effects may be more detrimental to elderly people with existing conditions, including economic and health inequalities. Generalisation of results is limited due to the absence of a dose-response, variations in methods, controlling for comorbid effects, and variance across studies. (4) Conclusions: The findings support the need for more research and a more extensive summary of the literature.

It is essential to mitigate gaseous emissions that result from poultry and livestock production to increase industry sustainability. Odorous volatile organic compounds (VOCs), ammonia (NH3), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and greenhouse gases (GHGs) have detrimental effects on the quality of life in rural communities, the environment, and climate. This study's objective was to evaluate the photocatalytic UV treatment of gaseous emissions of odor, odorous VOCs, NH3, and other gases (GHGs, O3 – sometimes considered as by-products of UV treatment) from stored swine manure on a pilot-scale. The manure emissions were treated in fast-moving air using a mobile lab equipped with UV-A and UV-C lights and TiO2-based photocatalyst. Treated gas airflow (0.25 to 0.76 m3/s) simulates output from a small ventilation fan in a barn. Through controlling the light intensity and airflow, UV dose was tested for techno-economic analyses. The treatment effectiveness depended on the UV dose and wavelength. Under UV-A (367 nm) photocatalysis, the percent reduction of targeted gases was up to i) 63% of odor, ii) 51%, 51%, 53%, 67%, and 32% of acetic acid, propanoic acid, butanoic acid, p-cresol, and indole, respectively, iii) 14% of nitrous oxide (N2O), iv) 100% of O3, and 26% generation of CO2. Under UV-C (185+254 nm) photocatalysis, the percent reductions of target gases were up to i) 54% and 47% for p-cresol and indole, respectively, ii) 25% of N2O, iii) 71% of CH4, and 46% & 139% generation of CO2 & O3, respectively. The results proved that the UV technology was sufficiently effective in treating odorous gases, and the mobile lab was ready for farm-scale trials. The UV technology can be considered for the scaled-up treatment of emissions and air quality improvement inside livestock barns.

A large amount of data is produced every day by stakeholders of the Air Traffic Management (ATM) system, in particular airline operators, airports, and air navigation service provider (ANSP). Most data is kept private for many reasons, including commercial and security concerns. More than data, shared information is precious, as it leverages intelligent decision-making support tools designed to smooth daily operations. We present a framework to detect, identify and characterise anomalies in past aircraft trajectory data. It is based on an open source of ADS-B based aircraft trajectories, and extracted information can benefit a wide range of stakeholders: Air Traffic Control (ATC) training centres could play more realistic simulations; ANSP may improve capacity indicators; academics improve safety models and risk estimations; and commercial stakeholders, like airlines and airports, may use such information to improve short-term predictions and optimise their operations. The technique is based on autoencoding artificial neural networks applied on flows of trajectories, which provide a useful reading grid associating cluster analysis with quantified level of abnormality. In particular, we find that the highest anomaly scores correspond to poor weather conditions, whereas anomalies with a lower score relate to ATC tactical actions.

Determination of time-weighted average (TWA) concentrations of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in air using solid-phase microextraction (SPME) is advantageous over other sampling techniques, but is often characterized by insufficient accuracies, particularly at longer sampling times. Experimental investigation of this issue and disclosing the origin of the problem is problematic and often not practically feasible due to high uncertainties. This research is aimed at developing the model of TWA extraction process and optimization of TWA air sampling by SPME using finite element analysis software (COMSOL Multiphysics). It was established that sampling by porous SPME coatings with high affinity to analytes is affected by slow diffusion of analytes inside the coating, an increase of analytes concentrations in the air near the fiber tip due to equilibration, and eventual lower sampling rate. The increase of a fiber retraction depth (Z) resulted in better recoveries. Sampling of studied VOCs using 23-ga Car/PDMS assembly at maximum possible Z (40 mm) was proven to provide more accurate results. Alternative sampling configuration based on 78.5 x 0.75 mm i.d. SPME liner was proven to provide similar accuracy at improved detection limits. Its modification with the decreased internal diameter from the sampling side should provide even better recoveries. The developed model offers new insight into optimization of air and gas sampling using SPME.

This paper describes a case study of ventilation as well as measured and perceived indoor air quality (IAQ) in a Finnish comprehensive school with a hybrid ventilation system and reported IAQ problems. An operational error was found when investigating the ventilation system that prevented air from coming into classrooms, except for short periods of high carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations. However, results indicated that hybrid ventilation system was able to provide adequate ventilation and sufficient IAQ once properly designed and maintained. After ventilation operation was improved, occupants reported less unpleasant odors and stuffy air. The amount of total volatile organic compounds (TVOC) and some single volatile organic compounds (VOCs) decreased. Indoor mycobiota was observed in settled dust in the classrooms, from which ventilation improvement eliminated the dominant, opportunistic human pathogen species Trichoderma citrinoviride found before improvement.

Open science, accessibility and knowledge sharing, especially of articles and monographs stemming from a publicly funded research, seem to be quite a positive direction in the development of science and have received almost unanimous approval from a scientific community. However, when it comes to data sharing, the data obtained by qualitative methodology deserve special attention and treatment. Although FAIR principles provide ways to anonymise the data and interlocoutors (as explained in Celjak et al 2020) individuals coming from smaller communities or even communities of practice can sometimes be easily regcognized by members of the same communitiy, especially if the data refers to audio files! The researcher is obliged to thoroughly describe the ways in which the data will be managed and used, and if it will state that the data will be managed in line with FAIR principles, this will inevitably impact the narratives collected. The prerogative to make all the data open will inevitably lead to autocesorship i.e. in creating a kind of FAIRy Tales for the future, interlocutors will share with researchers. Having all that in mind I argue for a more vigilant approach when embracing the idea that all the data should be made FAIR. Not all the data should be made FAIR because this could, in the end, compromise the research process itself. Some data must remain in the space of trust created between main actors in the research process. These data should be treated with CARE principles.

Centrifuges are commonly required devices in medical diagnostics facilities as well as scientific laboratories. Although there are commercial and open source centrifuges, costs of the former and required electricity to operate the latter, limit accessibility in resource-constrained settings. There is a need for low-cost, human-powered, verified and reliable lab-scale centrifuge. This study provides the designs for a low-cost 100% 3-D printed centrifuge, which can be fabricated on any low-cost RepRap-class fused filament fabrication (FFF) or fused particle fabrication (FPF)-based 3-D printer. In addition, validation procedures are provided using a web camera and free and open source software. This paper provides the complete open source plans including instructions for fabrication and operation for a hand-powered centrifuge. This study successfully tested and validated the instrument, which can be operated anywhere in the world with no electricity inputs obtaining a radial velocity of over 1750rpm and over 50N of relative centrifugal force. Using commercial filament the instrument costs about US$25, which is less than half of all commercially available systems; however, the costs can be dropped further using recycled plastics on open source systems for over 99% savings. The results are discussed in the contexts of resource-constrained medical and scientific facilities.

Low-cost personal exposure monitors (PEMs) to measure personal exposure to air pollution are potentially promising tools for health research. However, their adoption requires robust validation. This study evaluated the performance of twenty-one Plume Lab Flow2 (PLF) by comparing its air pollutant measurements, particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 μm or less (PM2.5), 10 μm or less (PM10), and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), against several high-quality air pollution monitors under field conditions (at indoor, outdoor, and roadside locations). Correlation and regression analysis were used to evaluate measurements obtained by different PLFs against reference instrumentation. For all measured pollutants, the overall correlation coefficient between the PLFs and the reference instruments was often weak (r<0.4). Moderate correlation was observed for one PLF unit at indoor location and two units at roadside location, when measuring PM2.5, but not for PM10 and NO2 concentration. During periods of particularly higher pollution, 11 PLF tools showed stronger regression results (R2 values > 0.5) with one-hour and 9 PLF units with one-minute time interval. Results show that the PLF cannot be used robustly to determine high and low exposure to poor air. Therefore, the use of PLFs in research studies should be approached with caution if data quality is important to the research outputs.

Visits to coastal and inland-waterways have strong associations with many health and economic benefits but are also opportunities for exposure to environmental pollution. In England, few balanced survey samples exist which can facilitate accurate identification of correlates with recreation in blue spaces. This information could support risk assessment for likelihood of exposure and message targeting in case of environmental threats. We process data from a recent (2022-2023) and large (n = 177,551) survey of English residents to describe demographic, seasonal and regional correlates with any participation in water-based recreational activities in previous year (logistic regression model), and in the previous 28 days (zero-inflated negative binomial regression). Activities studied were: surfing and paddleboarding; open water swimming; scuba-diving and snorkelling; canoeing and kayaking; angling. Summer was associated with most frequent participation, winter with fewest sessions except for rowing. Anglers were group most likely to be socially vulnerable: less likely to be university educated, more likely to be disabled and especially likely to be male. People resident in rural locations were more likely to participate at least once in prior year, but did not have higher participation rates in the previous 28 days. Regional variations in specific activities may suggest where demand for water recreation is unmet. The results provide a reference description of outdoor water-recreationalists doing specific types of activity in England and may be useful when designing emergency messages and otherwise setting policy with regard to management of microbiological, radiological or chemical hazards in coastal and inland waters.

Untargeted metabolomics is a powerful tool for measuring and understanding complex biological chemistries. However, employment, bioinformatics and downstream analysis of mass spectrometry (MS) data can be daunting for inexperienced users. Numerous open-source and free-to-use data processing and analysis tools exist for various untargeted MS approaches, including liquid chro-matography (LC), but choosing the ‘correct’ pipeline isn’t straight-forward. This tutorial, in con-junction with a user-friendly online guide presents a workflow for connecting these tools to process, analyse and annotate various untargeted MS datasets. The workflow is intended to guide explor-atory analysis in order to inform decision-making regarding costly and time-consuming down-stream targeted MS approaches. We provide practical advice concerning experimental design, organisation of data and downstream analysis, and offer details on sharing and storing valuable MS data for posterity. The workflow is editable and modular, allowing flexibility for updated/ changing methodologies and increased clarity and detail as user participation becomes more common. Hence, the authors welcome contributions and improvements to the workflow via the online repository. We believe that this workflow will streamline and condense complex mass-spectrometry approaches into easier, more manageable, analyses thereby generating opportunities for researchers previously discouraged by inaccessible and overly complicated software.

There is great current interest in systems represented by non-Hermitian Hamiltonians, including a wide variety of real systems that may be dissipative and whose behaviour can be represented by a "phase" parameter that characterises the way "exceptional points" (singularities of various sorts) determine the system. These systems are briefly reviewed with an emphasis on their geometrical thermodynamics properties.

There is great current interest in systems represented by non-Hermitian Hamiltonians, including a wide variety of real systems that may be dissipative and whose behaviour can be represented by a "phase" parameter that characterises the way "exceptional points" (singularities of various sorts) determine the system. These systems are briefly reviewed with an emphasis on their geometrical thermodynamics properties.

Microalgae biomass is a budding raw material for the origination of food, fuel, and other value-added products. However, bulk production of microalgal biomass at commercial level is a herculean task for the current microalgal mass production technologies due to the undesirable contaminations by biological pollutants. These contaminants hamstring the production of microalgae biomass by debilitating the growth of cultures, crumble the quality of biomass and sometimes may crash the whole culture. The best utilization of the microalgae biomass at industrial level could be attained by avoiding various possible biological contaminations in mass cultivation system, understanding the contamination mechanisms, and the complex interactions of algae with other microorganisms. This review explores the various types of biological pollutants, their possible mode of infection along with mechanisms, different controlling methods to maintain desired microalgae culture.

The Open Access (OA) publishing model that is based on article processing charges (APC) is often associated with the potential for more transparency regarding the expenditures for publications. However, the extent to which transparency can be achieved depends not least on the completeness of data in APC monitoring systems. This article investigates two blind spots of the largest collection of APC payment information, OpenAPC. It aims to identify likely APC-liable publications for German universities that contribute to this system and for those that do not provide data to it. The calculation combines data from Web of Science, the ISSN-Gold-OA-list and OpenAPC. The results show that for the group of universities contributing to the monitoring system, more than half of the APC payments are not covered by it and the average payments for non-covered APCs is higher than for APCs covered by the system. In addition, the group of universities that does not contribute to OpenAPC accounts for two thirds of the number of APC-liable publications recorded for contributing universities. Regarding the size of these blind spots, the value of the monitoring system is limited at present.

This paper presents the validation of the End Point Rate (EPR) tool for QGIS (EPR4Q), a tool built-in QGIS Graphical Modeler to calculate the shoreline change by End Point Rate method. The EPR4Q tries to fill the gap of user-friendly and free open-source tool for shoreline analysis in Geographic Information System environment, since the most used software - Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS) - although is a free extension, is suited for commercial software. Besides, the best free open-source option to calculate EPR called Analyzing Moving Boundaries Using R (AMBUR), since it is a robust and powerful tool, the complexity and heavy processes can restrict the accessibility and simple usage. The validation methodology consists of applying the EPR4Q, DSAS, and AMBUR on different examples of shorelines found in nature, extracted from the U.S. Geological Survey Open-File. The obtained results of each tool were compared with Pearson correlation coefficient. The validation results indicate that the EPR4Q tool created acquired high correlation values with DSAS and AMBUR, reaching a coefficient of 0.98 to 1.00 on linear, extensive, and non-extensive shorelines, guarantying that the EPR4Q tool is ready to be freely used by the academic, scientific, engineering, and coastal managers communities worldwide.

Introduction: The Pandemic of COVID-19, an infectious disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 motivated the scientific community to work together in order to gather, organize, process and distribute data on the novel biomedical hazard. Here, we analyzed how the scientific community responded to this challenge by quantifying distribution and availability patterns of the academic information related to COVID-19. The aim of our study was to assess the quality of the information flow and scientific collaboration, two factors we believe to be critical for finding new solutions for the ongoing pandemic. Materials and methods: The RISmed R package, and a custom Python script were used to fetch metadata on articles indexed in PubMed and published on Rxiv preprint server. Scopus was manually searched and the metadata was exported in BibTex file. Publication rate and publication status, affiliation and author count per article, and submission-to-publication time were analysed in R. Biblioshiny application was used to create a world collaboration map. Results: Our preliminary data suggest that COVID-19 pandemic resulted in generation of a large amount of scientific data, and demonstrates potential problems regarding the information velocity, availability, and scientific collaboration in the early stages of the pandemic. More specifically, our results indicate precarious overload of the standard publication systems, significant problems with data availability and apparent deficient collaboration. Conclusion: In conclusion, we believe the scientific community could have used the data more efficiently in order to create proper foundations for finding new solutions for the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, we believe we can learn from this on the go and adopt open science principles and a more mindful approach to COVID-19-related data to accelerate the discovery of more efficient solutions. We take this opportunity to invite our colleagues to contribute to this global scientific collaboration by publishing their findings with maximal transparency.

Local thermal comfort (TC) and draught rate (DR) has been studied widely. There has been more meaningful research performed in controlled boundary condition situations than in actual work environments involving occupants. TC conditions in office buildings in Estonia have been barely investigated in the past. In this paper, the results of TC and DR assessment in five office buildings in Tallinn are presented and discussed. Studied office landscapes vary in heating, ventilation and cooling (HVAC) system parameters, room units and elements. All sample buildings were less than six years old, equipped with dedicated outdoor air ventilation system and room conditioning units. The on-site measurements consisted of TC and DR assessment with indoor climate questionnaire (ICQ). The purpose of the survey is to assess the correspondence between HVAC design and the actual situation. Results show, whether and in what extent the standard-based criteria for TC is suitable for actual usage of the occupants. Preferring one room conditioning unit type or system may not guarantee better thermal environment without draught. Although some HVAC systems observed in this study should create the prerequisites for ensuring more comfort, results show that this is not the case for all buildings in this study.

Over the last twenty years, library publishing has emerged in higher education as a new class of publisher. Conceived as a response to commercial publishing practices that have strained library budgets and prevented scholars from openly licensing and sharing their works, library publishing is both a local service program and a broader movement to disrupt the current scholarly publishing arena. It is growing both in numbers of publishers and numbers of works produced. The commercial publishing framework which determines the viability of monetizing a product is not necessarily applicable for library publishers who exist as a common good to address the needs of their academic communities. Like any business venture, however, library publishers must develop a clear service model and business plan in order to create shared expectations for funding streams, quality markers, as well as technical and staff capacity. As the field is maturing from experimental projects to full programs, library publishers are formalizing their offerings and limitations. The anatomy of a library publishing business plan is presented and includes the principles of the program, scope of services, and staffing and governance requirements. Other aspects include production policies, financial structures, and measures of success.

Based on the total scholarly article output of Norway, we investigated the coverage and degree of openness according to three bibliographic services 1) Google Scholar, 2) oaDOI by Impact Story and 3) 1findr by 1science. According to Google Scholar, we find that more than 70% of all Norwegian articles are openly available. However, degrees are profoundly lower according to oaDOI and 1findr, respectively 31% and 52%. Varying degrees are mainly caused by different interpretations of openness, with oaDOI being most restrictive. Furthermore, open shares vary considerably by discipline, with the Medcine and Health sciences at the upper and the Humanities at the lower end. We also determined the citation frequencies using Cited-by values as of Google Scholar, applying year and subject normalization. We find a significant citation advantage for open articles. However, this is not the case for all types of openness. In fact, the category Open Access journals was by far lowest cited, indicating that young journals with a declared open access policy still lack recognition.

The commercial equipment that carries out the measurement of temperature has a high cost. Therefore, this article describes the development of a temperature measurement equipment, which uses a microcontrolled platform, responsible for managing the data of the collected temperature signals and making available the acquired information, so that they can be verified in real time at the measurement site, or remotely. The construction of the temperature measurement equipment was performed using open platform hardware / software, where performance tests were carried out with the objective of developing a temperature measurement equipment that has measurement quality and low cost.

Dump design and scheduling are critical elements to effective mine planning, especially if several of them are required in large-scale open pit mines. Infrastructure capital and transportation costs are considerable from an early stage in the mining project, and through the life-of-mine as these dumps gradually become immense structures. Delivered mining rates, as well as certain spatial and physical constraints, provide a set of parameters of mathematical and economic relationship that creates opportunities for modelling and thus facilitates the measuring and optimization of ultimate dump design by using programming and empirical techniques while achieving economic objectives. This paper presents a methodology to model and optimize the design of a mine dump by minimizing the total haulage costs. The proposed methodology consists on: (i) Formulation of a dump model based on a system of equations relying on multiple relevant parameters; (ii) Solves by minimizing the total cost using linear programming and determines a ‘preliminary’ dump design; (iii) Through a series of iterations, modifies the ‘preliminary’ footprint by projecting it to the topography and creates the ultimate dump design. Finally, an example application for a waste rock dump illustrates this methodology.

Aero submarines (aerosubs) are vehicles that can both fly both in air and travel under water. The concept of dual aerial and aquatic vehicles emerged in 1939 when Russian engineer Boris Ushakov proposed the “flying submarine”[1], and this was followed by further developments including RFS1 [2], convair project in 1964[3] , etc. however, to date, limited attempt has been diverted towards the advanced development of such aircraft. This is heavily influenced by challenges associated with the design and operation of the same. Based on the review of literature the authors aim to introduce a theoretical design for an aerosub (QFS-20) with a view to address the design and operation issues including power, entry to and exit from water.

Open Education, Open Educational Practices (OEP), and Open Educational Resources (OER) have emerged as significant opportunities for enhancing global sustainability information sharing. However, the creation and sharing of OER, as well as the usage of OEP in Higher Education for Sustainable Development (HESD), remain limited. This study explores the implementation of OEP in HESD, aiming to empower students to co-produce OER on Sustainable Development (SD). This study, drawing on the theoretical approach of the principle of constructive alignment, proposes the development of students’ digital competence in OER production. A two-group pre-test post-test analysis of 409 students (Psychology, Economics, Education, Geography) reveals a significant increase in digital competence over time among students who produced OER on SD, compared to their peers enrolled in courses unrelated to OER content development. We delve into the practical implications for designing OEP in HESD and strategize to support students in their OER production processes.

In this paper, we introduce a new class of open sets that is called is*-open set . Also, we present the notion of is*-continuous, is*-open, is*-irresolute, is*-totally continuous, and is-contra-continuous mappings, and we investigate some properties of these mappings. Furthermore, we introduce some is*-separation axioms, and is*-mappings are related with is*-separation axioms. . .

Fungi are ubiquitous and metabolically versatile. Their dispersion has important scientific, environmental, health, and economic implications. They can be dispersed through the air by the aerosolization of near surfaces or transported from distant sources. Here, we tested the contribution of local (scale of meters) versus regional (kilometers) sources by analyzing airborne fungal community by ITS sequencing around a copper mine in the North of Chile. The mine was the regional source, whereas soil and vegetal detritus were the local sources at each point. The airborne community was highly homogeneous in ca. 2,000 km2, impeding the detection of regional or local contributions. Ascomycota was the dominant phylum in the three communities. Soil and vegetal detritus communities had lower alpha-diversity, but some taxa had abundance patterns related to the distance to the mine and altitude. On the contrary, the air was compositionally even and unrelated to environmental or spatial factors, except for altitude. The presence of plant pathogens in the air suggests that other distant sources contribute to this region's airborne fungal community and reinforces the complexity of tracking the sources of air microbial communities in a real world where several natural and human activities coexist.

Fractal analysis of time series aims to extract the hidden or complex structures issued from the associated real data, such as scaling laws, non-stationary, dynamics, and so on. In the present work, the air quality index and its components are considered as time series owing fractal structures. To understand their underlying dynamics, wavelet multifractal approach is applied starting with a wavelet multifractal spectrum test to confirm the multifractality of the underlying data. Next, a new model is introduced improving the classical minmax one, provided with a statistical measure for the adequacy of the new model. The theoretical findings are applied to the north west Tabuk region of Saudi Arabia for environmental and climate data related to pollutants and factors involved in the estimation of the air quality index.

A single paragraph of about 200 words maximum. For research articles, abstracts should give a pertinent overview of the work. We strongly encourage authors to use the following style of structured abstracts, but without headings: (1) Background: place the question addressed in a broad context and highlight the purpose of the study; (2) Methods: describe briefly the main methods or treatments applied; (3) Results: summarize the article’s main findings; (4) Conclusions: indicate the main conclusions or interpretations. The abstract should be an objective representation of the article, it must not contain results which are not presented and substantiated in the main text and should not exaggerate the main conclusions.