This study investigated the effects of partially substituting fishmeal (FM) with fermented soybean meal (FSM) on the growth performance, liver and serum biochemical, flesh quality and metabolomics of tiger puffer (Takifugu rubripes). Five diets with FSM supplementation to replace 0 (control, FM), 15 % (FSM15), 30 % (FSM30), 45 % (FSM45) and 60 % (FSM60) FM were used to feed tiger puffer (39.6 ± 0.2 g) for 60 days. The results indicated that FSM could effectively replace up to 30 % of FM in diets without adverse impacts on weight gain (WG) and feed conversion ratio (FCR). In contrast, WG declined by 17.7 % and 33.6 %, and FCR increased by 0.22 and 0.55 in the FSM45 and FSM60 groups, respectively (P < 0.05). Compared to FM group, the contents of total fatty acids (TFA), C16:0, C22:6, total amino acids (TAA), Val, Ile and the activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione peroxidase (GPx) in flesh were significantly decreased, while the contents of collagen in flesh and alkaline phosphatase (ALP) in serum were significantly increased in FSM60 group (P < 0.05). In addition, FSM45 and FSM60 groups exhibited significantly higher the contents of total free amino acid (TFAA), flavor amino acid (FAA), Glu, Gly and Cys in flesh and alanine aminotransferase (ALT) in serum and lower liver cholesterol (CHO) levels compared to FM group (P < 0.05). 157 and 190 named metabolites were identified in FSM30 and FSM60 groups, respectively, compared to the control, and these metabolites were primarily involved in “lipid metabolism” and “amino acid metabolism”. In summary, in a diet containing 450 g/kg FM, FSM could replace FM up to 30 % without compromising the growth, serum and liver biochemical, flesh amino acids and fatty acids of tiger puffer. The optimum replacement level of FM with FSM was 31.79–32.48 % by broken-line based on WG and FCR.
Aneta Bylak, Andrzej Bobiec, Mateusz Bobiec
et al.
Abstract The pool of invasive ornamental plants keeps expanding, and one of the best studied plant invasion habitats is the riparian zone. Europe has no native Miscanthus spp. or bamboos, which are popular garden plants. In 2022–2024 we observed Bisset bamboo (Phyllostachys bissetii) and giant miscanthus (Miscanthus × giganteus) naturalizing in the riparian zones of two rivers of the Vistula River basin (Poland). Bisset bamboo has not been recorded before in the wild in Europe and giant miscanthus has not been reported before as naturalized in Europe. We describe their present habitats and invasive potential, to alert others to the prospect of spread in Europe. Examples from other parts of world indicate that Phyllostachys spp. invasive running bamboo has a tendency to spread aggressively. Because we only located single plants our species qualify as ‘casuals’, but we mention them out of a concern that these species are establishing more widely or will soon do so. Our observations fit an “accelerated trend” in exotic plant invasion in Europe, in particular, of escaped ornamental plants. Based on information about the ecology of both species, their popularity in horticulture, and our observations, we speculate that giant miscanthus and Bisset bamboo may become new European plant invaders. Both species should be mechanically removed. There is an urgent need to raise awareness among gardeners, hobbyists, plant sellers and importers, about environmental risk from spread of invasive plants. It is concerning that seedlings and seeds of other species of the genera Miscanthus and Phyllostachys, which have naturalised in several European countries, are available in horticulture. Bioinvasion is easier to control if there is early detection and a rapid response.
Maksim S. Maramygin, Natalya B. Boldyreva, Lyudmila G. Reshetnikova
In the new economic reality, air quality protection behaviour of companies remains a burning issue shifting the em phasis towards saving human life and health. The article explores the relationship between the air quality protection behav iour of public companies and stock returns in different economic sectors. The research methodology is based on environmental management theory, financial management theory, and stakeholder theory. The analytical procedures performed on the data involved cross-sectoral economic analysis and econometric analysis. Empirical data are retrieved from the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) and the Moscow Exchange and cover statistics on 45 public joint-stock companies (PAOs) from five sectors of the economy for the period of 2014–2022. Cross-sectoral economic analysis has shown that investors lack interest in PAOs’ air quality protection behaviour and invariably favour companies from the sectoral indices paying higher dividends compared to the Moscow Exchange, such as Chemicals and Petrochemicals, Metals and Mining, Oil and Gas. By integrating air quality protection factors into the Fama-French-Carhart model through econometric modelling, we estimated the dependence of returns of indus try portfolios on these factors and classical risk premiums. The study demonstrates a positive impact of market premium and size premium on returns of industry portfolios. No statistically significant impact of air quality protection factors on stock returns was found. Our empirical findings confirm that businesses are poorly motivated to take air environment protection measures and air pollution-reducing behaviour should be encouraged at the state level.
Valentin Vasselon, Sinziana F. Rivera, Éva Ács
et al.
DNA metabarcoding of benthic diatoms has been successfully applied for biomonitoring at the national scale and can now be considered technically ready for routine application. However, protocols and methods still vary between and within countries, limiting their transferability and the comparability of results. In order to overcome this, routine use of DNA metabarcoding for diatom biomonitoring requires knowledge of the sources of variability introduced by the different steps of the procedure. Here, we examine how elements of routine procedures contribute to variability between European laboratories. A set of four experiments were performed focusing on DNA extraction and PCR amplification steps to evaluate their reproducibility between different laboratories and the variability introduced by different protocols currently applied by the scientific community. Under the guidance of a reference laboratory, 17 participants from 14 countries performed DNA extraction and PCR amplification in parallel, using the same fixed protocol and their own choice of protocol. Experiments were performed by each participant on a set of standardised DNA and biofilm samples (river, lake and mock community) to investigate potential systematic and random errors. Our results revealed the successful transferability of a protocol amongst labs and a highly similar and consistent ecological assessment outcome obtained regardless of the protocols used by each participant. We propose an “all for one but prove them all” strategy, suggesting that distinct protocols can be used within the scientific community, as long as their consistency is be proven by following minimum standard requirements.
In this study, we investigate the protection offered by federated learning algorithms against eavesdropping adversaries. In our model, the adversary is capable of intercepting model updates transmitted from clients to the server, enabling it to create its own estimate of the model. Unlike previous research, which predominantly focuses on safeguarding client data, our work shifts attention protecting the client model itself. Through a theoretical analysis, we examine how various factors, such as the probability of client selection, the structure of local objective functions, global aggregation at the server, and the eavesdropper's capabilities, impact the overall level of protection. We further validate our findings through numerical experiments, assessing the protection by evaluating the model accuracy achieved by the adversary. Finally, we compare our results with methods based on differential privacy, underscoring their limitations in this specific context.
Environmental feedback mechanisms are ubiquitous in real-world complex systems. In this study, we incorporate a homogeneous environment into the evolutionary dynamics of a three-state system comprising cooperators, defectors, and empty nodes. Both coherence resonance and equilibrium states, resulting from the tightly clustering of cooperator agglomerates, enhance population survival and environmental quality. The resonance phenomenon arises at the transition between cooperative and defective payoff parameters in the prisoner's dilemma game.
Living environments play a vital role in the prevalence and progression of diseases, and understanding their impact on patient's health status becomes increasingly crucial for developing AI models. However, due to the lack of long-term and fine-grained spatial and temporal data in public and population health studies, most existing studies fail to incorporate environmental data, limiting the models' performance and real-world application. To address this shortage, we developed SatHealth, a novel dataset combining multimodal spatiotemporal data, including environmental data, satellite images, all-disease prevalences estimated from medical claims, and social determinants of health (SDoH) indicators. We conducted experiments under two use cases with SatHealth: regional public health modeling and personal disease risk prediction. Experimental results show that living environmental information can significantly improve AI models' performance and temporal-spatial generalizability on various tasks. Finally, we deploy a web-based application to provide an exploration tool for SatHealth and one-click access to both our data and regional environmental embedding to facilitate plug-and-play utilization. SatHealth is now published with data in Ohio, and we will keep updating SatHealth to cover the other parts of the US. With the web application and published code pipeline, our work provides valuable angles and resources to include environmental data in healthcare research and establishes a foundational framework for future research in environmental health informatics.
Robert Krahn, Nikson Kanti Paul, Franz Gregor
et al.
During the past few years, we have witnessed various efforts to provide confidentiality and integrity for applications running in untrusted environments such as public clouds. In most of these approaches, hardware extensions such as Intel SGX, TDX, AMD SEV, etc., are leveraged to provide encryption and integrity protection on process or VM level. Although all of these approaches increase the trust in the application at runtime, an often overlooked aspect is the integrity and confidentiality protection at build time, which is equally important as maliciously injected code during compilation can compromise the entire application and system. In this paper, we present Tical, a practical framework for trusted compilation that provides integrity protection and confidentiality in build pipelines from source code to the final executable. Our approach harnesses TEEs as runtime protection but enriches TEEs with file system shielding and an immutable audit log with version history to provide accountability. This way, we can ensure that the compiler chain can only access trusted files and intermediate output, such as object files produced by trusted processes. Our evaluation using micro- and macro-benchmarks shows that Tical can protect the confidentiality and integrity of whole CI/CD pipelines with an acceptable performance overhead.
In the field of new energy vehicles and related sectors, treating butyl acetate (BA), a typical oxygen-containing volatile organic compound (VOC), is becoming increasingly important. The surface structure and physicochemical properties of a CeO_2-U catalyst were adjusted by introducing 0.5% Pd, and compared with Al_2O_3 and TiO_2 catalysts containing the same Pd loading. Characterizations using SEM, XPS, in-situ DRIFTS, and other methods were conducted to explore the synergistic effect of Pd and Ce active components on catalytic oxidation of BA. The results showed that the introduction of Pd increased CeO_2-U′s CO_2 yield from 77.8% to 90.7% at 220 ℃, significantly promoting the deep oxidation process of BA and alleviating the issue of CO_2 selectivity delay. The introduction of Pd enhanced the mobility and reactivity of lattice oxygen in CeO_2, increased the proportion of surface Ce^3+, and boosted surface oxygen vacancy concentration. Additionally, the catalytic oxidation mechanism of BA over Pd/CeO_2-U was confirmed through in-situ DRIFTS analysis, indicating that the L-H mechanism was followed at low temperatures (T<200 ℃), while the MvK reaction mechaism occured followed at high temperature (T>200 ℃). It was found that the decomposition of intermediate carboxylate served as the rate-controlling step. These findings have implications for controlling BA in the field of related sectors.
Renewable energy sources, Environmental protection
Cascading failures, triggered by a local perturbation, can be catastrophic and cause irreparable damages in a wide area. Hence, blocking the devastating cascades is an important issue in real world networks. One of the ways to control the cascade is to use protective measures, so that the agents decide to be protected against failure. Here, we consider a coevolution of the linear threshold model for the spread of cascading failures and a decision-making game based on the perceived risk of failure. Protected agents are less vulnerable to failure and in return the size of the cascade affects the agent's decision to get insured. We find at what range of protection efficiency and cost of failure, the global cascades stop. Also we observe that in some range of protection efficiency, a bistable region emerges for the size of cascade and the prevalence of protected agents. Moreover, we show how savings or the ability of agents to repair can prevent cascades from occurring
The environment is comprised of physical factors such as air, water, and land and living organisms such as plants, animals, micro-organisms and the human beings on this earth. The relationship between man and nature is immense when these ecological principles are carefully protected. It is a tradition for a man to associate the environment within his geographical boundaries with his social life. Biodiversity and conservation are centered on the natural environment. Sangam literature is considered highly among the world literature. “Kurunthogai” is one of the best among the Sangam literature which includes nature and Tamil culture. This book conveys the message of ancient Tamils living in harmony with nature. Everything created by God is nature like mountains and seas are nature, sparkling rain is nature, grass and animals are nature, and trees and plants are nature. Tamils made this sort of life in harmony with nature. This research paper is based on promoting the protection of the natural environment through “Kurunthogai” to inculcate environmental thinking among the people from Tamil Literary Text.
Abstract The arterial occlusive disease is one of the leading causes of cardiovascular diseases, often requiring revascularization. Lack of suitable small-diameter vascular grafts (SDVGs), infection, thrombosis, and intimal hyperplasia associated with synthetic vascular grafts lead to a low success rate of SDVGs (< 6 mm) transplantation in the clinical treatment of cardiovascular diseases. The development of fabrication technology along with vascular tissue engineering and regenerative medicine technology allows biological tissue-engineered vascular grafts to become living grafts, which can integrate, remodel, and repair the host vessels as well as respond to the surrounding mechanical and biochemical stimuli. Hence, they potentially alleviate the shortage of existing vascular grafts. This paper evaluates the current advanced fabrication technologies for SDVGs, including electrospinning, molding, 3D printing, decellularization, and so on. Various characteristics of synthetic polymers and surface modification methods are also introduced. In addition, it also provides interdisciplinary insights into the future of small-diameter prostheses and discusses vital factors and perspectives for developing such prostheses in clinical applications. We propose that the performance of SDVGs can be improved by integrating various technologies in the near future. Graphical Abstract
Patrick Ferris, Michael Dales, Sadiq Jaffer
et al.
We make a case for "planetary computing" -- infrastructure to handle the ingestion, transformation, analysis and publication of global data products for furthering environmental science and enabling better informed policy-making. We draw on our experiences as a team of computer scientists working with environmental scientists on forest carbon and biodiversity preservation, and classify existing solutions by their flexibility in scalably processing geospatial data, and also how well they support building trust in the results via traceability and reproducibility. We identify research gaps in the intersection of computing and environmental science around how to handle continuously changing datasets that are often collected across decades and require careful access control rather than being fully open access.
Bjorn De Sutter, Sebastian Schrittwieser, Bart Coppens
et al.
Man-at-the-end (MATE) attackers have full control over the system on which the attacked software runs, and try to break the confidentiality or integrity of assets embedded in the software. Both companies and malware authors want to prevent such attacks. This has driven an arms race between attackers and defenders, resulting in a plethora of different protection and analysis methods. However, it remains difficult to measure the strength of protections because MATE attackers can reach their goals in many different ways and a universally accepted evaluation methodology does not exist. This survey systematically reviews the evaluation methodologies of papers on obfuscation, a major class of protections against MATE attacks. For 571 papers, we collected 113 aspects of their evaluation methodologies, ranging from sample set types and sizes, over sample treatment, to performed measurements. We provide detailed insights into how the academic state of the art evaluates both the protections and analyses thereon. In summary, there is a clear need for better evaluation methodologies. We identify nine challenges for software protection evaluations, which represent threats to the validity, reproducibility, and interpretation of research results in the context of MATE attacks and formulate a number of concrete recommendations for improving the evaluations reported in future research papers.