Usa Mongkolnkrajang, Kittisak Kuptawach, Papassara Sangtanoo
et al.
Abstract This study investigates the potential of bee pollen protein hydrolysate (BPPH) as a natural source of bioactive peptides capable of inhibiting dipeptidyl peptidase IV (DPP-IV) for the management of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), a metabolic disorder characterized by insulin resistance and hyperglycemia. BPPH was generated through pepsin–pancreatin digestion, followed by ultrafiltration and RP-HPLC purification. LC-Q-TOF-MS/MS analysis identified Ala-Thr-His-Ala-Leu-Leu-Ala (ATHALLA, AA-7) as a predominant peptide associated with DPP-IV inhibitory activity. AA-7 exhibited strong DPP-IV inhibitory activity (IC50 = 52.63 ± 2.32 µM) relative to the reference inhibitor diprotin A (IC50 = 22.4 ± 1.29 µM). Molecular docking predicted stable binding of AA-7 within the DPP-IV catalytic pocket, mediated by hydrogen bonding and hydrophobic interactions with key residues. AA-7 also modulated glucose uptake in Caco-2 cells, influencing SGLT1 and GLUT2 gene expression in a dose-dependent manner. Docking analysis suggested potential interactions with selected SGLT1 and GLUT2 residues, providing structural support for the observed cellular responses rather than definitive mechanistic evidence. In silico ADMET analysis indicated poor passive membrane permeability and limited predicted intestinal absorption, along with minimal CYP450 interactions and low predicted toxicity, highlighting potential pharmacokinetic limitations while supporting a favorable safety profile. These findings highlight AA-7 as a dual-action peptide with demonstrated DPP-IV inhibitory activity and the ability to modulate glucose transport in vitro, supporting the potential of bee-pollen-derived peptides for glycemic regulation and functional food or nutraceutical applications.
In the coming decade, artificially intelligent agents with the ability to plan and execute complex tasks over long time horizons with little direct oversight from humans may be deployed across the economy. This chapter surveys recent developments and highlights open questions for economists around how AI agents might interact with humans and with each other, shape markets and organizations, and what institutions might be required for well-functioning markets.
Nanoindentation technique is applied as the key tool to investigated mechanical properties of intermetallic compounds, particularly those formed at solder joint interfaces, which are essential for the mechanical stability and reliability of electronic packaging. This article reviews the findings on mechanical properties of various intermetallic compounds using nanoindentation, including the dependences of crystal orientation and structure, alloying effects, and how these influence hardness, Young’s modulus, plastic ability, and creep resistance. Young’s modulus/hardness ratio was proposed to evaluate toughness, and creep resistance, and to predict reliability of the joints. The reviews shed a brand-new approach for the alloy/substrate material design enhancing interconnect durability.
Materials of engineering and construction. Mechanics of materials
Abstract This study explores the potential for micromobility expansion in Ukraine, viewing the war’s disruption as an opportunity to rebuild urban space and transportation systems and to shift focus from post-Soviet planning to more sustainable urban mobility, prioritising cycling and other active modes. It aims to identify the impact indicators of micromobility usage during the ongoing war and to outline the challenges and prospects for micromobility. Employing a qualitative research approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with micromobility stakeholders across 16 administrative divisions in Ukraine. The findings shed light on the factors that either hinder or support micromobility users, the importance of collaboration among city stakeholders, and the micromobility role during and after the war. The study revealed regional differences in micromobility stakeholders’ cooperation and infrastructure development, positively correlating collaboration strength and micromobility adoption. These insights can inform strategic interventions to promote micromobility in Ukrainian cities, ensuring affordable and accessible mobility solutions while reducing infrastructure costs during wartime and post-war recovery. The interviewees suggest that despite current challenges, there is optimism for increased micromobility adoption in Ukraine, with estimates of 10–30% long-term adoption, potentially rising to 50% by 2050.
Transportation engineering, Transportation and communications
A high-strength glass-ceramic was synthesised utilising industrial solid waste, specifically waste granite and glass powder, as the primary raw materials. This study examined the influence of various factors, including the content of waste granite powder, sintering temperature, additive concentration, and soaking duration, on the physical and mechanical properties of the resulting glass-ceramics. The incorporation of waste granite in glass-ceramics reached a maximum of 92.5 wt%, indicating a promising potential for the large-scale commercial application of granite solid waste. The produced glass-ceramic's flexural strength and fracture toughness were significantly correlated with the quartz content. Notably, the sample processed at a temperature of 1150 °C for 2 h, which contained 39 % quartz with a density of 2.40 g/cm3 demonstrated a minimal water absorption rate of 0.14 %, exhibited the most favorable mechanical properties, achieving a flexural strength, fracture toughness, compressive strength and microhardness of 100.8 MPa, 2.22 MPa m1/2, 926.3 MPa and 5.57 GPa respectively, suggesting its viability as a suitable material for construction.
Microbial enzymes have revolutionised the textile industry by replacing harmful chemicals with eco-friendly alternatives, enhancing processes such as desizing, scouring, dyeing, finishing, and promoting water conservation while reducing pollution. This review explores the role of enzymes like amylases, pectinases, cellulases, catalases, laccases, and peroxidases in sustainable textile processing, focusing on their ability to mitigate environmental pollution from textile effluents. The review also examines the types and characteristics of hazardous textile waste and evaluates traditional waste treatment methods, highlighting sustainable alternatives such as microbial enzyme treatments for effluent treatment. Recent advancements in recombinant enzyme technology, including enzyme engineering and immobilisation techniques to enhance stability, reusability, and catalytic performance, are also explored. Additionally, the potential of extremozymes in textile processing and effluent treatment is explored, emphasising their stability under harsh industrial conditions. Strategies for reducing textile waste through enzyme-based processes are presented, focusing on principles of the circular economy. The review also addresses challenges such as scalability, cost, and process optimisation, while proposing potential solutions and outlining future directions for the widespread adoption of microbial enzymes in sustainable textile production and waste management. This review underscores the transformative potential of microbial enzymes in achieving greener textile manufacturing practices.
Traditional requirements engineering tools do not readily access the SysML-defined system architecture model, often resulting in ad-hoc duplication of model elements that lacks the connectivity and expressive detail possible in a SysML-defined model. Further integration of requirements engineering activities with MBSE contributes to the Authoritative Source of Truth while facilitating deep access to system architecture model elements for V&V activities. We explore the application of MBSE to requirements engineering by extending the Model-Based Structured Requirement SysML Profile to comply with the INCOSE Guide to Writing Requirements while conforming to the ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148 standard requirement statement patterns. Rules, Characteristics, and Attributes were defined in SysML according to the Guide to facilitate requirements definition, verification & validation. The resulting SysML Profile was applied in two system architecture models at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, allowing us to assess its applicability and value in real-world project environments. Initial results indicate that INCOSE-derived Model-Based Structured Requirements may rapidly improve requirement expression quality while complementing the NASA Systems Engineering Handbook checklist and guidance, but typical requirement management activities still have challenges related to automation and support in the system architecture modeling software.
We identify fiscal SVAR-IVs by utilizing unexpected variation in the output of trading partner economies, measured by professional forecast errors, to account for the systematic component of fiscal policy. Our identification builds on the small open economy assumption that these forecast errors correlate with output but are exogenous to domestic fiscal policy. In applying our approach to Canada and euro area small open economies we show that the instrument is relevant and find suggestive evidence for its exogeneity. Our baseline estimates for the two-year cumulative spending multiplier are around 1 for Canada and 0.5 for euro area small open economies.
Mi Sook Park, Yong Woo Hwang, Byong Chul Kim
et al.
Objectives In the context where the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from livestock manure (LSM) account for more than half of the GHG emissions in the livestock sector, it is necessary to find alternatives to composting due to the decrease in agricultural land. This study aims to calculate the GHG reduction contribution and economic benefits when converting LSM into solid fuel as an alternative to traditional composting. Methods The study compares the results of converting the entire LSM generated domestically into solid fuel replacing it with hard coal for fuel (HC-F), bituminous coal for raw materials (BC-R), bituminous coal for fuel (BC-F). The GHG reduction contribution is calculated following the domestic GHG inventory methodology, using the IPCC guidelines and the method for calculating carbon emission reduction effects. For the assessment of economic benefits, were evaluated by aggregating the impacts of reducing coal imports and GHG reduction benefits in line with EU-ETS standards. Economic benefits are assessed by combining the effects of avoiding coal imports and the GHG reduction benefits according to the EU-ETS. Results and Discussion The GHG reduction effect was found to be highest when replacing with HC-F, and this is attributed to the lower heating value and higher GHG emission coefficient of HC-F compared to BC-R, and BC-F, indicating that the substitution with HC-F is most effective in terms of import avoidance. If 20% of the annual coal consumption in 2022 is replaced with solid fuel from LSM, the GHG reduction effects for coal substitution are 1.4% for HC-F, 2.1% for BC-R, and 1.9% for BC-F based on the LSM generation CO2 emissions from biomass fuel are considered climate-neutral and are excluded from the national total emissions. Solid fuel from LSM serves as an alternative in addressing the GHG generated during the LSM treatment process, contributing to potential reduction. If all generated LSM is replaced with HC-F, BC-R, or BC-F, there are respective GHG reduction effects of 13,193,591 tGHG, 11,320,572 tGHG, and 11,226,331 tGHG. Conclusion In 2018, the livestock sector accounted for approximately 42% of the GHG emissions in the agricultural sector, totaling 9.4 million tCO2 eq. Assuming the complete conversion of LSM into solid fuel for coal substitution, regardless of the type of coal replaced, it offsets the entire GHG emissions from the agricultural sector. Currently, there is limited demand for the conversion of LSM into solid fuel due to a lack of proof and awareness, but with some coal-fired power plants scheduled for partial shutdown and the government considering energy options for LSM, a promising stage is anticipated in the future for the substitution and expanded use of solid fuel from LSM in place of coal in the coal fuel. Although it may not be possible to entirely replace the coal used in power plants and steel mills with solid fuel from LSM, it can be utilized by increasing the proportion of coal blending. However, even if not reported in the national GHG inventory, the treatment of pollutants generated by solid fuel combustion remains an ongoing challenge. As solid fuel becomes more commonplace in the future, a comprehensive assessment of the entire process, including potential environmental impacts throughout the life cycle, will be necessary to establish a basis for GHG reduction measures.
Hanne Rangnes Seeberg, Sverre Magnus Haakonsen, Marcin Luczkowski
Facing increasing sustainability demands, the construction industry is at a turning point where the implementation of circular economy (CE) strategies plays an essential role in driving the necessary transformation aimed at reducing the environmental impact. To facilitate this shift, structural engineering must effectively integrate circular principles into building design. With the exponential growth of research articles within this field, it is crucial to map the evolution of the research area. The objective of this study is to detail the trends with, challenges to, and research contributions, integration, and material applications of CE principles within structural engineering. Consequently, a systematic mapping of the CE within the field of structural engineering has been conducted in this study. Initially, the mapping process began with the identification of relevant keywords, followed by searches across four databases. Each resulting article was carefully screened against content criteria, culminating in 91 publications that were thoroughly evaluated. The publications were then categorized and analyzed based on attributes such as research type, circular design, materials, and applications. The results are presented through informative figures and tables. The analysis of the research indicates a predominant focus on technical solutions for structural systems, with demountable connections designed to facilitate the future reuse of materials representing more than half of the literature reviewed. A significant portion of the literature also addresses designing from reclaimed elements; these articles reflect a transformation in engineering approaches, incorporating computational design and innovative methodologies. The focus on steel as a structural material is prominent in the reviewed literature. However, there is an increasing focus on timber, which signals a definitive shift toward sustainable structural systems. Recurring challenges identified in the literature regarding the transition to a circular economy (CE) in the construction industry include the need for industry-wide adoption, precise standardization, the integration of digital tools, and the overcoming of related obstacles in policy and market acceptances. Furthermore, the literature demonstrates a significant research gap: the absence of a comprehensive digital framework enabling an effective digital circular structural design workflow.
This is an article in the field of mineral processing engineering. Some unavoidable ions commonly present in the slurry solution have an important influence on the flotation separation of lead-zinc sulfide ore. The unavoidable ions in the slurry mainly come from the water used in the processing plant, the dissolution of minerals, the dissociation of activators or depressants, and the primary ions introduced by the release of fluid inclusions and the secondary ions introduced during the grinding process. This article summarizes and analyzes the effects on the flotation separation of lead-zinc sulfide ore which is caused by the primary ions introduced in the slurry and the secondary inevitable ions introduced in the grinding system. It is found that both primary ions and secondary ions have obvious effects on the flotation behavior of lead-zinc sulfide ore. And many scholars have done a lot of research on this phenomenon. In this paper, a great breakthrough has been made through the adjustment and control of reagents and changes in the grinding environment. At the same time, this article provides important research ideas for follow-up researchers. The focus of this article is how to integrate the previous research results with the field process significantly, how to eliminate inevitable ions from the source without affecting the industrial economy, The important direction of future research is still how to reduce the influence of inevitable ions on the flotation index from the field process.
Medina Ayta Mohammed, Carmen De-Pablos-Heredero, José Luis Montes Botella
This study investigates the influence of a country’s financial access and stability and the adoption of retail central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) across 71 countries. Using an ordinal logit model, we examine how individual financial access, the ownership of credit cards, financing accessibility by firms, offshore loans, financial sanctions, and the ownership structure of financial institutions influence the probability of CBDC adoption in nations. These findings reveal that nations facing financial sanctions and those with substantial offshore bank loans are more inclined to adopt CBDCs. Furthermore, a significant relationship is observed in countries where many people have restricted financial access, indicating heightened interest in CBDC adoption. Interestingly, no statistically significant relationship was found between the adoption of CBDCs and the percentage of foreign-owned banks in each country. The results show that countries with low financial stability and financial access adopt CBDCs faster. This study expands our knowledge of how a nation’s financial situation influences its adoption of CBDCs. The results provide important and relevant insights into the current discussion of the direction of global finance.
Semi-structured explanation depicts the implicit process of a reasoner with an explicit representation. This explanation highlights how available information in a specific query is utilised and supplemented with information a reasoner produces from its internal weights towards generating an answer. Despite the recent improvements in generative capabilities of language models, producing structured explanations to verify a model's true reasoning capabilities remains a challenge. This issue is particularly pronounced for not-so-large LMs (e.g., FLAN-T5-XXL). In this work, we first underscore the limitations of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) in tackling this challenge, and then introduce a carefully crafted reward engineering method in reinforcement learning (RL) to better address this problem. We investigate multiple reward aggregation methods and provide a detailed discussion which sheds light on the promising potential of RL for future research. Our proposed method on two semi-structured explanation generation benchmarks (ExplaGraph and COPA-SSE) achieves new state-of-the-art results.
Matthew Tyler, Hengyun Zhou, Leigh S. Martin
et al.
We introduce a framework for designing Hamiltonian engineering pulse sequences that systematically accounts for the effects of higher-order contributions to the Floquet-Magnus expansion. Our techniques result in simple, intuitive decoupling rules, despite the higher-order contributions naively involving complicated, non-local-in-time commutators. We illustrate how these rules can be used to efficiently design improved Hamiltonian engineering pulse sequences for a wide variety of tasks, such as dynamical decoupling, quantum sensing, and quantum simulation.
In this paper, we identify and characterize the emerging area of representation engineering (RepE), an approach to enhancing the transparency of AI systems that draws on insights from cognitive neuroscience. RepE places population-level representations, rather than neurons or circuits, at the center of analysis, equipping us with novel methods for monitoring and manipulating high-level cognitive phenomena in deep neural networks (DNNs). We provide baselines and an initial analysis of RepE techniques, showing that they offer simple yet effective solutions for improving our understanding and control of large language models. We showcase how these methods can provide traction on a wide range of safety-relevant problems, including honesty, harmlessness, power-seeking, and more, demonstrating the promise of top-down transparency research. We hope that this work catalyzes further exploration of RepE and fosters advancements in the transparency and safety of AI systems.
This type of qualitative descriptive research. The population of the BPK RI office is 30 respondents. The data analysis technique used in this research is Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). Factor analysis is one of the multivariate statistical techniques used to summarize (data summarization) and reduce data (data reduction) from a large number of variables into a smaller number. The results of data processing and data analysis, the results obtained that the factors that influence Fraud Prevention are based on their formation, only two factors whose diagonal value is above 0.5, it is sufficient to represent the two factors formed which are the factors that affect the Fraud Prevention, namely Auditor Experience and Task-Specific Knowledge
O. Okorie, Fiona Charnley, Jennifer D. Russell
et al.
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research CouncilEngineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) [EP/R032041/1]; Circular4.0: Data Driven Intelligence for a Circular Economy
Abstract Platinum group metal-free electrocatalysts are an important class of materials for the sustainable energy economy and significant effort has been made toward developing platinum group metal-free catalysts to replace their costly Pt counterparts in fuel cell electric vehicles. The progress made in activity over the last decade is reviewed, along with synthesis strategies for more controlled active site formation and performance gains achieved through electrode engineering. The increased focus on durability, the growing understanding of degradation mechanisms, and the need for standard performance and accelerated stress test protocols are discussed.
There has been growing interest within the computational science and engineering (CSE) community in engaging with software engineering research -- the systematic study of software systems and their development, operation, and maintenance -- to solve challenges in scientific software development. Historically, there has been little interaction between scientific computing and the field, which has held back progress. With the ranks of scientific software teams expanding to include software engineering researchers and practitioners, we can work to build bridges to software science and reap the rewards of evidence-based practice in software development.