The granite sludge (GS) produced during block sawing can be exploited as alternative raw material in ceramic and concrete industries. Based on the case study of a Portuguese granite processing plant, this work analysed, by experimental tests and Environmental and Cost Life Cycle analyses, the feasibility of GS valorisation as a substitute (i) for feldspar in a ceramic paste and (ii) fine–medium inert filler in structural concrete. The results demonstrated that both the valorisation pathways are more advantageous than GS landfilling. Due to granulometric, mineralogical composition and shrinkage, GS can substitute feldspar in sandstone tiles or tableware products, although its tinting effect can limit noble whitish ceramic applications. In structural concrete mixes, 5% w/w GS instead of fine inert filler reduces the compressive strength and increases the water:cement ratio. The GS generates lower environmental impacts as a substitute for inert filler than as a substitute for feldspar in most of the impact categories analysed, even though the latter valorisation pathway provides higher benefits in Climate Change and the Depletion of Fossil resources, Water, and Ozone. If no monetary value is recognised for GS valorisation by the market, the sustainability of GS life cycle cost decreases when compared to its landfilling. Full article

Serious games (SGs) are often used for learning and cognitive improvement. This systematic review aims to verify the effectiveness of SG in enhancing the reading and writing of children with learning difficulties or disorders. The study was conducted according to the PRISMA 2020 Guidelines. The screening processes led to six relevant articles, all of which were randomized trials with a low risk of bias. The number of SGs developed for children with learning disorders with evidence of efficacy is very small, and they focus on enhancing only some aspects of literacy, leaving out the training of some fundamental skills, such as spelling and text comprehension. Serious games are effective in improving reading and metaphonological skills and in ensuring good engagement and enjoyment. However, poor generalization of progress to untreated skills was reported. The importance of investment in this area of research is highlighted. Full article

Pythium species are saprophytic or facultative plant pathogens that cause a variety of diseases. Usually, chemical anti-fungal seed dressing is applied in the conventional pre-harvest for seed protection. Nevertheless, recent legislative rules have created a ban on certain agrochemicals. Therefore, alternative eco-friendly methods have to be identified to ensure healthy field emergence and seedling development. In this study, a proof-of-concept was performed on the inactivation of Pythium ultimum Trow mycelia grown on potato dextrose broth agar (PBA) by plasma-processed air (PPA). Different plasma process parameters were applied using variation in gas flow of air through the microwave plasma generator and PPA exposure time. The PPA treatment was compared to the untreated and gas treated controls. The results showed a complete inactivation of P. ultimum mycelia after the PPA treatment. Inactivation efficiency was independent of the gas flow parameter and even shorter exposure times resulted in complete inactivation. To fully evaluate the potential of PPA as a possible seed hygiene measure, tests regarding the inactivation of P. ultimum after artificial inoculation onto seeds and/or studies using naturally infected seeds should be performed. This may be accompanied by monitoring the disease severity after the PPA treatment on a field scale. Full article

Tubular structures contribute to essential organ functions. Therefore, controlling tubulogenesis is essential for bottom-up tissue engineering approaches. Tissue engineering strategies to form tubular structures utilize extracellular matrix (ECM) components and micropatterned molds. To improve the tubular formation rate, we studied the substrate stiffness’s influence on the tubulogenesis of murine inner medullary collecting duct (mIMCD) cells. mIMCD cells were seeded in micropatterned molds with different compositions of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) (1:5, 1:10, 1:15, 1:20, 1:30) and agarose (1%, 2%, 3% 5%). We established the Young’s modulus of the PDMS and agarose substrates and determined the ideal substrate stiffness for tube formation to be between 277 kPa and 2610 kPa. Within our parameters, optimal tube formation was observed at 439.9 kPa, a value similar to the Young’s Modulus found in the basement membrane of the murine renal tubular compartment. We also found that different substrate concentrations of agarose or PDMS are associated with different expression levels of the apical polarization marker Zonula occludens 1 (ZO-1) in the generated tubular structures. In addition to the substrate stiffness, we observed that the tube formation differed based on the substrate material, with agarose showing a generally greater tube formation rate. While previous research demonstrated that ECM stiffness influences cellular behavior towards tube formation, our results suggest that the stiffness of the substrate influences tubular formation independently of the ECM. Full article

Recently, plant-based food has become important in the global food market. The increasing demand for plant-based food is a consequence of the increase in both environmental awareness and care for animal welfare as well as the changes in nutritional recommendations. Therefore, food producers are concentrating on fulfilling consumer needs by creating alternatives to animal-based products with comparable nutritional and sensory qualities but from plant-based sources. One promising trend is the production of plant-based fish. Thus, this work aimed to summarize the possibilities of creating plant-based fish analogs, including a review of alternatives to fish products currently available on the market and the possible use of the various ingredients to produce plant-based fish analogs like fillets, slices, as well as sticks, or burgers. Furthermore, the plant-based ingredients were characterized for potential use in fish analogs production. Additionally, the study includes technologies used for plant-based fish analogs production, e.g., texturization, 3D and 4D printing, electrospinning, etc. Furthermore, future perspectives were given considering the challenges and limitations in this range. Full article

The use of CNC equipment that integrates several machining operations allows the elimination of downtime resulting from setup changeovers and the clamping of workpieces in several different machine tools. More and more CNC machines and tools that allow the integration of several machining operations are appearing on the market, but there are only a few examples of these and many solutions that allow such integration for more complex operations are still missing. The aforementioned factors motivated the research work described in this paper. The purpose of the present study was to develop an innovative grinding head with different functional features for use in the process of shaped surfaces face grinding, the use of which will enable complete abrasive machining in a single mounting. The conducted tests of the grinding process showed a reduction in the values of the roughness parameters Sa (5.30, 1.12, 0.63 μm), St (31.8, 14.4, 6.72 μm), Sq (6.39, 1.46, 0.81 μm) and Spk (6.16, 0.77, 0.33 μm) and an increase in the value of the parameter Sds (393, 563, 1203 pks/mm²) on the surface after machining in two stages, first for rough grinding and then for finishing relative to the surface after the shaped milling process. Full article

Chromonic liquid crystals have recently received a lot of attention due to their spontaneous self-assembly in supramolecular columnar structures that, depending on their concentration in water, align to form a nematic liquid crystalline phase. The chirality may be induced in chromonics by adding chiral moieties to the nematic phase or enhanced by confining them in curved geometrical constraints. This review summarizes the recent research developments on chiral chromonic liquid crystals confined in spherical geometry, relating the results to what was observed for thermotropic liquid crystals in the same conditions. The review focuses on the studies carried out on commercially available nematic chromonics, investigating the effects on their topologies in different anchoring conditions and different chiral dopants and suggesting an application in the sensor field. Full article

The popularity of social media services has led to an increase of personality-relevant data in online spaces. While the majority of people who use these services tend to express their personality through measures offered by the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), another personality model known as the Big Five has been a dominant paradigm in academic works that deal with personality research. In this paper, we seek to bridge the gap between the MBTI, Big Five and another personality model known as the Enneagram of Personality, with the goal of increasing the amount of resources for the Big Five model. We further explore the relationship that was previously reported between the MBTI types and certain Big Five traits as well as test for the presence of a similar relationship between Enneagram and Big Five measures. We propose a new method relying on psycholingusitc features selected based on their relationship with the MBTI model. This approach showed the best performance through our experiments and led to an increase of up to 3% in automatic personality recognition for Big Five traits on the per-trait level. Our detailed experimentation offers further insight into the nature of personality and into how well it translates between different personality models. Full article

A large part of big data consists of text documents such as papers, patents or articles. To analyze text data, we have to preprocess the text documents and build a structured data based on a document-word matrix using various text mining techniques. This is because statistics and machine learning algorithms used in text analysis require structured train data. The row and column of the matrix are document and word, respectively. The element of the matrix represents the frequency value of the word occurring in each document. In general, because the number of words is much larger than the number of documents, most elements have zero values. Due to the sparsity problem caused by inflated zeros, the performance of the predictive model has decreased. In this paper, we propose a method to solve the sparsity problem and improve the model performance in text data analysis. We perform compound Poisson linear modeling to make the proposed method. To show the performance of our proposed method, we collect and analyze the patent documents from patent databases. In our experimental results, we compared the value of the Akaike information criterion (AIC) of the proposed model with traditional models, such as linear model, generalized linear model and zero-inflated Poisson model. Additionally, we illustrated that the AIC value of our proposed model is smaller than others. Therefore, we verify the validity of this paper. Full article

During the construction of coal mine shafts through Cretaceous water-rich stratum using the freezing method, the frozen shaft lining can break and lose stability. Hence, it is necessary to examine the mechanical properties and constitutive relationship of Cretaceous water-rich sandstone under the effect of surrounding rocks. To this end, in this work, the mechanical properties of red sandstone at different confining pressures and freezing temperatures were examined by using a ZTCR-2000 low-temperature triaxial testing system, wherein the 415–418 m deep red sandstone in the Lijiagou air-return shaft of Wenjiapo Mine was taken as the research object. The test results indicated that the stress–strain curves of rock under triaxial compression and uniaxial compression presented four stages: pore compaction, elastic compression, plastic yield, and post-peak deformation. The difference between the two cases was that the post-peak curve of the former was abrupt, while the latter exhibited a post-peak strain softening section. As the freezing temperature was constant, with the raise in the confining pressure, the elastic modulus and peak strength of the rock rose linearly, while the Poisson’s ratio decreased quadratically. As the control confining pressure was constant, the elastic modulus and rock’s peak strength increased with the decrease in the temperature, and under the condition of negative temperature, the two parameters were linearly correlated with the temperature, while the Poisson’s ratio showed the opposite trend. The two-part Hooke’s model and the statistical damage model based on Drucker–Prager (D-P) yield criterion were used to establish the stress–strain relationship models before and after the rock yield point, optimize the model parameters, and optimize the junction of the two models. The results revealed that the optimized model curve was in good agreement with the experimental curve, which suggests that the proposed model can accurately describe the stress–strain characteristics of rock under three-dimensional stress. This verified the feasibility and rationality of the proposed model for examining the constitutive relationship of rocks. Full article

Risk assessments and risk prioritizations are crucial aspects of new product design before a product is launched into the market. Risk-ranking issues involve the information that is considered for the evaluation and objective weighting considerations of the evaluation factors that are presented by the data. However, typical risk-ranking methods cannot effectively grasp a comprehensive evaluation of this information and ignore the objective weight considerations of the risk factors, leading to inappropriate evaluation results. For a more accurate ranking result of the failure mode risk, this study proposes a novel, flexible risk-ranking approach that integrates spherical fuzzy sets and the objective weight considerations of the risk factors to process the risk-ranking issues. In the numerical case validation, a new product design risk assessment of electronic equipment was used as a numerically validated case, and the simulation results were compared with the risk priority number (RPN) method, improved risk priority number (IRPN) method, intuitionistic fuzzy weighted average (IFWA) method, and spherical weighted arithmetic average (SWAA) method. The test outcomes that were confirmed showed that the proposed novel, flexible risk-ranking approach could effectively grasp the comprehensive evaluation information and provide a more accurate ranking of the failure mode risk. Full article

Objective: The study investigated the preoperative anatomical variables that affect the outcome of surgical correction in patients with Class III facial asymmetry. Methods: The study recruited 37 consecutive patients with facial asymmetry who had 2-jaw orthognathic surgery. They were divided into two groups based on the surgical outcome: symmetrical (S group) or asymmetrical (A group), according to the asymmetry index. The CBCT images were obtained before surgery (T0) and after debond (T1). The 3D dentofacial measurements were compared between groups S and A by the Mann–Whitney test. Spearman correlation analysis was performed to examine the relationship of all dentoskeletal variables in T0 with the facial symmetry outcome. Results: Significant between-group differences were observed in preoperative time, including maxillary anterior occlusal canting, maxillary posterior occlusal canting, the gonion–Frankfort horizontal plane (FHP) distance, the mandibular ramus axis–FHP distances, and sagittal and transverse of condyle position. Conclusions: For patients with severe skeletal Class III asymmetry, preoperative anatomical variables, particularly preoperative “roll” and “yaw” discrepancies and anatomical limitations of the mandible, should be considered for favorable asymmetry correction. Based on the anatomic variables that affect the outcomes of facial asymmetry correction, prognosis and treatment limitation could be predicted before treatment. Full article

The extent of the feathers covering a bird’s body and the condition of the plumage largely determine the bird’s well-being and aesthetic condition. This investigation aimed to compare changes in the plumage status of laying hens in dissimilar housing systems in the egg-laying period. The experiment was carried out with 1460 non-beak-trimmed laying hens, provided by Bábolna TETRA Ltd., representing a part of the Rhode-type elite lines (Rhode Island Red (RIR) and Rhode Island White (RIW)) used for breeding brown layer hybrids. Hens were kept in the closed experimental laying house of MATE University (Kaposvár Campus), where the RIR and RIW hens were placed into three types of housing systems: EU standard furnished cage (EU) (7560 cm²; 10 hens/cage; 756 cm²/hen); Alternative pen (A) (5.52 m², floor and litter combination, 53 hens/pen; 1040 cm²/hen); and Conventional cage (C) (3780 cm²; 6 hens/cage; 630 cm²/hen). The feathering status of the hens was examined at five body parts: neck, breast, wings, back and tail at 33, 45 and 61 weeks of age, which was evaluated on a four-grade scale by the same experienced scorer, and the cumulated plumage point (5–20) was calculated for each hen. The RIW genotype had a better plumage condition than RIR at each of the examined times (at the 33rd week: 19.0, 18.3; at the 45th week: 18.4, 17.4; at the 61st week: 17.2, 15.5). The status of the plumage of the RIR hens had deteriorated to a greater extent. As age progressed, the plumage condition of both genotypes significantly deteriorated in all the three housing technologies. The relatively high level of deterioration can be partly explained by the fact that the animals were non-beak-trimmed. At all test times, the total feather score of the birds in the alternative cage housing was significantly better (at the 33rd week: EU: 18.4, A: 19.1, C: 18.5; at the 45th week: EU: 17.6, A: 18.6, C: 17.4; at the 61st week: EU: 15.9, A: 16.9; C: 16.1). The condition of the neck plumage was better in group RIW than in RIR, and the best in the alternative housing at each test time. At the end, the high decomposition results were striking, since at the beginning there were values close to the maximum (3.98; 3.99). It can be concluded that the reason for the dominantly favorable aviary results is that the hens in this type of housing have to come into contact with fewer mechanical factors, their companions do not jump on their backs when changing places, they do not have to stick their heads out of the grid to collect feed, etc. In addition to all this, they also had a littered scratching area and a nest lined with artificial grass, where they could scratch and take a dust bath. Full article

The corrosion mechanism and characteristics of steel in typical atmospheric environments directly affect the rationality of corrosion protection methods. This study investigates the corrosion evolution law of Q235 steel that has been exposed to the urban industrial atmosphere for seven years. The mass loss is used for corrosion dynamics analysis. The rust layers have been characterized by SEM, EDS, and XRD. Finally, the corrosion mechanism was analyzed through a combination of electrochemical methods, corrosion kinetics, and rust layer characteristics. The mass loss results indicate that a two-stage corrosion power function law can still effectively describe the corrosion rate of a seven-year exposure that complies with the power function law. The short-term corrosion results fail to fully reflect the corrosion performance of Q235 steel. The typical morphological structures of γ-FeOOH and α-FeOOH are identified, and the rust layers change from a loose and flat form to a granular and, finally, compact into a smooth surface. The crystalline phases of the rust layers include α-FeOOH, γ-FeOOH, Fe₃O₄/γ-Fe₂O₃ and α-Fe₂O₃. Corrosion products in the initial period are mainly γ-FeOOH, followed by α-FeOOH, and a small amount of Fe₃O₄/γ-Fe₂O₃. With the increase in exposure time, α-FeOOH and Fe₃O₄/γ-Fe₂O₃ in the rust layer increase. SO₂ and Fe₃O₄/γ-Fe₂O₃ are the primary factors accelerating steel corrosion. During the first three years of atmospheric corrosion, the primary corrosion mechanism was governed by the acid cycle reaction mechanism. However, from the fifth year of atmospheric corrosion, oxygen-absorbing corrosion began to gradually dominate, specifically oxygen-absorbing corrosion. Full article

Electrification plays a critical role in decarbonizing energy consumption for various sectors, including transportation, heating, and cooling [...] Full article