Search Results (368)

Automated valet-parking trajectory planning has been widely studied in structured environments, whereas its counterpart in unstructured environments remains insufficiently explored. The working face of an open-pit mine is a typical unstructured production environment, where autonomous mining trucks (AMTs) must perform collision-free and kinematically feasible maneuvers under irregular boundaries, locally confined passages, large vehicle footprints, and strict terminal pose requirements. To address this problem, we introduce an adaptive bounded Hybrid A* planner for AMT maneuver planning at mining working faces. The proposed planner integrates local-geometry-aware top-K motion primitive scheduling, adaptive rollout-length assignment, progress-reward-based dual-cost correction, and bounded continuation after the first feasible Reeds–Shepp closure. By ranking and filtering motion primitives according to obstacle clearance, maneuver margin, goal distance, and heading alignment, the planner reduces ineffective successor generation during search. By adapting rollout lengths to local spatial constraints and primitive curvature, it improves the consistency between expansion scale and environmental structure. By retaining the first feasible Reeds–Shepp connection as an initial upper bound and continuing bounded refinement, it improves the final returned path beyond the first feasible solution. Comparative studies demonstrate that, relative to the conventional Hybrid A* baseline, the proposed planner reduces the average final planning time, generated nodes, and final path cost by 54.73%, 74.10%, and 12.76%, respectively, in the abstract mine-like scenarios. In the real-map-derived mining working-face scenarios, the corresponding reductions are 25.12%, 37.98%, and 7.15%, respectively. These results indicate that the proposed method reduces search redundancy while improving the efficiency–quality trade-off in confined and geometrically irregular working-face environments. Full article

This study develops a SCHISM-based hydrodynamic model and an offline Lagrangian virtual-particle workflow for the Zadar Channel, a geometrically complex island–mainland passage in the eastern Adriatic. Independent hourly observations from the MP Zadar tide gauge operated by the Hydrographic Institute of the Republic of Croatia (HHI) were used to evaluate the modelled free-surface response. After exclusion of the first 24 h ramping period, 192 matched hourly pairs gave a Pearson correlation of 0.913, a mean bias of 0.012 m, a mean absolute error of 0.051 m, and a root-mean-square error of 0.070 m; cross-correlation was maximized at zero lag. The model reproduced the timing of the observed oscillations but underestimated their amplitude, with simulated and observed standard deviations of 0.117 and 0.157 m, respectively. The adopted unstructured mesh contains 16,962 triangular elements and 9081 nodes. In four 24 h particle-sensitivity tests, maximum reach ranges from 8.4 to 14.2 km; a 15-fold change in horizontal diffusivity affects reach less than sampling a lower model layer, which reduces reach by 32.8%. In the June 2025 event calculation, cumulative numerical shoreline contact increases from zero to all 1000 particles. The approximately 4 km Copernicus regional product masks the narrow interior passages and is therefore used only to assess spatial representativeness, not to validate channel currents. The tide-gauge comparison supports the modelled sea-level response and its timing at one station, but does not constitute direct validation of local current velocities. The reported trajectories are current-driven passive-particle diagnostics; wave–current coupling, Stokes drift, and material-specific fate processes are not represented. Full article

In this study, the removal of vancomycin and rifampicin from aqueous media by three types of granular activated carbon was investigated under a wide range of operational conditions. There is growing concern about antimicrobial resistance to vancomycin, a last-line antibiotic for serious Gram-positive infections, and rifampicin, a key component of first-line combination therapy for tuberculosis. However, there has been little research into adsorption of these antibiotics from aquatic environments. Effect of temperature (5–45 °C), pH (3–11), contact time (up to 336 h) and the adsorbate initial concentration (5–100 µg.mL⁻¹) were evaluated on removal efficiency and uptake of the antibiotics by activated carbon from water. The results showed that all adsorption processes in this study were mainly controlled by physisorption, as they exhibited the enthalpy values between 5.97 kJ.mol⁻¹ to 21.19 kJ.mol⁻¹ (i.e., lower than 40 kJ.mol⁻¹). Temperature had a limited impact on the adsorption process. On the other hand, the contact time, initial adsorbate concentration and solution pH had a substantial effect in removing and retaining the studied antibiotics from water. The attributes of the antibiotics and the pore characteristics of the adsorbents determined the effectiveness of adsorption. Intra-particle diffusion assessments identified that the rate of the studied antibiotics’ removal from water is not controlled only by intra-particle diffusion and follows the sequential transport mechanisms, containing three steps for vancomycin (bulk transfer, passage through the boundary layer and diffusion into micropores) and two steps for rifampicin (passing through the boundary layer and diffusion into mesopores). Full article

In 2002, the students in my Performing Shakespeare seminar at Davidson College encountered many interpretive challenges when they mounted a full production of Love’s Labor’s Lost. Several cruces, they learned, came down to performance choices significant enough to determine either the audience’s engagement with a play that seems even more remote than most Shakespeare works or the larger interpretation of the play. Such cruces include the dense punning in 3.1 among Don Armado, Moth, and Costard; the verbal match among Berowne, the King, and the lords over Rosaline’s attractions and Berowne’s lengthy following speech rationalizing the men’s breaking of their oath (4.3.210 ff.); the Princess’s interaction with, first, the Forester and then Costard in 4.1.1-55; and the humbling of Don Armado in 5.2.666-710 and his response to it in 717-19 and 866-76. During the students’ rehearsal period, members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, in residence on campus at the time, worked with them on some of the challenges within such passages, several of which also claim attention in Shakespearean literary criticism. Excerpts from the students’ journals, as well as performance choices from selected professional productions, elucidate each crux, providing historical context. Ultimately, both performance and understanding of Love’s Labor’s come alive in these cruces, which continue over centuries to prompt readers’ and audiences’ thinking long after an individual production is past. If some of the cruces are insoluble, they are quintessentially theatrical. Full article

Crypto perpetual futures embed liquidation risk in one chain: leverage and funding move the margin boundary, the mark determines when a crossing is observed, and executable depth determines the concession paid after detection. The primary forecasting question is how to quantify both the probability of an isolated-margin boundary breach and the loss hidden by delayed or smoothed detection. This paper develops a first-passage density-forecasting framework in which the executable price is observed through a delayed or smoothed mark, funding is a persistent collateral drain, and liquidation occurs when isolated-margin surplus reaches its maintenance boundary. The output is a joint predictive distribution: a horizon-specific probability of a boundary breach and, conditional on detection, a distribution of catch-up loss. Under a fixed delay, expected overshoot is $\sigma \sqrt{\delta /2\pi }$, and bad-debt probability is a Gaussian tail governed by the latency-to-margin ratio $\sigma \sqrt{\delta }/m$. Its leverage independence is exact only in the constant-maintenance, fixed-non-price-drain benchmark. For time-weighted-average marks, fixed-time variance reduction does not imply liquidation-time safety. A stationary-downcrossing approximation size-biases the stale error in the adverse direction, producing a mean overshoot about $1.6$ times the same-window fixed-delay value. A rolling comparison with historical simulation scores model-consistent margin-breach forecasts from public price and funding paths. The structural forecast has lower Brier scores at $10\times$ over 24-, 72- and 168-hour horizons and across the 24-hour grid, but historical simulation performs better for one-week forecasts at $20\times$ and $50\times$. The evidence supports a conditional risk-forecasting use of the framework, while not establishing uniform forecast dominance. Full article

Emerging technology cultivation is formulated as a finite-time stochastic reachability problem under a budget-simplex constraint. Novelty potential, implementation feasibility, and industrial embeddedness form a three-state cascade Itô system, and success requires their joint entrance into a target set before a fixed horizon. The analysis establishes positive invariance, a unique globally attractive deterministic equilibrium, and an explicit asymptotic budget boundary whose minimum occurs at the maximizer of the knowledge-distance kernel. For specified constant-allocation rules, projected Euler–Maruyama simulation provides rule-specific node-monitoring probabilities and budget thresholds. A repeated finite-candidate sample-average approximation with independent candidate-generation, selection, and validation samples assesses the additional gain from adaptive candidate selection. The numerical results show that the deterministic grid-search rule reaches prescribed probability levels at lower intervention rates than balanced allocation, while the repeated SAA procedure yields further gains in the tested transition region. Finite-time success therefore depends on both the total budget rate and its allocation across cascade-dependent channels. Full article

The outermost region of the Solar System is called the Oort cloud, which is the Solar System’s reservoir of long-period comets that extends to distances up to 200,000 au from the Sun. Long-period comets can be injected towards the inner Solar System due to galactic tides and passing stars. While galactic tides are effective on long time scales, perturbations of stellar flybys are short-term effects that have not only occurred in the past. Gaia observations confirmed that the Solar System will experience a close flyby of the K-type star Gliese 710 in about 1.29 million years. This star will probably pass at a distance of about 10,500 au to the Sun. When crossing the Oort cloud, this 0.6 solar mass star will perturb the long-period comets, especially those objects that are close to Gliese 710’s trajectory. In this numerical investigation, we use our recently developed GPU-based N-body code GANBISS and study the orbits of 100 million test-comets for the time when the star enters the Oort cloud until its closest approach to the Sun, which takes about 32,000 years. The simulations show that the stellar passage generates cometary streams, which either transport comets into the inner Solar System or scatter a huge number of comets into interstellar space. Of the 100 million comets, about one third were scattered into interstellar space, and only 63,453 comets were directed toward the Sun, of which 1662 entered the inner Solar System within 2 au. Comet streams into this region would be possible over a period of 45 million years. After Gliese 710’s flyby, we investigated the influence of giant planets. This showed that the giant planets protect us from massive comet stremas. The first comet with a perihelion distance close to the Earth’s orbit will take about 1.505 million years to reach its perihelion after Gliese 710’s flyby. Full article

Polypropylene (PP) fiber-reinforced soil slopes undergo progressive resistance degradation under wet–dry cycling (WDC), while stochastic seismic loading introduces additional uncertainty, challenging deterministic seismic assessment. This study develops a time-dependent seismic reliability framework integrating the probability density evolution method and the equivalent extreme value event method. The cohesion and internal friction angle of unreinforced soil measured at different WDC states are represented as cross-correlated lognormal random fields and combined with random fiber configurations and weighted nonstationary stochastic ground motions in a nonlinear dynamic model. The main contribution is a unified uncertainty-propagation scheme that incorporates experimentally characterized WDC degradation and multiple uncertainty sources into the evolution of response probability and multilevel first-passage reliability. With increasing WDC number and PGA, the extreme displacement distributions shift toward larger values, accompanied by increased response dispersion, tail risk, and reliability loss. The reliability evolution exhibits three stages, namely initial stability, rapid degradation, and residual convergence, during the 70 s excitation. PP fiber reinforcement improves reliability, although the marginal gain becomes limited when the fiber content exceeds 0.15% under the present numerical conditions. The proposed framework provides a probabilistic basis for the seismic assessment and deformation control of PP fiber-reinforced soil slopes at different WDC degradation states. Full article

This paper presents an application and validation case for the recently obtained variational principle of a shock stationed in a duct. The streamline curvature method for the circumferentially averaged through-flow and blading design inverse problem remains fundamentally used in current axial compressor design systems and is indispensable as the generator of multi-stage blade coordinates. However, this method inherently smoothens flow discontinuities and thus, to date, cannot provide the stage stall margin, the key performance indicator most critical in the adjustment of high-loading stages, requiring instead a time-consuming CFD validation afterward. Leveraging the variational principle for shock stationarity, this paper acquires a method to show efficiently the stage stall margin by visualizing rotor passage shock rapidly. In the general coaxial rotating relative motion, by modeling the transonic streamlines as a set of layered quasi-one-dimensional duct flows, a variational principle of flow impulse potential energy for the stationary normal shock is derived. It is found that the factors governing the stationarity and location of the normal shock in relative motion include the variable cross-sectional area, the frictional and other on-way losses, and the variable rotational radius of the duct flow. In the applications to transonic rotor cascades, the frictional and other on-way losses are prescribed. First, the discontinuous entropy generation distributions along the cascades of each transonic layer are set to consider the boundary layer, oblique shock, normal passage shock, shock–boundary layer interference, and trailing edge losses. Second, with the total streamline loss fixed by the through-flow design, all shock locations possessing positional stability are determined via the variational principle for each streamline. Third, by comparing with CFD direct problem resu lts, a dimensionless rule governing the actual entropy generation distribution along the layer cascades is established. In three kinds of design cases of axial compressor stage, this method yields consistently 3D curved-surface structures of passage shock that agree well with CFD direct problem solutions, demonstrating its effectiveness and a certain applicability. Full article

Siphon vertical axial-flow pump systems are widely used in large-scale low-head pumping stations, irrigation and drainage projects, urban flood control, and water diversion engineering, where safe and stable operation is essential for hydraulic system reliability. Compared with steady operating conditions, the startup process involves rapid variations in impeller speed, flow rate, pressure distribution and hydraulic energy transfer, resulting in highly transient hydraulic behavior and obvious instability in the internal flow field. To clarify the transient hydraulic response of a siphon vertical axial-flow pump system during startup, an unsteady numerical model was established by coupling the impeller speed control equation with a dynamic boundary condition implemented through a user-defined function. The time-dependent evolution of flow rate, head, blade loading, pressure distribution, internal flow pattern and energy conversion characteristics was then investigated during the whole startup process. The results show that the pump system undergoes a distinct transition from an initially unstable flow state to a quasi-steady operating condition. At the early startup stage, the flow passage is not fully established, and the pump operates under a low-flow transient condition, leading to strong flow disorder, uneven blade loading and a sharp fluctuation in head. With the increase in rotational speed and flow rate, the internal flow gradually becomes organized, the pressure distribution on the blade surface tends to be more uniform, and the hydraulic energy transfer process becomes progressively stable. The pump head first exhibits an abnormal transient peak, then decreases rapidly, and finally recovers to a stable value as the flow field is fully established. The study reveals the transient evolution mechanism of hydraulic performance and energy conversion during startup, providing a theoretical basis for improving startup control strategy and operational stability of siphon vertical axial-flow pump systems. Full article

Single-stage submersible pumps have widespread applications in industry. A special casing used to efficiently cool an electric motor with pumped liquid in such pumps leads to lower efficiency. This factor negatively affects the mass and dimension parameters of pump units. The efficiency can be essentially increased through impeller and casing optimization. When used in pumps, such parts with complex geometry can be manufactured in small bulk at a low price and in a short time using AM methods with different technologies and materials. Therefore, the objective of this research was to design a numerical optimization methodology to improve pump unit efficiency and to compare experimental characteristics during AM of impellers and vaned diffusers from non-metallic and metallic materials for the original and optimized flow passage. This article examined the impact of the vaned diffusers on the flow structure in the casing. The first optimization stage included studying the correlation between the input parameters and the objective function. The parameters that had the greatest impact on the hydraulic efficiency of the pump were revealed. The second optimization stage included studying the effect of the number of calculation points on the objective function using the LHS method. The global maximum of the pump's hydraulic efficiency was determined. The third optimization stage included studying direct methods for searching for the local maximum of the objective function. The best calculation point with the highest hydraulic efficiency for the pump was revealed. Recommendations regarding 3D printing for BJ and FDM technologies for AM of impellers and vaned diffusers were provided. The results of these studies revealed that velocity and flow swirl reduction in the casing increased the experimental efficiency of the pump unit by 5% at the nominal flow rate. The CFD characteristics are consistent with the experimental data. The experimental characteristics also revealed good correlation. Full article

A study was performed on the electromagnetic response of the geological medium during the propagation of Rayleigh waves from the 2025 Kamchatka earthquakes (M8.8–7.4) at an epicentral distance of approximately 6000 km. The identities of the coseismic telluric current variations and the propagating Rayleigh wave have been revealed, with their power spectra exhibiting a pronounced quasi-line structure with dominant peaks at 0.04 Hz, 0.054 Hz, and 0.064 Hz. The high correlation of the telluric current response with the Rayleigh wave (r = 0.906, M8.8 and r = 0.83, M7.8) allowed the seismoelectric effect of the second kind to be considered the dominant mechanism for disturbance generation. Electromagnetic signals recorded by the IMS-008 induction sensor showed a lower correlation (r = 0.682), which may be attributed to the shaking of the induction sensor during the passage of the Rayleigh wave, though this does not preclude the presence of a true coseismic signal. Coseismic effects were recorded during the M7.8 and M8.8 earthquakes, but were absent during the M7.4 events. For the first time for the Northern Tien Shan region (at teleseismic distances of approximately 6000 km), key regularities in the generation of the seismoelectric effect during Rayleigh wave propagation have been identified. It is shown that the telluric current response is characterized by a threshold sensitivity to the event magnitude, with the magnitude of induced current variations strictly consistent with the intensity of the seismic wave’s dynamic impact. Utilizing telluric currents as a physical reference for the precise determination of Rayleigh wave arrival times allowed for the refinement of the Rayleigh wave group velocity (3.078–3.093 km/s), reducing calculation uncertainty to 0.5%. Full article

Lake Baikal is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the largest freshwater reservoir on the planet. It is located in the center of Eurasia, in an industrially developing region—Eastern Siberia. Although a regulatory and legal framework exists, quantitative estimates of the pathways of pollutant transport from industrial sources to the lake water area remain insufficiently studied, particularly in the context of seasonal dynamics and the influence of developing industrial sectors. In the present work, a quantitative analysis of the direct atmospheric transport of pollutants from three groups of stationary sources (the Irkutsk agglomeration, the Republic of Buryatia, and the oil-and-gas production areas of Irkutsk Oblast) to the lake surface was carried out for the first time using the HYSPLIT model for the period 2005–2025. About 4.7 million forward trajectories were computed at three heights (250, 500, 1000 m AGL) for each group of sources. It was established that conditions favorable for the transport of impurities to the lake occur in more than half of the cases. However, the spatial distribution of the impact on the Baikal air basin is heterogeneous: the Irkutsk agglomeration accounts for 67.5% of the “hits” (the main contribution being to the air basin of the Southern Basin), the Republic of Buryatia 18.8% (to the Central Basin), and the oil-and-gas areas 19.9% (to the Northern Basin). On the basis of a multifactor analysis, a combined Potential Impact (PI) index was developed that makes it possible to rank regional sources by the degree of their impact on the lake ecosystem, taking into account the emission volume, the probability of delivery, the residence time, and the height of trajectory passage. The results form a scientific basis for optimizing the spatial placement of environmental monitoring networks and for preliminary zoning of environmental risk assessment over the Lake Baikal water area. Ultimately, this study contributes to the sustainable management of the Baikal Natural Territory by providing actionable insights for balancing regional industrial growth with the long-term ecological preservation of the planet’s largest freshwater reservoir. Full article

To address the issues of low degradation efficiency in anaerobic bacteria targeting microcystin-LR (MC-LR) and the limitations of traditional genetic modification methods, this study applied ARTP mutagenesis technology for the first time to genetically engineer anaerobic MC-LR-degrading bacteria using the Citrobacter sp. D03 isolated from Lake Taihu sediments as the parental strain. Through three rounds of ARTP-induced mutagenesis and directed screening, a highly efficient mutant, C29, was obtained. The results indicate that the optimal mutagenesis conditions are 60 s, with a lethality rate of 90.15%; the anaerobic degradation efficiency of MC-LR by mutant strain C29 was 14% higher than that of the wild-type strain, and the genetic efficiency remained stable after consecutive passages. Whole-genome resequencing of the new strain C29 revealed 10 mutation sites, involving key genes such as toxD, cheA, murI, and mobB. qRT-PCR validation showed that the expression of genes related to sulfur metabolism, cell wall synthesis, molybdenum cofactor synthesis, and environmental adaptation was significantly upregulated. The study confirms that ARTP mutagenesis can effectively enhance the degradation capacity of anaerobic degrading bacteria toward MC-LR through polygenic synergistic regulation, providing both microbial resources and a theoretical basis for in situ anaerobic bioremediation of MC-LR pollution in eutrophic water bodies. Full article

The thrust of this article is to examine three key manifestations of the criteria for identifying and evaluating the status of a prophet in Jewish polemic. The first is a survey and analysis of the use by medieval Jewish and Christian polemicists of the Deuteronomic verses, setting forth these criteria with the objective of demonstrating or disproving the messianic status of Jesus. The second is the Jewish affirmation of the primacy of Mosaic prophecy, with its implications for the doctrine that the Torah will never be superseded. Here there are consequences for polemic with both Christians and Muslims. This discussion will lead us to examine the Jewish affirmation that Moses is unique as the sole prophet of Torah with primary attention to a problem that has elicited much discussion among scholars of medieval Jewish philosophy. How is it that Gersonides (1288–1344), who denied that God knows particulars, including specific human beings, was able to affirm without qualification that no prophet other than Moses would be able to achieve the status of Torah prophet? In this context, we shall be impelled to raise questions about the parameters of Gersonides’ basic position regarding divine responsiveness or non-responsiveness to human stimuli and the degree to which exegetical and theological pressures might have led him to deviate from it. In light of his uncompromising position affirming the uniqueness of Moses as a Torah prophet, we shall also have to address his atypical and apparently problematic understanding of what is arguably the most important Biblical passage in the medieval Jewish-Christian debate. Christians maintained that the so-called suffering servant in Isaiah 52:13–53:12 is the Messiah and that the description there accords perfectly with his redemptive mission. Most medieval Jews, especially in Christian Europe, responded to the Christian reading by identifying the serv-ant as the prophet, another prophet, or, most commonly, the Jewish collective. Maimonides, who lived in a Muslim environment, does use the terminology of Isaiah 52:13 in describing the Messiah; Gersonides who lived among Christians, not only does the same but, unlike Maimonides, asserts that he will be a prophet superior to Moses. Nonetheless, despite this apparently disconcerting acceptance of a position congenial to a Christian understanding, he manages to define the nature of that superiority in a manner fully consistent with the affirmation that Moses is the only possible Torah prophet and even to present it as a reason for the non-Jewish nations to abandon their faiths. Finally, we move to a contemporary development where the criteria for prophecy are invoked in a polemical context, this time that of an intrafaith polemic. Here the purported prophetic status of a messianic figure becomes a central element of the primary evidence that he is the Messiah. The belief of many, almost certainly most, Lubavitch hasidim affirms the messianic identity of the deceased Rebbe. This belief has generated an internal Jewish polemic with echoes of a key element in the historic Jewish–Christian debate. All Jewish believers in a Messianic figure, especially after Maimonides declared that the Messiah will be second only to Moses as a prophet, ascribed prophetic status to their Messiah. However, that status was not a key factor in the evidence that they cited to prove that he was in fact the Messiah. Shabbetai Zevi’s Messiahship was validated by prophecy, but the prophecy was not that of the Messiah himself. Rather, it was an explicit revelation to Nathan of Gaza, whose prophetic credentials were verified through other means, that named Shabbetai Zevi as the redeemer. Lubavitch messianists, on the other hand, have made the Rebbe’s prophetic standing the fundamental component of the proof that he is the Messiah and of the argument that Jewish law requires one to believe this. In their view, he identified himself as a prophet, issued prophecies during the Gulf War that were fulfilled, and affirmed in his capacity as a prophet that he is the Messiah. Since it is a religious obligation (a mitzvah) to accept the words of a prophet, the conclusion that he must be recognized as the Messiah follows inexorably. Full article