Search Results (6,223)

Cnidium monnieri (L.) Cusson (Apiaceae) is a well-known insectary plant in farmlands. Its vegetative and flowering stages can promote the migration of natural enemies. However, the arrival of natural enemies in crop fields often lags behind the establishment of pest populations. As gibberellin can accelerate plant growth and flowering, we investigated whether gibberellin treatment could advance the recruitment of natural enemies by altering the phenology of C. monnieri. Field experiments were conducted in 2021 and 2022 to evaluate the effects of different gibberellin concentrations on plant phenology, growth traits, and natural-enemy abundance. For field validation, C. monnieri strips established in wheat fields were treated with water or 50 mg/L gibberellin. The 50 mg/L treatment advanced the onset of flowering by 21 days and the first detection of natural enemies on C. monnieri by 14 days in 2021 and 20 days in 2022. It also significantly increased natural-enemy abundance on C. monnieri in 2022. In wheat fields, the same treatment resulted in earlier detection and significantly greater abundance of natural enemies in 2022. The earlier detection of natural enemies was temporally consistent with the advancement of flowering. These findings indicate that manipulating the flowering phenology of insectary plants may improve the timing of natural-enemy establishment and strengthen conservation biological control. Full article

Germanium is a critical rare-dispersed metal with irreplaceable applications in infrared optics, fiber-optic communications, and semiconductor industries, making its efficient recovery from secondary resources of great strategic importance. This study investigates the selective recovery of germanium from complex zinc smelting leachates using a novel hydroxamic acid extractant, BGYW, in synergistic combination with P204. The feed solution contained approximately 360 mg/L Ge, 10,790 mg/L Fe²⁺, and 98,530 mg/L Zn, representing a highly complex matrix. Continuous counter-current extraction was performed in a 30-stage miniature mixer-settler. Under optimized conditions of 10% BGYW + 5% P204 in white oil, an O/A ratio of 1:1, and 8 mol/L NH₄F as strippant, the single-stage germanium extraction efficiency reached 99.4%. Over 16 consecutive cycles, the extraction system maintained stable performance with average germanium extraction above 99%. A 3-stage scrubbing section using 50 g/L H₂SO₄ effectively removed co-extracted Zn, Cu, and Al impurities. Iron co-extraction, a major challenge, was successfully mitigated through a 2–3 stage iron scrubbing step using a chloride-containing scrubbing solution, which reduced the iron concentration in the strip liquor from approximately 600 mg/L to below 4 mg/L, and decreased the Fe/Ge mass ratio from 0.197 to below 0.01. The overall germanium recovery across the entire 30-stage continuous process reached 98.82%, and the dissolution loss of BGYW in the aqueous phase was reduced by over 85% compared to the conventional YW100 extractant. Third-phase formation caused by residual organic flocculants from the leaching step was eliminated through enhanced pre-treatment, while ferric fluoride precipitation in the stripping section was resolved by incorporating the iron scrubbing stage. This study demonstrates that the BGYW-P204 extraction system with the integrated iron scrubbing step offers an efficient, stable, and industrially viable approach for germanium recovery from zinc smelting leachates, providing a practical solution to the long-standing challenge of germanium–iron separation and contributing to the sustainable supply of this critical metal. Full article

Accurate shank-length phenotyping of live chickens is hindered by feather occlusion and uncertain endpoint localization in visible images. We developed a two-stage method that fuses registered visible and infrared images before predicting the two measurement endpoints. The fusion network used a U-Net encoder–decoder with residual blocks, Coordinate Attention, and Strip Pooling, trained with a YUV-guided loss. A YOLOv8s-Pose model with Coordinate Attention and a length-related loss then localized the endpoints. The dataset comprised 100 chickens and 1000 paired visible–infrared acquisitions, separated at the individual level into training, validation, and test sets. On the test set, at the chicken level, the reported mean signed difference, mean absolute error, and root mean square error were 0.129 mm, 0.790 mm, and 0.984 mm, respectively. The Pearson correlation coefficient between model-derived and manual reference measurements was 0.992. Compared with either single-modality input, the fused images reduced the mean absolute error and root mean square error. These findings show that complementary texture and thermal-boundary information can support accurate vision-based shank-length measurement under controlled acquisition conditions. Full article

Industrial steel property prediction is often constrained by limited labelled data, reducing the effectiveness of conventional machine learning models. This study investigated whether metallurgy-informed feature engineering enhances predictive performance under small-data conditions. A representative set of 300 samples from an industrial low-carbon hot-rolled steel strip dataset (C: 0.02–0.06 wt%; Mn: 0.17–0.38 wt%) was used to derive five physically meaningful descriptors: carbon equivalent (CE), nitrogen-to-aluminum ratio (N/Al), microalloying efficiency index (MEI), thermal processing parameter (TPP), and solid solution strengthening index (SSSI). These descriptors were combined with the original 17 compositional and processing variables to create a 22-feature dataset. Random Forest (RF) and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) models were evaluated on an independent 60-sample test set using 5-fold cross-validation. Feature engineering improved the prediction accuracy, with the greatest gain observed for elongation. For XGBoost, the mean percentage error decreased from 3.23% to 3.05%, whereas the test-set R² increased from 0.4935 to 0.5444, representing a 10.3% improvement in the explained variance. For the yield strength, the Random Forest method increased the R² from 0.4744 to 0.4861. Permutation importance and partial dependence analyses identified MEI and TPP as the six most influential predictors across all targets, confirming that the engineered descriptors provide complementary metallurgical information. Learning curve analysis showed slightly higher cross-validation R² values at intermediate training sizes (n = 125–175), indicating modestly improved sample efficiency. These findings establish domain-informed feature engineering as an interpretable and practical strategy for improving machine learning in data-limited steel manufacturing processes. Full article

Underground coal mining can induce deformation and failure of overlying strata and ground surface, which seriously endangers the safety of human life and property. During mining, the immediate roof rock successively experiences initial caving (fixed support on four sides) and periodic caving (fixed support on three sides and free on one side). Different boundary conditions alter the unloading and deformation processes such as cracking and fracturing of immediate roof rock, thereby affecting its subsequent mechanical behavior of compaction and deformation, and resulting in differences in the movement law of overlying strata. In this paper, the numerical simulation method is adopted to investigate the variation laws of unloading and fracturing characteristics of immediate roof rock under initial caving and periodic caving with thickness-width ratio (t/w), length-width ratio (l/w), unloading stress (σ_u) and specimen strength (σ_c), and the corresponding action mechanism is revealed. The fractal evolution law of fractured immediate roof rock obtained from this study can quantitatively evaluate the compaction characteristics of caved rock, provide refined parameter support for surface subsidence prediction and possess guiding significance for stope surrounding rock control engineering. The results show that the fragments formed after the failure of immediate roof rock are mainly block-strip shaped under both first caving and periodic caving conditions. With the increase in the thickness-width ratio, the flexural rigidity of immediate roof rock increases and crack propagation is restrained, so that the particle-size–mass fractal dimension of fragments increases first and then decreases for the two caving modes. The increase in length-width ratio weakens the propagation of secondary fractures and raises the particle size of fragments, while the overall variation in particle-size–mass fractal dimension is small under the two working conditions. As the unloading stress continuously rises, the coupled tension-shear effect inside the rock gradually intensifies, and the failure mode changes from tension-shear failure to global shear failure. Accordingly, both the particle-size–mass fractal dimension and fractal dimension of crack distribution increase first and then decrease under first caving and periodic caving conditions. The increase in the strength of immediate roof rock raises the energy consumption during rock failure, and large-size fragments are more likely to be generated, which reduces the particle-size–mass fractal dimension and increases the particle size of fragments under both caving modes. Meanwhile, internal micro-fractures continuously initiate and propagate with the growth of rock strength. For specimens with relatively high strength, crack propagation is inhibited and the development of secondary fractures is weakened, leading to an evolution trend that the fractal dimension of crack distribution increases first and then decreases. Under identical parameter conditions, the particle-size distribution and crack complexity for first caving are mainly affected by geometric parameters; the particle size of fragments is primarily controlled by specimen strength; and the unloading stress threshold governs the transition of failure mode. For periodic caving, the crack-initiation location is first determined by asymmetric boundary constraints. The thickness-width ratio dominates the particle-size distribution of fragments, and unloading stress as well as specimen strength further regulate the complexity of cracks. Full article

Rail light-strip morphology reflects the wheel-rail contact condition. Reliable automatic analysis remains difficult. The strip is narrow and has weak boundaries, while specular reflection, rail-head texture and trackside background interfere with color inspection images. This study proposes a segmentation-guided geometric method for rail light-strip abnormality analysis. An improved SegFormer jointly segments the background, rail-head and light-strip regions. A boundary detail enhancement module refines weak rail-head and light-strip contours. Focal Loss emphasizes minority and hard boundary pixels. The rail-head mask provides the geometric reference for extracting the light-strip centerline, eccentricity, width sequence and connected-component morphology. The predicted masks are ordered using the corrected mileage record. Every 1000 original-resolution rows then form a consecutive 1 m detection unit. When a geometric rule is triggered, the method reports that unit’s 1 m mileage interval together with its eccentricity, width-change or local-integrity measurement. The model achieves 95.67% mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) on 3520 annotated images. It detects 845 of 876 positive units, with 96.46% recall, 89.23% precision and 92.70% F1-score. The resulting records identify abnormal 1 m mileage intervals and report the corresponding eccentricity, width-change, or local-integrity measurements for targeted manual review. Full article

To meet the requirements of differentiated pesticide application between soybean and maize strips in soybean–maize strip intercropping systems, this study developed a strip-specific variable-rate spraying system based on real-time prescription map interpretation and spatiotemporal nozzle matching with delay compensation. A simulated prescription map with predefined application-rate levels was generated using ArcMap and converted into a binary data structure suitable for embedded-controller access. Based on high-precision RTK-BDS positioning information, a local field coordinate transformation model was established and combined with SRAM-based memory preloading to achieve rapid prescription matrix addressing. To reduce boundary misalignment caused by positioning offset, actuator response lag, and hydraulic delay during dynamic field operations, a nozzle spatial position prediction model and a forward delay-compensation control algorithm were developed. Results from the strip-specific variable-rate spraying tests based on the simulated prescription map showed that, under the tested conditions, the mean boundary offset decreased from 0.69 m to 0.29 m after delay compensation. The mean flow-rate control accuracy for both soybean and maize strips exceeded 95% across different application-rate levels, while the coefficients of variation of flow rate were below 6%. These results indicate that, under the tested conditions, the developed system was able to perform real-time prescription map interpretation, target application-rate matching, and strip-specific variable-rate control, demonstrating its technical feasibility for variable-rate spraying in soybean–maize strip intercropping. Full article

Recovering nitrogen from wastewater is vital for a circular economy, yet conventional air stripping is limited by aerodynamic backpressure and CO₂-induced pH drops. This study evaluates a novel pilot-scale engineering approach for municipal reject water, integrating chemical phosphorus precipitation with a fundamentally redesigned ammonia stripping column. Upstream calcium hydroxide dosing achieved >99.9% phosphorus recovery and spontaneously alkalized the effluent (pH > 12.1), eliminating supplementary caustic addition. The downstream stripping column utilized negative-pressure (vacuum) operation and high-pressure liquid atomization to maximize mass transfer while preventing flooding and alkalinity neutralization. Comprehensive on-site testing established a clear mathematical relationship between aerodynamics and efficiency. Results demonstrate that high-efficiency recovery requires gas-to-liquid (G/L) ratios exceeding 70:1, a threshold uniquely unlocked by this negative-pressure design. Under optimal conditions, the continuous-flow system achieved 87.6% ammonia removal. A low-resistance acid scrubber captured ~100% of the volatilized ammonia (exhaust 0–1 ppm), producing a concentrated ammonium sulfate bio-fertilizer. This integrated technology provides a scalable, applied engineering blueprint for advancing sustainable Water Resource Recovery Facilities. Full article

Access to clean drinking water is one of the main factors influencing public health during humanitarian crises. In the northern districts of the Gaza Strip, long-term warfare and mass migration caused serious damage to the water supply system, cutting off access to drinking water, limiting the availability of fuel and chemicals used for water chlorination, and increasing reliance on intermittent networks and water transportation services. The present study is a descriptive cross-sectional study of water quality and health risks in 11 emergency camps. Water samples were collected from supply points, communal tanks, and household storage containers and analyzed for key physicochemical indicators (pH, turbidity, electrical conductivity/total dissolved solids, residual free chlorine) and microbiological contamination (E. coli and fecal coliforms). Household surveys documented transport and storage practices, perceived service adequacy, and recent gastrointestinal illness. Overall, 35% of samples exceeded WHO microbiological limits; E. coli was detected in 28% of household containers and 24% of distribution tanks. Residual chlorine was <0.5 mg/L in 40% of samples and turbidity exceeded guidance in 18%. Forty-five percent of households reported transferring water using open/uncovered containers, and 42% reported gastrointestinal illness in the previous month, with higher reporting in sites showing microbial contamination. The results suggest that there are significant weaknesses in the source-to-point-of-use system during emergencies. The priority actions we recommend are, restoring residual disinfection; strengthening monitoring at important control points; improving hygienic transport and covered storage; and providing backup fuel and treatment supplies to minimize the risk of waterborne diseases in shelters in North Gaza. Full article

Soft-ground finite-element analyses commonly reduce curved Oedometer compression to one constant slope, obscuring where stress-level curvature affects boundary-value predictions. AJOP-T embeds the differentiable Arc Joint via Optimum Parameters map in continuous teardrop bounding-surface plasticity while retaining the inherited yield geometry, non-associated flow, radial mapping and SMP-transformed stress. High-order denotes only the map’s derivative hierarchy: its first two derivatives define tangent hardening and hardening curvature, not gradient, fractional, nonlocal or rate order. This first-phase formulation is deliberately rate-independent and retains constant κ to isolate compression-map hardening; time-dependent and nonlinear cyclic swelling responses are outside its claims. The formulation recovers constant-slope hardening asymptotically, yields a closed-form admissibility boundary, is invariant under SMP, and recovers the parent isotropic normally consolidated settlement equation. Four natural-clay compression maps were fitted; triaxial evidence is fitted for comparison except for one held-out Eastern Osaka extension path. Three implementations agree to at least five significant figures. Paired undrained strip-footing analyses reduce centre settlement by 31.8% in the curved regime but only 0.27% near the high-stress asymptote. A predicted 1.6% low-stress strength-ratio drift is below the reviewed data scatter and is not claimed as experimentally validated. Full article

High-resolution remote sensing stereo matching is challenging due to heavy computation and the difficulty of handling textureless areas, repetitive structures, and occlusions. To tackle these issues, we design BDNet (Balancing Dual-path Network)—a stereo matching network that seeks a reasonable trade-off between accuracy and efficiency for remote sensing applications. In the feature extraction stage, BDNet adopts progressive dilation with rates 5, 4, and 3, together with a decoupled multi-scale reduction (DMSR) module, which reduces multi-scale feature channels from 320 to 32. We also introduce a strip attention module to make the network more sensitive to horizontal and vertical structures commonly seen in urban scenes. For cost volume construction, the number of correlation groups is lowered from 40 to 8, in line with the compact 32-channel feature representation. For cost aggregation, a dual-path parallel hourglass architecture is designed, which preserves fine details through a high-resolution path while capturing global context through a low-resolution path. An attention-guided fusion module adaptively integrates features from both paths, improving accuracy in challenging regions such as textureless areas and disparity discontinuities. Experiments on the US3D and WHU-Stereo datasets demonstrate that BDNet achieves the best accuracy among the selected baseline methods on US3D, with D1 errors of 16.05% on Jacksonville and 11.84% on Omaha. It requires only 1.43 M parameters and 125.43 G FLOPs, achieving a favorable balance between accuracy and efficiency. Zero-shot generalization experiments on Omaha and WHU-Stereo further suggest the model’s potential for cross-domain adaptation to different satellite sensors and urban scenes. Full article

A flexible integrated composite electrode is fabricated using NiV-layered double hydroxide (NiV-LDH) nanosheets grown perpendicularly onto a Ti₃C₂T_x MXene-incorporated carbon nanofiber scaffold (MXene/CNFs). This hybrid structure, prepared by electrospinning and a hydrothermal treatment, is referred to as NiV-LDH@MXene/CNFs. Constructed from a conductive MXene/CNF scaffold and vertically aligned NiV-LDH nanosheets, the integrated flexible electrode offers uninterrupted electron transport, good flexibility, abundant active sites, and strong interfacial cohesion, thereby obviating the use of polymeric binders and conductive additives. The hydrophilic nature of MXene and the three-dimensionally interconnected porous structure favor rapid electrolyte uptake and ion diffusion. As a result of these synergistic effects, the composite exhibits a specific capacitance of 614 F g⁻¹ at 1 A g⁻¹ and retains 60% of its initial capacitance after 10,000 cycles at 5 A g⁻¹ in a three-electrode cell. An asymmetric supercapacitor made of this material and activated carbon achieves 68.75% capacitance retention under the same cycling protocol at 5 A g⁻¹ and shows a stable open-circuit voltage of 1.37 V. Two cells in series are capable of lighting a 3 V LED strip. Overall, this work validates an effective strategy to prepare high-capacity, robust, and binder-free flexible electrodes for advanced energy-storage applications. Full article

This article presents an experimental investigation into the mechanical properties of new laminated bamboo and bamboo–timber hybrid composite materials for construction. A total of thirty-six bamboo and bamboo–timber hybrid composite specimens were manufactured, which include a new configuration that integrates bamboo and pine strips in hybrid bamboo–timber composite members. An interleaved configuration of the hybrid bamboo–timber composites is proposed to enhance stress transfer and interfacial bonding. Such a design can mitigate global hygroscopic and thermal mismatch effects, including composites panel warping and continuous interfacial shear, through redistributing differential strains into small, localized scales. To minimize manufacturing energy demand, cold hydraulic pressing was used to prepare the specimens with bio-epoxy and polyvinyl acetate adhesives (PVAs). The list of experimental tests includes compression parallel to the grain, compression perpendicular to the grain, and flexure. The experimental results revealed that the developed bamboo and bamboo–timber composites outperform the reference materials consisting of commercial engineered bamboo and natural softwood. In particular, the average modulus of elasticity of the hybrid specimens bonded with bio-epoxy adhesive reaches 11.6 GPa (CoV = 13.8%), which is 40 percent greater than that of the tested commercial engineered bamboo specimens (CoV = 15.7%), emphasizing a stiffer and more reliable engineered bamboo. In the case of flexural testing, the hybrid bamboo–timber specimens reach the highest modulus of elasticity, while the engineered bamboo bio-epoxy test series exhibited a modulus of rupture that was 36% higher than that of the commercial engineered bamboo material with a CoV equal to 8%. Full article

Winter wheat productivity and grain quality are affected by crop rotation and soil tillage, but their combined long-term effects remain insufficiently documented for the conditions of central Poland. A three-year experiment (2020/2021–2022/2023) compared two long-term cropping systems established in 2011, an integrated four-field and an intensive three-field rotation differing in crop sequence, fertilisation and plant-protection intensity, each with conventional mouldboard ploughing (CT), reduced tillage (RT) and strip-till (ST). The intensive system yielded significantly more than the integrated one (7929.3 vs. 6800.2 kg ha⁻¹, +16.6%; p < 0.001), mainly through more grains per spike (41.41 vs. 37.13; p < 0.001). RT gave the highest mean yield (7780.2 kg ha⁻¹), exceeding CT and ST by 8.8% and 8.7% (p < 0.01), respectively. Relative to CT, wet gluten content increased by 5.8% under RT and 5.6% under ST, and the Zeleny sedimentation value increased by 7.9% and 6.4% (p ≤ 0.05); the sedimentation value was also higher in the intensive system (39.88 vs. 37.25 mL; p < 0.001). Starch content and test weight did not differ significantly. Reduced tillage improved productivity, while reduced soil disturbance supported selected quality traits; because the systems differed in several management components, these represent system-level effects. Full article

The continuous joining of aluminum alloys to engineering thermoplastics has emerged as a promising manufacturing path for lightweight hybrid structures, yet the influence of polymers’ mechanical behavior on friction stir joining remains poorly understood. This work investigates the role of melt rheology on the morphology, joining interface, and mechanical strength of dissimilar joints that combine AA6082-T6 with two engineering-grade thermoplastics, Noryl^® GFN2 and SustaPEEK^®. Two joining strategies were assessed under identical processing conditions: conventional friction stir joining (FSJ) and through-slot friction stir joining (TS-FSJ), the latter incorporating thin titanium strips intended to reduce heat transfer to the polymer. Joint morphology was assessed by optical and scanning electron microscopy, mechanical performance was evaluated through quasi-static tensile-shear testing, and the rheological behavior of both polymers was characterized by steady shear and oscillatory measurements. Conventional FSJ produced defect-free aluminum–Noryl joints, with a mechanical strength of 111.3 ± 8.4 kN/m, whereas aluminum–PEEK joints exhibited localized polymer overflow, poor surface finish and scattered strength performance of 116.7 ± 77.2 kN/m. Rheological measurements showed that PEEK exhibited higher melt viscosity and viscoelastic moduli, restricting polymer flow and promoting unstable interface formation. Although titanium inserts reduced heat transfer in TS-FSJ, their deformation reduced the effective joining area, resulting in lower tensile strength. Polymer rheology was identified as one of the key factors governing material flow, defect formation, process stability, and the joints’ mechanical performance, emphasizing the importance of tailoring the processing parameters reflecting the rheological characteristics of each polymeric base material. Full article