Basic interactions of Aspergillus niger with Se(IV)

Filamentous fungus Aspergillus niger is commonly found on decaying vegetation or in indoor environment and has a number of uses, including application in bioremediation. Hence, the basic interactions of this common mould with selenite were studied, including biovolatilization, bioaccumulation and toxicity effects of selenite on fungal growth. The fungal strain, originally isolated from noncontaminated soil, was cultivated under aerobic conditions on liquid cultivation media with concentration of Se(IV) 19 or 27 mg.l-1 during 25 days. The fungal growth in the presence of selenite was not inhibited when compared to control, only the sporulation was reduced. The concentration of Se(IV) in liquid medium decreased rapidly within first ten days to 1 mg.l-1. However, according to results from the 25th day of cultivation, the concentration of total selenium in medium did not change significantly and only negligible amount of selenium (less then 1%) was bioaccumulated. That indicates some biotransformation of selenite into other selenium species. During the cultivation, up to 21% of total amount of selenium was transformed into volatile derivatives (biovolatilization) by filamentous fungus A. niger.

Multiple Generations of Wolframite Mineralization in the Echassieres District (Massif Central, France)

The Echassières district in central France contains complex rare-element ore deposits, whose formation is related to exotic igneous events and several hydrothermal episodes that are not entirely understood to date. Tungsten mineralization consists of three generations of wolframite, characterized by distinct Fe/Mn ratios (8.4; 3.5 and 0.3, for wolframite a, b and c, respectively), formed during three separate hydrothermal episodes related to the Variscan orogeny. Wolframite a occurs in quartz veins of the La Bosse stockwork where it crystallized before the Barrovian metamorphism that affected these veins and the host rock. After metamorphism, before intrusion of the Beauvoir and Colettes granites, wolframite b crystallized in the stockwork during massive topazification. High concentrations of wolframite c occur in the proximal quartz veins in the Mazet area, while only scant amounts are found in the La Bosse stockwork. In both settings, wolframite c precipitated from the fluid responsible for greisen alteration that massively affected the Beauvoir granite. In the La Bosse stockwork, greisen alteration is characterized by hydrothermal topaz that is texturally and chemically distinct from that precipitated during topazification. Supergene alteration responsible for kaolinization of Beauvoir and Colettes granites caused remobilization of a non-negligible amount of tungsten (W) during replacement of wolframite by W-rich goethite in all units of the Echassières district. This model for multiple W mineralizing events is novel and can prove essential in distinguishing potential economic deposits worldwide.

Inventory and mapping the air emissions from transportation activities in Ho Chi Minh city

Ho Chi Minh City plays a role as a leading economic and social center in the South of Vietnam, together with the urbanization, transportation system is being rapidly developing, resulting in an increase in emissions from these activities, and worsen the quality of the city. Therefore in this study, emission inventory for transportation has been conducted using the EMISENS model and then using GIS solfware to distribute the emissions in space in order to have the overall picture of air emissions of this city. The results showed that on-road activites especially from using motorcycles are the major contributer to air emissions in the city. On-road source in general accounting for 88% of NOx, 99% of CO, 79% of SO2, 99% of NMVOC, 88% of PM in total emissions from transportation activities. Key finding in this study is that hahour activities contribute up to 20% of total SOx and 10% of total PM. Other sources of transportation (airport, habour, bus station, rail way) only accounting for negligible amount of emissions Emission maps of transportation showed that central areas (District 1, District 10, District 3 and District 5) reached higer level of emissions than others. In additions, harbours areas as District 2, District 4 and District 7 where Saigon Port and Cat Lat Port are located in suffer the highest emissions of SO2, NOx and Dust.

The evolution of intracluster medium in stellar clusters

Stars in globular clusters lose mass through slow stellar winds that are retained by the stellar cluster and should contribute to build up a non-negligible intracluster medium over time. However, all the observations so far found only a negligible amount of gas in GCs. We propose here to test different mechanisms such as ram-pressure stripping by the motion of the GC in the Galactic halo medium and the inclusion of ionising sources to explain the lack of gas in GCs. We use full 3D hydrodynamical simulations taking into account stellar winds, ionising radiation, radiative heating and radiative pressure. We find that the combined effect of ram-pressure and ionisation are able to explain the negligible amount of gas observed in the core of intermediate-mass and massive GCs.

The Elusive Likely Voter

Political commentators have offered evidence that the “polling misses” of 2016 were caused by a number of factors. This project focuses on one explanation: that likely-voter models—tools used by preelection pollsters to predict which survey respondents are most likely to make up the electorate and, thus, whose responses should be used to calculate election predictions—were flawed. While models employed by different pollsters vary widely, it is difficult to systematically study them because they are often considered part of pollsters’ methodological black box. In this study, we use Cooperative Congressional Election Study surveys since 2008 to build a probabilistic likely-voter model that takes into account not only the stated intentions of respondents to vote, but also other demographic variables that are consistently strong predictors of both turnout and overreporting. This model, which we term the Perry-Gallup and Demographics (PGaD) approach, shows that the bias and error created by likely-voter models can be reduced to a negligible amount. This likely-voter approach uses variables that pollsters already collect for weighting purposes and thus should be relatively easy to implement in future elections.

Variations in Ca-K line profiles and Ca-K line features as a function of latitude and solar cycle during the 20th century

The analysis of the Ca-K line spectra as a function of latitude and integrated over the visible disk obtained during the period of 1989–2011 at the Kodaikanal Solar Tower Telescope shows that the FWHM of the K1 distribution at different latitudes varies by negligible amount at about 60° latitude whereas it varies significantly at other latitudes. Findings, especially the fewer variations in mid-latitude belts as compared to polar regions and complex variation in the shift in the activity around 60° latitude belt, will have important implications on the modeling of solar dynamos. Further, we have generated a uniform set of digitized Ca-K line images by selecting images considering the intensity distribution of the images corrected for the instrumental vignetting for the data obtained at Kodaikanal during the 20th century. Then, we have determined the percentage of plage and network areas by using the intensity and area threshold values.

Extracting Parallel Paragraphs from Common Crawl

Most of the current methods for mining parallel texts from the web assume that web pages of web sites share same structure across languages. We believe that there still exists a non-negligible amount of parallel data spread across sources not satisfying this assumption. We propose an approach based on a combination of bivec (a bilingual extension of word2vec) and locality-sensitive hashing which allows us to efficiently identify pairs of parallel segments located anywhere on pages of a given web domain, regardless their structure. We validate our method on realigning segments from a large parallel corpus. Another experiment with real-world data provided by Common Crawl Foundation confirms that our solution scales to hundreds of terabytes large set of web-crawled data.

INTERNATIONAL TRADE OF COAL IN INDIA: TRENDS, CHALLENGES AND MEASURES FOR ACHIEVING TRADE BALANCE

Coal is one of the most important sources of electricity and energy in Indian economy. India is world’s third largest producer of coal yet it imports coal from different countries to meet its domestic requirement. With negligible amount of exports, it has resulted in trade deficit problems for Indian economy. This paper attempts to examine the burning issue of “International trade of coal in India: trends, challenges and suggestions for Improvement “from different perspectives. Accordingly the existing literature on the subject has been reviewed with topics ranging from coal exports and imports to illegal mining, clean technology and new ways to improve the quality of coal. The objective of the paper is to find reasons for huge imports and low exports of coal with a view to achieve trade balance. To conclude, it can be said that there are many unexplored areas which researchers can take up in future in order to achieve trade balance of coal.