It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, July 26, 2023
Spraying just 12% of the room kills 85% of the mosquitoes
A study in a semi-natural setting finds that targeting just the very bottom of a room’s walls with insecticide will kill most of the mosquitoes, suggesting a cheaper and easier way to treat houses during disease outbreaks. The mosquito Aedes aegypti is a vector for serious diseases, including dengue, chikungunya and Zika. In Asia and Latin America, one approach taken to control mosquitoes that rest inside homes is indoor residual spraying, in which interior walls are coated with a persistent insecticide. However, the large surface area that must be coated makes the approach expensive to implement. Luca Facchinelli and colleagues sought to identify a more precise “kill zone” to make indoor residual spraying cheaper and easier for individual householders to undertake on their own. The authors ran a series of experiments using sticky strips mounted at different wall heights to explore where mosquitoes choose to rest. Most mosquitoes chose to rest near the floor, with most of the insects choosing to perch on the first 20 centimeters of the wall, corresponding to 12.3% of the total wall surface. The hotter the room, the further down the mosquitoes tended to rest, as the lower part of the room is typically cooler. Spraying just in this bottommost zone could kill over 85% of the mosquitoes in the house, according to the author’s estimates—especially if this zone is colored black, as Aedes aegypti are known to prefer to perch on dark surfaces. Individual householders could easily apply insecticidal paint or an insecticide sprayed with a handheld aerosol can to this easily accessible zone, according to the authors.
IMAGE: SWRI ENGINEERS SET UP A DEVELOPMENTAL CHASSIS FOR THE ULTRA-WIDEBAND (UWR) RECEIVER. THE UWR SYSTEM, WHICH CONTAINS POWERFUL SIGNAL ACQUISITION ALGORITHMS, ACHIEVES “CONSTANT STARING” OVER THE ENTIRE ELECTROMAGNETIC WARFARE FREQUENCY RANGE USING A SINGLE PROCESSING CARD, VISIBLE HERE IN THE CENTER, MARKED BY TWO SMALL GREEN LIGHTS.view more
CREDIT: SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE
SAN ANTONIO — July 25, 2023 —The U.S. Air Force awarded Southwest Research Institute a $4.8 million contract to further develop an adaptable, “continuously staring,” next-generation electronic warfare system capable of detecting advanced enemy radar signals. Using cutting-edge algorithms in a congested signal test environment, the system demonstrated more than 99% probability of intercepting signals with no false detections in a USAF verified simulated environment, a software model loaded with enemy radar.
“Eliminating false detections is crucial, as they force the pilot and plane to divert scarce resources to defeat an ‘enemy’ that’s not there,” said SwRI’s Jarrett Holcomb, who is part of the technology development team. “As we strive for the fastest detection rate possible, our algorithms provide unmatched accuracy.”
Staring, rather than scanning, allows more rapid detection of adversarial pulses, enabling faster response and greater protection for U.S. military aircraft. The cost-efficient, digital ultra-wideband receiver (UWR) technology provides near-instant detection of signals across a wider swath of the electromagnetic spectrum, expanding capabilities to jam enemy radar. The UWR system achieves greater instantaneous bandwidth coverage over the entire electromagnetic warfare frequency range, using a single processing card, not a stack of cards required by many systems.
“It is important that the U.S. stays ahead of the advanced and emerging radars of potential combatants, while maintaining the ability to operate in ever-congested radio-frequency environments that contain a wide range of signals, from military radars to cell phones, TV and radio signals,” said SwRI’s Finley Hicks, who is leading the UWR development team. “SwRI’s powerful UWR technology is a long-term defense and intelligence solution, capable of outperforming existing and future enemy radar systems, even as they increase bandwidth, agility and adaptability.”
The UWR system follows the Sensor Open System Architecture (SOSA™) Technical Standard, which means it can easily integrate into legacy and newly developed Open Architecture Weapon systems. Technology aligned to SOSA allows quick and efficient system component updates to support new capabilities without having to replace or redesign the entire system.
“This open-system-based receiver will offer the military an ultra-wideband capability that can be integrated into existing defense systems to improve situational awareness and mission effectiveness,” said Hicks.
Compared to competing systems, the UWR technology improves on size, weight, power and cost (SWaP-C) requirements, delivering an efficient design with fewer components, lower maintenance expenses and a smaller logistical footprint for deployed units.
IMAGE: PROFESSOR MATTHEW SPENKO, SECOND FROM RIGHT, LOOKS AT TEAM WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE’S DRONE, ALONG WITH A MEMBER OF THE XPRIZE ORGANIZING TEAM, IN THE VEST, AND SEVERAL STUDENTS FROM ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. THE ILLINOIS TECH STUDENTS ARE, FROM LEFT, NAIA LUM (MMAE 4TH YEAR), PATRICK GRIDER (MMAE 4TH YEAR), ETHAN JENNSEN (MMAE 3RD YEAR), DAVID CAÑONES BONHAM (MMAE PH.D. STUDENT), PATRICK DUNNE (MMAE 4TH YEAR), AND KHANG PHAM (MMAE 3RD YEAR), LOOKING AWAY FROM CAMERA.view more
CREDIT: CAT KUTZ/XPRIZE
CHICAGO—July 25, 2023—Matthew Spenko, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology, is leading his team, Welcome to the Jungle, into the finals of the prestigious XPRIZE Rainforest competition—a global five-year, $10 million contest designed to enhance our understanding of tropical rainforest ecosystems around the world. Welcome to the Jungle—composed of members from Illinois Tech, Purdue University, Natural State, and the Morton Arboretum—is one of six teams advancing to the finals, which will be held in 2024.
“We are extremely excited to be part of the XPRIZE Rainforest competition finals. The semifinal field trials in Singapore showed us how difficult this challenge is, and we’re ready to implement everything we learned there into our approach for the finals,” says Spenko, whose team was one of 13 semifinalists. “We also got a glimpse at how impressive the competition is and are looking forward to seeing more next year.”
The team’s innovative approach involves delivering and retrieving sensor packages to the rainforest and 3D mapping the rainforest seamlessly using drones. These sensors are designed to identify species, particularly birds, from audio and visual data. Spenko’s partners at Purdue University, led by Professor Jinha Jung, took the lead on aerial surveying to measure vegetation, quantify tree species’ diversity and determine potential sensor deployment locations.
“Working collaboratively, our team has been able to obtain crucial insights about the health and biodiversity of the rainforest,” says Jung, assistant professor of civil engineering and a member of Purdue’s digital forestry initiative. “Our joint efforts illustrate the power of inter-university collaboration in addressing critical environmental challenges.”
Under the guidance of Spenko, the project has been a tremendous opportunity for experiential learning, with about 60 undergraduate students contributing to the project, including six who went to Singapore. “It’s just a lot of fun to be able to work with students on this,” Spenko says. “There’s great satisfaction getting to see the next generation of engineers working on important societal problems.”
The significant student involvement embodies Illinois Tech’s commitment to learning by doing, and Spenko hopes to bring undergraduate students to the finals as well.
“Participation in the XPRIZE Rainforest competition presents an unmatched experiential-learning opportunity for our students,” says Kevin Cassel, interim dean of Armour College of Engineering. “In addition to developing technical solutions in support of the environment, the team is seeing their hard work and innovative thinking recognized on a global platform, which is immensely gratifying and speaks volumes about the quality of engineering education at Illinois Tech, as well as the talent and commitment of our faculty.”
Illinois Tech alumnus Jim Albrecht (FE ’53, M.S. ’55) sponsored Welcome to the Jungle’s airfare and accommodations for the semifinals.
Incentivizing teams to innovate rapid and autonomous technology to expedite the monitoring of biodiversity and data collection, XPRIZE Rainforest aims to allow researchers to gain near real-time insights about the health and well-being of rainforests that can more immediately inform conservation action and policy, support sustainable bioeconomies and empower Indigenous peoples and local communities around the world.
“We cannot effectively protect what we cannot accurately measure and understand,” said Peter Houlihan, Executive Vice President, Biodiversity and Conservation, XPRIZE. “I’m extremely encouraged by the advancements these teams have made to develop new, more rapid ways of measuring biodiversity that can improve conservation efforts worldwide. We look forward to seeing how they further refine their approaches during finals testing.”
The winning team will survey the most biodiversity contained in 100 hectares of tropical rainforest in 24 hours and produce the most impactful real-time insights within 48 hours. Learn more at xprize.org/rainforest.
Dynamic pricing superior to organic waste bans in preventing climate change
Study from UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management suggests grocers that discount food nearing expiration could reduce the amount of food waste that contributes to GHG emissions
IMAGE: ROBERT SANDERS, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF MARKETING AND ANALYTICS AT THE RADY SCHOOL. SANDERS ESTIMATED FOOD WASTE AND INVENTORIES INDIRECTLY USING THE SHELF LIVES, SALES DATA AND PRODUCTION PROCESS KNOWLEDGE GAINED FROM INTERVIEWS WITH GROCERY STORE EMPLOYEES. CREDIT: UC SAN DIEGO'S RADY SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT.view more
CREDIT: UC SAN DIEGO'S RADY SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
While composting and organic waste ban policies are gaining popularity across the United States, a new study from the University of California San Diego’s Rady School of Management finds dynamic pricing could be the most effective way for grocery chains to keep perishables out of landfills, reducing food waste by 21% or more.
During decomposition, organic waste releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Globally, food waste releases up to 10% of worldwide annual greenhouse gas emissions, which has caught the attention of lawmakers working to slow global warming. Last year, California rolled out a residential composting program and the state’s legislature recently introduced a bill to reign in “sell by” dates from manufactures, which prompts consumers to needlessly throw out food.
More than 10 percent of food waste comes from grocery retailers that throw out surplus perishables past their expiration date. The Rady School of Management study, to be published in Marketing Science, evaluates two of the most popular programs targeted at businesses and residents to divert waste from landfills: organic waste bans, which have been introduced in nine U.S. states including California and dynamic pricing, which is more popular outside the U.S.
The organic waste ban in California, for example, requires businesses generating at least two cubic yards of waste to recycle their organic waste by composting or donation. Aside from diverting waste away from landfills, policymakers hope that the higher disposal costs incentivize business to directly reduce waste—rather than just divert it away from landfills—much like a waste tax would do.
Dynamic pricing, on the other hand, spurs retailers to throw less food out to begin with by applying an algorithm that determines when grocery stores should reduce the price of perishables depending on their inventory and expiration date. With dynamic pricing, vendors can change the price of food multiple times a day, compared to static pricing in which products have the same price all day, typically from the moment they arrive on the shelf until they expire.
Dynamic pricing reduces food waste and makes healthy food more affordable
“Oddly enough, fewer than 25% of U.S. grocery retailers offer any kind of dynamic pricing at all, while most hotels and airlines will discount rooms and seats when they have a surplus,” said the paper’s author, Robert Sanders, an assistant professor of marketing and analytics at the Rady School. “However, this research shows that the increased price flexibility of discounting food that is about to expire significantly reduces food waste and increases profit margins among retailers.”
Sanders’ analysis shows that dynamic pricing reduces waste by 21% on average while increasing grocery chains' gross margins by 3%. In contrast, an organic waste ban, even if it increased the cost of sending perishables to a landfill by ten times the amount it does today, reduces waste by only 4% and decreases gross margins about 1%.
“If regulators want to directly reduce grocery-store waste, they should incentivize grocery chains to adopt dynamic pricing over imposing organic waste bans or waste taxes,” Sanders said. “It is also a market-based solution that the retailers themselves could implement.”
An added benefit of dynamic pricing is that it makes perishables, which are less processed and generally healthier, more affordable, slightly benefiting consumers overall. On the other hand, organic waste bans slightly harm consumers by reducing retailers’ inventories, which can lead to stockouts.
Grocers create food waste because it is profitable to do so
The paper’s analysis of dynamic pricing is based on a structural economic model that characterizes a grocery retailer’s behavior, as grocers have to decide how much product to order before they know how much will sell prior to hitting its expiration date. To test the predictions of the model, Sanders used data from the artisanal bread category of Pick ’n Save, a large Midwestern grocery chain.
The dataset includes product prices, quantities, product production costs, shelf lives and consumer arrivals timestamped to the nearest minute. Sanders estimated waste and inventories indirectly using the shelf lives, salesdata and production process knowledge gained from interviews with store employees. Using these data sets, his descriptive analysis shows that the retailer generates high waste because it is profitable to do so: when gross profit margins are higher, the retailer stocks its shelves more fully to make sure it doesn’t miss out on sales, but as a result, waste increases.
Sanders then compared the impacts of dynamic pricing, if it were to be implemented across the Pick ’n Save grocery chain in the bread category, to those of static pricing for the same category in all 97 Pick ’n Save stores with a bakery.
“The results show that if a self-interested, profit-maximizing grocery retailer adopted dynamic pricing, they could end up benefiting its own profits, its customers and society more broadly by changing its prices so that they dynamically reflect the time-varying opportunity costs of perishables,” Sanders said.
The model’s data was then compared to another economic model that assessed the impacts of waste bans for Pick ’n Save’s bread category—if the bans increased the price of sending organic waste to a landfill from the current cost of $32 per ton of organic waste to $320 per ton (equivalent to a tenfold increase in disposal costs).
Sanders increased the cost of disposing waste in the model to explore the relationship between disposal costs and the amount of waste generated.
“I find waste is very inelastic with respect to the disposal cost,” he said. “Even if we dial up the disposal costs tenfold, which is unlikely and on the extreme end, we still don’t see the waste reduction that policymakers might hope for.”
He added,“Of course, waste bans could still be helpful if businesses comply and divert waste from the landfills, but the best and first thing to do is reduce the overall amount of waste generated to begin with. Dynamic pricing would likely lead to much larger reductions in retailer food waste.”
JOURNAL
Marketing Science
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Data/statistical analysis
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
Dynamic Pricing and Organic Waste Bans: A Study of Grocery Retailers' Incentives to Reduce Food Waste
UCF researcher leads $3.3 million project to develop floating offshore wind turbine simulators
The simulation software will improve the design of floating offshore wind turbines and help increase their use as a renewable energy source
ORLANDO, July 25, 2023- A University of Central Florida engineering professor is leading a $3.3 million project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to research floating offshore wind turbines.
“My goal is to model floating offshore wind turbines and use the model to explore design improvements while concurrently investigating new ideas for control and sensing, a concept that is termed Control Co-Design,” says Tuhin Das, the project’s principal investigator and a professor in UCF’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
He is working to build a software that simulates effects of external phenomena, such as waves crashing and changing winds, on the floating platform and the turbine system.
Floating offshore wind turbines are designed to diversify the repertoire of energy resources available in the U.S. and help increase the contribution of renewable energy to power grids whose energy demands are steadily increasing.
Das began the work in 2020 with phase one of the project. His initial funding was $772,000. The researcher’s project recently received a boost with a new $3.3 million grant from ARPA-e to continue the research in phase two for the next three years.
“In phase one, our job was to show the kind of benefits we can bring to the modeling and simulation sector,” Das says. “We showed that our results were at par with industry-accepted models and experimental data.”
Das’ software platform will become a product that can be hosted on a university web page and be licensed or commercialized, he says.
“We want this product to be mature enough so that at the end of the next three years, researchers from the industry and academia would be able to use this for advancing research in wind turbines,” Das says.
To date, very few floating offshore wind-turbine farms are in operation, with the first one located off the coast of Scotland.
Das says he hopes that renewable energy companies can use his software to develop their own technology innovations and create more offshore wind turbines.
The research was proposed in 2019 to develop a simulation software that facilitates concurrent design and control of floating offshore wind turbines, ultimately leading to a wider adoption of this technology.
Das says, since then, the software, which uses acausal modeling as the foundational principle, has had rapid growth and has matured in its predictive capability.
“Acausal modeling takes a declarative approach to modeling governing equations, rather than the conventional approach of using assignment statements,” Das says. “Here, the causality is unspecified and determined only during simulation.”
He says the approach is well-suited for modeling physical systems since the resulting models represent the physical structure of the modeled system closely.
“It leads to better reusability of models as compared to those containing assignment statements,” Das says.
A feature of acausal modeling is bidirectional data flow between the ports of connected component models, he says.
In phase one, Das collaborated with researchers at the University of Maine who have been generating experimental data for the project and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory who have collaborated in validating the software.
Das' team at UCF currently consists of multiple UCF graduate students and one postdoctoral research scholar.
“We are planning to work extremely hard the next few years, with some increase in student involvement, and by involving professionals that are well versed with software development,” Das says.
Das earned his doctorate and master’s degrees, both in mechanical engineering, from Michigan State University. He joined UCF’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, part of the College of Engineering and Computer Science, in 2011.
Writer: Beatriz Nina Ribeiro Oliveira, UCF Office of Research
Why computer security advice is more confusing than it should be
If you find the computer security guidelines you get at work confusing and not very useful, you’re not alone. A new study highlights a key problem with how these guidelines are created, and outlines simple steps that would improve them – and probably make your computer safer.
At issue are the computer security guidelines that organizations like businesses and government agencies provide their employees. These guidelines are generally designed to help employees protect personal and employer data and minimize risks associated with threats such as malware and phishing scams.
“As a computer security researcher, I’ve noticed that some of the computer security advice I read online is confusing, misleading or just plain wrong,” says Brad Reaves, corresponding author of the new study and an assistant professor of computer science at North Carolina State University. “In some cases, I don’t know where the advice is coming from or what it’s based on. That was the impetus for this research. Who’s writing these guidelines? What are they basing their advice on? What’s their process? Is there any way we could do better?”
For the study, researchers conducted 21 in-depth interviews with professionals who are responsible for writing computer security guidelines for organizations including large corporations, universities and government agencies.
“The key takeaway here is that the people writing these guidelines try to give as much information as possible,” Reaves says. “That’s great, in theory. But the writers don’t prioritize the advice that’s most important. Or, more specifically, they don’t deprioritize the points that are significantly less important. And because there is so much security advice to include, the guidelines can be overwhelming – and the most important points get lost in the shuffle.”
The researchers found that one reason security guidelines can be so overwhelming is that guideline writers tend to incorporate every possible item from a wide variety of authoritative sources.
“In other words, the guideline writers are compiling security information, rather than curating security information for their readers,” Reaves says.
Drawing on what they learned from the interviews, the researchers developed two recommendations for improving future security guidelines.
First, guideline writers need a clear set of best practices on how to curate information so that security guidelines tell users both what they need to know and how to prioritize that information.
Second, writers – and the computer security community as a whole – need key messages that will make sense to audiences with varying levels of technical competence.
“Look, computer security is complicated,” Reaves says. “But medicine is even more complicated. Yet during the pandemic, public health experts were able to give the public fairly simple, concise guidelines on how to reduce our risk of contracting COVID. We need to be able to do the same thing for computer security.”
Ultimately, the researchers find that security advice writers need help.
“We need research, guidelines and communities of practice that can support these writers, because they play a key role in turning computer security discoveries into practical advice for real world application,” Reaves says.
“I also want to stress that when there’s a computer security incident, we shouldn’t blame an employee because they didn’t comply with one of a thousand security rules we expected them to follow. We need to do a better job of creating guidelines that are easy to understand and implement.”
The study, “Who Comes Up with this Stuff? Interviewing Authors to Understand How They Produce Security Advice,” will be presented at the USENIX Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, being held Aug. 6-8 in Anaheim, Calif. First author of the study is Lorenzo Neil, a Ph.D. student at NC State. The paper was co-authored by Harshini Sri Ramulu of George Washington University and by Yasemin Acar of Paderborn University and George Washington University.
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Survey
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
Who Comes Up with this Stuff? Interviewing Authors to Understand How They Produce Security Advice
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
8-Aug-2023
Bacterial testing in kids with sinusitis could slash antibiotic use
IMAGE: NADER SHAIKH, M.D., PEDIATRICIAN AT UPMC CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL OF PITTSBURGH AND PROFESSOR OF PEDIATRICS AND CLINICAL AND TRANSLATIONAL SCIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH SCHOOL OF MEDICINEview more
CREDIT: UPMC
In children with suspected sinusitis, a nasal swab to test for three types of bacteria can tell whether antibiotics are likely to be effective or not, according to a new JAMA study by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC.
“Five million kids in the U.S. get prescribed antibiotics for sinusitis each year,” said lead author Nader Shaikh, M.D., pediatrician at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and professor of pediatrics and clinical and translational science at Pitt. “Our study suggests that only half of these kids see an improvement in symptoms with antibiotic use, so by identifying who they are, we could greatly reduce unnecessary antibiotic use.”
Sinusitis, which is an inflammation or swelling of the sinuses, can cause congestion, runny nose, discomfort and difficulty breathing. Doctors often prescribe antibiotics — which target only bacterial infections — to treat the condition, even though it may be caused by viruses.
“Sinusitis is one of the most common diseases we see in children, but it’s difficult to diagnose because it’s based on the duration of symptoms: If the child has a runny nose or congestion for more than 10 days, we suspect sinusitis,” said Shaikh. “For an ear infection, we can look inside the ear; for pneumonia, we listen to the lungs. But for sinusitis, we have nothing to go on from a physical exam. That was very unsatisfying to me.”
With the goal of developing a better tool to diagnose bacterial sinusitis, Shaikh and his team enrolled about 500 children with sinusitis symptoms from six centers across the U.S. and randomly assigned them to receive either a course of antibiotics or placebo. The researchers also took swabs from inside the nose — much like a COVID-19 test — from each child and tested for the three main types of bacteria involved in sinusitis.
Kids who tested positive for the bacteria had better resolution of symptoms with antibiotic treatment compared to those who did not have bacteria. These findings suggest that testing for bacteria could be a simple and effective way to detect children who are likely to benefit from antibiotics and avoid prescribing antibiotics to those who wouldn’t.
“If antibiotics aren’t necessary, then why use them?” said Shaikh. “These medications can have side effects, such as diarrhea, and alter the microbiome, which we still don’t understand the long-term implications of. Overuse of antibiotics can also encourage antibiotic resistance, which is an important public health threat.”
According to Shaikh, a common belief among parents and doctors is that yellow or green snot signals a bacterial infection. Although several small studies have suggested that nasal discharge color is not meaningful, Shaikh and his team formally tested this idea by asking parents to identify the hue of their child’s snot on a color card.
“If kids with green or yellow discharge benefitted more from antibiotics than those with clear-colored discharge, we would know that color is relevant for bacterial infection,” explained Shaikh. “But we found no difference, which means that color should not be used to guide medical decisions.”
The researchers are now looking at how to best roll out nasal testing in the clinic. A major challenge is that bacterial culture-based tests used in the study are not easy for most family doctors to order and can take several days to get results. A more practical approach could be commercially available molecular testing, which could return results overnight, said Shaikh.
Another possibility could be development of rapid antigen tests that work like COVID-19 at-home testing kits. The researchers also plan to delve deeper into the data from this study to see whether there could be another type of biomarker in nasal discharge indicating the presence of bacteria that would be easier to test for.
Additional authors of the study were Alejandro Hoberman, M.D., Timothy R. Shope, M.D., Jong-Hyeon Jeong, Ph.D., Marcia Kurs-Lasky, M.S., Judith M. Martin, M.D., Sonika Bhatnagar, M.D., Gysella B. Muniz, M.D., Melissa Andrasko, R.N., Matthew C. Lee, B.A., and Kumaravel Rajakumar, M.D., all of Pitt or UPMC; Stan L. Block, M.D., of Kentucky Pediatric/Adult Research; and Ellen R. Wald, M.D., of the University of Wisconsin.
This research was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (U01AI118506).
Nasal discharge color card
CREDIT
UPMC
JOURNAL
JAMA
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Randomized controlled/clinical trial
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
Identifying Children Likely to Benefit from Antibiotics for Acute Sinusitis: A Randomized Clinical Trial
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
25-Jul-2023
Improving recyclable waste classification with laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy
Coupling spectroscopy with sorting algorithms paves the way for more efficient and reliable waste segregation in the future
IMAGE: IDENTIFICATION AND CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM FOR RECYCLABLE WASTE.view more
CREDIT: LEI YANG
WASHINGTON, July 25, 2023 – Managing and classifying waste accurately for reuse is a growing challenge in environmental protection. Addressing this issue, researchers at Hefei University of Technology in China have embarked on a quest to innovate in the realm of waste management, seeking effective methods that can simplify and improve the identification and classification of recyclable waste.
Delving into the intricacies of waste management, the researchers explored the application of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy technology for the identification and classification of recyclable waste and discuss their work in AIP Advances, from AIP Publishing. They collected and analyzed the spectra of 80 recyclable waste samples, classifying them into paper, plastic, glass, metal, textile, and wood based on LIBS spectra. This crucial step toward waste management optimization demonstrates a significant stride toward improving environmental sustainability and promoting resource reuse.
“We have used LIBS technology for the first time to identify and classify recyclable waste,” said author Lei Yang. “This method has accurate, reliable, fast detection results, and can achieve automatic detection.”
Given the complexities of waste materials and the importance of precise classification, the researchers further subclassified metals and plastics into subcategories. With their unique properties, each subclass of waste holds a distinct potential for specific reuse and recycling practices, making accurate identification and classification a key to unlocking efficient waste management solutions.
The research methodology employed an array of machine learning models to further advance the identification process. Among the explored models, the combination of linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and random forest (RF) emerged as the most optimal for classifying recyclable waste. Additionally, for subclassifying metals and plastics, a combination of principal component analysis and RF was deemed most effective.
Researchers were struck by the accuracy of the model of LDA with RF in classifying recyclable waste, achieving an accuracy of 100%. For subclassifying metals and plastics, the model of PCA(9D) + RF scored the highest accuracy. These results indicate the potential of this method in improving recycling efficiency and waste management practices.
“What surprised us the most was that by using LIBS technology for classification and recognition without any preprocessing of the waste object, the results are satisfactory,” Yang said.
Fueled by the promising outcomes of their research, the team is eager to expand their work in the future. They plan to enhance their studies by increasing the number of waste samples and incorporating other forms of waste such as kitchen waste. Furthermore, they hope to deepen the understanding of transparent glass detection with LIBS, opening new avenues for recycling and waste management.
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The article “Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy identifies and classifies recyclable waste: A crucial step toward improved waste management” is authored by Lei Yang, Yong Xiang, Yinchuan Li, Wenyi Bao, Feng Ji, Jingtao Dong, Jingjing Chen, Mengjie Xu, Rongsheng Lu. It will appear in AIP Advances on July 25, 2023 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0149329). After that date, it can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0149329.
ABOUT THE JOURNAL
AIP Advances is an open access journal publishing in all areas of physical sciences—applied, theoretical, and experimental. The inclusive scope of AIP Advances makes it an essential outlet for scientists across the physical sciences. See https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv.
About The Study: State restrictions were associated with significantly increased estimated drive times for youths seeking gender-affirming care. With more than 1 in 4 gender clinics located in states with restrictions, it is unknown whether existing clinics may have capacity to meet the increased need of out-of-state patients.
Authors: Kevin C. Chung, M.D., M.S., of the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, is the corresponding author.
Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.
About The Study: The results of this study suggest that consuming a vegetarian diet may modestly but significantly improve cardiometabolic outcomes beyond standard pharmacological therapy in individuals at high risk of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), highlighting the potential protective and synergistic effects of vegetarian diets for the primary prevention of CVD.
Authors: Tian Wang, A.P.D., R.D., of the University of Sydney in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, is the corresponding author.
Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.
About JAMA Network Open: JAMA Network Open is an online-only open access general medical journal from the JAMA Network. On weekdays, the journal publishes peer-reviewed clinical research and commentary in more than 40 medical and health subject areas. Every article is free online from the day of publication.
