The Carbon Footprint of a Public Sector University Before and During the COVID-19 Lockdown.

<p>Carbon footprint (CF) is a measure of greenhouse gas emissions generated from daily human-induced activities as carbon dioxide equivalent. This study is an attempt to represent a consumption-based CF study from the scope of transportation, electricity, and waste generation for University of the Punjab (PU), Lahore under the WRI/WBCSD greenhouse gas protocol corporate standards. Data acquired through fieldwork, questionnaire surveys, direct sampling, and existing records for the year 2019-20 suggested that electricity is the greatest contributor of CO2 emissions at 59%, followed by transportation at 36%, and waste generation at approximately 5%. The total CF(CO2_eq) generated from different sources is about 18360.62MT for one year. The recent COVID-19 lockdown has offered inimitable prospect to compare the carbon footprint of one of the largest higher education institutes of Pakistan before and during this pandemic. The data can serve for tracking, assessing, and setting goals for greenhouse gas emission reduction programs in future.</p>

Experimental Evaluation of Sub-Sampling IQ Detection for Low-Level RF Control in Particle Accelerator Systems

The low-level radio frequency (LLRF) control system is one of the fundamental parts of a particle accelerator, ensuring the stability of the electro-magnetic (EM) field inside the resonant cavities. It leverages on the precise measurement of the field by in-phase/quadrature (IQ) detection of an RF probe signal from the cavities, usually performed using analogue downconversion. This approach requires a local oscillator (LO) and is subject to hardware non-idealities like mixer nonlinearity and long-term temperature drifts. In this work, we experimentally evaluate IQ detection by direct sampling for the LLRF system of the Polish free electron laser (PolFEL) now under development at the National Centre for Nuclear Research (NCBJ) in Poland. We study the impact of the sampling scheme and of the clock phase noise for a 1.3-GHz input sub-sampled by a 400-MSa/s analogue-to-digital converter (ADC), estimating amplitude and phase stability below 0.01% and nearly 0.01°, respectively. The results are in line with state-of-the-art implementations, and demonstrate the feasibility of direct sampling for GHz-range LLRF systems.

Comparison of Two Blood-Based Genotyping Tests to Investigate the KRAS G12C Mutation in Patients with Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer at Failure of First-Line Treatments

Although molecular profiling at diagnosis has traditionally relied on direct sampling of neoplastic tissue, cancer clonal evolution represents a critical obstacle to use primary tissue biopsies to guide clinical decision-making at the time of progressive disease. Liquid biopsies might offer enormous advantages over tissue biopsies, tracking in real-time temporal-based tumor dynamics following each line of treatment. Here, we compared two liquid biopsy assays, specifically real-time polymerase chain reaction and next-generation sequencing, to track the KRAS G12C mutation at onset of progression from previous lines of therapy. The KRAS G12C mutation was acquired at the time of progressive disease in 24% of patients. Furthermore, all patients with KRAS G12C mutation-positive tissue became negative in ctDNA at progressive disease. The presence of other somatic mutations in all these samples confirmed the tumor origin of the circulating DNA. This pilot study suggests that in the assessment of the plasma KRAS G12C mutation as a druggable target, real-time PCR assay Idylla might be a suitable approach to better match patients to interventional biomarker-targeted therapies.

Ice volume and basal topography estimation using geostatistical methods and ground-penetrating radar measurements: application to the Tsanfleuron and Scex Rouge glaciers, Swiss Alps

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is widely used for determining mountain glacier thickness. However, this method provides thickness data only along the acquisition lines, and therefore interpolation has to be made between them. Depending on the interpolation strategy, calculated ice volumes can differ and can lack an accurate error estimation. Furthermore, glacial basal topography is often characterized by complex geomorphological features, which can be hard to reproduce using classical interpolation methods, especially when the field data are sparse or when the morphological features are too complex. This study investigates the applicability of multiple-point statistics (MPS) simulations to interpolate glacier bedrock topography using GPR measurements. In 2018, a dense GPR data set was acquired on the Tsanfleuron Glacier (Switzerland). These data were used as the source for a bedrock interpolation. The results obtained with the direct-sampling MPS method are compared against those obtained with kriging and sequential Gaussian simulations (SGSs) on both a synthetic data set – with known reference volume and bedrock topography – and the real data underlying the Tsanfleuron Glacier. Using the MPS modeled bedrock, the ice volume for the Scex Rouge and Tsanfleuron glaciers is estimated to be 113.9 ± 1.6 million cubic meters. The direct-sampling approach, unlike the SGS and kriging, allowed not only an accurate volume estimation but also the generation of a set of realistic bedrock simulations. The complex karstic geomorphological features are reproduced and can be used to significantly improve for example the precision of subglacial flow estimation.

Direct Sampling for Recovering Sound Soft Scatterers from Point Source Measurements

In this paper, we consider the inverse problem of recovering a sound soft scatterer from the measured scattered field. The scattered field is assumed to be induced by a point source on a curve/surface that is known. Here, we propose and analyze new direct sampling methods for this problem. The first method we consider uses a far-field transformation of the near-field data, which allows us to derive explicit bounds in the resolution analysis for the direct sampling method’s imaging functional. Two direct sampling methods are studied, using the far-field transformation. For these imaging functionals, we use the Funk–Hecke identities to study the resolution analysis. We also study a direct sampling method for the case of the given Cauchy data. Numerical examples are given to show the applicability of the new imaging functionals for recovering a sound soft scatterer with full and partial aperture data.

Ultrahigh-Throughput Direct Sampling MS: Sampling at 22 Hz by Infrared Matrix-Assisted Desorption Electrospray Ionization Mass Spectrometry

Infrared Matrix-Assisted Desorption Electrospray Ionization (IR-MALDESI) mass spectrometry is an ambient-direct sampling method being developed for high-throughput, label-free, biochemical screening of large-scale compound libraries. Here, we report the development of an ultrahigh-throughput continuous motion IR-MALDESI sampling approach capable of acquiring data at rates up to 22.7 samples per second in a 384-well microtiter plate. At top speed, less than 1% analyte carryover is observed from well-to-well and intensity relative standard deviations (RSD) of 11.5% and 20.9% for 3 micromolar 1-hydroxymidazolam and 12 micromolar dextrorphan, respectively, are achieved. The ability to perform parallel kinetics studies on 384 samples with ~30s time resolution using an isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 (IDH1) enzyme assay is shown. Taken together, these results demonstrate the use of IR-MALDESI at sample acquisition rates that surpass other currently reported direct sampling mass spectrometry approaches.