Successive Grinding and Polishing Effect on the Retained Austenite in the Surface of 42CrMo4 Steel

Low-alloy 42CrMo4 steels were studied by 57Fe Mössbauer spectroscopy (MS), X-ray diffractometry (XRD), and Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDS) measurements. The investigations were performed on metallographic samples, which were subjected to a series of successive grinding and polishing with a progressively finer grit. Conversion X-ray Mössbauer spectroscopy (CXMS) was used to determine the occurrence of austenite in steel samples. It is a unique method detecting the austenite content very sensitively. Six samples with different surface preparation were investigated, starting with 4.8% of austenite on an as-cut sample, and a large decrease in the retained austenite to 2.6% was observed after the first grinding of a hardened cut sample. Additionally, an unexpectedly large decrease in the austenite content to 2.3% was found due to the final polishing. A second time applied successive grinding and polishing of all samples resulted in identical austenite content determined by CXMS of approx. 5%, which proved the applicability of the CXMS method. Generally, the result calls attention to the importance of preparation of metallurgical samples by grinding and polishing where the results can vary significantly on the level of surface processing.

Competition of insect decomposers over large vertebrate carrion: Necrodes beetles (Silphidae) vs blow flies (Calliphoridae)

Large carrion is inhabited by highly variable and interactive communities of insects. Positive interactions in carrion insect communities have been recently the focus in carrion ecology. By contrast, competition between carrion insects is rather undervalued. Here we provide evidence that blow flies (Calliphoridae) and Necrodes beetles (Silphidae), dominant decomposers of large carcasses in terrestrial habitats, compete over carrion. By reanalysing the results from 90 pig carcasses we demonstrated that the contribution of the flies and the beetles to the decay was negatively related. The greater part of the large carrion pool was monopolised by blow flies, whereas Necrodes beetles abundantly colonized carcasses, on which blow flies were less effective as decomposers. In behavioural assays, we found that adult beetles killed four times more frequently feeding than postfeeding third instar larvae of the flies, with the large decrease in the killing frequency after the larvae reached the age of early third instar. Therefore, adult Necrodes beetles preferentially killed the larvae that were before or in their peak feeding. The study provides evidence that the interaction between blow flies and Necrodes beetles is a combination of indirect exploitative effects of the flies and direct interference effects of the beetles (the mixed competition).

Depletion of ozone over Antarctica during 2006

The large decrease in the ozone hole area from 2003 to 2004 and the large increase again from 2004 to 2005 and again from 2005 to 2006 cannot be explained by changes in stratospheric halogen loading but are due to interannual dynamical variability. This variability will make it difficult to detect the onset of ozone recovery in Antarctica and in particular it will be difficult to attribute any positive change in ozone to declining amounts of ozone depleting substances. In addition to analysis based on meteorological data and satellites, this paper contains results from a number of stations. Total ozone and ozonesonde data for the 2006 season have been compared to data from previous years. Several stations have observed total ozone columns that are close to the all time low for those stations. In some cases record low total ozone columns have been recorded.

The Use of Geospatial Technologies to Monitor the Variation of LULC for the Period from 1990 to 2020 for Some Agricultural Districts of Ramadi in Anbar Governorate - Iraq

Geospatial technologies were used in the study of variability in LULC for four years 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2020 in 15 agricultural districts, located on the left bank of the Euphrate s River, within the are a bounde d b etwee n the cities of Ramadi and Khalidiya in Anbar Governorate, located between longitudes 43° 36′ 22″ -43° 15′ 22″ ′ E and 33° 31′ 05′ - 33° 23′ 25″ N, covering an area of 18,163.5 hectares. The results showed a large variation in the types of ground covers between 1990 and 2020. Albu-Farraj recorded a very large decrease in its agricultural lands with an area of 567.45 hectares, offset by an increase in the urban or built-up area of 28.84%. While it was noted that Mahoz district recorded the largest increase in the area of the barren lands type during the study period by 30.78%. And that the classification accuracy for the LULC indicator was 100% for the types of buildings and water, while it was 83% for the agricultural lands category, and barren lands ranked last, with an accuracy rate of 75%. And that the overall accuracy of the directed rating was 86.7%, while the Kappa Coefficient was 81.1% for this rating.

EP.WE.93An Overview of the Effect of COVID-19 on the General Surgical Take: Before, During and After the First UK National Lockdown

Aims Emergency general surgical (EGS) services have faced new challenges during the coronavirus pandemic. This study compared all EGS presentations before, during and after the first UK national lockdown between March and May 2020. Methods All EGS patients presenting to our centre in four separate weeks were included. These weeks represented ‘pre-lockdown’, ‘early lockdown’, ‘established lockdown’ and ‘post lockdown’ groups. Demographic data, treatment, admission and outcomes were collected for all patients and compared between groups. Results 178 patients accounted for 214 EGS attendances over four weeks. Attendances decreased from 74 pre-lockdown, to 43 in early lockdown, 32 in late lockdown and rose to 65 in the post lockdown group. Significantly more patients received repeat outpatient reviews in the lockdown groups (p = 0.002). Length of stay was significantly reduced in established lockdown (0.5 days vs. 2 days pre-lockdown, p = 0.042). There was a trend towards conservative management of surgical pathology in the lockdown groups (65% vs 47% pre and post-lockdown, p = 0.10). No very elderly or frail EGS patients presented during the lockdown study period. There was no evidence of delay to presentation. Conclusions The COVID-19 pandemic and UK Coronavirus lockdown resulted in a large decrease in EGS admissions and alteration in characteristics of these admissions. New national guidance during the pandemic advocated ambulatory and conservative management of surgical conditions where possible and is reflected in our cohort. These changes reverted almost back to pre-lockdown state the week following the easing of the first UK national lockdown.

Unravelling the Role of Temperature and Photoperiod on Poinsettia Heat Delay

The effects of day temperature (DT), night temperature (NT), and night length (NL) were evaluated on the flowering responses of heat-tolerant and heat-sensitive poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima Willd. ex Klotzsch) cultivars Orion Red and Prestige Red, respectively. Plants were placed under 60 DT × NT × NL treatments that consisted of three DT (20, 24, 28 °C), four NT (16, 20, 24, 28 °C), and five NL (10, 11, 12, 13, 14 hours) for the first 17 days of the experiment. After 17 days, all plants were consolidated to one greenhouse with an inductive environment (14-hour NL, 24 ± 2.0 °C DT and 21.2 ± 1.4 °C NT), and the timing of first color, visible bud, and anthesis were recorded. ‘Orion Red’ reached anthesis 8 to 10 days faster than ‘Prestige Red’ across all NLs; however, in both cultivars, days to anthesis decreased in a sigmoidal pattern as NL increased. The relative rate of progress to anthesis (1/days to anthesis) under a 12-hour NL was approximately half that of plants grown at a 13- or 14-hour NL. At a 12-hour NL, the relative rate of progress to anthesis decreased linearly as DT increased for both cultivars. At 13- to 14-hour NL, DT had relatively little effect on the relative rate of progress to anthesis. Thus, high DT delayed flowering of both heat-tolerant and heat-sensitive cultivars when flower initiation occurred under NL, typical of naturally occurring NLs in September and early October (i.e., 12-hour NL), whereas high DT did not delay flowering for either cultivar under a 14-hour NL, which is typically provided under black cloth systems. In contrast, the flowering responses to NT were quite different for the two cultivars. The heat-tolerant cultivar showed relatively little change in the relative rate of progress to anthesis as NT increased from 16 to 28 °C within each NL treatment; however, the heat-sensitive cultivar displayed a large decrease in the relative rate progress to anthesis as NT increased from 20 to 28 °C within each NL treatment. Although the delayed flowering that occurred at 28 °C and 14-hour NL was significant, the relative rate of progress to anthesis at this treatment was significantly higher than the 28 °C and 12-hour NL treatment. This suggests that artificially shortening NL to 14 hours with a black cloth system does not prevent heat delay of poinsettia, but it allows for more rapid flowering than if flower initiation took place under natural NL (≈12 hours). To summarize, high DT affected flowering when flower initiation took place at 12-hour NL for heat-tolerant and heat-sensitive poinsettia cultivars, whereas high NT uniquely delayed flowering of the heat-sensitive cultivar at NL from 12 to 14 hours.

An Adversarial Attacks Resistance-based Approach to Emotion Recognition from Images using Facial Landmarks

Emotion recognition has become an increasingly important area of research due to the increasing number of CCTV cameras in the past few years. Deep network-based methods have made impressive progress in performing emotion recognition-based tasks, achieving high performance on many datasets and their related competitions such as the ImageNet challenge. However, deep networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Due to their homogeneous representation of knowledge across all images, a small change to the input image made by an adversary might result in a large decrease in the accuracy of the algorithm. By detecting heterogeneous facial landmarks using the machine learning library Dlib we hypothesize we can build robustness to adversarial attacks. The residual neural network (ResNet) model has been used as an example of a deep learning model. While the accuracy achieved by ResNet showed a decrease of up to 22%, our proposed approach has shown strong resistance to an attack and showed only a little (< 0.3%) or no decrease when the attack is launched on the data. Furthermore, the proposed approach has shown considerably less execution time compared to the ResNet model.

An Adversarial Attacks Resistance-based Approach to Emotion Recognition from Images using Facial Landmarks

Emotion recognition has become an increasingly important area of research due to the increasing number of CCTV cameras in the past few years. Deep network-based methods have made impressive progress in performing emotion recognition-based tasks, achieving high performance on many datasets and their related competitions such as the ImageNet challenge. However, deep networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Due to their homogeneous representation of knowledge across all images, a small change to the input image made by an adversary might result in a large decrease in the accuracy of the algorithm. By detecting heterogeneous facial landmarks using the machine learning library Dlib we hypothesize we can build robustness to adversarial attacks. The residual neural network (ResNet) model has been used as an example of a deep learning model. While the accuracy achieved by ResNet showed a decrease of up to 22%, our proposed approach has shown strong resistance to an attack and showed only a little (< 0.3%) or no decrease when the attack is launched on the data. Furthermore, the proposed approach has shown considerably less execution time compared to the ResNet model.

Simulation of the transition between Mid Miocene Climate Optimum (17-15 Ma) and Miocene Climate Transition (14 Ma)

&lt;p&gt;Mid Miocene Climate Optimum (MMCO) is an interesting period. Indeed since Mid Eocene (40 Ma) the large trends of climate evolution are: a large decrease of pCO2 and a drastic cooling. The MMCO appears as a short period when these trends were reversed, during 2 Ma, followed by a new period of cooling. Using the IPSL CM5A2 coupled model, we simulated the MMCO using two different pCO2 values (2.5 PAL and 1.5 PAL) and for the Miocene Climate Transition MCT for which we used a pCO2 value of 1.5 PAL. Superimposed to these very long runs we further simulated sensitivity of these experiments to insolation at the top of the atmosphere for Antarctica ice-sheet. In our referent simulation, the astronomical parameters remained unchanged as present day, whereas we performed new simulations with maximum and minimum insolation at the top of the atmosphere for December, January, February (at 75&amp;#176;S). These series of experiments will be analyzed and compared with available data. Moreover, we will compare our results to other simulations using various OAGCMs. We will emphasize on the consistency between the climate simulated at high latitude and the prescribed ice-sheet reconstruction of Antarctica.&lt;/p&gt;

Large decrease in paediatric hospitalisations during the COVID-19 outbreak in Japan

We evaluated the nationwide trends in paediatric hospitalisations including non-emergency hospitalisations during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. Using inpatient data from 272 acute-care hospitals covering 12.4% of total hospitalisations of all ages, we analysed the number of hospitalisations of children (aged 1–17 years) for weeks 9–21 of 2020 (during the outbreak) versus 2017–2019. Hospitalisation decreased during the outbreak by 38.4% (adjusted incidence rate ratio, 0.60; 95% CI, 0.53 to 0.69). There were reductions in communicable diseases and trauma, possibly through non-pharmaceutical interventions, but not in appendicitis. This study highlights the potential importance of reallocating paediatric care resources during the pandemic.