Low Utilization Research Articles

Participant-reported personal utility of genetic testing for Parkinson’s disease and interest in clinical trial participation

Genetic testing for Parkinson’s disease (PD) is infrequently performed due to perceptions of low utility. We investigated the personal utility in PD GENEration and how results lead to enrollment in additional research studies. Participants (n = 972) underwent genetic testing, results disclosure, genetic counseling, and completed a survey examining the perceived personal utility of their results and interest in participating in additional studies. Most participants found their genetic test results useful, including satisfying curiosity (81%), feeling good about helping the medical community (80%), and having information to share with family (77%). There were no significant differences in responses based on result type. Forty-five percent of participants expressed interest in participating in research studies; whereas 16% of participants confirmed enrollment. Our results suggest that participants find personal utility in genetic testing regardless of results. Although participants may be interested in enrolling in additional research, they may need support and resources.

Enhancing the Filler Utilization of Composite Gel Electrolytes via In Situ Solution-Processable Method for Sustainable Sodium-Ion Batteries.

The composite gel electrolyte (CGE), which combines the advantages of inorganic solid-state electrolytes and solid polymer electrolytes, is regarded as the ultimate candidate for constructing batteries with high safety and superior electrode-electrolyte interface contact. However, the ubiquitous agglomeration of nanofillers results in low filler utilization, which seriously reduces structural uniformity and ion transport efficiency, thus restricting the development of consistent and durable batteries. Herein, a solution-processable method to in situ construct CGE with high filler utilization is introduced. The homogeneous metal-organic framework fillers contribute to uniform ionic and electronic filed distribution, realizing a stable electrode-electrolyte interface. Consequently, the CGE with high filler utilization achieves an ultra-long lifespan of 10000 cycles with a capacity retention of 80.2%. This work provides guidance for constructing high-performance CGEs in electrochemical energy-storage devices.

Effects of Recommended Fertilizer Application Strategies Based on Yield Goal and Nutrient Requirements on Drip-Irrigated Spring Wheat Yield and Nutrient Uptake

Excessive application of fertilizers in drip-irrigated wheat production can suppress yields, lower nutrient utilization efficiency, and lead to economic and environmental issues such as nitrogen residues in the soil. Based on a recommended fertilizer application (RF) strategy that takes into account target yield and nutrient requirements, this study explores the responses of wheat plant traits, changes in topsoil and subsoil nutrients, fertilizer utilization, and economic benefits under this strategy. From 2022 to 2023, a field experiment was conducted in a typical oasis spring wheat production area at the northern foot of the Tianshan Mountains in Xinjiang. The treatments included no fertilizer control (CK), the farmer’s conventional practice (FP), recommended fertilizer (RF), RF with nitrogen omission (RF-N), phosphorus omission (RF-P), and potassium omission (RF-K). The results showed that compared with FP, the RF reduced 91 kg N ha−1 (30.3%) and 33 kg P2O5 ha−1 (24.8%) in 2022, and 69 kg N ha−1 (23.0%) and 2 kg P2O5 ha−1 (1.5%) in 2023. The effect in 2023 was better; RF also decreased the NO3−1-N residue in the 0–100 cm soil layer by 40.1 kg N ha−1 compared with FP, with no significant difference in wheat grain yield (RF: 5382.9 kg ha−1) or economic benefit (RF: USD 1613.1 ha−1). Furthermore, there were no significant differences between RF and FP in pre-anthesis NP transport or post-anthesis NP accumulation; however, RF significantly increased pre-anthesis potassium transport volume (15.8%) and transport rate (12.5%). RF led to a 16.3% increase in nitrogen utilization efficiency (NUE), while there was no significant difference in phosphorus utilization efficiency (PUE) compared with FP. The fertilizer yield effect for RF was evaluated as N > P > K. Correlation analysis indicated that grain yield was significantly positively correlated with pre-anthesis NPK transport and post-anthesis NP accumulation. It was also positively correlated with organic matter, alkali-hydrolyzed nitrogen, and Olsen-P content in both the topsoil (0–20 cm) and subsoil (20–40 cm), but not with available potassium in the soil. Therefore, conducting soil tests and determining fertilizer recommendations based on the proposed RF method at harvest can reduce fertilizer usage and achieve a balance between the conflicting objectives of environmental protection, increased crop yields, nutrient utilization efficiency, and improved economic benefits in oasis agricultural areas facing excessive fertilizer application.

Antenatal Care Services Uptake and Associated Factors in Somaliland: Further Analysis of the 2020 Somaliland Demographic Health Survey

Purpose Antenatal care (ANC) is vital to maintain the health of pregnant women and their unborn babies. It was linked to a positive pregnancy experience. However, ANC uptake remained low in Somaliland, and no study has been conducted to assess possible predictors. Hence, the current study aimed to determine the level of ANC utilization and to identify its associated factors in Somaliland. Materials and Methods Somaliland Demographic Health Survey (SLDHS) Data 2020 were used. A weighted sample of 3,192 women aged 15-49 years participated in the study. The survey used a two-stage cluster design for sample selection. Descriptive statistics in the form of frequency and percentage and multilevel multinomial logistic regression analysis were carried out to determine associated factors and statistical significance was declared by p< 0.05. Results The findings showed that 62.4% (95% CI: 60.7-64.1) of the women did not utilize ANC services, while 23.4% (95% CI: 21.9, 24.9) partially utilized and 14.2% (95% CI: 13.0, 15.4) adequately utilized ANC services. The odds of adequately utilizing ANC service decreased by a factor of 0.88 for women aged 35 and above compared to 15 - 24 year old women (AOR= 0.88, 95% CI: 0.61, 1.26). Women with higher educational levels had significantly higher odds (AOR=4.31, 95% CI: 1.54, 12.02) of adequately utilizing ANC compared to those with no formal education. The employment status, marital status, household wealth index, residence and region were also found to be associated with the utilization of Antenatal care. Conclusion The study showed low adequate utilization of ANC services in Somaliland. The variables, including age, education, wealth index, marital status, employment status, residence and region, were significantly associated with ANC utilization. Governmental and non-governmental organizations should enact a strategy with targeted intervention focusing on women from nomadic and rural communities, those from poor households, and low educational levels.

Lightweight skin cancer detection IP hardware implementation using cycle expansion and optimal computation arrays methods

Skin cancer is recognized as one of the most perilous diseases globally. In the field of medical image classification, precise identification of early-stage skin lesions is imperative for accurate diagnosis. However, deploying these algorithms on low-cost devices and attaining high-efficiency operation with minimal energy consumption poses a formidable challenge due to their intricate computational demands. This study proposes a lightweight hardware design based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) for real-time processing of skin disease classifiers on portable devices. Our skin cancer recognition processor utilizes an optimally parallel designed processing engine (PE) for global computation, which greatly reduces hardware resource utilization by multiplexing of computational unit circuits. In addition, a design approach that provides loop unrolling effectively reduces the number of data accesses, thereby reducing computational complexity and logic resource requirements. The hardware circuits in this design perform data inference in convolutional, pooling, and fully connected layers based on 16-bit floating-point numbers. Evaluation of the HAM10000 database dataset shows that the architecture achieves an average classification accuracy of 97.8 %. We are the first to implement an all-hardware FPGA-based skin cancer detection platform that offers a 3.5x speedup in recognition compared to existing skin cancer accelerators at 50 MHz while consuming only 0.48 W of power. The implementation of this hardware architecture meets the major constraints of portable devices, featuring low resource utilization, low power consumption, and cost-effectiveness, while still providing efficient classification and high accuracy results.

Plasmonic chitosan cross-linked dialdehyde chitosan aerogels as 3D surface-enhanced Raman scattering substrates for sensitive and reliable detection

Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) has the advantages of non-destructive detection and high sensitivity, however, low hotspots utilisation and inhomogeneous distribution limit its application. In response to the problem of underutilization of hotspots in most SERS substrates, a crosslinking of chitosan with dialdehyde chitosan aerogels loaded with Ag NPs (CDSA) as SERS substrates with chitosan (CS) as the main body and dialdehyde chitosan (DACS) as the reducing and cross-linking agent were prepared. Unlike other 3D structures such as hydrogels, CDSA can capture probe molecules in a much shorter period of time and enhance SERS signals by collapse. The SERS performance of CDSA was evaluated by rhodamine 6 G (R6G) and methylene blue (MB), indicating that the CDSA substrate has good stability (90 days), repeatability (RSD=4.15 %) and reproducibility (RSD=4.86 %). The enhancement factors (EFs) was 1.3×108 for R6G and 9.2×107 for MB. Both gas sample and liquid sample were detected to evaluate the performances of CDSA in practical application. 4-Aminothiophenol (4-ATP) was utilized to test the efficacy of CDSA on gas-phase to-be-tested substances and the limit of detection (LOD) was 0.59 mg/L. The tests performed on sildenafil (SD) in real samples showed recoveries ranging from 97.5 % to 103.4 % with a LOD of 0.055 mg/L. It was indicated that the CDSA substrate could serves as a satisfactory SERS sensor for sensitive and rapid detection for both gas phase and liquid samples.

Research Progress on Peptide Drugs for Type 2 Diabetes and the Possibility of Oral Administration

Diabetes is a global disease that can lead to a range of complications. Currently, the treatment of type 2 diabetes focuses on oral hypoglycemic drugs and insulin analogues. Studies have shown that drugs such as oral metformin are useful in the treatment of diabetes but can limit the liver’s ability to release sugar. The development of glucose-lowering peptides has provided new options for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. Peptide drugs have low oral utilization due to their easy degradation, short half-life, and difficulty passing through the intestinal mucosa. Therefore, improving the oral utilization of peptide drugs remains an urgent problem. This paper reviews the research progress of peptide drugs in the treatment of diabetes mellitus and proposes that different types of nano-formulation carriers, such as liposomes, self-emulsifying drug delivery systems, and polymer particles, should be combined with peptide drugs for oral administration to improve their absorption in the gastrointestinal tract.

Performance Study of an MRI Motion-Compensated Reconstruction Program on Intel CPUs, AMD EPYC CPUs, and NVIDIA GPUs

Motion-compensated image reconstruction enables new clinical applications of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), but it relies on computationally intensive algorithms. This study focuses on the Generalized Reconstruction by Inversion of Coupled Systems (GRICS) program, applied to the reconstruction of 3D images in cases of non-rigid or rigid motion. It uses hybrid parallelization with the MPI (Message Passing Interface) and OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing). For clinical integration, the GRICS needs to efficiently harness the computational resources of compute nodes. We aim to improve the GRICS’s performance without any code modification. This work presents a performance study of GRICS on two CPU architectures: Intel Xeon Gold and AMD EPYC. The roofline model is used to study the software–hardware interaction and quantify the code’s performance. For CPU–GPU comparison purposes, we propose a preliminary MATLAB–GPU implementation of the GRICS’s reconstruction kernel. We establish the roofline model of the kernel on two NVIDIA GPU architectures: Quadro RTX 5000 and A100. After the performance study, we propose some optimization patterns for the code’s execution on CPUs, first considering only the OpenMP implementation using thread binding and affinity and appropriate architecture-compilation flags and then looking for the optimal combination of MPI processes and OpenMP threads in the case of the hybrid MPI–OpenMP implementation. The results show that the GRICS performed well on the AMD EPYC CPUs, with an architectural efficiency of 52%. The kernel’s execution was fast on the NVIDIA A100 GPU, but the roofline model reported low architectural efficiency and utilization.

Recyclable palladium nanocatalyst for effective organic pollutants removal through reduction☆

Palladium is a metal catalyst with excellent performance, but its application is severely restricted due to low atomic utilization and weak recovery capacity. To address these issues, we prepared a palladium nanocatalyst through a universal nanocatalysts preparation strategy. It has a particle size of less than 100 nm, possesses good superparamagnetism, and its saturation strength is 71.48 emu/g. It demonstrates outstanding catalytic properties in the reduction and decolorization of organic fuels, and the achieving conversion rates are 92 %, 99 %, and 97 % for methylene blue, rhodamine B, and methyl orange, respectively. Additionally, it can catalyze the hydrogenation dehalogenation of p-chlorophenol, with a 100 % conversion rate and selectivity. The nanocatalyst shows outstanding recyclability in the test of recyclability. Therefore, our results show that the palladium nanocatalysts have attractive characteristics of simple preparation, excellent catalytic activity and reusability. This work lays the foundation for the preparation of palladium nanocatalysts and their potential applications in areas like environmental pollution treatment.

Utilization of Biomass Waste Through Small-Scale Gasification Technology in the Eastern Cape Province in South Africa: Towards the Achievement of Sustainable Development Goal Number 7

Despite being resource-richly endowed with various energy sources, and despite the connection of 89.8% of the households to the grid in South Africa, the Eastern Cape province, as compared to other provinces, has the lowest level of grid connection of about 64.5%. Some of the rural poor households in the Eastern Cape province supplement their free basic electricity with unclean energy alternatives. Using unclean energy alternatives is not only detrimental to the environment and health of the people, but it is a sign of energy poverty and among the contributing factors to depesantization, deagrarianization, and deindustrialization which prolongs the underdevelopment in rural areas. Innovation in energy technologies is a key ingredient in meaningful rural development. The utilization of small-scale biomass gasification technologies can be a solution to the South African energy crisis in rural areas, and it is in line with sustainable development goal number 7, which is about ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all. Alternative renewable energy sources cannot be ignored when dealing with the energy crises in South Africa. Renewable energy sources in the country include biomass, solar, wind, and hydropower. Despite its low utilization in the Eastern Cape province, small-scale biomass gasification technology remains pivotal in reducing energy crisis by producing electricity. However, the affordability of biomass gasification technology also plays a role in whether people will accept small-scale biomass gasification technology. The purpose of this paper is to determine the possibilities of using small-scale biomass gasification technology. This paper gives a comprehensive review of small-scale biomass gasification technology potential in the Eastern Cape province and the link between acceptance of small-scale gasification technology and affordability by evaluating the availability of biomass sources in the province and achievements with regards to small-scale biomass gasification. This paper also covers the impact of biomass gasification technology integration in the energy grid, what needs to be taken into consideration before its installation, its benefits and the barriers to its development in Eastern Cape province.

Medical imaging utilization in migrants compared with nonmigrants in a universal healthcare system: A population-based matched cohort study.

Medical imaging is an integral part of healthcare. Globalization has resulted in increased mobilization of migrants to new host nations. The association between migration status and utilization of medical imaging is unknown. A retrospective population-based matched cohort study was conducted in Ontario, Canada from April 1, 1995 to December 31, 2016. A total of 1,848,222 migrants were matched 1:1 to nonmigrants in the year of migration on age, sex, and geography. Utilization of computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), radiography, and ultrasonography was determined. Rate differences per 1,000 person-years comparing migrants to nonmigrants were calculated. Relative rates were calculated using a recurrent event framework, adjusting for age, sex, and time-varying socioeconomic status, comorbidity score, and access to a primary care provider. Estimates were stratified by migration age: children and adolescents (≤19 years), young adults (20 to 39), adults (40 to 59), and older adults (≥60). Utilization rates of CT, MRI, and radiography were lower for migrants across all age groups compared with Ontario nonmigrants. Increasing age at migration was associated with larger differences in utilization rates. Older adult migrants had the largest gap in imaging utilization. The longer the time since migration, the larger the gap in medical imaging use. In multivariable analysis, the relative rate of imaging was approximately 20% to 30% lower for migrants: ranging from 0.77 to 0.88 for CT and 0.72 to 0.80 for MRI imaging across age groups. Radiography relative rates ranged from 0.84 to 0.90. All migrant age groups, except older adults, had higher rates of ultrasonography. The indication for imaging was not captured, thus it was not possible to determine if the imaging was necessary. Migrants utilized less CT, MRI, and radiography but more ultrasonography. Older adult migrants used the least amount of imaging compared with nonmigrants. Future research should evaluate whether lower utilization is due to barriers in healthcare access or health-seeking behaviors within a universal healthcare system.

A Fair MAC Protocol Based on Dual Bandwidth Allocation Iterations in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

ABSTRACTMost existing passive allocation‐based media access control (MAC) protocols for underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) overlook the fairness issue in channel bandwidth allocation, resulting in certain nodes occupying channel resources for extended periods, thereby leading to low channel utilization. To address this issue, this paper proposes a fair MAC protocol based on dual bandwidth allocation iterations (FBA‐MAC). Firstly, by limiting the maximum number of packets and the maximum number of available time slots that the host node can receive in each communication cycle, the protocol reduces collisions and collisions more effectively, thus controlling the communication delay. Secondly, in the process of channel bandwidth allocation, a dual bandwidth allocation iterative method was used to allocate appropriate channel bandwidth for each member node according to its communication requirements and the generation time of its generated data packets. Finally, in order to minimize the time interval of each packet arriving at the host node to reduce the communication delay, the transmission scheduling scheme was adaptively adjusted by combining the results of channel bandwidth allocation to maximize the channel utilization. Simulation results indicate that compared to the other four MAC protocols, FBA‐MAC demonstrates significant advantages in terms of fairness (10% higher), achieving higher network throughput (10% higher) and shorter end‐to‐end delay. Therefore, FBA‐MAC exhibits superior adaptability and efficiency in dynamic network environments.

Dynamic Flexible Allocation of Slots in Container Line Transport

Due to the imbalance between supply and demand, liner container transportation often faces the problem of low slot utilization, which will occur in the shipping process, such as dry container demand exceeding the available dry slots and reefer slots not being fully utilized. This makes it important and challenging to maintain a balance between the actual demand and the limited number of slots allocated for liner container transport. Therefore, this study proposes a flexible allocation method: expanding the types of containers that can be loaded in the same slot. This method is suitable for handling each dynamic arrival container booking request by shipping enterprises, making decisions to accept or reject, and flexibly allocating shipping slots. In order to maximize the total revenue generated by accepting container booking requests during the entire booking acceptance cycle, we establish a dynamic programming model for the flexible allocation of slots. For model solving, we use the Q-learning reinforcement learning algorithm. Compared with traditional heuristic algorithms, this algorithm can improve solving efficiency and facilitate decision-making at the operational level of shipping enterprises. In terms of model performance, examples of different scales are used for comparison and training; the results are compared with the model without flexible allocation, and it is proved that the model proposed in this paper can obtain higher returns than the model without flexible allocation. The results show that the model and Q-learning algorithm can help enterprises solve the problem of the flexible allocation of shipping slots, and thus, this research has practical significance.

Rape straw biochar-assisted preparation of flower-like BiOCl with enriched oxygen vacancies for efficient photocatalytic CO2 reduction and pollutants degradation

Utilizing photocatalytic technology to transform CO2 into high added value chemical products has represented an effective strategy for alleviating the climate problems that have arisen due to excessive CO2 emissions. As a typical bismuth-based photocatalyst, BiOCl has garnered widespread attention due to its unique layered structure and low toxicity. However, the low light utilization efficiency and the rapid recombination of e−/h+ pairs severely hinder the practical application of BiOCl. Introducing oxygen vacancies (OVs) into BiOCl has been demonstrated to be one of the effective strategies for enhancing the photocatalytic performance of BiOCl. However, introduction of OVs through a mild and cost-effective approach remains a significant challenge. In this work, we developed a strategy for introducing OVs on BiOCl, which indues the growth of BiOCl into flower-like spherical structures and introduction of abundant OVs through addition of rape straw biochar (RC) under hydrothermal conditions. The synergistic interaction of RC and OVs endows with BiOCl more active sites as well as higher photogenerated carriers (e−/h+) separation efficiency. When the mass ratio of RC to BiOCl is 0.5 % (RC-0.5), the sample demonstrates the best performance, conversion of CO2 to CO on the sample is 4.0 μmol g−1 h−1, which is 3.08 times higher than that on the reference BiOCl. Additionally, versatility of the photocatalysts was further evaluated through photocatalytic degradation of rhodamine B (RhB) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). The degradation rate constant of RhB and PFOA on the RC-0.5 sample is 0.0642 min−1 and 0.00566 min−1, respectively, which is 2.26 times and 0.43 times higher than that on the reference BiOCl. Total organic carbon (TOC) experiments demonstrate that RhB can be effectively mineralized into CO2, H2O and small molecules on the photocatalyst. The main reactive species involved in the photocatalytic degradation process were investigated through active free radical trapping experiments and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR). This work provides a viable strategy for the development of high-performance BiOCl photocatalysts for environmental applications.

Flexible Hybrid Membrane with Synergistic Exciton Dynamics for Excessive 280 h of Durably Piezo-Photocatalytic H2O-to-H2 Conversion.

Solar-driven H2O-to-H2 conversion is a feasible artificial photoconversion technology for clean energy production. However, low photon utilization efficiency has become a major obstacle limiting the practical application of this technology. Herein, a metal atomic replacement (Sb→Ni) is conducted to disintegrate bulk Sb2S3 nanorods and synchronously grow the NiS nanolayers, and a flower-like Sb2S3-NiS nanocomposite with high BET specific surface area and synergistic exciton dynamics is constructed for simulated solar (SSL)-driven H2O-to-H2 conversion. The optimal Sb2S3-NiS nanocomposite is compounded with polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) to prepare a flexible PVDF/Sb2S3-NiS (PSN) hybrid membrane with stable structure and excellent recyclability via an electrospinning method. Due to the synergistically interacted organic-inorganic interface and high porosity, it is conducive to the exposure of effective active sites, exciton conduction and mass transfer and exchange, thereby an outstanding alkaline (Ph=13.0) H2O-to-H2 conversion activity with a 0.06% of solar-to-hydrogen efficiency and over 280 h (70 cycles) of durable recycling is achieved under the collaborative drives of SSL and weak ultrasound (40 Hz). This study raises a state-of-the-art membrane material for solar-driven panel reaction technology.

Optimization Study on Hardness of Cold Rolled Strip Steel Based on a Data-Driven Approach

As a key index to measure product quality and processability, the hardness of cold-rolled strip steel has an important influence on the production efficiency of iron and steel enterprises. However, due to the coupling between the process parameters at each stage of the continuous annealing process, and the setting of traditional process parameters depending on the experience of the operator, the lack of scientific and systematic optimization methods, which easily leads to the problem of high hardness fluctuation and low resource utilization. In this study, the data-driven method is used to conduct a preliminary correlation analysis to further clarify the optimal combination of process parameters for achieving the target hardness. The Pearson correlation coefficient is used to determine that carbon content, quenching furnace temperature, and strip speed significantly affect strip hardness. To further clarify the optimal combination of process parameters to achieve the target hardness, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) was tried in this study. The results show that the optimized process parameter combination can effectively improve the stability and consistency of strip hardness, and provide a scientific basis for the process parameter setting in the cold rolled strip production process, which is helpful for enterprises to improve product quality, reduce cost, and enhance market competitiveness.

Efficient conversion of syngas to linear α-olefins by phase-pure χ-Fe5C2.

Oil has long been the dominant feedstock for producing fuels and chemicals, but coal, natural gas and biomass are increasingly explored alternatives1-3. Their conversion first generates syngas, a mixture of CO and H2, which is then processed further using Fischer-Tropsch (FT) chemistry. However, although commercial FT technology for fuel production is established, using it to access valuable chemicals remains challenging. A case in point is linear α-olefins (LAOs), which are important chemical intermediates obtained by ethylene oligomerization at present4-8. The commercial high-temperature FT process and the FT-to-olefin process under development at present both convert syngas directly to LAOs, but also generate much CO2 waste that leads to a low carbon utilization efficiency9-14. The efficiency is further compromised by substantially fewer of the converted carbon atoms ending up as valuable C5-C10 LAOs than are found in the C2-C4 olefins that dominate the product mixtures9-14. Here we show that the use of the original phase-pure χ-iron carbide can minimize these syngas conversion problems: tailored and optimized for the process of FT to LAOs, this catalyst exhibits an activity at 290 °C that is 1-2 orders higher than dedicated FT-to-olefin catalysts can achieve above 320 °C (refs. 12-15), is stable for 200 h, and produces desired C2-C10 LAOs and unwanted CO2 with carbon-based selectivities of 51% and 9% under industrially relevant conditions. This higher catalytic performance, persisting over a wide temperature range (250-320 °C), demonstrates the potential of the system for developing a practically relevant technology.

Multi-Stage Rolling Grid Expansion Planning for Distribution Networks Considering Conditional Value at Risk

Existing single-stage planning and multi-stage non-rolling planning methods for distribution networks have problems such as low equipment utilization efficiency and poor investment benefits. In order to solve the above problems, this paper firstly proposes a multi-stage rolling planning method for distribution networks based on analyzing the limitations of the existing planning methods, which divides the planning cycle of the distribution network into multiple planning stages, and makes rolling amendments to the planning scheme of each stage according to the latest information during the planning cycle. Then, a multi-stage rolling planning model of distribution network taking into account conditional value at risk is established with the objective of minimizing the total investment and operation cost of the distribution network. On the one hand, the users’ electricity bill is taken into account in the objective function, and the necessity of this part of the benefits is demonstrated. On the other hand, the conditional value at risk is used to quantify the uncertainty of the operation cost in the process of the expansion planning of the distribution network, which reduces the operation cost risk of the distribution network. Next, this paper uses the rainflow counting method to characterize the capacity decay characteristics of energy storage in the distribution network, and proposes an iterative solution framework that considers energy storage capacity decay to solve the proposed model. Finally, the proposed method is applied to an 18-node distribution network planning case. This confirms that the multi-stage rolling planning method could improve the investment benefits and reduce the investment cost by approximately 27.27%. Besides, it will increase the total cost by approximately 2750 USD in the case if the users’ electricity bill is not taken into account. And the maximum capacity of energy storage may decay to 87.6% of the initial capacity or even lower during operation, which may cause the line current to exceed the limit if it is not taken into account.

Tackling fashion waste from inside the wardrobe: The influence of personal factors on sustainable clothing use practice

Fashion consumption seems predestined for disenchantment, demarcated by low utilization levels and a consumption cycle that is too short to foster emotional attachment. To be sure, what occurs after purchase when clothing is taken home for use is a carbon intensive phase of the product's lifespan that is squarely within the clothing user's control and responsibility. Decreasing the purchase of new garments has the greatest potential to reduce the global carbon emissions associated with fashion consumption, and prolonging clothing's utilization are consumer habits considered critical to this aim. Clothing use, manifest in the wear, care, and repair practice, are a linchpin in determining how much and how quickly fashion becomes waste. Though these use behaviors clearly advance sustainable clothing consumption, the least is known about what occurs between purchase and disposal or why. It is also important to develop a method to measure sustainable use practice and explore the influence of personal factors that determine engagement in such. This research study examined how personal factors (including fashion trend sensitivity, style orientation, frugality) influence sustainable clothing use practices (wear, care, and repair). A quantitative questionnaire was administered online to a representative sample of 420 U.S. consumers. A multi-level path analysis was used to test a proposed model. The results indicate that fashion trend sensitivity, style orientation, and frugality positively influence sustainable clothing use practices. Further, findings reveal that these personal factors explain 80% of the variance in sustainable clothing use, highlighting the critical role of use practice in shaping sustainable clothing behavior.

Prevalence of hypertension and factors associated with the utilization of primary health care services for hypertension among hypertensive population aged 40 years and above in Pyin Oo Lwin Township, Myanmar.

Utilization of hypertension services at primary health care levels has not been assessed at township level, since launching of PEN interventions in Myanmar. This study aimed to determine the factors associating with the utilization of primary health care services for hypertension among 40 years and above hypertensive population. Community-based cross-sectional study was done in Pyin Oo Lwin Township, 2023. Multi stage sampling was conducted to recruit 40 years and above participants; response rate was 85%. Joint National Committee (JNC7) classification was used to define hypertension. Among hypertensive participants, descriptive analysis, Chi squared test and multiple logistic models were conducted, with a significance level of 0.05. Out of 1001 screening participants, prevalence of hypertension was 38.6% (386). Among 386 participants, 51.8% (200) utilized primary health care services provided by public health facilities. Rural residents (AOR = 2.79, CI = 1.68, 4.67), known hypertension (AOR = 4.36, CI = 2.39, 8.23), good perception on hypertension (AOR = 0.30, CI = 0.14, 0.62), perceived cost of travel as necessary (AOR = 0.57, CI = 0.35, 0.92) and awareness of available services (AOR = 4.11, CI = 2.55, 6.71) were associated with the utilization of primary health care services for hypertension. This study provided context-specific scientific evidence to tackle existing problems of low utilization of PHC services for hypertension. Strengthening health care infrastructure for quality hypertension care at primary health care level was also recommended.