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• ST612-MRSA in Australia form distinct equine/veterinarian-associated and human-associated clades. • Bacteraemia-causing ST612-MRSA isolate in Western Australia is of the equine and veterinarian-associated ST612 clade. • ST612-MRSA is closely related to ST8 USA500 and carries conserved insertion sequences in virulence-modulating genes. • Rifampicin use in equine veterinary practice may encourage colonisation of horses by ST612-MRSA. Staphylococcus aureus is a serious human and animal pathogen. Multilocus sequence type 612 (ST612) is the dominant methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) clone in certain South African hospitals and is sporadically isolated from horses and horse-associated veterinarians in Australia. Colonisation and infection by ST612-MRSA is increasing in Western Australia. Whole-genome sequencing was performed for 51 isolates of ST612-MRSA from Western Australian patients and healthcare workers, South African hospital patients, Australian veterinarians and New South Wales horses. Core genome phylogenies suggested that Australian equine and veterinarian-associated ST612-MRSA were monophyletic. Individual Western Australian isolates grouped either with this equine-associated lineage or more diverse lineages related to those in South African hospitals. Bioinformatic analyses of the complete ST612-MRSA reference genome SVH7513 confirmed that ST612-MRSA was closely related to ST8 USA500 MRSA. Common use of rifampicin in South Africa and equine veterinarian practice may favour ST612-MRSA in these settings. Humans and horses colonised with ST612-MRSA are potential reservoirs for MRSA in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aims to promote the sustainable utilization of locally available, environmentally friendly resources, making a substantial contribution to both mitigating global warming and fulfilling future energy needs. Hybrid renewable energy systems have demonstrated superior stability and reliability compared to single-source systems, all while operating at minimal costs. This paper provides an overview of various hybrid renewable energy systems employed for electricity generation. It underscores that in hot regions, despite high solar radiation, solar PV systems experience reduced electrical yield due to elevated solar cell temperatures beyond the recommended range, especially in summer. In such areas, leveraging solar thermal applications and abundant biomass energy from extensive agricultural activities is preferable. What sets this study apart is its innovative approach: replacing conventional hybrid systems, like PV, wind, diesel generators, and batteries, with a Stirling engine powered by dish solar concentrators, which offer high efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The proposed Hybrid Renewable Energy System (HRES), consisting of a parabolic dish solar concentrator and Biomass Digester (PDSC/BG), transforms challenges into opportunities. It provides the community with a sustainable source of electricity, heating, and cooking gas, simultaneously addressing the region's waste management issues. The system is evaluated at Brack City, Libya, and comprises a 36,560 m3 biomass digester that produces 27 Mm3 annually, a 1230 kW Stirling generator, and a 6006 m2 PDSC collector area. The system will add 5,670,534 kWh of energy to the grid yearly, with a peak load capacity of 1230 kWh and a coverage of 5,892,666 kWh. The system's technical and economical viability is evaluated using SAM software. The project has a 20.04-year payback period, an estimated capital cost of $12,365,896, and an LCOE of $0.075/kWh. Annual CO 2 emissions will be reduced by 7.8 kton as a result of the project. • Introduce a novel off-grid hybrid system design. • Substitute storage with a more reliable, cost-effective biomass gasification source. • Utilize a single Stirling engine for both technologies to reduce capital investment and lower LCOE. • Evaluate the energy, economic, and environmental effects of the proposed system. • Assess biomass impact on different sizes of hybrid renewable energy systems (HRES). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Highlighting the wind energy at many sites in Libya. • Introducing a new approach for LCA for importing countries. • Introducing a new terminology Life cycle levelized cost of energy LCLCOE. • Identifying the most suitable type of wind turbine for each site in Libya. The recent investigation has demonstrated that wind energy holds great potential as a viable and environmentally friendly energy source in Libya. The study employed a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology to evaluate various energy, economic, and environmental indicators for potential wind farm installations at multiple suitable locations across Libya. The assessment encompassed estimations of energy requirements and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with the conversion of wind energy into electricity throughout the entire life cycle of the proposed wind farms. In light of Libya not being a producer of wind energy converters, a novel approach was developed to define the system's boundaries. These boundaries included distinct subsystems, each corresponding to various stages within the life cycle of a wind energy system, encompassing factors such as shipping emissions from the manufacturer's location to Tripoli's marine ports, land transportation to the wind farm sites, energy and emissions associated with installation, operation, maintenance, and eventual disposal of wind turbines. Hourly climate data spanning a 25-year period from 1995 to 2020 were gathered from the SolarGis climate information site. The System Advisor Model (SAM) program was utilized to predict the energy yields of 100 MW capacity wind farms at 12 sites in Libya. Additionally, a novel eco-environmental indicator known as the Life Cycle Levelized Cost of Energy (LCLCOE) was introduced, which factors in all environmental damage costs throughout the entire lifespan of wind energy projects. The study's findings revealed that the Gamesa turbine, with a capital cost of $146,916,400 for a 100 MW capacity wind energy farm, exhibited the most favorable economic and environmental performance. GHG emission factors across all examined cities ranged from 32 to 70 gGHG/kWh, with carbon payback durations spanning from 4.5 to 12.3 months. The estimated energy payback period varied from 13 to 22 months, while the LCLCOE ranged from 4.8 to 8.4 ¢/kWh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Theoretical measurement and optimization of drug solubility. • Predicting the solubility of Pantoprazole sodium sesquihydrate via ML. • The models were validated with experimental data. • Gradient boosting was selected as the main model of this work. Theoretical/experimental measurement and optimization of solubility is considered as an active field of research in different scientific areas such as pharmaceutics. Novel orally administered therapeutic medicines have recently suffered from low solubility and bioavailability. Therefore, finding better methods to improve the drug solubility and bioavailability are of prime importance. Application of CO 2 supercritical fluid (CO 2 SCF) as a well-known procedure has attracted numerous attentions in pharmaceutical industry to increase the drug solubility and bioavailability due to its low flammability, reasonable cost, and negligible detrimental impacts for ecosystem. Pantoprazole sodium sesquihydrate is an extensively-used drug, which is indicated for the alleviation of the undesirable signs of esophagitis caused by stomach acid due to gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). The purpose of this research is to analyze and optimize the solubility of Pantoprazole sodium sesquihydrate using four different tree-based models where we have temperature and pressure as input features. These models include the regression tree, the boosting model based on it (gradient boosting), the bagging model based on it (random forest), and finally a more recently developed boosting model (extreme gradient boosting). All of these models, after optimization with their hyper-parameters, show an R2-score of more than 0.9. Finally, extreme gradient boosting was selected as the main model of this work, which has a 1.07 × 10-2 maximum error and an RMSE error rate of 5.85 × 10-3. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Room-temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) have been promoted as "green" chemicals that can be used as alternatives to conventional volatile organic solvents. In addition to low volatilities, hydrophobicity for organic liquids and hydrophilicity for ions in RTILs lead to a wide spectrum of applications. ILs have recently been considered as alternative solvents to carboxylic acids and amines used for solvent extraction desalination (SED). RTILs are used in pairs of cations and anions that can significantly influence SED potentials. This study aimed to find an optimal combination of cationic and anionic RTIL as a desalination solvent through theoretical, experimental, and computational approaches. SED potentials in terms of water absorption and salt rejection were investigated for ten pairs of RTILs using different combinations of imidazolium and phosphonium cations with various anions. SED potentials were highly dependent on the anion type, with Tf2N showing the most promising SED potential. Imidazolium based RTILs exhibited better SED performances than phosphonium based RTILs in experiments. [BMIM][Tf 2 N] was recommended as a candidate SED-IL material, showing a water absorption and salt rejection of 1.73 % and 93.7 %, respectively. Molecular dynamics (MDs) simulation was implemented in parallel in order to examine and analyze intermolecular interactions that led to particular experimental observations. [Display omitted] • Cation-anion RTIL combinations for solvent extraction desalination were investigated. • Solubility parameter (HSP) of RTIL pair was related to SED potentials. • Selection of anion IL was more important for SED. • Molecular interactions between ILs and water were simulated and analyzed through MD. • Experiments and MD simulation for RTIL-SED were well matched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The release of colored compounds containing wastewaters into the environment and surface water resources is known as a serious threat to public health and aquatic ecosystems. Accordingly, in the present study, cost-effective and efficient activated carbons (ACs) were prepared employing agricultural wastes (walnut shell) over a two-stage physical activation under CO2 at various activation temperature (700–1000 °C) and time (30–120 min). The prepared ACs were characterized by various analyses of SEM, XRD, FTIR, BET, and also their adsorption performance was checked via the measure of methylene blue (MB) number in order to determine selected activated carbon. According to the reported results, the AC produced at the activation temperature and time of 900 °C and 60 min, respectively, indicated better physicochemical properties and more favorable performance compared to others. The selected AC had the highest BET surface area (S BET) of 903.9 m2/g and the greatest adsorption capacity of 307.4 mg/g as the MB number. Furthermore, the adsorption capacity as iodine number and pH of point of zero charge (pH PZC) were reported to be 1150 mg/g and 4.6, respectively, for the selected AC. In the following, the performance of the selected AC was further evaluated as adsorption of synthetic (MB) and natural dyes from biologically treated wastewaters under different conditions. Maximum absorption capacity of the MB was obtained to be 307.45 mg/g at optimum conditions (the adsorbent dosage of 1 g/L, adsorbate concentration of 400 mg/L, contact time of 3 h, and agitation speed of 150 rpm). Moreover, the selected AC demonstrated appreciable performance at adsorbent dosage of 1 g/L and the contact time of 240 min using three biologically treated wastewaters. The highest adsorption capacity of 395.7 mg/g was obtained by the biologically treated baker's yeast wastewater as the adsorbate. The selected AC revealed the highest conformity with the Langmuir isotherm model (R2 = 0.9999) and the Pseudo-second-order kinetic model (R2 = 0.9994). • The walnut shell-based activated carbons (ACs) were physically synthesized. • The impact of activation temperature and time on the ACs properties was studied. • The AC performance was evaluated as natural dye removal from field samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic Grammar Error Correction (GEC) detects and corrects various types of syntax, spelling, and grammatical errors. Different approaches such as rule-based, Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), and Neural Machine Translation (NMT) have been proposed. Among these approaches, NMT based on seq2seq multi-head attention (Transformer) performs the best. The key shortcoming of GEC seq2seq models with multiple encoder-decoder layers is that only the top layer is exploited in the subsequent processes. In addition, due to the exposure bias problem during inference, some of the previous target words are deleted and replaced by other words generated by the model itself, which leads to unsatisfactory output. This paper proposed GEC model based on seq2seq Transformer for low-resource languages such as Arabic to address these issues. Initially, we proposed a noising method for constructing synthetic parallel data to overcome the bottleneck arising from the lack of corpus. Furthermore, motivated by the success of capsule networks in computer vision, we used the Expectation-Maximization routing algorithm to dynamically aggregate information across layers in Arabic GEC. Moreover, to conquer the exposure bias problem, we introduced a bidirectional regularization term using Kullback-Leibler divergence in the training objective to improve the agreement between Right-to-left and Left-to-right models. Experiments performed on two benchmarks QALB-2014 and QALB-2015 showed that our proposed model achieved the best F 1 score compared to the existing Arabic GEC systems. • We proposed an automatic Arabic grammar error correction. • we proposed a semi-supervision noising method to construct synthetic parallel training data. • We proposed to use dynamic linear combination and EM routing algorithm with seq2seq Transformer. • We introduced a regularization bidirectional agreement method to overcome the exposure bias problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The composite NF membranes were successfully fabricated using incorporation of K-B-N triple TiO 2. • 0.5 wt. % K-B-N triple TiO 2 incorporated membrane imparted the superior antifouling attitude. • The selected membrane revealed potent performance under continuous visible light irradiation. • The chosen membrane indicated appreciable behavior under various conditions in the dynamic regime. The photocatalytic nanocomposite NF membranes blended with K-B-N triple TiO 2 were fabricated employing conventional wet phase inversion method. The dynamic performance of the photocatalytic membranes was evaluated by filtering biologically treated palm oil mill effluent (POME) at dark and light conditions. The performance of the chosen membrane was checked using central composite design (CCD) of response surface methodology (RSM) under continuous visible light irradiation and various variables in a dynamic mode. According to experimental results, the 0.5 wt. % membrane indicated less flux reduction without scarifying COD rejection capacity as a function of time while filtering POME under continuous visible light irradiation. The largest values of FRR and COD removal efficiency were reported to be 97 % and 100 %, respectively, at the highest feed flow rate of 150 L/min, the lowest operating pressure of 5 bar, and the lowest COD concentration of 1000 mg/L. While, the highest value of flux (33.9 kg/m2h) was obtained at operating pressure of 9 bar, feed flow rate of 50 L/h and COD concentration of 1000 mg/L. By judging from results, the photocatalytic NF membrane by benefiting from both photocatalytic and self-cleaning properties has enough potential to be applied in practical applications. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systemic plant protection products, such as neonicotinoids (NIs), are capable of being translocated throughout a plant. Although NIs are less toxic to mammals, fish, and birds, their impact on microbial and non-target insects is of concern. This study investigates the uptake, translocation, and accumulation of the NI, imidacloprid (IMI), in romaine lettuce ( Lactuca sativa L. var. longipolia ). Exposing 15-day-old seedlings to "10 mg/L" of IMI, the effects on microbial communities in both cultivated (CS) and non-cultivated soil (NCS) were studied along with IMI translocation within plant tissues. The concentrations of IMI in soil varied temporally and between soil types after initial application, with a decrease from 2.0 and 7.7 mg/kg on the first day of sampling to 0.5 and 2.6 mg/kg on the final sampling day (day 35) for CS and NCS, respectively. The half-life of IMI soil was 10.7 and 72.5 days in CS and NCS, respectively, indicating that IMI degraded more quickly in CS, possibly due to smaller grain size, aeration, microbial degradation, and water flow. The accumulated concentrations of IMI in lettuce tissues ranged from 12.4 ± 0.2 and 18.7± 0.9 mg/kg in CS and NCS, respectively. The highest concentration of IMI was found in the shoots, followed by the roots, whereas the soil showed the lowest IMI residuals at the end of the trial. Soil bacteria and fungi were altered by the application of IMI, with a lower abundance index within the bacterial community, indicating a negative impact on the distribution of bacteria in the soil.

Background: Anti-drug antibodies are associated with treatment failure to anti-TNF agents in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)., Aim: To assess whether immunogenicity to a patient's first anti-TNF agent would be associated with immunogenicity to the second, irrespective of drug sequence METHODS: We conducted a UK-wide, multicentre, retrospective cohort study to report rates of immunogenicity and treatment failure of second anti-TNF therapies in 1058 patients with IBD who underwent therapeutic drug monitoring for both infliximab and adalimumab. The primary outcome was immunogenicity to the second anti-TNF agent, defined at any timepoint as an anti-TNF antibody concentration ≥9 AU/ml for infliximab and ≥6 AU/ml for adalimumab., Results: In patients treated with infliximab and then adalimumab, those who developed antibodies to infliximab were more likely to develop antibodies to adalimumab, than patients who did not develop antibodies to infliximab (OR 1.99, 95%CI 1.27-3.20, p = 0.002). Similarly, in patients treated with adalimumab and then infliximab, immunogenicity to adalimumab was associated with subsequent immunogenicity to infliximab (OR 2.63, 95%CI 1.46-4.80, p < 0.001). For each 10-fold increase in anti-infliximab and anti-adalimumab antibody concentration, the odds of subsequently developing antibodies to adalimumab and infliximab increased by 1.73 (95% CI 1.38-2.17, p < 0.001) and 1.99 (95%CI 1.34-2.99, p < 0.001), respectively. Patients who developed immunogenicity with undetectable drug levels to infliximab were more likely to develop immunogenicity with undetectable drug levels to adalimumab (OR 2.37, 95% CI 1.39-4.19, p < 0.001). Commencing an immunomodulator at the time of switching to the second anti-TNF was associated with improved drug persistence in patients with immunogenic, but not pharmacodynamic failure., Conclusion: Irrespective of drug sequence, immunogenicity to the first anti-TNF agent was associated with immunogenicity to the second, which was mitigated by the introduction of an immunomodulator in patients with immunogenic, but not pharmacodynamic treatment failure., (© 2022 The Authors. Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Introduction C-reactive protein (CRP) has been reported as a predictor of the severity of acute pancreatitis (AP). However, there is conflicting evidence in the literature. The proposed cut-off values and intervals for best prediction include an absolute value of 150 at 48 hours; an absolute value of 190 at 48 hours; and the interval change in CRP of 90 at 48 hours. The current study assesses the value of CRP at different intervals and cut-offs in predicting complicated acute pancreatitis (CAP) and compares its performance against other available predictors like neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR); Glasgow scoring system and modified CT severity index (MCTSI).  Methods Analysis of prospectively maintained data for index episodes of acute pancreatitis managed in 225 patients over a period of five years (2014-2018) was done. CAP was defined by using revised Atlanta classification and included all the AP patients with local and or systemic complications. It was used as a gold standard. Diagnostic and predictive performance of different biochemical markers and multifactorial scoring systems were determined by analyzing receiving operating curves (ROCs), the area under the curve (AUC), sensitivity, specificity, and predictive values (positive and negative).  Results Out of 225 patients, 122 were female while 103 patients were male. CAP developed in 47 patients (20.9%) while 178 (79.1%) patients had mild AP. Overall, in-hospital mortality rate was 1.8% (n=4). ROC analysis demonstrated that CRP at admission had low discriminatory value (AUC= 0.54, p-value=0.74). CRP at 48 hours had AUC of 0.70 (p-value=0.007). At a cut-off of 150, the positive predictive value (PPV) of 150 was 30 %. The PPV of CRP at 48 hours at a cut-off of 190 was 28%. Interval change in CRP at 48 hours greater than 90 had a PPV of 26 %. Further comparison of CRP with other scoring systems like Glasgow scoring system (AUC= 0.65), NL ratio (AUC=0.54), and MCTSI was performed. Among the single predictors, although, NL ratio showed good sensitivity at a cut-off value of 4.7 (87.23%), however, its discriminatory power was negligible (AUC=0.542, p-value=0.513). The overall best performance was achieved by the MCTSI scoring system at a cut-off of 3 (AUC=0.90, sensitivity=83.33 %, specificity=100%, diagnostic accuracy=94.49%).  Conclusion CRP measured at admission or at 48 hours has a very limited role in the prediction of CAP. Along with other scoring systems, its negative predictive value should be used to predict cases with mild AP which can help in clinical decision making for early discharge or management of such patients on ambulatory care basis. MCTSI scoring system can be used in cases with high suspicion of CAP., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright © 2021, Ahmad et al.)

Fahad Hospital, which is the only referral centre for Al-Hasa region, Saudi Arabia.