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Recently, LEDs with various light qualities have been used in closed plant factories, and they are known to have different effects on the growth and quality of crops. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate the change in growth and quality in mini red romaine lettuce using LEDs with various light qualities. Wide red spectrum (WRS)-LEDs, blue (B)-LEDs, blue + red (BR)-LEDs, red (R)-LEDs, and white (W)-LEDs were used as the artificial light sources. Regarding growth, the R-LED treatment showed the most positive effect, but the leaf shape was not normal and the Hunter b* value was not suitable because it was higher than that of the other treatments. The Hunter a*, SPAD, and NDVI values of the B- and BR-LED treatments were effective, but this was not the case for those of the R- and W-LED treatments. The anthocyanin reflectance index 1 (ARI1) was 20 times higher in the B-LED treatment than in the R-LED treatment, and the ascorbic acid content was the highest in the WRS-LED treatment. In the sensory evaluation, bitterness and sweetness showed opposite tendencies. Regarding the overall preference, the BR-LED treatment received the highest score. Correlation analysis showed that the bitterness was closely correlated with the anthocyanin content and leaf color. Taken together, BR-LEDs provided a good top fresh weight, dark red leaves, and high anthocyanin and ascorbic acid contents, with the highest overall preference; therefore, BR-LEDs were the most suitable for the cultivation of mini red romaine lettuce.

Limited research examines how people of color view Jesus’s race and the influence of culture on such a view. We investigated the relationship between views of Jesus’s race and implicit bias when viewing images of Jesus (e.g., positive words associated with White Jesus, negative words associated with non-White Jesus) among Asian American students ( N = 103) from a Christian university. We predicted that (a) a small percentage of participants would view Jesus as White; (b) participants would demonstrate implicit bias; and (c) beliefs about Jesus’s race, racial colorblindness, ethnic identity, and internalized model minority stereotype would predict implicit bias. Participants were more likely to view Jesus as non-White but favor images of White Jesus over images of non-White Jesus, especially participants who endorsed White Jesus. Racial colorblindness was associated with beliefs about Jesus’s race and implicit bias. These findings highlight how inaccurately portraying prominent figures’ race as White perpetuates White standards such that race is obliviated and biases are internalized.

This study investigated the effects of supplemental inter-lighting on paprika (cv. Nagano RZ) in South Korea in summer using various LED light sources. The following LED inter-lighting treatments were used: QD-IL (blue + wide-red + far-red inter-lighting), CW-IL (cool-white inter-lighting), and B+R-IL (blue + red (1:2) inter-lighting). To investigate the effect of supplemental lighting on each canopy, top-lighting (CW-TL) was also used. Additionally, a control without supplemental lighting was included for comparison. Significant variations were observed in the plant growth indexes 42 days after treatment. The SPAD values and total chlorophyll content in the last period of cultivation were significantly higher than those of the control. In November, the marketable fruit yield was significantly higher than that of the control. QD-IL, CW-IL, and CW-TL resulted in significantly higher values of total soluble solids than the control, and CW-IL resulted in higher values of ascorbic acid content than the control. Regarding the economic analysis, CW-IL resulted in the highest net income rate (12.70%) compared with the control. Therefore, the light sources of CW-IL were assessed as suitable for supplemental lighting due to the highest total soluble solids, ascorbic acid content, and net income rate obtained.

Purpose: The exact role of adjuvant chemotherapy has yet to be elucidated in rectal cancer after preoperative chemoradiotherapy (CRT) and total mesorectal excision (TME). Thus, we assess the significance of positive surgical margin and perineural invasion (PNI) associated with adjuvant chemotherapy in patients with rectal cancer.Methods: This multi-institutional retrospective study included 1799 patients with rectal cancer at cT3-4N0-2M0. All patients received preoperative CRT with a dose of 50.4 Gy and curative TME. Patients were divided into two groups according to the status of surgical margin and PNI. The high-risk group had a positive margin and/or perineual invasion. The low-risk group showed no positive margin or PNI. Propensity-score matching analysis was performed to balance baseline characteristics of the two groups, and a total of 928 patients with 464 in each arm were evaluated.Results: The high-risk group showed significant differences in overall survival (OS, 73.4% vs. 53.9%, P < 0.01) and recurrence-free survival (RFS, 52.7% vs. 40.9%, P = 0.01) at five years between the adjuvant chemotherapy arm and observation arm. The low-risk group showed no significant differences in 5-year OS (86.6% vs. 75.3%, P = 0.61) and RFS (66.9% vs. 53.1%, P = 0.75) between the two arms. Multivariate analyses showed that age, pathologic N stage, and adjuvant chemotherapy were significantly correlated with OS and RFS in the high-risk group (all P < 0.05).Conclusion: Adjuvant chemotherapy improved OS and RFS more significantly in rectal cancer patients with positive surgical margin or PNI than in those with negative surgical margin and PNI.

Faced with the increasing disparity between SSD throughput and CPU-based compute capabilities, there have been growing interests to move compute closer to storage and accelerate the data analytic workloads. In this letter, we propose SmartSSD, an SSD with onboard FPGA, which enables offloading computation within SSD. We perform a detailed model-based evaluation to evaluate the end-to-end performance and energy benefit of SmartSSD for the representative data analytic workloads with Spark SQL and Parquet columnar data format. Our evaluation shows that SmartSSD has the potential to have a transformative impact when building a high performance data analytic system, which enables 3.04x performance improvement and consuming only 45.8 percent of energy compared to the conventional CPU-based approach.

The effect of 10% CO2 pre-storage treatment for 12, 24, and 48 h alongside modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) on chilling injury was determined in this study. This study found significant interactions between chilling injuries and cell membrane damage indicators. The results show that chilling injuries can be somewhat reduced by the use of CO2 treatment for sweet peppers. It was noticed that the fruit’s respiration rate increased as the treatment duration increased immediately after the treatments, while the resultant did not affect the ethylene production rate, electrolyte leakage, or malondialdehyde. Similarly, after cold storage and on the final day, no really significant differences were shown in all those parameters except for the weight loss rate, chilling injury, calyx browning, and firmness, which were at the poorest state in the control group. Of all the treatments in this study, MAP appeared to be the best treatment, and preference may be given to the 24 h treatment of pretreated fruits. Weight loss, firmness, calyx browning, and chilling injury were maintained best in MAP due to the presence of CO2 and high humidity.

Water loss, interwoven with other factors, is identified as the cause of chilling injury to sweet peppers. The breaker stage is the most vulnerable of all maturity stages. The purpose of this study was to see if increasing the storage relative humidity (RH) reduces the chilling injury and to compare its effect on breaker-stage fruits to red-ripe fruits at a normal RH. The fruits were stored at 5 °C with a RH of 98 ± 2% and 70 ± 6% for high and low RH, respectively. After 15 days of cold storage, the fruits were moved to ambient conditions for 3–5 days for chilling injury symptoms to appear. The results showed that high RH storage reduced fruit water loss by 4–4.5% compared to low RH storage, resulting in fewer chilling injury symptoms regardless of fruit maturity stage. Due to the increased RH, cell membrane damage indicators such as electrolyte leakage, MDA, respiration, and ethylene production rates were shown to be reduced, while brix and color were well maintained, indicating reduced or stopped senescence. Furthermore, DPPH antioxidant activity and vitamin C were retained and optimized. The microbiological analyses also showed that a high RH may not promote the growth of microorganisms as quickly as may have been thought. Finally, the findings of this study indicate that breaker-stage peppers stored at a high RH may be less susceptible to chilling injury than red-ripe peppers stored at a low RH.

Purpose This study was conducted to compare the outcome of three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy (3D-CRT) and intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) for the postoperative treatment of biliary tract cancer. Materials and methods From February 2008 to June 2016, 57 patients of biliary tract cancer treated with curative surgery followed by postoperative 3D-CRT (n = 27) or IMRT (n = 30) were retrospectively enrolled. Results Median follow-up time was 23.6 months (range, 5.2 to 97.6 months) for all patients and 38.4 months (range, 27.0 to 89.2 months) for survivors. Two-year recurrence-free survival is higher in IMRT arm than 3D-CRT arm with a marginal significance (25.9% vs. 47.4%; p = 0.088). Locoregional recurrence-free survival (64.3% vs. 81.7%; p = 0.122) and distant metastasis-free survival (40.3% vs. 55.8%; p = 0.234) at two years did not show any statistical difference between two radiation modalities. In the multivariate analysis, extrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma, poorly-differentiated histologic grade, and higher stage were significant poor prognostic factors for survival. Severe treatment-related toxicity was not significantly different between two arms. Conclusion IMRT showed comparable results with 3D-CRT in terms of recurrence, and survival, and radiotherapy toxicity for the postoperative treatment of biliary tract cancer.

This study aimed to examine the effect of modified atmosphere (MA) storage on the quality and storability of romaine lettuce. Whole and fresh-cut romaine lettuce were packaged with 1300, 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 cc m−2·day−1·atm−1 O2 transmission rate (OTR) films and stored at 2 or 8 °C for 15 days. The respiration and ethylene production rates before pre-cooling were higher in fresh-cut lettuce than in whole romaine lettuce. The reduction in fresh weight for whole and fresh-cut romaine lettuce during storage was less than 0.5%. The CO2 concentration was less than 2%, except for the 1300 cc treatment (at 8 °C for whole and fresh-cut lettuce) and 10,000 cc (in fresh-cut lettuce). At the end date of storage, the overall quality of the whole lettuce was good, the off-odor was lower in the 10,000 cc treatment, and the 50,000 cc treatment at 8 °C led to good overall quality in the fresh-cut lettuce. The chlorophyll content of the whole lettuce was maintained at a higher level in the treatment of 10,000 cc at 8 °C, while it was higher in the 50,000 cc treatments at 2 and 8 °C in the fresh-cut lettuce. Correlation and PCA confirmed that the main factors affecting the storability and quality of romaine lettuce were fresh weight loss rate, off-odor, and the concentration of CO2. In addition, the storage characteristics of whole and fresh-cut lettuce were opposite to 0 in PC1 and PC2, indicating that the storage characteristics were different depending on the processing type.

Purpose The role of adjuvant chemotherapy after preoperative chemoradiation therapy (CRT) and curative surgery in rectal cancer has yet to be definitely determined. We performed a retrospective and multicenter study to evaluate whether adjuvant chemotherapy (AC) could reduce recurrence and improve survival in locally advanced rectal cancer. Methods and Materials We analyzed data from 8 tertiary institutions for 1442 patients with rectal cancer who underwent preoperative CRT and total mesorectal excision. Patients were classified into 2 groups: the AC group (patients who received chemotherapy after surgery) and the observation group (those who did not receive chemotherapy after surgery). Propensity-score matching was used to assess the exact role of AC. The AC group was then subdivided to investigate the impact of adding oxaliplatin to 5-fluorouracil (5-FU). Group 1 was treated with 5-FU/folinic acid or capecitabine without oxaliplatin, and group 2 received 5-FU/folinic acid or capecitabine with oxaliplatin. Results The 3-year relapse-free survival rates in the AC and observation groups were 85.9% and 84.3%, respectively (P = .532). The 3-year overall survival rates in the AC and observation groups were 94.9% and 89.9%, respectively (P = .123). The rates of locoregional recurrence (2.2% vs 3.2%, P = .294) and distant metastasis (12.4% vs 12.9%, P = .927) at 3 years were not significantly different between the two groups. The 3-year relapse-free survival rates of group 1 and group 2 were 71.5% and 74.8%, respectively (P = .426). The 3-year overall survival rates of group 1 and group 2 were 89.9% and 96.5%, respectively (P = .102). Conclusions This multicenter study found insufficient evidence to support the use of 5-FU–based AC after preoperative CRT and curative surgery in rectal cancer.