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Topic Review
Building the Profile of Soils' Water Storage Capacity
By taking the soil moisture as a proxy in the modelling, a neural network is designed to capture those impact factors of soil water storage capacity and their nonlinear interaction implicitly without knowing the underlying soil hydrologic processes. An internal vector of the proposed neural network assimilates the soil moisture response to meteorological conditions and is regulated as the profile of the soil water storage capacity. Different from static single value indicators, the profile vector can describe the amount of water that a soil can hold under various moisture levels over a range of time periods. Moreover, the trained model can be deployed as an alternative to the expensive sensor networks for continuous soil moisture monitoring.
  • 235
  • 27 Jun 2023
Topic Review
Building-Integrated Photovoltaics in Singapore
Building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPVs) represent an effective technology to attain zero energy buildings (ZEBs) via solar energy use. A BIPV system can seamlessly integrate PV modules into external building surfaces, such as walls, roofs, shading devices, and decorative components. Moreover, it can generate clean energy. From an environmental and economic perspective, PV energy generation provides more advantages than fossil fuel-based energy generation. First, in contrast to the limited storage of fossil fuels, the solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface every day contains 10,000 times the energy requirements of humans on a daily basis. Second, the manufacturing process of PV modules produces only a small amount of carbon dioxide (20–30 g carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e/kWh)).
  • 1.9K
  • 30 Aug 2022
Topic Review
Built-In Car Navigation System
Driving is based on effective navigation. When using a navigation device, the user interface, the amount and quality of the underlying data and its representation all effect the quality of navigation. This study evaluates whether drivers in three different countries consider these devices to be useful and what functionality they would prefer. An online questionnaire was used to assess built-in navigation systems. The findings from 213 respondents show that current car GPSs are overloaded with features. Regardless of country, drivers simply require more basic functionality in the interface. It was also noted that the embedded functions in these devices are not fully utilized. In addition, many people use the navigation service to enter a new address while the car is moving. It may be worth examining how this option can be better implemented.
  • 3.5K
  • 10 May 2022
Topic Review
Burgess Shale Type Preservation
The Burgess Shale of British Columbia is famous for its exceptional preservation of mid-Cambrian organisms. Around 40 other sites have been discovered of a similar age, with soft tissues preserved in a similar, though not identical, fashion. Additional sites with a similar form of preservation are known from the Ediacaran and Ordovician periods. These various shales are of great importance in the reconstruction of the ecosystems immediately after the Cambrian explosion. The taphonomic regime results in soft tissue being preserved, which means that organisms without hard parts that could be conventionally fossilised can be seen; also, we gain an insight into the organs of more familiar organisms such as the trilobites. The most famous localities preserving organisms in this fashion are the Canadian Burgess Shale, the Chinese Chengjiang fauna, and the more remote Sirius Passet in north Greenland. However, a number of other localities also exist.
  • 372
  • 28 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Burmese Amber
Burmese amber, also known as Burmite or Kachin amber, is amber from the Hukawng Valley in northern Myanmar. The amber is dated to around 99 million years old, during the earliest part of the Cenomanian age of the Late Cretaceous. The amber is of significant palaeontological interest due to the diversity of flora and fauna contained as inclusions, particularly arthropods including insects and arachnids but also birds, lizards, snakes, frogs and fragmentary dinosaur remains. The amber has been known and commercially exploited since the first century AD, and has been known to science since the mid-nineteenth century. Research on the deposit has attracted controversy due to its role in funding internal conflict in Myanmar and hazardous working conditions in the mines where it is collected.
  • 871
  • 24 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Bush Encroachment
Bush encroachment (also shrub encroachment, woody encroachment, bush thickening, woody plant proliferation) is a natural phenomenon characterised by the increase in density of woody plants, bushes and shrubs, at the expense of the herbaceous layer, grasses and forbs. It predominantly occurs in grasslands, savannas and woodlands and can cause biome shifts from open grasslands and savannas to closed woodlands. The term bush encroachment refers to the expansion of native plants and not the spread of alien invasive species. It is thus defined by plant density, not species. Bush encroachment is often considered an ecological regime shift and can be a symptom of land degradation. Its causes include land use intensification, such as high grazing pressure and the suppression of wildfires. Climate change is found to be an accelerating factor for woody encroachment. The impact of bush encroachment is highly context specific. It is often found to have severe negative consequences on key ecosystem services, especially biodiversity, animal habitat, land productivity and groundwater recharge. Across rangelands, woody encroachment has led to significant declines of productivity, threatening the livelihoods of affected land users. The phenomenon is observed across different ecosystems and with different characteristics and intensities globally. Various countries actively counter woody encroachment, through adapted grassland management practices and targeted bush thinning. In some cases, areas affected by woody encroachment are classified as carbon sinks and form part of national greenhouse gas inventories. However, carbon sequestration effects of woody encroachment are highly context specific and still insufficiently researched.
  • 4.3K
  • 08 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Business Process Re-Engineering to Digitalise Quality Control Checks
Business process re-engineering allows optimising processes within businesses. One way to do so is to use lean thinking to maximise customer value whilst minimising waste. Just-in-time is one of the core elements of lean production and is the material flow design upon which the lean production model is founded. For such a production model to succeed and achieve high efficiency and productivity levels, it needs to have a robust quality management system to accomplish the notion of ‘right first time’ and have quality controls at the source to prevent defects from entering the production system altogether. Defects occur when products are produced outside of agreed tolerances of the approved specification. Defects are a significant contributor to product waste and waste of resources, including raw materials, energy, water, and human resources. A reduction in waste generation helps to boost business performance by lowering environmental, economic and social impacts, i.e., the three pillars of sustainability. Optimised process monitoring helps identify defects in advance or as they happen in real time. A key function of the quality control (QC) process is to provide evidence that customer requirements (tolerances) of the product are met; therefore, measuring and controlling the values of the different variables that regulate the manufacturing processes is critical. However, collecting these values and handling the data manually tends to be slow, tedious, and prone to human error, as data can be misread, misplaced, or misrecorded easily. Furthermore, human judgement may not be consistent due to various factors including fatigue, mental or physical stress, as well as variability in heuristic and cognitive capabilities. Data capturing and analysing technology can be used instead to acquire such data and use it to control processes within acceptable parameters, ensuring optimum product flow and quality. Furthermore, as computing devices get smaller and cheaper, it is increasingly possible to tailor them to meet more needs on the factory floor, enabling machines to gather data, measure key performance indicators, and track operational efficiency. Data archiving is also necessary so that results can be reviewed later for auditing purposes. As cloud storage becomes safer, more affordable and with connection speeds that provide quick access, companies are increasingly moving away from paper records. This change introduces the challenge of reviewing and re-writing internal procedures to capture these new ways of data collection and reporting. It is important to know and prove who does what, when, how, and why for the purposes of traceability, accuracy, and consistency.
  • 687
  • 01 Dec 2021
Topic Review
Cadmium Pollution in Rice- and Wheat- Cropping Systems
The accumulation of cadmium in rice (Oryza sativa L.) and wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is a serious threat to the safe use of farmland and to the health of the human diet that has attracted extensive attention from researchers. Cadmium toxicity reduces the uptake and transport of essential elements in rice and wheat. Cadmium stress seriously affected the growth and morphology of plant roots. In the shoots, Cd toxicity was manifested by a series of physiological injuries, such as decreased photosynthesis, soluble protein, sugar, and antioxidant enzyme activity. Cadmium that accumulates in the shoots is transferred to grains and then passes up the food chain to people and animals.
  • 630
  • 27 Dec 2022
Topic Review
Cadmium Recovery from Spent Ni-Cd Batteries
The significant increase in the demand for efficient electric energy storage during the last decade has promoted an increase in the production and use of Cd-containing batteries. On the one hand, the amount of toxic Cd-containing used batteries is growing, while on the other hand, Cd is on a list of critical raw materials (for Europe). Both of these factors call for the development of effective technology for Cd recovery from spent batteries. Alkaline nickel-cadmium (Ni-Cd) batteries are widely used as autonomous sources of industrial and household current (power banks) due to a successful combination of feasibility studies and achieved sustainable electrical characteristics. In recent decades, the market of secondary current sources for portable equipment has undergone significant changes, which leads to an intensive replacement of Ni-Cd batteries with lithium-ion (LIB) and nickel-metal-hydride.
  • 710
  • 07 Feb 2022
Topic Review
Cairn
A cairn is a man-made pile (or stack) of stones. The word cairn comes from the Scottish Gaelic: càrn [ˈkʰaːrˠn̪ˠ] (plural càirn [ˈkʰaːrˠɲ]). Cairns have been and are used for a broad variety of purposes, from prehistoric times to the present. In modern times, cairns are often erected as landmarks, a use they have had since ancient times. However, since prehistory, they have also been built and used as burial monuments; for defense and hunting; for ceremonial purposes, sometimes relating to astronomy; to locate buried items, such as caches of food or objects; and to mark trails, among other purposes. Cairns are used as trail markers in many parts of the world, in uplands, on moorland, on mountaintops, near waterways and on sea cliffs, as well as in barren deserts and tundras. They vary in size from small stone markers to entire artificial hills, and in complexity from loose conical rock piles to delicately balanced sculptures and elaborate feats of megalithic engineering. Cairns may be painted or otherwise decorated, whether for increased visibility or for religious reasons. An ancient example is the inuksuk (plural inuksuit), used by the Inuit, Inupiat, Kalaallit, Yupik, and other peoples of the Arctic region of North America. Inuksuit are found from Alaska to Greenland. This region, above the Arctic Circle, is dominated by the tundra biome and has areas with few natural landmarks.
  • 1.0K
  • 30 Nov 2022
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