The use of large amounts of chemical fertilizers promotes high-yield agriculture, but is also associated with a number of problems, such as low fertilizer utilization rates, soil acidification, and soil salinization. Comprehensive studies have shown that spraying chelated fertilizer on leaves can reduce the total amounts of fertilizer applied and achieve high fertilizer efficiency. Foliar fertilizer application after soil fertilization is an effective method to increase the contents of trace elements in crops and crop yield, and to improve the soil environment. However, the application of inorganic foliar fertilizer results in difficulties in nutrient absorption and migration in plants. Chelated foliar fertilizers are effective for improving element utilization efficiency, crop yield, and quality. The physicochemical properties, molecular structure, chelating strength, and chelating rate of chelating agents modulate the effects of application of nutrients. This study reviews and discusses the effects and problems associated with sugar alcohol-containing chelated fertilizers and foliar fertilizers.

A dynamically tunable terahertz (THz) narrowband metamaterial absorber is presented. The absorber is based on an electrostatically actuated micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) cantilever and split ring resonator (SRR) array. An equivalent LC circuit model for a transverse electric (TE) polarization wave is introduced to analyze the mechanism of frequency tuning. A finite element method is applied to simulate the mechanical characteristics of the cantilever, and a finite integration technique is used to study the frequency tuning properties of the absorber. The results show that, for a TE polarization wave, there is only one absorption peak in the frequency range from 0.6 to 1.6 THz. The absorption peak frequency can be continuously tuned from 1.32 to 1.28 THz, and then abruptly to 1.12 THz. The maximum tunable frequency is 0.20 THz, which is about 15% of the initial resonance frequency. For a transverse magnetic (TM) polarization wave, there are two tunable absorption peaks in this frequency range. Moreover, for a TE wave, some geometric dimensions affecting the initial resonance frequency are investigated.

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Political optimizer (PO) is a relatively state-of-the-art meta-heuristic optimization technique for global optimization problems, as well as real-world engineering optimization, which mimics the multi-staged process of politics in human society. However, due to a greedy strategy during the election phase, and an inappropriate balance of global exploration and local exploitation during the party switching stage, it suffers from stagnation in local optima with a low convergence accuracy. To overcome such drawbacks, a sequence of novel PO variants were proposed by integrating PO with Quadratic Interpolation, Advance Quadratic Interpolation, Cubic Interpolation, Lagrange Interpolation, Newton Interpolation, and Refraction Learning (RL). The main contributions of this work are listed as follows. (1) The interpolation strategy was adopted to help the current global optima jump out of local optima. (2) Specifically, RL was integrated into PO to improve the diversity of the population. (3) To improve the ability of balancing exploration and exploitation during the party switching stage, a logistic model was proposed to maintain a good balance. To the best of our knowledge, PO combined with the interpolation strategy and RL was proposed here for the first time. The performance of the best PO variant was evaluated by 19 widely used benchmark functions and 30 test functions from the IEEE CEC 2014. Experimental results revealed the superior performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of exploration capacity.