The interest for food waste (FW) in the scientific community has been growing consistently in the most recent years. This is reflected by the number of publications (journal articles and proceedings ...papers) which can be accessed in the Web of Science (WoS) database. However, lacking of systematic, chronological and synthesizing studies indicating how this field has evolved over time. The main objective of this paper is to consolidate the state of the art of research on FW, based on a bibliometrics study of articles published over the past 18 years. The results are discussed under the following perspectives: chronological distribution, countries, institutions, source titles, subject categories, and author keywords. It is found that the FW research has increased rapidly over past 18 years, most notably in the last 8 years. In total, 2340 research articles were published in 801 journals and in 161 WoS subject categories. The top 7 productive countries were analyzed herein. The predominance of Chinese institutions in terms of article count and a predominance of industrialized countries' institutions in terms of citation score were compared. Finally, based on keywords analysis, it comes to the conclusion that the clean energy, treatment and valorization, and management innovation have attracted extensive attention during the past decade.
•A systematic overview of scientific literature dealing with FW is provided by a bibliometric analysis.•The analysis of publication output, distribution of countries, institutions, and subject category are carried out.•The analysis of author keywords helps in drawing the research trends in a special perspective.•Researches on clean energy, LCA, and sustainability tend to be a new research focus in the area of FW.
Rare earth elements (REEs) are applied in various industries. They have entered the environment through different pathways and caused serious pollutions. So far, due to the lack of calculated ...toxicity coefficient of rare earth elements, it is still difficult to evaluate their ecological risks. The potential ecological risk index method is commonly used in the pollution assessment of heavy metals. And rare earth elements are similar to heavy metals. Herein, we used this method to calculate the toxicity coefficient of 15 rare earth elements (La, Ce, Pr, Nd, Sm, Eu, Gd, Tb, Dy, Ho, Er, Tm, Yb, Lu, and Y). The calculation was based on two principles, rare earth elements coexist with each other because of their similar chemical properties, and the elemental abundance and release effect determine their toxicity. The results are as follows: La = 1, Ce = 1, Pr = 5, Nd = 2, Sm = 5, Eu = 10, Gd = 5, Tb = 10, Dy = 5, Ho = 10, Er = 5, Tm = 10, Yb = 5, Lu = 20, Y = 2. Our results can provide a reference to the potential ecological risk assessment of rare earth elements.
There are large amounts of ion-adsorption rare earth resources in the granite red soil region of southern China, and exploitation of rare earth elements (REEs) has caused serious soil erosion and ...soil pollution in the area. In this study, the spatial variability of soil REEs in Zhuxi watershed, Changting County, southern China, was analyzed using a geostatistics method. The analysis produced several important results: (1) The content of total rare earth elements (TREEs) in the soil samples ranged from 56.04 to 951.76 mg kg-1, with a mean value of 255.34 mg kg-1, which was higher than the background value of soil in China. The REE variables showed strong positive Ce anomalies and strong negative Eu anomalies, with mean values of 2.26 and 0.44, respectively. (2) The contents of TREEs in five subtypes of the soils were different, but they had broadly similar curves of chondrite-normalized REE patterns, with steeper patterns from La to Eu and flatter patterns from Eu to Y. (3) The spatial variability of light rare earth elements (LREEs) was mainly affected by natural factors, but the spatial variabilities of heavy rare earth elements (HREEs) and TREEs were influenced by the combination of natural factors and anthropogenic factors. Soil erosion can contribute significantly to REE migration, especially for HREEs. (4) The distribution of TREEs showed that the high content of TREEs was in the lowland of the western watershed. By comparing the distributions of TREEs in paddy fields and hilly land, we found that the area with a high content of TREEs was greater in paddy fields than in hilly land, so we deduced that REEs migrate from hilly land to the paddy field and accumulate in the soil there.
Epoxy-based nanocomposites were prepared with natural nanotubes from halloysite, a clay mineral with the empirical formula Al2Si2O5(OH)4. The morphology of the nanotubes was examined by scanning ...electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and was found geometrically similar to multi-walled carbon nanotubes. The thermal and mechanical properties of the nanocomposites were characterized by thermogravimetric analysis, dynamic mechanical analysis, Charpy impact and three-point bending tests. The results demonstrated that blending epoxy with 2.3wt% halloysite nanotubes increased the impact strength by 4 times without scarifying flexural modulus, strength and thermal stability. Unique toughening mechanisms for this improvement were investigated and discussed. It was proposed that impact energy was dissipated via the formation of damage zones with a large number of micro-cracks in front of the main crack. The micro-cracks were stabilized by nanotube bridging. Nanotube bridging, pull-out and breaking were also observed and proposed as the major energy dissipating events. The findings of this work suggest that halloysite nanotube may be an effective impact modifier for epoxy and other brittle polymers.
Growth differentiation factor 15 (GDF15; also known as MIC-1) is a divergent member of the TGF-β superfamily and is associated with body-weight regulation in humans and rodents. However, the cognate ...receptor of GDF15 is unknown. Here we show that GDF15 binds specifically to GDNF family receptor α-like (GFRAL) with high affinity, and that GFRAL requires association with the coreceptor RET to elicit intracellular signaling in response to GDF15 stimulation. We also found that GDF15-mediated reductions in food intake and body weight of mice with obesity were abolished in GFRAL-knockout mice. We further found that GFRAL expression was limited to hindbrain neurons and not present in peripheral tissues, which suggests that GDF15-GFRAL-mediated regulation of food intake is by a central mechanism. Lastly, given that GDF15 did not increase energy expenditure in treated mice with obesity, the anti-obesity actions of the cytokine are likely driven primarily by a reduction in food intake.
The role of adjuvant therapy in small bowel adenocarcinoma (SBA), a rare malignancy with a poor prognosis, is controversial. The purpose of this article is to investigate the impact of adjuvant ...therapy on the survival of patients with SBA in a meta-analysis.
We performed a comprehensive search of PubMed, EMBASE and the Cochrane Library database between 2010 and 2017. Hazard ratios (HR) with 95% confidence intervals (95%CI) were used to assess the effect of adjuvant chemotherapy and/or radiation treatment after curative surgery in patients with SBA. Moreover, impact of age, sex, stage, differentiation, lymph node involvement, and margin status was also evaluated.
We included 15 studies to evaluate the effect of adjuvant therapy on the survival of patients with SBA. The pooled HR of overall survival (OS) involving 5986 patients showed that adjuvant therapy did not have a statistically significant effect on the survival of patients with SBA (pooled HR = 0.89, 95% CI = 0.73-1.09, p = 0.25). Further, 607 patients with duodenal adenocarcinoma (DA) had similar results (pooled HR = 0.96, 95% CI = 0.75-1.23, p = 0.77). Similarly, adjuvant treatment vs. non-adjuvant treatment in terms of disease-free survival (DFS) or relapse-free survival (RFS) showed the same results (pooled HR = 0.89, 95% CI = 0.64-1.23, p = 0.48). However, we found that adjuvant therapy resulted in favorable postoperative survival in Europe according to the subgroup analysis (pooled HR = 0.63, 95% CI = 0.5-0.8, p = 0.0002). In addition, the pooled HR shows that stage, differentiation, lymph node involvement, and margin status were related to the OS of patients with SBA.
Patients with SBA who received adjuvant therapy after surgery did not receive a significant survival benefit. Adjuvant therapy may be more useful in advanced cancer or metastatic patients.
Co-inhibitory immune receptors can contribute to T cell dysfunction in patients with cancer
. Blocking antibodies against cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated protein 4 (CTLA-4) and programmed cell ...death 1 (PD-1) partially reverse this effect and are becoming standard of care in an increasing number of malignancies
. However, many of the other axes by which tumours become inhospitable to T cells are not fully understood. Here we report that V-domain immunoglobulin suppressor of T cell activation (VISTA) engages and suppresses T cells selectively at acidic pH such as that found in tumour microenvironments. Multiple histidine residues along the rim of the VISTA extracellular domain mediate binding to the adhesion and co-inhibitory receptor P-selectin glycoprotein ligand-1 (PSGL-1). Antibodies engineered to selectively bind and block this interaction in acidic environments were sufficient to reverse VISTA-mediated immune suppression in vivo. These findings identify a mechanism by which VISTA may engender resistance to anti-tumour immune responses, as well as an unexpectedly determinative role for pH in immune co-receptor engagement.
In this paper, we extend the iterative method for computing the inner inverse of a matrix proposed in Li and Li W.G. Li, Z. Li, A family of iterative methods for computing the approximate inverse of ...a square matrix and inner inverse of a non-square matrix, Applied Mathematics and Computation 215 (2010) 3433–3442 to compute the Moore–Penrose inverse of a matrix, and show that the generated sequence converges to the Moore–Penrose inverse of a matrix in a higher order. The performance of the method is tested on some randomly generated matrices.
A white light non-scanning correlation interrogation system was proposed and built to interrogate absolute length of the air cavity of fiber-optic compound Fabry⁻Perot pressure sensors for the ...extraction of pressure value. By carefully choosing thickness range and tilt angle of the optical wedge used for cavity length matching, correlation interferometric signal of the basal cavity can be naturally filtered out. Based on peak positioning by Fourier transform, bandpass filtering in frequency domain, inverse Fourier transform back to time domain, envelope fitting and zero fringe finding through a gravity center method, cavity length can be determined with an accuracy of 0.04%. The system was used for the interrogation of a fiber-optic compound Fabry⁻Perot pressure sensor under different pressures. For a pressure range of 0.1~2.9 Mpa, the linear relationship between the air cavity length and the gas pressure imposed was successfully extracted.
PDF
