In the current scenario, the word waste management holds much importance in every individual's life. Pollution and the generation of vast waste quantities with no proper waste management process have ...become one of humanity's biggest threats. This review article provides a complete review of the innovative technologies currently employed to handle and dispose of the waste successfully. This work aims to include the different solid, liquid, gaseous, and radioactive waste management processes. The novel and improved plasma gasification concepts, transmutation, incineration, bio-refineries, microbial fuel cells (MFC) have been thoroughly explained. In addition, some new techniques like Mr. Trash Wheel and the Smart bin approach provide much hope of adequately managing waste. The work's novelty lies in adopting several successful methods of various countries for waste disposal and management. To incorporate or improve India'sIndia's same techniques and processes, we have to tackle the ever-increasing waste disposal problems and find economic and eco-friendly ways of waste management.
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•The anaerobic-aerobic method is a convenient way of managing solid wastes.•Liquid wastes spread quickly and pollute the environment faster than solid waste.•The smart waste bin concept is based on wireless sensor network technologies.•Internet of things devices and Radio frequency identification tags have revolutionized the waste management process.•Mr. Trash Wheel is an innovative approach for cleaning water bodies.
Ultrawide‐bandgap (UWBG) semiconductors, with bandgaps significantly wider than the 3.4 eV of GaN, represent an exciting and challenging new area of research in semiconductor materials, physics, ...devices, and applications. Because many figures‐of‐merit for device performance scale nonlinearly with bandgap, these semiconductors have long been known to have compelling potential advantages over their narrower‐bandgap cousins in high‐power and RF electronics, as well as in deep‐UV optoelectronics, quantum information, and extreme‐environment applications. Only recently, however, have the UWBG semiconductor materials, such as high Al‐content AlGaN, diamond and Ga2O3, advanced in maturity to the point where realizing some of their tantalizing advantages is a relatively near‐term possibility. In this article, the materials, physics, device and application research opportunities and challenges for advancing their state of the art are surveyed.
Ultrawide‐bandgap (UWBG) semiconductors, with bandgaps significantly wider than the 3.4 eV of GaN, represent an exciting and challenging new area of research in semiconductor materials, physics, devices and applications. This article surveys and presents an enumerated list of the materials, physics, device and associated application research opportunities and challenges important for advancing the state of their science and technology.
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•Metabolites and the gut microbiome have an association with Fatty liver disease.•Diagnosis of human diseases by surgery and biomarkers or metabolites-based methods.•Obesity ...metabolites and gut microenvironmental changes metabolomics profile.•Microbiome- metabolome study used for risk assessment of obesity and liver cancers.
Fatty liver disease (FLD) is one of the largest burdens to human health worldwide and is associated with gut microbiome and metabolite stability. Engineered liver tissues have shown promise in restoring liver functions in non-alcoholic FLD (NAFLD), hepatitis and cirrhosis. Fatty liver, largely noted in obesity and hepatic cancer, is highly fatal and has led to a global increase in death rates. It is associated with complex metabolic reprogramming too. A standard approach to therapy in the newly diagnosed setting includes surgery or identification of biomarkers/ metabolites for therapeutic purposes, which ultimately focus on improvement of liver health in patients. As such there are no standard procedures for patient care, but depending on the severity, systemic therapy with either genomic, proteomic or metabolomic profiling form potential options. Better comparisons and study of underlying mechanisms in gut microbiome-based metabolic functions in obesity are urgently required. Today, an emerging field, focusing on metabolomic approaches and metabolic phenotyping, involved in high-throughput identification of metabolome in obesity and gut disorders, is involved in biomarker and metabolite identification. There are supporting technologies and approaches in NAFLD that throw light on the metabolites and gut microbiome, and also on the understanding of the risk factors of obesity along with liver cancer metabolic reaction networks. We discuss the current state of NAFLD metabolites, gut micro-environmental changes, and the further challenges in digital metabolomics profiling. Innovative clinical trial designs, with biomarker-enrichment strategies that are required to improve the outcome of NAFLD in patients are also discussed.
Boron carbide is one of the potential neutron-shielding materials and its use can be maximized for structural shielding application by dispersing it into metal matrixes such as aluminum. Dispersion ...of B4C and its interfacial stability is a major issue during its processing. This investigation is on the synthesis of B4C-reinforced 6061 aluminum matrix composite by liquid–metal stir-casting technique under optimized conditions after solving the issues related to the processing, and evaluation of the structural, mechanical, and interfacial characteristics. During processing of composites, pretreatment of B4C particles is necessary to improve its dispersion. However, higher preheating temperatures above 300°C lead to particle agglomeration in the matrix due to the formation of B2O3 phase during preheating. B2O3 is formed due to the surface oxidation of B4C particles above 300°C and this glassy phase leads to particle sintering and lump formation. Incorporation of particles preheated at 250°C has shown uniform distribution of particles in the composite. Interfacial characterization of the composite and the extracted B4C particles from the matrix has shown the presence of interfacial reaction products such as AlB2, Al3BC, AlB12, and AlB10.
Identification of multiple predominant instruments in polyphonic music is addressed using convolutional neural networks (CNN) through Mel-spectrogram, modgd-gram, and its fusion. Modgd-gram, a visual ...representation, is obtained by stacking modified group delay functions of consecutive frames successively. CNN learns the distinctive local characteristics from the visual representation and classifies the instrument to the group to which it belongs. The proposed system is systematically evaluated using the IRMAS dataset. We trained our networks using fixed-length audio excerpts to recognize multiple predominant instruments from the variable-length testing files. A wave-generative adversarial network (WaveGAN) architecture is also employed to generate audio files for data augmentation. We experimented with different fusion techniques, early fusion, mid-level fusion, and late or score-level fusion. The late fusion experiment reports a micro and macro F1 score of 0.69 and 0.62, respectively. These metrics are 7.81% and 12.73% higher than those obtained by the state-of-the-art Han’s model. The architectural choice of CNN with score-level fusion on Mel-spectro/modgd-gram has merit in recognizing the predominant instruments in polyphonic music.
Megaporous spherical acrylate copolymer beads were synthesized by suspension polymerization using non-solvating porogens. Non-solvating porogens with higher aliphatic hydrocarbon content generated ...megaporous morphology with lower surface area. Surface area increased and inversely megaporosity was decreased with decrease in the aliphatic hydrocarbon content of porogen. Megaporosity (5.47 μm) and pore volume of 5.52 cm3/g was obtained with n-decanol. Thermal property of copolymer is a function of type (rigidity/flexibility/elemental composition) and concentration (cross-link density) of monomer and cross-linker. Copolymer containing rigid cross-linker (divinylbenzene) had better thermal stability over copolymer with flexible cross-linker (ethylene dimethacrylate). Further, higher concentration of rigid cross-linker or lower concentration of flexible cross-linker enhanced the thermal stability. Porous polymers are potentially recognized as a solid support for solid-phase synthesis.
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•Megaporosity (≥5 μm) was obtained using non-solvating porogens.•Polymer demonstrates the highest pore size (5.47 μm) and pore volume (5.52 cm3/g).•An interfacial tension of non-solvating porogen is inversely functioning towards surface area and megaporosity.•Megaporosity increases with increasing aliphatic hydrocarbon content in non-solvating porogens.
We report an outbreak of invasive and non-invasive disease due to an unusual type of Streptococcus pyogenes (group A Streptococcus, emm66) among a vulnerable, largely homeless population in southern ...England and Wales, detected in September 2016. Twenty-seven confirmed cases were subsequently identified between 5 January and 29 December 2016; 20 injected drugs and six reported problematic alcohol use. To date, we have ruled out drug-related vehicles of infection and identified few common risk factors.
Summary Objective Synovitis is associated with pain and other symptoms in patients with knee osteoarthritis (OA), and in patients with meniscal tears even in the absence of radiographic OA. Patients ...undergoing arthroscopic partial meniscectomy were followed for 2 years to determine whether synovitis predicts post-operative symptoms. Design Thirty-three patients scheduled for arthroscopy were recruited for this pilot study. Symptoms were assessed using a knee pain scale, the Lysholm score, and the short form-12 (SF-12® ) pre-operatively and at 16 weeks, 1 year and 2 years post-operatively. Synovial inflammation and hyperplasia were graded on surgical biopsies. Linear mixed effects models were tested to determine whether inflammation or hyperplasia is associated with outcome scores over time. Results Lysholm scores and SF-12® physical component sub-scores were worse pre-operatively in patients with inflammation (Lysholm: 52.42 95% confidence interval (CI) 42.37, 62.47 vs 72.38 66.03, 78.72, P < 0.001; SF-12: 36.81 28.26, 45.37 vs 46.23 40.14, 52.32, P < 0.05). Up to 2-years post-operatively, patients with inflammation achieved mean scores similar to those without inflammation. As a result, the mean improvement in Lysholm scores was 13.01 1.48–24.53 points higher than patients without inflammation, P = 0.03. 33% (4/12) of patients with inflammation still had fair to poor Lysholm scores 2 years after surgery compared to 7% (1/15, P =0.14) without inflammation. No association between hyperplasia and symptoms was noted. Conclusions In this pilot study of patients undergoing partial meniscectomy, synovial inflammation was associated with worse pre-operative symptoms, but not with poorer outcomes in the first 2 years post-arthroscopy. Larger cohorts and longer follow-up should be pursued to confirm this relationship, and determine if the initial response is sustained.
The enteric bacterium and intracellular human pathogen
causes hundreds of millions of cases of the diarrheal disease shigellosis per year worldwide.
is acquired by ingestion of contaminated food or ...water; upon reaching the colon, the bacteria invade colonic epithelial cells, replicate intracellularly, spread to adjacent cells, and provoke an intense inflammatory response. There is no animal model that faithfully recapitulates human disease; thus, cultured cells have been used to model
pathogenesis. However, the use of transformed cells in culture does not provide the same environment to the bacteria as the normal human intestinal epithelium. Recent advances in tissue culture now enable the cultivation of human intestinal enteroids (HIEs), which are derived from human intestinal stem cells, grown
, and then differentiated into "mini-intestines." Here, we demonstrate that HIEs can be used to model
pathogenesis. We show that
invades polarized HIE monolayers preferentially via the basolateral surface. After
invades HIE monolayers,
replicates within HIE cells and forms actin tails.
also increases the expression of HIE proinflammatory signals and the amino acid transporter SLC7A5. Finally, we demonstrate that disruption of HIE tight junctions enables
invasion via the apical surface.
A facile NHC-mediated reaction of aromatic aldehydes with carbon dioxide leading to carboxylic acids is described. The present protocol is mechanistically important, and it can serve as a tool for ...the sequestration of carbon dioxide.
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