Microwave (MW) technology has gained increasing interest in wastewater treatment due to its unique properties, such as fast and uniform heating, hot spots effect, and non-thermal effect. MW enhances ...the production of active radicals (e.g., OH, SO4−), which exerts a stronger integrated treatment effect in combination with advanced oxidation processes. Over the years, microwave-assisted advanced oxidation processes (MW-AOPs) have developed rapidly to degrade pollutants as innovative treatment approaches. This paper provides a detailed classification and a comprehensive review of MW-AOPs. The latest applications of MW in different advanced oxidation systems (oxidation systems, catalytic oxidation systems, and photochemical, electrochemical and sonochemical systems) are reviewed. The reaction parameters and performance of MW-AOPs in wastewater treatment are discussed, and the enhancement of pollutant degradation by MW is highlighted. In addition, the operating costs of MW-AOPs are evaluated. Some recommendations on MW-AOPs are made for future research. This review provides meaningful information on the potential development and evolution of MW-AOPs.
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•The mechanisms of MW in various AOPs are summarized.•Three types of MW-AOPs based on different oxidation systems are described.•The synergistic effect in the MW catalytic oxidation system is discussed.•The advantages of MW-assisted photochemical, electrochemical, and sonochemical AOPs are demonstrated.•The economic costs of MW-AOPs are evaluated.
Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) has become one of the most prevalent diseases on earth and several treatments have been developed. However, the current intervention approaches have not been as ...effective as expected. One promising supplementary strategy is the use of probiotics through direct or indirect approaches. Probiotics are microbial food cultures conferring health-promoting properties. In this review, we summarized the current theories and mechanisms of T2DM intervention using probiotics and hypothesize that probiotics intervene T2DM during its onsetting, developing, and complicating. For the first time, we comprehensively analyzed T2DM intervention in animal models using both wide-type probiotics in different forms and using recombinant probiotics. Then, probiotic intervention in T2DM patients was reviewed and the main results were compared with that obtained from animal studies. Finally yet importantly, remaining questions that are important such as in which form and in which state, as well as the future potential of probiotic intervention in T2DM were discussed from a perspective of food microbiologists. In conclusion, probiotic intervention in T2DM is promising but there are still many important issues unsolved yet. Critical review of the advances, questions, and potential of probiotic intervention in T2DM promotes the development of this approach for further application in humans.
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•SUHI in different time and different global climate zones have significant differences.•The top three most important drivers of SUHI for daytime are PREC, POP, and PRES.•The top ...three most important drivers of SUHI for nighttime are PREC, POP, and AHE.•Natural-anthropogenic drivers interactively affect SUHI in multiple urban grids.•Greening is more effective to mitigate SUHI in arid climate zones when EVI > 0.38.
The inconstant climate change and rapid urbanization substantially disturb the global thermal balance and induce severe urban heat island (UHI) effect, adversely impacting human development and health. Existing literature has revealed the UHI characteristics and driving factors at an urban scale, but interactions between the main factors of a global grid scale assessment on the context of climate zones remain unclear. Therefore, based on the multidimensional climatic and socio-economic statistical datasets, the multi-time scale of surface urban heat island intensity (SUHI) characteristics was investigated in this study to analyze how natural-anthropogenic drivers affect the variance of SUHI and vary in their importance for the changes of other interaction factors. The results show that the mean value of SUHI in summer is higher than in winter, and in daytime is higher than in nighttime on a seasonal and daily scale. SUHIs in different global climate zones have significant differences. When analyzing drivers’ contributions and interactions with LightGBM model and SHAP algorithm, we know that monthly precipitation (PREC), the estimated population (POP) and surface pressure (PRES) are the three major drivers of daytime SUHI. The nighttime SUHI is mainly PREC, POP and anthropogenic heat emission (AHE), the influence rules of the natural driversare mostly opposite to that of daytime. This study highlights the fundamental role of background climate for designing strategies. Irrigation or artificial rainfall will be effective to mitigate SUHI in low rainfall areas, while it is more effective to reduce AHE in high rainfall areas. In where greening can be difficult in the most developed cities, reducing AHE, increasing per capita GDP and controlling the population scale may also contribute to alleviating the SUHI. This study provides ideas for developing responsive urban heat island mitigation policies in a more realistic setting.
Effective photosensitizers are of particular importance for the widespread clinical utilization of phototherapy. However, conventional photosensitizers are usually plagued by short-wavelength ...absorption, inadequate photostability, low reactive oxygen species (ROS) quantum yields, and aggregation-caused ROS quenching. Here, we report a near-infrared (NIR)-supramolecular photosensitizer (RuDA) via self-assembly of an organometallic Ru(II)-arene complex in aqueous solution. RuDA can generate singlet oxygen (
O
) only in aggregate state, showing distinct aggregation-induced
O
generation behavior due to the greatly increased singlet-triplet intersystem crossing process. Upon 808 nm laser irradiation, RuDA with excellent photostability displays efficient
O
and heat generation in a
O
quantum yield of 16.4% (FDA-approved indocyanine green: Φ
= 0.2%) together with high photothermal conversion efficiency of 24.2% (commercial gold nanorods: 21.0%, gold nanoshells: 13.0%). In addition, RuDA-NPs with good biocompatibility can be preferably accumulated at tumor sites, inducing significant tumor regression with a 95.2% tumor volume reduction in vivo during photodynamic therapy. This aggregation enhanced photodynamic therapy provides a strategy for the design of photosensitizers with promising photophysical and photochemical characteristics.
Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is a major foodstuff for over 40% of the world’s population. However, hexavalent chromium Cr(VI) in contaminated soil significantly affects wheat production and its ...ecological environment. Streptomyces sp. HU2014 was first used to investigate the effects of Cr (VI) stress on wheat growth. We analyzed the Cr(VI) concentration, physicochemical properties of wheat and soil, total Cr content, and microbial community structures during their interactions. HU2014 reduced the toxicity of Cr(VI) and promoted wheat growth by increasing total nitrogen, nitrate nitrogen, total phosphorus, and Olsen-phosphorus in Cr(VI)-contaminated soil. These four soil variables had strong positive effects on two bacterial taxa, Proteobacteria and Bacteroidota, in the HU2014 treatments. In addition, the level of the dominant Proteobacteria positively correlated with the total Cr content in the soil. Among the fungal communities, which had weaker correlations with soil variables compared with bacterial communities, Ascomycota was the most abundant. Our findings suggest that HU2014 can promote the phytoremediation of Cr(VI)-contaminated soil.
•It is the first time to investigate the effect of Streptomyces sp. HU2014 on wheat grown under Cr(VI) stress.•It is the first time to investigate the interaction between Streptomyces sp. HU2014 and microbial communities t in wheat rhizosphere under Cr(VI) stress.•HU2014 inoculation increases the content of four soil nutrients in Cr(VI) contaminated soil, such as total nitrogen, nitrate nitrogen, total phosphorus, and Olsen-phosphorus.•The four mentioned soil factors have positive correlation with two bacterial taxa (Proteobacteria and Bacteroidota).•Proteobacteria and Ascomycota dominate in microbial communities, and the former positively correlate with total Cr content.
Recently, wearable energy harvesting systems have been attracting great attention. As thermal energy is abundant in nature, developing wearable energy harvesters based on thermal energy conversion ...processes has been of particular interest. By integration of a high-efficient solar absorber, a pyroelectric film, and thermoelectric yarns, herein, we design a novel wearable solar-energy-driven pyrothermoelectric hybrid generator (PTEG). In contrast to those wearable pyroelectric generators and thermoelectric generators reported in previous works, our PTEG can enable effective energy harvesting from both dynamic temperature fluctuations and static temperature gradients. Under an illumination intensity of 1500 W/m2 (1.5 sun), the PTEG successfully charges two commercial capacitors to a sum voltage of 3.7 V in only 800 s, and the total energy is able to light up 73 LED light bulbs. The volumetric energy density over the two capacitors is calculated to be 67.8 μJ/cm3. The practical energy harvesting performance of the PTEG is further evaluated in the outdoor environment. The PTEG reported in this work not only demonstrates a rational structural design of high-efficient wearable energy harvesters but also paves a new pathway to integrate multiple energy conversion technologies for solar energy collection.
With concerns about depletion of fossil fuel and environmental pollution, synthesis of biofuels such as isobutanol from low-cost substrate by microbial cell factories has attracted more and more ...attention. As one of the most promising carbon sources instead of food resources, acetate can be utilized by versatile microbes and converted into numerous valuable chemicals. An isobutanol synthetic pathway using acetate as sole carbon source was constructed in E. coli. Pyruvate was designed to be generated via acetyl-CoA by pyruvate-ferredoxin oxidoreductase YdbK or anaplerotic pathway. Overexpression of transhydrogenase and NAD kinase increased the isobutanol titer of recombinant E. coli from 121.21 mg/L to 131.5 mg/L under batch cultivation. Further optimization of acetate supplement concentration achieved 157.05 mg/L isobutanol accumulation in WY002, representing the highest isobutanol titer by using acetate as sole carbon source. The utilization of acetate as carbon source for microbial production of valuable chemicals such as isobutanol could reduce the consumption of food-based substrates and save production cost. Engineering strategies applied in this study will provide a useful reference for microbial production of pyruvate derived chemical compounds from acetate.
Hypoxia-induced pulmonary hypertension (HPH) represents a severe pulmonary disorder with high morbidity and mortality, which necessitates identifying the critical molecular mechanisms underlying HPH ...pathogenesis.
The mRNA expression microarray GSE15197 (containing 8 pulmonary tissues from HPH and 13 normal controls) was downloaded from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). Gene ontology (GO), and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) were executed by RStudio software. The Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) network was visualized and established using Cytoscape, and the cytoHubba app from Cytoscape was used to pick out the hub modules. The infiltration of immune cells in HPH was analyzed using the CIBERSORTx. To confirm the potential hub genes, real-time quantitative reverse transcription PCR (qRT-PCR) was conducted using lung tissues of rat HPH models and controls.
A total of 852 upregulated and 547 downregulated genes were identified. The top terms in biological processes were apoptosis, proliferation, and regulation of the MAPK cascade, including ERK1/2. Cytoplasm, cytosol, and membrane were enriched in cellular component groups. Molecular functions mainly focus on protein binding, protein serine/threonine kinase activity and identical protein binding. KEGG analysis identified pathways in cancer, regulation of actin cytoskeleton and rap1 signaling pathway. There was significantly different immune cell infiltration between HPH and normal control samples. High proportions of the memory subsets of B cells and CD4 cells, Macrophages M2 subtype, and resting Dendritic cells were found in HPH samples, while high proportions of naive CD4 cells and resting mast cells were found in normal control samples. The qRT-PCR results showed that among the ten identified hub modules, FBXL3, FBXL13 and XCL1 mRNA levels were upregulated, while NEDD4L, NPFFR2 and EDN3 were downregulated in HPH rats compared with control rats.
Our study revealed the key genes and the involvement of immune cell infiltration in HPH, thus providing new insight into the pathogenesis of HPH and potential treatment targets for patients with HPH.
Accurately predicting the remaining mileage of electric vehicles (EVs) can effectively alleviate user's mileage anxiety and develop refinement of energy management strategy. However, traditional ...prediction methods not only consume time and resources, but also accumulate errors and lack interpretability. In this paper, we proposed a model based on dimension expansion and model fusion strategy, which uses the extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) algorithm to directly predict the remaining mileage of EVs. After pre‐processing the real running data of EVs, we constructed the field of remaining driving range and analyzed the relationship between features and remaining driving range, and then directly predicted the remaining driving mileage. Compared with other machine learning methods, XGBoost model has the highest accuracy. Then dimensional extended data set was obtained based on prior knowledge and symbol conversion, which improved the model performance. Finally, the model fusion strategy was adopted to further improve the generalization ability and stability of the model. The experimental results show that the Bootstrap aggregating (Bagging) fusion model has the highest predictive performance on the test set and outperformed other methods. The maximum RAE is not more than 3.5%, RMSE is less than 3km and MAE is about 2 km.
Cracks inside urban underground comprehensive pipe galleries are small and their characteristics are not obvious. Due to low lighting and large shadow areas, the differentiation between the cracks ...and background in an image is low. Most current semantic segmentation methods focus on overall segmentation and have a large perceptual range. However, for urban underground comprehensive pipe gallery crack segmentation tasks, it is difficult to pay attention to the detailed features of local edges to obtain accurate segmentation results. A Global Attention Segmentation Network (GA-SegNet) is proposed in this paper. The GA-SegNet is designed to perform semantic segmentation by incorporating global attention mechanisms. In order to perform precise pixel classification in the image, a residual separable convolution attention model is employed in an encoder to extract features at multiple scales. A global attention upsample model (GAM) is utilized in a decoder to enhance the connection between shallow-level features and deep abstract features, which could increase the attention of the network towards small cracks. By employing a balanced loss function, the contribution of crack pixels is increased while reducing the focus on background pixels in the overall loss. This approach aims to improve the segmentation accuracy of cracks. The comparative experimental results with other classic models show that the GA SegNet model proposed in this study has better segmentation performance and multiple evaluation indicators, and has advantages in segmentation accuracy and efficiency.
