Nano-CaO_(2)Promotes the Release of Carbon Sources from Municipal Sludge and the Preparation of Double-Network Hydrogels with High Swelling Ratios

In this study,hydrogels were prepared from municipal sludge to recycle and realize the value-added utilization of the carbon components in this abundant waste material.The carbon sources were extracted from the municipal sludge using synthesised nano CaO_(2)as an oxidant,and the carbon sources were graft copolymerised with acrylic acid monomer using N,N′-methylenebisacrylamide as a crosslinking agent and ammonium persulfate as an initiator.The factors influencing the hydrogel preparation were investigated by single-factor experiments.Based on the results of the single-factor experiments,a hydrogel with a swelling ratio of up to 19768.4%at 12 h was prepared with an oxidant dosage of 0.20 g,a monomer dosage of 5.8 g,a neutralisation degree of the monomer of 70%,an initiator dosage of 0.15 g,and a crosslinking agent dosage of 0.15 g.The hydrogel preparation conditions were optimized using the response surface method,and the interactions between the different reaction conditions were analysed to obtain the best preparation conditions.X-ray diffraction results showed that hydrogels were amorphous in structure.Scanning electron microscopy images showed that the SiO_(2)particles from the sludge acted as crosslinking points between different layers of hydrogel chains.The crosslinking polymerisation and crosslinking agent worked together to form hydrogels with an inorganic-organic double network structure,and this structure was highly stretchable,resulting in hydrogels with good swelling properties.

Adjuvant postbiotic administration improves dental caries prognosis by restoring the oral microbiota

Conventional filling therapy fails to fundamentally reduce oral cariogenic bacteria.Thus,oral microbiota follow-up intervention after filling would be necessary for improving dental caries prognosis.We recruited 9 caries-free individuals,and 89 dental caries subjects(5 dropouts).Eighty-nine patients were randomized into three groups:caries(n=8;no treatment),control(n=40;filling),and postbiotics(n=41;filling and 14-day Probio-Eco®intervention).Salivary samples were collected at 0 day(after filling)and 14 days.Our results showed that the diversity of dental caries oral microbiota was significantly increased compared with healthy subjects,and filling could restore a healthier oral microbiota partially and temporarily.Thepostbiotics intervention keeps a low alpha-diversity.Co-occurrence network analysis showed that a more stable oral microbiota structure after postbiotics intervention.Taxonomic and functional annotation of the microbiota revealed that postbiotics co-treatment significantly:increased the relative abundance of Pseudomonas and P.reactans,decreased the relative abundance of Prevotella shahii,and enriched the energy metabolism-related pathways.BugBase-predicted phenotypes inferred to an oral microbiota with decreased potential pathogenic bacteria and increased oxidative stress-tolerant bacteria after postbiotics intervention.Collectively,it suggested that postbiotics co-treatment could be a promising strategy that restores the oral microecological balance for dental caries.

One memristor–one electrolyte-gated transistor-based high energy-efficient dropout neuronal units

Artificial neural networks(ANN) have been extensively researched due to their significant energy-saving benefits.Hardware implementations of ANN with dropout function would be able to avoid the overfitting problem. This letter reports a dropout neuronal unit(1R1T-DNU) based on one memristor–one electrolyte-gated transistor with an ultralow energy consumption of 25 p J/spike. A dropout neural network is constructed based on such a device and has been verified by MNIST dataset, demonstrating high recognition accuracies(> 90%) within a large range of dropout probabilities up to40%. The running time can be reduced by increasing dropout probability without a significant loss in accuracy. Our results indicate the great potential of introducing such 1R1T-DNUs in full-hardware neural networks to enhance energy efficiency and to solve the overfitting problem.

Middle Jurassic-early Cretaceous radiolarian assemblages of the western Yarlung Zangbo Suture Zone: Implications for the evolution of the Neo-Tethys

Cherts in the Zhongba melange of the western Yarlung Zangbo Suture Zone(YZSZ) contain well preserved radiolarian assemblages. These radiolarian assemblages indicate that the Zhongba melange has middle Jurassic-early Cretaceous remnant, are coeval with those from the central and eastern parts of the YZSZ. Cherts from the Najiu area yield Aalenian to Aptian radiolarians, while cherts interbedded with siliceous mudstones from the Bielongjiala area yield Aptian radiolarians, indicating that terrigenousderived sediments were deposited during early Aptian. The above observations indicate that the entire YZSZ have a similar geochronological framework and thus they underwent similar geological evolution:(1) during the Jurassic, the Neo-Tethys was a wide ocean with pelagic sediments distal from continents;(2) during the Cretaceous(around 130-120 Ma), the Neo-Tethys started to subduct along the southern margin of the Lhasa block, and terrigenous-derived siliceous mudstone began deposition.

In-situ polymerization for PPy/g-C_3N_4 composites with enhanced visible light photocatalytic performance

Polypyrrole‐modified graphitic carbon nitride composites(PPy/g‐C3N4)are fabricated using an in‐situ polymerization method to improve the visible light photocatalytic activity of g‐C3N4.The PPy/g‐C3N4 is applied to the photocatalytic degradation of methylene blue(MB)under visible light irradiation.Various characterization techniques are employed to investigate the relationship between the structural properties and photoactivities of the as‐prepared composites.Results show that the specific surface area of the PPy/g‐C3N4 composites increases upon assembly of the amorphous PPy nanoparticles on the g‐C3N4 surface.Owing to the strong conductivity,the PPy can be used as a transition channel for electrons to move onto the g‐C3N4 surface,thus inhibiting the recombination of photogenerated carriers of g‐C3N4 and improving the photocatalytic performance.The elevated light adsorption of PPy/g‐C3N4 composites is attributed to the strong absorption coefficient of PPy.The composite containing 0.75 wt%PPy exhibits a photocatalytic efficiency that is 3 times higher than that of g‐C3N4 in 2 h.Moreover,the degradation kinetics follow a pseudo‐first‐order model.A detailed photocatalytic mechanism is proposed with·OH and·O2-radicals as the main reactive species.The present work provides new insights into the mechanistic understanding of PPy in PPy/g‐C3N4 composites for environmental applications.

Preparation of Peanut Shell Cellulose Double-Network Hydrogel and Its Adsorption Capacity for Methylene Blue

To achieve optimal recovery and value-added utilisation of cellulose in peanut shells,the cellulose in peanut shells was first extracted using the sodium hydroxide-sodium chlorite method.Then,cellulose hydrogel was prepared by graft copolymerisation using N,N’-methylenebisacrylamide as the cross-linking agent,sodium persulfate as the initiator,and acrylic acid as the monomer.Orthogonal optimisation experiments were designed to obtain optimal process parameters for hydrogel preparation with the cellulose dosage of 0.40 g,initiator dosage of 0.20 g,polymerisation temperature of 70°C,cross-linking agent of 0.25 g,and monomer dosage of 3.0 mL.The effect of initiator dosage on hydrogel synthesis was the most significant,followed by monomer dosage and reaction temperature.Characterisation using X-ray diffraction analysis and scanning electron microscopy revealed that the hydrogel was amorphous and exhibited a distinct three-dimensional double network structure.Hydrogel swelling kinetic analysis showed that the hydrogel swelling process was divided into three stages,and fitted the Schott secondary swelling kinetic model.The prepared hydrogel had a good adsorption effect on methylene blue;the adsorption of methylene blue by the hydrogel was 1.259 mg/g at 25°C when the initial concentration of methylene blue was 5 mg/L.The adsorption kinetics of the hydrogel fit the pseudo-first-order kinetic model,pseudo-secondorder kinetic model,Eovich model and particle diffusion model.The best fitting effect was obtained with the pseudo-second-order kinetic model.The adsorption isotherm analysis of methylene blue on hydrogel showed that the adsorption process was consistent with Langmuir and Freundlich models.The correlation coefficient of the Freundlich isotherm model was higher,indicating that the adsorption of methylene blue on hydrogel was mainly chemisorption.

Demonstration of 10 Gbps satellite-to-ground laser communications in engineering

In June 2023,researchers at the Aerospace Information Research Institute(AIR)of the Chinese Academy of Sciences undertook a series of experiments on satellite-to-ground laser communication using the Jilin-1 MF02A04(JLMF)satellite and independently developed a 500 mm optical communication ground station(AIROSG),achieving a successful throughput of 10 gigabits per second(Gbps)in the satellite-to-ground optical link.The obtained satellite payload data demonstrated good performance and satisfied the requirements of high-standard scientific applications.

Spraying compound probiotics improves growth performance and immunity and modulates gut microbiota and blood metabolites of suckling piglets

One factor that shapes the establishment of early neonatal intestinal microbiota is environmental microbial exposure,and probiotic application has been shown to promote health and growth of piglets.Thus,this study hypothesized that environmental probiotic application in early days of life would be beneficial to newborn piglets.This study aimed to investigate the effect of spraying a compound probiotic fermented liquid(CPFL)into the living environment of piglets on their early growth performance and immunity.This work included 68 piglets,which were randomized into probiotic and control groups.Blood and fecal samples were collected at 0,3,7,14,and 21 days of age.Spraying CPFL significantly reshaped the microbiota composition of the delivery room environment,increased piglets’daily weight gain and weaning weight(P<0.001),and modulated piglets’serum cytokine levels(increases in Ig A,Ig G,and IL-10;decrease in IFN-γ;P<0.05 in each case)in piglets.Additionally,spraying CPFL during early days of life modified piglets’gut microbiota structure and diversity,increased the abundance of some potentially beneficial bacteria(such as Bacteroides uniformis,Butyricimonas virosa,Parabacteroides distasonis,and Phascolarctobacterium succinatutens)and decreased the abundance of Escherichia coli(P<0.05).Interestingly,CPFL application also significantly enhanced the gut microbial bioactive potential and levels of several serum metabolites involved in the metabolism of vitamins(B2,B3,B6,and E),medium/long-chain fatty acids(caproic,tetradecanoic,and peptadecanoic acids),and dicarboxylic acids(azelaic and sebacic acids).Our study demonstrated that spraying CPFL significantly could improve piglets’growth performance and immunity,and the beneficial effects are associated with changes in the gut microbiota and host metabolism.Our study has provided novel data for future development of probiotic-based health-promoting strategies and expanded our knowledge of probiotic application in animal husbandry.

The effect of dislocations on the thermodynamic properties of Ta single crystal under high pressure by molecular dynamics simulation

The thermodynamic properties of Ta metal under high pressure are studied by molecular dynamics simulation. For dislocation-free Ta crystal, all the thermodynamic properties considered are in good agreement with the results from exper- iments or higher level calculations. If dislocations are included in the Ta crystal, it is found that as the dislocation density increases, the hydrostatic pressure at the phase transition point of bcc-＋hcp and hcp--＋fcc decreases, while the Hugoniot temperature increases. Meanwhile, the impact pressure at the elastic-plastic transition point is found to depend on the crys- tallographic orientation of the pressure. As the dislocation density increases, the pressure of the elastic-plastic transition point decreases rapidly at the initial stage, then gradually decreases with the increase of the dislocation density.

Discriminative features based comprehensive detector for defective insulators

Insulators are essential equipment to ensure the safety and reliability of power transmission systems. Defective insulators may cause partial discharge and even lead to serious safety accidents. Hence it is necessary to accurately identify the defective insulator from a string of insulators. However, small defect poses significant challenges for recognizing the defective insulator from a large number of insulators. To address these issues, we collect and annotate the randomly generated defect dataset (RGDD). Further, the discriminative feature learning-based detector (DFLD) is constructed based on the pattern of backbone-neck-head. Specifically, considering the simultaneous existence of many insulators, attention-based bidirectional feature pyramid (ABFP) is designed to capture the discriminative information. Considering the small size of defective part, the efficient receptive field adaptation (ERFA) module is constructed to enhance the perception of contextual information related to defective insulators. Meanwhile, the two-stage detection head is designed to correct the location of defective insulators. It also adapts to the shape variation of insulators by the deformable convolution. On this basis, the keypoints method is introduced to more accurately represent the location of defective insulators. Due to the imbalance between positive and negative samples, the Adaptive Threshold Sample Assignment (ATSA) Strategy is proposed for selecting the best positive samples. DFLD has achieved good detection performance compared with classical object detection networks on the RGDD dataset and CPLID dataset. The ablation experiments are conducted on the RGDD dataset. It is verified that the discriminative features from DFLD can effectively recognize the small defect from insulators.

iLABdb:基于WEB的综合乳酸菌数据库

Lactic acid bacteria(LAB)are a group of Gram-positive,facultative anaerobic bacteria that are widely distributed in nature and have important functions in various industrial,medical,and environmental processes[1,2].They are well-known for their ability to produce lactic acid and are thus widely used in the production of fermented foods and beverages,such as yogurt,cheese,and sauerkraut[3].Two of the most prominent and well-studied orders within the LAB group are Lactobacillales and Bifidobacteriales.

Substation rotational object detection based on multi-scale feature fusion and refinement

In modern energy systems,substations are the core of electricity transmission and distribution.However,similar appearance and small size pose significant challenges for automatic identification of electrical devices.To address these issues,we collect and annotate the substation rotated device dataset(SRDD).Further,feature fusion and feature refinement network(F3RNet)are constructed based on the classic structure pattern of backbone-neck-head.Considering the similar appearance of electrical devices,the deconvolution fusion module(DFM)is designed to enhance the expression of feature information.The balanced feature pyramid(BFP)is embedded to aggregate the global feature.The feature refinement is constructed to adjust the original feature maps by considering the feature alignment between the anchors and devices.It can generate more accurate feature vectors.To address the problem of sample imbalance between electrical devices,the gradient harmonized mechanism(GHM)loss is utilized to adjust the weight of each sample.The ablation experiments are conducted on the SRDD dataset.F3RNet achieves the best detection performance compared with classical object detection networks.Also,it is verified that the features from global feature maps can effectively recognize the similar and small devices.

Bifidobacteria DNA Induces Murine Macrophages Activation in vitro

Previous studies have shown that oligodeoxynucleotides containing unmethylated CpG motifs were used as adjuvants for immunoregulation and immune response. This study was to explore the activation effects of Bifidobacteria DNA containing unmethylated CpG motifs （CpG DNA） on murine macrophage J774A.1 cells. The genomic DNA of Bifidobacteria was extracted and purified, and the methylation degree of CpG motifs was tested. The phagocytic ability of the macrophages was detected by flow cytometry. The cytokines （IL-1β, IL-6, IL-12p40 and TNF-α） levels in the culture supernatants of Bifidobacteria DNA treated J774A.1 cells were assayed by ELISA. The content of nitric oxide （NO） was detected by Griess reagent. After treated with Bifidobacteria DNA for 24h, Nile Red stain increased in J774A.1 macrophage, which suggested that the lipid metabolism increased in the macrophages. The phagocytic ability and levels of NO and cytokines of IL-1β, IL-6, IL-12p40 and TNF-α were significantly higher than PBS group and CT DNA group. The results indicated that Bifidobacteria DNA could activate murine macrophages J774A.1, which could provide scientific basis for the research and application of microorganism DNA preparation. Cellular ＆ Molecular Immunology. 2005;2（6）：473-478.