Electrically and Electrochemically Assisted Nanofiltration: A Promising Approach for Fouling Mitigation

Membrane fouling is regarded as the most critical bottleneck for the widespread application of membrane separation technology. The application of electricity to the surface of membrane provides a promising alternative for fouling mitigation, which may involve the following effects such as electrophoresis, electroosmosis, and electrooxidation. Electrophoresis and electroosmosis influence the movement of charged species (ions or molecules) or movement of fluid adjacent to charged surface under the applied electric field, while electrooxidation functions by degrading species accumulated in the concentration polarization layer and fouling layer to resume permeate flux. Different membrane modules have been developed to satisfy the requirement of electrode assembly. Meanwhile, this coupled process also promotes the development of stable and conductive electrodes including membrane electrodes. Successful applications have been found in the areas of ion separation and treatment of dye wastewater, arsenic contaminated wastewater, antibiotic contaminated wastewater, etc. Compared with microfiltration (MF) and ultrafiltration (UF), existing research in the nanofiltration (NF) is still limited. The increasing applications of NF in practice because of its unique separation capability will definitely trigger more investigations on this electrically or electrochemically combined antifouling technique

Laminated Ti-Al composites: Processing, structure and strength

Laminated Ti-Al composite sheets with different layer thickness ratios have been fabricated through hot pressing followed by multi-pass hot rolling at 500 °C.The laminated sheets show strong bonding with intermetallic interface layers of nanoscale thickness between the layers of Ti and Al. The mechanical properties of the composites with different volume fractions of Al from 10% to 67% show a good combination of strength and ductility. A constraint strain in the hot-rolled laminated structure between the hard and soft phases introduces an elastic-plastic deformation stage, which becomes more pronounced as the volume fraction of Al decreases. Moreover, the thin intermetallic interface layer may also contribute to the strength of the composites, and this effect increases with increasing volume fraction of the interface layer

The diploid genome sequence of an Asian individual

Here we present the first diploid genome sequence of an Asian individual. The genome was sequenced to 36-fold average coverage using massively parallel sequencing technology. We aligned the short reads onto the NCBI human reference genome to 99.97% coverage, and guided by the reference genome, we used uniquely mapped reads to assemble a high-quality consensus sequence for 92% of the Asian individual's genome. We identified approximately 3 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) inside this region, of which 13.6% were not in the dbSNP database. Genotyping analysis showed that SNP identification had high accuracy and consistency, indicating the high sequence quality of this assembly. We also carried out heterozygote phasing and haplotype prediction against HapMap CHB and JPT haplotypes (Chinese and Japanese, respectively), sequence comparison with the two available individual genomes (J. D. Watson and J. C. Venter), and structural variation identification. These variations were considered for their potential biological impact. Our sequence data and analyses demonstrate the potential usefulness of next-generation sequencing technologies for personal genomics

Platinum-based metallomesogens bearing a Pt(4,6-dfppy)(acac) skeleton : Synthesis, photophysical properties and polarised phosphorescence application

Polarised phosphorescence has a bright future in backlighting for conventional liquid crystal displays due to its theoretical 100% internal quantum efficiency and low cost. However, there are scarce reports on polarised phosphorescence from metallomesogens. In this contribution, a platinum-based metallomesogen containing a mesogenic biphenyl (Pt1) was prepared and characterised. To further explore the effect of the substituent on mesophase and emission properties, a related complex Pt2 containing a tetraphenylethene (TPE) moiety was also synthesised. Both complexes melt at elevated temperatures but thereafter do not appear to crystallise on cooling. Complex Pt1 shows an enantiotropic nematic phase from which a broad emission can be seen when spread as a film; in solution, an intense, sky-blue emission is observed. For Pt2, which shows a monotropic SmA phase, the emission in the condensed phase is suppressed and there is only weak emission in solution. Polarisation-dependent photoluminescence with a polarised ratio of 5.4 was obtained for the aligned film of a Pt1:polyimide mixture. Using Pt1 as an emissive layer, non-doped, polarised organic light-emitting diodes presented a broad emission spectrum in the range of 450-900 nm with a polarised ratio of 1.33 and the highest external quantum efficiency of 1.1%. This research has an important significance for achieving broad-based polarised phosphorescence from platinum complex-based metallomesogens

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Automatic Representative View Selection of a 3D Cultural Relic Using Depth Variation Entropy and Depth Distribution Entropy

Automatically selecting a set of representative views of a 3D virtual cultural relic is crucial for constructing wisdom museums. There is no consensus regarding the definition of a good view in computer graphics; the same is true of multiple views. View-based methods play an important role in the field of 3D shape retrieval and classification. However, it is still difficult to select views that not only conform to subjective human preferences but also have a good feature description. In this study, we define two novel measures based on information entropy, named depth variation entropy and depth distribution entropy. These measures were used to determine the amount of information about the depth swings and different depth quantities of each view. Firstly, a canonical pose 3D cultural relic was generated using principal component analysis. A set of depth maps obtained by orthographic cameras was then captured on the dense vertices of a geodesic unit-sphere by subdividing the regular unit-octahedron. Afterwards, the two measures were calculated separately on the depth maps gained from the vertices and the results on each one-eighth sphere form a group. The views with maximum entropy of depth variation and depth distribution were selected, and further scattered viewpoints were selected. Finally, the threshold word histogram derived from the vector quantization of salient local descriptors on the selected depth maps represented the 3D cultural relic. The viewpoints obtained by the proposed method coincided with an arbitrary pose of the 3D model. The latter eliminated the steps of manually adjusting the model’s pose and provided acceptable display views for people. In addition, it was verified on several datasets that the proposed method, which uses the Bag-of-Words mechanism and a deep convolution neural network, also has good performance regarding retrieval and classification when dealing with only four views

Sex Determination of 3D Skull Based on a Novel Unsupervised Learning Method

In law enforcement investigation cases, sex determination from skull morphology is one of the important steps in establishing the identity of an individual from unidentified human skeleton. To our knowledge, existing studies of sex determination of the skull mostly utilize supervised learning methods to analyze and classify data and can have limitations when applied to actual cases with the absence of category labels in the skull samples or a large difference in the number of male and female samples of the skull. This paper proposes a novel approach which is based on an unsupervised classification technique in performing sex determination of the skull of Han Chinese ethnic group. The 78 landmarks on the outer surface of 3D skull models from computed tomography scans are marked, and a skull dataset of a total of 40 interlandmark measurements is constructed. A stable and efficient unsupervised algorithm which we abbreviated as MKDSIF-FCM is proposed to address the classification problem for the skull dataset. The experimental results of the adult skull suggest that the proposed MKDSIF-FCM algorithm warrants fairly high sex determination accuracy for females and males, which is 98.0% and 93.02%, respectively, and is superior to all the classification methods we attempted. As a result of its fairly high accuracy, extremely good stability, and the advantage of unsupervised learning, the proposed method is potentially applicable for forensic investigations and archaeological studies

Knowledge Graph Completion for the Chinese Text of Cultural Relics Based on Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers with Entity-Type Information

Knowledge graph completion can make knowledge graphs more complete, which is a meaningful research topic. However, the existing methods do not make full use of entity semantic information. Another challenge is that a deep model requires large-scale manually labelled data, which greatly increases manual labour. In order to alleviate the scarcity of labelled data in the field of cultural relics and capture the rich semantic information of entities, this paper proposes a model based on the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) with entity-type information for the knowledge graph completion of the Chinese texts of cultural relics. In this work, the knowledge graph completion task is treated as a classification task, while the entities, relations and entity-type information are integrated as a textual sequence, and the Chinese characters are used as a token unit in which input representation is constructed by summing token, segment and position embeddings. A small number of labelled data are used to pre-train the model, and then, a large number of unlabelled data are used to fine-tune the pre-training model. The experiment results show that the BERT-KGC model with entity-type information can enrich the semantics information of the entities to reduce the degree of ambiguity of the entities and relations to some degree and achieve more effective performance than the baselines in triple classification, link prediction and relation prediction tasks using 35% of the labelled data of cultural relics