Trace Elements in Coal Gangue: A Review

Coal gangue is one of the largest industrial residues. It has high ash content, low carbonaceous content, and heating value. Meanwhile, it has some trace elements. Large quantities of coal gangue cause serious environmental problems by polluting the air, water, and soil as well as occupying a tremendous amount of land. Now, coal gangue utilization is a matter of great concern and has attracted wide interest. However, some toxic trace elements in coal gangue should be paid more attention during the utilization of coal gangue. In this article, the modes of occurrence and the leaching characters of trace elements in coal gangue were introduced according to the result of the sequential extraction method and the leaching method. The release character of trace elements during combustion of coal gangue and the environmental implication of trace elements in coal gangue were also discussed. The sulfide-bound trace elements are dominant form in coal gangue. Leaching behavior of trace elements from coal gangue is affected by many factors. Different trace elements presented different transformation behaviors. Trace elements in coal gangue could release out and produce environmental implication in various degrees, depending on the type of trace elements

Project-Based Learning: an Effective Approach to Link Teacher Professional Development and Students Learning

Professional development for teachers is a key mechanism for improving classroom instruction and student achievement, yet there is little empirical evidence upon which to damonstrate the connection between teachers’ professional development and students’ achievement. This paper presents a pilot research which adopts project-based teaching and learning(PjBL) as an approch to link teahcer professional development and student learning. In our longitudinal study, a resource-rich school in urban areas and a less developed school in outlying areas join hands to carry out a research project. Study groups were composed of 2-3 teachers and 10-15 students in each school. The groups from different regions then collaboratively carried out a learning project with the support of an online learning community. The data is collected from focus groups and interviews with stakeholders, online surveys and paper-based questionnaires, computer proficiency tests, observations from site visits, and an analysis of the students\u27 artificial product. Research findings show that project-based collaborative inquiry activity provides the greatest support for teachers and students to develop their comprehensive capacity

Relationship between Thermal Conductivity and Compressive Strength of Insulation Concrete: A Review

Developing insulation concrete with high strength is essential for the construction of energy saving buildings. This is important to achieve carbon neutrality in the modern building industry. This paper reviews the existing studies in the literature on insulation concrete. This paper aims to reveal the correlation between the thermal conductivity and strength of concrete and identify the most effective method to make insulation concrete with lower thermal conductivity but higher strength. The review is carried out from two perspectives, including the effects of different foaming methods and various lightweight aggregates. As for the foaming methods, the chemical and mechanical foaming methods are discussed. As for the lightweight aggregates, cenospheres, porous aggregates, aerogels, and phase change materials are assessed. It is clearly observed that the thermal conductivity and compressive strength of concrete can be fitted by a linear function. As for the foaming methods, chemical foaming using hydrogen peroxide is the most effective to produce concrete with relatively lower thermal conductivity and higher compressive strength. For concrete with lightweight aggregates, cenospheres are the best option. Finally, recommendations are made to develop concrete with lower thermal conductivity and higher strength

Pathogenicity and functional analysis of CFAP410 mutations causing cone-rod dystrophy with macular staphyloma

BackgroundCone-rod dystrophy (CORD) caused by pathogenic variants in CFAP410 is a very rare disease. The mechanisms by which the variants caused the disease remained largely unknown. CFAP410 pathogenic variants were identified in a cone-rod dystrophy with macular staphyloma patient. We explored the pathogenicity and performed functional analysis of two compound heterozygous mutations.MethodsA 6-year-old boy complained decreased vision for 1 year, underwent ocular examinations together with systemic X-ray check. Blood sample was taken for targeted next generation sequencing (Tg-NGS). Pathogenicity of identified variants was determined by ACMG guideline. Mutated plasmids were constructed and transferred to HEK293T cells. Cell cycle, protein stability, and protein ubiquitination level was measured.ResultsThe best-corrected visual acuity of proband was 0.20 bilaterally. Fundus showed macular staphyloma and uneven granular pigment disorder in the periphery of the retina. SS-OCT showed thinning and atrophy of the outer retina, residual ellipsoid zone (EZ) in the fovea. Scotopic and photopic ERG responses severe reduced. Two heterozygous missense pathogenic variants, c.319 T > C (p.Tyr107His) and c.347 C > T (p.Pro116Leu) in exon 4 of the CFAP410, were found and were pathogenic by the ACMG guideline. In vitro, pathogenic variants affect cell cycle. Immunofluorescence and western blotting showed that the mutant proteins decreased expression levels protein stability. Meanwhile, co-IP data suggested that ubiquitination level was altered in cells transferred with the mutated plasmids.ConclusionCompound heterozygous pathogenic variants c.319 T > C and c.347 C > T in CFAP410 caused CORD with macular staphyloma. The pathogenic mechanisms may be associated with alternations of protein stability and degradation through the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway

Threat by marine heatwaves to adaptive large marine ecosystems in an eddy-resolving model.

Marine heatwaves (MHWs), episodic periods of abnormally high sea surface temperature (SST), severely affect marine ecosystems. Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs) cover ~22% of the global ocean but account for 95% of global fisheries catches. Yet how climate change affects MHWs over LMEs remains unknown, because such LMEs are confined to the coast where low-resolution climate models are known to have biases. Here, using a high-resolution Earth system model and applying a "future threshold" that considers MHWs as anomalous warming above the long-term mean warming of SSTs, we find that future intensity and annual days of MHWs over majority of the LMEs remain higher than in the present-day climate. Better resolution of ocean mesoscale eddies enables simulation of more realistic MHWs than low-resolution models. These increases in MHWs under global warming poses a serious threat to LMEs, even if resident organisms could adapt fully to the long-term mean warming

Dual Semantic Fusion Network for Video Object Detection

Video object detection is a tough task due to the deteriorated quality of video sequences captured under complex environments. Currently, this area is dominated by a series of feature enhancement based methods, which distill beneficial semantic information from multiple frames and generate enhanced features through fusing the distilled information. However, the distillation and fusion operations are usually performed at either frame level or instance level with external guidance using additional information, such as optical flow and feature memory. In this work, we propose a dual semantic fusion network (abbreviated as DSFNet) to fully exploit both frame-level and instance-level semantics in a unified fusion framework without external guidance. Moreover, we introduce a geometric similarity measure into the fusion process to alleviate the influence of information distortion caused by noise. As a result, the proposed DSFNet can generate more robust features through the multi-granularity fusion and avoid being affected by the instability of external guidance. To evaluate the proposed DSFNet, we conduct extensive experiments on the ImageNet VID dataset. Notably, the proposed dual semantic fusion network achieves, to the best of our knowledge, the best performance of 84.1\% mAP among the current state-of-the-art video object detectors with ResNet-101 and 85.4\% mAP with ResNeXt-101 without using any post-processing steps.Comment: 9 pages,6 figure

Guinea Pig Model for Evaluating the Potential Public Health Risk of Swine and Avian Influenza Viruses

BACKGROUND: The influenza viruses circulating in animals sporadically transmit to humans and pose pandemic threats. Animal models to evaluate the potential public health risk potential of these viruses are needed. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We investigated the guinea pig as a mammalian model for the study of the replication and transmission characteristics of selected swine H1N1, H1N2, H3N2 and avian H9N2 influenza viruses, compared to those of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 and seasonal human H1N1, H3N2 influenza viruses. The swine and avian influenza viruses investigated were restricted to the respiratory system of guinea pigs and shed at high titers in nasal tracts without prior adaptation, similar to human strains. None of the swine and avian influenza viruses showed transmissibility among guinea pigs; in contrast, pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus transmitted from infected guinea pigs to all animals and seasonal human influenza viruses could also horizontally transmit in guinea pigs. The analysis of the receptor distribution in the guinea pig respiratory tissues by lectin histochemistry indicated that both SAα2,3-Gal and SAα2,6-Gal receptors widely presented in the nasal tract and the trachea, while SAα2,3-Gal receptor was the main receptor in the lung. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We propose that the guinea pig could serve as a useful mammalian model to evaluate the potential public health threat of swine and avian influenza viruses