Improving Biomethanation of Chicken Manure by Co-Digestion with Ethanol Plant Effluent

As the global production of chicken manure has steadily increased, its proper management has become a challenging issue. This study examined process effluent from a bioethanol plant as a co-substrate for efficient anaerobic digestion of chicken manure. An anaerobic continuous reactor was operated in mono- and co-digestion modes by adding increasing amounts of the ethanol plant effluent (0%, 10%, and 20% (v/v) of chicken manure). Methanogenic performance improved significantly in terms of both methane production rate and yield (by up to 66% and 36%, respectively), with an increase in organic loading rate over the experimental phases. Correspondingly, the specific methanogenic activity was significantly higher in the co-digestion sludge than in the mono-digestion sludge. The reactor did not suffer any apparent process imbalance, ammonia inhibition, or nutrient limitation throughout the experiment, with the removal of volatile solids being stably maintained (56.3???58.9%). The amount of ethanol plant effluent appears to directly affect the rate of acidification, and its addition at ???20% (v/v) to chicken manure needs to be avoided to maintain a stable pH. The overall results suggest that anerobic co-digestion with ethanol plant effluent may provide a practical means for the stable treatment and valorization of chicken manure

Space-frequency model of amplified spontaneous emission and super-radiance in free electron laser operating in the linear and non-linear regimes

A three-dimensional, space-frequency model for the excitation of electromagnetic radiation in a free-electron laser is presented. The approach is applied in a numerical particle code WB3D, simulating the interaction of a free-electron laser operating in the linear and non-linear regimes. Solution of the electromagnetic excitation equations in the frequency domain inherently takes into account dispersive effects arising from the cavity and the gain medium. Moreover, it facilitates the consideration of statistical features of the electron beam and the excited radiation, necessary for the study of spontaneous emission, synchrotron amplified spontaneous emission (SASE), super-radiance and noise. We employ the code to study the statistical and spectral characteristics of the radiation generated in a pulsed beam free-electron laser operating in the millimeter wavelengths. The evolution of radiation spectrum, excited when a Gaussian shaped bunch with a random distribution of electrons is passing through the wiggler, was investigated.Comment: 9 page

Control of the entanglement of a two-level atom in a dissipative cavity via a classical field

We investigate the entanglement dynamics and purity of a two-level atom, which is additionally driven by a classical field, interacting with a coherent field in a dissipative environment. It is shown that the amount of entanglement and the purity of the system can be improved by controlling the classical field.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Phonetic variability and grammatical knowledge: an articulatory study of Korean place assimilation.

The study reported here uses articulatory data to investigate Korean place assimilation of coronal stops followed by labial or velar stops, both within words and across words. The results show that this place-assimilation process is highly variable, both within and across speakers, and is also sensitive to factors such as the place of articulation of the following consonant, the presence of a word boundary and, to some extent, speech rate. Gestures affected by the process are generally reduced categorically (deleted), while sporadic gradient reduction of gestures is also observed. We further compare the results for coronals to our previous findings on the assimilation of labials, discussing implications of the results for grammatical models of phonological/phonetic competence. The results suggest that speakers’ language-particular knowledge of place assimilation has to be relatively detailed and context-sensitive, and has to encode systematic regularities about its obligatory/variable application as well as categorical/gradient realisation

Assessment of the in vitro antithrombotic properties of sardine (sardina pilchardus) fillet lipids and cod liver oil

peer-reviewedThe aim of the current study was to compare the biological activities of total polar lipids (TPL) and thin-layer chromatography (TLC) polar lipid fractions of sardine fillet and cod liver oil against atherogenesis. TPL and TLC polar lipid fractions obtained from these two sources were assessed for their ability to inhibit the platelet-activating-factor (PAF)-induced platelet aggregation (PAF-antagonists) or to induce platelet aggregation (PAF-agonists), since PAF plays a crucial role in the initiation and development of atherosclerosis. This study focused on the polar lipids since previous studies have underlined that the antithrombotic properties of foodstuffs are mainly attributed to polar lipid micro-constituents. TPL of sardine fillet induced platelet aggregation, while TPL of cod liver had a bimodal effect on platelets. TLC polar lipid fractions of both samples exhibited in vitro aggregatory and inhibitory activity towards platelets. However, TLC sardine polar lipid fractions showed stronger in vitro antithrombotic activities than the cod liver oil ones. These data constitute evidence of the putative contribution of fish polar lipids against cardiovascular diseases, underling firstly the beneficial effect of fish and fish lipids as functional foodstuffs against atherogenesis and secondly the more important role of sardine polar lipids as opposed to cod liver oil.PUBLISHEDpeer-reviewe

Temperature-scaling behavior of the Hall conductivity for Hg-based superconducting thin films

The Hall conductivities of HgBa_{2}CaCu_{2}O_{6+\delta}and HgBa_{2}Ca_{2}Cu_{3}O_{8+\delta} thin films are investigated for a magnetic field parallel to the c axis. The mixed-state Hall conductivity for these compounds is well described by \sigma_{xy}=C_{1}/H+C_{2}+C_{3}H. The prefactor C_1 shows a temperature dependence of the form C_1 = A(1-t)^n near T_c, where t=T/T_c is the reduced temperature. Contrary to the previous results, C_2 also follows a temperature-scaling behavior similar to that of the coefficient C_1. The observed value of n = 1.8 - 2.3 is comparable to the previously observed values for YBa_{2}Cu_{3}O_{7-\delta} and La_{2-x}Sr_{x}CuO_{4}.Comment: 5 pages, 4 eps figure

Simultaneous amplification and screening of whole plasmids using the T7 bacteriophage replisome

This study describes a novel helicase-mediated isothermal DNA amplification method that exponentially amplifies circular DNAs. The circular helicase-dependent amplification (cHDA) system is based on the T7 replication machinery, which includes the processive T7 helicase, an exonuclease-deficient T7 DNA polymerase (T7 Sequenase) and the T7 Gp2.5 single-stranded DNA-binding (SSB) protein. After the duplex DNA template is unwound by the T7 helicase, specific primers anneal to the separated DNA strands and T7 Sequenase extends the 3′ end of each primer by a rolling circle mechanism to amplify not only a region defined by the primers but also continuous concatemers of the template. The cHDA reaction can be carried out at one temperature (25°C) for the entire process and can achieve up to 10 000-fold amplification. Amplification can be performed using purified plasmid DNA or a crude cell lysate and can amplify inserts as large as 10 kb. Following a cHDA reaction, the amplified products can be used directly for sequencing and restriction enzyme digestion without further purification. By utilizing the helicase enzyme, circular DNA samples can be simultaneously screened and amplified at one constant temperature in one easy step

Thermally activated charge carriers and mid-infrared optical excitations in quarter-filled CDW systems

The optical properties of the quarter-filled single-band CDW systems have been reexamined in the model with the electron-phonon coupling related to the variations of electron site energies. It appears that the indirect, electron-mediated coupling between phase phonons and external electromagnetic fields vanishes for symmetry reasons, at variance with the infrared selection rules used in the generally accepted microscopic theory. It is shown that the phase phonon modes and the electric fields couple directly, with the coupling constant proportional to the magnitude of the charge-density wave. The single-particle contributions to the optical conductivity tensor are determined for the ordered CDW state and the related weakly doped metallic state by means of the Bethe--Salpeter equations for elementary electron-hole excitations. It turns out that this gauge-invariant approach establishes a clear connection between the effective numbers of residual, thermally activated and bound charge carriers. Finally, the relation between these numbers and the activation energy of dc conductivity and the optical CDW gap scale is explained in the way consistent with the conductivity sum rules.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure

Truncation of a 2-dimensional Fermi surface due to quasiparticle gap formation at the saddle points

We study a two-dimensional Fermi liquid with a Fermi surface containing the saddle points $(\pi,0)$ and $(0,\pi)$. Including Cooper and Peierls channel contributions leads to a one-loop renormalization group flow to strong coupling for short range repulsive interactions. In a certain parameter range the characteristics of the fixed point, opening of a spin and charge gap and dominant pairing correlations are similar to those of a 2-leg ladder at half-filling. An increase of the electron density we argue leads to a truncation of the Fermi surface with only 4 disconnected arcs remaining.Comment: Reference added. RevTeX 4 pages incl. 4 ps file