Sequential biological and photocatalysis based treatments for shipboard slop purification: A pilot plant investigation

This study investigated the treatment of a shipboard slop containing commercial gasoline in a pilot plant scale consisting of a membrane biological reactor (MBR) and photocatalytic reactor (PCR) acting in series. The MBR contributed for approximately 70% to the overall slop purification. More precisely, the biological process was able to remove approximately 40%, on average, of the organic pollution in the slop. Nevertheless, the membrane was capable to retain a large amount of organic molecules within the system, amounting for a further 30% of the influent total organic content removal. However, this affected the membrane fouling, thus resulting in the increase of the pore blocking mechanism that accounted for approximately 20% to the total resistance to filtration (2.85∙10 13 m −1 ), even if a significant restoration of the original membrane permeability was obtained after chemical cleanings. On the other hand, the biological treatment produced a clear solution for the photocatalytic system, thereby optimizing the light penetration and generation of highly oxidizing active oxygen species that enabled the degradation of bio-recalcitrant compounds. Indeed, low total organic carbon (TOC) values (<10 mg L −1 ) were achieved in the output of the photocatalytic reactor by means of only 60 Einstein (E) of cumulative impinging energy after the addition of K 2 S 2 O 8 . Overall, coupling the two processes enabled very high TOC removal (ca. 95%)

Cryptocurrency scams: analysis and perspectives

Since the inception of Bitcoin in 2009, the market of cryptocurrencies has grown beyond the initial expectations, as witnessed by the thousands of tokenised assets available on the market, whose daily trades amount to dozens of USD billions. The pseudonymity features of these cryptocurrencies have attracted the attention of cybercriminals, who exploit them to carry out potentially untraceable scams. The wide range of cryptocurrency-based scams observed over the last ten years has fostered the research on the analysis of their effects, and the development of techniques to counter them. However, doing research in this field requires addressing several challenges: for instance, although a few data sources about cryptocurrency scams are publicly available, they often contain incomplete or misclassified data. Further, there is no standard taxonomy of scams, which leads to ambiguous and incoherent interpretations of their nature. Indeed, the unavailability of reliable datasets makes it difficult to train effective automatic classifiers that can detect and analyse cryptocurrency scams. In this paper, we perform an extensive review of the scientific literature on cryptocurrency scams, which we systematise according to a novel taxonomy. By collecting and homogenising data from different public sources, we build a uniform dataset of thousands of cryptocurrency scams.We devise an automatic tool that recognises scams and classifies them according to our taxonomy.We assess the effectiveness of our tool through standard performance metrics.We also give an in-depth analysis of the classification results, offering several insights into threat types, from their features to their connection with other types. Finally, we provide a set of guidelines that policymakers could follow to improve user protection against cryptocurrency scams

Enhancing selectivity in photocatalytic formation of p-anisaldehyde in aqueous suspension under solar light irradiation via TiO2 N-doping

The photocatalytic partial oxidation of 4-methoxybenzyl alcohol to the corresponding aldehyde (p-anisaldehyde) was performed under simulated solar irradiation by using home prepared N-doped TiO2 catalysts. The photocatalysts were prepared by a sol–gel method, using TiCl4 as TiO2 precursor and NH4Cl, urea or NH4OH as N-doping sources. A commercial TiO2 (Degussa P25) was also used for comparison aims. The prepared catalysts were characterized by BET specific surface area, XRD, ESEM and UV-vis spectroscopy. The reactivity results show that (i) the doped catalysts are predominantly amorphous, and they show selectivity values far higher than those of the corresponding undoped ones and of well crystallized catalysts – even if the last ones show a higher activity – and (ii) exploitation of solar light significantly increases the reaction selectivity. In addition, different light sources were also used in order to investigate the effect of radiation wavelength ranges on the reactivity and selectivity to aldehyde

Selective photocatalytic and photoelectrocatalytic synthesis of valuable compounds in aqueous medium

In the past decades, photocatalytic and photoelectrocatalytic methods have been widely employed for the degradation of harmful compounds present both is gaseous and aqueous effluents. In the last years scientists have paid great attention to the synthesis of valuable compounds and hydrogen production. Organic syntheses are generally carried out in organic solvents, under high temperature/pressure, with toxic oxidants such as permanganate. On the other hand, photocatalysis and photoelectrocatalysis using water as solvent, air or water as oxidant, and sunlight as energy source, can be an efficient alternative to the traditional, non-environmentally friendly methods. This review summarizes the photocatalytic and photoelectrocatalytic transformations of organic molecules to commercially valuable products in water, sometimes evaluating also the contemporary H2 production. The reaction conditions, mechanisms and kinetics are presented and discussed. Future perspectives are also given

Anti-BVDV activity evaluation of naphthoimidazole derivatives compared with parental imidazoquinoline compounds.

Background: Pestivirus genus includes animal pathogens which are involved in economic impact for the livestock industry. Among others, Bovine Viral Diarrhoea Virus (BVDV) establish a persistent infection in cattle causing a long list of symptoms and a high mortality rate. In the last decades, we synthesised and reported a certain number of anti-BVDV compounds. Methods: In them, imidazoquinoline derivatives turned out as the most active. Their mechanism of actions has been deeply investigated, BVDV RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RpRd) resulted as target and the way of binding was predicted in silico through three main H-bond interaction with the target. The prediction could be confirmed by target or ligand mutation. The first approach has already been performed and published confirming the in silico prediction. Results: Here, we present how the ligand chemical modification affects the anti-BVDV activity. The designed compounds were synthesised and tested against BVDV as in silico assay negative control. Conclusion: The antiviral results confirmed the predicted mechanism of action, as the newly synthesised compounds resulted not active in the in vitro BVDV infection inhibitio

Time occurrence of earthquake instabilities in rate– and state–dependent friction models

Since the latter half of last century many studies and laboratory experiments have focused on the understanding of the evolution of frictional strength during sliding events on active faults. Such events may occur through aseismic fault creep, high-velocity slip and, in some cases, as a combination of both. According to the concept that earthquakes are frictional instabilities, their time occurrence may show a periodical pattern (the seismic cycle) whose behavior can be referred to the stick-slip dynamic. The dynamic evolution of a fault is often modeled considering its formal analogy with a physical system known as the spring-slider model (namely, a damped harmonic oscillator). Many experimental studies have been conducted using the spring-slider model, most of them simulating the interaction between slip surfaces with the surrounding elastic medium with a single-degree-of-freedom system. Despite its obvious limitations, such a model has provided important insights on dynamics of stick-slip cycle [Gu et al., 1984; Carlson et al., 1994], nucleation of earthquakes and triggered earthquake phenomena [e.g. Belardinelli et al., 2003]. On the basis of several experimental results on rock friction, Dieterich (1979) and Ruina (1983) formulated rate- and state-dependent friction laws, in which the frictional resistance is expressed through the evolution of the sliding rate and its history. Afterwards, Chester and Higgs (1992) figured out that also the temperature variation, produced by frictional heating, can affect the duration of the seismic cycle and the evolution of the frictional strength as well and consequently they incorporate such a thermal effect, improving the previous Ruina’s constitutive law. The present study is aimed to: 1. investigate the spring-slider physical response depending on the adopted constitutive law; 2. show the influence that the constitutive laws can exert on the time occurrence of a seismic instability and on the seismic cycle duration; 3. compare the constitutive laws in order to show their different features in simulating the evolution of slip velocity, stress drop and seismic cycle

Is the dependence on the temperature of the friction important in stress triggering phenomena? The case of the 2000 Iceland seismic sequence

We perform numerical experiments by using a mass–spring fault model subject to an external coseismic stress perturbation due to a remote seismic event happening on another fault, the causative fault. In particular, the aim of this study is to investigate the instantaneous fault interaction and possible triggering that happens when a fault perturbed by a stress change fails before the so–called unperturbed instability. As a realistic example we focus our attention on the instantaneous dynamic triggering phenomena occurred during the 17 June 2000 south Iceland seismic sequence in the South Iceland Seismic Zone (SISZ, Reykjanes Peninsula). The main event (Ms 6.6) was followed by three large events within a few tens of seconds (8, 26 and 30 s, respectively) located in a neighborhood of several tens of km. Among them the 26 s event was the best constrained (Bizzarri and Belardinelli, 2008). In the present study, conditions to simulate the instantaneous dynamic triggering connected to the former three events, have been investigated using the simple 1–D spring–slider analogue model representing a fault governed by the rate– and state–dependent friction laws. In previous studies suitable constitutive parameters of the modeled fault which allow the instantaneous triggering of the three events, have been found (Antonioli et al., 2006) and, furthermore, it was also shown how the dynamics of the 26 s event strongly depends on the assumed constitutive law and stress conditions (Bizzarri and Belardinelli, 2008) by considering the Dieterich–Ruina (DR henceforth) and the Ruina–Dieterich (RD henceforth) governing laws. In this context take place the present study original contribution that is to better understand if the conditions of instantaneous dynamic triggering (focusing on the case of the 26 s triggered event) provide any significant differences if modeled with a different rate– and state–dependent governing equation, the Chester and Higgs law (CH henceforth; see Chester and Higgs, 1992; Bizzarri, 2010b; Bizzarri, 2010c) which accounts for the thermal effect for frictional heating which may occur during seismic sliding