MORE ENVIRONMENTAL FRIENDLY METHOD OF LEAD RECYCLING FROM WASTE BATTERY PASTE-AN ELECTROCHEMICAL INVESTIGATION

Joint Research on Environmental Science and Technology for the Eart

Antibacterial activities of ethanolic extract of four species of Rutaceae family

In this study, the antibacterial activity of ethanolic extract from the leaves of four Rutaceae species, including Acronychia pedunculata, Clausena excavata, Glycosmis pentaphylla and Luvunga scandens, were performed using the agar disk diffusion method for the first time. The ethanolic extracts from the leaves of A. pedunculata and G. pentaphylla were able to resist against all six bacterial strains with zones of inhibition for Bacillus cereus (17.3±2.1 mm, 20.8±1.0 mm) Staphylococcus aureus (8.5±0.5 mm, 17.6±0.3 mm) Escherichia coli (16.7±2.1 mm, 15.3±1.2 mm), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (11.7±0.6 mm, 14.0±1.7 mm), Salmonella enteritidis (22.3±0.6 mm, 24.6±0.5 mm) and Salmonella typhimurium (9.5±0.9 mm, 8.3±0.6 mm). On the other hand, the ethanolic extract of C. excavata leaf was resistant to B. cereus (12.3±0.6 mm), S. aureus (11.6±0.5 mm), E. coli (11.5±2.1 mm), P. aeruginosa (10.6±0.3 mm) while B. cereus (8.2±0.3 mm), S. aureus (9.3±0.6 mm), E. coli (8.5±0.5 mm) and S. typhimurium (8.3±0.6 mm) were inhibited by the ethanolic extract of L. scandens leaf. This study could provide necessary information for further application of these species in medicine

Microbial Protease or Yeast Extract—Alternative Additions for Improvement of Fermentation Performance and Quality of Beer Brewed with a High Rice Content

Reduction of production costs is an important advantage of adjunct utilization in brewing. Nevertheless, addition of 40% rice significantly decreases the biomass formation of yeast due to depletion of assimilable nitrogen in the wort. This leads to longer fermentation times and may have a negative influence on beer organoleptic quality. This study compared addition of protease to the malt-mash during mashing or supplementation of yeast extract in wort after boiling to increase the wort assimilable nitrogen content. In both cases, the fermentation was considerably accelerated, and the beer quality was significantly improved. Yeast extract gave better results than microbial protease. The fermentation kinetics and the beer quality from a 60% malt-40% rice wort supplemented by yeast extract were the same as those from a 100% malt wort

CulturaX: A Cleaned, Enormous, and Multilingual Dataset for Large Language Models in 167 Languages

The driving factors behind the development of large language models (LLMs) with impressive learning capabilities are their colossal model sizes and extensive training datasets. Along with the progress in natural language processing, LLMs have been frequently made accessible to the public to foster deeper investigation and applications. However, when it comes to training datasets for these LLMs, especially the recent state-of-the-art models, they are often not fully disclosed. Creating training data for high-performing LLMs involves extensive cleaning and deduplication to ensure the necessary level of quality. The lack of transparency for training data has thus hampered research on attributing and addressing hallucination and bias issues in LLMs, hindering replication efforts and further advancements in the community. These challenges become even more pronounced in multilingual learning scenarios, where the available multilingual text datasets are often inadequately collected and cleaned. Consequently, there is a lack of open-source and readily usable dataset to effectively train LLMs in multiple languages. To overcome this issue, we present CulturaX, a substantial multilingual dataset with 6.3 trillion tokens in 167 languages, tailored for LLM development. Our dataset undergoes meticulous cleaning and deduplication through a rigorous pipeline of multiple stages to accomplish the best quality for model training, including language identification, URL-based filtering, metric-based cleaning, document refinement, and data deduplication. CulturaX is fully released to the public in HuggingFace to facilitate research and advancements in multilingual LLMs: https://huggingface.co/datasets/uonlp/CulturaX.Comment: Ongoing Wor

LAYERED O3-NaFe0.5Co0.5O2 AS HIGH CAPACITY AND LOW- COST MATERIAL FOR SODIUM ION BATTERIES

O3-NaFe0.5Co0.5O2 layered cathode material was synthesized by solid state reaction at 900 oC followed by a quenching step in argon atmosphere. The chemical composition and morphology of synthesized material were analyzed by Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy (AAS) and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). The electrochemical properties were evaluated by Cyclic Voltammetry (CV) and charge-discharge cycling. The material NaFe0.5Co0.5O2 shows the sloped discharge curves with high flat voltage plateau and excellent cycling stability. The reversible capacity of about 120 mAh/g at rate C/10 and good capacity retention after 100 cycles were obtained

In vitro antioxidant activity and content of bioactive compounds from Homalomena occulta

Homalomena occulta, a plant widely used in traditional Vietnamese medicine, was assessed for its antioxidant potential through DPPH radical scavenging and total antioxidant capacity methods. The results showed that Homalomena occulta exhibited significant antioxidant activities with a low IC50 value of 40.27 μg/mL, which is comparable to that of curcumin (38.50 μg/mL). Furthermore, the total antioxidant capacity of the Homalomena occulta extract was determined to be 77.48 ± 2.34 mg GA/g. To investigate the composition of the plant, various compounds including total phenolic, total flavonoid, polysaccharides, and triterpenoids were quantified using colorimetric methods with specific reagents. The content of phenolic compounds, flavonoid compounds, polysaccharides, and triterpenoids in Homalomena occulta was found to be 36.87 ± 0.42 GAE/g, 26.83 ± 0.29 mg QUE/g, 5.06 ± 0.06%, and 52.09 ± 1.77 mg Olenanoic/g, respectively. Notably, this study provides the first-ever report on the polysaccharide and total triterpenoid content of Homalomena occulta

In vitro antioxidant activity and bioactive compounds from Calocybe indica

Nowadays, the use of mushrooms in medicine is ubiquitous and has achieved particular success. The antioxidants in mushrooms can deactivate free radicals. This study assesses the antioxidant potential of mushroom Calocybe indica with the 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical and 2,2′-azino-bis(3-ethylbenzthiazoline-6-sulfonic acid) (ABTS) radical scavenging methods and the total antioxidant capacity. The mushroom’s ethanol extract exhibits acceptable activity with a low IC50 value (240.11 μg/mL), approximately 2.9 times lower than that of the mushroom Ophiocordyceps sobolifera extract. The ABTS scavenging rate of the extract is around 60% at 500 µg/mL, and the total antioxidant capacity is equivalent to 64.94 ± 1.03 mg of GA/g or 77.42 ± 0.42 μmol of AS/g.  The total phenolics, flavonoids, polysaccharides, and triterpenoids are equivalent to 29.33 ± 0.16 mg of GAE/g, 17.84 ± 0.11 mg of QUE/g (5.04 ± 0.04%), and 4.96 ± 0.04 mg of oleanolic acid/g, respectively. Specifically, the total triterpenoid content has been reported for the first time. The mushroom can have potential biomedical applications

Polysaccharide extraction from Myxopyrum smilacifolium trunk and its antioxidant capacity

As a traditional medicinal plant in Vietnam, Myxopyrum smilacifolium has been used for a long history to treat cough, nervous disorders, numbness, rheumatism, and cephalalgia. Nevertheless, reports on the antioxidant activity and extraction of M. smilacifolium polysaccharides are still very rare. This study was designed to extract a high yield of polysaccharides from the M. smilacifolium trunk and characterize it. As a result, the maximum yield of the polysaccharides of 5.13 ± 0.05% was obtained with an extraction time of three hours, extraction temperature of 100 oC, the ratio of water to sample of 1:50 as extraction solution, extraction number of times 3, and the ratio of ethanol to extract volume 5:1 (v/v). Polysaccharides was characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and high-performance gel-permeation chromatography (HPGPC). The average molecular weight of extracted polysaccharides was around 3.78 × 105 Da. In vitro assays dan impressive antioxidant activities of the extracted polysaccharides, containing 0.2423 ± 0.0028 mg GA/g or 0.2142 ± 0.0007 μmol AS/g. The IC50 values of polysaccharides in the DPPH and ABTS methods were 0.89 mg/mL and 3.85 mg/mL, respectively.  These findings exhibited the potential for application or further research and development of polysaccharides from Myxopyrum smilacifolium

The Emergence of Rotavirus G12 and the Prevalence of Enteric Viruses in Hospitalized Pediatric Diarrheal Patients in Southern Vietnam

Diarrhea is a major cause of childhood morbidity and mortality in developing countries, and the majority of infections are of viral etiology. We aimed to compare the etiological prevalence of the major enteric viruses in an urban and a rural setting in southern Vietnam. We simultaneously screened fecal specimens from 362 children in Ho Chi Minh City and Dong Thap province that were hospitalized with acute diarrhea over a 1-month-long period for four viral gastrointestinal pathogens. Rotavirus was the most common pathogen identified, but there was a differential prevalence of rotavirus and norovirus between the urban and rural locations. Furthermore, rotavirus genotyping and phylogenetic analysis again differentiated the genotypes by the sampling location. Our data show a disproportional distribution of enteric viral pathogens in urban and rural locations, and we provide evidence of continual importation of new rotavirus strains into southern Vietnam and report the emergence of rotavirus genotype G12

Kinetics of neutralizing antibodies against Omicron variant in Vietnamese healthcare workers after primary immunization with ChAdOx1-S and booster immunization with BNT162b2

We studied the development and persistence of neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 ancestral strain, and Delta and Omicron (BA.1 and BA.2) variants in Vietnamese healthcare workers (HCWs) up to 15 weeks after booster vaccination. We included 47 HCWs, including group 1 (G1, N = 21) and group 2 (G2; N = 26) without and with breakthrough Delta variant infection before booster immunization, respectively). The study participants had completed primary immunization with ChAdOx1-S and booster vaccination with BNT162b2. Neutralizing antibodies were measured using a surrogate virus neutralization assay. Of the 21 study participants in G1, neutralizing antibodies against ancestral strain, Delta variant, BA.1, and BA.2 were (almost) abolished at month 8 after the second dose, but all had detectable neutralizing antibodies to the study viruses at week 2 post booster dose. Of the 26 study participants in G2, neutralizing antibody levels to BA.1 and BA.2 were significantly higher than those to the corresponding viruses measured at week 2 post breakthrough infection and before the booster dose. At week 15 post booster vaccination, neutralizing antibodies to BA.1 and BA.2 dropped significantly, with more profound changes observed in those without breakthrough Delta variant infection. Booster vaccination enhanced neutralizing activities against ancestral strain and Delta variant compared with those induced by primary vaccination. These responses were maintained at high levels for at least 15 weeks. Our findings emphasize the importance of the first booster dose in producing cross-neutralizing antibodies against Omicron variant. A second booster to maintain long-term vaccine effectiveness against the currently circulating variants merits further research