Біоекологічні особливості Echinacea pallida Nutt. у Лісостепу України

Bioecological peculiarities of growing and develop ment of Echinacea pallida Nutt. and methods of reproduction are studed. The best sample of Echinacea pallida according to biologically and economically valuable properties was selected. This species was received from Canada.Досліджено біоекологічні особливості росту і розвитку Echinacea pallida Nutt., способи розмноження. За біологічними та господарсько-цінними ознаками виділено кращий зразок колекції Echinacea pallida, отриманий із Канади

Giovanni Paolo Marana’s Turkish Spy and the Police of Louis XIV: the Fear of Being Secretly Observed by Trained Agents in Early Modern Europe

Giovanni Paolo Marana’s epistolary novel, entitled l’Espion du Grand-Seigneur and published for the first time in the 1680s, was a pioneering work of a genre that was to flourish much later, namely spy story. The story features an Arab who comes to Paris in 1637 and spends the next 45 years collecting information about French government’s activity without being ever identified by French counter-intelligence. The main character was an undercover agent of a Muslim empire, who watched Christians with contempt - and yet the book that pretended to be just a bunch of his letters, accidentally found and translated from Arabic by Marana, was a bestseller in late seventeenth- and then eighteenth-century Western Europe. The paper presents the fates of the work and discusses the reasons of its huge success. Apart from the fact that the novel was written in a brilliant style, and published at the time when the ongoing Habsburg-Turkish war had triggered intensive interest in the Muslim East, one of these reasons was the fact that it was published in the time when in France a modern police force was created. Its tasks included collecting information about political opinions, religious practices and intimate lives of the Sun King’s subjects. The new feeling of being observed by the government’s men and informers certainly prepared the ground for the success of the first spy story of the West

Attractive forces in microporous carbon electrodes for capacitive deionization

The recently developed modified Donnan (mD) model provides a simple and useful description of the electrical double layer in microporous carbon electrodes, suitable for incorporation in porous electrode theory. By postulating an attractive excess chemical potential for each ion in the micropores that is inversely proportional to the total ion concentration, we show that experimental data for capacitive deionization (CDI) can be accurately predicted over a wide range of applied voltages and salt concentrations. Since the ion spacing and Bjerrum length are each comparable to the micropore size (few nm), we postulate that the attraction results from fluctuating bare Coulomb interactions between individual ions and the metallic pore surfaces (image forces) that are not captured by meanfield theories, such as the Poisson-Boltzmann-Stern model or its mathematical limit for overlapping double layers, the Donnan model. Using reasonable estimates of the micropore permittivity and mean size (and no other fitting parameters), we propose a simple theory that predicts the attractive chemical potential inferred from experiments. As additional evidence for attractive forces, we present data for salt adsorption in uncharged microporous carbons, also predicted by the theory.Comment: 19 page

Theory of membrane capacitive deionization including the effect of the electrode pore space

Membrane capacitive deionization (MCDI) is a technology for water desalination based on applying an electrical field between two oppositely placed porous electrodes. Ions are removed from the water flowing through a channel in between the electrodes and are stored inside the electrodes. Ion-exchange membranes are placed in front of the electrodes allowing for counterion transfer from the channel into the electrode, while retaining the coions inside the electrode structure. We set up an extended theory for MCDI which includes in the description for the porous electrodes not only the electrostatic double layers (EDLs) formed inside the porous (carbon) particles, but also incorporates the role of the transport pathways in the electrode, i.e., the interparticle pore space. Because in MCDI the coions are inhibited from leaving the electrode region, the interparticle porosity becomes available as a reservoir to store salt, thereby increasing the total salt storage capacity of the porous electrode. A second advantage of MCDI is that during ion desorption (ion release) the voltage can be reversed. In that case the interparticle porosity can be depleted of counterions, thereby increasing the salt uptake capacity and rate in the next cycle. In this work, we compare both experimentally and theoretically adsorption/desorption cycles of MCDI for desorption at zero voltage as well as for reversed voltage, and compare with results for CDI. To describe the EDL-structure a novel modified Donnan model is proposed valid for small pores relative to the Debye length