The impact of the particle size of meat and bone meal (MBM) incineration ash on phosphate precipitation and phosphorus recovery

Meat and bone meal (MBM) ash was characterized and used for phosphate wastewater treatment and phosphorus recovery. The bottom ash (MBM-BA) with size >250 μm accounted for ~80% and distributed evenly in the >1000 μm, 500-1000 μm, and 250-500 μm fractions, while air pollution control residue (MBM-APCr) distributed evenly among the 250-500 μm, 125-250 μm, and 1000 μm and 8 was favorable to P removal. Based on the compositions of the solid phases, extracts before and after treatment, and Ca/P ratio 1.22-1.73, the phosphate removal mechanisms were dominated by HAP crystallization/precipitation. Using MBM-BA for wastewater treatment increased its P content to 16.30%. Depending on particle size, the acid consumption for P recovery of 84% from MBM-BA was 2.6-3.0 mM H+/mM P. Strategies for management and utilization of MBMA according to these findings were proposed

Size-dependent phase transition from amorphous to crystalline in antimony clusters on crystalline surfaces

This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.Peer Reviewe

The influence of tDCS on perceived bouncing/streaming

Processing ambiguous situations is a constant challenge in everyday life and sensory input from different modalities needs to be integrated to form a coherent mental representation on the environment. The bouncing/streaming illusion can be studied to provide insights into the ambiguous perception and processing of multi-modal environments. In short, the likelihood of reporting bouncing rather than streaming impressions increases when a sound coincides with the moment of overlap between two moving disks. Neuroimaging studies revealed that the right posterior parietal cortex is crucial in cross-modal integration and is active during the bouncing/streaming illusion. Consequently, in the present study, we used transcranial direct current stimulation to stimulate this brain area. In the active stimulation conditions, a 9 cm2 electrode was positioned over the P4-EEG position and the 35 cm2 reference positioned over the left upper arm. The stimulation lasted 15 min. Each participant did the bouncing/streaming task three times: before, during and after anodal or sham stimulation. In a sample of N = 60 healthy, young adults, we found no influence of anodal tDCS. Bayesian analysis showed strong evidence against tDCS effects. There are two possible explanations for the finding that anodal tDCS over perceptual areas did not modulate multimodal integration. First, upregulation of multimodal integration is not possible using tDCS over the PPC as the integration process already functions at maximum capacity. Second, prefrontal decision-making areas may have overruled any modulated input from the PPC as it may not have matched their decision-making criterion and compensated for the modulation