Boric Acid Cross-linked 3D Polyvinyl Alcohol Gel Beads by NaOH-Titration Method as a Suitable Biomass Immobilization Matrix

Granule-base immobilization of biomass is a potential method for a decent quality granular sludge cultivation. In this study, 3D polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) gel beads were chemically cross-linked via a simple NaOH-titration method. The PVA gel beads’ porous morphology was characterized using scanning electron microscope (SEM) and Brunauer–Emmette–Teller (BET), and their mechanical properties were evaluated by swelling rate and compressive stress tests. When cross-linking time was 10 min, high quality gel beads (P10) were synthesized, which demonstrated a homogeneous porous structure, good swelling rate, and high compressive strength. A mechanism for synthesis of the gel beads was proposed based on the results of Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and X-ray diffractometer (XRD) analysis. Briefly, the intermolecular hydrogen bonds of PVA were firstly broken by NaOH to generate active bond of O–Na, which easily reacted with B(OH)4 − to produce the PVA-boric acid gel beads. P10 showed excellent biocompatibility for anaerobic ammonia oxidation (anammox) biomass’ immobilization. After incubation for three months, well granule-base immobilized sludge on P10 was developed in up-flow reactor. The sludge had high abundance of anammox biomass and was in balance with other functional bacteria. This work provides a simple method for the rapid preparation of 3D PVA gel beads and verifies their potential in granule-base immobilization of biomass.</p

Investigation of a refrigeration system based on combined supercritical CO2 power and transcritical CO2 refrigeration cycles by waste heat recovery of engine

The majority of the energy in the fuel burned in the internal combustion engines is lost in the form of waste heat. To address this issue, waste heat recovery technology has been proposed to increases the overall efficiency of engine. This paper investigates a heat driven cooling system based on a supercritical CO2 (S-CO2) power cycle integrated with a transcritical CO2 (T-CO2) refrigeration cycle, aiming to provide an alternative to the vapour absorption cooling system. The combined system is proposed to produce cooling for food preservation on a refrigerated truck by waste heat recovery of engine. In this system, the S-CO2 absorbs heat from the exhaust gas and the generated power in the expander is used to drive the compressors in both S-CO2 power cycle and T-CO2 refrigeration cycle. Unlike the bulky vapour absorption cooling system, both power plant and vapour compression refrigerator can be scaled down to a few kilo Watts, opening the possibility for developing small-scale waste heat driven cooling system that can be widely applied for waste heat recovery from IC engines of truck, ship and trains.A new layout sharing a common cooler is also studied. The results suggest that the concept of S-CO2/T-CO2 combined cycle sharing a common cooler has comparable performance and it is thermodynamically feasible. The heat contained in exhaust gas is sufficient for the S-CO2/T-CO2 combined system to provide enough cooling for refrigerated truck cabinet whose surface area is more than 105 m2

Adiponectin is Associated with Impaired Fasting Glucose in the Non-Diabetic Population

OBJECTIVES: Adiponectin is strongly associated with diabetes in the Western population. However, whether adiponectin is independently associated with impaired fasting glucose (IFG) in the non-obese population is unknown. METHODS: The serum adiponectin, insulin resistance (IR), and waist circumference (WC) of 27,549 healthy Koreans were measured. Individuals were then classified into tertile groups by gender. IFG was defined as a fasting serum glucose of 100-125 mg/dL without diabetes. IR was calculated using the homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR). The association of adiponectin and IFG was determined using logistic regression analysis. RESULTS: WC and adiponectin were associated with IFG in both men and women. However, the association of WC with IFG was attenuated in both men and women after adjustment for the HOMA-IR. Adiponectin was still associated with IFG after adjustment for and stratification by HOMA-IR in men and women. Strong combined associations of IR and adiponectin with IFG were observed in men and women. Multivariate adjusted odds ratios (ORs) (95% confidence interval [CI]) among those in the highest tertile of IR and the lowest tertile of adiponectin were 9.8 (7.96 to 12.07) for men and 24.1 (13.86 to 41.94) for women. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that adiponectin is strongly associated with IFG, and point to adiponectin as an additional diagnostic biomarker of IFG in the non-diabetic population.ope

Guiding the PLMs with Semantic Anchors as Intermediate Supervision: Towards Interpretable Semantic Parsing

The recent prevalence of pretrained language models (PLMs) has dramatically shifted the paradigm of semantic parsing, where the mapping from natural language utterances to structured logical forms is now formulated as a Seq2Seq task. Despite the promising performance, previous PLM-based approaches often suffer from hallucination problems due to their negligence of the structural information contained in the sentence, which essentially constitutes the key semantics of the logical forms. Furthermore, most works treat PLM as a black box in which the generation process of the target logical form is hidden beneath the decoder modules, which greatly hinders the model's intrinsic interpretability. To address these two issues, we propose to incorporate the current PLMs with a hierarchical decoder network. By taking the first-principle structures as the semantic anchors, we propose two novel intermediate supervision tasks, namely Semantic Anchor Extraction and Semantic Anchor Alignment, for training the hierarchical decoders and probing the model intermediate representations in a self-adaptive manner alongside the fine-tuning process. We conduct intensive experiments on several semantic parsing benchmarks and demonstrate that our approach can consistently outperform the baselines. More importantly, by analyzing the intermediate representations of the hierarchical decoders, our approach also makes a huge step toward the intrinsic interpretability of PLMs in the domain of semantic parsing

NanoSTR: A method for detection of target short tandem repeats based on nanopore sequencing data

Short tandem repeats (STRs) are widely present in the human genome. Studies have confirmed that STRs are associated with more than 30 diseases, and they have also been used in forensic identification and paternity testing. However, there are few methods for STR detection based on nanopore sequencing due to the challenges posed by the sequencing principles and the data characteristics of nanopore sequencing. We developed NanoSTR for detection of target STR loci based on the length-number-rank (LNR) information of reads. NanoSTR can be used for STR detection and genotyping based on long-read data from nanopore sequencing with improved accuracy and efficiency compared with other existing methods, such as Tandem-Genotypes and TRiCoLOR. NanoSTR showed 100% concordance with the expected genotypes using error-free simulated data, and also achieved &gt;85% concordance using the standard samples (containing autosomal and Y-chromosomal loci) with MinION sequencing platform, respectively. NanoSTR showed high performance for detection of target STR markers. Although NanoSTR needs further optimization and development, it is useful as an analytical method for the detection of STR loci by nanopore sequencing. This method adds to the toolbox for nanopore-based STR analysis and expands the applications of nanopore sequencing in scientific research and clinical scenarios. The main code and the data are available at https://github.com/langjidong/NanoSTR

Investigation on Laser-induced Breakdown Spectroscopy of Potassium Chloride Solution

peer reviewedThe experimental setup for laser—induced breakdown spectroscopy test was designed with pulsed Nd：YAG laser，spectrograph and ICCD and so on．Furthermore the potassium chloride solution spectra signals were detected by this setup．The spectra lines of the trace elements such as natrium (20mg／1)，magnesium(1 mg／1)，calcium(3 mg／1)are recorded．Experiment results show that delay time is one of the important parameters when qualitative analysis．It is easy for LIBS technology to detect multi—elements simultaneity if delay time is appropriate，and qualitative analysis has demonstrated that the feasibility of detecting trace poisonous metals in waste water using LIBS

Modeling seismic wave propagation in the Loess Plateau using a viscoacoustic wave equation with explicitly expressed quality factor

The thick Quaternary loess on the Loess Plateau of China produces strong seismic attenuation, resulting in weak reflections from subsurface exploration targets. Accurately simulating seismic wavefield in the Loess Plateau is important for guiding subsequent data processing and interpretation. We present a 2D/3D wavefield simulation method for the Loess Plateau using a viscoacoustic wave equation with explicitly expressed quality factor. To take into account the effect of irregular surface, we utilize a vertically deformed grid to represent the topography, and solve the viscoacoustic wave equation in a regular computational domain that conforms to topographic surface. Grid deformation introduces the partial derivatives such as ∂vx/∂z and ∂vy/∂z in the wave equation, which is difficult to be accurately computed using traditional staggered-grid finite-difference method. To mitigate this issue, a finite-difference scheme based on a fully staggered-grid is adopted to solve the viscoacoustic wave equation. Numerical experiments for a simple layer model and 2D/3D realistic Loess Plateau models demonstrate the feasibility and adaptability of the proposed method. The 3D modeling results show comparable amplitude and waveform characteristics to the field data acquired from the Chinese Loess Plateau, suggesting a good performance of the proposed modeling method

The Effects of Short-duration Exercise on Arterial Stiffness in Patients with Stable Coronary Artery Disease

Arterial stiffness is an important contributor to the development of cardiovascular disease. We investigated the effect of short duration exercise using the treadmill test on arterial stiffness in the presence of coronary artery disease. We enrolled patients with and without coronary artery diseases (CAD and control group, 50 patients each) referred for treadmill testing. Brachial-ankle pulse wave velocity (baPWV) were measured before and after treadmill testing. Values of baPWV were significantly reduced at 10 min after exercise in both groups, more in the CAD group than in the control group (baseline baPWV and post-exercise change [cm/sec]: 1,527±245 and -132±155 in the CAD group, 1,439±202 and -77±93 in the control group, respectively, P for change in each group <0.001, P for difference in changes between the two groups <0.001). These findings persisted after adjusting for age, body mass index, systolic blood pressure, mean arterial pressure (MAP), MAP decreases, and baseline baPWV. Significant post-exercise baPWV reductions were observed in both groups, and more prominently in the CAD group. This finding suggests that short-duration exercise may effectively improve arterial stiffness even in patients with stable coronary artery disease