Development of an environmentally friendly gel foam and assessment of its thermal stability and fire suppression properties in liquid pool fires

Large-scale tank fires are one of the most challenging firefighting scenarios and pose significant threats to the safety of personnel and the integrity of equipment. The development of effective extinguishing agents is thus of both fundamental and practical importance in the controlling, mitigation, and suppression of tank fires. In this study, a novel environmentally friendly fire suppression foam based on gel-glycoside was developed using alpha-olefin sulfonate (AOS) and alkyl ethoxy polyglycosides (AEG) as the foaming agents, and sodium silicate, and sodium bicarbonate as the gelling and cross-linking agents respectively. The optimal ratios of the foaming agents were determined firstly by examining the foam expansion ratio and foam comprehensive value. Subsequently, the foamability, thermal stability, cross-linking time, and spreadability of the optimized formulations were analyzed. Finally, the fire extinguishing effects and performance in suppressing burnback of these formulations were examined and compared with those of a traditional film-forming fluoroprotein foam (FFFP). The experimental results indicated that the gel-glycoside foam, consisting of a composite foaming agent (AOS:AEG=1:9), sodium silicate, and sodium bicarbonate at concentrations of 0.6, 2.4 and 3.7wt%, respectively, exhibited the best spreadability and thermal stability. This formulation also showed excellent performance in cooling and suppressing burnback in the fire extinguishing tests, with a 90% burnback time of 485s, 45% higher than that of FFFP. The present results clearly demonstrated that gel-glycoside foams can effectively control and suppress liquid pool fires and hence reduce the risk in potential re-ignition. These findings are also important for the further development of gel foams for extinguishing large-scale oil storage tank fires

De novo transcriptome analysis of Medicago falcata reveals novel insights about the mechanisms underlying abiotic stress-responsive pathway

BACKGROUND: The entire world is facing a deteriorating environment. Understanding the mechanisms underlying plant responses to external abiotic stresses is important for breeding stress-tolerant crops and herbages. Phytohormones play critical regulatory roles in plants in the response to external and internal cues to regulate growth and development. Medicago falcata is one of the stress-tolerant candidate leguminous species and is able to fix atmospheric nitrogen. This ability allows leguminous plants to grow in nitrogen deficient soils. METHODS: We performed Illumina sequencing of cDNA prepared from abiotic stress treated M. falcata. Sequencedreads were assembled to provide a transcriptome resource. Transcripts were annotated using BLASTsearches against the NCBI non-redundant database and gene ontology definitions were assigned. Acomparison among the three abiotic stress treated samples was carried out. The expression of transcriptswas confirmed with qRT-PCR. RESULTS: We present an abiotic stress-responsive M. falcata transcriptome using next-generation sequencing data from samples grown under standard, dehydration, high salinity, and cold conditions. We combined reads from all samples and de novo assembled 98,515 transcripts to build the M. falcata gene index. A comprehensive analysis of the transcriptome revealed abiotic stress-responsive mechanisms underlying the metabolism and core signalling components of major phytohormones. We identified nod factor signalling pathways during early symbiotic nodulation that are modified by abiotic stresses. Additionally, a global comparison of homology between the M. falcata and M. truncatula transcriptomes, along with five other leguminous species, revealed a high level of global sequence conservation within the family. CONCLUSIONS: M. falcata is shown to be a model candidate for studying abiotic stress-responsive mechanisms in legumes. This global gene expression analysis provides new insights into the biochemical and molecular mechanisms involved in the acclimation to abiotic stresses. Our data provides many gene candidates that might be used for herbage and crop breeding. Additionally, FalcataBase (http://bioinformatics.cau.edu.cn/falcata/) was built for storing these data. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12864-015-2019-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Endothelial Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptor Nuclear Translocator Mediates the Angiogenic Response to Peripheral Ischemia in Mice With Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

Hypoxia-inducible factors (HIFs) are the master regulators of angiogenesis, a process that is impaired in patients with diabetes mellitus (DM). The transcription factor aryl hydrocarbon receptor nuclear translocator (ARNT, also known as HIF1β) has been implicated in the development and progression of diabetes. Angiogenesis is driven primarily by endothelial cells (ECs), but both global and EC-specific loss of ARNT-cause are associated with embryonic lethality. Thus, we conducted experiments in a line of mice carrying an inducible, EC-specific ARNT-knockout mutation (ArntΔEC, ERT2) to determine whether aberrations in ARNT expression might contribute to the vascular deficiencies associated with diabetes. Mice were first fed with a high-fat diet to induce diabetes. ArntΔEC, ERT2 mice were then adminstrated with oral tamoxifen to disrupt Arnt and peripheral angiogenesis was evaluated by using laser-Doppler perfusion imaging to monitor blood flow after hindlimb ischemia. The ArntΔEC, ERT2 mice had impaired blood flow recovery under both non-diabetic and diabetic conditions, but the degree of impairment was greater in diabetic animals. In addition, siRNA-mediated knockdown of ARNT activity reduced measurements of tube formation, and cell viability in human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) cultured under high-glucose conditions. The ArntΔEC, ERT2 mutation also reduced measures of cell viability, while increasing the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in microvascular endothelial cells (MVECs) isolated from mouse skeletal muscle, and the viability of ArntΔEC, ERT2 MVECs under high-glucose concentrations increased when the cells were treated with an ROS inhibitor. Collectively, these observations suggest that declines in endothelial ARNT expression contribute to the suppressed angiogenic phenotype in diabetic mice, and that the cytoprotective effect of ARNT expression in ECs is at least partially mediated by declines in ROS production

Regression results of heterogeneity analysis.

Regression results of heterogeneity analysis.</p

Endogeneity test: Regression results via 2SLS.

Endogeneity test: Regression results via 2SLS.</p

Regression results of local government debt impacting enterprise innovation.

Regression results of local government debt impacting enterprise innovation.</p

Regression results of digital finance as the mediating variable.

Regression results of digital finance as the mediating variable.</p

Regression results of financing constraint as the mediating variable.

Regression results of financing constraint as the mediating variable.</p

Regression results of robustness test.

Regression results of robustness test.</p

Regression results of enterprise profit as the mediating variable.

Regression results of enterprise profit as the mediating variable.</p