An Investigation into the Environmental and Human Health Implications of Microplastic Toxicity

The pervasive distribution of microplastics in the environment has become a global concern, with potential repercussions for human health, ecosystems, and biological toxicity. This review synthesizes current research on the environmental distribution, potential pathways of human exposure, and health implications of microplastics. We highlight the methodologies employed in quantifying and characterizing microplastics, as well as the toxicological assessments conducted in various biological matrices. Our findings indicate a significant correlation between microplastic exposure and adverse health outcomes, necessitating urgent policy interventions and further research.

Theory and technique of permeability enhancement and coal mine gas extraction by fracture network stimulation of surrounding beds and coal beds

AbstractThe existing reservoir stimulating technologies are only applicable to hard coal but helpless for soft coal, which is one of the main factors hindering the CBM industrialization in China. Therefore, it is urgent to develop a universal stimulating technology which can increase the permeability in various coal reservoirs. Theoretical analysis and field tests were used to systematically analyze the mechanical mechanisms causing the formation of various levels and types of fractures, such as radial tensile fractures, peripheral tensile fractures, and shear fractures in hydraulic fracturing, and reveal the mechanism of permeability enhancement by fracture network stimulating in surrounding beds and coal reservoirs. The results show that multi-staged perforation fracturing of horizontal wells, hydraulic-jet staged fracturing, four-variation hydraulic fracturing and some auxiliary measures are effective technical approaches to fracture network stimulation, especially the four-variation hydraulic fracturing can stimulate the fracture network in vertical and cluster wells. It is concluded that the fracture network stimulating technology for surrounding beds has significant advantages, such as safe drilling operation, strong stimulation effect, strong adaptability to stress-sensitive and velocity-sensitive beds, and is suitable for coal reservoirs of any structure. Except for the limitation in extremely water-sensitive and high water-yield surrounding beds, the technology can be universally used in all other beds. The successful industrial tests in surface coal bed methane and underground coal mines gas extraction prove that the theory and technical system of fracture network stimulating in surrounding beds and coal reservoirs, as a universally applicable measure, will play a role in the CBM development in China

Towards on-chip time-resolved thermal mapping with micro-/nanosensor arrays

In recent years, thin-film thermocouple (TFTC) array emerged as a versatile candidate in micro-/nanoscale local temperature sensing for its high resolution, passive working mode, and easy fabrication. However, some key issues need to be taken into consideration before real instrumentation and industrial applications of TFTC array. In this work, we will demonstrate that TFTC array can be highly scalable from micrometers to nanometers and that there are potential applications of TFTC array in integrated circuits, including time-resolvable two-dimensional thermal mapping and tracing the heat source of a device. Some potential problems and relevant solutions from a view of industrial applications will be discussed in terms of material selection, multiplexer reading, pattern designing, and cold-junction compensation. We show that the TFTC array is a powerful tool for research fields such as chip thermal management, lab-on-a-chip, and other novel electrical, optical, or thermal devices

Semantical Markov Logic Network for Distributed Reasoning in Cyber-Physical Systems

The challenges associated with developing accurate models for cyber-physical systems are attributable to the intrinsic concurrent and heterogeneous computations of these systems. Even though reasoning based on interconnected domain specific ontologies shows promise in enhancing modularity and joint functionality modelling, it has become necessary to build interoperable cyber-physical systems due to the growing pervasiveness of these systems. In this paper, we propose a semantically oriented distributed reasoning architecture for cyber-physical systems. This model accomplishes reasoning through a combination of heterogeneous models of computation. Using the flexibility of semantic agents as a formal representation for heterogeneous computational platforms, we define autonomous and intelligent agent-based reasoning procedure for distributed cyber-physical systems. Sensor networks underpin the semantic capabilities of this architecture, and semantic reasoning based on Markov logic networks is adopted to address uncertainty in modelling. To illustrate feasibility of this approach, we present a Markov logic based semantic event model for cyber-physical systems and discuss a case study of event handling and processing in a smart home