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The latest development with regard to biomedical uses of permanent magnet nanoparticles.
There is growing concern regarding human dietary exposure to arsenic (As) via consumption of rice. The concentration and speciation of As in rice are highly variable, and models describing rice As speciation as a function of environmental covariates remain elusive. We conducted a survey of paddy rice and soil in the Mekong Delta with the objective of linking patterns in rice As content to soil chemical variables or hydrogeological parameters. The sum of As species (ΣAs) in husked rice averaged 243 μg/kg and the average inorganic As (iAs) content was 84%. There was no relationship found between rice As concentration or speciation and As levels in soil. However, mean As concentrations in groundwater near rice sampling locations were strongly correlated with grain ΣAs and iAs over a large part of the study region, despite the fact that groundwater is not commonly used for rice paddy irrigation in this region. We hypothesize that surficial sediments with high concentrations of soluble and plant-available As also serve as sources of arsenic to downgradient shallow aquifers, explaining the observed associations between rice and groundwater As. This study suggests that shallow groundwater As concentrations may serve as a useful indicator for locations at risk of elevated iAs concentrations in rice.Three of the primary bottlenecks, which should be consider for practical, point-of-need use of microbial fuel cell (MFC) analytical devices were surpassed in this work i) the use of a diffusive barrier, hence, an electrogenic biofilm; ii) longer enrichment/stabilization times to produce a biofilm, made in a laboratory environment, over the electrode; and iii) difficulty comparing results obtained from MFCs based on electrogenic biofilms with standardized bioassays, a setback to be adopted as a new method. Here we show an easy way to determine water toxicity employing planktonic bacteria as biorecognition agents. The paper-based MFC contain an electron carrier (or mediator) to facilitate charge transfer from bacteria to the anode. In this way, there is no need to use biofilms. As far as we know this is the first paper-based MFC containing P. putida KT2440, a well characterized non-pathogenic bacteria previously used in standardized water toxicity bioassays. Results were obtained in 80 min and an effective concentration 50 of 9.02 mg L-1, calculated for Zn2+ (a reference toxic agent), was successfully compared with previously published and ISO standardized bioassays, showing a promising future for this technology. The practical design and cost (less than one U.S. dollar) of the paper-based MFC toxicity test presented will open new market possibilities for rapid and easy-to-use MFC analytical devices.FeAl-layered double hydroxide (FeAl-LDH) supported by char was synthesized using the hydrothermal method in order to activate hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) to degrade phenol. The effects of char type, char synthesis amount, and several important parameters on the degradation were investigated. In addition, the physicochemical properties of FeAl-LDH@BC were revealed by instruments including the transmission electron microscope (TEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and Fourier-transform infrared (FT-IR). The results showed that the degradation efficiency of phenol (80 mg/L) by [email protected] was 85.28% at a pH of 3 and H2O2 concentration of 400 mg/L, and exhibited good reusability with a small amount of iron leaching. Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) and radical quenching results indicated that ·OH radicals were the main participant during the degradation process, and XRD and FTIR spectra showed that FeAl-LDH was dissolved and rebuilt during the degradation process, and a small amount of iron was leached out resulting in the homogeneous catalysis. Hence, both homogeneous and heterogeneous processes occurred in the phenol oxidation process. Further soil remediation experiments showed that [email protected] could also effectively degrade phenol in soil, although the efficiency was lower than that in solution.The design and control of an intelligent integrated standalone micro-grid (I-ISMG) have been proposed in this study. The ISMG system consists of solar photovoltaic (SPV), wind turbine generator (WTG), diesel engine generator (DEG) as distributed power generation (PG), and battery and flywheel as energy storage systems (ESSs). An improved incremental conductance (I-InC) maximum power point (MPP) tracking (MPPT) scheme, and a fuzzy wind power generation model (FWPGM) are utilized to obtain the power from solar, and wind energy systems respectively. The key contribution of this work is to control the power flow for synchronous micro-grid (MG) operation, which in turn resolves the problem of load frequency control (LFC). In this control strategy, an intelligent, i.e. fuzzy logic-based adaptive control scheme is proposed for the coordinated power flow among the generation, demand, and storage system. To minimize the frequency deviation (Δf) and control of PG from WTG and DEG, frequency support (FS) fuzzy logic-based droop characteristic is employed. Scriptaid mw For the droop control in WTG and DEG, fuzzy logic-based proportional-integral-derivative (F-PID), and self-tuned-fuzzy PID (STF-PID) control schemes are utilized respectively. Apart from droop controls, a fuzzy observer (FO) is designed to manage power flow to/from the storage systems. Further, the proposed control scheme has been benchmarked using single area power system (SAPS) and modified New England IEEE 39 bus system.Atangana-Baleanu-Caputo (ABC) fractional differential operator based upon Mittag-Leffler kernel exhibits all the advantages of conventional Riemann-Liouville and Caputo fractional differential operators; in addition, the kernel associated is non-singular. Therefore, this paper puts forward a closed-form analytical formulation for the design of an ABC-based fractional-order FIR filter for various signal processing and filtering applications. The closed-form expression is derived by utilizing backward finite difference method and fractional sample delay interpolation techniques. Furthermore, several design examples are considered to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. From the analytical and simulation studies done, it is observed that the proposed design efficiently approximates the ideal frequency response of ABC-fractional differential operator. Finally, one-dimensional and two-dimensional applications of the proposed method are validated and compared against state-of-the-art methods for electrocardiogram (ECG) R-peak detection as well as for digital image sharpening.
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