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Membrane-based pre-concentration (MPC) process has been regarded as an attractive approach to sustainable municipal wastewater (MW) treatment. The aim of this study is to verify the techno-economic feasibility of pilot-scale MPC demonstrations and to design a complete technical route for MPC-based MW treatment and resource recovery. Three pilot MPC demonstrations (50–500 t/d) were operated for several months with different strategy combinations of chemicals and aeration. The filtration performance, pollutant removal performance, and concentrate characteristics were investigated and a techno-economic assessment was conducted. Based on the characteristics of each MPC effluent, biofilters, reverse osmosis (RO) and membrane capacitive deionization (MCDI) were selected as post-treatment units. Comparisons were carried out from 6 perspectives, including effluent quality, energy consumption, capital investment, operating cost, by-products, and recovery potential. In MPC_C, the combination of intermittent aeration and "50 mg/L Polyaluminium chloride +25 mg/L activated carbon" ensured a stable filtration (flux >10 LMH over 3 months) and an exceptional pollutant removal (soluble organics removal rate >75%) performance. The highest energy recovery potential (0.35 kWh/m3) was also achieved in MPC_C with the lowest energy consumption (0.12 kWh/m3) and an acceptable operating cost (0.53 CNY/m3). As for post-treatment units, RO showed advantages in effluent quality, technological maturity, and economic cost. An "MPC (intermittent aeration + high strength dosage) + RO + anaerobic digestion" system was proposed for synchronous water-energy reclamation. The net energy consumption and operating cost were estimated as 0.273 kWh/m3 and CNY 1.132/m3, respectively. This study will open new possibilities for the establishment of revolutionary wastewater treatment routes for carbon neutrality and sustainable development. [Display omitted] • Techno-economic feasibility of "membrane-based pre-concentration (MPC) + post-treatment" was verified. • Intermittent aeration + high-strength chemical dosage is a promising operating strategy in MPC. • Reverse osmosis (RO) is a favorable technology for treating MPC permeate currently. • A combined system (MPC-RO) was proposed for synchronous water-energy reclamation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A pilot-scale enhanced magnetic separation equipment (300 m3/d) was proposed for up-concentration. • Adsorption further enhanced the ability to capture soluble organics of magnetic separation. • Over 60% of organics were removed within 10 min with satisfactory energy consumption. • The energy potential of the produced sludge was competitive. The up-concentration process has been demonstrated as an attractive approach to carbon-neutral wastewater treatment. Innovation in the separation processes can help eliminate the current heavy dependence on gravity, and credible pilot-scale verification is crucial for application promotion. We hereby proposed a pilot-scale enhanced magnetic separation (EMS) system as an up-concentration step to maximize energy recovery from municipal wastewater. The design of EMS was based on the hypothesis that magnetic-driven separation could be a breakthrough in separation speed, and adsorption could further enhance the separation efficiency by capturing soluble substances. Jar tests confirmed the feasibility of activated carbon adsorption, which could also roughen the surface of aggregates. Further, over one-year operation of a 300 m3/d EMS equipment provided optimum operation strategies and evidence of system effectiveness. More than 80% of particulate organics and 60% of soluble organics were removed within 10 min at an energy consumption of only 0.036 kWh/m3. The characteristics of sludge were clarified in terms of organic concentration, extracellular polymeric substances composition, and micro-community analysis. The anaerobic experiments further demonstrated the potential value of the concentrated products. Surprisingly, the developed EMS system exhibited significant advantages in time consumption and space occupation, with competitive operating cost and energy consumption. Overall, the results of this study posed the EMS process for up-concentration as a potential approach to organics recovery from municipal wastewater. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• 13a exhibited growth inhibitory effects on prostate cancer cells by inhibiting AR and CYP17. • 13a could dramatically reduce PSA expression induced by testosterone, which was comparable with Abiraterone. Both AR and CYP17 are important targets for blocking androgen signaling, and it has been accepted that multifunctional drugs have a low risk of drug resistance in the treatment of cancer. Thus, herein a series of steroidal imidazoles were designed, synthesized and evaluated as dual AR/CYP17 ligands. Several compounds displayed good biological profiles in both enzymatic and cellular assays. SAR studies showed that introducing oximino at the C-3 position of steroidal scaffold is beneficial to the enhancement of AR antagonistic activity. Among these compounds, the most potent compound 13a exhibited the best AR inhibition (IC 50 = 0.5 μM) that was 27-fold increase compared with the hit compound 5 as well as comparable CYP17 inhibition (IC 50 = 11 μM). Additionally, 13a displayed promising anti-proliferative effects on LNCap cell lines with the IC 50 value of 23 μM which was superior to positive control Flutamide (IC 50 = 28 μM). Furthermore, the docking results of 13a revealed that the oxygen atom at the position of C-3 connected to the heme of CYP17, which may be helpful for its satisfactory dual-target inhibition. In summary, this study provides an efficient strategy for multi-targeting drug discovery in the treatment of prostate cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a fundamental task for geographical information updating, 3D city modeling, and other critical applications, the automatic extraction of building footprints from high-resolution remote sensing images has been substantially explored and received increasing attention over recent years. Among different types of building extraction methods, the polygonal segmentation methods produce vector building polygons that are in a more realistic format compared with those obtained from pixel-wise semantic labeling and contour-based methods. However, existing polygonal building segmentation methods usually require a perfect segmentation map and a complex post-processing procedure to guarantee the polygonization quality, or produce inaccurate vertex prediction results that suffer from wrong vertex sequence, self-intersections, fixed vertex quantity, etc. In our previous work, we have proposed a method for polygonal building segmentation from remote sensing images that addresses the above limitations of existing methods. In this paper, we propose PolyCity, which further extends and improves our previous work in terms of the application scenario, methodology design, and experimental results. Our proposed PolyCity contains the following three components: (1) a pixel-wise multi-task network for learning the semantic and geometric information via three tasks, i.e., building segmentation, boundary prediction, and edge orientation prediction; (2) a simple but effective vertex selection module (VSM), which effectively bridges the gap between pixel-wise and graph-based models via transforming the segmentation map into valid polygon vertices; (3) a graph-based vertex refinement network (VRN) for automatically adjusting the coordinates of VSM-generated valid polygon vertices, producing the final building polygons with more precise vertices. Results on three large-scale building extraction datasets demonstrate that our proposed PolyCity generates vector building footprints with more accurate vertices, edges, shapes, etc., achieving significant vertex score improvements while maintaining high segmentation and boundary scores compared with the current state-of-the-art. The code of PolyCity will be released at https://github.com/liweijia/polycity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Porous graphene oxide (GO) adsorbents were successfully prepared by connecting GO sheets with tetrafluoroterephthalonitrile (TFT) or decafluorobiphenyl (DFB) through a nucleophilic aromatic substitution reaction. Textural characterization indicated that the enlarged surface area and pore size of the as-synthesized GO-based adsorbents were favorable for the diffusion and adsorption of the typical pharmaceuticals. The GO reacted with 20 mmol/L DFB (GO-DFB20) exhibited the highest removal for six pharmaceuticals among the prepared adsorbents, and can be separated easily. The adsorption capacities of GO-DFB20 for carbamazepine (CBZ), sulfamethoxazole (SMZ), sulfadiazine (SDZ), ibuprofen (IBP), paracetamol (PCT) and phenacetin (PNT) were 340.5, 428.3, 214.7, 224.3, 350.6 and 316.1 μmol/g, respectively. The adsorption kinetics of PCT on the GO-DFB20 was faster than SMZ. According to the Langmuir fitting, the maximum adsorption capacities of GO-DFB20 for SMZ and PCT were 749.6 and 663.9 μmol/g, respectively. The spent GO-DFB20 was successfully regenerated by methanol with little loss of adsorption capacity in five successive adsorption cycles. This study shows that the porous GO adsorbent has a promising application for the removal of typical pharmaceuticals from water or wastewater. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Allergic rhinitis (AR) is globally prevalent and its pathogenesis remains unclear. Alternative activation of macrophages is suggested in AR and thought to be involved in natural immunoregulatory processes in AR. Aberrant activation of Nod-like receptor protein 3 (NLRP3) inflammasome is linked with AR. Human placenta extract (HPE) is widely used in clinics due to its multiple therapeutic potential carried by diverse bioactive molecules in it. We aim to investigate the effect of HPE on AR and the possible underlying mechanism. Ovalbumin (OVA)-induced AR rat model was set up and treated by HPE or cetirizine. General manifestation of AR was evaluated along with the histological and biochemical analysis performed on rat nasal mucosa. A proteomic analysis was performed on AR rat mucosa. Mouse alveolar macrophages (MH-S cells) were cultured under OVA stimulation to investigate the regulation of macrophages polarization. The morphological changes and the expression of NLRP3 inflammasome and immunity-related GTPase M (IRGM) in nasal mucosa as well as in MH-S cells were evaluated respectively. The results of our study showed the general manifestation of AR along with the histological changes in nasal mucosa of AR rats were improved by HPE. HPE suppresses NLRP3 inflammasome and the decline of IRGM in AR rats and MH-S cells. HPE regulates macrophage polarization through IRGM/NLRP3. We demonstrated that HPE had protection for AR and the protection is achieved partly through suppressing M1 while promoting M2, the process which is mediated by IRGM via inhibiting NLRP3 inflammasome in AR. [Display omitted] • HPE improves the general manifestation and histological changes of AR. • HPE suppresses NLRP3 inflammasome in AR. • HPE protects against AR through regulating macrophage polarization via IRGM/NLRP3. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The time-space domain finite difference methods reduce numerical dispersion effectively by minimizing the error in the joint time–space domain. However, their interpolating coefficients are related with the Courant numbers, leading to significantly extra time costs for loading the coefficients consecutively according to velocity in heterogeneous models. In the present study, we develop a time-space domain stereo finite difference (TSSFD) method for 3D scalar wave equation. The method propagates both the displacements and their gradients simultaneously to keep more information of the wavefields, and minimizes the maximum phase velocity error directly using constant interpolation coefficients for different Courant numbers. We obtain the optimal constant coefficients by combining the truncated Taylor series approximation and the time-space domain optimization, and adjust the coefficients to improve the stability condition. Subsequent investigation shows that the TSSFD can suppress numerical dispersion effectively with high computational efficiency. The maximum phase velocity error of the TSSFD is just 3.09% even with only 2 sampling points per minimum wavelength when the Courant number is 0.4. Numerical experiments show that to generate wavefields with no visible numerical dispersion, the computational efficiency of the TSSFD is 576.9%, 193.5%, 699.0%, and 191.6% of those of the 4th-order and 8th-order Lax-Wendroff correction (LWC) method, the 4th-order staggered grid method (SG), and the 8th-order optimal finite difference method (OFD), respectively. Meanwhile, the TSSFD is compatible to the unsplit convolutional perfectly matched layer (CPML) boundary condition for absorbing artificial boundaries. The efficiency and capability to handle complex velocity models make it an attractive tool in imaging methods such as acoustic reverse time migration (RTM). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The estrogen receptors have played important roles in breast cancer development and progression. Selective estrogen receptor modulators, such as Tamoxifen, have showed great benefits in the treatment and prevention of breast cancer. But the disadvantages of induction of endometrial cancer and drug resistance have limited their use. Multiple ligand which act at multiple biomolecular targets may exert favorable advantages of improved efficacy with lower incidence of side effects. In this work, we described the synthesis and evaluation of a series of 6-aryl-indenoisoquinolone derivatives as dual ERα and VEGFR-2 inhibitors. These compounds presented good ERα binding affinity and ERα antagonistic activity, as well as potent VEGFR-2 inhibitory potency. They also possessed excellent anti-proliferative activities against MCF-7, MDA-MB-231, Ishikawa and HUVEC cell lines. Further investigation of selective compound 21c showed that it was able to inhibit the activation of VEGFR-2 and the signaling transduction of Raf-1/MAPK/ERK pathway in MCF-7 cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Understandsing microbial aggregation behavior from benefit-driven perspective. • Aggregates gained benefits in biological activity and toxicity resistance. • Benefit mechanism was clarfied via kinetics, EPS, heme c and microbial community. • Aggregates benefit by diverse microbial communities and organized spatial structure. This work tried understanding aggregation preference of anammox bacteria from benefit-driven perspective. Aggregated anammox sludge (AGS) gained benefits in specific anammox activity (SAA) (increased by 40.47 ± 12.64%) and in toxicity resistance (enhanced by 65.41%) than scattered anammox sludge (SCS), which were verified by kinetics. The increased heme c content by 35.67 ± 5.77% and enhanced relative abundance of anammox bacteria by 9.29% supported the benefits in biological activity and improved EPS content by 1097.59 ± 43.06% (622.16 ± 61.73% for protein (PN), 2403.47 ± 162.75% for humic acid (HA) and 1145.34 ± 97.33% for polysaccharide (PS)) justified the benefits in toxicity resistance. The diverse microbial communities and organized spatial structures owned by AGS promoted interactions between species, as the intrinsic justification for obtaining the benefits. We expect our findings to provide theoretical guidance for promotions and applications of the anammox process with excellent nitrogen removal capacity and stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Integrated system of floc, aggregate and carrier reaped high-quality anammox biofilm. • A model of developing high-quality anammox biofilm was established. • A strategy of reaping high-quality biofilm was proposed. This work investigated the effects of integration of floc, aggregate and carrier (IFAC) on anammox biofilm quality and development mechanisms. The IFAC system harvested high-quality anammox biofilm with a reduction of 60% in the formation period, an increment of 282.14%~397.26% in mechanical stability, an enhancement of 10.18 ~ 21.56% in ecological stability and an improvement of 9.44%~46.18% in abundance of the phylum Planctomycetes. Aggregates enabled carriers to accumulate initial biomass efficiently and equipped biofilm with additional joint forces. Floc promoted accumulation of terminal biomass, enhanced ecological stability by improving community diversity and raised abundance of the phylum Planctomycetes by assisting anammox consortium settlement. A model of the development procedure of high-quality anammox biofilm was established and a strategy for pre-designing the IFAC system to reap high-quality biofilm was proposed. We expect our findings to provide theoretical guidance for designs and applications of anammox process with excellent stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]