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Two polysaccharides from Crocus sativus petals (PCSPs), PCSPA and PCSPB, presented immunopotentiatory activity through activating macrophages via MAPK and NF-κB pathway. In this study, two PCSPs were investigated for the adjuvant effects and underlying mechanisms using ovalbumin (OVA) in mice. PCSPA and PCSPB remarkably not only boosted the OVA-specific IgG antibody and its isotype titers, but strengthened splenocyte proliferation and natural killer cell activities in immunized mice. Both PCSPs also dramatically triggered the production of Th1- and Th2-cytokines and facilitated the gene expression of Th1- and Th2-cytokines and transcription factors in OVA-stimulated splenocytes. In mechanisms, two PCSPs rapidly elicited the gene and protein expression of cytokines and chemokines, promoted the recruitment and antigen uptake of immune cells in the injected-muscles, and augmented the migration and antigen transport of immune cells to the draining lymph nodes. These findings demonstrated that PCSPs enhanced and improved immune responses and simultaneously elicited Th1- and Th2-immune responses to OVA through activating innate immune microenvironment, and that they could act as promising vaccine adjuvant candidates. [Display omitted] • PCSPs possess adjuvant activity on specific cellular and humoral immunity to OVA. • PCSPs elicited the expression of cytokines and chemokines at the injection site. • PCSPA and PCSPB augment the recruitment of immune cells into the injection site. • PCSPA and PCSPB promote the migration of immune cells to draining lymph nodes. • PCSPA and PCSPB exerted the adjuvant activities by activating innate immunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper mainly studies numerical solution to the Volterra integral equation of the second kind. By using the roots of Chebyshev polynomial as collocation points, a new collocation method is proposed to solve the Volterra integral equation of the second kind. The proposed method firstly interpolates the product of the kernel function and the unknown solution at the roots of Chebyshev polynomial. Then, the Volterra integral equation is transformed into a system of linear algebra equations by properties of Chebyshev polynomials. Finally, the numerical solution of the Volterra integral equation is obtained by the Chebyshev polynomial interpolation. In addition, the error estimates of the proposed method are provided in a semi-posteriori sense; and numerical examples are given to show effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Battery-like materials have recently been proposed as relevant bridge materials between pseudo-capacitance and battery materials. These composites have widely been used as electrodes in hybrid supercapacitors. In this account, MnCo 2 O 4 (MCO), active carbon (AC) and a series of MnCo 2 O 4 @active carbon (MCO@AC) composites were investigated as electrodes of hybrid supercapacitors in aqueous alkaline electrolytes. MCO@AC200 achieved the highest specific capacity of 443.5 C g−1 at current density of 0.5 A g−1. This composite also overcame the low utilization of active material and difficult electron transport caused by thickness of high mass-loading conditions, yielding elevated volumetric capacity of 527.13 C cm−3 at 0.5 A g−1. However, MCO@AC200 was found to suffer from poor cycle stability. To clarify the electrochemical behaviors of all hybrid electrode materials and figure out the reasons behind the short-coming, the electrochemical kinetics were analyzed by means of cyclic voltammetry, galvanostatic charge-discharge, and valence states of elements. The charge storage behaviors of MCO and AC in MCO@AC composites were found to be mutually independent. MCO as battery-like material showed irreversible phase transition, leading to deteriorated cycle stability. Overall, both electrode structure design and irreversible phase transition should be considered when developing hybrid supercapacitors with high volumetric capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Limestone addition to circulating fluidized bed boilers for sulfur removal affects nitrous oxide (N 2 O) emission at the same time, but mechanism of how sulfation process influences the surface activity of CaO for N 2 O decomposition remains unclear. In this paper, we investigated the effect of sulfation on the surface properties and catalytic activity of CaO for N 2 O decomposition using density functional theory calculations. Sulfation of CaO (1 0 0) surface by the adsorption of a single gaseous SO 2 or SO 3 molecule forms stable local CaSO 3 or CaSO 4 on the CaO (1 0 0) surface with strong hybridization between the S atom of SO x and the surface O anion. The formed local CaSO 3 increases the barrier energy of N 2 O decomposition from 0.989 eV (on the CaO (1 0 0) surface) to 1.340 eV, and further sulfation into local CaSO 4 remarkably increases the barrier energy to 2.967 eV. Sulfation from CaSO 3 into CaSO 4 is therefore the crucial step for deactivating the surface activity for N 2 O decomposition. Completely sulfated CaSO 4 (0 0 1) and (0 1 0) surfaces further validate the negligible catalytic ability of CaSO 4 for N 2 O decomposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The salinity of soil can result in serious potential environmental hazards such as increased collapsibility and corrosiveness. Microbially induced carbonate precipitation is an upcoming and pollution-free treatment modality that can eliminate environmental and engineering hazards of saline soil. To verify the feasibility of the method of curing saline soils, a series of tests were conducted to investigate the impact of chloride salt on urea hydrolysis, the impact of the method on engineering and mechanical properties of coarse-grained soils containing chloride salt and the deterioration mechanism of curing effect caused by salt. The study demonstrated that, even though the curing effect of the method is excellent, the negative effect of salt cannot be ignored. With increased salt concentration, the hydrolysis rate and calcium carbonate precipitation efficiency sharply decrease at first and tend to be flatter. The unconfined compressive strength and shear strength of the samples can be greatly improved through the application of the method. However, calcium carbonate content reduces with an increase in the salt content, which decreases the strength. Compared to uncured samples, the permeability coefficient of cured samples reduced from 1 to 2 orders of magnitude. On the other hand, as the dominant aperture size increases with a decrease in the calcium carbonate content, the permeability coefficient increases with an increase in the salt content. Furthermore, micro-mechanical tests, such as X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscope tests, were conducted to analyze the mechanism by which salt degrades the reinforcement. As a guiding agent, while chloride salt can improve the proportion of calcite in calcium carbonate, it decreases the total quantity of calcium carbonate through the limiting urea hydrolysis process. A significant amount of calcium carbonate is deposited on the surface of the particles in each sample, especially the contact surface. In conclusion, even though salt has a certain deterioration effect, microbially-induced carbonate precipitation is still an effective and environment-friendly method to cure saline soil. This study can provide a theoretical basis for using this method to solidify saline soil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to data scarcity and class imbalance in medical images, the training dataset seriously affects the classification accuracy of the model. We propose a retinal image generation model based on GAN (RetiGAN). A dual-scale discriminator is operated to train the network at two scales to improve the quality of generated images. RetiGAN can better retain the semantic information of the original images under the guidance of the content loss due to the embedding of the VGG network into RetiGAN to extract the high-level semantic information of the original and the generated images. Besides, in order to enhance the details of the generated image, RetiGAN is guided to generate the retinal images with clearer edges by feeding smoothed images to the discriminator and forcing it to distinguish the smoothed from the original ones. The qualitative and quantitative analysis verifies that the generated retinal images are similar to the original ones in structure rather than simple copies. In addition, ablation experiments exhibit that the model can improve the resolution of generated images with better visibility and clearer edges. In summary, RetiGAN is superior to other retinal image generation models in the aspects of the preservation of structural similarity and high resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Component and process based exergy evaluation was performed on a typical 600MW coal-fired power plant in China. Component based exergy analysis figures out and compares the exergetic performances of each component by identifying the deficiencies of each component. Process based exergy analysis aims at finding out the degree of imperfection of main processes, which will break the limitation of single-component performance optimization (a sensitivity analysis) and enlighten the process-level optimization by innovative flow design and the consideration of the interaction between components. This work provides the exergy consumption and distribution profile of a large-scale coal-fired power plant with component-based and process-based analysis, providing guidance for the energy-saving measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Rhabdomyolysis is a potentially lethal syndrome resulting in leakage of myocyte intracellular contents into the plasma. Some drugs, such as lipid-lowering drugs and antihistamines, can cause rhabdomyolysis. In this work, a dataset containing 186 chemical compounds causing rhabdomyolysis and 117 drugs not causing rhabdomyolysis was collected. The dataset was split into a training set (containing 230 compounds) and a test set (containing 73 compounds). A Kohonen’s self-organizing map (SOM) and a support vector machine (SVM) were applied to develop classification models to differentiate compounds causing and not causing rhabdomyolysis. Using the SOM method, classification accuracies of 93.3% for the training set and 84.5% for the test set were achieved; using the SVM method, classification accuracies of 95.2% for the training set and 84.9% for the test set were achieved. In addition, the extended connectivity fingerprints (ECFP_4) for all the molecules were calculated and analyzed to find the important features of molecules relating to rhabdomyolysis. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract Dodecahedral NaBH 4 -reduced Co 3 O 4 (R-Co 3 O 4) was successfully prepared via a conformal transformation method. Such facile procedure leads to abundance of electrochemically active sites of Co2+ ions. The as-prepared R-Co 3 O 4 affords the material an improved specific capacitance of 329 F/g, which is triply that of the pristine Co 3 O 4. In addition, an enhanced cycling stability is also achieved for the R-Co 3 O 4. Thus, we develop a novel but simple route for large-scale industrial production of electrochemically active materials via NaBH 4 reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of new carbon materials for high-energy-density supercapacitors and efficient filter membranes is still challenging. In this work, a novel biomass carbon material with large specific surface area and high oxygen content was fabricated for high-energy and environmental applications. The as-obtained carbon material exhibited high specific capacitance of 437 F g-1 at 1 A g-1 with superior capacitance retention of 90.9% after 100,000 cycles even at 100 A g-1 in H 2 SO 4 electrolyte when tested in a three-electrode setup. The material also showed elevated specific capacitance in metal ion electrolyte, conducive to expanding its applications in aqueous metal ion supercapacitors. After assembly into a symmetric supercapacitor, the material showed an excellent energy density of 39.33 Wh kg-1 with outstanding capacitance retention of 125% after 100,000 GCD charge/discharge cycles at 20 A g-1. A new membrane was also prepared using the fabricated carbon material for the removal of different pollutants, such as heavy metal ions, antibiotics, and dyes. The tests revealed the new carbon-based membrane to exhibit an ultra-high flux of 1200 L m-2 h-1 bar-1 toward different pollutants with substantial rejection of ciprofloxacin (93.1%). Overall, this work provided a new research paradigm for the multifunctional application and theoretical exploration of novel carbon-based materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Weatherability of soil can be effectively improved by CGN. • The strength of solidified samples slightly increased with the dosage and curing time. • Under the appropriate dosage, color difference of solidified samples can meet principle of "repairing the old as the old". • Carbonation is the dominant reaction of CGN during the curing stage. Earthen site is a kind of preciously historic building constructed with soil as the building material. In northwestern China, the earthen sites are threatened because of environmental hazards, such as wind erosion, water erosion, and so on. Rammed reinforcement of the erosion area can improve the overall stability of the site. In addition, region formed by ramming reinforcement can be defined as ramming area. The formation of the ramming area is a new surface, and new interface between the ramming area and the original site is formed. Therefore, ramming area must meet principle of "repairing the old as the old" and maintain compatibility with the original earthen sites in terms of soil strength, permeability. Calcined ginger nuts is an environment-friendly and inorganic material that is emerging curing agent to reinforce the erosion area of the earthen site, which may make the reinforcement area to meet the above requirements. A series of tests were performed to verify its feasibility and investigate its solidified effects and mechanism. The study demonstrated that, with dosage and curing time increasing, the shear strength and unconfined compressive strength of solidified samples slightly improved and the permeability coefficient decreased with a small extent, the disintegration and shrinkage rate significantly decreased, and the total color difference value of samples increased as the sample became brighter. Furthermore, the mechanism of solidified soil has been studied by performing mercury injection, X-ray diffraction, and scanning electron micrograph tests under 25% dosage, which is proposed as the optimum dosage. The pore size decreased with increase of curing time as calcium carbonate content increased. Crystal type of calcium carbonate is mainly calcite—a material with high strength and cohesiveness. Thus, carbonation is the dominant reaction during the curing stage. Moreover, the crystal morphology of calcite changes from needle-stick calcite to flake. In conclusion, calcined ginger nuts can be used as curing agent for reinforcing the erosion area of earthen sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]