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The effect of microwave pre-treatment on the magnetic properties of tennantite and enargite was investigated. Magnetic susceptibility, XRD, and XPS characterization of tennantite and enargite before and after treatment were conducted to explore the changes in their magnetic properties. Moreover, magnetic separation of chalcopyrite binary mixtures with enargite and tennantite was performed. The results showed insignificant effects on the magnetic susceptibility of the two minerals after microwave pre-treatment. Magnetic separation results showed arsenic rejection by 84.2%, and 76.3% in the case of enargite and tennantite binary mixtures with chalcopyrite; respectively.

To provide an updated overview of the existing and emerging non-invasive diagnostic methods to assess portal hypertension. Data on liver stiffness measurement confirmed that it is a mainstay for assessing the risk of clinically significant portal hypertension in patients with advanced chronic liver disease of any etiology. The Baveno criteria for identifying patients who can safely spare endoscopy have been validated in NASH and cholestatic liver disease. New expanded criteria and other simple non-invasive algorithms including MELD score or spleen stiffness have been proposed and can lead to a higher proportion of endoscopies without significantly increasing the risk of missing large esophageal varices. MR and CT improve the anatomical imaging of gastroesophageal varices and abdominal collaterals and dynamic imaging based on MR and able to quantify hepatic blood flow are in development. Contrast-enhanced ultrasound and methacetin breath test are emerging promising methods to estimate the HVPG non-invasively. Several different non-invasive methods are now available and can be used in clinical practice to achieve a successful identification of patients with clinically significant portal hypertension in chronic liver disease. However, an exact estimation of HVPG is not available yet, and changes in portal pressure cannot yet be detected by non-invasive methods.

Limited water resources and climate change in arid and semi-arid regions have negative impacts on food and water security. Management of irrigation and compost may be used to tackle this issue. Crop models are the powerful tools that could predict grain yield (GY) and water productivity (WP) under a broad range of irrigation, compost and temperature interactions. In addition, modeling irrigation management requires the selection of the most suitable evapotranspiration (ET) approach to achieve robust simulations. To achieve this goal, two crop models in Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) (i.e. CERES-Wheat and N-Wheat), were calibrated and evaluated using a field dataset of three growing seasons in a high-temperate region in Egypt (Luxor). Then, the models were applied to explore GY and WP across a wide range of irrigation (11 options) and compost (8 rates) interactions using two ET routines such as Priestley-Taylor (PT) and FAO 56 Penman-Monteith (PM). The models were also used to predict (GY) and (WP) within the same range of irrigation and compost interactions at higher temperatures (i.e. +1,2,3 and 4) compared to the baseline outputs (1981–2010). Simulation results showed that, deficit irrigation up to 80% and 85% from soil available water achieved the highest values of GY (7.5 t ha-1) and WP (18.4 kg ha-1 mm-1) respectively, provided that using higher rate of compost (12 t ha-1). Rising temperature up to 4 °C decreased GY and WP by 17.2% and 7.4% respectively relative to the baseline without any benefits from compost. Compost technology does not help offset the negative impacts of temperature, but increased yield reduction and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Higher compost rates may be used to mitigate the effect of deficit irrigation on wheat yield and water productivity, but not compatible with mitigation of climate change in arid and semi-arid regions.