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Schematic shows the preparation of pure active water.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-oag-10.1177_00307270231173137 for Use of “demonstration farm” videos to affect attitude change toward animal welfare on beef, egg, and fish farms in China by Yifei Yang, Tianxu Liu, Danielle Nilsson, Kate Hartcher, Hao-Yu Shih, Zhong-Hong Wu, Zhong-Ying Liu, Michelle Sinclair, Xochitl Samayoa, Kate Henning and Kris Descovich in Outlook on Agriculture

Bulk water is generally considered to be an inert solvent because of its tetrahedral hydrogen-bonded structure. Recently, unusual properties of confined water in nanosized environments have aroused...

Liquid water, as the most environmentally friendly polar solvent, is popularly used in physical processes and chemical reactions. Its unique properties and activities come from the presence of intermolecular hydrogen bonds (HBs) with itself and other species. Scientists have been discussing properties other than known bulk water for a long time. However, the particular application of water being researched is limited today. Mass-produced active and stable plasmon-activated water (PAW) with a reduced HB network based on hot electron transfer (HET) from resonantly illuminated gold (Au) nanoparticles (NPs) was first created in 2014. In this work, we report its distinct intermolecular HBs with water-soluble alcohols and the solubility of hydrophobic solutes. Interestingly, the densities of PAW in methanol, ethanol, and propanol at various ratios all increased due to stronger HBs between PAW and the alcohols, particularly seen with propanol, compared to deionized water (DIW)-based systems. Moreover, these results reflect the decreased evaporation rates of PAW/alcohol solutions, especially observed for the solution with the maximum increased density, compared to DIW-based systems. Compared to DIW, the solubilities of hydrophobic antioxidants of curcumin and melatonin in PAW increased by ca. 240% and 120%, respectively. Moreover, sunflower oil was more soluble in the more-lipophilic PAW compared to conventional DIW. The distinct increased density of the alcohol/PAW solution lasted for at least 1 week. Innovative PAW has emerged as a promising green active solvent applicable for both hydrophilic and hydrophobic solutions.

Water is the most environmentally friendly solvent, but bulk water is conventionally considered to be a bystander in reactions performed in it. For decades, scientists have been discussing the characteristics of water that differ from bulk water in special environments. Recently, various small amounts of treated water were developed to create specific applications. In 2014, comprehensively active and stable plasmon-activated water (PAW), which was mass-produced and innovatively created by utilizing hot electron transfer (HET) from gold nanoparticles (AuNPs), was first reported. In this work, we report the maintenance of activity of purified Au-free PAW collected from water condensed from PAW vapor (PAW-V). Interestingly, the metastable PAW-V was still active with a structure of electron-doping and reduced hydrogen bonding (HB), which were confirmed by zeta potentials and the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) relaxation time (T1). Like PAW, PAW-V enhanced hydrogen evolution reactions (HERs) and oxygen evolution reactions (OERs), compared to deionized water (DIW). The PAW-V itself exhibited the ability to more rapidly evaporate due to reduced HBs between homogeneous molecules, while a PAW/isopropanol solution evaporated more slowly due to enhanced HBs between heterogeneous molecules. Also, PAW-V could scavenge free 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radicals and reduce the strong KMnO4 oxidant. The unique properties of PAW-V were maintained after storage for 3 days at room temperature in the dark. The condensed Au-free PAW has emerged as a promising green active solvent applicable in various fields of physics, chemistry and biomedicine.

High surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) enhancement is generally accompanied by low signal reproducibility. Thus, various complicated technologies focusing on SERS-active substrates were developed to overcome these limitations. On the other hand, innovatively treated plasmon-activated water (PAW) with properties distinct from those of untreated bulk water was previously reported. Herein, we propose an alternative promising strategy to obtain overall improved SERS performances of analyte solutions prepared using PAW instead of conventional deionized water (DIW). Interestingly, SERS signals were higher, but the corresponding relative standard deviations were lower for the model molecules of rhodamine 6G and methyl blue, with different concentrations prepared in PAW compared to those prepared in DIW. Moreover, these overall improved SERS performances were observed when detecting the pesticides acetamiprid (AC) and imidacloprid (IM) prepared in PAW, compared to those prepared in DIW. Experimental results indicated that the limit of detection (LOD) was 5 ppb (100 ppb based on DIW) for AC prepared using PAW. Moreover, the LOD was 10 ppb for IM prepared using PAW. These extremely low values of LOD detected for AC and IM were comparable to and even better than other SERS detection methods based on solutions prepared using organic solvents or organic solvent/water systems. Moreover, using PAW to dissolve analyte provides an innovative method in SERS studies.

The study systematically investigates a catalyst-free method of producing H 2 by mixing low-grade Mg scraps (LGMS) in aqueous organic acids. A concave downward relationship exists between the hydrogen yield and the citric acid concentration in seawater. The H 2 yield was highest when the seawater contained 30 wt% citric acid. Activation energy for the H 2 generation in citric acid-added seawater was calculated. H + mobility and H + concentration in citric acid aqueous affect the total H 2 yield, causing that the highest yield occurred at some intermediate citric acid concentration. A concave downward relationship existed between the H 2 yield and NaCl concentration in citric acid solution. NaCl concentration had strong effect on H 2 yield in citric acid solution but did not have the effect on the H 2 yield in acetic acid solution. The H 2 generation rate from the Mg scraps in 15 wt% acetic acid solution evidently exceeded that in 15 wt% citric acid solution although the two solutions each had approximately equal moles of dissociable hydrogen atoms.

This work employed a mixture of low-grade Mg scraps (LGMS) and citric acid-added seawater to generate hydrogen gas. Metal catalyst was not required for accelerating the reaction of H2 generation in the Mg scraps/citric acid solution. LGMS in 20 wt% citric acid-added seawater could produce substantially higher H2 volume than the LGMS in 5 wt% citric acid-added seawater. Purity of the generated H2 was about 99% (after dehumidification). By filling H2-production reactor every 30 min with fresh seawater to which citric acid has been added, ∼70 l of hydrogen could be produced in 100 min.

This paper presents an automatic traffic surveillance system to estimate important traffic parameters from video sequences using only one camera. Different from traditional methods that can classify vehicles to only cars and noncars, the proposed method has a good ability to categorize vehicles into more specific classes by introducing a new "linearity" feature in vehicle representation. In addition, the proposed system can well tackle the problem of vehicle occlusions caused by shadows, which often lead to the failure of further vehicle counting and classification. This problem is solved by a novel line-based shadow algorithm that uses a set of lines to eliminate all unwanted shadows. The used lines are devised from the information of lane-dividing lines. Therefore, an automatic scheme to detect lane-dividing lines is also proposed. The found lane-dividing lines can also provide important information for feature normalization, which can make the vehicle size more invariant, and thus much enhance the accuracy of vehicle classification. Once all features are extracted, an optimal classifier is then designed to robustly categorize vehicles into different classes. When recognizing a vehicle, the designed classifier can collect different evidences from its trajectories and the database to make an optimal decision for vehicle classification. Since more evidences are used, more robustness of classification can be achieved. Experimental results show that the proposed method is more robust, accurate, and powerful than other traditional methods, which utilize only the vehicle size and a single frame for vehicle classification.

This paper presents a morphology-based method for detecting license plates from cluttered images. The proposed system consists of three major components. At the first, a morphology-based method is proposed to extract important contrast features as guides to search the desired license plates. The contrast feature is robust to lighting changes and invariant to several transformations like scaling, translation, and skewing. Then, a recovery algorithm is applied for reconstructing a license plate if the plate is fragmented into several parts. The last step is to do license plate verification. The morphology based method can significantly reduce the number of candidates extracted from the cluttered images and thus speeds up the subsequent plate recognition. Under the experimental database, 128 examples got from 130 images were successfully detected. The average accuracy of license plate detection is 98%. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves the state-of-the-art work in terms of effectiveness and robustness of license plate detection.

This paper presents an automatic traffic surveillance system to estimate important traffic parameters from video sequences using only one camera. Different from traditional methods which classify vehicles into only cars and non-cars, the proposed method has a good capability to categorize cars into more specific classes with a new "linearity" feature. In addition, in order to reduce occlusions of vehicles, an automatic scheme of detecting lane dividing lines is proposed. With the found lane dividing lines, not only occlusions of vehicles can be reduced but also a normalization scheme can be developed for tackling the problems of feature size variations. Once all vehicle features are extracted, an optimal classifier is then designed to robustly categorize vehicles into different classes even though shadows, occlusions, and other noise exist. The designed classifier can collect different evidences from the database and the verified vehicle itself to make better decisions and thus much enhance the robustness and accuracy of classification. Experimental results show that the proposed method is much robust and powerful than other traditional methods.

This paper presents a morphology-based method for ex- tracting license plates from cluttered images. The proposed system consists of three major components. First, a morphology-based method is proposed for extracting important contrast features as guides to search for desired license plates. The contrast feature is robust to lighting changes and invariant to different transformations like image scaling, translation, and skewing. Then, a recovery algo- rithm is applied to reconstruct a license plate if it is fragmented into pieces. The last stage of this method is to do license plate verifica- tion. The criterion for verification is based on the number of charac- ters appearing in the plate that can be extracted from a clustering algorithm. The morphology-based method can significantly reduce the number of possible characters extracted and thus speeds up subsequent plate recognition. Since the feature extracted is robust to different image changes, the proposed method works well in ex- tracting differently illuminated and oriented license plates. The aver- age accuracy of detection is 98%. Due to the simplicity of the pro- posed method, all the license plates can be extracted very fast (in less than 0.5 s). The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the state-of-the-art work in terms of effectiveness and robustness for license plate detection. © 2002 SPIE and IS&T.