Bacterial community structure of water, sediment and microplastics in Poyang Lake wetland.

As a new type of pollutant, microplastics accumulate continuously in the environment. The environmental problems caused by microplastics have attracted wide attention. In this study, we collected water, sediment and four types of microplastics (film, foam, fiber and fragment) from wetland in East Lake area of Poyang Lake.

Information theoretic perspective on coastal water-quality monitoring and management near an offshore industrial park.

A semi-continuous water-quality monitoring system was installed in Yunlin Offshore Industrial Park (YOIP), the largest industrial park in Taiwan, in 2007 to provide real-time water-quality information such as pH, water depth, dissolved oxygen, temperature, turbidity, conductivity, and chlorophyll. To interpret the large quantities of high-frequency data generated by this system, information theory was applied for data analysis and extraction of useful information for further coastal water-quality management. Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics that involves the quantification of information.

A new sol-gel process for producing Na(2)O-containing bioactive glass ceramics.

The sol-gel process of producing SiO(2)-CaO bioactive glasses is well established, but problems remain with the poor mechanical properties of the amorphous form and the bioinertness of its crystalline counterpart. These properties may be improved by incorporating Na(2)O into bioactive glasses, which can result in the formation of a hard yet biodegradable crystalline phase from bioactive glasses when sintered. However, production of Na(2)O-containing bioactive glasses by sol-gel methods has proved to be difficult.