Garlic Peel-Based Biochar Prepared under Weak Carbonation Conditions for Efficient Removal of Methylene Blue from Wastewater.

Background: Due to it containing cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin with abundant specific functional groups which could interact with organic dyes, garlic peel (GP) might be used as an efficient biosorbent. The aim of this study is to evaluate the adsorption performances of GP-based bio-adsorbents and obtain optimum preparation conditions.

Methods: GP-based bio-adsorbents were prepared by thermal pyrolysis under different temperatures (150-400 °C).

Cobalt vanadate intertwined in carboxylated multiple-walled carbon nanotubes for simultaneous electrochemical detection of ascorbic acid, dopamine and uric acid.

Low-cost transition metal vanadate-based electrochemical sensors have attracted a lot of attention recently. A cobalt vanadate and carboxylated multi-walled carbon nanotube composite (CoV/MWCNTs-COOH) was prepared by an ultrasonic-assisted assembly method. The uniform and dense MWCNTs-COOH attached to the surface of CoV not only combines the large surface area and superior conductivity of MWCNTs-COOH with the excellent electrochemical activity of CoV, but also enhances the redox reaction between CoV/MWCNTs-COOH composite and the analyte through synergistic effect of hydrogen bonding and electrostatic interaction.

Facile hydrothermal assembly of three-dimensional GO-MTZE composite and its adsorption properties toward Cu.

Three-dimensional (3D) graphene oxide (GO)-based aerogels, GO and 4-methyl-5-thiazoleethanol (MTZE) composites, were prepared by a facile hydrothermal method. Due to the hydrogen bonding and π-π stacking interactions, the produced 3D GO-MTZE composites possessed large cylindrical structures. The morphologies, composition, and chemical states of 3D GO-MTZE composite were characterized by Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), and N adsorption-desorption isotherms based on the Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) method.

Learning to Holistically Detect Bridges From Large-Size VHR Remote Sensing Imagery.

Bridge detection in remote sensing images (RSIs) plays a crucial role in various applications, but it poses unique challenges compared to the detection of other objects. In RSIs, bridges exhibit considerable variations in terms of their spatial scales and aspect ratios. Therefore, to ensure the visibility and integrity of bridges, it is essential to perform holistic bridge detection in large-size very-high-resolution (VHR) RSIs.

Ingenious fabrication of bamboo leaf-like ferric vanadate intertwined multi-walled carbon nanotubes nanocomposite as a sensitive sensor for determination of uric acid in fetal bovine serum.

A novel nanocomposite material, ferric vanadate intertwined multi-walled carbon nanotubes (FeV/MWCNTs), has been designed which was drop-coated onto a glassy carbon electrode (GCE). The constructed sensor was used for the sensitive determination of uric acid (UA) in fetal bovine serum (FBS) and human serum (HS). A series of characterization and electrochemical tests showed that the ultrasound-assisted assembly of FeV with MWCNTs not only overcame the disadvantages of low conductivity and easy (unwanted) aggregation, but also avoided the decrease in effective surface area due to the severe aggregation of each individual raw material.

Efficient and Selective Removal of Organic Cationic Dyes by Peel of Brassica juncea Coss. var. gemmifera Lee et Lin-Based Biochar.

The design and preparation of cheaper, greener and more efficient adsorbents is essential for the removal of pollutants by adsorption. In this study, biochar was prepared from peel of Brassica juncea var. gemmifera Lee et Lin (PoBJ) using a facile, low-temperature and vacuum pyrolysis, and the adsorption mechanism toward organic dyes in aqueous solution was elucidated.

Bayesian Collaborative Learning for Whole-Slide Image Classification.

Whole-slide image (WSI) classification is fundamental to computational pathology, which is challenging in extra-high resolution, expensive manual annotation, data heterogeneity, etc. Multiple instance learning (MIL) provides a promising way towards WSI classification, which nevertheless suffers from the memory bottleneck issue inherently, due to the gigapixel high resolution. To avoid this issue, the overwhelming majority of existing approaches have to decouple the feature encoder and the MIL aggregator in MIL networks, which may largely degrade the performance.

Prototypical multiple instance learning for predicting lymph node metastasis of breast cancer from whole-slide pathological images.

Computerized identification of lymph node metastasis of breast cancer (BCLNM) from whole-slide pathological images (WSIs) can largely benefit therapy decision and prognosis analysis. Besides the general challenges of computational pathology, like extra-high resolution, very expensive fine-grained annotation, etc., two particular difficulties with this task lie in (1) modeling the significant inter-tumoral heterogeneity in BCLNM pathological images, and (2) identifying micro-metastases, i.

Removal of Chromium Species by Adsorption: Fundamental Principles, Newly Developed Adsorbents and Future Perspectives.

Emerging chromium (Cr) species have attracted increasing concern. A majority of Cr species, especially hexavalent chromium (Cr(VI)), could lead to lethal effects on human beings, animals, and aquatic lives even at low concentrations. One of the conventional water-treatment methodologies, adsorption, could remove these toxic Cr species efficiently.

A Novel Low-Cost Bio-Sorbent Prepared from Crisp Persimmon Peel by Low-Temperature Pyrolysis for Adsorption of Organic Dyes.

In order to properly reuse food waste and remove various contaminants from wastewater, the development of green, sustainable and clean technologies has demonstrated potential in the efficient inhibition of secondary pollution to the environment. In this study, an economical and green method was used to prepare biochar from crisp persimmon peel (CPP) using flash-vacuum pyrolysis at different temperatures (200-700 °C; referred to as CPP200-CPP700). CPP200 has high polarity, low aromaticity and high oxygen-containing functional groups that exhibit superior MB adsorption capabilities.

Novel Silver-Plated Nickel-Coated Graphite Powder with Excellent Heat and Humidity Resistance: Facile Preparation and Performance Investigation.

Nickel-coated graphite (Ni/C) powder has many applications in diverse areas such as paint, print ink, adhesive, conductive rubber, and so on. To increase its stability in harsh environmental conditions, the electroless plating of silver film on Ni/C via ascorbic acid was studied. A silver layer with a thickness of 2.

Triallyl Isocyanurate as an Efficient Electrolyte Additive for Layered Oxide Cathode Material-Based Lithium-Ion Batteries with Improved Stability under High-Voltage.

In this study, a new electrolyte additive 1,3,5-tri-2-propenyl-1,3,5-triazine-2,4,6-(1H, 3H, 5H)-trione (TAIC) for lithium-ion batteries is reported. The additive is introduced as a novel electrolyte additive to enhance electrochemical performances of layered lithium nickel cobalt manganese oxide (NCM) and lithium cobalt oxide (LiCoO) cathodes, especially under a higher working voltage. Encouragingly, we found protective films would be formed on the cathode surface by the electrochemical oxidation, and the stability of the cathode material-electrolyte interface was greatly promoted.

Novel lanthanum vanadate-based nanocomposite for simultaneously electrochemical detection of dopamine and uric acid in fetal bovine serum.

The abnormal levels of two biological molecules, dopamine (DA) and Uric acid (UA), in human body are symptoms of diseases such as Parkinson's disease and arrhythmia. A novel lanthanum vanadate and multi-walled carbon nanotubes (LaV-MWCNTs) composite modified glassy carbon electrode (GCE) was developed and utilized as an efficient electrochemical sensor for the simultaneous detection of DA and UA. LaV-MWCNTs composite was successfully fabricated by a facile ultrasonic self-assembly method and identified by means of a series of successive measurements including XPS, XRD, FT-IR and FE-SEM.

A Critical Review on Black Phosphorus-Based Photocatalytic CO Reduction Application.

Energy shortages and greenhouse effects are two unavoidable problems that need to be solved. Photocatalytically converting CO into a series of valuable chemicals is considered to be an effective means of solving the above dilemmas. Among these photocatalysts, the utilization of black phosphorus for CO photocatalytic reduction deserves a lightspot not only for its excellent catalytic activity through different reaction routes, but also on account of the great preponderance of this relatively cheap catalyst.

Rational assembly of GO-based heterocyclic sulfur- and nitrogen-containing aerogels and their adsorption properties toward rare earth elementals.

An aromatic heterocyclic compound, 2-aminobenzothiazole (ABT), was used to decorate graphene oxide (GO) by a facile hydrothermal self-assembly procedure. The developed three-dimensional (3D) GO-ABT composite aerogels could be utilized as high-powered and sustainable adsorbents for the enrichment and recovery of low concentration rare earth elements (REEs) from aqueous solutions. The composition and microstructure of GO-ABT composites were explored various characterization methods.

WS-RCNN: Learning to Score Proposals for Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation.

Weakly supervised instance segmentation (WSIS) provides a promising way to address instance segmentation in the absence of sufficient labeled data for training. Previous attempts on WSIS usually follow a proposal-based paradigm, critical to which is the proposal scoring strategy. These works mostly rely on certain heuristic strategies for proposal scoring, which largely hampers the sustainable advances concerning WSIS.

Learning Invariant Patterns Based on a Convolutional Neural Network and Big Electroencephalography Data for Subject-Independent P300 Brain-Computer Interfaces.

A brain-computer interface (BCI) measures and analyzes brain activity and converts this activity into computer commands to control external devices. In contrast to traditional BCIs that require a subject-specific calibration process before being operated, a subject-independent BCI learns a subject-independent model and eliminates subject-specific calibration for new users. However, building subject-independent BCIs remains difficult because electroencephalography (EEG) is highly noisy and varies by subject.

Improving the Stability of High-Voltage Lithium Cobalt Oxide with a Multifunctional Electrolyte Additive: Interfacial Analyses.

In recent years, various attempts have been made to meet the increasing demand for high energy density of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). The increase in voltage can improve the capacity and the voltage platform performance of the electrode materials. However, as the charging voltage increases, the stabilization of the interface between the cathode material and the electrolyte will decrease, causing side reactions on both sides during the charge-discharge cycling, which seriously affects the high-temperature storage and the cycle performance of LIBs.

Investigating the use of a two-stage attention-aware convolutional neural network for the automated diagnosis of otitis media from tympanic membrane images: a prediction model development and validation study.

Objectives: This study investigated the usefulness and performance of a two-stage attention-aware convolutional neural network (CNN) for the automated diagnosis of otitis media from tympanic membrane (TM) images.

Design: A classification model development and validation study in ears with otitis media based on otoscopic TM images. Two commonly used CNNs were trained and evaluated on the dataset.

Immobilization of 6-O-α-maltosyl-β-cyclodextrin on the surface of black phosphorus nanosheets for selective chiral recognition of tyrosine enantiomers.

A novel chiral sensing platform, 6-O-α-maltosyl-β-cyclodextrin (Mal-βCD)-based film, is proposed for selective electrochemical recognition of tyrosine (Tyr) enantiomers. Black phosphorus nanosheets (BP NSs) and Mal-βCD modified glassy carbon electrode (Mal-βCD/BP NSs/GCE) were prepared by a layer-to-layer drop-casting method, and the platform was easy to fabricate and facile to operate. It is proposed that the amino and hydroxyl groups of the Tyr enantiomers and the chiral hydroxyl groups of Mal-βCD selectively form intermolecular hydrogen bonds to dominate effective chiral recognition.

Hybrid carbon nanotubes modified glassy carbon electrode for selective, sensitive and simultaneous detection of dopamine and uric acid.

Based on a hybrid carbon nanotube composite, a novel electrochemical sensor with high sensitivity and selectivity was designed for the simultaneous determination of dopamine (DA) and uric acid (UA). The hybrid carbon nanotube composite was prepared by ultrasonic assembly of carboxylated multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT-COOH) and hydroxylated single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT-OH). And the hybrid (MWCNT-COOH/SWCNT-OH) composite was characterized by field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) and Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy.

Highly sensitive and selective determination of p-nitrophenol at an interpenetrating networks structure of self-assembled rod-like lanthanum hydroxide-oxidized multi-walled carbon nanotubes nanocomposite.

In this study, a novel electrochemical sensor based on self-assembled rod-like lanthanum hydroxide-oxidized multi-walled carbon nanotubes (La(OH)-OxMWCNTs) nanocomposite was developed for sensitive determination of p-nitrophenol (p-NP). The La(OH)-OxMWCNTs nanocomposite with an interpenetrating networks structure was characterized by field emission electron microscope (FE-SEM), Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, Raman spectra and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). The cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measurements were performed to study the electrochemical behaviors of La(OH)-OxMWCNTs modified glassy carbon electrode (La(OH)-OxMWCNTs/GCE).

Nafion-stabilized black phosphorus nanosheets-maltosyl-β-cyclodextrin as a chiral sensor for tryptophan enantiomers.

In this work, we have fabricated nafion (NF) stabilized black phosphorus nanosheets (BPNSs) and 6-O-α-maltosyl-β-cyclodextrin (G2-β-CD) composite (BPNSs-G2-β-CD) as novel electrochemical sensoring platform for chiral recognition of tryptophan (Trp) enantiomers. BPNSs-G2-β-CD composite modified glassy carbon electrode (BPNSs-G2-β-CD/GCE) was further coated with NF which served as a protective film to immobilize BPNSs-G2-β-CD on the electrode surface to achieve high stability. Under the optimum conditions, the oxidation peak current ratio of L-Trp to D-Trp (I/I) and the difference between the peak potential (ΔEp = E - E) were observed to be 1.

PtNPs-GNPs-MWCNTs-β-CD nanocomposite modified glassy carbon electrode for sensitive electrochemical detection of folic acid.

A novel electrochemical sensor, platinum nanoparticles/graphene nanoplatelets/multi-walled carbon nanotubes/β-cyclodextrin composite (PtNPs-GNPs-MWCNTs-β-CD) modified carbon glass electrode (GCE), was fabricated and used for the sensitive detection of folic acid (FA). The PtNPs-GNPs-MWCNTs-β-CD nanocomposite was easily prepared with an ultrasound-assisted assembly method, and it was characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The electrochemical behavior of FA at PtNPs-GNPs-MWCNTs-β-CD/GCE was investigated in detail.