Publications by authors named "Lichtfouse E"

Methane (CH) emission from livestock feces, led by ruminants, shows a profound impact on global warming. Despite this, we have almost no information on the syntrophy of the intact microbiome metabolisms, from carbohydrates to the one-carbon units, covering multiple stages of ruminant development. In this study, syntrophic effects of polysaccharide degradation and acetate-producing bacteria, and methanogenic archaea were revealed through metagenome-assembled genomes from water saturated dairy cattle feces.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - To address global warming and its effects on communities, it is essential to cut carbon dioxide emissions and invest in clean energy sources, as fossil fuel use harms the environment and sustainability.
  • - Cobalt oxide hybrids are promising, low-cost, and eco-friendly materials that enhance electrocatalytic performance when combined with various frameworks like metal oxides and carbon nanotubes, but a comprehensive study on their physicochemical and electronic properties is lacking.
  • - This review highlights important aspects of material design, fabrication, and electroactivity for cobalt oxide hybrids, discusses their economic potential for large-scale applications, and offers recommendations for future research to advance sustainable energy technologies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Biochar application is an effective strategy to address Agro-climatic challenges. However, the agro-environmental impacts of different biochar technology models are lacking of systematic summaries and reviews. Therefore, this paper comprehensively reviews recent developments derived from published literature, delving into the economic implications and environmental benefits of three distinct process namely technologies-pyrolysis, gasification, and hydrothermal carbonization.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The structure tuning of bulk graphitic carbon nitride (g-CN) is a critical way to promote the charge carriers dynamics for enhancing photocatalytic H-evolution activity. Exploring feasible post-treatment strategies can lead to effective structure tuning, but it still remains a great challenge. Herein, a supercritical CHOH (ScMeOH) post-treatment strategy (250-300 °C, 8.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Biochar-assisted anaerobic digestion (AD) remains constrained due to the inefficient decomposition of complex organics, even with the direct interspecies electron transfer (DIET) pathway. The coupling of electrochemistry with the anaerobic biological treatment could shorten lengthy retention time in co-digestion by improving electron transfer rates and inducing functional microbial acclimation. Thus, this work investigated the potential of improving the performance of AD by coupling low-magnitude electric fields with biochar derived from the anaerobically digested biogas residue.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

ConspectusThis Account presents a new discipline, single sample molecular chronology (SSMC), which studies the relative age of an individual compound occurring in several temporal pools of a single sample in complex media. Geochemists have analytically observed for a long time that several pools of the same compound, e.g.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Nanomaterials can evade the immune system, altering immunological responses and potentially causing inflammation due to their unique physical and chemical properties.
  • The size, shape, composition, surface charge, and adsorbed molecules on nanomaterials significantly influence how immune cells respond to these materials.
  • The review focuses on the characteristics of engineered nanomaterials, their effects on immune responses, biocompatibility, safety concerns, and future developments in optimizing their application in immunomodulation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Metals are rarely found as free ions and are often linked to organic matter and minerals, making them hard to recycle effectively in a circular economy.
  • Current methods for treating metal-organic complexes in wastewater, like flocculation and adsorption, often fail to fully decompose these complexes and may cause secondary pollution.
  • This review explores the molecular structure and properties of metal-organic complexes, their decomplexation methods using various oxidizing agents, and highlights gaps in existing research, suggesting potential future research avenues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Combustion of fossil fuels, industry and agriculture sectors are considered as the largest emitters of carbon dioxide. In fact, the emission of CO greenhouse gas has been considerably intensified during the last two decades, resulting in global warming and inducing variety of adverse health effects on human and environment. Calling for effective and green feedstocks to remove CO, low-cost materials such as coal ashes "wastes-to-materials", have been considered among the interesting candidates of CO capture technologies.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

H-driven reduction of hexavalent chromium (Cr(VI)) using precious-metal catalysts is promising, but its implementation in water treatment has been restricted by poor H-transfer efficiency and high catalyst loss. We investigated the reduction of Cr(VI) through hydrogenation catalyzed by elemental-palladium nanoparticles (PdNPs) generated in-situ within biofilm of a membrane biofilm reactor (MBfR), creating a Pd-MBfR. Experiments were conducted using a Pd-MBfR and a non-Pd MBfR.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

To guarantee the blue skies for the 2022 Winter Olympics held in Beijing and Zhangjiakou from February 4 to 20, Beijing and its surrounding areas adopted a series of emission control measures. This provides an opportunity to determine the impacts of large-scale temporary control measures on the air quality in Beijing during this special period. Here, we applied the WRF-CMAQ model to quantify the contributions of emission reduction measures and meteorological conditions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Understanding the source of methane (CH) is of great significance for improving the anaerobic fermentation efficiency in bioengineering, and for mitigating the emission potential of natural ecosystems. Microbes involved in the process named direct interspecies electron transfer coupling with CO reduction, i.e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The presence of antibiotics in water is a growing concern for public health and ecosystems, and traditional treatments to break them down often fail due to natural organic matter (NOM) complicating the process.
  • - This study found that specific types of NOM actually improved the removal of antibiotics like trimethoprim and sulfamethoxazole when using ferrate(VI) under mild alkaline conditions.
  • - The mechanics involve NOM generating radicals that interact quickly with ferrate(VI), enhancing the breakdown of antibiotics, with similar positive effects observed for humic and fulvic acids from both lake and river waters.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Global waste production is anticipated reach to 2.59 billion tons in 2030, thus accentuating issues of environmental pollution and health security. 37 % of waste is landfilled, 33 % is discharged or burned in open areas, and only 13.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Heterostructured nanomaterials, particularly nickel sulfides, show great promise for environmental applications like water purification and pollutant monitoring due to their desirable properties such as stability and cost-effectiveness.
  • The review focuses on the advancement of nickel sulfide-based photocatalysts, detailing their synthesis, structural properties, and modifications that enhance their effectiveness in degrading organic contaminants in water.
  • The findings suggest that these nickel sulfide photocatalysts can achieve degradation efficiencies comparable to more expensive noble-metal options, and the review also discusses future possibilities for their use in sustainable environmental remediation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Food waste (FW) is a severe environmental and social concern that today's civilization is facing. Therefore, it is necessary to have an efficient and sustainable solution for managing FW bioprocessing. Emerging technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) are critical to achieving this, in which IoT sensors' data is analyzed using AI and ML techniques, enabling real-time decision-making and process optimization.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Microalgae have great potential in producing energy-dense and valuable products via thermochemical processes. Therefore, producing alternative bio-oil to fossil fuel from microalgae has rapidly gained popularity due to its environmentally friendly process and elevated productivity. This current work aims to review comprehensively the microalgae bio-oil production using pyrolysis and hydrothermal liquefaction.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Transmission of the coronavirus disease 2019 is still ongoing despite mass vaccination, lockdowns, and other drastic measures to control the pandemic. This is due partly to our lack of understanding on the multiphase flow mechanics that control droplet transport and viral transmission dynamics. Various models of droplet evaporation have been reported, yet there is still limited knowledge about the influence of physicochemical parameters on the transport of respiratory droplets carrying the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Unlabelled: Policies and measures to control pandemics are often failing. While biological factors controlling transmission are usually well explored, little is known about the environmental drivers of transmission and infection. For instance, respiratory droplets and aerosol particles are crucial vectors for the airborne transmission of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, the causation agent of the coronavirus 2019 pandemic (COVID-19).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Sulfamethoxazole (SMX) is one of veterinary drugs and food additives, which has been frequently detected in surface waters in recent years and will cause damage to organisms. Therefore, SMX was selected as a target to be investigated, including the degradation kinetics, evolution of toxicity, and antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) of SMX during chlorination in batch reactors and water distribution systems (WDS), to determine the optimal factors for removing SMX. In the range of investigated pH (6.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Nitrogen pollution and the rising amount of wastewater generation are calling for advanced wastewater treatments, which is particularly necessary for carbon-deficient wastewater that contains multi-species inorganic nitrogen, since conventional heterotrophic denitrification processes cannot remove nitrogen completely when carbon sources are insufficient. For that, bioelectrochemical systems (BES) have been recently developed because they can simultaneously produce electricity and remove resistant nitrogen from the carbon-deficient wastewater. However, the simultaneous removal of multi-species inorganic nitrogen cannot be achieved by electroautotrophic denitrification using BES alone.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Forward osmosis is a water separation process that uses the natural energy of osmotic pressure to separate water from dissolved solutes through a semipermeable membrane. One of the major challenges using this process is the rejection water which contains high content of pollutants, hindering its practical application. Herein, for the first time, this work introduces a coupled electrochemical-physical process including iron-electrocoagulation/filtration/sedimentation as a cost-effective treatment to the forward osmosis reject water containing hexavalent chromium to be reclaimed.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Anaerobic digestion (AD) is a viable and cost-effective method for converting organic waste into usable renewable energy. The efficiency of organic waste digestion, nonetheless, is limited due to inhibition and instability. Accordingly, biochar is an effective method for improving the efficiency of AD by adsorbing inhibitors, promoting biogas generation and methane concentration, maintaining process stability, colonizing microorganisms selectively, and mitigating the inhibition of volatile fatty acids and ammonia.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Global pollution is calling for advanced methods to remove contaminants from water and wastewater, such as TiO-assisted photocatalysis.  The environmental applications of titanium dioxide have started after the initial TiO application for water splitting by Fujishima and Honda in 1972. TiO is now used for self-cleaning surfaces, air and water purification systems, microbial inactivation and selective organic conversion.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF