Ultrastable Covalent Triazine Organic Framework Based on Anthracene Moiety as Platform for High-Performance Carbon Dioxide Adsorption and Supercapacitors

Conductive and porous nitrogen-rich materials have great potential as supercapacitor electrode materials. The exceptional efficiency of such compounds, however, is dependent on their larger surface area and the level of nitrogen doping. To address these issues, we synthesized a porous covalent triazine framework (An-CTFs) based on 9,10-dicyanoanthracene (An-CN) units through an ionothermal reaction in the presence of different molar ratios of molten zinc chloride (ZnCl₂) at 400 and 500 °C, yielding An-CTF-10-400, An-CTF-20-400, An-CTF-10-500, and An-CTF-20-500 microporous materials. According to N₂ adsorption–desorption analyses (BET), these An-CTFs produced exceptionally high specific surface areas ranging from 406–751 m²·g⁻¹. Furthermore, An-CTF-10-500 had a capacitance of 589 F·g⁻¹, remarkable cycle stability up to 5000 cycles, up to 95% capacity retention, and strong CO₂ adsorption capacity up to 5.65 mmol·g⁻¹ at 273 K. As a result, our An-CTFs are a good alternative for both electrochemical energy storage and CO₂ uptake.     

Selective Extraction of Scandium by a Long Alkyl Chain Carboxylic Acid/Organophosphonic Ester Binary Extractant

ABSTRACT

The organophosphorus extractant 2-ethylhexylphosphonic acid mono-2-ethylhexyl ester (PC88A) is widely used for solvent extraction of rare earth elements in an acidic leaching solution, but stripping of the loaded metals is difficult because of the high affinity between the metals and the extractant. Adding 100 times the concentration of neodecanoic acid (Versatic 10) to the extractant solution reduces the extraction ability for scandium (Sc) and enables quantitative stripping of the loaded Sc with a mild acidic solution, such as a 1 M mineral acid. The loading capacity is dependent on the PC88A concentration, so PC88A is the main species responsible for Sc extraction in the binary mixture. Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) of the organic phases suggests a potential interaction between the mixed extractants through the change in the hydrogen bonding. This causes an antagonistic effect and facilitates efficient Sc stripping from the extractant solution, so this method could be used for scandium recovery in industry.     

Facile Fabrication of Pt-Doped Mesoporous ZnS as High Efficiency for Photocatalytic CO2 Conversion

Developing high efficiency, environmentally friendly, and low-cost mesoporous Pt/ZnS photocatalyst for CO₂ conversion to CH₃OH is significant for clean energy conversion. Herein, we described a facile synthesis of mesoporous ZnS framework decorated Pt NPs as high efficiency for CO₂ conversion through visible light illumination. The results indicated that Pt/ZnS nanocomposites showed that the structural and crystallinity integrity of polyhedral heterojunction obviously maintain after incorporating Pt NPs, and they are well-distributed on the ZnS surface with particles size about 3–5 nm. The optimized photocatalyst 1.5% Pt/ZnS nanocomposite could prominently exhibit a high photocatalytic efficiency compared to undoped ZnS. Remarkably, the yield of CH₃OH of 400 µmolg^??1 in 9 h over 1.5% Pt/ZnS nanocomposite indicated a significantly promoted CH₃OH formation, nearly 22-fold greater than that of the undoped ZnS NPs, which substantially verified the great promoting potential for conversion of clean energy. The CH₃OH formation rate over mesoporous 1.5% Pt/ZnS nanocomposite (44.5 µmolg^?1 h^?1) is larger 24 times than that of undoped ZnS NPs (1.86 µmolg^?1 h^?1). The recycled Pt/ZnS photocatalyst does not alter the CH₃OH formation remarkably after five repeating cycles with excellent durability. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, photocurrent response, and photoluminescence analyses were investigated to support our results and suggested mechanism for enhancement of CO₂ conversion to CH₃OH.

     

Analyzing Arabic Twitter-Based Patient Experience Sentiments Using Multi-Dialect Arabic Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers

Healthcare organizations rely on patients’ feedback and experiences to evaluate their performance and services, thereby allowing such organizations to improve inadequate services and address any shortcomings. According to the literature, social networks and particularly Twitter are effective platforms for gathering public opinions. Moreover, recent studies have used natural language processing to measure sentiments in text segments collected from Twitter to capture public opinions about various sectors, including healthcare. The present study aimed to analyze Arabic Twitter-based patient experience sentiments and to introduce an Arabic patient experience corpus. The authors collected 12,400 tweets from Arabic patients discussing patient experiences related to healthcare organizations in Saudi Arabia from 1 January 2008 to 29 January 2022. The tweets were labeled according to sentiment (positive or negative) and sector (public or private), and thereby the Hospital Patient Experiences in Saudi Arabia (HoPE-SA) dataset was produced. A simple statistical analysis was conducted to examine differences in patient views of healthcare sectors. The authors trained five models to distinguish sentiments in tweets automatically with the following schemes: a transformer-based model fine-tuned with deep learning architecture and a transformer-based model fine-tuned with simple architecture, using two different transformer-based embeddings based on Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), Multi-dialect Arabic BERT (MARBERT), and multilingual BERT (mBERT), as well as a pre-trained word2vec model with a support vector machine classifier. This is the first study to investigate the use of a bidirectional long short-term memory layer followed by a feedforward neural network for the fine-tuning of MARBERT. The deep-learning fine-tuned MARBERT-based model—the authors’ best-performing model—achieved accuracy, micro-F1, and macro-F1 scores of 98.71%, 98.73%, and 98.63%, respectively.     

Chemical disinfection of Legionella in hot water systems biofilm: a pilot-scale 1 study

Legionella bacteria encounter optimum growing conditions in hot water systems and cooling towers. A pilot-scale 1 unit was built in order to study the biofilm disinfection. It consisted of two identical loops, one used as a control and the other as a 'Test Loop'. A combination of a bio-detergent and a biocide (hydrogen peroxide + peracetic acid) was applied in the Test Loop three times under the same conditions at 100 and 1,000 mg/L with a contact time of 24 and 3-6 hours, respectively. Each treatment test was preceded by a three week period of biofilm re-colonization. Initial concentrations of culturable Legionella into biofilm were close to 10(3) CFU/cm2. Results showed that culturable Legionella spp. in biofilm were no longer detectable three days following each treatment. evertheless, initial Legionella spp. concentrations were recovered 7 days after the treatments (in two cases). Before the tests, Legionella spp. and L. pneumophila PCR counts were both about 10(4) GU/cm2 in biofilm and they both decreased by 1 to 2 log units 72 hours after each treatment. The three tests had a good but transient efficiency on Legionella disinfection in biofilm.     

Efficient triangulation for P2P networked virtual environments

Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures have recently become a popular design choice for building scalable Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs). In P2P-based NVEs, system and data management is distributed among all participating users. Towards this end, a Delaunay Triangulation can be used to provide connectivity between the different NVE users depending on their positions in the virtual world. However, a Delaunay Triangulation clearly suffers from high maintenance cost as it is subject to high connection change rate due to continuous users’ movement. In this paper, we propose a new triangulation algorithm that provides network connectivity to support P2P NVEs while dramatically decreasing maintenance overhead by reducing the number of connection changes due to users’ insertion and movement. Performance evaluations show that our solution drastically reduces overlay maintenance cost in highly dynamic NVEs. More importantly, and beyond its quantitative advantages, this work questions the well accepted Delaunay Triangulation as a reference means for providing connectivity in NVEs, and paves the way for more research towards more practical alternatives for NVE applications.     

PRMT5 Selective Inhibitor Enhances Therapeutic Efficacy of Cisplatin in Lung Cancer Cells

As a therapeutic approach, epigenetic modifiers have the potential to enhance the efficacy of chemotherapeutic agents. Protein arginine methyltransferase 5 (PRMT5), highly expressed in lung adenocarcinoma, was identified to be involved in tumorigenesis. In the current study, we examined the potential antineoplastic activity of PRMT5 inhibitor, arginine methyltransferase inhibitor 1 (AMI-1), and cisplatin on lung adenocarcinoma. Bioinformatic analyses identified apoptosis, DNA damage, and cell cycle progression as the main PRMT5-associated functional pathways, and survival analysis linked the increased PRMT5 gene expression to worse overall survival in lung adenocarcinoma. Combined AMI-1 and cisplatin treatment significantly reduced cell viability and induced apoptosis. Cell cycle arrest in A549 and DMS 53 cells was evident after AMI-1, and was reinforced after combination treatment. Western blot analysis showed a reduction in demethylation histone 4, a PRMT5- downstream target, after treatment with AMI-1 alone or in combination with cisplatin. While the combination approach tackled lung cancer cell survival, it exhibited cytoprotective abilities on HBEpC (normal epithelial cells). The survival of normal bronchial epithelial cells was not affected by using AMI-1. This study highlights evidence of novel selective antitumor activity of AMI-1 in combination with cisplatin in lung adenocarcinoma cells.     

Phytochemical Content,Antioxidant Properties,and Phenolic Profile of Tunisian Raisin Varieties (Vitis Vinifera L.)

Four raisin (Vitis vinifera L.) varieties, Chriha, Razeki, Assli, and Meski, were evaluated for total phenolic content, total o-diphenol content, total flavonoid content, total condensed tannin, total carotenoid content, and total anthocyanin content. Antioxidant potential was assessed by three assays: 2,2-Diphenyl-1-Picrylhydrazyl and 2,2’-azino-bis-3-ethylbenzthiazoline-6-sulphonic acid radical scavenging capacity and ferric reducing power. Individual phenolic profiles were determined by high-performance liquid chromatography. The results revealed that the four raisin varieties had considerable phenolic content and antioxidant activity. Chriha had the highest total phenolic content (534.2 mg/g dry weight) while Meski had high total condensed tannin (208.6 mg CEQ/g dry weight), TAC (137 mg/100 g dry weight), total o-diphenol content (115.8 mg/g dry weight), total flavonoid content (93 mg CEQ/g dry weight), and total carotenoid content (33 mg/100 g dry weight). There were significant differences in phenolic content among the four varieties (p < 0.05). Meski had the highest 2,2-Diphenyl-1-Picrylhydrazyl scavenging capacity, while Chriha had adequate reducing power and 2,2’-azino-bis-3-ethylbenzthiazoline-6-sulphonic acid scavenging capacity. The individual phenolic compounds (2.96–6.54 mg/g dry weight) were variety-dependent.     

Survival of Listeria monocytogenes in experimental chorizos

Chorizos-Mexican-style raw-meat sausages-are a concern in California because their production in small ethnic food markets is unregulated. Their formulation may cause them to appear cooked to the consumer, who may eat the raw sausage without prior proper cooking. Bacterial pathogens in such products may cause illness or even death. Survivability of Listeria monocytogenes in chorizos was evaluated under different storage conditions selected on the basis of an initial survey of uninspected chorizos in California. Sausages were formulated to five different initial water activity (aw) levels (0.85, 0.90, 0.93, 0.95, 0.97), stored under four conditions (refrigeration, "Ref," 6 to 8 degrees C under convective air circulation; room temperature, "RT," 24 to 26 degrees C under convective air circulation; hood, "Hd," 24 to 26 degrees C under forced air circulation; and incubation, "Inc," 30 to 31 degrees C under convective air circulation), and sampled after 1, 2, 4, and 7 days. The initial pH was 4.8 and remained near 5.0 from day 1 of the sampling period. An inoculated-pack study using a five-strain cocktail of L. monocytogenes was performed twice for each initial aw. Results indicated that the three lowest initial aw levels (0.85, 0.90, 0.93) and the Hd and Inc storage conditions were more effective (P < or = 0.05) at reducing L. monocytogenes levels in chorizos than the two highest initial aw levels (0.95 and 0.97) and the Ref storage condition, irrespective of storage time. These results can provide a scientific basis for guidelines given to uninspected chorizo producers in California and reduce the risk of foodborne illness.