Heat-Localized and Salt-Resistant 3D Hierarchical Porous Ceramic Platform for Efficient Solar-Driven Interfacial Evaporation

Solar-driven interfacial evaporation (SDIE) is a highly promising approach to achieve sustainable desalination and tackle the global freshwater crisis. Despite advancements in this field, achieving balanced thermal localization and salt resistance remains a challenge. Herein, the study presents a 3D hierarchical porous ceramic platform for SDIE applications. The utilized alumina foam ceramics (AFCs) exhibit remarkable corrosion resistance and chemical stability, ensuring a prolonged operational lifespan in seawater or brines. The millimeter-scale air-filled pores in AFCs prevent thermal losses through conduction with bulk water, resulting in heat-localized interfaces. The hydrophilic nature of macroporous AFC skeletons facilitates rapid water replenishment on the evaporating surface for effective salt-resistant desalination. Benefiting from its self-radiation adsorption and side-assisted evaporation capabilities, the AFC-based evaporators exhibit high indoor evaporation rates of 2.99 and 3.54 kg m-2 h-1 under one-sided and three-sided illumination under 1.0 sun, respectively. The AFC-based evaporator maintains a high evaporation rate of ≈2.77 kg m-2 h-1 throughout the 21-day long-term test. Furthermore, it achieves a daily water productivity of ≈10.44 kg m-2 in outdoor operations. This work demonstrates the potential of 3D hierarchical porous ceramics in addressing the trade-off between heat localization and salt resistance, and contributes to the development of durable solar steam generators.

Dendrobium Nobile Polysaccharides Attenuates Ferroptosis and Improves Cognitive Function in Vascular Dementia Rats

INTRODUCTION

To investigate the neuroprotective effect and mechanism of Dendrobium nobile polysaccharide (DNP) on vascular dementia (VD) rats.

METHODS

VD model rats were prepared by permanent ligation of bilateral common carotid arteries. Cognitive function was tested by morris water maze test, mitochondrial morphology and ultrastructure of hippocampal synapses were tested by transmission electron microscopy, GSH, xCT, GPx4, and PSD-95 expressions were tested by western blot and PCR.

RESULTS

The number of platform crossing was significantly increased, and the escape latency was significantly shorter in DNP group. The expressions of GSH, xCT and GPx4 in the hippocampus were up-regulated in DNP group. Moreover, the synapses of DNP group were relatively intact and synaptic vesicles increased, the length of synaptic active zone and PSD thickness were significantly increased, and PSD-95 protein expression was significantly up-regulated compared VD group.

CONCLUSION

DNP may take a neuroprotective effect by inhibiting ferroptosis in VD.

A Lightweight YOLOv4-Based Forestry Pest Detection Method Using Coordinate Attention and Feature Fusion

Traditional pest detection methods are challenging to use in complex forestry environments due to their low accuracy and speed. To address this issue, this paper proposes the YOLOv4_MF model. The YOLOv4_MF model utilizes MobileNetv2 as the feature extraction block and replaces the traditional convolution with depth-wise separated convolution to reduce the model parameters. In addition, the coordinate attention mechanism was embedded in MobileNetv2 to enhance feature information. A symmetric structure consisting of a three-layer spatial pyramid pool is presented, and an improved feature fusion structure was designed to fuse the target information. For the loss function, focal loss was used instead of cross-entropy loss to enhance the network's learning of small targets. The experimental results showed that the YOLOv4_MF model has 4.24% higher mAP, 4.37% higher precision, and 6.68% higher recall than the YOLOv4 model. The size of the proposed model was reduced to 1/6 of that of YOLOv4. Moreover, the proposed algorithm achieved 38.62% mAP with respect to some state-of-the-art algorithms on the COCO dataset.

Isolation and characterization of two phosphate-solubilizing fungi from rhizosphere soil of moso bamboo and their functional capacities when exposed to different phosphorus sources and pH environments

Phosphate-solubilizing fungi (PSF) generally enhance available phosphorus (P) released from soil, which contributes to plants' P requirement, especially in P-limiting regions. In this study, two PSF, TalA-JX04 and AspN-JX16, were isolated from the rhizosphere soil of moso bamboo (Phyllostachys edulis) widely distributed in P-deficient areas in China and identified as Talaromyces aurantiacus and Aspergillus neoniger, respectively. The two PSF were cultured in potato dextrose liquid medium with six types of initial pH values ranging from 6.5 to 1.5 to assess acid resistance. Both PSF were incubated in Pikovskaya's liquid media with different pH values containing five recalcitrant P sources, including Ca3(PO4)2, FePO4, CaHPO4, AlPO4, and C6H6Ca6O24P6, to estimate their P-solubilizing capacity. No significant differences were found in the biomass of both fungi grown in media with different initial pH, indicating that these fungi could grow well under acid stress. The P-solubilizing capacity of TalA-JX04 was highest in medium containing CaHPO4, followed by Ca3(PO4)2, FePO4, C6H6Ca6O24P6, and AlPO4 in six types of initial pH treatments, while the recalcitrant P-solubilizing capacity of AspN-JX16 varied with initial pH. Meanwhile, the P-solubilizing capacity of AspN-JX16 was much higher than TalA-JX04. The pH of fermentation broth was negatively correlated with P-solubilizing capacity (p<0.01), suggesting that the fungi promote the dissolution of P sources by secreting organic acids. Our results showed that TalA-JX04 and AspN-JX16 could survive in acidic environments and both fungi had a considerable ability to release soluble P by decomposing recalcitrant P-bearing compounds. The two fungi had potential for application as environment-friendly biofertilizers in subtropical bamboo ecosystem.