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Cancer is a significant disease that often results in severe side effects from traditional treatments. Microwave hyperthermia has emerged as a minimally invasive, highly effective, and low‐toxicity treatment option that has gained widespread use in recent years. The primary objective of this study is to develop and assess a miniaturized slit patch antenna designed to operate at 2450 MHz for hyperthermia therapy. The octagonal antenna patch features four symmetrical slots to reduce its size, enhance directional radiation, and improve focusing and penetration depth. Additionally, a metal cavity is incorporated at the top of the antenna to create a gap between the antenna and the skin, allowing for skin heat dissipation, improved impedance matching, reduced outgoing radiation, and enhanced directional radiation. The performance of the antenna is assessed based on specific absorption rate (SAR), penetration depth (PD), and effective field size (EFS). Subsequently, the antenna is fabricated and tested in pork tissue, with the measured results demonstrating good agreement with the simulated outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antibiotics are misused and discharged into environmental water, posing a constant potential threat to the ecosystem. Utilising plasma's physical and chemical effects to remove antibiotics has emerged as a promising wastewater treatment technology. However, the complexity and high cost of reactor configurations represent significant limitations to the practical application of this technology. Furthermore, evaluating the degradation efficiency of antibiotics necessitates using costly and sophisticated testing instruments, coupled with time-consuming and labour-intensive experiments. The present study developed a generalised model using machine learning algorithms to predict the removal efficiency of antibiotics by a plasma system. Of the eight machine learning algorithms constructed, the ensemble model XGBoost exhibited the highest prediction accuracy, as indicated by a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.943. This correlation indicates a strong relationship between the predicted removal rates and the experimental values. Moreover, the accuracy of the prediction was enhanced through the utilisation of a multi-model stacking approach. A further quantitative assessment of the key factors affecting the efficiency of the plasma process, and their synergistic effects, is provided by the interpretable analysis of the model's behaviour. It is anticipated that the results will facilitate the design of efficient plasma systems, reduce the need for extensive experimental screening, and improve practical applications in the removal of antibiotic contamination. This provides an informative view of the applications of plasma technology, opening the way for new environmental research questions., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The mechanism of biological effects of environmental electromagnetic radiation is still not completely clear. The chelation of biological small molecule peptides with metal ions plays a very important role in human metabolism. In this paper, a special experimental system was designed to measure the conductivity of carnosine and zinc chloride mixed aqueous solutions under different concentration ratios, microwave powers, and temperatures. The experimental results show that, first, different concentration ratios can alter the conductivity change rate of the mixed aqueous solution. The conductivity of the solution always increases under microwave irradiation at a concentration ratio of 1:1. However, the conductivity is reduced by -0.04% with a 1:5 concentration ratio and 6 W microwave power at 10 °C. Second, temperature can alter the conductivity change rate of the aqueous mixture. The higher the temperature, the smaller the conductivity change rate. Third, different microwave powers can alter the conductivity change rate of the mixed aqueous solution. In general, the conductivity change rate increases with an increase in microwave power. Experimentally observed reduction of the conductivity change rate in carnosine and zinc chloride aqueous solution under low microwave power and low temperature indicates that microwaves do affect the chelation of carnosine with zinc chloride. This work provides a new perspective for the mechanism of explanation of microwave biological effects.

The influence of anisotropic potential energy and interaction between polar molecules on power absorption in chemical reactions with linear reaction dynamics in a weak alternating electric field is studied theoretically according to the reaction-diffusion equation. The expression for transient power loss is derived using two methods, electrodynamic method and equivalent circuit method, based on the electric energy conservation equation. Numerical calculations are carried out, and the results show that both the anisotropic potential energy and the interaction between polar molecules have a strong impact on energy dissipation and storage. For the anisotropic potential energy, when the applied dimensionless anisotropy is equal to 1, the power loss density increases about 32% at a low reaction rate and 27% at a high reaction rate compared to the case without anisotropic potential energy. When the dimensionless anisotropy is equal to -1, the power loss is suppressed and is reduced about 27% and 24% at low and high reaction rates, respectively. On the other hand, for the interaction between polar molecules, the power loss density decreases about 10% and 30% with low and high interaction potential energies, respectively. In addition, if the reaction rate is relatively high, the power loss will quickly decrease due to the end of the reaction process., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing financial interest., (© 2024 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society.)