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Silver nanoparticles colloid has been prepared by a modified sonoelectrodeposition technique in which a silver plate was used as the source of silver ions. This technique allows producing Ag nanoparticles with the size of 4–30 nm dispersed in a non-toxic solution. The Ag nanoparticles were loaded in a high surface activated carbon produced from coconut husk, a popular agricultural waste in Vietnam by thermal activation. The surface area of the best activated carbon is 890 m2/g. The presence of Ag nanoparticles does not change significantly properties of the activated carbon in terms of morphology and methylene blue adsorption ability. The Ag nanoparticle-loaded activated carbon shows a good antibacterial activity against Escherichia coli with very low minimal inhibitory concentration of 16 μg/ml and strong As(V) adsorption. The materials are potential for prevention and treatment of microbial infection and contamination for environmental applications.

Over the course of the past two decades there has been growing research interest in the site formation processes of shell middens. This stands along-side and is being used to inform cultural, dietary and palaeo-environmental reconstructions. Just as midden site formation processes have turned out to be many and varied, however, the kinds of shell-bearing sites that past human communities created are likely to have been no less diverse. Subsuming such sites under a single category – shell middens – normalises that variation and may lead to the misinterpretation of site function. The greater part of research in this field also continues to focus on coastal shell middens; comparatively little attention has been paid to middens containing freshwater and especially terrestrial molluscs from hinterland locations. As a result, much of the current understanding about shell-midden sites carries a spatial as well as a functional bias. This paper hopes to contribute towards discussion on both fronts. It presents a detailed examination of the formation processes that went into the creation of a land snail-dominated late- to post-glacial midden from northern Vietnam, and considers the role that it may have played in the early settlement of this area. The data presented comes from ongoing archaeological excavations at Hang Boi, a cave located in the sub-coastal karstic uplands of Trang An park, in the Vietnamese Province of Ninh Binh.

To examine how government spending affects the Australian economy, we apply a vector autoregressive (VAR) model, based on the recursive approach of Caldara and Kamps (2008). The estimation results suggest that (i) the government expenditure shock has positively contributed to Australia’s economic growth; (ii) the shock has also had positive effects on price levels, inflation and interest rate; and (ii) interestingly, an increase in the government spending is not always offset by an increase in taxes in the short-term.