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Abstract Biocrude derived from biomass via hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) is a sustainable substitute for petroleum to obtain energy and biochemicals. Upgrading biocrude inevitably faces the trade-off between consuming large amounts of hydrogen via hydrotreating and high yield of solid residue without additional hydrogen. In this work, we report a non-hydrogenated refinery paradigm for nearly complete valorization (~90%), via co-generating green coal and bio-lubricant. The obtained green coal has higher heating values comparable to commercial coals, with a lower fuel ratio and reduced ash content. Viscosity of upgraded vacuum distillate is comparable to that of a lubricant oil. A life cycle assessment confirms 28% reduction in greenhouse gas emission and 35% reduction in energy input of this paradigm compared with conventional hydrotreating biorefinery. This approach presents an environmentally friendly, safe and convenient paradigm for biocrude refining from huge biowaste towards carbon-neutral society.

Bio-tar, a promising renewable carbon precursor, has garnered significant attention for its potential in supercapacitor electrode applications. However, the polymerization of bio-tar into carbon presents challenges, particularly in achieving a dense, interconnected pore structure essential for optimal electrochemical performance. This study introduced an innovative approach using hydrochar as a framework combined with bio-tar as the carbon source to synthesize bio-carbon composite. The results showed that the prepared bio-carbon exhibited a stable morphological structure in which the hydrochar skeleton supported the wrapping of bio-tar originated carbon, specifically at a hydrochar to bio-tar ratio of 1:6. And it also showed a maximum specific surface area of 2714.27 m2/g, with a mesopore ratio of 68.79 % at an activation temperature of 800 °C. The optimal electrochemical properties were observed at the highest specific capacitance of 340.4 F/g in a three-electrode system under a current density of 0.5 A/g. When assembled into a supercapacitor, the single-pole specific capacitance reached 213.3 F/g at 0.5 A/g. The structure-property relationship suggested that the water contact angle is a key factor influencing the specific capacitance, particularly at high specific surface areas. This study demonstrated an innovative way to prepare sustainable composite bio-carbon material with excellent electrochemical performance.

The function-led design of porous hydrochar from mineral-rich biowaste for environmental applications inevitably suffers from carbon–ash recalcitrance. However, a method to alter the original carbon skeleton with ash remains elusive and hinders the availability of hydrochar. Herein, we propose a facile strategy for breaking the rigid structure of carbon–ash coupled hydrochar using phase-tunable molten carbonates. A case system was designed in which livestock manure and NaHCO3 were used to prepare the activated hydrochar, and NH3 served as the target contaminant. Due to the redox effect, we found that organic fractions significantly advanced the melting temperature of Na2CO3 below 800 °C. The Na species steadily broke the carbon–ash interaction as the thermal intensity increased and transformed inorganic constituents to facilitate ash dissolution, rebuilding the hydrochar skeleton with abundant hierarchical channels and active defect edges. The surface polarity and mesopore distribution collectively governed the five cycles NH3 adsorption attenuation process. Manure hydrochar delivered favorable potential for application with a maximum overall adsorption capacity of 100.49 mg·g−1. Integrated spectroscopic characterization and theoretical computations revealed that incorporating NH3 on the carbon surface could transfer electrons to chemisorbed oxygen, which promoted the oxidation of pyridine-N during adsorption. This work offers deep insight into the structure function correlation of hydrochar and inspires a more rational design of engineered hydrochar from high-ash biowaste.

Exposure to carbon disulfide (CS2) is a recognized risk factor in the pathogenesis of Parkinson’s disease, yet the underlying mechanisms of deleterious effects on mitochondrial integrity have remained elusive. Here, through establishing CS2 exposure models in rat and SH-SY5Y cells, we demonstrated that highly expressed α-synuclein (α-Syn) is transferred to mitochondria via membrane proteins such as Tom20 and leads to mitochondrial dysfunction and mitochondrial oxidative stress, which ultimately causes neuronal injury. We first found significant mitochondrial damage and oxidative stress in CS2-exposed rat midbrain and SH-SY5Y cells and showed that mitochondrial oxidative stress was the main factor of mitochondrial damage by Mitoquinone intervention. Further experiments revealed that CS2 exposure led to the accumulation of α-Syn in mitochondria and that α-Syn co-immunoprecipitated with mitochondrial membrane proteins. Finally, the use of an α-Syn inhibitor (ELN484228) and small interfering RNA (siRNA) effectively mitigated the accumulation of α-Syn in neurons, as well as the inhibition of mitochondrial membrane potential, caused by CS2 exposure. In conclusion, our study identifies the translocation of α-Syn to mitochondria and the impairment of mitochondrial function, which has important implications for the broader understanding and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases associated with environmental toxins.

Abstract Bio-tar extra-produced from biomass pyrolysis is prone to pose a threat to environment and human health. A novel N-doped porous electrode from bio-tar was produced under dual-activation of urea and KOH in this study. One-pot dual-activation played significant roles in N-functional group and micro-mesoporous structure, which resulted in the carbon material with the highest of nitrogen content (4.08%) and the special surface area (1298.26 m2·g−1). Specifically, the potential mechanisms of pore formation and N-doping in the one-pot dual-activation strategy were also proposed as a consequence, the one-pot dual-activated carbon material displayed excellent electrochemical performance with the highest capacitance of 309.5 F·g−1 at 0.5 A·g−1, and the unipolar specific capacitance remained with cyclic characteristics of 80.1% after 10,000 cycles in two-electrode symmetric system. Furthermore, the one-pot dual-activation strategy could create a profit of $1.64–$2.38 per kilogram of bio-tar processed without considering the initial investment and labor costs, which provides new perspectives for the utilization of waste bio-tar. Graphical Abstract

This study introduces a novel tracking control strategy tailored to aeroengines, which are highly nonlinear and characterized by significant uncertainty. The proposed method entails a robust extended Kalman filter (REKF) enhanced by a forgetting factor for improved performance. An accompanying augmented, mixed onboard adaptive model based on the REKF precisely estimates and manages engine performance degradation. This advanced model effectively counters the degradation term in the perturbation block of the engine’s uncertain model. Using this strategic approach, a robust gain-scheduling controller was constructed and was found to outperform its predecessors, marking a notable advancement in control system design. Controlling twin rotor multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) systems is a highly complex process due to model uncertainties and unpredictable external disturbances. To address these challenges, we constructed an adaptive two-degree-of-freedom robust gain-scheduling controller (ATDF-RGSC) using a mixed sensitivity approach. Rigorous performance analysis confirms that this controller offers enhanced robustness, faster tracking, and more precise disturbance attenuation compared to other methods. These advanced control strategies successfully manage uncertainties and disturbances, improving performance metrics in both simulated and experimental scenarios. The proposed method may significantly enhance the safety and reliability of aeroengines and MIMO systems in practical applications.

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction of aeroengines not only enhances aviation safety and operational efficiency but also significantly lowers operational costs, offering substantial economic and social benefits to the aviation industry. Aiming at RUL prediction, this paper proposes a novel dual-dimension convolutional-attention (DDCA) mechanism. DDCA consists of two branches: one includes channel attention and spatial attention mechanisms, while the other applies these mechanisms to the inverted dimensions. Pooling and feature-wise pooling operations are employed to extract features from different dimensions of the input data. These branches operate in parallel to capture more complex temporal and spatial feature correlations in multivariate time series data. Subsequently, an end-to-end DDCA-TCN network is constructed by integrating DDCA with a temporal convolutional network (TCN) for RUL prediction. The proposed prediction model is evaluated using the C-MAPSS dataset and compared to several state-of-the-art RUL prediction models. The results show that the RMSE and SCORE metrics of DDCA-TCN decreased by at least 12.8% and 4.6%, respectively, compared to other models on the FD002 subset, and by at least 10.6% and 18.4%, respectively, on the FD004 subset, which demonstrates that the DDCA-TCN model exhibits excellent performance in RUL prediction, particularly under multiple operating conditions.

Abstract Biochar, as a potential CO2 adsorbent, is of great significance in addressing the problem of global warming. Previous studies have demonstrated that the CO2 adsorption performance of biochar can be improved by nitrogen and sulfur doping. Co-doping can integrate the structure and function of two elements. However, the physicochemical interaction of nitrogen and sulfur during doping and the CO2 adsorption process remains unclear in co-doped biochar. In this study, the heteroatom-doped biochar was prepared with different additives (urea, sodium thiosulfate, and thiourea) via hydrothermal carbonization, and the physicochemical interaction of nitrogen and sulfur in co-doped biochar was investigated extensively. The findings revealed that nitrogen and sulfur competed for limited doped active sites on the carbon skeleton during the co-doping process. Interestingly, thiourea retained the amino group on the surface of biochar to a great extent due to carbon–sulfur double bond breaking and bonding, which facilitated the formation of pore in the activation process. Significantly, co-doping had no significant improvement effect although nitrogen and sulfur doping separately enhanced the CO2 adsorption performance of biochar by 11.9% and 8.5%. The nitrogen-containing and sulfur-containing functional groups in co-doped biochar exhibited mutual inhibition in the process of CO2 adsorption. The findings of this study will have pertinent implications in the application of N/S co-doped biochar for CO2 adsorption. Graphical Abstract

Health risks associated with acrylamide (ACR) or high-fat diet (HFD) exposure alone have been widely concerned in recent years. In a realistic situation, ACR and HFD are generally co-existence, and both are risk factors for the development of neurological diseases. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the combined effects of ACR and HFD on the motor nerve function. As a result, neurobehavioral tests and Nissl staining disclosed that long-term HFD exacerbated motor dysfunction and the damage of spinal cord motor neurons in ACR-exposed mice. Co-exposure of ACR and HFD resulted in morphological changes in neuronal mitochondria of the spinal cord, a significantly reduced mitochondrial subunits NDUFS1, UQCRC2, and MTCO1, released the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) into the cytoplasm, and promoted the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Combined exposure of HFD and ACR activated the calpain/CDK5/Drp1 axis and caused the mitochondrial excessive division, ultimately increasing MLKL-mediated necroptosis in spinal cord motor neurons. Meanwhile, HFD significantly exacerbated ACR-induced activation of NFkB, NLRP3 inflammasome, and cGAS-STING pathway. Taken together, our findings demonstrated that combined exposure of ACR and HFD aggravated the damage of spinal cord motor neurons via neuroinflammation and necroptosis signaling pathway, pointing to additive effects in mice than the individual stress effects.

Carbon tetrachloride (CCl4)-mediated liver damage has been well recognized, but the sources and mechanisms of mitochondrial damage during this progress still remain poorly understood. Accumulating evidence has revealed that LonP1-TDP-43 pathway affect proper mitochondrial integrity and function in neurodegenerative diseases. The current study aims to investigate whether mitochondrial oxidative stress regulate LonP1-TDP-43 pathway and the possible roles of this pathway in CCl4-driven liver fibrosis. We found that TDP-43 interacted with LonP1 in chronic CCl4 exposure-induced hepatic fibrogenesis. Moreover, CCl4 led to deficiency of LonP1 and excessive accumulation of TDP-43 on mitochondria. Particularly, the gene correlation analysis for liver fibrosis patients RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) results (GSE159676) showed an obvious negative correlation between LonP1 and TDP-43. By contrast, MitoQ enhanced the occurrence of mitochondrial unfolded protein response (mtUPR), especially the activation of LonP1 after CCl4 treatment. Importantly, mitochondrial antioxidant also promoted the degradation of TDP-43 and alleviated mitochondrial damage. In addition, our results showed that CCl4 induced the release of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and effectively elevated cGAS-STING-mediated immune response, which can be inhibited by MitoQ. Finally, MitoQ prevented CCl4-induced liver fibrosis. Together, our study revealed that LonP1-TDP-43 pathway mediated by mitochondrial oxidative stress participated in the progress of CCl4-drived liver fibrosis. Therefore, mitigating or reversing mitochondrial damage through targeting LonP1-TDP-43 pathway may serve as a promising therapeutic strategy for CCl4 exposure-induced liver diseases.

Summary: Exposure to carbon disulfide (CS2) has been associated with an increased incidence of parkinsonism in workers, but the mechanism underlying this association remains unclear. Using a rat model, we investigated the effects of chronic CS2 exposure on parkinsonian pathology. Our results showed that CS2 exposure leads to significant motor impairment and neuronal damage, including loss of dopaminergic neurons and degeneration of the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNpc). The immunoassays revealed that exposure to CS2 induces aggregation of α-synuclein and phosphorylated α-synuclein, as well as activation of necroptosis in the SNpc. Furthermore, in vitro and in vivo experiments demonstrated that the interaction between α-synuclein and the necrosome complex (RIP1, RIP3, and MLKL) is responsible for the loss of neuronal cells after CS2 exposure. Taken together, our results demonstrate that CS2-mediated α-synuclein aggregation can induce dopaminergic neuron damage and parkinsonian behavior through interaction with the necrosome complex.

Sensor health assessments are of great importance for accurately understanding the health of an aeroengine, supporting maintenance decisions, and ensuring flight safety. This study proposes an intelligent framework based on a physically guided neural network (PGNN) and convolutional neural network (CNN) to diagnose sensor faults under dynamic conditions. The strength of the approach is that it integrates information from physics-based performance models and deep learning models. In addition, it has the structure of prediction–residual–generation-fault classification that effectively decouples the interaction between sensor faults and system state changes. First, a PGNN generates the engine’s non-linear dynamic prediction output because the PGNN has the advantage of being able to handle temporal information from the long short-term memory (LSTM) network. We use a cross-physics–data fusion scheme as the prediction strategy to explore the hidden information of the physical model output and sensor measurement data. A novel loss function that considers physical discipline is also proposed to overcome the performance limitations of traditional data-driven models because of their physically inconsistent representations. Then, the predicted values of the PGNN are compared with the sensor measurements to obtain a residual signal. Finally, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to classify faults for residual signals and deliver diagnostic results. Furthermore, the feasibility of the proposed framework is demonstrated on an engine sensor fault dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the pure data-driven approach, with the predicted RMSE being reduced from 1.6731 to 0.9897 and the diagnostic accuracy reaching 95.9048%, thereby confirming its superior performance.

This study was conducted to develop a novel tracking control strategy for aeroengines with strong nonlinearity and uncertainty. Compared to existing robust gain-scheduling control strategies, the proposed control strategy has relatively low conservatism and can markedly improve engine performance. An improved on-board adaptive aeroengine model was established to estimate engine performance degradation and eliminate the degradation term contained in the perturbation block of the engine uncertain model in the design process. Robust controllers under engine normal and performance degradation states were designed at a set of operating points and scheduled according to relevant scheduling and health parameters. A desired robust gain-scheduling controller, which works based on performance degradation, can be precisely constructed via this approach. Simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, where the response speed of engine is improved by 38%.

Arthritis is a general term for various types of inflammatory joint diseases. The most common clinical conditions are mainly represented by rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis, which affect more than 4% of people worldwide and seriously limit their mobility. Arthritis medication generally requires long-term application, while conventional administrations by oral delivery or injections may cause gastrointestinal side effects and are inconvenient for patients during long-term application. Emerging microneedle (MN) technology in recent years has created new avenues of transdermal delivery for arthritis drugs due to its advantages of painless skin perforation and efficient local delivery. This review summarizes various types of arthritis and current therapeutic agents. The current development of MNs in the delivery of arthritis drugs is highlighted, demonstrating their capabilities in achieving different drug release profiles through different self-enhancement methods or the incorporation of nanocarriers. Furthermore, the challenges of translating MNs from laboratory studies to the clinical practice and the marketplace are discussed. This promising technology provides a new approach to the current drug delivery paradigm in treating arthritis in transdermal delivery.

The direct use of digestate on farmlands as soil amendment is becoming an uneconomic option for farmers. Moreover, there are serious environmental concerns about its oversupply in regions with intensive biogas plants. Downstream technologies, offering innovative upcycling methods to handle huge amounts of digestate, have absorbed great interest in this context. In this study, three digestate treatment technologies were compared from a life cycle assessment perspective to combine the environmental impacts from pig manure transportation to biogas plants, biogas production, different digestate treatment technologies, and the use of final products. The results showed that scenario including digestate fractionation into solid and liquid, and their use for compost production and microalgae cultivation, respectively, would be a suitable downstream strategy with lower impacts on human health, ecosystem quality, and climate change damage categories, however future improvements still required. The results showed that sealed storage system or fast-continuous downstream processes as well as shorter distances between biogas plants and farms can significantly enhance the environmental performance of coupled anaerobic digestion and microalgae production. The high energy payback also signified that co-digestion of pig manure and microalgae would be energetically favorable in this context. However, having compared the results with a baseline scenario demonstrated that the direct use of digestate on farmlands, under controlled conditions to avoid its over application, is still the most environmentally favorable option, despite being a costly option for farmers. The results achieved in the present study suffered some uncertainties because technologies under consideration are at their infancy stage, thus further research still is required to find the most sustainable solutions. Keywords: Anaerobic digestion, Digestate treatment, Flocculation-biological contact oxidation, Microalgae

Abstract Background Hypophasis is one of the most frequently observed sequelae of patients with Bell’s palsy, who have not recovered completely, creating a clinical difficulty for physicians. Acupuncture therapy has been widely used to treat Bell’s palsy as a reasonable resolution for management of symptoms such as hypophasis. The number of acupuncture points (acu-points) is frequently selected in the approach of acupuncture therapy; however, whether these had high efficiency has not been proved. According to the literature review, Bi’nao was useful for treating eye and eye lipid diseases, which could be proved only by some successful cases. Thus, a randomized controlled trial was designed to evaluate the efficiency of the acu-point Bi’nao. Methods/Design Participants with hypophasis as the major symptom are selected among patients with Bell’s palsy and randomly allocated into one of the three groups at a 1:1:1 allocation ratio. All participants receive conventional acupuncture therapy; however, those assigned to the real acupuncture group will be given added acupuncture therapy on the acu-point Bi’nao, while those assigned to the sham acupuncture group were given extra acupuncture therapy on the sham Bi’nao as a placebo. The efficacy of the acupuncture therapy on the acu-point Bi’nao for hypophasis will be evaluated by Eye Crack Width Measurement (ECWM) and Eyelid Strength Assessment (ESA) before and after therapy. Discussion This is the first study assessing the safety and efficiency of Bi’nao in treating the hypophasis of patients with Bell’s palsy that might support the application of this acupuncture therapy. However, evaluating hypophasis is challenging, and, thus, ECWM and ESA were applied to measure the eyelid movement. Trial registration Chinese Clinical Trials Registry, ChiCTR-INR-17012955. Registered on 12 October 2017.

Diallyl sulfide (DAS) is an effective bioactive organosulfur compound extracted from garlic. This study aimed to explore whether the protective effect of DAS on lipopolysaccharide (LPS)/d-galactosamine (d-GalN) induced acute liver injury was associated with the regulation of Kupffer cell (KC) activation. The results indicated that DAS administration protected mice from LPS/D-GalN-induced histopathological damage and serum aminotransferase elevation and also showed more pronounced beneficial effects than GdCl3 administration. The F4/80+ or CD11b+ KC immunohistochemistry results showed that DAS administration suppressed LPS/D-GalN-induced KC activation. DAS administration also suppressed LPS/D-GalN-triggered production of TNF-α, IL-1β, MCP-1 and NO in the liver or serum, which was in line with the mRNA expression of TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-6, MCP-1 and iNOS in the liver. Taken together, these findings reveal that the protective effects of DAS on LPS/D-GalN-induced acute liver injury may be achieved by inhibiting the activation of KC, thereby suppressing the secretion of various proinflammatory mediators.

TDMA protocols are recognized to save energy consumption by avoiding unnecessary idle listening and communication collision. As sensor nodes are usually equipped with limited resource supply, they are thus desirable to improve network capacity and energy efficiency by adopting TDMA scheduling for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This paper proposes a TDMA scheduling approach, which reuses time slots among sensor nodes, for WSNs. Specifically, with the idea of consecutive slots assignment, our approach can reduce both the time and energy cost of establishing nodes' schedule. Furthermore, the energy of node's switching is also reduced. To avoid the transmission of a node's result interference to all irrelevant receivers within its interference range, we develop a slot negotiation mechanism for slot assignment. We perform extensive simulations in NS-2 to evaluate our proposed approach. The results show that our approach outperforms existing TDMA scheduling in terms of time and energy overhead.

Wireless sensor networks have been widely deployed for environment monitoring. The resource-limited sensor nodes usually transmit the sensing readings to Sink node collaboratively in a multihop manner to conserve energy. In this paper, we consider the problem of spatial clustering for approximate data collection that is feasible and energy-efficient for environment monitoring applications. Spatial clustering aims to group the highly correlated sensor nodes into the same cluster for rotatively reporting representative data later. Through a thorough investigation of a real-world environmental data set, we observe strong temporal-spatial correlation and define a novel similarity measure metric to inspect the similarity between any two sensor nodes, which take both magnitude and trend of their sensing readings into consideration. With such metric, we propose a clustering algorithm named as HSC to group the most similar sensor nodes in a distributed way. HSC runs on a prebuilt data collection tree, and thus gets rid of some extra requirements such as global network topology information and rigorous time synchronization. Extensive simulations based on realworld and synthetic data sets demonstrate that HSC performs superiorly in clustering quality when compared with the alternative algorithms. Furthermore, approximate data collection scheme combined with HSC can reduce much more communication overhead while incurring modest data error than with other algorithms.

The composition and stability of the microbial community structure of roots and root zone soils play a key role in the healthy growth of plants. We examined the distribution characteristics of phenolic acids and saponins, as well as microbial communities in the root space (root endosphere, rhizoplane soil, rhizosphere soil, and bulk soil) of healthy and root rot disease-affected Panax notoginseng. The results showed that after infection with root rot, the rhizoplane soil exhibited significant decreases in organic matter and hydrolyzable nitrogen and significant increases in available phosphorus, available potassium, and total nitrogen. The contents of phenolic acids (except benzoic acid) and ginsenoside Rg2 in the root endosphere significantly increased. Ferulic acid and p-hydroxybenzoic acid in the rhizoplane soil significantly increased. Rhodococcus increased significantly in the root endosphere, rhizoplane, and rhizosphere soil; Nitrospira decreased significantly in the rhizoplane, rhizosphere, and bulk soil; and Plectosphaerella decreased significantly in the root endosphere and rhizoplane soil. Moreover, the accumulation of most autotoxins can promote the growth of pathogens. In summary, the spatial autotoxic substances and microbial community differences in P. notoginseng roots jointly induce the occurrence of root rot. IMPORTANCE Panax notoginseng is highly susceptible to soil-borne diseases induced during planting, and root rot, which usually occurs in the root and stem parts of the plant, is the most severe. We divided the root environment of P. notoginseng into four parts (root endosphere, rhizoplane soil, rhizosphere soil, and bulk soil) and studied it with unplanted soil as the control. In this study, we examined the changes in the content of autotoxic substances in the root space of P. notoginseng, along with the interplay between these substances and microorganisms. This study revealed the mechanism underlying root rot and provided a theoretical basis for alleviating continuous cropping obstacles in P. notoginseng. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]