Association of serum Asprosin concentrations with heart failure.

BACKGROUND: To analyze the association of serum Asprosin concentrations with heart failure (HF). METHODS: A total of 103 patients with HF were included in the HF group, and 103 patients with health checkups were included in the non-HF group. The serum Asprosin levels of the two groups were measured, and relevant clinical data were collected for statistical analysis. RESULTS: Compared with the non-HF group, the serum Asprosin concentration was significantly higher in the HF group, and the difference was statistically significant (P < 0.001). According to the serum Asprosin levels, we divided all the subjects into three quartiles. We found that the prevalence of HF increased with increasing serum Asprosin levels in the three groups (P < 0.001). Serum Asprosin levels were positively correlated with NT-ProBNP (P < 0.05) and negatively correlated with LVEF (P < 0.001). Dichotomous logistic regression analysis found Asprosin and age to be independent risk factors for HF (OR = 1.010, 95% CI: 1.003-1.018; OR = 1.058, 95% CI:1.004-1.665, respectively). Combining Asprosin and NT-proBNP indicators to draw ROC curves can improve the specificity and sensitivity of HF diagnosis. CONCLUSIONS: Serum Asprosin levels were significantly elevated in HF patients. The serum Asprosin level is an independent risk factor for HF, and the combined detection of Asprosin and NT-proBNP levels can improve the accuracy of HF diagnosis.

Enhancement of organics and nutrient removal and microbial mechanism in vertical flow constructed wetland under a static magnetic field.

Low and unstable pollutant removal is regarded as the bottleneck problem in constructed wetlands (CWs) for wastewater treatment. This study investigated the effect of static magnetic field (MF) on enhancing the purification efficiency and microbial mechanism in vertical flow CW systems for treating domestic wastewater. The results showed that MF-CWs outperformed control systems in terms of treatment performance, with average removal efficiencies of COD, NH4+-N, TN, and TP reaching 92.58%, 73.58%, 72.53%, and 95.83%, respectively. The change of malondialdehyde (MDA), catalase (CAT), and superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity indicated that MF application was beneficial for plant health. Additionally, higher ammonia monooxygenase (AMO) activity in MF-CWs suggested the removal of NH4+-N was facilitated. The high-throughput sequencing results demonstrated that MF application could enrich the functional bacteria such as Patescibacteria phylum, mainly, including Gammaproteobacteria, Betaproteobacteria, and Alphaproteobacteria, which further accelerated pollutants transformation. These findings would be beneficial in understanding pollutant removal processes and their mechanism in CWs with MF application.

Realizing PIT-like transparency via the coupling of plasmonic dipole and ENZ modes.

Plasmon induced transparency (PIT), known as the coupling of plasmon modes in metamaterials, has attracted intensive research interests in photonic applications. In this work, a PIT-like transparency is realized via the strong coupling of plasmonic dipole and epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) mode. Two types of metasurfaces, namely the gold nanoantenna and dolmen-like metasurface, are designed with an integrated ENZ material aluminum doped zinc oxide (AZO) film. Simulations with the finite element method (FEM) demonstrate that single and double transparent windows are achieved respectively. The adjustments of the peak position and transmittance of transparent windows via the structure parameters and the AZO film thickness are further investigated. This work provides an alternative coupling scheme of realizing PIT-like transparency with simple metasurface design, and offers great potential for future metamaterial applications.

Isolation and thermo-acclimation of thermophilic bacteria in hyperthermophilic fermentation system.

Hyperthermophilic microorganisms play a key role in the hyper-thermophilic composting (HTC) technique. However, little information is available about the hyperthermophilic microorganisms prevalent in HTC systems, except for the Calditerricola satsumensis, Calditerricola yamamurae, and Thermaerobacter. To obtain effective hyper-thermophilic microorganisms, a continuous thermo-acclimation of the suitable thermophilic microorganisms was demonstrated in this study. Bacillus thermoamylovorans with high-temperature endurance (70 °C) were newly isolated from sludge composting, and an adequate slow heating rate (2 °C per cycle) was applied to further improve its thermostability. Finally, a strain with a maximum growth temperature of 80 °C was obtained. Moreover, structural and hydrophobic changes in cell proteins, the special amino acid content ratio, and the membrane permeability of the thermophilic bacterium after thermo-acclimation were evaluated for improved thermostability. In addition, the acclimated hyperthermophilic bacterium was further inoculated into the HTC system, and an excellent performance with a maximum operating temperature of 82 °C was observed.

Highly tunable thermal emitter with vanadium dioxide metamaterials for radiative cooling.

An efficient thermal emitter for selective radiative cooling is realized with vanadium dioxide metamaterials. The novel structure consists of patterned VO2 metamaterials on the multilayer substrate and a composite layer on it. To obtain the enhanced emissivity, the influence of the top composite layer and external thermal stimuli are comprehensively optimized. The emissivity can reach up to 0.952 in the metallic phase of VO2 with a composite layer in the atmospheric window, which is due to strong localization of the electric field in the cavity. The influence on the emissivity with different incident angles and geometric parameters is investigated elaborately. Finally, the cooling power is calculated and achieves a high value of 710W/m2 at 383 K, which is significantly higher than that of previous works. Thus, our proposed tunable emitter with high performance will be beneficial to the dynamic radiative cooling system and may open a potential application in building cooling and intelligent windows.

Graphene aperture-based metalens for dynamic focusing of terahertz waves.

We theoretically study a tunable reflective focusing lens, based on graphene metasurface, which consists of rectangle aperture array. Dynamic control of either the focal intensity or focal length for terahertz circular polarized waves can be achieved by uniformly tuning the graphene Fermi energy. We demonstrate the graphene apertures with the same geometry; however, spatially varying orientations can only control the focal intensity. To change the focal length, the spatially varying aperture lengths are also required. A comparative study between the metalenses, which generate only geometric or both gradient and geometric phase changes, has shown that the apertures' spatially varying length distribution is the key factor for determining the modulation level, rather than the focal length's modulation range. This kind of metalens provides tunable, high-efficiency, broadband, and wide-angle off-axis focusing, thereby offering great application potential in lightweight and integrated terahertz devices.

Fractal spiral zone plates.

We present diffractive optical elements with an extended depth of focus, namely, fractal spiral zone plates (FSZPs), which combine a fractal structure and spiral zone plates (SZPs) to generate a sequence of coaxial vortices in the focal volume along the propagation direction. The axial irradiance of the FSZPs is examined both experimentally and in a simulation and is compared with that of SZPs and that of fractal zone plates. The focusing properties of the FSZPs with different parameters are investigated, and a potential application to edge-enhancement images is also shown.

Theoretical investigation of a multi-resonance plasmonic substrate for enhanced coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering.

The development of new substrates for surface-enhanced spectroscopy is primarily motivated by the ability to design such substrates to provide the maximum signal enhancement. In this paper, we theoretically design and investigate a crisscross dimer array as a plasmonic substrate for enhancing coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS). The plasmonic film-crisscross dimer array system can excite multiple resonances at optical frequencies. By properly designing structure parameters, three plasmon resonances with large field enhancements and same spatial hot spot regions can spectrally match with the pump, Stokes and anti-Stokes beams, respectively. The CARS signals are strongly enhanced by multi-resonance plasmon field enhancements. The estimated CARS factor can reach as high order as ~1016 over conventional CARS without the plasmonic substrate.

A monolayer of hierarchical silver hemi-mesoparticles with tunable surface topographies for highly sensitive surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy.

We proposed a facile green synthesis system to synthesize large-scale Ag hemi-mesoparticles monolayer on Cu foil. Ag hemi-mesoparticles have different surface morphologies on their surfaces, including ridge-like, meatball-like, and fluffy-like shapes. In the reaction, silver nitrate was reduced by copper at room temperature in dimethyl sulfoxide via the galvanic displacement reaction. The different surface morphologies of the Ag hemi-mesoparticles were adjusted by changing the reaction time, and the hemi-mesoparticle surface formed fluffy-spherical nanoprotrusions at longer reaction time. At the same time, we explored the growth mechanism of silver hemi-mesoparticles with different surface morphologies. With 4-mercaptobenzoic acid as Raman probe molecules, the fluffy-like silver hemi-mesoparticles monolayer with the best activity of surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), the enhancement factor is up to 7.33 × 10(7) and the detection limit can reach 10(-10)M. SERS measurements demonstrate that these Ag hemi-mesoparticles can serve as sensitive SERS substrates. At the same time, using finite element method, the distribution of the localized electromagnetic field near the particle surface was simulated to verify the enhanced mechanism. This study helps us to understand the relationship between morphology Ag hemi-mesoparicles and the properties of SERS.

Ultra-narrow band perfect absorbers based on plasmonic analog of electromagnetically induced absorption.

A novel plasmonic metamaterial consisting of the solid (bar) and the inverse (slot) compound metallic nanostructure for electromagnetically induced absorption (EIA) is proposed in this paper, which is demonstrated to achieve an ultra-narrow absorption peak with the linewidth less than 8 nm and the absorptivity exceeding 97% at optical frequencies. This is attributed to the plasmonic EIA resonance arising from the efficient coupling between the magnetic response of the slot (dark mode) and the electric resonance of the bar (bright mode). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the plasmonic EIA is used to realize the narrow-band perfect absorbers. The underlying physics are revealed by applying the two-coupled-oscillator model. The near-perfect-absorption resonance also causes an enhancement of about 50 times in H-field and about 130 times in E-field within the slots. Such absorber possesses potential for applications in filter, thermal emitter, surface enhanced Raman scattering, sensing and nonlinear optics.

Guided mode caused by silicon nanopillar array for light emission enhancement in color-converting LED.

Plasmonic metallic nanostructures have been demonstrated an effective way to enhance the light emission efficiency in LEDs. Here, we propose a design of white LEDs that combining dielectric silicon nanopillar array in the color-converting layer. By investigating theoretically the guided mode caused by the nanopillar array-waveguide system, we demonstrate that the silicon nanopillar arrays enable larger near-field enhancement and more efficient photons emission property than the plasmonic counterparts. These performances make the silicon nanopillar arrays have potential application in light converter for efficient white LEDs. We also show that the guided mode can be controlled by changing the period of nanopillar grating and the thickness of polymer layer. More significant performance can be achieved by further optimizing the shape and size of the silicon nanoparticles. Compared with the square nanoparticle arrays, the hexagonal nanopillar arrays are demonstrated to have larger field enhancement and emission enhancement. Our research is expected to give insights into the design and optimization of the solid-state lighting systems by using silicon nanostructures, and the all-dielectric metamaterials for gaining or lasing devices.

[Research on Early Diagnosis of Gastric Cancer by the Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy of Human Hemoglobin].

Early diagnosis have great positive effect on the treatment of gastric cancer patients. Raman spectroscopy can provide a useful monitor for hemoglobin dynamics. Besides, Raman spectroscopy has notable advantages in the fields of abnormal hemoglobin diagnosis, hemoglobin oxygen saturation deter mination and blood methemoglobin analysis. In this paper, novel silver colloid was synthesized by microwave heated method. The surface enhanced Raman spectrums of hemoglobin from 11 normal persons and 20 gastric cancer patients are measured and analyzed in order to obtain spectrums which are high repeatability and characteristic peaks protruding. By analyzing the assignations of the SERS bands, it found that the content of asparagine, tyrosine and phenylalanine in the hemoglobin are significantly lower than healthy people. Discussing the structure of hemoglobin, when hemoglobin combines with oxygen, Fe²âº is in a low spin state, ionic radius shrinks and moves 0. 075 nm and fall into the pore in the middle of the heme porphyrin ring plane. This spatial variation affects F8His connected with the iron, will narrow the gap between the globin in the two strands of the helix, as a result, HC2 tyrosine pushed out of the void. Using this mechanism, the absorption peak of 1 560 cm⁻¹ confirmed that the tyrosine content in patients with gastric cancer was lower than that of normal people. Principal component analysis(PCA) is employed to get a three-dimensional scatter plot of PC scores for the health and cancer groups, and it can be learned that they are distributed in separate areas. By using the method of discriminate analysis, it is found that the diagnostic algorithm separates the two groups with sensitivity of 90.0% and diagnostic specificity of 90.9%, the overall diagnostic accuracy was 90.3%. The results from this exploratory study demonstrate that, SERS detection of oxyhemoglobin combined with multivariate analysis would be an effective method for early diagnosis of gastric cancer.

Underwater light source changes microecosystem constructed by Vallisneria spinulosa Yan for water restoration: Efficiency of water purification, characteristics of growth, and rhizosphere.

Submerged macrophytes are effective in ecological restoration of water bodies polluted by nitrogen and phosphorus, and its restoration capacity depends on underwater illumination condition. This study explored the influencing mechanism of illumination on Vallisneria spinulosa Yan (V. spinulosa Yan) for water restoration. Addition of underwater light source increased the total nitrogen, ammonia nitrogen, total phosphorus, and phosphate removal loads of the V. spinulosa Yan growth system by 61.5, 39.2, 8.5, and 5.0 mg m-2 d-1, respectively. Meanwhile, the growth of V. spinulosa Yan was obviously promoted, even with high water turbidity. Although the biological nitrogen removal processes were inhibited by adding underwater light source, the growth of V. spinulosa Yan can be significantly improved, thus enhancing the efficiency of water purification via the absorption of nitrogen and phosphorus by V. spinulosa Yan. This study provides a theoretical foundation and technical support for application of submerged macrophytes in ecological water restoration.

Double Fano resonances due to interplay of electric and magnetic plasmon modes in planar plasmonic structure with high sensing sensitivity.

Double Fano resonant characteristics are investigated in planar plasmonic structure by embedding a metallic nanorod in symmetric U-shaped split ring resonators, which are caused by a strong interplay between a broad bright mode and narrow dark modes. The bright mode is resulted from the nanorod electric dipole resonance while the dark modes originate from the magnetic dipole induced by LC resonances. The overlapped dual Fano resonances can be decomposed to two separate ones by adjusting the coupling length between the nanorod and U-shaped split ring resonators. Fano resonances in the designed structure exhibit high refractive-index sensing sensitivity and figure of merit, which have potential applications in single or double-wavelength sensing in the near-infrared region.

A novel planar metamaterial design for electromagnetically induced transparency and slow light.

A novel planar plasmonic metamaterial for electromagnetically induced transparency and slow light characteristic is presented in this paper, which consists of nanoring and nanorod compound structures. Two bright modes in the metamaterial are induced by the electric dipole resonance inside nanoring and nanorod, respectively. The coupling between two bright modes introduces transparency window and large group index. By adjusting the geometric parameters of metamaterial structure, the transmittance of EIT window at 385 THz is about 60%, and the corresponding group index and Q factor can reach up to 1.2 × 10³ and 97, respectively, which has an important application in slow-light device, active plasmonic switch, SERS and optical sensing.

High-precision tracking of brownian boomerang colloidal particles confined in quasi two dimensions.

In this article, we present a high-precision image-processing algorithm for tracking the translational and rotational Brownian motion of boomerang-shaped colloidal particles confined in quasi-two-dimensional geometry. By measuring mean square displacements of an immobilized particle, we demonstrate that the positional and angular precision of our imaging and image-processing system can achieve 13 nm and 0.004 rad, respectively. By analyzing computer-simulated images, we demonstrate that the positional and angular accuracies of our image-processing algorithm can achieve 32 nm and 0.006 rad. Because of zero correlations between the displacements in neighboring time intervals, trajectories of different videos of the same particle can be merged into a very long time trajectory, allowing for long-time averaging of different physical variables. We apply this image-processing algorithm to measure the diffusion coefficients of boomerang particles of three different apex angles and discuss the angle dependence of these diffusion coefficients.

Iron, lanthanum and manganese oxides loaded on gamma-AI2O3 for selective catalytic reduction of NO with NH3 at low temperature.

A series of Mn/Al2O3, La-Mn/Al2O3 and Fe-La-Mn/Al2O3 catalysts were prepared by an impregnation method and investigated for selective catalytic reduction of NO with NH3 at low temperature. The experimental results revealed that NO conversion over La-Mn/Al2O3 was obviously improved after La doping. Addition of Fe increased both NO conversion and the resistance to H2O and SO2. The catalyst Fe0.04La0.03Mn0.06/Al2O3 with a load mass of MnO2 = 6%, La2O3 = 3% and Fe2O3 = 4% exhibited relatively high catalytic activity and yielded 98% NO conversion at 260 degrees with a space velocity of 15,000 h(-1). Meanwhile, the catalytic activity was slightly decreased in the presence of H2O and SO2. Moreover, the catalysts were characterized by N2 adsorption measurement, X-ray diffraction and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The results showed that the doping of La enhanced the dispersion and oxidation states of Mn on the surface of Al2O3. On the surface of the Fe0.04La0.03Mn0.06/Al2O3 catalyst, La was highly dispersed and a mixed oxidation state of Mn existed, while iron ions were only in the Fe3+ state. The mechanism of selective catalytic reduction over these catalysts is also discussed. In this experiment, metal oxides loaded on the support were catalytic centres which served as electron transfer during NO reduction. The electron transfer between Mn3+ and Fe3+ might also exist and the mixture oxidation states of Mn on the surface of the Fe0.04La0.03Mn0.06/Al2O3 catalyst contributed to the SCR activity.

[Research on early diagnosis of esophageal cancer by Raman spectroscopy of human hemoglobin].

The Raman spectrums of hemoglobin from 20 normal persons and 21 esophageal cancer patients were measured and analyzed in the present paper, the results show obvious differences between the Raman spectrums of esophageal cancer patients and normal persons. Compared with normal persons, there are more iron ions in low spin state and less in high spin state in the hemoglobin of esophageal cancer patients. It indicates that some iron ions in high spin state turned to low spin state because of cancerization, and this experimental result coincides with the fact that hemolysis is more likely to occur in cancer patients. Principal component analysis (PCA) was employed to get a three-dimensional scatter plot of PC scores for the health and cancer groups, and it can be learned that they are distributed in separate areas. By using the method of discriminate analysis, it was found that the diagnostic algorithm separates the two groups with sensitivity of 90.5% and diagnostic specificity of 95%, and the overall diagnostic accuracy was 92.7%. The results from this exploratory study demonstrate that Raman spectroscopy combined with multivariate analysis would be an effective method for early diagnosis of esophageal cancer.

A comprehensive review on mixotrophic denitrification processes for biological nitrogen removal.

Biological denitrification is the most widely used method for nitrogen removal in water treatment. Compared with heterotrophic and autotrophic denitrification, mixotrophic denitrification is later studied and used. Because mixotrophic denitrification can overcome some shortcomings of heterotrophic and autotrophic denitrification, such as a high carbon source demand for heterotrophic denitrification and a long start-up time for autotrophic denitrification. It has attracted extensive attention of researchers and is increasingly used in biological nitrogen removal processes. However, so far, a comprehensive review is lacking. This paper aims to review the current research status of mixotrophic denitrification and provide guidance for future research in this field. It is shown that mixotrophic denitrification processes can be divided into three main kinds based on different kinds of electron donors, mainly including sulfur-, hydrogen-, and iron-based reducing substances. Among them, sulfur-based mixotrophic denitrification is the most widely studied. The most concerned influencing factors of mixotrophic denitrification processes are hydraulic retention times (HRT) and ratio of chemical oxygen demand (COD) to total inorganic nitrogen (C/N). The dominant functional bacteria of sulfur-based mixotrophic denitrification system are Thiobacillus, Azoarcus, Pseudomonas, and Thauera. At present, mixotrophic denitrification processes are mainly applied for nitrogen removal in drinking water, groundwater, and wastewater treatment. Finally, challenges and future research directions are discussed.

Magnetic reed biochar materials as adsorbents for aqueous copper and phenol removal.

Organics and heavy metals are common pollutants in many wastewaters and water bodies. Adsorption processes by magnetic materials can rapidly remove these pollutants from water and effectively recycle adsorbent. In this study, magnetic analyzer, X-ray diffraction, Flourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and granulometry were used to characterize the synthesized magnetic reed biochar materials (ZnFe2O4/biochar). Influences of adsorption time, pH, temperature, initial solution concentration, and adsorption equilibrium concentration on adsorption performances were investigated for Cu2+ and phenol adsorption by ZnFe2O4/biochar. Adsorption kinetic and isotherm models were used to describe the adsorption processes. Adsorption of phenol and Cu2+ by ZnFe2O4/biochar reached saturation within 45 min and increased slightly with the increase of temperature from 15 to 45 °C. Adsorption of Cu2+ increased with the increase of pH, while the adsorption of phenol peaked at pH = 6. The adsorption processes fit the pseudo-second order kinetics model, and both conformed to the Langmuir model. The fitting results show that the maximum single-component adsorption capacity of phenol and Cu2+ by ZnFe2O4/biochar is 63.29 and 12.20 mg/g, and the maximum bi-component adsorption capacity reaches 40.16 and 9.48 mg/g, respectively. All the findings demonstrate that ZnFe2O4/biochar has good adsorption performance for phenol and Cu2+.