Region-Specific Sourcing of Lignocellulose Residues as Renewable Feedstocks for a Net-Zero Chemical Industry.

Biobased chemicals, crucial for the net-zero chemical industry, rely on lignocellulose residues as a major feedstock. However, its availability and environmental impacts vary greatly across regions. By 2050, we estimate that 3.0-5.2 Gt of these residues will be available from the global forest and agricultural sectors, with key contributions from Brazil, China, India, and the United States. This supply satisfies the growing global feedstock demands for plastics when used efficiently. Forest residues have 84% lower climate change impacts than agricultural residues on average globally but double the land-use-related biodiversity loss. Biobased plastics may reduce climate change impacts relative to fossil-based alternatives but are insufficient to fulfill net-zero targets. In addition, they pose greater challenges in terms of biodiversity loss and water stress. Avoiding feedstock sourcing from biodiversity-rich areas could halve lignocellulose residues-related biodiversity loss without significantly compromising availability. Improvements in region-specific feedstock sourcing, agricultural management and biomass utilization technologies are warranted for transitioning toward a sustainable chemical industry.

Electrophoretic deposition polymerization of diacetylenes with tunable structure.

Serial novel chiral polydiacetylenes (PDAs) are efficiently prepared at room temperature by the controllable electrophoretic deposition of diacetylenes with tunable structure as designed from easily available starting materials. The colorimetrically reversible properties of PDAs in the range between 25 and 85 °C are influenced by the different amino acid moiety in the PDAs as anticipated. The PDA containing aromatic ring is much better for the colorimetrically reversible properties, while irreversible thermochromism is displayed for the PDA with the structure of the longer methylene units in the main chain of amino acid moiety.

CAST: Learning Both Geometric and Texture Style Transfers for Effective Caricature Generation.

Given a photo of a subject, ability to generate a caricature image that captures distinct characteristics of the subject but with certain exaggeration of their prominent features is of fundamental importance to image processing and facial recognition. There are two main challenges in this task: shape exaggeration and style transfer. The former morphs and exaggerates key facial features of the subject, while the latter generates caricature images in a certain artistic style. In this paper, we propose a CAricature Style Transfer (CAST) framework for caricature generation. There are two modules in the proposed framework. The first is a geometric warping module. Different from the existing style transfer methods, we incorporate the Whitening and Coloring Transformation (WCT) in the geometric style transfer. The WCT is learned on photo and caricature landmarks or the caricature landmark space of a specific artist and is capable of transforming input photo landmarks to caricature landmarks. The second module is a texture style rendering module. We propose a new style transfer method by considering a semantic region-aligned style transfer via affinity constraint. Given a reference caricature image as the style reference, this module is capable of transferring styles between the same or similar semantic regions in caricatures and photos. Furthermore, it can transfer visual attributes of the reference caricatures (such as mouth shape and expressions) to the output caricatures. Experiments have shown desirable effects of the proposed method in transferring both the geometric and artistic texture styles of caricatures. Both qualitative and quantitative results show that the CAST framework is more effective compared than the state-of-the-art caricature generation methods.

Study on electrochemical behaviors and the reaction mechanisms of dopamine and epinephrine at the pre-anodized inlaying ultrathin carbon paste electrode with nichrome as a substrate.

In this paper, nichrome was adopted as a substrate, to fabricate the pre-anodized inlaying ultrathin carbon paste electrode (PAIUCPE). The electrochemical behaviors of dopamine (DA) and epinephrine (EP) at the electrode were investigated by cyclic voltammetry (CV). The reaction mechanisms of DA and EP have also been put forward. It was found that the electrode showed an excellent electrochemical behavior for electrode reaction of DA and EP. The cathodic potential difference of DA and EP was about 370 mV and the simultaneous determination of DA and EP was achieved based on it. The reduction peak current was proportional to the DA and EP concentrations in the range of 8.0×10(-7)-3.0×10(-4) M and 2.0×10(-6)-1.5×10(-4) M with the detection limits of 1.70×10(-7) M and 3.27×10(-7) M, respectively. Because the oxidation of ascorbic acid (AA) is an irreversible reaction at the PAIUCPE, the interferences of AA for determining DA and EP were eliminated. The method has been successfully applied to the determination of DA and EP in hydrochloride injection with satisfactory results.