Integrated assessment of the pollution and risk of heavy metals in soils near chemical industry parks along the middle Yangtze River.

Industrialization in riparian areas of critical rivers has caused significant environmental and health impacts. Taking eight industrial parks along the middle Yangtze River as examples, this study proposes a multiple-criteria approach to investigate soil heavy metal pollution and associated ecological and health risks posed by industrial activities. Aiming at seven heavy metals, the results show that nickel (Ni), cadmium (Cd), and copper (Cu) exhibited the most significant accumulation above background levels. The comprehensive findings from Pearson correlation analysis, cluster analysis, principal component analysis, and industrial investigation uncover the primary sources of Cd, arsenic (As), mercury (Hg), and lead (Pb) to be chemical processing, while Ni and chromium (Cr) are predominantly derived from mechanical and electrical equipment manufacturing. In contrast, Cu exhibits a broad range of origins across various industrial processes. Soil heavy metals can cause serious ecological and carcinogenic health risks, of which Cd and Hg contribute to >70 % of the total ecological risk, and As contributes over 80 % of the total health risk. This study highlights the importance of employing multiple mathematical and statistical models in determining and evaluating environmental hazards, and may aid in planning the environmental remediation engineering and optimizing the industry standards.

Copper-Catalyzed Electrochemical Selective Bromination of 8-Aminoquinoline Amide Using NH4Br as the Brominating Reagent.

A simple and mild protocol for copper-catalyzed bromination of quinoline at the C5 site of quinoline by anodic oxidation was developed, affording the desired remote C-H activation products with isolated yields of up to about 90%. The reaction proceeds with low-cost NH4Br and shows mild and green conditions (electricity as a green oxidant; NH3 and H2 as byproducts). At the same time, a gram-scale bromination reaction was also successfully fulfilled, showing its potential applicable value in organic synthesis. Moreover, the CV chart further demonstrated the proposed catalytic cycle.

Asymmetric Organocatalysis Combined with Palladium Catalysis: Synergistic Effect on Enantioselective Mannich/α-Allylation Sequential Reactions of Pyrazolones in Constructing Vicinal Quaternary Stereocenters.

In this letter, an efficient one-pot asymmetric sequential reaction is achieved by organo/transition metal relay catalysis in constructing two consecutive C-C bonds, which involves enantioselective amino squaramide catalytic Mannich-type addition of pyrazolones to isatin-derived ketimines and a subsequent palladium catalyzed diastereoselective allylic alkylation of pyrazolones with allylic acetates. An array of novel pyrazolone-aminooxindole-propylene structural motifs are obtained in a high level of yield and with excellent enantio- and diastereoselectivity (up to 95% yield, >20:1 dr, >99% ee). This methodology features the formation of vicinal quarternary carbon-stereocenters, and the second all-carbon tetrasubstituted stereogenic center is induced by joint action of the achiral palladium catalysis and the chiral environment generated from the Mannich step. Moreover, the usefulness of this methodology is highlighted by converting the allylic product into the carbonyl compound.

Three-dimensional near-field microwave holography for tissue imaging.

This paper reports the progress toward a fast and reliable microwave imaging setup for tissue imaging exploiting near-field holographic reconstruction. The setup consists of two wideband TEM horn antennas aligned along each other's boresight and performing a rectangular aperture raster scan. The tissue sensing is performed without coupling liquids. At each scanning position, wideband data is acquired. Then, novel holographic imaging algorithms are implemented to provide three-dimensional images of the inspected domain. In these new algorithms, the required incident field and Green's function are obtained from numerical simulations. They replace the plane (or spherical) wave assumption in the previous holographic methods and enable accurate near-field imaging results. Here, we prove that both the incident field and Green's function can be obtained from a single numerical simulation. This eliminates the need for optimization-based deblurring which was previously employed to remove the effect of realistic non-point-wise antennas.