Domestic wastewater treatment by constructed wetlands enhanced with bioremediating rhizobacteria.

Constructed wetlands (CWs) offer several advantages for treating waters; however, the successful application of these systems remains a challenge. Practical solutions to pollution through CWs remain incipient because wetlands are still studied as "black boxes"; further studies are required regarding the involvement of rhizosphere bacteria in the removal of pollutants. This research focused on increasing the performance of CWs treatment systems for the removal of inorganic and organic pollutants from domestic wastewater, by the application of native bioremediating rhizobacteria. A bacterial consortium (CAD/1S) was designed with four rhizobacteria strains isolated from Typha domingensis plants of natural wetlands. Each individual strain was identified by 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene sequencing. This consortium removed organic matter, ammonium, and phosphate with percentages over 70% from model wastewater. The evaluation of abiotic and biotic factors' influence on pollutant removal indicated the best conditions to remove pollutants: a neutral pH, a 72-h contact time, and an inoculum from single growth of each strain. The subsequent bioaugmentation with the consortium of CWs at laboratory scale allowed 100%, greater than 70 and 55% removal of organic matter, ammonium, and phosphate, respectively. The set of results allowed the proposal of a new strategy for the improvement of CWs technology for the treatment of domestic wastewater pollutants.

Basic color terms use by aged observers: lens aging and perceptual compensation.

Basic Color Terms (BCTs) use by aged people (normal and tritanomalous) was analysed on the basis of the results provided by two visual search tasks. One task (mapping) required participants to select every stimulus that could be included in a specific BCT. Another task (best representative) required participants to select the stimulus that most accurately identified a BCT. Both tasks' results were used for two different goals. First (descriptive level), to specify the main differences between aged and young people in their use of BCTs (dimensions provided by multidimensional scaling, confusions between specific pairs of BCTs). Second (explicative level), to compare the accuracy of three models for predicting aged people's performance. Model A (filtering without compensation) assumed that aged people must use BCTs as young people do when responding to stimuli similar to the ones produced by lens aging. On the contrary, model B (filtering with compensation) assumed that lens aging effects were partially compensated by a von Kries-type mechanism (white normalisation). Finally, model C (tritan lines) assumed that ocular aging only influences S cone responses (tritan responses). Results showed that model B was the most accurate with the percentage of explained variance over 90% for both aged groups.