Polyaniline-Coated Porous Vanadium Nitride Microrods for Enhanced Performance of a Lithium-Sulfur Battery.

To solve the slow kinetics of polysulfide conversion reaction in Li-S battery, many transition metal nitrides were developed for sulfur hosts. Herein, novel polyaniline-coated porous vanadium nitride (VN) microrods were synthesized via a calcination, washing and polyaniline-coating process, which served as sulfur host for Li-S battery exhibited high electrochemical performance. The porous VN microrods with high specific surface area provided enough interspace to overcome the volume change of the cathode. The outer layer of polyaniline as a conductive shell enhanced the cathode conductivity, effectively blocked the shuttle effect of polysulfides, thus improving the cycling capacity of Li-S battery. The cathode exhibited an initial capacity of 1007 mAh g-1 at 0.5 A g-1, and the reversible capacity remained at 735 mAh g-1 over 150 cycles.

Ca(ClO)2 pretreatment enhancing suspended solids removal through flocculation from digested dairy wastewater and its mechanisms.

Intensive animal farming produces large volume of digested liquid, and overdose application often causes the pollution of surface water and groundwater. Therefore, post-treatment is very necessary for the discharging of surplus digested liquid, but the removal of high concentrations of suspended solids (SS) in the digested liquid is a challenge. In this study, the effect of Ca(ClO)2 pretreatment on SS flocculation removal of digested dairy wastewater was investigated. The results showed that, without Ca(ClO)2 pretreatment, the flocculation by polyacrylamide (PAM), polyferric sulfate (PFS) or polymeric aluminum chloride (PAC) only removed 42.6 %-50.4 % SS from anaerobic digested liquid. With the combination of Ca(ClO)2 pretreatment and PAC flocculation together, the SS removal efficiency can reach 80 %. The total chemical oxygen demand (TCOD) removal had a similar trend with SS removal, but soluble chemical oxygen demand (SCOD) removal was less affected by the pretreatment and flocculation. More than 75 % of orthophosphate (SRP) and total soluble phosphorus (TSP) was removed after Ca(ClO)2 pretreatment and flocculation with PFS or PAC. Ca(ClO)2 pretreatment also effectively inactivated fecal bacteria. The mechanisms of Ca(ClO)2 pretreatment enhancing SS flocculation removal were further elucidated. The SS removal was the action of ClO- and Ca2+ together. The function of ClO- was to break down suspended particles, change the surface, and decrease the absolute Zeta potential, while the function of Ca2+ was to form precipitation. This result indicates that Ca(ClO)2 pretreatment can effectively enhance the SS flocculation removal of anaerobic digested liquid.

Tourism Experience and Construction of Personalized Smart Tourism Program Under Tourist Psychology.

The present work aims to boost tourism development in China, grasp the psychology of tourists at any time, and provide personalized tourist services. The research object is the tourism industry in Macau. In particular, tourists' experiences are comprehensively analyzed in terms of dining, living, traveling, sightseeing, shopping, and entertaining as per their psychological changes using approaches including big data analysis, literature analysis, and field investigation. In this case, a model of tourism experience formation path is summarized, and a smart travel solution is proposed based on psychological experience. In the end, specific and feasible suggestions are put forward for the Macau tourism industry. Results demonstrate that the psychology-based smart travel solution exerts a significant impact on tourists' tourism experience. Specifically, the weight of secular tourism experience is 0.523, the weight of aesthetic tourism experience is 0.356, and the weight of stimulating tourism experience is 0.121. Tourists prefer travel destinations with excellent urban security and scenic authenticity. They give the two indexes comprehensive scores of 75.14 points and 73.12 points, respectively. The proposed smart travel solution can grasp the psychology of tourists and enhance their tourism experiences. It has strong practical and guiding significances, which can promote constructing smart travel services in Macau and enhancing tourism experiences.

B-cell receptor-associated protein 31 promotes migration and invasion in ovarian cancer cells.

B cell receptor associated protein 31 (BAP31) is a member of the B cell receptor that functions as a transporter for numerous types of newly formed proteins from the endoplasmic reticulum to the Golgi apparatus. Previous studies found that that BAP31 serves an important role in the pathogenesis of malignancy but its specific effect on ovarian cancer is not clear. The present study aimed to investigate whether BAP31 affects ovarian cancer and its underlying mechanism. In the present study, ovarian cancer tissue, human ovarian normal epithelial cell line IOSE80 and five ovarian cancer cell lines (A2780, Hey-T30, COC1, SKOV3 and OVCAR3) underwent reverse transcription-quantitative PCR, western blotting, Cell Counting Kit-8, Transwell and co-immunoprecipitation (Co-IP) assay and transcriptome sequencing. Previous studies showed that compared with healthy tissues, the expression level of BAP31 protein was found to be significantly higher in various types of cancer tissues, implying that BAP31 may serve an important role in the pathogenesis of cancer. The present study found that BAP31 expression was upregulated in five ovarian cancer cell lines and ovarian cancer tissue, such that BAP31 knockdown [performed using two short hairpin (sh)RNA plasmids] decreased proliferation, invasion and migration. In addition, BAP31 knockdown was found to downregulate the expression of N-cadherin and upregulate the expression of E-cadherin on transcriptional level by controlling the nuclear aggregation of TWIST1, a transcriptional regulator of N-cadherin and E-cadherin. There was no interaction between BAP31 and E-cadherin or N-cadherin using Co-IP detection, while BAP31, E-cadherin and N-cadherin interacted with TWIST1 protein. E-cadherin and N-cadherin expression levels recovered when TWIST1 was overexpressed in the shBCAP31 cells. These results suggest that BAP31 can regulate the migration and invasion of ovarian cancer cells through the epithelial-mesenchymal transition pathway at the transcriptional level, which may be beneficial for the identification of potentially novel targets for ovarian cancer therapy.