高分子重金属絮凝剂SSXA对Cu2+的捕集性能研究

以淀粉-丙烯酰胺接枝共聚物、NaOH、CS2为原料,在一定条件下合成了一种新型高分子重金属絮凝剂--淀粉基黄原酸酯-丙烯酰胺接枝共聚物.研究了该絮凝剂的除Cu2 、去浊机理,并对硫酸铝浓度、初始Cu2 浓度、pH值、浊度等影响其除铜及去浊效能的因素作了考察.实验结果表明:(1)该絮凝剂对Cu2 有很好的捕集功能,但需要与硫酸铝复配以提高其沉降性能,适合复配使用.Al3 与初始Cu2 的体积摩尔浓度比值为0.3较为适宜,此时Cu2 去除率大于98%;(2)pH值对复配体系的除Cu2 、去浊效果影响不大;(3)Cu2 和致浊物质共存时,会互相促进彼此的去除.对初始Cu2 浓度为25 mg·L-1、浊度为5～300NTU的水样,处理后出水Cu2 浓度小于0.5mg·L-1、浊度小于3NTU.     

同时产甲烷反硝化与硝化串联工艺处理淀粉废水

采用UASB作为同时产甲烷反硝化反应器、AUSB作为好氧硝化反应器的串联工艺处理实际淀粉废水.结果表明:①将好氧反应器的出水硝化液按1:1～3:1的回流比回流到UASB反应器,可在其中实现同时产甲烷反硝化,进水有机(以COD计)负荷约为11kg·m-3·d-1时,COD去除率为95%;NO-3-N负荷可达0.48 kg·m-3·d-1,NO-3-N去除率高达100%.②UASB反应器的出水进入AUSB反应器,其有机负荷为0.5～2 5 kg·m-3·d-1,去除率为63%～91%;氨氮负荷为0.2～0.9 kg·m-3·d-1,去除率在98.8%以上.③串联工艺在回流比为1:1、2:1、3:1下,COD去除率分别为98.7%、98.3%、99.3%,总氮去除率分别为72.9%、76.3%、82.9%.④随着UASB反应器内进水硝酸盐负荷的增加,其颗粒污泥与接种污泥相比,粒径明显增加,平均密度先增加后减小,最大比产甲烷活性先降低,而后有较大提高.     

黄姜皂素清洁生产工艺试验研究

传统皂素生产工艺在皂素生产过程中,不仅造成了优质淀粉资源的巨大浪费,而且还造成环境污染及其所带来的高昂的污染治理费用。采用水洗淀粉法,即从皂素生产的源头把淀粉从黄姜中分离出来。这种工艺不但回收了淀粉,提高了皂素的收率,淀粉回收率平均约为46.3%,皂素收率提高了1.1%,而且还降低了皂素废水的处理难度,末端废水COD从原来的33615mg/L降为12285mg/L。该工艺简单、投资费用少,在实际生产中有较好的应用前景。     

Alcohol-related deaths among young passengers: An analysis of national alcohol-related fatal crashes

Introduction: There is consensus that riding with an impaired driver (RWI) constitutes a major threat to public health. The aim of this study was to characterize the factors contributing to the motor-vehicle deaths of 15–20 year-old (y/o) passengers that RWI with a peer. Method: Secondary analyses of the 2010–2018 Fatality Analysis Reporting System. 5,673 passengers aged 15–20 y/o killed while riding in passenger cars with a driver aged 21 or older, 3,542 of these drivers also aged 15–20 y/o. Analyses were conducted between October 2019 and December 2020. Results: Sixty-three percent of the young passengers were killed while riding with a driver 15–20 y/o. Of these drivers, 26.8% had a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) >0.00 g/dL and 77.1% had a BAC ≥0.08 g/dL. Compared with those occurring during the day on weekdays, fatalities of young passengers who RWI with a peer driver with a BAC ≥ 0.08 g/dL often occurred on weekend nights (OR = 8.2) and weekday nights (OR = 5.2), and when the passenger and driver were both male (OR = 1.8). Race/ethnicity was not a significant contributor to RWI fatalities. Conclusions: Most 15–20 y/o RWI fatalities occurred on weekends, at night, when the driver was a young peer with a high BAC, and the passenger and driver were male. The high prevalence of fatalities in these high-risk situations suggests that young driver-passenger dynamics may contribute to alcohol-related fatalities. Practical Applications: To curb RWI fatalities among underage passengers, countermeasures should focus not only on underage drinking drivers and riders, but also on drinking drivers of all ages. Prevention should increase focus on situations in which both the young passenger and young driver are males.     

Hydrogen inhibition in wet dust removal systems by using L-aspartic: A feasible way of hydrogen explosion control measures

Alloy dust generated from automobile wheel hub grinding, after entering the wet dust collector, will react with water to produce hydrogen, thus exposing the entire ventilation and dust removal system to potential hydrogen explosion. In this paper, the inhibition mechanism and kinetic characteristics of different concentrations of L-Aspartic acid (L-Asp) on the reaction of Al_0.9Mg_0.1 alloy with water were studied with respect to adsorption morphology, chemical kinetic modeling and molecular dynamics (MD), using L-Asp as the environmentally-safe hydrogen inhibitor. The results show that within a given temperature interval, the hydrogen production rate of Al_0.9Mg_0.1 alloy dust decreases with increasing L-Asp concentration. When the L-Asp concentration exceeds 1.0g/L, the hydrogen evolution rate is almost zero. The calculated results of chemical kinetics agree with the Langmuir adsorption model, confirming that L-Asp is an ideal monolayer physical adsorption system on the surface of alloy particles. The FTIR and MD simulation results show that –NH₂ and –COOH groups in L-Asp molecules contribute greatly to the adsorption. The research results of this paper can help fundamentally avoid hydrogen generation in wet dust collectors and guarantee intrinsic safety.     

Estimating non-native plant richness with a species-accumulation model along roads

Monitoring non-native plant richness is important for biodiversity conservation and scientific research. The species-area model (SA model) has been used frequently to estimate the total species richness within a region. However, the conventional SA model may not provide robust estimations of non-native plant richness because the ecological processes associated with the accumulation of exotic and native plants may differ. Because roads strongly dictate the distributions of exotic plants, we propose a species-accumulation model along roads (SR model), rather than an SA model, to estimate the non-native plant richness within a region. Using 270 simulated data sets, we compared the differences in performance between the SR and SA models. A decision tree based on prediction accuracy was created to guide model application, which was validated using field data from 3 national nature reserves in 3 different provinces in China. The SR model significantly outperformed the SA model when non-native species were restricted to the roadsides and the proportion of uncommon exotic species was small. More importantly, the SR model accurately estimated the non-native plant richness in all field sites with an error of <1 species per site. We believe our new model meets the practical need to efficiently and robustly estimate non-native plant richness, which may facilitate effective biodiversity conservations and promote research on non-native plant invasion and vegetation dynamics.     

Linguistic diversity and conservation opportunities at UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Africa

Africa contains much of Earth's biological and cultural–linguistic diversity, but conserving this diversity is enormously challenging amid widespread poverty, expanding development, social unrest, and rapidly growing human population. We examined UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Natural World Heritage Sites (WHSs) on continental Africa and nearby islands—48 protected areas containing globally important natural or combined natural and cultural resources—to gauge the potential for enlisting Indigenous peoples in their conservation. We used geographic information system technology to identify instances where Natural WHSs co-occur with Indigenous languages, a key indicator of cultural diversity. And, we compared the geographic ranges for 4 taxa and selected freshwater species with occurrence of all Indigenous languages within Natural WHSs and subsections of WHSs covered by the geographic extent of Indigenous languages to measure the correlation between linguistic and biological diversity. Results indicated that 147 languages shared at least part of their geographic extent with Natural WHSs. Instances of co-occurrence where a WHS, a language, or both were endangered marked localities particularly deserving conservation attention. We examined co-occurrence of all languages and all species, all languages and endangered species, and endangered languages and endangered species and found a correlation between linguistic and biological diversity that may indicate fundamental links between these very different measures of diversity. Considering only endangered species or endangered languages and species reduced that correlation, although considerable co-occurrence persisted. Shared governance of government-designated reserves is applicable for natural WHSs because it capitalizes on the apparent connection between culture and nature. Natural WHSs in Africa containing speakers of Indigenous languages present opportunities to conserve both nature and culture in highly visible settings where maintaining natural systems may rely on functioning Indigenous cultural systems and vice versa.     

Conserving the abundance of nonthreatened species

Human modification of the environment is driving declines in population size and distributional extent of much of the world's biota. These declines extend to many of the most abundant and widespread species, for which proportionally small declines can result in the loss of vast numbers of individuals, biomass, and interactions. These losses could have major localized effects on ecological and cultural processes and services without elevating a species’ global extinction risk. Although most conservation effort is directed at species threatened with extinction in the very near term, the value of retaining abundance regardless of global extinction risk is justifiable based on many biodiversity or ecosystem service metrics, including cultural services, at scales from local to global. The challenges of identifying conservation priorities for widespread and abundant species include quantifying the effects of species’ abundance on services and understanding how these effects are realized as populations decline. Negative effects of population declines may be disconnected from the threat processes driving declines because of species movements and environment flows (e.g., hydrology). Conservation prioritization for these species shares greater similarity with invasive species risk assessments than extinction risk assessments because of the importance of local context and per capita effects of abundance on other species. Because conservation priorities usually focus on preventing the extinction of threatened species, the rationale and objectives for incorporating declines of nonthreatened species must be clearly articulated, going beyond extinction risk to encompass the range of likely harmful effects (e.g., secondary extinctions, loss of ecosystem services) if declines persist or are not reversed. Research should focus on characterizing the effects of local declines in species that are not threatened globally across a range of ecosystem services and quantifying the spatial distribution of these effects through the distribution of abundance. The case for conserving abundance in nonthreatened species can be made most powerfully when the costs of losing this abundance are better understood.     

Wildlife impacts and vulnerable livelihoods in a transfrontier conservation landscape

Interactions between humans and wildlife resulting in negative impacts are among the most pressing conservation challenges globally. In regions of smallholder livestock and crop production, interactions with wildlife can compromise human well-being and motivate negative sentiment and retaliation toward wildlife, undermining conservation goals. Although impacts may be unavoidable when human and wildlife land use overlap, scant large-scale human data exist quantifying the direct costs of wildlife to livelihoods. In a landscape of global importance for wildlife conservation in southern Africa, we quantified costs for people living with wildlife through a fundamental measure of human well-being, food security, and we tested whether existing livelihood strategies buffer certain households against crop depredation by wildlife, predominantly elephants. To do this, we estimated Bayesian multilevel statistical models based on multicounty household data (n = 711) and interpreted model results in the context of spatial data from participatory land-use mapping. Reported crop depredation by wildlife was widespread. Over half of the sample households were affected and household food security was reduced significantly (odds ratio 0.37 [0.22, 0.63]). The most food insecure households relied on gathered food sources and welfare programs. In the event of crop depredation by wildlife, these 2 livelihood sources buffered or reduced harmful effects of depredation. The presence of buffering strategies suggests a targeted compensation strategy could benefit the region's most vulnerable people. Such strategies should be combined with dynamic and spatially explicit land-use planning that may reduce the frequency of negative human–wildlife impacts. Quantifying and mitigating the human costs from wildlife are necessary steps in working toward human–wildlife coexistence.     

Combining chemical sequential extractions with 3D fluorescence spectroscopy to characterize sludge organic matter

The design and management of anaerobic digestion of sewage sludge (SS) require a relevant characterisation of the sludge organic matter (OM). Methods currently used are time-consuming and often insufficiently informative. A new method combining chemical sequential extractions (CSE) with 3D fluorescence spectroscopy was developed to provide a relevant SS characterisation to assess both OM bioaccessibility and complexity which govern SS biodegradability. CSE fractionates the sludge OM into 5 compartments of decreasing accessibility. First applied on three SS samples with different OM stability, fractionation profiles obtained were in accordance with the latter. 3D fluorescence spectroscopy revealed that the bioaccessible compartments were mainly constituted of simple and easily biodegradable OM while the unaccessible ones were largely made of complex and refractory OM. Then, primary, secondary and anaerobically digested sludge with different biodegradabilities were tested. Complexity revealed by 3D fluorescence spectroscopy was linked with biodegradability and chemical accessibility was correlated with sludge bioaccessibility.