Cyclo.Plas 2: A Dual Focus Development as Alternative Materials to Plastic by Upcycling Fish Scale Waste Components

Using the biomimicry of fish scale composition, calcium salts and collagen, Cyclo.Plas 2 (CP2) is a dual-focus materials development addressing plastic degradability and waste accumulation. The biomineralisation concept was applied to valorise 3D-printed polylactic acid (PLA) waste with a fish scale-inspired mineral, hydroxyapatite (HAp), to form composites. It was found that the composites exhibited greater flexural strength compared to 3D-printed PLA waste and had faster degradation in hydrolysis, home composting and acidic environments. Following the sclerotisation concept, the physicochemical properties of intact collagenous matrix of fish scale waste were enhanced to form a thin, plastic-like material. These thin films were comparable to low-density polyethylene (LDPE), with high transparency and shrinkage performance. Samples biodegraded after 8 weeks with no phytotoxicity and enhanced plant growth. Trials showed improved thermal stability and water resistance, yet the samples degraded with low total dissolved solids. Cyclo.Plas 2 serves as a preventative and practical disposal solution to promoting a circular economy through home composting.

Stablization of Clayey Soil Via Lime and Plastic Fibre for Advanced Foundation Proposition.

Soil is the most widely used and basic material for civil engineering. The soil is used for houses, walls, bridges and roads. The Earth provides various types of soil and varies in its properties, scale, composition and textures. The earth's soil is a natural fine grain rock that contains one or more minerals from Earth, which have metal oxides and traces of organic matter. Based on the structure, the clay has quite a range of characteristics. It's slow, and difficult to accelerate, and used for something small. This study is aimed at achieving soil engineering properties for subgrade. In the subgrade construction, waste plastic bottles are used from waste disposal and the application of raw waste soil reinforcement materials and tried to stabilize the clay soil in different strong lime percentages (2 percent, 4 percent, 6 percent, 8 percent, 10 percent, and 12 percent). Testing of the strength of the clay earth, like Maximum Dry Density (MDD) and California Bearing (CBR) was done at different plastic strip percentages. In order to measure improvements in technologies, the clay floor swelling index and the microscopic examination also are performed. Keywords: Clay soil, Lime, Plastic, fiber material.

On the occurrence of Persian Gulf Sea Snake, Hydrophis lapemoides (Gray, 1849) (Reptilia, Squamata, Elapidae, Hydrophiinae), along the coast of Bangladesh

We provide the first evidence of the presence of the Persian Gulf Sea Snake, Hydrophis lapemoides (Gray, 1849), along the coast of Bangladesh. This species was assumed to exist in there, but neither specimens nor confirmed observations exist until now. We document here the first confirmed record of H. lapemoides based on a freshly collected and taxonomically verified specimen from coastal Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi specimen had the following diagnostic characters: 55 black bands, a dorsal scale composition of 35:51:43, 342 ventrals, one pre-ocular, two post-oculars, 2+3 temporals, 8 supralabials (II largest and contact prefrontals; III–IV contact orbit) and 8 infralabials (I–IV contact genials).

Free trade and the environment – evidence from Chinese cities

This paper studies the impact of trade openness and the proportion of exporters on environmental quality through the scale, composition and technique effects from 1998 to 2007 using firm- and city-level data for 287 Chinese cities. Our results reveal that, on average, trade openness has a detrimental impact on the environment in Chinese cities, but this impact remains heterogeneous across regions. A higher proportion of exporters improves the environment in central and eastern cities while generating nevertheless more pollution in western cities. As regards the sector-specific impact, we find that the higher proportion of exporters in the mining and less-polluting manufacturing sectors in eastern cities diminishes the emissions of particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5). Our finding also suggests that a pollution haven effect emerges in China at the city level. Finally, our results confirm the presence of an environmental Kuznets curve effect for the PM2.5 pollutant across Chinese cities.

Does Trade Openness Transfer Pollution across Borders: An Experience of Pakistan

The study aims to empirically explore the link between trade openness and emission level in Pakistan by using Johansson co integration technique during the period from1972 to 2019. The empirical strategy of the study progressively incorporates models from zero interaction terms to complete interaction terms for analyzing the relationship between trade openness and emission level in the presence of scale, composition and technique effect. The variable of the trade openness appeared in all the models with negative sign except in scale effect model. It means technique effect outweighs the composition and scale effect in Pakistan which ultimately makes decreasing impact of trade on pollution. The scale effect results in higher emissions in Pakistan. Similarly, composition effect also bears positive sign showing that higher capital labor ratio in Pakistan will increase pollution because capital goods are said to be pollution intensive goods.

Characterization and Properties of Polyurea Elastomer Used as Blast Mitigation Agent

The blast that caused from terrorist activities, explosion and weapons effect on not only the human life, but also the architectural structure. The development of materials used to protect them is needed. Polyurea is a one type of elastomer that derive from the reaction product of an isocyanate component and a synthetic resin blend component through step-growth polymerization. It is revealed that polyurea is a new entrant in the field of elastomer has received enormous attention in view of its excellent blast mitigation properties and ballistic protection. In this work, the microstructure and elemental composition of polyurea samples are studied using scanning electron microscope coupled with energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer (SEM-EDS). The main composition consisted of carbon, oxygen and silica approximately 63-75, 17-29, and 0.15-1.69 wt%, respectively. Sulfur and chlorine present as the chain extender. Titanium is added to modify its structure. Other elements present as the additives, fillers and pigments. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is conducted to confirm nano-scale composition. Dynamic mechanical, thermal and tensile properties are also studied. It is shown that the modulus and loss factor increase as the increasing of the frequency and temperature. The elongation capacity is greater than 100%. Infrared spectroscopy based on synchrotron radiation (SR IR) shows the various constituents of the composition in the form of the functional groups along with the wave number.

Multi-Scale Anomaly Detection on Attributed Networks

Many social and economic systems can be represented as attributed networks encoding the relations between entities who are themselves described by different node attributes. Finding anomalies in these systems is crucial for detecting abuses such as credit card frauds, web spams or network intrusions. Intuitively, anomalous nodes are defined as nodes whose attributes differ starkly from the attributes of a certain set of nodes of reference, called the context of the anomaly. While some methods have proposed to spot anomalies locally, globally or within a community context, the problem remain challenging due to the multi-scale composition of real networks and the heterogeneity of node metadata. Here, we propose a principled way to uncover outlier nodes simultaneously with the context with respect to which they are anomalous, at all relevant scales of the network. We characterize anomalous nodes in terms of the concentration retained for each node after smoothing specific signals localized on the vertices of the graph. Besides, we introduce a graph signal processing formulation of the Markov stability framework used in community detection, in order to find the context of anomalies. The performance of our method is assessed on synthetic and real-world attributed networks and shows superior results concerning state of the art algorithms. Finally, we show the scalability of our approach in large networks employing Chebychev polynomial approximations.

Import Liberalization of Intermediates and Environment: Empirical Evidence from Chinese Manufacturing

This paper investigates how the import liberalization of intermediates affects firm-level pollution emissions. We divide the impact of freer import of intermediates on pollution emissions into induced scale, composition and technique effects and then develop interaction terms to examine these effects. Relying on a panel of plant-level data from China manufacturing sector for the period 2001 to 2007, we find freer import of intermediate inputs is conducive to pollution reductions at the plant level, lowering pollution via induced technique and composition effects and, in turn, increasing emission through induced scale effect. In summary, import liberalization of intermediate inputs can contribute to the better environmental performance of China manufacturing sector.