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With the rising demands for energy storage in recent years, finding materials for battery production that are durable and environmentally friendly has been receiving wider attention among scientists than ever before. Among renewable energy sources, black liquor from rice husk pretreatment processes has been shown to possess huge potential for anodic electrodes in lithium-ion batteries due to their high silica content. In a similar manner, black liquor from rice straw material, which has not been widely investigated, can also be a prospective candidate with its high concentration of silica. This study, therefore, retrieved lignin-silica hybrids from black liquor originating from the rice straw pretreatment stage for lithium battery anode production. The carbonized lignin–silica material experienced an enhanced initial specific charge capacity of 1668 mAh g −1 and a stable cycling capacity at 100 cycles. Based on these achievements, the study created profound progress in valorizing black liquors to solve environmental problems as well as provided a new resource to support energy storage technology.

Black liquor released during the kraft pulping process is one of the main drawbacks in the paper and biorefinery industry due to its significant impact on the environment. Despite being employed for the recovery of lignin, a natural UV absorber, the production of high-purity lignin from black liquor required harsh conditions. Also, chitosan is an abundant polymer that can be applied in many industries due to its biodegradability and biocompatibility properties. Therefore, in this study, the production of a biodegradable film from the combination of chitosan and lignin as a UV absorber was investigated to explore its ability without any size modification. The results showed that lignin reduces the film transmittance to UV light to 0% in all samples. While the degradation temperature of chitosan/lignin film rose with the increase of lignin content, the water vapor permeability of the films containing lignin decreased due to the effect of lignin on the obtained films as a filler. The addition of lignin in the chitosan/lignin film sample further boosted the DPPH radical scavenging activity from 56.14% (LN0) to 91.31% (LN2). These materials exhibited considerable potential for preventing bacterial and fungal growth when the LN2 showed a great inhibition rate for E. Coli and C. Abicans of 80.39 and 99.77%, respectively. This study defined thoroughly the process of recycling lignin from harmful waste to create value-added material useful for application in the food industry, contributes to the advancement of converting biomass and waste into sustainable, value-added materials, enhancing resource efficiency from biomass waste, and promotes environmental preservation while reducing the reliance on plastics. Graphical Abstract

The majority 65–80% of the durian (Durio zibethinus) fruit is the shell and seed that are inedible and cause major issues in waste management. This paper, therefore, outlines the current plausible methods for treating durian biomass based on the biomass processing technologies of (1) thermochemical treatment for energy production, (2) fiber extraction through physicochemical pretreatment, (3) microbiological conversion techniques and (4) green solvent extraction of polysaccharides and phytochemicals, focusing on notable problems and suggestions toward the recalcitrant structures and high volatile matter contents of durian wastes. Within this scope, the possible value-added products with different functional properties each method are considered with high emphasis on the aspect of scaling up. From this, suitable recommendations have been made to combine the different technology or biomass sources for the most economical processing.

Rice straw is an abundant agricultural waste, especially in Asian countries, of which a large amount is still open burnt. This leads to the emission of greenhouse gases (CH 4 , N 2 O, etc.) causing huge environmental impacts and is a waste of a cellulose, lignin, and silica source, which are highly valuable compounds. In this work, nanocellulose (CNC) was produced from rice straw using chemical method, together with waste stream utilization. The acid waste from the hydrolysis and the black liquor from cellulose isolation were used to recover a hybrid material of lignin and silica (LS), which was then applied to remove methylene blue from water. CNC was prepared using acid hydrolysis presented as rod-like particles with a crystallinity of 85% and a diameter of 20–30 nm in width and 200–400 nm in length, which was of high quality and suitable for further applications. The LS hybrid performed well in adsorbing methylene blue in aqueous solution, with the trapping capacity of 68 mg/g. Subsequently, a pilot-scale integrated process to produce CNC and LS hybrid was proposed to reduce the chemical and water usage in treating waste stream and move towards the “zero-waste” concept and circular economy principle. The process is a possible solution for facile and feasible large-scale transformation of rice straw into value-added products. Graphical abstract

Single-cell transcriptomics can provide quantitative molecular signatures for large, unbiased samples of the diverse cell types in the brain 1 – 3 . With the proliferation of multi-omics datasets, a major challenge is to validate and integrate results into a biological understanding of cell-type organization. Here we generated transcriptomes and epigenomes from more than 500,000 individual cells in the mouse primary motor cortex, a structure that has an evolutionarily conserved role in locomotion. We developed computational and statistical methods to integrate multimodal data and quantitatively validate cell-type reproducibility. The resulting reference atlas—containing over 56 neuronal cell types that are highly replicable across analysis methods, sequencing technologies and modalities—is a comprehensive molecular and genomic account of the diverse neuronal and non-neuronal cell types in the mouse primary motor cortex. The atlas includes a population of excitatory neurons that resemble pyramidal cells in layer 4 in other cortical regions 4 . We further discovered thousands of concordant marker genes and gene regulatory elements for these cell types. Our results highlight the complex molecular regulation of cell types in the brain and will directly enable the design of reagents to target specific cell types in the mouse primary motor cortex for functional analysis. The authors describe an integrated atlas of the diverse cell types in the mouse primary motor cortex.