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Over the years, heavy metal pollution has become a very serious environmental problem worldwide. Even though anthropogenic sources are believed to be the major cause of heavy metal pollution, they can also be introduced into the environment from natural geogenic sources. Heavy metals, because of their toxicity and carcinogenicity, are considered to be the most harmful contaminants of groundwater as well as surface water, a serious threat to both human and aquatic life. Nanomaterials due to their size and higher surface area to volume ratio show some unique properties compared to their bulk counterpart and have drawn significant attention of the scientific community in the last few decades. This large surface area can make these materials as effective adsorbents in pollution remediation studies. In this review, an attempt has been made to focus on the applicability of different types of nanomaterials, such as clay-nanocomposites, metal oxide-based nanomaterials, carbon nanotubes, and various polymeric nanocomposites as adsorbents for removal of variety of heavy metals, such as As, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Hg, Mn, Ni, Pb, Sn, U, V, and Zn, from water as reported during the last few years. This work tries to analyze the metal–nanomaterial interactions, the mechanism of adsorption, the adsorption capacities of the nanomaterials, and the kinetics of adsorption under various experimental conditions. The review brings forward the relation between the physicochemical properties of the nanomaterials and heavy metal adsorption on them.

When characterizing the processes that shape ecosystems, ecologists increasingly use the unique perspective offered by repeat observations of remotely sensed imagery. However, the concept of change embodied in much of the traditional remote-sensing literature was primarily limited to capturing large or extreme changes occurring in natural systems, omitting many more subtle processes of interest to ecologists. Recent technical advances have led to a fundamental shift toward an ecological view of change. Although this conceptual shift began with coarser-scale global imagery, it has now reached users of Landsat imagery, since these datasets have temporal and spatial characteristics appropriate to many ecological questions. We argue that this ecologically relevant perspective of change allows the novel characterization of important dynamic processes, including disturbances, long-term trends, cyclical functions, and feedbacks, and that these improvements are already facilitating our understanding of critical driving forces, such as climate change, ecological interactions, and economic pressures.

The human brain goes through numerous cognitive states, most of these being hidden or implicit while performing a task, and understanding them is of great practical importance. However, identifying internal mental states is quite challenging as these states are difficult to label, usually short-lived, and generally, overlap with other tasks. One such problem pertains to bistable perception, which we consider to consist of two internal mental states, namely, transition and maintenance. The transition state is short-lived and represents a change in perception while the maintenance state is comparatively longer and represents a stable perception. In this study, we proposed a novel approach for characterizing the duration of transition and maintenance states and classified them from the neuromagnetic brain responses. Participants were presented with various types of ambiguous visual stimuli on which they indicated the moments of perceptual switches, while their magnetoencephalogram (MEG) data were recorded. We extracted different spatio-temporal features based on wavelet transform, and classified transition and maintenance states on a trial-by-trial basis. We obtained a classification accuracy of 79.58% and 78.40% using SVM and ANN classifiers, respectively. Next, we investigated the temporal fluctuations of these internal mental representations as captured by our classifier model and found that the accuracy showed a decreasing trend as the maintenance state was moved towards the next transition state. Further, to identify the neural sources corresponding to these internal mental states, we performed source analysis on MEG signals. We observed the involvement of sources from the parietal lobe, occipital lobe, and cerebellum in distinguishing transition and maintenance states. Cross-conditional classification analysis established generalization potential of wavelet features. Altogether, this study presents an automatic classification of endogenous mental states involved in bistable perception by establishing brain-behavior relationships at the single-trial level.

Graphene and graphene oxide (GO) are used for adsorbing toxic heavy metal ions, but they have disadvantages like aggregation of graphene layers due to strong π–π interactions and difficulty in separation. Thus, adsorption efficiency of bare graphene and GO is quite low. Surface modification techniques have improved GO’s adsorption capacity. Various GO-based materials, including chemically modified functionalized GO, non-metal- and metal-based GO composites, metal oxide-based GO and GO-organic compound composites, have been designed for wastewater decontamination. In this review article, the chemistry of graphene-based composites reported by various group of workers since last ten years is reviewed. The synthesis processes, characterizations of prepared materials and application as scavengers or adsorbents were critically analysed. The limitations and the future directions are also highlighted. Graphical abstract

The coatomer complex has been implicated in cancer progression; however, a comprehensive pan-cancer analysis is lacking. Therefore, it is essential to identify the critical roles and essentiality of coatomer genes across pan-cancer. We systematically profiled the genetic alterations, expression patterns, prognostic relevance, and functional dependencies of all coatomer subunits across multiple cancers using more than 10,000 tumor samples from The Cancer Genome Atlas, complemented by functional perturbation data from CRISPR (n = 1178) and RNAi (n = 707) screens in DepMap. Functional validation was also performed to identify the essentiality of selectively essential coatomer genes in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Gene amplification, most notably of COPB2, was the most frequent alteration and was associated with poor survival in bladder and esophageal cancers. Mutations in COPA and SEC31A also demonstrated prognostic significance in endometrial carcinoma. Expression analyses revealed broad upregulation of coatomer genes across cancer types, with COPG1 and COPB1 emerging as strong risk-associated genes (HR > 2). Integrative functional dependency analyses identified COPG1 as selectively essential in multiple cancers, and its loss was associated with increased drug sensitivity. Functional validation in hepatocellular carcinoma revealed that COPG1 knockdown impaired malignant phenotypes and reduced tumorigenicity in vivo. Mechanistically, COPG1 depletion induced Golgi disruption and ER stress, increased ROS production, and suppressed PI3K–AKT signaling, thereby sensitizing cells to sorafenib and doxorubicin. Collectively, this pan-cancer analysis reveals the context-dependent roles of coatomer subunits and identifies COPG1 as a novel oncogenic driver and potential therapeutic target in HCC, mediating chemoresistance through redox modulation and PI3K–AKT pathway inhibition.

When characterizing the processes that shape ecosystems, ecologists increasingly use the unique perspective offered by repeat observations of remotely sensed imagery. However, the concept of change embodied in much of the traditional remote‐sensing literature was primarily limited to capturing large or extreme changes occurring in natural systems, omitting many more subtle processes of interest to ecologists. Recent technical advances have led to a fundamental shift toward an ecological view of change. Although this conceptual shift began with coarser‐scale global imagery, it has now reached users of Landsat imagery, since these datasets have temporal and spatial characteristics appropriate to many ecological questions. We argue that this ecologically relevant perspective of change allows the novel characterization of important dynamic processes, including disturbances, long‐term trends, cyclical functions, and feedbacks, and that these improvements are already facilitating our understanding of critical driving forces, such as climate change, ecological interactions, and economic pressures.

The interest in the wetlands ecosystems on Calcutta's periphery should be understood in the context of the search for development alternatives—for locally-adapted, appropriate modes of development rather than transplantation of alien models. Too often, planners look abroad for ideas without realizing that appropriate principles and practices are present in their own backyards. We are now coming to understand that ecodevelopment entails bringing together creative techniques with the ways in which people perceive and approach the issues of quality of life through environmental changes that are in the forefront of planning debates. Human and ecologically-sound planning requires an integration of such understanding with suitable techniques and procedures.

The various cultural and ethnic communities inhabiting India have their own distinct cultures and traditions which make them assert their identity as separate nationalities. It is rightly argued (Baruah. 1991) that this assertion of identity by smaller nationalities need not be construed as a threat to the Indian nation state because it is possible to accept the existence of more than one nationality within a state without expecting them to assimilate with the dominant one of the State concerned or suspecting them as secessionist and leading to the disintegration of the present state.

The tremendous increase in the use of heavy metals over the past few decades has inevitably resulted in an increased flux of metallic substances in aquatic environment. Heavy metals have taken the center-stage due to their non-degradable, hazardous and toxic nature. The toxic metals, viz., As(III), Cd(II), Cr(VI), Co(II), Cu(II), Hg(II), Pb(II), Ni(II), Zn(II), etc., are found in the aquatic systems through wastewater from metal industries. Hence, the elimination of heavy metals from water and wastewater is of utmost importance to protect public health. Adsorption process is promising in this regard as it achieves higher level of removal over a wider range of solution concentrations and generally reduce the quantity of solid residual that need to be disposed of. Activated carbons and synthetic resins have found ample use as adsorbent, however, the high cost of preparation and regeneration of activated carbon and synthetic resins prohibit their large-scale use in wastewater treatments. To overcome this problem, extensive studies have been done to find cheaper adsorbent materials. A large number of conventional and non-conventional adsorbents have been reported in literature, namely, bone charcoal, silica gel, natural and modified zeolites, natural and modified oxides, sawdust, rice husk, wheat bran, fly-ash, red mud, blast furnace slag and sludge, fertilizer waste slurry, peat, coal, chitin and chitosan, banana pith, waste tea leaves, orange peel, etc. The present work has been designed for using natural and modified clays as adsorbents with the following objectives: (i) To prepare adsorbents from common clay minerals such as kaolinite and montmorillonite by calcination under controlled conditions, (ii) To prepare other adsorbents from kaolinite and montmorillonite by intercalating with polyoxo and quaternary ammonium cations, and also by acid treatment, (iii) To characterize the adsorbents with XRD, FTIR and to determine such properties as specific surface area, cation exchange capacity (CEC), etc., (iv) To use the adsorbents in batch processes for removing toxic metal cations from water by using synthetic effluents, and to evaluate the effects of various experimental conditions such as pH, concentrations of metal ions, amount of adsorbent, etc., on adsorption capacity, (v) To make a through study of the kinetics of adsorbate-adsorbent interactions in order to understand the mechanism of the interactions, (vi) To test the validity and applicability of...

Assembly elections in the Northeast in general, and Meghalaya in particular, have been characterised by an interesting trend - the party voted into power is usually the ruling party at the Centre.