Selective Growth and Structural Analysis of Regular MnO Nanooctapods Bearing Multiple High‐Index Surface Facets

Although numerous morphologies of MnO nanostructures have been reported, an exact structural analysis and mechanistic study has been lacking. In the present study, the formation of regular MnO octapods was demonstrated in a simple procedure, comprising the thermal decomposition of manganese oleate. Because of their structural uniformity, an ideal three‐dimensional model was successfully constructed. The eight arms protruded from the cubic center with tip angles of 38° and surface facets of {311} and {533} with rounded edges. The concentrations of oleate and chloride ions were the determining factors for the octapod formation. Selective coordination of the oleate ions to the {100} faces led to edge growth along the <111> direction, which was then limited by the chloride ions bound to the high‐index surface facets. These structural and mechanistic analyses should be helpful for understanding the complex nanostructures and for tuning their structure‐related properties.     

Bioremediation of Cd by Microbially Induced Calcite Precipitation

Contamination by Cd is a significant environmental problem. Therefore, we examined Cd removal from an environmental perspective. Ureolysis-driven calcium carbonate precipitation has been proposed for use in geotechnical engineering for soil remediation applications. In this study, 55 calcite-forming bacterial strains were newly isolated from various environments. Biomineralization of Cd by calcite-forming bacteria was investigated in laboratory-scale experiments. A simple method was developed to determine the effectiveness of microbially induced calcite precipitation (MICP). Using this method, we determined the effectiveness of biomineralization for retarding the flow of crystal violet through a 25-mL column. When the selected bacteria were analyzed using an inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometer, high removal rates (99.95 %) of Cd were observed following incubation for 48 h. Samples of solids that formed in the reaction vessels were examined using a scanning electron microscope. The CdCO₃ compounds primarily showed a spherical shape. The results of this study demonstrate that MICP-based sequestration of soluble heavy metals via coprecipitation with calcite may be useful for toxic heavy metal bioremediation.     

Stability approach to selecting the number of principal components

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a canonical tool that reduces data dimensionality by finding linear transformations that project the data into a lower dimensional subspace while preserving the variability of the data. Selecting the number of principal components (PC) is essential but challenging for PCA since it represents an unsupervised learning problem without a clear target label at the sample level. In this article, we propose a new method to determine the optimal number of PCs based on the stability of the space spanned by PCs. A series of analyses with both synthetic data and real data demonstrates the superior performance of the proposed method.     

Hybrid projection algorithms for treating common fixed points of a family of demicontinuous pseudocontractions

In this work, a projection algorithm is considered for treating strongly continuous semigroups of demicontinuous pseudocontractions. Theorems of strong convergence of fixed points are established in the framework of real Hilbert spaces.     

Phase fluctuation of self-phase-controlled stimulated Brillouin scattering waves via K8 glass

As stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) materials, solids have many advantages such as compactness, innoxiousness, and ease of handling. The SBS threshold and reflectivity of K8 glass, a solid material, are investigated. A SBS phase control experiment using K8 glass to achieve coherent beam combination is performed with a self-phase-control technique below the optical damage threshold. The experimental results show that the short-term phase has been stabilized well with λ/33.8 fluctuation during 256 shots (25.6 s), and that the long-term phase change with non-convective K8 glass is much slower than that with convective HT-70 liquid.     

Acremolin,a new 1H-azirine metabolite from the marine-derived fungus Acremonium strictum

Acremolin (1), a novel modified base, was isolated from the culture broth of the marine fungus Acremonium strictum. Based on combined spectroscopic analyses, the structure of this compound was that of a methyl guanine base containing an isoprene unit. In addition, the presence of a 1H-azirine moiety is unprecedented among natural products. This compound exhibited weak cytotoxicity against an A549 cell line.