Cyanobacteria blooms are a risk to environmental health and public safety due to the potent toxins certain cyanobacteria can produce. These nuisance organisms can be removed from water bodies by biomass flocculation and sedimentation. Here, we studied the efficacy of combinations of a low dose coagulant (poly-aluminium chloride-PAC-or chitosan) with different ballast compounds (red soil, bauxit...

Invasive species introduced via the ballast water of commercial ships cause enormous environmental and economic damage worldwide. Accurate monitoring for these often microscopic and morphologically indistinguishable species is challenging but critical for mitigating damages. We apply eDNA sampling, which involves the filtering and subsequent DNA extraction of microscopic bits of tissue suspende...

Fluorescent lamps were first introduced to the world in the 1939 World’s Fair. They are low-pressure mercury discharge lamps. Since then, the fluorescent lamps have been the mainly lighting source due to their merits of high color rendering, soft-visualization, long life, and energy-saving. Unfortunately, however, all gas discharge lamps cannot directly connect to a voltage source and require a...

MOTIVATION Blast programs are very efficient in finding relatively strong similarities but some very distantly related sequences are given a very high Expect value and are ranked very low in Blast results. We have developed Ballast, a program to predict local maximum segments (LMSs-i.e. sequence segments conserved relatively to their flanking regions) from a single Blast database search and to ...

The compatibility of the Current Sourcing Push Pull Resonant Inverter (CS-PPRI) with the driving requirements of HID lamps designated for automotive headlight applications was investigated theoretically, by simulation and experimentally. The study reveals that a based ballast (CS-PPRI) complies with the automotive requirement of very fast warm up. The experimental ballast was run under Zero Vol...

Correlations between particulate organic carbon (POC) and mineral fluxes in the deep ocean have inspired the inclusion of "ballast effect" parameterizations in carbon cycle models. A recent study demonstrated regional variability in the effect of ballast minerals on the flux of POC in the deep ocean. We have undertaken a similar analysis of shallow export data from the Arctic, Atlantic, and Sou...

In railways Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) studies, the evaluation of materials dielectric properties is critical as they are sensitive to water content, to petrographic type of aggregates and to fouling condition of the ballast. Under the load traffic, maintenance actions and climatic effects, ballast condition change due to aggregate breakdown and to subgrade soils pumping, mainly on existing...

Ships' ballast water can carry aquatic organisms into foreign ecosystems. In our previous studies, a concept using ion exchange membrane electrolysis to treat ballast water has been proven. In addition to other substantial approaches, a new strategy for inactivating algae is proposed based on the developed ballast water treatment system. In the new strategy, the means of multi-trial injection w...

The demand of efficient lighting is increasing day by day. The efficient lighting includes maximum efficacy of light as well as maximum utilization of energy by improving the power factor with less complexity. The discharge lamps with high frequency electronic ballasts are used for maximum efficient lighting. The power factor of the ballast which is used in fluorescent lamp circuit should be in...

Successful biological invasion requires introduction of a viable population of a nonindigenous species (NIS). Rarely have ecologists assessed changes in populations while entrained in invasion pathways. Here, we investigate how zooplankton communities resident in ballast water change during transoceanic voyages. We used next-generation sequencing technology to sequence a nuclear small subunit r...