Membrane fouling has been regarded as one of the biggest challenges to widespread application of membrane bioreactor (MBR). This study focuses on minimizing the membrane fouling and improving the performance of submerged membrane bioreactor (SMBR) by porous sponge addition. The effects of sponge addition on sustainable flux and membrane fouling were investigated. Acclimatized sponge could signi...

Marine sponges are potential sources of many unique metabolites, including cytotoxic and anticancer compounds. Natural sponge populations are insufficient or inaccessible for producing commercial quantities of metabolites of interest. This review focuses on methods of producing sponge biomass to overcome supply limitations. Production techniques discussed include aquaculture in the sea, the con...

We revisit the Raz-Safra plane-vs.-plane test and study the closely related cube vs. cube test. In this test the tester has access to a “cubes table” which assigns to every cube a low degree polynomial. The tester randomly selects two cubes (affine sub-spaces of dimension 3) that intersect on a point x ∈ F, and checks that the assignments to the cubes agree with each other on the point x. Our m...

We study subgroups of Z which possess group theoretic properties analogous to properties introduced by Menger (1924), Hurewicz (1925), Rothberger (1938), and Scheepers (1996). We obtain purely combinatorial characterizations of these properties, and combine them with other techniques to solve several questions of Babinkostova, Kočinac, and Scheepers. We also show that, while the Menger Conjectu...

In this paper propositions will be established concerning the collection of all the cut points of a given planef continuum. It will be shown that there does not exist an uncountable collection of mutually exclusive subcontinua of a given continuum M each of which contains at least one cut point of M. With the aid of this fundamental theorem it is shown, among other things, that the set of all t...

We establish a surprising connection between Menger’s classical covering property and Blass’s modern combinatorial notion of groupwise density. This connection implies a short proof of the groupwise density bound on the additivity number for Menger’s property.

The selection of a suitable scaffold matrix is critical for cell-based bone tissue engineering. This study aimed to identify and characterize natural marine sponges as potential bioscaffolds for osteogenesis. Callyspongiidae marine sponge samples were collected from the Fremantle coast of Western Australia. The sponge structure was assessed using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Hematoxyl...

Sponge diseases have been widely reported, yet the causal factors and major pathogenic microbes remain elusive. In this study, two individuals of the sponge Crella cyathophora in total that showed similar disease-like characteristics were collected from two different locations along the Red Sea coast separated by more than 30 kilometers. The disease-like parts of the two individuals were both c...

Data cube construction is a commonly used operation in data warehouses. Because of the volume of data stored and analyzed in a data warehouse and the amount of computation involved in data cube construction, incremental maintenance of data cube is really effective. To maintain a data cube incrementally, previous methods were mainly for relational databases. In this paper, we employ an extendibl...