In this study, we fabricated a superhydrophilic and underwater superoleophobic protonated melamine sponge for effective separation of water-rich immiscible oil/water mixtures with extremely high separation efficiency. This protonated melamine sponge exhibited excellent antifouling properties and could be used to separate oil/water mixtures continuously for up to 12 h without any increase in the...

Sponge metagenomes are a useful platform to mine cryptic biosynthetic gene clusters responsible for production of natural products involved in the sponge-microbe association. Since numerous sponge-derived bioactive metabolites are biosynthesized by the symbiotic bacteria, this strategy may concurrently reveal sponge-symbiont produced compounds. Accordingly, a metagenomic analysis of the Japanes...

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 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.

This study investigated the removal of micropollutants using polyurethane sponge as attached-growth carrier. Batch experiments demonstrated that micropollutants could adsorb to non-acclimatized sponge cubes to varying extents. Acclimatized sponge showed significantly enhanced removal of some less hydrophobic compounds (log D<2.5), such as ibuprofen, acetaminophen, naproxen, and estriol, as comp...

Mangrove roots in the well-protected channels and ponds among dense mangrove stands provide very similar habitats for sponges in the Twin Cays and Pelican Cays and harbor extraordinarily dense and diverse sponge communities in both locations. The species of sponges are very different, however, possibly because of an important difference in context: the Twin Cays mangrove roots are embedded in p...