Phenolic compounds are intermediary transformation products of many naturally occurring substances and synthetic chemicals, including crop residues, organic wastes, pesticides and industrial products. They are suitable substrates for the phenolases and peroxidases produced by the soil microflora. Although measurement of the enzymatic oxidation of phenolic compounds is an important measure of th...

The economic utilization of abundant lignocellulosic biomass as a feedstock for the production of fuel and chemicals would represent a profound shift in industrial carbon utilization, allowing sustainable resources to substitute for, and compete with, petroleum based products. In order to exploit biomass as a source material for production of renewable compounds, it must first be broken down in...

The purpose of this review work is to give an overview of the research reported on bioprocesses for the treatment of domestic or industrial wastewaters (WW) containing pharmaceuticals. Conventional WW treatment technologies are not efficient enough to completely remove all pharmaceuticals from water. Indeed, these compounds are becoming an actual public health problem, because they are more and...

produced in vast quantities due to their numerous applications such as herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, solvents, hydraulic and heat transfer fluids, plasticizers, and intermediates for chemical synthesis. Because of their toxicity, bio-concentration, and persistence, the ubiquitous distribution of the halogenated compounds in the biosphere has caused public concern over the possible effec...

We demonstrate that thermocapillary forces may drive bubbles against liquid flow in 'anomalous' mixtures. Unlike 'ordinary' liquids, in which bubbles migrate towards higher temperatures, we have observed vapour bubbles migrating towards lower temperatures, therefore against the flow. This unusual behaviour may be explained by the temperature dependence of surface tension of these binary mixture...