Uncontrolled disposal of feathers from the poultry industry and slaughterhouses is environmentally undesirable. The feathers are composed of approximately 90% of keratin which is an important ingredient of cosmetics, shampoos and hair treatment creams. This study aimed to determine the optimum conditions for the extraction of keratin from chicken feathers. The extraction of keratin using variou...

Room temperature sodium–sulfur (Na–S) batteries are severely hampered by dissolution of polysulfides into electrolytes. Herein, a facile approach is used to tune biomass-derived carbon down an ultrasmall 0.37 nm microporous structure for the first time as cathode in batteries. This produced intact uniform Na2S membrane greatly confine while realizing direct solid phase conversion complete reduc...

The unpinning of the etched GaAs ( 100) surface has recently been reported by both photowashing and by Na2S'9H20 treatments. Both techniques hold promise of elucidating the mechanism by which GaAs passivation is achieved. We have identified as part of the photowashing process a separate photoactivation step. The activation step did not become apparent until we modified the photo wash process in...

This work estimates the potential of banana pseudo-stem with high cellulosic content 42.2-63 %, for the production of fermentable sugars for lactic acid production through statistically optimized pretreatment method. To evaluate the catalyzed pretreatment efficiency of banana pseudo stem based on the enzymatic digestibility, Response Surface Methodology (RSM) was employed for the optimization o...

Chloride ions were found to potentially increase activity of cerussite surfaces. Dissolution experiments, zeta potential measurements, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) studies, and density functional theory (DFT) computation were conducted in this study. Dissolution experiments showed that the lead ion concentrations in the NaCl solution system were lower than those in the deionized water...

We used thermochemical equilibrium calculations in the O–S– Na–K–Cl–H system to model the speciation of volcanic gases emitted from high-temperature (1000–2000 K) silicate magmas on Io. The effects of temperature, pressure, and bulk composition of the gases are explored. The bulk compositions are based on atomic ratios observed in Io’s plasma torus and extended atmosphere, and from chondritic a...