Environmental contamination research has been quite interesting in bioindicators recently. The basic objective of bioindicator research is to find species that can reliably detect environmental disturbances and demonstrate how those disturbances affect other species or biodiversity as a whole. Since they frequently come into contact with the harmful substances found in soil, water, and air, insects are particularly valuable for evaluating how human activities affect the terrestrial ecosystem, the aquatic system, and the atmosphere. In this review article, we’ve emphasized the use of insects as a resource for assessing contaminants and monitoring environmental contamination. Insects have been our main focus since they are key indicators of changes in soil, water, and air quality. The majority of insects, including beetles, ants, honey bees, and butterflies are employed in this study as biological indicators since they are sensitive to even the slightest environmental changes and are also used to monitor different environmental toxins.
In the current scenario, it is estimated that by 2050, there will be an additional 2.5 billion people and a 70% increase in food demand. Crop yields are not increasing fast enough to support global needs, and world agriculture is facing several serious challenges. Therefore, insects can be a nutritious alternative to meet the ever-increasing food demand in the present and future. The majority of insect consumption occurs in developing countries, with approximately 1,900 insect species consumed worldwide. Food and feed derived from them are of high quality, have a high feed conversion ratio and emit a low level of greenhouse gases. Among insects silkworms are beneficial to humans, not only because of their high nutritional value, but also because of their several pharmacological properties. Silkworm eggs, larvae, and pupae contains high amount of proteins, oils, minerals, vitamins, and several other beneficial components which are nutritious as well as have positive effect on human health. Studies have shown that silkworm pupae protect the liver, enhance immunity, inhibit apoptosis, inhibit cancer, inhibit tumor growth, inhibit microbial growth, regulate blood glucose and blood lipids, and lower blood pressure. This review paper summerized the nutritional value of different life stages of silkworm, nutritional comparison of silkworm with the major human foods, and the effects of silkworm consumption on human health, thus ittargets to generate interest toward in sericulture and improve human health by using silkworm as a nutritious food and attain sustainability in food and nutritional security.
In this article, the effect of wire-size on the effective band gap of Silicon (Si) is analyzed. The band gap is one of the most significant electronic parameters of semiconductor material. The band gap of semiconductor depends on temperature, pressure, composition, number of atoms as well as on the size of the particle. When semiconductors are synthesized at nanoscale level, their small particle size gives rise to quantum confinement and the energy bands are split into discrete levels. It is observed that effective band gap of semi-conductor depends on the size of the wire (number of atoms and dimensions) and it increases by decreasing the size of Si nanowire. The size quantization effect is noticed as a shift of the effective band gap toward lower values with increasing temperature of Si nanowire which also shows increase in atomic vibrations. Keywords: Size effect; Energy band gap; Semiconductor, effective mass; nanowire.
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