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Magnetotactic bacteria (MTB) have started to be employed for the biosynthesis of magnetic nanoparticles, due to the rapidly increasing demand for nanoparticles in biomedical, biotechnology and environmental protection. MBT are the group of prokaryotes that have the ability to produce bio-magnetic minerals or bio-magnetic crystals of either magnetite (Fe O ) or greigite (Fe S ) in numerous shapes and size ranges, known as magnetosomes (MS). MS compel MTB to respond to the applied external magnetic field. However, it is extremely difficult to grow MTB and produce high yield of MS under artificial environmental conditions, thus creating a major hurdle to relocate MTB technology from laboratory scale to industrial or commercial level. Therefore, to best of our knowledge this review is the first attempt to highlight existing research developments about the laboratory scale and mass production of MS by MTB. Moreover, the optimum culture media and environmental conditions used for the cultivation of MTB were also considered. Finally, future research is encouraged for the improvement of MS yield which will result in the development of advanced nanotechnology/magnetotechnology.

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The present study provides performance evaluation of two kinds of crosslinked hydrophilic organic polymer sorbents (PS-I and PS-II) for desiccant air-conditioning applications. In this regard, optimum temperature and humidity zones are established for various air-conditioning applications which include (i) humans’ thermal comfort, (ii) animals’ thermal comfort, and (iii) postharvest storage of fruits/vegetables. Honeycomb-like desiccant blocks composed of PS-I/PS-II are assumed for numerical simulation analysis. The numerical simulation model is programmed into MATLAB which utilizes the scientific relationships of adsorption isotherms, adsorption kinetics, isosteric heat of adsorption, and thermophysical properties for each sorbent. A particular desiccant air-conditioning system design is proposed, and numerical simulation has been conducted for the performance evaluation of PS-I and PS-II. According to the results, PS-I enables higher dehumidification than PS-II at low regeneration temperature (50℃) and cycle time of 60:90 min. It is because the PS-I possesses better water vapor sorption kinetics as compared to PS-II. Although the PS-II enabled higher steady-state adsorption amount but it could not influence the overall system performance. On the other hand, the optimum performance by the PS-II is limited to relatively long cycle time and higher regeneration temperature (≥80℃). It has been concluded that the PS-I is relatively better choice for desiccant air-conditioning, and consequently can be considered for various air-conditioning applications. Furthermore, effects of mass flow rate, isosteric heat of adsorption, regeneration temperature, and cycle time on air humidity ratio and air temperature profiles have been discussed in order to highlight the performance variability of desiccant air-conditioning system.

Presently, there is an emerging research trend in the fabrication of the noble Phytogenic Magnetic Nanoparticles (PMNPs) and their application in the water/wastewater treatment (WWT).

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Effective transportation status surveillance imposes critical challenges for the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) design. In this paper, the microscopic congestion detection protocol (MCDP) is proposed to make the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication capable of monitoring vehicle density and identifying traffic jam. By introducing transportation control domain in the existing network protocol header, each vehicle can count its neighbors and estimate the time spacing among vehicles. MCDP provides an infrastructure-less solution to the estimate of vehicle density, flow, and average velocity in a microscopically manner. Moreover, the safety speed limit is introduced to make each vehicle calculate its time to cover the intervehicle distance, such that every vehicle is able to assess the transportation congestion by comparing with some predefined safety time threshold. Monte Carlo simulations of the MCDP over four typical Chinese highways are presented to compare the MCDP scheme with the existing GreenShield congestion detection scheme. In addition, real road traces generated by SUMO over NS2 are utilized to show the achieved performance in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, and packet delivery rate (PDR) in comparison to DSR and AOMDV in IEEE 802.11p and IEEE 802.11ac scenarios. On the basis of all the results, we conclude that MCDP is an inexpensive transport congestion detection technique for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs).