Engineering

CO-EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Dr. Glen Daigger Professor, University of Michigan, USA Member, USA National Academy of Engineering Dr. Nan-Qi Ren Head, State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment, China Member, Chinese Academy of Engineering Executive Editor-in-Chief Dr. Yu Tian  Professor, Harbin Institute of Technology, China Distinguished Professor of Yangtze River Scholar Deputy Director, State Key Laboratory of Urban Water  Resource and Environment, China GUEST EDITORIAL BOARD Dr. Helmut Krosis Distinguished Fellow and Former President, IWA Professor, Vienna University of Technology Dr. Teng Chye Khoo Professor, National University of Singapore Former CEO, PUB, Singapore Dr. Dragan Savic Professor, University of Exeter, UK CEO, KWR Water Research Institute, The Netherlands Dr. Ai-Jie Wang Distinguished Fellow, IWA Professor, Harbin Institute of Technology, China Dr. Peter Vanrolleghem IWA Fellow Professor, Université Laval, Canada Dr. Zeynep Erdal Business and Techn...

Scientists have long been challenged by the complex process of drug discovery and development, with investments that often go unrewarded. However, with the advancement of experimental technology and computer hardware, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a leading tool in analyzing abundant and high-dimensional data. In a new academic paper published in the journal   Engineering   titled “Artificial Intelligence in Pharmaceutical Sciences,” researchers detail the advantages of AI technology in all aspects of new drug research and development (R&D). AI is capable of discovering new drugs more efficiently and at a lower cost. Through the explosive growth of biomedical data, AI has led to a revolution in drug R&D, from target discovery to preclinical research, automated drug synthesis, and influences on the pharmaceutical market. In the review, the authors provide a brief overview of common AI models in the field of drug discovery, then summarize and discuss in dep...

  We have witnessed the global spread of COVID-19 in the past years and fully recognized the importance of rapid, accurate, and easy sensing of viruses and diseases. It is highly desired to have a personalized sensing device that can be implemented in our daily life to improve the life quality.  Recently, researchers have been exploring on-chip sensing technologies to tackle these emerging challenges. More and more healthcare monitoring functionalities were integrated with wearable devices.  New research led by engineers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST of Saudi Arabia) and the State University of New York at Buffalo (University at Buffalo, USA) makes significant progress along this direction. The system is constructed by a graded surface nanograting with the period changing from 300 nm to 500 nm. Under the illumination of LEDs or lasers, one can see a dark bar in the reflection image (as illustrated in the image). The spatial location of the d...

  The growth of ecological restoration programs worldwide has made the planet greener. Meanwhile, the failure of large-scale restoration has also been witnessed, due to conflicts between stakeholders during the implementation process. For effective ecological restoration, a comprehensive understanding of social-ecological interactions during the land conversion process and the integration of social dimension into large-scale ecological restoration planning play key roles. However, large-scale ecological restoration planning tends to pay more attention to ecological attributes (e.g., slope), with social attributes often neglected. Furthermore, how social dimensions should be considered remains a challenge.  Recently, many researchers have attempted to analyze the responses and feedbacks of human behavior at the household scale during large-scale ecological restoration implementation. A new study led by the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences of the Chinese Academy of...

  Recently,   Engineering   published the research work on sodium nitrate passivation as a novel insulation technology for soft magnetic composites developed by Prof. Mi Yan and Dr. Chen Wu’s team. Soft magnetic composites, which are fabricated based on metallic magnetic powders via insulation coating, binding, compaction, and annealing, serve as the key fundamental material in various fields including energy, transportation, aerospace, and national defense. Due to the low-electrical-resistivity nature of the soft magnetic alloys, it is challenging to control the eddy current loss, which has become a bottle-neck problem for high-frequency applications. For scientific research and industrial production, phosphorization technology is usually used to generate insulation coatings. However, the resultant phosphate coating tends to decompose above 600 ℃ and lose the insulation effect at elevated temperatures. It is of great significance to develop new insulation technology to f...

  A research team, led by Prof. Xiaoyong Tian in the State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering at Xi’an Jiaotong University, has successfully manufactured a thermo-tunable broadband metamaterial (T-TBM) by 3D printing. The electromagnetic (EM) response of the T-TBM can be adjusted by controlling the solid–liquid phase state of different metamaterial units. Unlike previously reported active control metamaterials, the absorption response of the T-TBM can be controlled by the change of temperature; furthermore, its performance of ultra-wideband absorbing does not change with the temperature. The T-TBM can further promote the development of intelligent metamaterials and thermally controlled absorbers, according to the research team. In this study, the research team first prepared RGO@Fe 3 O 4  nanocomposites by mechanical method. The characterization results of the RGO@Fe 3 O 4  nanocomposites confirmed that the RGO@Fe 3 O 4  nanocomposites with sandwich...

  Recent, the rapid development of optoelectronic devices has made human life more convenient. However, these devices emit large amounts of electromagnetic radiation, which not only endanger human health, but also cause unacceptable malfunction of electronic systems. Therefore, electromagnetic shielding technology that eliminates the adverse electromagnetic waves is of vital importance to protect sensitive circuits from interference and preserve a healthy living environment. The absorption-based electromagnetic shielding technology is the most ideal method of electromagnetic shielding at present due to the electromagnetic waves cannot return to space and are completely eliminated. In particular, the optical transparent and tunable microwave absorption technology, which can be tuned in real time and applied in visual observation occasions, has attracted great attention for its scientific and application values. Vanadium dioxide is a promising candidate material for tunable absorbers...

  Background Phosphorus (P) eutrophication and P mineral resource depletion are increasingly serious global problems. Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are both the sink and source for P. The bioprocess known as enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR) can effectively promote P removal and recovery in WWTPs. It relies on a specific microbial functional guild called polyphosphate-accumulating organisms (PAOs). Recently,  Tetrasphaera  PAOs have gained increasing attention due to their prevalence in global WWTPs as both important contributors to P removal and potential reservoirs for P recovery. However, only a few studies have reported  Tetrasphaera -enriched microbiomes that were fed amino acids as a sole carbon source. The enrichment strategy, process, and key biotic and abiotic factors are unclear, hindering the in-depth study of  Tetrasphaera  PAOs for optimizing the P removal and recovery in WWTPs. To fill above knowledge gaps, this study propose...

 Huifang Wu, Dan Hu, Quanxiao Li, Chunyu Wang, Xiaoyi Zhu, Wei Li, Binfan Chen, Ping Ji, Keke Huang, Ailing Huang, Jinghe Huang, Dimiter S. Dimitrov, Yanling Wu, Tianlei Ying, Half-Life Extension Enhances Drug Efficacy in Adeno-Associated Virus Delivered Gene Therapy, Engineering, Volume 21, 2023, Pages 203-213, ISSN 2095-8099, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2022.02.009. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095809922001485) Abstract: Prolonged half-life of protein-based therapeutics can improve drug efficacy. However, the impact of drug half-life on gene therapy, which inherently provides long-lasting production of the desired therapeutic protein, remains unclear. In this study, several proteins with extended half-lives were engineered by fusion with the soluble monomeric immunoglobulin G 1 (IgG1) fragment crystallizable (sFc) or Fc region of IgG in adeno-associated virus (AAV)-delivered gene therapy. It was demonstrated that extending the half-life of a small-sized ...