The increasing amount of municipal sludge in China requires safe and effective management to protect human health and ensure environmental sustainability. Pyrolysis is a thermochemical process that that decompose organic matter at elevated temperature and under anaerobic conditions, and it has attracted an increasing attention in sludge treatment in the recent years. However, comprehensive environmental and economic assessment of sludge pyrolysis in China's context is rare, due to the small quantities of full-scale sludge pyrolysis plant. In this paper, we applied our design and operation parameters of full-scale sludge pyrolysis plants to generate the material and energy consumptions of the pyrolysis system under various of conditions, including sludge organic content and moisture content, system size, system energy distribution, and whether or not heat substitution is applied. Life cycle assessment and techno-economic assessment were then applied to investigate the environmental and economic performance of the system Our results demonstrate the significant environmental and economic impacts associated with sludge properties and system size. Generally, sludge with higher organic content and lower moisture content requires less natural gas consumption, which leads to a simultaneous improvement of the system environmental and economic performance. The system economic performance is more sensitive to the system size, and centralized sludge handling using a larger pyrolysis is more economic favorable. In the most ideal case, the average global warming potential and minimum sludge handling price of sludge pyrolysis could be as low as -32.5 kg CO₂-Eq/t DS and 188.8 $/t DS, respectively. Based on these results, we discussed the pathways that could be taken to further optimize the environmental and economic performances of the pyrolysis system.

Ion-complementary self-assembling peptides have been studied in many fields for their distinct advantages mainly due to their self-assembly properties. However, their shortcomings, such as insufficient specific activity and poor mechanical properties, also limited their application. For better and wider application of this kind of promising biomaterials, ion-complementary self-assembling peptides can be modified with their self-assembly properties not being destroyed to the greatest extent. The modification strategies were reviewed by taking RADA16-Ⅰ as an example. For the insufficient specific activity, RADA16-Ⅰ can be structurally modified with active motifs derived from the active domain of the extracellular matrix or other related active factors. For weak mechanical properties, materials with strong mechanical properties or materials that can undergo chemical crosslinking were used to mix with RADA16-Ⅰto enhance the mechanical properties of RADA16-Ⅰ. To improve the performance of RADA16-Ⅰ as drug carriers, appropriate adjustment of the RADA16-Ⅰ sequence and/ or modification of the RADA16-Ⅰ-related delivery system with polymer materials or specific molecules can be considered to achieve sustained and controlled release of specific drugs or active factors. The modification strategies reviewed in this paper may provide some references for the further basic research and clinical application of ion-complementary self-assembling peptides and their derivatives.

In this study, we analyzed the optical observations of a subluminous Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) 2017fzw, which exhibited high photospheric velocity (HV) at B-band maximum light. The absolute B-band peak magnitude was determined to be M^B_max = -17.77  0.10 mag, similar to 91bg-like SNe Ia. The decline rate of the B-band light curve was estimated to be Dm15(B) = 1.60  0.06 mag. The spectra of SN 2017fzw were similar to those of 91bg-like SNe Ia, with prominent Ti II and Si II l5972 features at early phases, gradually transitioning to spectra resembling normal (mainly HV subclass) SNe Ia at later phases, with a stronger Ca II NIR feature. Notably, SN 2017fzw exhibited spectral evolution features similar to those of HV SNe Ia at all phases, with a maximum-light Si II l6355 velocity of 13, 786  414 km s