Abstract Membrane capacitive deionization (MCDI) has been investigated as a promising desalination technology, offering reduced operational voltage and enhanced electrode regeneration capability. Traditional materials used for ion exchange membranes rely on fluorinated polymers, which face drawbacks on fabricating processes and high cost. This study introduces a natural-based cellulose acetate membrane, with improvements by both chemical modification (phosphorylation) and physical blending (graphene oxide (GO) addition) option, and comparison between these enhancing pathways in MCDI application. The structure of synthesized membranes was investigated by Fourier-transform infrared and scanning electron microscopy. Several properties were used to evaluate the performance of the material, exhibiting...

Abstract In the IoT era, wearable photodetectors play a crucial role in remote healthcare and environmental monitoring. Semiconductors are the most important component of these devices. Among them, ZnO is a potential candidate due to its high charge carrier mobility, mechanical stability, low cost, and non-toxicity. However, ZnO has a limited working range within the UV region. Here, the study introduces the development of an Ag/ZnO hybrid structure using an eco-friendly hydrothermal method for growing ZnO nanorods and producing Ag nanoparticles via green glucose reduction directly on a flexible substrate. When exposed to visible light (464 nm), the developed Ag/ZnO device...

Abstract Counterfactual explanations (CE) can make face classifiers more transparent, yet existing methods implicitly target a single attribute at a time, yield unnatural imagery, overly broad or off-target edits, and weak interpretability. We introduce a unified framework that (i) constrains edits with FacePart-based segmentation masks, (ii) performs localized blended latent diffusion on Stable Diffusion 2.1, (iii) re-ranks candidates via a semantic filter that combines CLIP with a trained classifier, and (iv) applies a controlled PGD adversarial step to expose decisive regions – jointly leveraging prompts, spatial masks, and classification gradients to steer generation while preserving identity. On CelebA-HQ with 40...