a. aryafar

In the present work, the cadmium oxide (CdO) nanoparticles (NPs) are synthesized using the Ferula extract. Ferula acts as a naturally-sourced reducing agent and stabilizer for the construction of the CdO NPs. The biosynthesized CdO NPs are characterized by different techniques such as X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform-infrared (FT-IR), spectroscopy and field emission-scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM). After ensuring a successful synthesis of the CdO NPs, their photocatalytic activity is studied for the degradation of ciprofloxacin antibiotic in aqueous media under the sunlight. Approximately 95% degradation of ciprofloxacin using the CdO NPs is achieved after 60 minutes. The recycling experiments confirm the high stability and durability of the CdO NPs. Therefore, this work illustrates an efficient strategy for the photo-degradation of ciprofloxacin, and provides a new insight into the removal of pharmaceutical contaminants in aquatic environments.

Northwestern part of Iran is one of the important metal bearing zones and the Baluqaya region which is one of the interesting parts of this area, was selected as the study area. In this research the endmembers were extracted from ASTER dataset and then were compared with spectral library to find matching reference minerals for them. Subsequently, the abundances of endmembers were exracted using the matched filtering technique. Then, the classification and distribution maps of minerals were extracted by implementing the floating threshold as a novel technique on endmembers abundance maps. The mineralogical data of the study area are also involved in the floating threshold method. This method classifies areas with high abundance values of endmembers that probabily have high potential for mineralization. The results delineated argillic and advanced argillic alterations at the midwest of the study area. By performing of robust principal component analysis (RPCA) on ICP-MS geochemical data, correlation of gold concentrations with that of antimony and arsenic was detected in the remote sensing derived alteration area. Finally, it is concluded that a possible high sulfidation epithermal mineralization system has developed in the study area