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Great efforts have been made to determine total suction using elaborate laboratory tests, because there is no a specific correlation relating the total suction to the water content of bentonites. However, elaborate laboratory tests are difficult and time consuming to perform on bentonites. Thus, a theoretical equation is a necessary choice to correlate the total suction to the water content. A simple method is proposed to calculate the total suction from the water content based on the surface fractal model for bentonites. The correlation relating the total suction to the water content is expressed by a power-law function with the exponent of $D_{\mathrm{\text{s}}}-3,D_{\mathrm{\text{s}}}$ is the surface fractal dimension of bentonites. The surface fractal dimension can be determined using the nitrogen adsorption isotherm tests. The total suction of bentonites calculated from the proposed method is in satisfactory agreement with the experimental data found in the literature. In addition, the correlation of the total suction to the water content also offers another method to determine the surface fractal dimension of bentonites.

With the focus on the characteristics of temporal and spatial fluctuations of the bottom-sediment properties and their vertical distributions around the mouth of the Tama River in Tokyo Bay, the properties of surface sediments, such as grain-size distributions and water contents, had been monitored by taking bottom-sediment core samples from several sampling stations around the river mouth with the intervals of 3 month for a period of five years from 2006 through 2010. Based on the monitored data, the impact of flood events which occurred during the survey period on bottom sediment properties and the recovery processes after the flood event were evaluated. This study clarified that seasonal fluctuations of surface bottom sediment qualities clearly appear on river mouth shoals and tidal wetlands and the impact of the river flood was relatively slight and the damages were restored over relatively short period of time after the flood event. On the other hand, the flood event remarkably caused rapid decline of the water content of bottom sediments at offshore of the river mouth, and it took about three years for their bottom sediments to return to its normal as before the flood event. This paper also discusses the recovery process of the sediment properties at the offshore region and shows that the long-term evolution of the sediment properties was caused by the constant settling of new deposition of suspended particles from the water column and accumulation rate was estimated at 2.5 cm per year.

Accurate numerical calculation of the thermal profile in humans requires reliable estimates of the following five tissue properties: specific heat capacity (c), thermal conductivity (k), blood perfusion rates (m), metabolic heat production (A₀), and density (ρ). A sixth property, water content (w, as a %), can also be used to estimate c and k. To date, researchers have used various and inconsistent estimates of these parameters, which hinders comparison of the corresponding results. In an effort to standardize and improve the accuracy of these parameters for future studies, we have documented over 150 key papers and books and developed a database of the six thermal properties listed above for 43 human tissues. For each tissue and each property the following were obtained: the average value, the number of source values, the minimum and maximum of source values, and the reference for each source value. A key premise for the development of the database was to only use references that provided the original measurements. This database is offered for use by the biological thermal modeling community to help improve the accuracy and consistency of thermal modeling results.

${\mathrm{\text{NH}}}_2$-MIL-101(Al) material containing phenazine groups, i.e. 1-metal-organic framework (MOF) has been prepared and characterized via FT-IR, PXRD, TGA, SEM and ${\mathrm{\text{N}}}_2$ adsorption and desorption isotherm in this work. 1-MOF can exhibit emission peaks at 447 nm (in pure aqueous solvent) and 595 nm (in pure organic solvents) under 327 nm ultraviolet excitation, respectively. Based on this interesting feature, 1-MOF has been effectively used as a ratiometric fluorescent probe to detect water content in organic solvents. The luminescence color of 1-MOF changed obviously from red to blue with the increasing of water content in organic solvents, which can be observed by the naked eyes. The route to detect water content in organic solvents is fast, accurate and possessing great application potential.

Irrigation and water conservation are an integral aspect of rural infrastructural construction but canal water distribution has a problem of low commonality in most areas of China. For example, the irrigation canal system water distribution was optimized through improved ant colony algorithm, based on the geographic information and remote sensing measurement and control technology in Da an district in Jilin province. People eventually started saving water and its production increased. In irrigation process of northern China, optimization of water distribution is of great importance in the field of agriculture. The improved ant colony algorithm can minimize the water loss of canal water distribution pattern in some constraint conditions to make the limited water resources more useful. The results are more close to reality where it is very worthy of popularizing the improved the ant colony algorithm.