Organic solar cells (OSCs) are emerging as a new photovoltaic technology with the great advantages of low cost, light-weight, flexibility and semi-transparency. They are promising for portable ...energy-conversion products and building-integrated photovoltaics. Organoboron chemistry offers an important toolbox to design novel organic/polymer optoelectronic materials and to tune their optoelectronic properties for OSC applications. At present, organoboron small molecules and polymers have become an important class of organic photovoltaic materials. Power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) of 16% and 14% have been realized with organoboron polymer electron donors and electron acceptors, respectively. In this review, we summarize the research progress in various kinds of organoboron photovoltaic materials for OSC applications, including organoboron small molecular electron donors, organoboron small molecular electron acceptors, organoboron polymer electron donors and organoboron polymer electron acceptors. This review also discusses how to tune their opto-electronic properties and active layer morphology for enhancing OSC device performance. We also offer our insight into the opportunities and challenges in improving the OSC device performance of organoboron photovoltaic materials.
Microplastic pollution of intertidal mangrove ecosystems is receiving growing attention, and scientists suspect that the microplastic pollution of semi-enclosed seas is significantly different from ...that of other coastal types because of their unique geographical features. However, data on the distributions and characteristics of microplastics in the mangrove sediment of semi-enclosed seas are very limited. This study selected the Maowei Sea, a typical semi-enclosed sea, as its representative study site. The analysis revealed that the microplastic abundances in the river estuaries were much lower than those at the oceanic entrance zones, with values ranging from 520 ± 8 to 940 ± 17 items/kg. Polyethylene (PE)/polypropylene (PP)/polystyrene (PS), white/transparent, and <1 mm were the dominant type, colour, and size of the microplastics, respectively, in the observed mangrove sediments. Moreover, some other factors, including the rhizosphere/non-rhizosphere and the proportion of organic matter, codetermined the distribution and characteristics of microplastics. Specifically: (1) the percentage of colorful microplastics were higher in the rhizosphere due to the microbial activities and (2) positive linear relationships were found between the pore volume (PV) values of the free particulate organic matter (FPOM), occluded particulate organic matter (OPOM) (1.6–2.0 g/cm3 and >2.0 g/cm3), and the abundance of very small microplastics (<1 mm).
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•Microplastics were first detected in the mangrove sediment of the semi-enclosed sea.•Factors determining microplastic contents in estuaries and entrances differed.•Pore structure influenced the microplastic content in mangrove sediment.•Microbial activity in rhizosphere accelerated the microplastics' colour changes.
Fishery activities are an important source of microplastic pollution in coastal areas but have received little attention. The Beibu Gulf, a traditional fishing ground of China and the China-Indo ...Peninsula, was selected in this study, and the focus was on the impacts of fishery activities on the horizontal distribution of microplastics in sediment. The results showed that the dominant contaminants (polypropylene fibers and polyethylene fibers) might originate from the abrasion of fishing gear and contributed to 61.6% of the total abundance of microplastics in surface sediment. The abundance of polypropylene fibers and polyethylene fibers exhibited a strong correlation (R 2 = 0.8586, p = 0.015) with values of fishery yields of different districts, which highlighted the effects of different fishery activities on microplastic contamination in marine sediment. Microplastics could be “hidden” in deep sediment to a depth of 60 cm. The estimated storage of microplastics in deep sediment (185 tons) was 5 times that in surface sediment. The assessment of microplastic storage worldwide might be underestimated because most previous studies only examined surface sediment. The abundance distribution and size distribution of microplastics in the sediment core suggested long-term burial of microplastics in deep sediment. Bioturbation might be responsible for the vertical transport of microplastics, leading to “fresh microplastics” preservation in “old sediment”.
Hong Ke’s
The Tree of Life
is a novel with the story that rooted in the middle and western land of our country. By tracing the homology of human life, it reflects the process of collision, ...interaction and integration among different cultures along the Silk Road. The time-crossing plots and scenes in the novel fully reflect the close similarity and harmony of the Silk Road culture. The analyses of Culture Cognate Consciousness in this novel reflects the inclusiveness of Chinese culture and the grand vision of the Chinese nation for the inter-connectivity and integration of world cultures.
Abstract Theranostics, the integration of diagnostics and therapies, has become a new concept in the battles with various major diseases such as cancer. Here, we report a multifunctional ...nanoplatform, which is developed by covalently grafting core–shell structured upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) with nanographene oxide (NGO) via bifunctional polyethylene glycol (PEG), and then loading phthalocyanine (ZnPc) on the surface of NGO. The obtained UCNPs-NGO/ZnPc nanocomposites are not only be used as upconversion luminescence (UCL) imaging probes of cells and whole-body animals with high contrast for diagnosis, but also can generate cytotoxic singlet oxygen under light excitation for photodynamic therapy (PDT), as well as rapidly and efficiently convert the 808 nm laser energy into thermal energy for photothermal therapy (PTT). A remarkably improved and synergistic therapeutic effect compared to PTT or PDT alone is obtained, providing high therapeutic efficiency for cancer treatment. Therefore, benefiting from the unique multifunctional hybrid nanostructure, UCNPs-NGO/ZnPc nanocomposites developed herein are promising as an integrated theranostic probe for potential UCL image-guided combinatorial PDT/PTT of cancer.
Chronic kidney disease (CKD) and cardiac insufficiency often co-exist, particularly in uremic patients on hemodialysis (HD). The occurrence of abnormal renal function in patients with cardiac ...insufficiency is often indicative of a poor prognosis. It has long been established that in patients with cardiac insufficiency, poorer renal function tends to indicate poorer cardiac mechanics, including left atrial reserve strain, left ventricular longitudinal strain, and right ventricular free wall strain (Unger et al., Eur J Heart Fail, 2016, 18(1), 103-12). Similarly, patients with chronic kidney disease, particularly uremic patients on HD, often have cardiovascular complications in addition to abnormal endothelial function with volume overload, persistent inflammatory states, calcium overload, and imbalances in redox responses. Cardiac insufficiency due to uremia is therefore mainly due to multifaceted non-specific pathological changes rather than pure renal insufficiency. Several studies have shown that the risk of adverse cardiovascular events is greatly increased and persistent in all patients treated with HD, especially in those who have just started HD treatment. Inflammation, as an important intersection between CKD and cardiovascular disease, is involved in the development of cardiovascular complications in patients with CKD and is indicative of prognosis (Chan et al., Eur Heart J, 2021, 42(13), 1244-1253). Therefore, only by understanding the mechanisms underlying the sequential development of inflammation in CKD patients and breaking the vicious circle between inflammation-mediated renal and cardiac insufficiency is it possible to improve the prognosis of patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD). This review highlights the mechanisms of inflammation and the oxidative stress that co-exists with inflammation in uremic patients on dialysis, as well as the mechanisms of cardiovascular complications in the inflammatory state, and provides clinical recommendations for the anti-inflammatory treatment of cardiovascular complications in such patients.
Cancer cells are known to undergo metabolic reprogramming to sustain survival and rapid proliferation, however, it remains to be fully elucidated how oncogenic lesions coordinate the metabolic switch ...under various stressed condi- tions. Here we show that deprivation of glucose or glutamine, two major nutrition sources for cancer cells, dramat- ically activated serine biosynthesis pathway (SSP) that was accompanied by elevated cMyc expression. We further identified that cMyc stimulated SSP activation by transcriptionally upregulating expression of multiple SSP enzymes. Moreover, we demonstrated that SSP activation facilitated by cMye led to elevated glutathione (GSH) production, cell cycle progression and nucleic acid synthesis, which are essential for cell survival and proliferation especially un- der nutrient-deprived conditions. We further uncovered that phosphoserine phosphatase (PSPH), the final rate-lim- iting enzyme of the SSP pathway, is critical for cMyc-driven cancer progression both in vitro and in vivo, and impor- tantly, aberrant expression of PSPH is highly correlated with mortality in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients, suggesting a potential causal relation between this cMyc-regulated enzyme, or SSP activation in general, and cancer development. Taken together, our results reveal that aberrant expression of cMyc leads to the enhanced SSP activa- tion, an essential part of metabolic switch, to facilitate cancer progression under nutrient-deprived conditions.
Extracting indoor scene components (i.e., the meaningful parts of indoor objects) and obtaining their spatial relationships (e.g., adjacent, in the left of, etc.) is crucial for scene reconstruction ...and understanding. At present, the detection of indoor scene components with complex shapes is still challenging. To fix the problem, a simple yet powerful slice-guided algorithm is proposed. The key insight is that slices of indoor scene components always have similar profiles no matter if the components are simple-shaped or complex-shaped. Specifically, we sliced the indoor scene model into many layers and transformed each slice into a set of two-dimensional (2D) profiles by resampling. After that, we clustered 2D profiles from neighbor slices into different components on the base of spatial proximity and similarity. To acquire the spatial relationships between indoor scene components, an ontology was constructed to model the commonsense knowledge about the semantics of indoor scene components and their spatial relationships. Then the spatial semantics of the relationships between indoor scene components were inferred and a semantic graph of spatial relationship (SGSR) was yielded to represent them. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively detect complex-shaped indoor scene components. The spatial relationships between indoor components can be exactly acquired as well.
DNA detection with high sensitivity and specificity has tremendous potential as molecular diagnostic agents. Graphene and graphene-based nanomaterials, such as graphene nanopore, graphene nanoribbon, ...graphene oxide, and reduced graphene oxide, graphene-nanoparticle composites, were demonstrated to have unique properties, which have attracted increasing interest towards the application of DNA detection with improved performance. This article comprehensively reviews the most recent trends in DNA detection based on graphene and graphene-related nanomaterials. Based on the current understanding, this review attempts to identify the future directions in which the field is likely to thrive, and stimulate more significant research in this subject.
Outlier removal is a fundamental data processing task to ensure the quality of scanned point cloud data (PCD), which is becoming increasing important in industrial applications and reverse ...engineering. Acquired scanned PCD is usually noisy, sparse and temporarily incoherent. Thus the processing of scanned data is typically an ill-posed problem. In the paper, we present a simple and effective method based on two geometrical characteristics constraints to trim the noisy points. One of the geometrical characteristics is the local density information and another is the deviation from the local fitting plane. The local density based method provides a preprocessing step, which could remove those sparse outlier and isolated outlier. The non-isolated outlier removal in this paper depends on a local projection method, which placing those points onto objects. There is no doubt that the deviation of any point from the local fitting plane should be a criterion to reduce the noisy points. The experimental results demonstrate the ability to remove the noisy point from various man-made objects consisting of complex outlier.