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•Direct Z-scheme 2D/1D Bi2WO6/Ta3N5 heterojunction was prepared.•Bi2WO6/Ta3N5 exhibits superior photocatalytic activity for antibiotics degradation.•O2−, h+ and OH play vital roles in ...degradation and mineralization of antibiotics.•Boosting catalytic performance is due to the formation of Z-scheme heterojunction.•The contact between Bi2WO6/Ta3N5 and antibiotics is crucial for the degradation.
Pharmaceutical wastewater has become a severe, tremendous threaten to ecological environment and human health. Semiconductor photocatalysts have emerged as potential candidates for degrading pharmaceutical pollutants. Construction of highly efficient, stable and recyclable Z-scheme photocatalysts that are superior to individual constituents or widely studied heterojunction photocatalysts is very fascinating yet challenging. Herein, we report an efficient, stable and recyclable visible-light-driven (VLD) Bi2WO6/Ta3N5 Z-scheme heterojunction with compact interface contact fabricated via an electrospinning–calcination–solvothermal route, in which abundant Bi2WO6 nanosheets are in-situ, compactly and vertically grown on the surface of the Ta3N5 nanofibers. These as-fabricated Z-scheme Bi2WO6/Ta3N5 heterojunctions display dramatically enhanced VLD catalytic activity compared to pristine Bi2WO6, Ta3N5, or the mixture of Bi2WO6 and Ta3N5. Particularly, Bi2WO6/Ta3N5 (1.0Bi–Ta) presents the highest photocatalytic property for the removal of tetracycline hydrochloride (TC) and ciprofloxacin (CIP), achieving approximately 86.7% and 81.1% degradation efficiency, respectively. The extraordinary photocatalytic property is ascribed to the Z-scheme hetero-structure with unique core–shell architecture that realizes compactly interfacial contact between the components for efficient separation of photo-excited carriers, strong visible-light absorption, as well as possesses the strong oxidation ability of photo-excited hole, and the high reduction capacity of photo-excited electron. The trapping experiments combined with electron spin resonance (ESR) analyses verify the prevailing role of photo-induced holes (h+), superoxide radicals (O2−), and hydroxyl radicals (OH) in the Bi2WO6/Ta3N5 photocatalytic system. Notably, the direct contact between Bi2WO6/Ta3N5 and contaminants is experimentally demonstrated to be significant for the efficient degradation of pollutants. Moreover, Bi2WO6/Ta3N5 is endowed with easily recyclable characteristics and excellent durability. Therefore, this research illustrates that Bi2WO6/Ta3N5 may hold a great prospect for the treatment of harmful pharmaceutical pollutants.
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•DFT and microkinetic simulation were performed to study WGSR on oxygen-deficient TiO2 supported copper cluster catalysts with different sizes and Cu(111) crystal planes.•DFT and ...microkinetic simulation results showed that WGSR activities follow the order of Cu4 > Cu2 ≈ Cu8 > Cu1 > Cu(111).•The redox pathway cannot proceed due to the lack of active sites on Cu1 and Cu2 clusters.•The active center structure of the copper cluster is composed of 3 copper atoms in which the Cu-Cu coordination number is ca. 2 ∼ 3.•The low-coordination copper atoms determined by the geometry structure promote the WGSR activity of the copper clusters.
The water–gas shift reaction (WGSR) is of great significance in industrial hydrogen production. In this paper, Cun/TiO2(n = 1,2,4,8) and Cu (111) crystal planes were studied to explore the effect of size effect on the activity of WGSR. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations showed that the adsorption energy of H2O molecule was significantly enhanced on the surface of Cu1 and Cu2 clusters compared with Cu4 and Cu8 clusters, while CO adsorption strength first increased and then decreased. Among many copper clusters of different sizes, the redox pathway cannot proceed due to the lack of active sites on Cu1 and Cu2 clusters. According to the analysis of the microkinetic model, the order of WGSR activity on the surface of copper clusters of different sizes is: Cu4 > Cu2 ≈ Cu8 > Cu1 > Cu (111). The active center structure of the copper cluster is composed of 3 copper atoms in which the Cu-Cu coordination number is ca. 2 ∼ 3, and the active center is partially oxidized copper. Essentially, the low-coordination copper atoms determined by the geometry structure promote the WGSR activity of the copper clusters. This work not only reveals the copper cluster size effect on WGSR, but also provides the guidance for the size design and control of other supported metal catalysts.
Lieb lattice has been extensively studied to realize ferromagnetism due to its exotic flat band. However, its material realization has remained elusive; so far only artificial Lieb lattices have been ...made experimentally. Here, based on first-principles and tight-binding calculations, we discover that a recently synthesized two-dimensional sp
carbon-conjugated covalent-organic framework (sp
c-COF) represents a material realization of a Lieb-like lattice. The observed ferromagnetism upon doping arises from a Dirac (valence) band in a non-ideal Lieb lattice with strong electronic inhomogeneity (EI) rather than the topological flat band in an ideal Lieb lattice. The EI, as characterized with a large on-site energy difference and a strong dimerization interaction between the corner and edge-center ligands, quenches the kinetic energy of the usual dispersive Dirac band, subjecting to an instability against spin polarization. We predict an even higher spin density for monolayer sp
c-COF to accommodate a higher doping concentration with reduced interlayer interaction.
This study proposes a simple but strong baseline for deep person re-identification (ReID). Deep person ReID has achieved great progress and high performance in recent years. However, many ...state-of-the-art methods design complex network structures and concatenate multi-branch features. In the literature, some effective training tricks briefly appear in several papers or source codes. The present study collects and evaluates these effective training tricks in person ReID. By combining these tricks, the model achieves 94.5% rank-1 and 85.9% mean average precision on Market1501 with only using the global features of ResNet50. The performance surpasses all existing global- and part-based baselines in person ReID. We propose a novel neck structure named as batch normalization neck (BNNeck). BNNeck adds a batch normalization layer after global pooling layer to separate metric and classification losses into two different feature spaces because we observe they are inconsistent in one embedding space. Extended experiments show that BNNeck can boost the baseline, and our baseline can improve the performance of existing state-of-the-art methods. Our codes and models are available at: https://github.com/michuanhaohao/reid-strong-baseline
While post-disaster rebuilding is an urgent task for affected areas, an approach without consideration for climate protection will probably lead to another disaster of carbon lock-in. Therefore, ...policymaking and implementation are critically important. This paper takes the Guangyuan prefecture as a case study, where the local government took the lead in low-carbon initiative and made a great contribution to low-carbon development. Based on long-term field investigations and semi-structured interviews, using the theory of multi-level governance, it discusses policy formation and implementation in the Guangyuan prefecture, and how the governance system promoted an environment-and-climate-friendly rebuilding. The results demonstrate the urgency of carbon decoupling in post-disaster-rebuilding and the significance of an effective governance system. This provides insight to the contemporary world that post-disaster rebuilding is not only a revitalization of the affected areas, but a comprehensive undertaking to avoid other possible disasters and ensure a sustainable future.
The breaking of SU(6) symmetry to a more general flavor SU(3) symmetry could serve as a potential explanation for the “hyperon puzzle” of neutron stars by adjusting the hyperon potentials. ...Specifically, when the soft relativistic mean-field (RMF) Λ hyperon potentials fall within the domains of chiral SU(3) interactions NLO13 with two-body forces, the maximum mass of neutron stars is expected to be lower than 2.0 M⊙, whereas it can exceed 2.0M⊙ if the RMF Λ hyperon potentials are sufficiently stiff to be consistent with those from chiral SU(3) interactions NLO13 with three-body forces. In our investigation involving these two types of Λ hyperon potentials, we explore how the hyperon yields and flows are affected in heavy-ion collisions. We find that the inclusion of hyperon potentials results in better agreement of the Λ directed flows with data but without clear differentiation in the stiffness of the hyperon potentials. Similarly negligent is the disparity in the rapidity distributions of the Λ collective flows predicted by the stiff and soft hyperon potentials. In contrast, the Λ collective flows beyond the central rapidity region turn out to be sensitive to the stiffness of the RMF equation of state (EOS) with the preference of a soft RMF EOS to a stiff one. Notably, the transverse momentum distributions of Λ hyperon production are sensitive to both the stiffness of the RMF EOS and Λ hyperon potential at high transverse momenta.
Poverty reduction has become a core subject for researchers across the social sciences from economics to finance, management and entrepreneurship. In general, the faster and more widespread economic ...growth in recent decades has enabled large numbers of people to move out of poverty such that extreme poverty has fallen to less than ten percent of world population. However, it is increasingly clear that while some countries and regions have seen dramatic improvement of poverty, there are other places with large numbers of people still in poverty that can greatly benefit from poverty alleviation efforts. Management scholars and economists increasingly recognize that entrepreneurship may offer a significant part of the solution to poverty around the world. A related focus regarding the ways in which poverty can be reduced in through entrepreneurship and new venture creation, however, how to link the key issues above with the current platform, network/digital and sharing economies, how to find new ways and new solutions to effectively reduce poverty in now political, economic and global contexts still needs to be better understood. This Special Issue has set the goals of publishing work that builds knowledge about thenature of poverty reduction and business, entrepreneurship and innovation activities in both developed and developing economies, as well as their models, antecedents and consequences related with the current platform.
The NLRP3 inflammasome has been implicated in the pathogenesis of a wide variety of human diseases. A few compounds have been developed to inhibit NLRP3 inflammasome activation, but compounds ...directly and specifically targeting NLRP3 are still not available, so it is unclear whether NLRP3 itself can be targeted to prevent or treat diseases. Here we show that the compound CY-09 specifically blocks NLRP3 inflammasome activation. CY-09 directly binds to the ATP-binding motif of NLRP3 NACHT domain and inhibits NLRP3 ATPase activity, resulting in the suppression of NLRP3 inflammasome assembly and activation. Importantly, treatment with CY-09 shows remarkable therapeutic effects on mouse models of cryopyrin-associated autoinflammatory syndrome (CAPS) and type 2 diabetes. Furthermore, CY-09 is active ex vivo for monocytes from healthy individuals or synovial fluid cells from patients with gout. Thus, our results provide a selective and direct small-molecule inhibitor for NLRP3 and indicate that NLRP3 can be targeted in vivo to combat NLRP3-driven diseases.
Oridonin (Ori) is the major active ingredient of the traditional Chinese medicinal herb Rabdosia rubescens and has anti-inflammatory activity, but the target of Ori remains unknown. NLRP3 is a ...central component of NLRP3 inflammasome and has been involved in a wide variety of chronic inflammation-driven human diseases. Here, we show that Ori is a specific and covalent inhibitor for NLRP3 inflammasome. Ori forms a covalent bond with the cysteine 279 of NLRP3 in NACHT domain to block the interaction between NLRP3 and NEK7, thereby inhibiting NLRP3 inflammasome assembly and activation. Importantly, Ori has both preventive or therapeutic effects on mouse models of peritonitis, gouty arthritis and type 2 diabetes, via inhibition of NLRP3 activation. Our results thus identify NLRP3 as the direct target of Ori for mediating Ori's anti-inflammatory activity. Ori could serve as a lead for developing new therapeutics against NLRP3-driven diseases.
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