Toroidal dipole resonance can significantly reduce radiation loss of materials, potentially improving sensor sensitivity. Generally, toroidal dipole response is suppressed by electric and magnetic ...dipoles in natural materials, making it difficult to observe experimentally. However, as 2D metamaterials, metasurfaces can weaken the electric and magnetic dipole, enhancing toroidal dipole response. Here, we propose a new graphene-integrated toroidal resonance metasurface as an ultra-sensitive chemical sensor, capable of qualitative detection of chlorothalonil in the terahertz region, down to a detection limit of 100 pg/mL. Our results demonstrate graphene-integrated toroidal resonance metasurfaces as a promising basis for ultra-sensitive, qualitative detection in chemical and biological sensing.
•Penetrating canaloplasty is a remedy to control IOP in ICE eyes.
To report the efficacy of a bleb-independent penetrating canaloplasty in the management of glaucoma secondary to iridocorneal ...endothelial syndrome (GS-ICE).
Prospective, non-comparative clinical study.
Penetrating canaloplasty was performed on 35 eyes from 35 patients with GS-ICE and medically uncontrolled intraocular pressure (IOP) between January 2018 and April 2020. Patients were followed up at 1 week, months 1, 3, 6, 12 postoperatively, and semi-annually thereafter. The IOP, anti-glaucoma medication, and surgery-related complications were recorded. Surgical success was defined as IOP ≥ 5 mmHg and ≤ 21 mmHg without (complete success) or with/without (qualified success) IOP-lowering medication.
A total of 29 eyes (82.9%) had 360° catheterization and successfully received penetrating canaloplasty. Of these eyes, 24 (82.8%) achieved qualified success and 22 (75.9%) achieved qualified success at 12 months after surgery. The mean IOP decreased from 39.5 ± 11.8 mmHg on 2.9 ± 1.0 medications before surgery to 16.6 ± 5.3 mmHg (P < .001) on 0.2 ± 0.6 medications (P < .001) at 12 months postoperatively, respectively. Hyphema (37.9%), transient hypotony (34.5%), and transient postoperative IOP elevation (≥ 30 mmHg, 17.9%) were the most commonly observed early complications at the 1 week and 1 month visits. From 1 month and beyond, all treated eyes showed no obvious bleb at the operation quadrant.
Penetrating canaloplasty rescued the inner aqueous outflow in ICE eyes and demonstrated acceptable success in IOP control with few complications, providing a new option for the management of GS-ICE.
Why do we repeat choices that we know are bad for us? Decision making is characterized by the parallel engagement of two distinct systems, goal-directed and habitual, thought to arise from two ...computational learning mechanisms, model-based and model-free. The habitual system is a candidate source of pathological fixedness. Using a decision task that measures the contribution to learning of either mechanism, we show a bias towards model-free (habit) acquisition in disorders involving both natural (binge eating) and artificial (methamphetamine) rewards, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. This favoring of model-free learning may underlie the repetitive behaviors that ultimately dominate in these disorders. Further, we show that the habit formation bias is associated with lower gray matter volumes in caudate and medial orbitofrontal cortex. Our findings suggest that the dysfunction in a common neurocomputational mechanism may underlie diverse disorders involving compulsion.
We recently demonstrated that acute myeloid leukemia (AML) cell lines and patient-derived blasts release exosomes that carry RNA and protein; following an in vitro transfer, AML exosomes produce ...proangiogenic changes in bystander cells. We reasoned that paracrine exosome trafficking may have a broader role in shaping the leukemic niche. In a series of in vitro studies and murine xenografts, we demonstrate that AML exosomes downregulate critical retention factors (Scf, Cxcl12) in stromal cells, leading to hematopoietic stem and progenitor cell (HSPC) mobilization from the bone marrow. Exosome trafficking also regulates HSPC directly, and we demonstrate declining clonogenicity, loss of CXCR4 and c-Kit expression, and the consistent repression of several hematopoietic transcription factors, including c-Myb, Cebp-β and Hoxa-9. Additional experiments using a model of extramedullary AML or direct intrafemoral injection of purified exosomes reveal that the erosion of HSPC function can occur independent of direct cell-cell contact with leukemia cells. Finally, using a novel multiplex proteomics technique, we identified candidate pathways involved in the direct exosome-mediated modulation of HSPC function. In aggregate, this work suggests that AML exosomes participate in the suppression of residual hematopoietic function that precedes widespread leukemic invasion of the bone marrow directly and indirectly via stromal components.
Solid polymer electrolytes (SPEs) play a pivotal role in advancing electrochemical devices, such as proton batteries and supercapacitors, owing to their potential for enhancing safety and ...flexibility. In this work, employs a solution casting technique to prepare SPEs, utilizing chitosan‐dextran blends as the polymer matrix. Ammonium thiocyanate (NH4SCN) is incorporated as a charge carrier, while honey is introduced as a plasticizer. The interaction between these materials is confirmed through Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) analysis. X‐ray diffraction (XRD) analysis reveals that the addition of 10 wt.% honey (H10) to the polymer blend results in the lowest degree of crystallinity (15.24%), emphasizing the pivotal role of plasticizers in modulating the structural properties of SPEs. Furthermore, by incorporating 40 wt.% NH4SCN (SN40) into the plasticizer‐polymer host (H10), the ambient temperature conductivity obtains its maximum value of (1.08 ± 0.19 × 10−3 S cm−1) with the lowest degree of crystallinity of 10.44%, verify it is the most amorphous electrolyte. The observed trend in conductivity is influenced by the diffusion coefficient (D), ion density (n), and mobility of the ions (μ). Complementing these findings, field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) is employed to investigate the surface morphology and cross section of the SPEs, providing a comprehensive understanding of their structural characteristics. From linear sweep voltammetry (LSV), SN40 is electrochemically stable up to 2.2 V and the tion is 0.97 indicating that the ions are the dominant charge carriers.
Proton conducting polymer electrolyte based on chitosan‐dextran‐honey‐NH4SCN.
Stress-induced premature senescence program is known to be activated in cells by various genotoxic stressors, and oxidative stress is considered to be the main of those. To this end, many studies ...discover antioxidants as protective anti-aging agents. In the current study, we examined the effects of different antioxidants (Tempol, resveratrol, NAC, DPI) on the mesenchymal stem cells maintained in normal physiological conditions. We used high, but non-cytotoxic antioxidant doses which are widely used in laboratory practice to protect cells from oxidative damage. We show that these substances induce reversible block of cell proliferation and do not cause any genotoxic effects when applied to the quiescent cells. However, the same doses of the same substances, when applied to the proliferating cells, can induce irreversible cell cycle arrest, DNA strand breaks accumulation and DNA damage response activation. As a consequence, antioxidant-induced DNA damage results in the stress-induced premature senescence program activation. We conclude that high doses of antioxidants, when applied to the proliferating cells that maintain physiological levels of reactive oxygen species, can cause DNA damage and induce premature senescence which suggests to re-estimate believed unconditional anti-aging antioxidant properties.
Due to water scarcity challenges around the world, it is essential to think about non-conventional water resources to address the increased demand in clean freshwater. Environmental and public health ...problems may result from insufficient provision of sanitation and wastewater disposal facilities. Because of this, wastewater treatment and recycling methods will be vital to provide sufficient freshwater in the coming decades, since water resources are limited and more than 70% of water are consumed for irrigation purposes. Therefore, the application of treated wastewater for agricultural irrigation has much potential, especially when incorporating the reuse of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous, which are essential for plant production. Among the current treatment technologies applied in urban wastewater reuse for irrigation, wetlands were concluded to be the one of the most suitable ones in terms of pollutant removal and have advantages due to both low maintenance costs and required energy. Wetland behavior and efficiency concerning wastewater treatment is mainly linked to macrophyte composition, substrate, hydrology, surface loading rate, influent feeding mode, microorganism availability, and temperature. Constructed wetlands are very effective in removing organics and suspended solids, whereas the removal of nitrogen is relatively low, but could be improved by using a combination of various types of constructed wetlands meeting the irrigation reuse standards. The removal of phosphorus is usually low, unless special media with high sorption capacity are used. Pathogen removal from wetland effluent to meet irrigation reuse standards is a challenge unless supplementary lagoons or hybrid wetland systems are used.
Recent research has revealed that COVID-19 pneumonia is often accompanied by pulmonary edema. Pulmonary edema is a manifestation of acute lung injury (ALI), and may progress to hypoxemia and ...potentially acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which have higher mortality. Precise classification of the degree of pulmonary edema in patients is of great significance in choosing a treatment plan and improving the chance of survival. Here we propose a deep learning neural network named Non-local Channel Attention ResNet to analyze the lung ultrasound images and automatically score the degree of pulmonary edema of patients with COVID-19 pneumonia. The proposed method was designed by combining the ResNet with the non-local module and the channel attention mechanism. The non-local module was used to extract the information on characteristics of A-lines and B-lines, on the basis of which the degree of pulmonary edema could be defined. The channel attention mechanism was used to assign weights to decisive channels. The data set contains 2220 lung ultrasound images provided by Huoshenshan Hospital, Wuhan, China, of which 2062 effective images with accurate scores assigned by two experienced clinicians were used in the experiment. The experimental results indicated that our method achieved high accuracy in classifying the degree of pulmonary edema in patients with COVID-19 pneumonia by comparison with previous deep learning methods, indicating its potential to monitor patients with COVID-19 pneumonia.
A model construction scheme of chaotic optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) based on the Fourier neural operator (FNO) is proposed. Different from the conventional methods, we learn the nonlinear dynamics ...of OEO (actual components) in a data-driven way, expecting to obtain a multi-parameter OEO model for generating chaotic carrier with high-efficiency and low-cost. FNO is a deep learning architecture which utilizes neural network as a parameter structure to learn the trajectory of the family of equations from training data. With the assistance of FNO, the nonlinear dynamics of OEO characterized by differential delay equation can be modeled easily. In this work, the maximal Lyapunov exponent is applied to judge whether these time series have chaotic behavior, and the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) is introduced to evaluate the modeling performance. Compare with long and short-term memory (LSTM), FNO is not only superior to LSTM in modeling accuracy, but also requires less training data. Subsequently, we analyze the modeling performance of FNO under different feedback gains and time delays. Both numerical and experimental results show that the PCC can be greater than 0.99 in the case of low feedback gain. Next, we further analyze the influence of different system oscillation frequencies, and the generalization ability of FNO is also analyzed.
An immunochromatographic test was developed for the simultaneous detection of several compounds in a complex sample matrix. The system was designed in a ‘traffic light’ format comprising three lines ...of different colors on a test strip, thereby providing an easy tool with which to identify an analyte of interest based on the visible color of the line formed (qualitative analysis), and to determine the amount of the analytes present based on the fluorescence intensity of the lines (quantitative analysis). For the development of the multicolor immunochromatographic test, we used antibodies against antibiotics of three different classes as selective binders. Each antibody was labeled with water-soluble quantum dots with emission maximum at either 525, 585, or 625nm. The test system exhibited high sensitivity, with limits of detection for ofloxacin, chloramphenicol, and streptomycin of 0.3, 0.12, and 0.2ngmL−1, respectively. These values are 80–200 times lower than those achievable with ELISA using the same antibodies. Using the ‘traffic light’ assay, these antibiotics could be detected in milk samples within 10min without any sample preparation. The ‘traffic light’ assay also demonstrated a high degree of analyte detection when testing spiked milk samples (92–101%) and accuracy (quantitation error <8% of the mean).
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