Herein, we use a facile procedure to graft a thin graphitic C3N4 (g‐C3N4) layer on aligned TiO2 nanotube arrays (TiNT) by a one‐step chemical vapor deposition (CVD) approach. This provides a platform ...to enhance the visible‐light response of TiO2 nanotubes for antimicrobial applications. The formed g‐C3N4/TiNT binary nanocomposite exhibits excellent bactericidal efficiency against Escherichia coli (E. coli) as a visible‐light activated antibacterial coating, without the use of additional bactericides.
Go nano! A facile procedure has been introduced to graft a thin g‐C3N4 layer on aligned TiO2 nanotube arrays by a one‐step chemical vapor deposition (CVD) approach. The formed g‐C3N4/TiNT binary nanocomposite exhibits excellent bactericidal efficiency against E. coli as a visible‐light‐activated antibacterial coating (see figure).
Organic–inorganic hybrid perovskites have reached an unprecedented high efficiency in photovoltaic applications, which makes the commercialization of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) possible. In the ...past several years, particular attention has been paid to the stability of PSC devices, which is a critical issue for becoming a practical photovoltaic technology. In particular, the interface‐induced degradation of perovskites should be the dominant factor causing poor stability. Here, imidazole bromide functionalized graphene quantum dots (I‐GQDs) are demonstrated to regulate the interface between the electron transport layer (ETL) and formamidinium lead iodide (FAPbI3) perovskite layer. The incorporation of I‐GQDs not only reduces the interface defects for achieving a better energy level alignment between ETL and perovskite, but also improves the film quality of FAPbI3 perovskite including enlarged grain size, lower trap density, and a longer carrier lifetime. Consequently, the planar FAPbI3 PSCs with I‐GQDs regulation achieve a high efficiency of 22.37% with enhanced long‐term stability.
The MA‐free organic‐inorganic hybrid perovskite (FAPbI3) have drawn intense attention. The imidazole bromide functionalized graphene quantum dots is introduced to regulate the interface between SnO2 layer and FAPbI3 perovskite layer. The resulting reduced interface defects, better energy level alignment, and better perovskite film achieve a high efficiency of 22.37% with enhanced long‐term stability.
This study aimed to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying the roles of metformin (MET) and Sorafenib (SOR) in the treatment of endometrial hyperplasia (EH) in polycystic ovary syndrome ...(PCOS). Effects of MET and SOR on the area of endometrium and myometrium were detected. Western blot analysis and immunohistochemistry assays were carried out to detect the levels of mammalian target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1), mTORC2, LC3‐II, P62, and Caspase‐3 in rats and cultured cells. Furthermore, cell counting kit‐8 assay and flow cytometry analysis was carried out to determine the apoptotic profiles of treated cells. MET and SOR could apparently decrease the areas of endometrium and myometrium in PCOS. MET notably enhanced the expression of LC3‐II and Caspase‐3 in PCOS while substantially reducing the level of mTORC1 and P62. Similarly, SOR also enhanced the expression of LC3‐II and Caspase‐3 in PCOS while substantially reducing the level of mTORC2 and P62. Treatment with MET and SOR significantly inhibited the proliferation of HCC‐94 and HEC‐1‐A cells while promoting their apoptosis by upregulating the expression of Caspase‐3. In cells treated with MET, the expression of mTORC1 and LC3‐II was upregulated while the expression of P62 was downregulated. Similarly, in cells treated with SOR, the expression of mTORC2 and LC3‐II was also upregulated while the expression of P62 was also downregulated. Furthermore, MET showed no effect on mTORC2 expression, while SOR showed no effect on mTORC1 expression. In this study, we suggested that MET and SOR alleviated the risk of EH in PCOS via the mTORC1/autophagy/apoptosis axis and mTORC2/autophagy/apoptosis axis, respectively.
The findings of this study demonstrated that the deregulation of autophagy is responsible for the development of endometrial hyperplasia (EH) in polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). In this study, we showed that metformin and Sorafenib exerted a synergistic therapeutic effect on PCOS‐induced EH both in vivo and in vitro by regulating the process of autophagy.
Sensors are a key component in industrial automation systems. A fault or malfunction in sensors may degrade control system performance. An engineering system model is usually disturbed by input ...uncertainties, which brings a challenge for monitoring, diagnosis, and control. In this study, a novel estimation technique, called adaptive unknown-input observer, is proposed to simultaneously reconstruct sensor faults as well as system states. Specifically, the unknown input observer is used to decouple partial disturbances, the un-decoupled disturbances are attenuated by the optimization using linear matrix inequalities, and the adaptive technique is explored to track sensor faults. As a result, a robust reconstruction of the sensor fault as well as system states is then achieved. Furthermore, the proposed robustly adaptive fault reconstruction technique is extended to Lipschitz nonlinear systems subjected to sensor faults and unknown input uncertainties. Finally, the effectiveness of the algorithms is demonstrated using an aircraft system model and robotic arm and comparison studies.
Prinsepiautilis Royle is a wild woody oil species of Rosaceae that yields edible oil which has been proved to possess particular benefits for human health and medical therapy. However, the lack of ...bred varieties has largely impeded exploiting immense potentials for high quality of its seed oil. It is urgently needed to enlarge the knowledge of genetic basis of the species and develop genetic markers to enhance modern breeding programs.
Here we reported the complete chloroplast (cp) genome of 156,328 bp. Comparative cp sequence analyses of P. utilis along with other four Rosaceae species resulted in similar genome structures, gene orders, and gene contents. Contraction/expansion of inverted repeat regions (IRs) explained part of the length variation in the Rosaceae cp genomes. Genome sequence alignments revealed that nucleotide diversity was associated with AT content, and large single copy regions (LSC) and small single copy regions (SSC) harbored higher sequence variations in both coding and non-coding regions than IRs. Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) were detected in the P. utilis and compared with those of the other four Rosaceae cp genomes. Almost all the SSR loci were composed of A or T, therefore it might contribute to the A-T richness of cp genomes and be associated with AT biased sequence variation. Among all the protein-coding genes, ycf1 showed the highest sequence divergence, indicating that it could accomplish the discrimination of species within Rosaceae as well as within angiosperms better than other genes.
With the addition of this new sequenced cp genome, high nucleotide substitution rate and abundant deletions/insertions were observed, suggesting a greater genomic dynamics than previously explored in Rosaceae. The availability of the complete cp genome of P. utilis will provide chloroplast markers and genetic information to better enhance the conservation and utilization of this woody oil plant.
In flotation, metal ions possess significant roles that are usually fulfilled by either selectively activating or depressing the target minerals. Despite that tremendous efforts have been made to ...address the roles of metal ions in flotation, it still lacks a comprehensive review, especially to compare various ions instead of focusing on a specific one. This review begins by elaborately categorizing the factors involved in affecting the roles of metal ions in flotation. After that, well-accepted mechanisms are updated and discussed from the ore type. Furthermore, typical approaches to explore the underlying mechanisms are emphasized, including traditional techniques such as micro-flotation, contact angle measurement, zeta potential measurement, and other recent prevailing methodologies, like computational method, solution chemistry calculation, and cyclic voltammetry. This work will pave the way to promote flotations via activities like selectively adding/reducing metal ions, choosing reagents, and regulating the slurry chemistry.
Fully Homomorphic encryption-based Merkle Tree (FHMT) is a novel technique for streaming authenticated data structures (SADS) to achieve the streaming verifiable computation. By leveraging the ...computing capability of fully homomorphic encryption, FHMT shifts almost all of the computation tasks to the server, reaching nearly no overhead for the client. Therefore, FHMT is an important technique to construct a more efficient lightweight ADS for resource-limited clients. But the typical FHMT cannot support the dynamic scenario very well because it cannot expend freely since its height is fixed. We now present our fully dynamic FHMT construction, which is a construction that is able to authenticate an unbounded number of data elements and improves upon the state-of-the-art in terms of computational overhead. We divided the algorithms of the DFHMT with the following phases: initialization, insertion, tree expansion, query and verification. The DFHMT removes the drawbacks of the static FHMT. In the initialization phase, it is not required for the scale of the tree to be determined, and the scale of the tree can be adaptively expanded during the data-appending phase. This feature is more suitable for streaming data environments. We analyzed the security of the DFHMT, and point out that DFHMT has the same security with FHMT. The storage, communication and computation overhead of DFHMT is also analyzed, the results show that the client uses simple numerical multiplications and additions to replace hash operations, which reduces the computational burden of the client; the length of the authentication path in DFHMT is shorter than FHMT, which reduces storage and communication overhead. The performance of DFHMT was compared with other construction techniques of SADS via some tests, the results show that DFHMT strikes the performance balance between the client and server, which has some performance advantage for lightweight devices.
A self‐powered and sustainable traffic monitoring system is highly required for future urban development. Herein, self‐healable piezoresistive sensors and triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) are ...constructed by in situ polymerization of polyvinyl alcohol‐polyacrylamide double network hydrogel in the presence of sodium alginate and tannic acid‐modified cellulose nanocrystals (denoted as PPC) for all‐weather self‐powered intelligent traffic monitoring applications. Because of hydrogen bonding and boron ester bonding, the resultant PPC‐based strain sensor can rapidly self‐heal and restore its sensing ability within 1 min with a self‐healing efficiency of 97.4%. Based on piezoresistive effect, the ions in sodium alginate endow the PPC‐based strain sensor with a relatively high gauge factor of 8.39, which can monitor the motion and fatigue of drivers. Based on triboelectrification effect, the PPC‐based TENG sensor can detect instantaneous vehicle speed, judge traffic accident liability, evaluate vehicle weight, and alert the driver to prevent accidents caused by drowsy driving. After partially replacing water in the PPC with glycerin, the resulting PPC‐based TENG sensor exhibits stable performance at temperatures ranging from ‐30 to 40 °C, ensuring its all‐weather monitoring ability. The all‐weather and self‐powered intelligent traffic monitoring system is promising for ensuring the security of future cities.
An intelligent traffic system is constructed by in situ polymerization of polyvinyl alcohol‐polyacrylamide double network hydrogel dispersion of sodium alginate and tannic acid‐modified cellulose nanocrystals, which can not only innovatively realize the functions of detecting instantaneous vehicle speed, judging traffic accident liability, and inspecting vehicle weight, but also monitor the driver state to prevent accidents caused by drowsy driving.
As a strong oxidizing gas, ozone can damage the human respiratory tract and cardiovascular system. Aside from ambient outdoor ozone that enters buildings, indoor ozone emission devices (IOEDs) such ...as disinfectors, air purifiers, and printing devices are the primary source of indoor ozone. This review briefly presents the types and ozone emission mechanisms of IOEDs, the setups and procedures for measuring the ozone emission rate (OER) of IOEDs, and various equations for analyzing test results. This review also summarizes and compares the OERs of different IOEDs and analyzes the factors affecting the OER. The average OERs of in-duct air cleaners, ozone generators, room air purifiers, photocopiers, laser printers, and other small household devices are 62.8, 76.3, 4.6, 3.3, 0.8, and 0.4 mg/h, respectively. The OERs of in-duct air cleaners and ozone generators are generally larger than those of printing devices. The highest and lowest OERs of room air purifiers in the surveyed literature are 30.5 mg/h and 56 μg/h, respectively, with a difference of approximately 550 times. The ozone emission per unit paper for printing devices and per kilowatt hour for other IOEDs are also calculated and compared. In addition, the effects of the design and working mechanism of IOEDs on the OER are also discussed in detail. Users' operation and daily maintenance of an IOED and the OER test conditions can also affect the OER. Finally, analytical equations are used to compare the influence of the test result processing method on the OER for the same IOED.
In recent years, the remote sensing image (RSI) semantic segmentation attracts increasing research interest due to its wide application. RSIs are difficult to be processed holistically on current GPU ...cards on account of their large field-of-views (FOVs). However, the prevailing practices such as downsampling and cropping will inevitably decrease the quality of semantic segmentation. To address this conflict, this paper proposes a new deep adaptive fusion network with multiple FOVs (MFVNet), which is specially designed for RSI semantic segmentation. Different from existing methods, MFVNet takes into consideration the differences among multiple FOVs. By pyramid sampling the RSI, we first obtain images on different scales with multiple FOVs. Images on the high scale with a large FOV can capture larger spatial contexts and complete object contours, while images on the low scale with a small FOV can keep the higher spatial resolution and more detailed information. Then scale-specific models are chosen to make the best predictions for all scales. Next, the output feature maps and score maps are aligned through the scale alignment module to overcome spatial misregistration among scales. Finally, the aligned score maps are fused with the help of adaptive weight maps generated by the adaptive fusion module, producing the fused prediction. The performance of MFVNet surpasses the previous state-of-the-art semantic segmentation models on three typical RSI datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed MFVNet.
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