Graphene is a two-dimensional material that offers a unique combination of low density, exceptional mechanical properties, large surface area and excellent electrical conductivity. Recent progress ...has produced bulk 3D assemblies of graphene, such as graphene aerogels, but they possess purely stochastic porous networks, which limit their performance compared with the potential of an engineered architecture. Here we report the fabrication of periodic graphene aerogel microlattices, possessing an engineered architecture via a 3D printing technique known as direct ink writing. The 3D printed graphene aerogels are lightweight, highly conductive and exhibit supercompressibility (up to 90% compressive strain). Moreover, the Young's moduli of the 3D printed graphene aerogels show an order of magnitude improvement over bulk graphene materials with comparable geometric density and possess large surface areas. Adapting the 3D printing technique to graphene aerogels realizes the possibility of fabricating a myriad of complex aerogel architectures for a broad range of applications.
Patients with atrial fibrillation are known to have a high risk of mortality. There is a paucity of population-based studies about the impact of atrial fibrillation on the mortality risk stratified ...by age, sex, and detailed causes of death.
A total of 15,411 patients with atrial fibrillation from the Korean National Health Insurance Service-National Sample Cohort were enrolled, and causes of death were identified according to codes of the 10th revision of the International Classification of Diseases.
From 2002 to 2013, a total of 4,479 (29%) deaths were confirmed, and the crude mortality rate for all-cause death was 63.3 per 1,000 patient-years. Patients with atrial fibrillation had a 3.7-fold increased risk of all-cause death compared with the general population. The standardized mortality ratio for all-cause death was the highest in young patients and decreased with increasing age (standardized mortality ratio 21.93, 95% confidence interval 7.60-26.26 in patients aged <20 years; standardized mortality ratio 2.77, 95% confidence interval 2.63-2.91 in patients aged ≥80 years). Women with atrial fibrillation exhibited a greater excess mortality risk than men (standardized mortality ratio 3.81, 95% confidence interval 3.65-3.98 in women; standardized mortality ratio 3.35, 95% confidence interval 3.21-3.48 in men). Cardiovascular disease was the leading cause of death (38.5%), and cerebral infarction was the most common specific disease. Patients with atrial fibrillation had an about 5 times increased risk of death due to cardiovascular disease compared with the general population.
Patients with atrial fibrillation had a 4 times increased risk of mortality compared with the general population. However, the impact of atrial fibrillation on mortality decreased with age and in men. Cerebral infarction was the most common cause of death, and more attention should be paid to reducing the risk of stroke.
Graphene is an atomically thin, two-dimensional (2D) carbon material that offers a unique combination of low density, exceptional mechanical properties, thermal stability, large surface area, and ...excellent electrical conductivity. Recent progress has resulted in macro-assemblies of graphene, such as bulk graphene aerogels for a variety of applications. However, these three-dimensional (3D) graphenes exhibit physicochemical property attenuation compared to their 2D building blocks because of one-fold composition and tortuous, stochastic porous networks. These limitations can be offset by developing a graphene composite material with an engineered porous architecture. Here, we report the fabrication of 3D periodic graphene composite aerogel microlattices for supercapacitor applications, via a 3D printing technique known as direct-ink writing. The key factor in developing these novel aerogels is creating an extrudable graphene oxide-based composite ink and modifying the 3D printing method to accommodate aerogel processing. The 3D-printed graphene composite aerogel (3D-GCA) electrodes are lightweight, highly conductive, and exhibit excellent electrochemical properties. In particular, the supercapacitors using these 3D-GCA electrodes with thicknesses on the order of millimeters display exceptional capacitive retention (ca. 90% from 0.5 to 10 A·g–1) and power densities (>4 kW·kg–1) that equal or exceed those of reported devices made with electrodes 10–100 times thinner. This work provides an example of how 3D-printed materials, such as graphene aerogels, can significantly expand the design space for fabricating high-performance and fully integrable energy storage devices optimized for a broad range of applications.
Abstract
Despite ML’s impressive performance in commercial applications, several unique challenges exist when applying ML in materials science applications. In such a context, the contributions of ...this work are twofold. First, we identify common pitfalls of existing ML techniques when learning from underrepresented/imbalanced material data. Specifically, we show that with imbalanced data, standard methods for assessing quality of ML models break down and lead to misleading conclusions. Furthermore, we find that the model’s own confidence score cannot be trusted and model introspection methods (using simpler models) do not help as they result in loss of predictive performance (reliability-explainability trade-off). Second, to overcome these challenges, we propose a general-purpose explainable and reliable machine-learning framework. Specifically, we propose a generic pipeline that employs an ensemble of simpler models to reliably predict material properties. We also propose a transfer learning technique and show that the performance loss due to models’ simplicity can be overcome by exploiting correlations among different material properties. A new evaluation metric and a trust score to better quantify the confidence in the predictions are also proposed. To improve the interpretability, we add a rationale generator component to our framework which provides both model-level and decision-level explanations. Finally, we demonstrate the versatility of our technique on two applications: (1) predicting properties of crystalline compounds and (2) identifying potentially stable solar cell materials. We also point to some outstanding issues yet to be resolved for a successful application of ML in material science.
The timing and indications for surgical intervention to prevent systemic embolism in infective endocarditis remain controversial. We conducted a trial to compare clinical outcomes of early surgery ...and conventional treatment in patients with infective endocarditis.
We randomly assigned patients with left-sided infective endocarditis, severe valve disease, and large vegetations to early surgery (37 patients) or conventional treatment (39). The primary end point was a composite of in-hospital death and embolic events that occurred within 6 weeks after randomization.
All the patients assigned to the early-surgery group underwent valve surgery within 48 hours after randomization, whereas 30 patients (77%) in the conventional-treatment group underwent surgery during the initial hospitalization (27 patients) or during follow-up (3). The primary end point occurred in 1 patient (3%) in the early-surgery group as compared with 9 (23%) in the conventional-treatment group (hazard ratio, 0.10; 95% confidence interval CI, 0.01 to 0.82; P=0.03). There was no significant difference in all-cause mortality at 6 months in the early-surgery and conventional-treatment groups (3% and 5%, respectively; hazard ratio, 0.51; 95% CI, 0.05 to 5.66; P=0.59). The rate of the composite end point of death from any cause, embolic events, or recurrence of infective endocarditis at 6 months was 3% in the early-surgery group and 28% in the conventional-treatment group (hazard ratio, 0.08; 95% CI, 0.01 to 0.65; P=0.02).
As compared with conventional treatment, early surgery in patients with infective endocarditis and large vegetations significantly reduced the composite end point of death from any cause and embolic events by effectively decreasing the risk of systemic embolism. (EASE ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00750373.).
Low-density metal foams have many potential applications in electronics, energy storage, catalytic supports, fuel cells, sensors, and medical devices. Here, we report a new method for fabricating ...ultralight, conductive silver aerogel monoliths with predictable densities using silver nanowires. Silver nanowire building blocks were prepared by polyol synthesis and purified by selective precipitation. Silver aerogels were produced by freeze-casting nanowire aqueous suspensions followed by thermal sintering to weld the nanowire junctions. As-prepared silver aerogels have unique anisotropic microporous structures, with density precisely controlled by the nanowire concentration, down to 4.8 mg/cm3 and an electrical conductivity up to 51 000 S/m. Mechanical studies show that silver nanowire aerogels exhibit “elastic stiffening” behavior with a Young’s modulus up to 16 800 Pa.
Biodegradable nanoprodrugs, inheriting the antitumor effects of chemotherapy drugs and overcoming the inevitable drawback of side effects on normal tissues, hold promise as next‐generation cancer ...therapy candidates. Biodegradable nanoprodrugs of transferrin‐modified MgO2 nanosheets are developed to selectively deliver reactive oxygen species to cancer cells for molecular dynamic therapy strategy. The nanosheets favor the acidic and low catalase activity tumor microenvironment to react with proton and release nontoxic Mg2+. This reaction simultaneously produces abundant H2O2 to induce cell death and damage the structure of transferrin to release Fe3+, which will react with H2O2 to produce highly toxic ·OH to kill tumor cells.
Biodegradable nanoprodrugs of transferrin‐modified MgO2 nanosheets are developed to selectively deliver reactive oxygen species to cancer cells for molecular dynamic therapy strategy. The nanosheets favor acidic conditions and low catalase activity in the tumor microenvironment to react with protons and release nontoxic Mg2+. This reaction simultaneously produces abundant H2O2 and highly toxic ·OH, which destroys tumor cells.
Whether metabolically healthy obese (MHO) individuals are at increased risk of ischemic stroke is not well known. We investigated the association of the MHO phenotype with ischemic stroke.
A total of ...354,083 adults (age 45.8 ± 14.2 years) from the Korean National Health Insurance Service-National Sample Cohort enrolled in 2004-2008 were followed-up for incident ischemic stroke until 2013. Subjects meeting none of the metabolic syndrome criteria were classified as 'metabolically healthy'. The cohort was categorized into four groups according to obesity and metabolic status: metabolically healthy normal weight (MHNW), metabolically unhealthy normal weight (MUNW), MHO, and metabolically unhealthy obese (MUO).
Ischemic stroke was newly diagnosed in 4,884 (1.4%) individuals during a mean follow-up of 7.4 ± 1.5 years. Stroke incidence rates for the MHNW, MUNW, MHO, and MUO groups were 0.56, 2.61, 0.61, and 2.76 per 1,000 person-years, respectively. While risk for stroke increased significantly in metabolically unhealthy groups, it was not increased in MHO compared to the MHNW group on multivariate analysis. In metabolically healthy individuals, obesity did not increase the risk for ischemic stroke, regardless of the severity of obesity. Meanwhile, in metabolically unhealthy individuals, being obese was significantly associated with increased risk of stroke.
MHO individuals were not at increased risk for ischemic stroke. However, obesity increased risk for ischemic stroke in persons with metabolic risk factors; therefore, maintaining normal weight may be more important for this population. Also, metabolic unhealthiness showed greater association than obesity with stroke.
At least 246 cases of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) have been linked to nightclubs in Seoul, South Korea. During the April 30-May 5 holiday, young adults from across the country who visited ...nightclubs in Seoul contracted COVID-19 and spread it nationally. Nightclubs were temporarily closed to limit COVID-19 spread.