The environmental pollution has become a serious issue because the pollutants can cause permanent damage to the DNA, nervous system, and circulating system, resulting in various incurable diseases, ...such as organ failure, malformation, angiocardiopathy, and cancer. The effective detection of environmental pollutants is urgently needed to keep them far away from daily life. Among the reported pollutant sensors, luminescent metal–organic frameworks (LMOFs) with tunable structures have attracted remarkable attention to detect the pollutants because of their excellent selectivity, sensitivity, and recyclability. Although lots of metal–organic framework (MOF)‐based luminescent sensors have been summarized and discussed in previous reviews, the detection of environmental pollutants, especially radioactive ions and heavy metal ions, still have not been systematically presented. Here, the sensing mechanisms and construction principles of luminescent MOFs are discussed, and the state‐of‐the‐art MOF‐based luminescent sensors of environmental pollutants, including pesticides, antibiotics, explosives, VOCs, toxic gas, toxic small molecules, radioactive ions, and heavy metal ions are highlighted. This comprehensive review may further guide the development of luminescent MOFs and promote their practical applications for sensing environmental pollutants.
Luminescent MOFs have attracted remarkable attention to detect environmental pollutants because of their excellent selectivity, sensitivity, and recyclability. In this review, the sensing mechanisms and construction principles of luminescent MOFs are discussed, and the state‐of‐the‐art luminescent MOF‐based sensors of environmental pollutants, including pesticides, antibiotics, explosives, VOCs, toxic gas, toxic small molecules, radioactive ions, and heavy metal ions are highlighted.
Efficient building energy management is essential for energy saving and green society. This paper investigates sustainable energy management for an energy building cluster with distributed ...transaction. The building cluster consists of several types of energy buildings, e.g., office, industrial, and commercial buildings. We first formulate utility functions for the buildings of consuming energy based on the characteristics of their controllable loads. Then a two-stage energy sharing strategy is presented. In the first stage, the total social energy cost is minimized through finding the optimal energy sharing profiles in a distributed way. In the second stage, the clearing for mutual energy sharing is modeled as a non-cooperative game, and the existence of the equilibrium of the game is illustrated and a relaxation-based algorithm is introduced to search for the equilibrium. Moreover, a real-time model for each building to overcome real-time uncertainties, such as renewable energy generation and base loads is provided. The simulation results show that the proposed energy sharing strategy is economically beneficial for the energy buildings, computationally efficient, and is promising to facilitate a sustainable regional building cluster.
As a collective quasiparticle excitation of the magnetic order in magnetic materials, spin wave, or magnon when quantized, can propagate in both conducting and insulating materials. Like the ...manipulation of its optical counterpart, the ability to manipulate spin wave polarization is not only important but also fundamental for magnonics. With only one type of magnetic lattice, ferromagnets can only accommodate the right-handed circularly polarized spin wave modes, which leaves no freedom for polarization manipulation. In contrast, antiferromagnets, with two opposite magnetic sublattices, have both left and right-circular polarizations, and all linear and elliptical polarizations. Here we demonstrate theoretically and confirm by micromagnetic simulations that, in the presence of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, an antiferromagnetic domain wall acts naturally as a spin wave polarizer or a spin wave retarder (waveplate). Our findings provide extremely simple yet flexible routes toward magnonic information processing by harnessing the polarization degree of freedom of spin wave.Spin waves are promising candidates as carriers for energy-efficient information processing, but they have not yet been fully explored application wise. Here the authors theoretically demonstrate that antiferromagnetic domain walls are naturally spin wave polarizers and retarders, two key components of magnonic devices.
Next generation industrial biotechnology (NGIB) based on extremophilic bacteria grown under unsterile and continuous way in plastic transparent bioreactors.▪
•Low petroleum prices require innovations ...to make bio-production competitive.•Contamination resistant extremophilic microorganisms can simplify bioprocessing.•Next generation industrial biotechnology (NGIB) is energy and fresh water saving.•NGIB should be operated under open and continuous conditions and easily automated.•NGIB should make bulk chemical production as competitive as chemical processes.
Industrial biotechnology aims to produce bulk chemicals including polymeric materials and biofuels based on bioprocessing sustainable agriculture products such as starch, fatty acids and/or cellulose. However, traditional bioprocesses require bioreactors made of stainless steel, complicated sterilization, difficult and expensive separation procedures as well as well-trained engineers that are able to conduct bioprocessing under sterile conditions, reducing the competitiveness of the bio-products. Amid the continuous low petroleum price, next generation industrial biotechnology (NGIB) allows bioprocessing to be conducted under unsterile (open) conditions using ceramic, cement or plastic bioreactors in a continuous way, it should be an energy, water and substrate saving technology with convenient operation procedure. NGIB also requires less capital investment and reduces demand on highly trained engineers. The foundation for the simplified NGIB is microorganisms that resist contaminations by other microbes, one of the examples is rapid growing halophilic bacteria inoculated under high salt concentration and alkali pH. They have been engineered to produce multiple products in various scales.
Piwi‐interacting RNAs (piRNAs), a novel class of small non‐coding RNAs, were first discovered in germline cells and are thought to silence transposons in spermatogenesis. Recently, piRNAs have also ...been identified in somatic tissues, and aberrant expression of piRNAs in tumor tissues may be implicated in carcinogenesis. However, the function of piR‐823 in colorectal cancer (CRC) remains unclear. Here, we first found that piR‐823 was significantly upregulated in CRC tissues compared with its expression in the adjacent tissues. Inhibition of piR‐823 suppressed cell proliferation, arrested the cell cycle in the G1 phase and induced cell apoptosis in CRC cell lines HCT116 and DLD‐1, whereas overexpression of piR‐823 promoted cell proliferation in normal colonic epithelial cell line FHC. Interestingly, Inhibition of piR‐823 repressed the expression of heat shock protein (HSP) 27, 60, 70. Furthermore, elevated HSPs expression partially abolished the effect of piR‐823 on cell proliferation and apoptosis. In addition, we further demonstrated that piR‐823 increased the transcriptional activity of HSF1, the common transcription factor of HSPs, by binding to HSF1 and promoting its phosphorylation at Ser326. Our study reveals that piR‐823 plays a tumor‐promoting role by upregulating phosphorylation and transcriptional activity of HSF1 and suggests piR‐823 as a potential therapeutic target for CRC.
piR‐823 is up‐regulated in colorectal cancer tissues .piR‐823 promotes proliferation and inhibits apoptosis in colorectal cancer carcinogenesis.piR‐823 elevates the expression of HSP27, 60 and 70 by binding to HSF1 and enhancing its activity.
High‐performance nonfullerene polymer solar cells (PSCs) are developed by integrating the nonfullerene electron‐accepting material ...3,9‐bis(2‐methylene‐(3‐(1,1‐dicyanomethylene)‐indanone))‐5,5,11,11‐tetrakis(4‐hexylphenyl)‐dithieno2,3‐d:2′,3′‐d′‐s‐indaceno1,2‐b:5,6‐b′dithiophne) (ITIC) with a wide‐bandgap electron‐donating polymer PTzBI or PTzBI‐DT, which consists of an imide functionalized benzotriazole (TzBI) building block. Detailed investigations reveal that the extension of conjugation can affect the optical and electronic properties, molecular aggregation properties, charge separation in the bulk‐heterojunction films, and thus the overall photovoltaic performances. Single‐junction PSCs based on PTzBI:ITIC and PTzBI‐DT:ITIC exhibit remarkable power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) of 10.24% and 9.43%, respectively. To our knowledge, these PCEs are the highest efficiency values obtained based on electron‐donating conjugated polymers consisting of imide‐functionalized electron‐withdrawing building blocks. Of particular interest is that the resulting device based on PTzBI exhibits remarkable PCE of 7% with the thickness of active layer of 300 nm, which is among the highest values of nonfullerene PSCs utilizing thick photoactive layer. Additionally, the device based on PTzBI:ITIC exhibits prominent stability, for which the PCE remains as 9.34% after thermal annealing at 130 °C for 120 min. These findings demonstrate the great promise of using this series of wide‐bandgap conjugated polymers as electron‐donating materials for high‐performance nonfullerene solar cells toward high‐throughput roll‐to‐roll processing technology.
High‐performance nonfullerene polymer solar cells with power conversion efficiencies of around 10% are achieved by integrating the wide‐bandgap polymers PTzBI or PTzBI‐DT with a nonfullerene acceptor ITIC. The extension of conjugation can affect the optical and electronic properties, molecular aggregation properties, and charge separation in the bulk‐heterojunction films, and thus the overall photovoltaic performances.
Inhibition of TICT can significantly increase the brightness of fluorescent materials. Accurate prediction of TICT is thus critical for the quantitative design of high‐performance fluorophores and ...AIEgens. TICT of 14 types of popular organic fluorophores were modeled with time‐dependent density functional theory (TD‐DFT). A reliable and generalizable computational approach for modeling TICT formations was established. To demonstrate the prediction power of our approach, we quantitatively designed a boron dipyrromethene (BODIPY)‐based AIEgen which exhibits (almost) barrierless TICT rotations in monomers. Subsequent experiments validated our molecular design and showed that the aggregation of this compound turns on bright emissions with ca. 27‐fold fluorescence enhancement, as TICT formation is inhibited in molecular aggregates.
A generalizable and reliable computational approach is formulated for modeling the twisted intramolecular charge transfer. Applying this approach in combination with experimental validations, azetidinyl‐substituted PRODAN and BODIPY derivatives were designed for bioimaging and aggregation‐induced emission (AIE) applications with enhanced performance.
As the internet has become popularized in recent years, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-i) has shifted from a face-to-face approach to delivery via the internet (internet-based CBT-i, ...ICBT-i). Several studies have investigated the effects of ICBT-i on comorbid anxiety and depression; however, the results remain inconclusive. Thus, a meta-analysis was conducted to determine the effects of ICBT-i on anxiety and depression. Electronic databases, including PubMed, EMBASE, PsycINFO and the Cochrane Library (throughout May 28, 2015), were systematically searched for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of ICBT-i. Data were extracted from the qualified studies and pooled together. The standardized mean difference (SMD) and 95% confidence interval (95% CI) were calculated to assess the effects of ICBT-i on comorbid anxiety and depression. Nine records that included ten studies were ultimately qualified. The effect sizes (ESs) were -0.35 -0.46, -0.25 for anxiety and -0.36 -0.47, -0.26 for depression, which were stable using a between-group or within-group comparison and suggest positive effects of ICBT-i on both comorbid disorders. Although positive results were identified in this meta-analysis, additional high-quality studies with larger sample sizes are needed in the future.
A novel naphtho1,2‐c:5,6‐c′bis(1,2,5thiadiazole)‐based narrow‐bandgap π‐conjugated polymer is designed for application in polymer solar cells. Remarkable power conversion efficiencies over 10% can ...be achieved based on both conventional and inverted device architectures with thick photoactive layers, which are processed by using chlorinated or nonhalogenated solvents, suggesting its great promise toward practical applications based on high‐throughput roll‐to‐roll processing.
We explore the skyrmion formation and control possibilities in two-dimensional (2D) magnets from the ubiquitous moiré pattern in vdW heterostructures. Using the example of a ferromagnetic monolayer ...on an antiferromagnetic substrate, we demonstrate a new origin of skyrmions in the 2D magnets from the lateral modulation of interlayer magnetic coupling by the locally different atomic registries in moiré. The moiré skyrmions are doubly degenerate with opposite topological charge and trapped at an ordered array of sites with the moiré periodicity that can be dramatically tuned by strain and interlayer translation. At relatively strong interlayer coupling, the ground states are skyrmion lattices, where magnetic field can switch the skyrmion vorticity and location in the moiré. At weak interlayer coupling limit, we find metastable skyrmion excitations on the ferromagnetic ground state that can be deterministically moved between the ordered moiré trapping sites by current pulses. Our results point to potential uses of moiré skyrmions both as information carriers and as drastically tunable topological background of electron transport.
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