The development of energy storage devices that can endure large and complex deformations is central to emerging wearable electronics. Hydrogels made from conducting polymers give rise to a promising ...integration of high conductivity and versatility in processing. However, the emergence of conducting polymer hydrogels with a desirable network structure cannot be readily achieved using conventional polymerization methods. Here we present a cryopolymerization strategy for preparing an intrinsically stretchable, compressible and bendable anisotropic polyvinyl alcohol/polyaniline hydrogel with a complete recovery of 100% stretching strain, 50% compressing strain and fully bending. Due to its high mechanical strength, superelastic properties and bi-continuous phase structure, the as-obtained anisotropic polyvinyl alcohol/polyaniline hydrogel can work as a stretching/compressing/bending electrode, maintaining its stable output under complex deformations for an all-solid-state supercapacitor. In particular, it achieves an extremely high energy density of 27.5 W h kg
, which is among that of state-of-the-art stretchable supercapacitors.
Abstract
Reducing needs for heating and cooling from fossil energy is one of the biggest challenges, which demand accounts for almost half of global energy consumption, consequently resulting in ...complicated climatic and environmental issues. Herein, we demonstrate a high-performance, intelligently auto-switched and zero-energy dual-mode radiative thermal management device. By perceiving temperature to spontaneously modulate electromagnetic characteristics itself, the device achieves ~859.8 W m
−2
of average heating power (∼91% of solar-thermal conversion efficiency) in cold and ~126.0 W m
−2
of average cooling power in hot, without any external energy consumption during the whole process. Such a scalable, cost-effective device could realize two-way temperature control around comfortable temperature zone of human living. A practical demonstration shows that the temperature fluctuation is reduced by ~21 K, compared with copper plate. Numerical prediction indicates that this real zero-energy dual-mode thermal management device has a huge potential for year-round energy saving around the world and provides a feasible solution to realize the goal of Net Zero Carbon 2050.
SUMMARY
In seismic data processing, the median filter is usually applied along the structural direction of seismic data in order to attenuate erratic or spike-like noise. The performance of a ...structure-oriented median filter highly depends on the accuracy of the estimated local slope from the noisy data. When local slope contains significant error, which is usually the case for noisy data, the structure-oriented median filter will still cause severe damages to useful energy. We propose a type of structure-oriented median filter that can effectively attenuate spike-like noise even when the local slope is not accurately estimated, which we call structure-oriented space-varying median filter. A structure-oriented space-varying median filter can adaptively squeeze and stretch the window length of the median filter when applied in the locally flattened dimension of an input seismic data in order to deal with the dipping events caused by inaccurate slope estimation. We show the key difference among different types of median filters in detail and demonstrate the principle of the structure-oriented space-varying median filter method. We apply the structure-oriented space-varying median filter method to remove the spike-like blending noise arising from the simultaneous source acquisition. Synthetic and real data examples show that structure-oriented space-varying median filter can significantly improve the signal preserving performance for curving events in the seismic data. The structure-oriented space-varying median filter can also be easily embedded into an iterative deblending procedure based on the shaping regularization framework and can help obtain much improved deblending performance.
Tissue engineering using cells, scaffolds, and bioactive molecules can promote the repair and regeneration of injured tissues. Copper is an essential element for the human body that is involved in ...many physiological activities and in recent years, copper has been used increasingly in tissue engineering.
The current advances of copper-based biomaterial for bone and cartilage tissue engineering were searched on PubMed and Web of Science.
Various forms of copper-based biomaterials, including pure copper, copper ions, copper nanoparticles, copper oxides, and copper alloy are introduced. The incorporation of copper into base materials provides unique properties, resulting in tuneable porosity, mechanical strength, degradation, and crosslinking of scaffolds. Copper also shows promising biological performance in cell migration, cell adhesion, osteogenesis, chondrogenesis, angiogenesis, and antibacterial activities. In vivo applications of copper for bone and cartilage tissue engineering are discussed.
This review focuses on copper’s physiochemical and biological effects, and its applications in bone and cartilage tissue engineering. The potential limitations and future perspectives are also discussed.
This review introduces the recent advances in copper-based biomaterial for bone and cartilage tissue engineering. This revie could guide researchers to apply copper in biomaterials, improving the generation of bone and cartilages, decrease the possibility of infection and shorten the recovery time so as to decrease medical costs.
DNA-coated colloids hold great promise for self-assembly of programmed heterogeneous microstructures, provided they not only bind when cooled below their melting temperature, but also rearrange so ...that aggregated particles can anneal into the structure that minimizes the free energy. Unfortunately, DNA-coated colloids generally collide and stick forming kinetically arrested random aggregates when the thickness of the DNA coating is much smaller than the particles. Here we report DNA-coated colloids that can rearrange and anneal, thus enabling the growth of large colloidal crystals from a wide range of micrometre-sized DNA-coated colloids for the first time. The kinetics of aggregation, crystallization and defect formation are followed in real time. The crystallization rate exhibits the familiar maximum for intermediate temperature quenches observed in metallic alloys, but over a temperature range smaller by two orders of magnitude, owing to the highly temperature-sensitive diffusion between aggregated DNA-coated colloids.
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common malignant liver tumor with poor clinical outcomes. Increasing amount of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been revealed to be implicated in the ...carcinogenesis and progression of HCC. However, the expressions, clinical significances, and roles of most lncRNAs in HCC are still unknown.
The expression of lncRNA MCM3AP antisense RNA 1 (MCM3AP-AS1) in HCC tissues and cell lines was detected by qRT-PCR and fluorescence in situ hybridization. Immunoblotting, CCK-8, EdU, colony formation and flow cytometry were performed to investigate the role of MCM3AP-AS1 in HCC cell proliferation, cell cycle and apoptosis in vitro. A subcutaneous tumor mouse model was constructed to analyze in vivo growth of HCC cells after MCM3AP-AS1 knockdown. The interactions among MCM3AP-AS1, miR-194-5p and FOXA1 were measured by RNA pull-down, RNA immunoprecipitation and luciferase reporter assay.
We revealed a novel oncogenic lncRNA MCM3AP-AS1, which is overexpressed in HCC and positively correlated with large tumor size, high tumor grade, advanced tumor stage and poor prognosis of HCC patients. MCM3AP-AS1 knockdown suppressed HCC cell proliferation, colony formation and cell cycle progression, and induced apoptosis in vitro, and depletion of MCM3AP-AS1 inhibited tumor growth of HCC in vivo. Mechanistically, MCM3AP-AS1 directly bound to miR-194-5p and acted as competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA), and subsequently facilitated miR-194-5p's target gene forkhead box A1 (FOXA1) expression in HCC cells. Interestingly, FOXA1 restoration rescued MCM3AP-AS1 knockdown induced proliferation inhibition, G1 arrest and apoptosis of HCC cells.
Our results recognized MCM3AP-AS1 as a novel oncogenic lncRNA, which indicated poor clinical outcomes in patients with HCC. MCM3AP-AS1 exerted an oncogenic role in HCC via targeting miR-194-5p and subsequently promoted FOXA1 expression. Our findings suggested that MCM3AP-AS1 could be a potential prognostic biomarker and therapeutic target for HCC.
Abstract
Assembling metal-organic framework (MOF)-based particles is an emerging approach for creating colloidal superstructures and hierarchical functional materials. However, realization of this ...goal requires strategies that not only regulate particle interactions but also harness the anisotropic morphologies and functions of various frameworks. Here, by exploiting depletion interaction induced by ionic amphiphiles, we show the assembly of a broad range of low-dimensional MOF colloidal superstructures, including 1D straight chains, alternating or bundled chains, 2D films of hexagonal, square, centered rectangular, and snowflake-like architectures, and quasi-3D supercrystals. With well-defined polyhedral shapes, the MOF particles are mutually oriented upon assembly, producing super-frameworks with hierarchically coordinated crystallinity and micropores. We demonstrate this advantage by creating functional MOF films with optical anisotropy, in our cases, birefringence and anisotropic fluorescence. Given the variety of MOFs available, our technique should allow access to advanced materials for sensing, optics, and photonics.
The assembly of active and self-propelled particles is an emerging strategy to create dynamic materials otherwise impossible. However, control of the complex particle interactions remains ...challenging. Here, we show that various dynamic interactions of active patchy particles can be orchestrated by tuning the particle size, shape, composition, etc. This capability is manifested in establishing dynamic colloidal bonds that are highly selective and directional, which greatly expands the spectrum of colloidal structures and dynamics by assembly. For example, we demonstrate the formation of colloidal molecules with tunable bond angles and orientations. They exhibit controllable propulsion, steering, reconfiguration as well as other dynamic behaviors that collectively reflect the bond properties. The working principle is further extended to the co-assembly of synthetic particles with biological entities including living cells, giving rise to hybrid colloidal molecules of various types, for example, a colloidal carrousel structure. Our strategy should enable active systems to perform sophisticated tasks in future such as selective cell treatment.
Recently, in this article, due to pervasive usability, smartphone-based human activity recognition (HAR) has witnessed significant development in smart health. Meanwhile, deep recurrent neural ...network (DRNN) shows a strong ability to automatically extract features from the time-series data, and therefore, DRNN-based HAR schemes have achieved more effective recognition (i.e., recognition accuracy) than those adopting the traditional machine learning. However, the efficiency in training and recognition (in terms of running time) has not fully taken into account, especially for resource-constraint smartphones. To solve the above issue, we propose the PSDRNN and tri-PSDRNN schemes that employ the explicit feature extraction before DRNN. Specifically, considering that the power spectral density (PSD) feature can capture the frequency characteristics and meanwhile retain the successive time characteristics of data gathered from smartphone accelerometer, PSD feature vectors are, respectively, extracted from linear accelerations and triaxle accelerations and explicitly used as the input to the following DRNN classification model. Thorough experiments based on a real dataset demonstrate that the PSDRNN can achieve the comparable effectiveness as the xyz -DRNN (the most accurate DRNN-based HAR scheme only using acceleration data), and the average recognition and training time were reduced by 56% and 80%, respectively. Moreover, tri-PSDRNN advantages over the xyz -DRNN in terms of recognition accuracy, and the running time is still lower than the xyz -DRNN. Besides, our proposed PSDRNN scheme achieved superiority in the recognition of complex transition activities.
The ability to design and assemble three-dimensional structures from colloidal particles is limited by the absence of specific directional bonds. As a result, complex or low-coordination structures, ...common in atomic and molecular systems, are rare in the colloidal domain. Here we demonstrate a general method for creating the colloidal analogues of atoms with valence: colloidal particles with chemically distinct surface patches that imitate hybridized atomic orbitals, including sp, sp(2), sp(3), sp(3)d, sp(3)d(2) and sp(3)d(3). Functionalized with DNA with single-stranded sticky ends, patches on different particles can form highly directional bonds through programmable, specific and reversible DNA hybridization. These features allow the particles to self-assemble into 'colloidal molecules' with triangular, tetrahedral and other bonding symmetries, and should also give access to a rich variety of new microstructured colloidal materials.
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