The enhancement of the functional properties of materials at reduced dimensions is crucial for continuous advancements in nanoelectronic applications. Here, we report that the scale reduction leads ...to the emergence of an important functional property, ferroelectricity, challenging the long-standing notion that ferroelectricity is inevitably suppressed at the scale of a few nanometers. A combination of theoretical calculations, electrical measurements, and structural analyses provides evidence of room-temperature ferroelectricity in strain-free epitaxial nanometer-thick films of otherwise nonferroelectric strontium titanate (SrTiO3). We show that electrically induced alignment of naturally existing polar nanoregions is responsible for the appearance of a stable net ferroelectric polarization in these films. This finding can be useful for the development of low-dimensional material systems with enhanced functional properties relevant to emerging nanoelectronic devices.
There is increasing public concern about poultry welfare; the quality of animal welfare is closely related to the quality of livestock products and the health of consumers. Good animal welfare ...promotes the healthy growth of poultry, which can reduce the disease rate and improve the production quality and capacity. As behaviour responses are an important expression of welfare, the study of behaviour is a simple and non-invasive method to assess animal welfare. The use of modern technology offers the possibility to monitor the behaviour of broilers and laying hens in a continuous and automated way. This paper reviews the latest technologies used for monitoring the behaviour of broilers and laying hens under both experimental conditions and commercial applications and discusses the potential of developing a precision livestock farming (PLF) system. The techniques that are presented and discussed include sound analysis, which can be an online tool to automatically monitor poultry behaviour non-invasively at the group level; wireless, wearable sensors with radio-frequency identification devices, which can automatically identify individual chickens, track the location and movement of individuals in real time and quantify some behavioural traits accordingly and image processing technology, which can be considered a direct tool for measuring behaviours, especially activity behaviours and disease early warning. All of these technologies can monitor and analyse poultry behaviour, at the group level or individual level, on commercial farms. However, the popularity and adoption of these technologies has been hampered by the logistics of applying them to thousands and tens of thousands of birds on commercial farms. This review discusses the advantages and disadvantages of these techniques in commercial applications and presents evidence that they provide potential tools to automatically monitor the behaviours of broilers and laying hens on commercial farms. However, there still has a long way to go to develop a PLF system to detect and predict abnormal situations.
•Combining key regions of the frontal-limbic network as seeds to explore seed-based whole-brain rs-FC could discriminate bipolar depression (BipD) from unipolar depression (UniD).•Both UniD and BipD ...showed abnormal functional connectivity, mainly involving the frontal and sensorimotor networks.•Compared with UniD, BipD showed more widespread affected functional connectivity patterns, which primarily included the sensorimotor network.
The frontal-limbic circuit is hypothesized as sub-serving emotional regulation. We performed whole brain resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) analysis by studying the key hubs of frontal-limbic circuit: anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), bilateral insula subregions, bilateral amygdala (Amy) as seeds, separately, to discriminate bipolar depression (BipD) from unipolar depression (UniD).
We compared seed-based rs-FC of the frontal-limbic seeds with whole brain among 23 BipD participants; 23 age, gender, and depression severity matched patients with UniD, and 23 healthy controls (HCs). We also used support vector machine learning to study classification based on the rs-FC of ACC, bilateral insula subregions, and bilateral Amy seeds with whole brain.
BipD showed increased rs-FC between the left ventral anterior insula (vAI) seed and the left anterior supramarginal gyrus (aSMG) and left postcentral gyrus, as well as increased rs-FC between left amygdala seed and the left aSMG when compared to HCs and UniD. Compared to UniD, BipD was associated with increased rs-FC between right dorsal anterior insula seed and right superior frontal gyrus, as well as increased rs-FC between left posterior insula seed and right precentral gyrus and right thalamus. Combined rs-FC of ACC, bilateral insula subregions and bilateral Amy seeds with the whole brain discriminated BipD from UniD with an accuracy of 91.30%.
Rs-FC of the emotional regulation circuit is more widely disturbed in BipD than UniD. Using rs-FC with this circuit may lead to further developments in diagnostic decision-making.
We report the first experimental demonstration of quantum entanglement among ten spatially separated single photons. A near-optimal entangled photon-pair source was developed with simultaneously a ...source brightness of ∼12 MHz/W, a collection efficiency of ∼70%, and an indistinguishability of ∼91% between independent photons, which was used for a step-by-step engineering of multiphoton entanglement. Under a pump power of 0.57 W, the ten-photon count rate was increased by about 2 orders of magnitude compared to previous experiments, while maintaining a state fidelity sufficiently high for proving the genuine ten-particle entanglement. Our work created a state-of-the-art platform for multiphoton experiments, and enabled technologies for challenging optical quantum information tasks, such as the realization of Shor's error correction code and high-efficiency scattershot boson sampling.
Attributed to their superior properties over the conventional alloys, high-entropy alloys (HEAs) have attracted considerable interest. One of HEAs' attractive properties is their high wear ...resistance. Although considerable research on wear of HEAs can be found in the literature, understanding of the responses of HEAs to different wearing conditions needs to be enhanced in order to utilize HEAs effectively. For instance, studies on nano-wear and nano/micro-machining under different conditions are rare, which influences the extension of HEAs' applications to nanotechnological areas, e.g., nano/micro-devices and nano-manufacturing. In this study, we conducted molecular dynamics simulations to investigate responses of CrMnFeCoNi and CrFeCoNi HEAs to wear under unidirectional and bi-directional sliding conditions, respectively, for two nano-wearing processes. One process is similar to nano-machining and the other is sliding wear on nano-scale under a light normal force. Due to its higher hardness, the Mn-free HEA is more resistant to wear than the Mn-containing one. During the simulated nano-machining process, both the alloys were worn more under the bi-directional sliding condition. While the situation was reversed during the sliding wear process, in which the bi-directional sliding caused less wear. Bauschinger's effect plays a role in influencing the wear behavior of the HEAs under the different conditions. This work provides an insight into nano-tribological behaviors of the alloys under different wearing conditions, helping either mitigate wear of HEAs or improve their machining efficiency.
•Nano-tribological behaviors of high-entropy alloys, CrMnFeCoNi and CrFeCoNi, are investigated.•CrFeCoNi is more wear resistant than CrMnFeCoNi due to its higher hardness.•The HEAs were worn more under the bi-directional sliding condition during the nano-machining process.•HEAs were worn less under the bi-directional sliding condition during the sliding wear process.•Bauschinger's effect plays a role in influencing the wear behavior of the HEAs.
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