One can derive an analytic result for the issue of Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC) in anisotropic 2D harmonic traps. We find that the number of uncondensed bosons is represented by an analytic ...function, which includes a series expansion of q-digamma functions in mathematics. One can utilize this analytic result to evaluate various thermodynamic functions of ideal bosons in 2D anisotropic harmonic traps. The first major discovery is that the internal energy of a finite number of ideal bosons is a monotonically increasing function of anisotropy parameter p. The second major discovery is that, when p≥0.5, the changing with temperature of the heat capacity of a finite number of ideal bosons possesses the maximum value, which happens at critical temperature Tc. The third major discovery is that, when 0.1≤p<0.5, the changing with temperature of the heat capacity of a finite number of ideal bosons possesses an inflection point, but when p<0.1, the inflection point disappears. The fourth major discovery is that, in the thermodynamic limit, at Tc and when p≥0.5, the heat capacity at constant number reveals a cusp singularity, which resembles the λ-transition of liquid helium-4. The fifth major discovery is that, in comparison to 2D isotropic harmonic traps (p=1), the singular peak of the specific heat becomes very gentle when p is lowered.
Alkaline water electrolyzers (AWEs) and anion‐exchange membrane fuel cells (AEMFCs) have received increasing attention for their natural compatibility with earth‐abundant materials and are regarded ...as the cutting‐edge of hydrogen energy techniques and the research focuses. However, the commercialization of these devices remains in the sluggish hydrogen electrode reactions due to the requirement of cooperative adsorption of both hydrogen species and hydroxyl species. The research on synergistic alkaline hydrogen oxidation/evolution reaction (HOR/HER) electrocatalysts is still in its infancy. This review summarizes the recent progress and strategies in constructing synergistic active sites for advancing alkaline HOR/HER electrocatalysts. The fundamentals of alkaline HOR/HER are first introduced with both theoretical and experimental verifications to rationalizing the necessity of constructing synergistic active sites. Then, this review systemically dissects the functionality of different active sites in recently reported innovative HOR/HER catalysts and introduces the synergistic effects. Finally, some perspectives on the challenges and opportunities for the future design and synthesis of the synergistic HOR and HER electrocatalysts are proposed, intending to promote the application of hydrogen‐based energy conversion systems.
In this review, the recent progress and strategies in constructing synergistic active sites for advancing alkaline hydrogen oxidation/evolution reaction electrocatalysts are systematically summarized, aiming at promoting the commercialization of hydrogen‐based energy conversion systems.
Exosomes contain cell-specific collections of bioactive materials including proteins, lipids, and RNAs that are transported to recipient cells to exert their impacts. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) can function ...as tumor suppressor or oncogenic genes and miR-21 is one of the most frequently up-regulated miRNAs in solid tumors including colon cancer. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of miR-21, secreted from exosomes, in proliferation and invasion of colon cancer, along with the mechanistic details. We used a variety of biochemical techniques including ultracentrifugation-based exosome purification, electron transmission microscopy, western blot and RT-qPCR to detect the expression levels of miR-21 in exosomes purified from culture media of human colonic adenocarcinoma cell lines. We then performed functional and mechanistic studies using three colon cancer cell lines HT29, T84 and LS174 as well as the normal colon epithelial cells CRL1831. miR-21 target PDCD4 was investigated for its role in mediating miR-21 effects. Expression of miR-21 was significantly up-regulated in exosomes of colon cancer cells, compared to the normal human colon epithelial cells. Treatment of colon cancer cells with isolated exosomes or miR-21 led to an increased expression of genes involved in cell proliferation, invasion and extracellular matrix formation. miR-21 targets PDCD4, TPM1 and PTEN were down-regulated by exosomes and silencing of PDCD4 mimicked miR-21 functional effects, even the induced resistance against 5-FU. Our study suggests that targeted inhibition of exosomes, particularly those carrying miR-21, may represent a novel approach for treatment of colorectal cancer.
Capacity degradation monitoring of lithium batteries is necessary to ensure the reliability and safety of electric vehicles. However, capacity of cell is related to its complex internal ...physicochemical reactions and thermal effects and cannot be measured directly. A data-driven remaining capacity estimation approach for lithium-ion batteries based on charging health feature extraction is presented in this work. The proposed method utilizes rational analysis and principal component analysis to extract and optimize health features of charging stage which adapt to various working conditions of battery. The remaining capacity estimation is realized by relevance vector machine and validations of different working conditions are made with six battery data sets provided by NASA Prognostics Center of Excellence. The results show high efficiency and robustness of the proposed method.
•Health features extracted from charging voltage, current and temperature curves.•Feature optimization based on grey relational and principal component analysis.•Remaining capacity estiamtion with relevance vector machine.•Validations with battery data in various operating conditions.
Earlier studies have reaffirmed the pivotal role played by the private sectors in China's development, so the growth of private enterprises deserves more attention. This paper carries out a series of ...empirical studies based on the motives for holding cash. It is found that private enterprises were forced to maintain a high level of cash holdings to deal with financing constraints, while SOEs accumulate cash proactively for larger financial flexibility. In such context, credit discrimination remains an urgent problem pending Chinese financial system reform solutions.
While originally designed for natural language processing tasks, the self-attention mechanism has recently taken various computer vision areas by storm. However, the 2D nature of images brings three ...challenges for applying self-attention in computer vision: (1) treating images as 1D sequences neglects their 2D structures; (2) the quadratic complexity is too expensive for high-resolution images; (3) it only captures spatial adaptability but ignores channel adaptability. In this paper, we propose a novel linear attention named large kernel attention (LKA) to enable self-adaptive and long-range correlations in self-attention while avoiding its shortcomings. Furthermore, we present a neural network based on LKA, namely Visual Attention Network (VAN). While extremely simple, VAN achieves comparable results with similar size convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs) in various tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, panoptic segmentation, pose estimation, etc. For example, VAN-B6 achieves 87.8% accuracy on ImageNet benchmark, and sets new state-of-the-art performance (58.2 PQ) for panoptic segmentation. Besides, VAN-B2 surpasses Swin-T 4 mIoU (50.1 vs. 46.1) for semantic segmentation on ADE20K benchmark, 2.6 AP (48.8 vs. 46.2) for object detection on COCO dataset. It provides a novel method and a simple yet strong baseline for the community. The code is available at
https://github.com/Visual-Attention-Network
.
Chemokines in colon cancer progression Jia, Sheng-Nan; Han, Ying-Bo; Yang, Rui ...
Seminars in cancer biology,
11/2022, Volume:
86, Issue:
Pt 3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Colon cancer is a major human cancer accounting for about a tenth of all cancer cases thus making it among the top three cancers in terms of incidence as well as mortality. Metastasis to distant ...organs, particularly to liver, is the primary reason for associated mortality. Chemokines, the chemo-attractants for various immune cells, have increasingly been reported to be involved in cancer initiation and progression, including in colon cancer. Here we discuss the available knowledge on the role of several chemokines, such as, CCL2, CCL3, CCL5, CXCL1, CXCL2, CXCL8 in colon cancer progression. CCL20 is one chemokine with emerging evidence for its role in influencing colon cancer tumor microenvironment through the documents effects on fibroblasts, macrophages and immune cells. We focus on CCL20 and its receptor CCR6 as promising factors that affect multiple levels of colon cancer progression. They interact with several cytokines and TLR receptors leading to increased aggressiveness, as supported by multitude of evidence from in vitro, in vivo studies as well as human patient samples. CCL20-CCR6 bring about their biological effects through regulation of several signaling pathways, including, ERK and NF-κB pathways, in addition to the epithelial-mesenchymal transition. Signaling involving CCL20-CCR6 has profound effect on colon cancer hepatic metastasis. Combined with elevated CCL20 levels in colon tumors and metastatic patients, the above information points to a need for further evaluation of chemokines as diagnostic and/or prognostic biomarkers.
Abstract
Primordial black holes of planetary masses captured by compact stars are widely studied to constrain their composition fraction of dark matter. Such a capture may lead to an inspiral process ...and be detected through gravitational-wave signals. In this Letter, we study the postcapture inspiral process by considering two different kinds of compact stars, i.e., strange stars and neutron stars. The dynamical equations are numerically solved, and the gravitational-wave emission is calculated. It is found that the Advanced LIGO can detect the inspiraling of a 10
−5
M
⊙
primordial black hole at a distance of 10 kpc, while a Jovian-mass case can even be detected at megaparsecs. Promisingly, the next generation of gravitational-wave detectors can detect cases of 10
−5
M
⊙
primordial black holes up to ∼1Mpc and Jovian-mass cases at several hundred megaparsecs. Moreover, the kilohertz gravitational-wave signal shows significant differences for strange stars and neutron stars, potentially making it a novel probe to the dense matter equation of state.
•A LFR which employs CPC, evacuated tubes and uses molten salt as HTF is designed.•3D optical and thermal models are developed with MCRT and FVM methods.•The optical and thermal performance, the ...effects of key parameters are studied.•The instantaneous optical efficiency of 65.0% is achieved at normal incidence.•The collector efficiencies are above 46.0% under all the studied conditions.
A novel linear Fresnel reflector which employs the evacuated tube, CPC secondary reflector, and uses molten salt as the heat transfer fluid (HTF) was designed and studied in this paper. A 3D optical model was developed to simulate the radiation transmission within the system with Monte Carlo Ray Tracing (MCRT) method. Based on the model, firstly, the optical performance of the systems using cylindrical and parabolic mirrors was compared. Then the local solar flux distribution on the absorber surface and the optical efficiency were computed. Then the effects of the slope error, time and location, etc. were investigated. Finally, the thermal performance was investigated by coupling the MCRT with the Finite Volume Method (FVM). The optical simulation results indicate that the system with optimized cylindrical mirrors can achieve nearly the same performance as the one with parabolic mirrors. The solar flux distribution on the absorber exhibits a non-uniform characteristic which can be improved by using mirrors with proper slope error. The instantaneous optical efficiency of 65.0% at normal incidence and the annual mean optical efficiency which ranges between 55.2% and 34.8% from the equator to N50° can be achieved. The numerical results indicate that the temperature profiles on the absorber follow the non-uniform solar flux. The collector efficiencies are all above 46.0% under the studied conditions. Both the thermal efficiency and the collector efficiency increase with decreasing salt temperature and with increasing radiation. These results suggest that the introduced system is a feasible choice for using molten salt as the HTF in Fresnel system.
Abstract
Anion-exchange membrane fuel cells and Zn–air batteries based on non-Pt group metal catalysts typically suffer from sluggish cathodic oxygen reduction. Designing advanced catalyst ...architectures to improve the catalyst’s oxygen reduction activity and boosting the accessible site density by increasing metal loading and site utilization are potential ways to achieve high device performances. Herein, we report an interfacial assembly strategy to achieve binary single-atomic Fe/Co-N
x
with high mass loadings through constructing a nanocage structure and concentrating high-density accessible binary single-atomic Fe/Co–N
x
sites in a porous shell. The prepared FeCo-NCH features metal loading with a single-atomic distribution as high as 7.9 wt% and an accessible site density of around 7.6 × 10
19
sites g
−1
, surpassing most reported M–N
x
catalysts. In anion exchange membrane fuel cells and zinc–air batteries, the FeCo-NCH material delivers peak power densities of 569.0 or 414.5 mW cm
−2
, 3.4 or 2.8 times higher than control devices assembled with FeCo-NC. These results suggest that the present strategy for promoting catalytic site utilization offers new possibilities for exploring efficient low-cost electrocatalysts to boost the performance of various energy devices.
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