The faithful storage and coherent manipulation of quantum states with matter-systems would enable the realization of large-scale quantum networks based on quantum repeaters. To achieve useful ...communication rates, highly multimode quantum memories are required to construct a multiplexed quantum repeater. Here, we present a demonstration of on-demand storage of orbital-angular-momentum states with weak coherent pulses at the single-photon-level in a rare-earth-ion-doped crystal. Through the combination of this spatial degree-of-freedom (DOF) with temporal and spectral degrees of freedom, we create a multiple-DOF memory with high multimode capacity. This device can serve as a quantum mode converter with high fidelity, which is a fundamental requirement for the construction of a multiplexed quantum repeater. This device further enables essentially arbitrary spectral and temporal manipulations of spatial-qutrit-encoded photonic pulses in real time. Therefore, the developed quantum memory can serve as a building block for scalable photonic quantum information processing architectures.
Soaring cases of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) are pummeling the global health system. Overwhelmed health facilities have endeavored to mitigate the pandemic, but mortality of COVID-19 continues to ...increase. Here, we present a mortality risk prediction model for COVID-19 (MRPMC) that uses patients' clinical data on admission to stratify patients by mortality risk, which enables prediction of physiological deterioration and death up to 20 days in advance. This ensemble model is built using four machine learning methods including Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, Gradient Boosted Decision Tree, and Neural Network. We validate MRPMC in an internal validation cohort and two external validation cohorts, where it achieves an AUC of 0.9621 (95% CI: 0.9464-0.9778), 0.9760 (0.9613-0.9906), and 0.9246 (0.8763-0.9729), respectively. This model enables expeditious and accurate mortality risk stratification of patients with COVID-19, and potentially facilitates more responsive health systems that are conducive to high risk COVID-19 patients.
This study aimed to establish an effective prognostic nomogram with or without plasma Epstein-Barr virus DNA (EBV DNA) for nondisseminated nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC).
The nomogram was based on a ...retrospective study of 4630 patients who underwent radiotherapy with or without chemotherapy at Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center from 2007 to 2009. The predictive accuracy and discriminative ability of the nomogram were determined by a concordance index (C-index) and calibration curve and were compared with EBV DNA and the current staging system. The results were validated using bootstrap resampling and a prospective cohort study on 1819 patients consecutively enrolled from 2011 to 2012 at the same institution. All statistical tests were two-sided.
Independent factors derived from multivariable analysis of the primary cohort to predict recurrence were age, sex, body mass index (BMI), T stage, N stage, plasma EBV DNA, pretreatment high sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP), lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), and hemoglobin level (HGB), which were all assembled into the nomogram with (nomogram B) or without EBV DNA (nomogram A). The calibration curve for the probability of recurrence showed that the nomogram-based predictions were in good agreement with actual observations. The C-index of nomogram B for predicting recurrence was 0.728 (P < .001), which was statistically higher than the C-index values for nomogram A (0.690), EBV DNA (0.680), and the current staging system (0.609). The C-index of nomogram B (0.730) and nomogram A (0.681) remained higher for predicting recurrence among patients treated with intensity-modulated radiotherapy (P < .001). The results were confirmed in the validation cohort.
The proposed nomogram with or without plasma EBV DNA resulted in more accurate prognostic prediction for NPC patients.
Antimony sulfide (Sb2S3) is emerging as a promising light harvesting material owing to its brilliant photoelectric property. However, the performance of Sb2S3‐based solar cells is partly limited by ...serious back contact interface recombination and hole transportation resistance. High‐efficiency Sb2S3 devices typically use Spiro‐OMeTAD and/or Au as back contact materials, but their stability and cost are a concern. In this sense, a surface modification scheme by lithium‐doping is first introduced for Sb2S3 via a facile molten salt method. The ions in the molten state have high mobility and activity, enabling doping reactions to complete within a short time. The lithium‐doped Sb2S3 thin film has a smooth and well‐bonded surface, preferred (hk1) orientations, and an upshifted valence band maximum (VBM), which favors the hole extraction. Finally, a device using carbon as an electrode, which is more than a dozen times cheaper than gold, raises the short‐circuit current density (JSC) from 12.35 to 14.40 mA cm−2, and the power conversion efficiency (PCE) from 4.47% to 6.16%. This is among the highest PCE reported for full‐inorganic Sb2S3 solar cells, which demonstrates a facile interface modification technique via molten alkali salt to improve the performance of Sb2S3 solar cells.
Sb2S3 is a kind of new light‐absorbing material possessing high stability in ambient environment, high absorption coefficient in the visible range, and abundant elemental storage. Here, a surface modification scheme by lithium‐doping is first introduced for Sb2S3 via a facile molten salt method. The device with the low‐cost carbon electrode delivers a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 6.16%, which is among the highest PCE reported for the full‐inorganic Sb2S3 solar cells.
Copper nanowires grow from spherical copper seeds in an aqueous solution. Conductive films of copper nanowires have a transmittance of 65% (∼15% more than the best values reported for carbon ...nanotubes), and remain conductive after 1000 bending cycles or one month in air.
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a leading cause of death, resulting in over 700 thousand deaths annually worldwide. Chemotherapy is the primary therapeutic strategy for patients with late-stage ...HCC. Heteronemin is a marine natural product isolated from Hippospongia sp. that has been found to protect against carcinogenesis in cholangiocarcinoma, prostate cancer, and acute myeloid leukemia. In this study, heteronemin was found to inhibit the proliferation of the HCC cell lines HA22T and HA59T and induce apoptosis via the caspase pathway. Heteronemin treatment also induced the formation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), which are associated with heteronemin-induced cell death, and to trigger ROS removal by mitochondrial SOD2 rather than cytosolic SOD1. The mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling pathway was associated with ROS-induced cell death, and heteronemin downregulated the expression of ERK, a MAPK that is associated with cell proliferation. Inhibitors of JNK and p38, which are MAPKs associated with apoptosis, restored heteronemin-induced cell death. In addition, heteronemin treatment reduced the expression of GPX4, a protein that inhibits ferroptosis, which is a novel form of nonapoptotic programmed cell death. Ferroptosis inhibitor treatment also restored heteronemin-induced cell death. Thus, with appropriate structural modification, heteronemin can act as a potent therapeutic against HCC.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely deployed in intelligent transportation systems. Battery-free WSN (BF-WSN) scavenges energy from the environment. In the BF-WSN, whose nodes harvest ...radio frequency (RF) energy, delivering data with low energy consumption is important for the BF-WSN nodes to have a longer runtime. Some existing baseband encoding or carrier-modulation schemes exhibit the energy consumption disparity (ECD) between transmitting bit 0 and bit 1. An example is FM0 (bi-phase space) baseband encoding, which is widely applied in the backscattering communications in radio frequency identification systems and wireless identification sensing platform. With FM0, transmitting bit 0 consumes much greater energy than bit 1. To achieve energy-saving in delivering data with the ECD, we, in this paper, formulate the optimization problem (OP) that maximizes percentage of energy saving. The solution of the OP leads to the optimal energy-efficient codebook. Based on the derived codebook, we present the energy-efficient data delivery scheme (EEDDS), with which the sender transmits the codewords in the codebook and the receiver recovers the corresponding original data blocks using the codebook. Simulation results show that the proposed EEDDS outperforms the traditional data delivery scheme in terms of energy consumption in the case when the applied baseband encoding or carrier-modulation schemes occupy the ECD.
Cadmium is a major environmental toxicant that is released into the atmosphere, water and soil in the form of cadmium oxide, cadmium chloride, or cadmium sulfide via industrial activities, such as ...the manufacturing of batteries and pigments, metal smelting and refining and municipal waste incineration. In the present study, we investigated the effects of cadmium exposure on sperm quality parameters, fertilization capacity and early embryonic development. Our study showed that in vitro incubation of human or mouse sperms with cadmium for a long time (up to 24 hours) could significantly decreased sperm motility in a concentration- and time-dependent manner. Exposure to cadmium in the environment for a short term (30 min) did not affect sperm motility but significantly reduced in vitro fertilization rate. We also evaluated the effects of cadmium at concentrations of 0.625 μg/ml, and 1.25 μg/ml on early embryonic development in vitro and observed that the blastocyst formation rate dramatically decreased with increasing cadmium concentration. This finding emphasizes the hazardous effects of cadmium on sperm quality as well as on natural embryo development and raises greater concerns regarding cadmium pollution.
A novel hybrid mode control technique for a phase-shift full-bridge (PSFB) converter is proposed in this paper. The proposed method can improve power efficiency under both the light-load and ...heavy-load conditions. The basic concept of the proposed control technique is to decrease the turns ratio to reduce the circulating current, hence resulting in lower circulating losses. However, the output voltage under heavy load may not be stabilized using phase-shift control if smaller turns ratio is utilized. Therefore, the proposed technique employs asymmetrical pulsewidth modulation to achieve higher output voltage. To further improve the efficiency, an adaptive dead-time control method, which determines the dead-time value according to the load level, is also proposed. To validate the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed method, a 480-W PSFB converter is constructed and experiments are carried out accordingly. Comparing with a conventional PSFB converter, the efficiency of the proposed method can be improved up to 3.2%, 1.3%, and 0.6% under light-load, 30% load, and full-load conditions, respectively.
Anxiety-related disorders can be treated by cognitive therapies and transcranial magnetic stimulation, which involve the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Subregions of the mPFC have been implicated ...in mediating different and even opposite roles in anxiety-related behaviors. However, precise causal targets of these top-down connections among diverse possibilities have not been established. Here, we show that the lateral septum (LS) and the central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) represent 2 direct targets of the infralimbic cortex (IL), a subregion of the mPFC that modulates anxiety and fear. Two projections were unexpectedly found to exert opposite effects on the anxious state and learned freezing: the IL-LS projection promoted anxiety-related behaviors and fear-related freezing, whereas the IL-CeA projection exerted anxiolytic and fear-releasing effects for the same features. Furthermore, selective inhibition of corresponding circuit elements showed opposing behavioral effects compared with excitation. Notably, the IL-CeA projection implemented top-down control of the stress-induced high-anxiety state. These results suggest that distinct IL outputs exert opposite effects in modulating anxiety and fear and that modulating the excitability of these projections with distinct strategies may be beneficial for the treatment of anxiety disorders.
PDF
