Bioinspired lubricant‐infused surfaces exhibit various unique properties attributed to their liquid‐like and molecularly smooth nature. Excellent liquid repellency and “slippery” properties, ...self‐healing, antiicing, anticorrosion characteristics, enhanced heat transfer, antibiofouling, and cell‐repellent properties have been already demonstrated. This progress report highlights some of the recent developments in this rapidly growing area, focusing on properties of lubricant‐infused surfaces, and their emerging applications as well as some future challenges.
Slippery lubricant‐infused surfaces are attracting a lot of interest due to their unique liquid repellency, low sliding angles, antibiofouling, anti‐icing, and self‐healing properties as well as various potential applications. In this progress report, the current state of design, manufacturing, and application of slippery lubricant‐infused surfaces is discussed.
Global crop production has doubled since the Green Revolution on the average, but crop yield has stagnated or even declined in some regions. In the same time, food demand has highly increased due to ...population growth and higher living standards. The use of pesticides and mineral fertilizers has improved crop yields but also contaminated food and the environment, thus leading to a global food crisis. Here, we reviewed the historical trends of global pesticide and fertilizer application, cereal yields, and production. Our main findings are as follows: (1) fertilizer and pesticide consumption increased for 35–40 % of the countries; (2) cereal production in 38 % of countries and yields in 47 % of countries either stagnated or decreased from 1961 to 2010; (3) countries showing stagnated or decreased yields are countries with low gross domestic product per capita, mainly situated in Africa, South America, and West Asia. Our findings thus evidence a global imbalance in food production and the usage of fertilizers and pesticides.
Although designed for land surfaces, MODIS Aqua surface reflectance data products (MYD09, termed as R_Land in this work) have also been used for water applications. Yet to date their uncertainties ...and general suitability in such applications have rarely been documented. In this study, R_Land products of two regions (Chesapeake Bay and Taihu Lake) between July 2002 and December 2015 are evaluated against in situ measurements and against reflectance products derived by the MODIS Ocean Team using atmospheric correction schemes specifically designed for water applications, namely the default atmospheric correction method based on the near‐infrared (NIR) bands (denoted as R_NIR, data products available from NASA) and alternative atmospheric correction method based on the shortwave‐infrared (SWIR) bands (denoted as R_SWIR, data products not available from NASA but require customized processing by the user), respectively. Results suggest high accuracy in R_Land(645) and R_Land(645/555) for both Chesapeake Bay and Taihu Lake in terms of daily spatial distributions, seasonality, and long‐term trends. A sensitivity test also shows improved data quality in R_Land(645/555) when data are binned by 7 × 7 pixels in space and 32 days in time. Improved data quality can also be obtained for R_Land(645) when data are only binned in time to minimize the patchiness noise in R_Land daily images. Given the fact that most users do not have the capacity to process low‐level data to obtain R_SWIR and the standard NASA R_NIR products often lack coverage over inland waters because they are optimized for global oceans instead of inland waters, this study provides a general guide on the applicability of the widely available R_Land products in inland and estuarine water applications in the absence of customized R_NIR or R_SWIR data products for local regions.
Key Points
MYD09 (R_Land) products were evaluated using in situ data and reflectance derived using ocean color based NIR and SWIR atmospheric corrections
R_Land(645) and R_Land(645/555) demonstrated high accuracy in terms of daily spatial distributions, seasonality, and long‐term trends
Improved data quality in R_Land(645/555) was found when data are binned by 7 × 7 pixels in space and 32 days in time
Implantation is a milestone event during mammalian embryogenesis. Implantation failure is a considerable cause of early pregnancy loss in humans
. Owing to the difficulty of obtaining human embryos ...early after implantation in vivo, it remains unclear how the gene regulatory network and epigenetic mechanisms control the implantation process. Here, by combining an in vitro culture system for the development human embryos after implantation and single-cell multi-omics sequencing technologies, more than 8,000 individual cells from 65 human peri-implantation embryos were systematically analysed. Unsupervised dimensionality reduction and clustering algorithms of the transcriptome data show stepwise implantation routes for the epiblast, primitive endoderm and trophectoderm lineages, suggesting robust preparation for the proper establishment of a mother-to-offspring connection during implantation. Female embryos showed initiation of random X chromosome inactivation based on analysis of parental allele-specific expression of X-chromosome-linked genes during implantation. Notably, using single-cell triple omics sequencing analysis, the re-methylation of the genome in cells from the primitive endoderm lineage was shown to be much slower than in cells of both epiblast and trophectoderm lineages during the implantation process, which indicates that there are distinct re-establishment features in the DNA methylome of the epiblast and primitive endoderm-even though both lineages are derived from the inner cell mass. Collectively, our work provides insights into the complex molecular mechanisms that regulate the implantation of human embryos, and helps to advance future efforts to understanding early embryonic development and reproductive medicine.
Atmospheric correction methods that are designed for either ocean color or land applications often result in low-quality or even no surface reflectance data for coastal and inland waters. In ...contrast, Rayleigh-corrected reflectance (Rrc) has been used in water applications, although without removing aerosol scattering. However, a systematic effort has not been made to investigate the uncertainties and applicability of Rrc in ocean color studies. This knowledge gap was filled in this study by using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data covering a large area (almost the entire middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River Basin and the Yangtze River Estuary) between 2002 and 2016. We first examined the correlation between a quality-controlled reflectance product that was generated using a shortwave-infrared (SWIR)-based atmospheric correction method (Rrs_swir) and Rrc. Improved relationships between these two products were found for all MODIS bands if a subtraction of the Rayleigh-corrected reflectance at 1240-nm was utilized as the aerosol correction for Rrc (Rrc-1240). The robust correlations between the two products allow for Rrs_swir to be replaced with Rrc-1240-converted reflectance (denoted as Rrs_rrc-1240) in water applications. In situ validations further demonstrated that the accuracy levels between usable Rrs_rrc-1240 and Rrs_swir data are comparable for most MODIS wavelengths. The most striking superiority of Rrs_rrc-1240 over Rrs_swir is the pronounced increase in data coverage (especially for small water bodies), where the percentages of usable observations (PUOs) of the former are several times to more than one order of magnitude higher than those of the latter. The differences in PUOs were mostly due to perturbations related to land adjacency effects (LAEs) in the SWIR-based atmospheric correction. Such effects could also explain the reduced PUOs for smaller water bodies. Ocean color applications in the examined regions could benefit from such a dramatic increase in PUOs, which could enhance the capability of tracking short- to long-term dynamics and could create new possibilities for inland water system monitoring at the basin scale.
Eutrophication of inland waters is considered a serious global environmental problem. Satellite remote sensing (RS) has been established as an important source of information to determine the trophic ...state of inland waters through the retrieval of optically active water quality parameters such as chlorophyll-a (Chl-a). However, the use of RS techniques for assessment of the trophic state of inland waters on a global scale is hindered by the performance of retrieval algorithms over highly dynamic and complex optical properties that characterize many of these systems. In this study, we developed a new RS approach to assess the trophic state of global inland water bodies based on Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) imagery and the Forel-Ule index (FUI). First, the FUI was calculated from MODIS data by dividing natural water colour into 21 indices from dark blue to yellowish-brown. Then the relationship between FUI and the trophic state index (TSI) was established based on in-situ measurements and MODIS products. The water-leaving reflectance at 645 nm band was employed to distinguish coloured dissolved organic matter (CDOM)-dominated systems in the FUI-based trophic state assessment. Based on the analysis, the FUI-based trophic state assessment method was developed and applied to assess the trophic states of 2058 large inland water bodies (surface area >25 km2) distributed around the world using MODIS data from the austral and boreal summers of 2012. Our results showed that FUI can be retrieved from MODIS with a considerable accuracy (92.5%, R2 = 0.92) by comparing with concurrent in situ measurements over a wide range of lakes, and the overall accuracy of the FUI-based trophic state assessment method is 80.0% (R2 = 0.75) validated by an independent dataset. Of the global large water bodies considered, oligotrophic large lakes were found to be concentrated in plateau regions in central Asia and southern South America, while eutrophic large lakes were concentrated in central Africa, eastern Asia, and mid-northern and southeast North America.
•Present a trophic state assessment method for global large inland waters based on MODIS.•Produce the trophic state map of global large inland water bodies.•Analyze the spatial distribution of the trophic states of global large inland water bodies.
DNA methylation is a crucial element in the epigenetic regulation of mammalian embryonic development. However, its dynamic patterns have not been analysed at the genome scale in human ...pre-implantation embryos due to technical difficulties and the scarcity of required materials. Here we systematically profile the methylome of human early embryos from the zygotic stage through to post-implantation by reduced representation bisulphite sequencing and whole-genome bisulphite sequencing. We show that the major wave of genome-wide demethylation is complete at the 2-cell stage, contrary to previous observations in mice. Moreover, the demethylation of the paternal genome is much faster than that of the maternal genome, and by the end of the zygotic stage the genome-wide methylation level in male pronuclei is already lower than that in female pronuclei. The inverse correlation between promoter methylation and gene expression gradually strengthens during early embryonic development, reaching its peak at the post-implantation stage. Furthermore, we show that active genes, with the trimethylation of histone H3 at lysine 4 (H3K4me3) mark at the promoter regions in pluripotent human embryonic stem cells, are essentially devoid of DNA methylation in both mature gametes and throughout pre-implantation development. Finally, we also show that long interspersed nuclear elements or short interspersed nuclear elements that are evolutionarily young are demethylated to a milder extent compared to older elements in the same family and have higher abundance of transcripts, indicating that early embryos tend to retain higher residual methylation at the evolutionarily younger and more active transposable elements. Our work provides insights into the critical features of the methylome of human early embryos, as well as its functional relation to the regulation of gene expression and the repression of transposable elements.
In the context of the growing human demand for green secondary energy sources, proton-exchange membrane water electrolysis (PEMWE) is necessary to meet the high-efficiency production of high-purity ...hydrogen required for proton-exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). The development of stable, efficient, and low-cost oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts is key to promoting the large-scale application of hydrogen production by PEMWE. At present, precious metals remain irreplaceable in acidic OER catalysis, and loading the support body with precious metal components is undoubtedly an effective strategy to reduce costs. In this review, we will discuss the unique role of common catalyst-support interactions such as Metal-Support Interactions (MSIs), Strong Metal-Support Interactions (SMSIs), Strong Oxide-Support Interactions (SOSIs), and Electron-Metal-Support Interactions (EMSIs) in modulating catalyst structure and performance, thereby promoting the development of high-performance, high-stability, low-cost noble metal-based acidic OER catalysts.
Biodiversity conservation plays an important role in the sustainable development of human society. China had made significant progress in biodiversity conservation studies and practices. This paper ...reviews major achievements in China in the past decades, especially those since 2010. In terms of the science behind biodiversity conservation, Chinese scholars have made significant contributions to priority research subjects, including mechanisms for maintaining biological communities and the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Simultaneously, biodiversity conservation and management systems specific to China have been basically established. The Chinese Government and researchers have undertaken a number of investigations, scientific studies, and monitoring, and have established relevant databases. With efforts taken to protect and restore biodiversity and ecosystems, the concept of biodiversity has gradually become popular in China. This review is an attempt to share with the world the learning from China’s progress towards becoming an ecological civilization and highlights that the efforts towards biodiversity conservation need to be organically integrated with sustainable development goals.
•Chinese contributions to the theories of biodiversity conservation were briefly summarized.•Recent practices of biodiversity conservation in China were systematically reviewed.•Chinese government and scientists had made significant contributions on the related issues.•This review can tell the beautiful stories to the world in the new era of China’s ecological civilization progress.
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