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Ni-rich cathode materials have garnered significant attention attributable to the high reversible capacity and superior rate performance, particularly in the electric vehicle industry. However, the structural degradation experienced during cycling results in rapid capacity decay and deterioration of the rate performance, thereby impeding the widespread application of Ni-rich cathodes. Herein, a Mg/Ti co-doping strategy was developed to boost the structure stability and Li-ion transport kinetics of the Ni-rich cathode material LiNi0.90Co0.05Mn0.05O2(NCM9055) under long cycle. It is demonstrated that the Mg2+ions inserted into the lithium layer could serve as pillars, enhancing the stability of the delithiated layer structure. The introduction of robust Ti–O bonding mitigated the detrimental H2–H3 phase transition (∼4.2 V) during cycling. In addition, despite the fact that Mg/Ti co-doping slightly reduces Li+diffusion coefficient in the modified cathode material (NCM9055-MT), it effectively stabilized the robustness of the layered structure and maintained the Li+diffusion channel while charging and discharging, thereby improving the Li+diffusion coefficient after a long cycle. Therefore, the Mg/Ti co-doped cathode materials exhibited an exceptional capacity retention rate of 99.9% (100 cycles, 1 C). Additionally, the Li+diffusion coefficient of the co-doped NCM9055-MT (2.924 × 10–10cm2s–1) after 100 cycles was effectively enhanced compared with the case of undoped NCM9055 (4.806 × 10–11cm2s–1). This work demonstrates that the Mg/Ti co-doping approach effectively enhanced the stability of layered Ni-rich cathode materials.

The interaction between muscle and bone is shown to be clinically important but the underlying mechanisms are largely unknown. The canonical Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway is reported to be involved in muscle-bone crosstalk, but its detailed function remains unclear. This systematic review aims to investigate and elucidate the role of the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathways in muscle-bone crosstalk.

The neuromuscular junction (NMJ) is a specialized chemical synapse that converts neural impulses into muscle action. Age-associated NMJ degeneration, which involves nerve terminal and postsynaptic decline, denervation, and loss of motor units, significantly contributes to muscle weakness and dysfunction. Although physical training has been shown to make substantial modifications in NMJ of both young and aged animals, the results are often influenced by methodological variables in existing studies. Moreover, there is still lack of strong consensus on the specific effects of exercise on improving the morphology and function of the ageing NMJ. Consequently, the purpose of this study was to conduct a systematic review to elucidate the effects of exercise training on NMJ compartments in the elderly.

In this letter, a three-dimensional dam was fabricated by direct ink printing of geopolymer/hexagonal boron nitride paste on a direct plated copper substrate to package high-power white light-emitting diodes (WLEDs). Compared to traditional dam fabricated and glued on substrate by organic material, the geopolymer-based dam with higher thermal conductivity enhanced heat dissipation. At temperature of 300°C, the solidified geopolymer-based dam demonstrated excellent thermal reliability. The phosphor weight in silicone was optimized to tune WLED optical performance. At 9 wt%, the resulting WLED demonstrated natural white light luminous efficiency equal to 142.26 lm/W, a correlated color temperature equal to 4304 K, and color rendering index equal to 59 under the 350 mA driving current. These results show that this novel packaged design provides a reliable and effective strategy for enhancing heat dissipation of high-power WLEDs.

Enhancing the accuracy and reliability of perception systems in automated vehicles is critical, especially under varying driving conditions. Unfortunately, the challenges of adverse weather and low-visibility conditions can seriously degrade camera performance, introducing significant risks to vehicle safety. To address these concerns, in this study, we introduce a novel transformer-based 3D object detection model named ‘REDFormer’. By exploiting bird's-eye-view camera-radar fusion, the REDFormer offers a more practical and financially viable solution for tackling low-visibility conditions. We validate our model using the comprehensive nuScenes dataset, incorporating camera images, multi-radar point clouds, weather information, and time-of-day data. In comparative analyses, our model surpasses state-of-the-art benchmarks in both classification and detection accuracy. An in-depth ablation study further elucidates the individual contributions of each model component in overcoming the challenges posed by weather and lighting conditions. Experimental results specifically highlight the model's significant performance improvements, demonstrating a 31.31% increase in accuracy under rainy conditions and a 46.99% enhancement during nighttime scenarios, affirming REDFormer's potential as a robust and cost-effective solution for automated vehicles.

The direct epoxidation of propylene using molecular oxygen to synthesize propylene oxide (PO) is a process of significant industrial and environmental interest. In this study, we employed density functional theory to explore the influence of halogen doping (specifically F, Cl, Br, and I) on the Cu2O(110) surface. The computational investigation revealed that replacing a surface lattice oxygen with a halogen atom would enhance the electron density of adjacent Cu sites, leading to more effective formation of the O2−species. Our results indicated that the selectivity for PO production on these halogen-modified catalysts adheres to the sequence Cl > Br > F > I. Further structural analysis indicated that halogen integration adjusts the twist angle of the pivotal oxametallacycle propylene intermediate, effectively suppressing the competitive α-H abstraction side reaction and thereby elevating PO selectivity. These insights into the electronic and structural effects induced by halogens presented a compelling strategy for the development of more efficient catalysts for propylene epoxidation.

Grating interferometers highly valued for high resolution, straightforward benchmark, and insensitivity to environmental disturbances have become one of the most mainstream methods for ultraprecision positioning. Traditional heterodyne grating interferometers which use a dual-frequency orthogonally polarized laser source suffer nanometer-level periodic nonlinear error due to frequency and polarization mixing, thus becoming incompetent to undertake sub-nanometer measurement. Based on the design of two separated laser beams with a small frequency difference for heterodyne beating, a wavelength-stabilized and quasi-common-path heterodyne grating interferometer is proposed. It incorporates a symmetrical oblique incidence structure where the residual dead path is calibrated and the laser source wavelength is stabilized to the rubidium atomic transition line, diminishing heterodyne phase errors resulted from the optical path difference. This approach not only significantly mitigates periodic nonlinear error to below 0.3 nm but also enhances measurement resolution, repeatability, and interference robustness. The proposed heterodyne grating interferometer is determined for ultraprecision positioning serving for precision machinery manufacturing and scanning beam interference lithography and so forth.

Six new sesquiterpenoids (1–6), a pair of enantiomers (7aand 7b), and six known ones (8–13) were isolated from the fruits of Alpinia oxyphylla. The structures of the new compounds were elucidated by extensive spectroscopic data and ECD calculations. The stereochemistry of 7aand 7bwas reported for the first time. All compounds showed significant GLP-1 stimulation in NCI-H716 cells with promoting ratios ranging from 90.4 to 668.9% at 50 μM. Mechanism study indicated that compound 6stimulated GLP-1 secretion mainly by regulating the transcription and the shearing process of proglucagon, while compound 13exerted its effects through up-regulating prkacalevels. Interestingly, the GLP-1 stimulative effects of 6and 13were both closely related with Ca2+/CaMKII and PKA pathways but irrelevant to TGR5 and GPR119 receptors. Moreover, most compounds exhibited inhibitory activity against α-glucosidase and PTP1B at concentrations of 100 and 200 μM, while showing no activity against GPa. Compounds 3, 9, 11, and 13could suppress α-glucosidase with IC50values of 190.0, 204.0, 181.8, and 159.6 μM, equivalent to acarbose (IC50= 212.0 μM). This study manifests that A. oxyphyllacontains diverse sesquiterpenoids with multiple activities.

The liver is a vital organ in chickens that performs a number of crucial physiological functions, including the storage of hepatic glycogen, protein synthesis, detoxification, and deoxidation. The growth and metabolism of the liver are complex processes influenced by factors such as environment, diet, and genetics. MicroRNAs (miRNAs), as post-transcriptional regulatory molecules, play a role in various biological processes. There is growing evidence that miR-27b-5p plays a key role in the regulation of liver development and metabolism in various species. However, its role in chicken livers has yet to be determined. In our experiment, we found that chickens with fatty livers had significantly higher levels of serum triglyceride (TG) and total cholesterol (TC) compared to the normal chickens, while the control group had significantly higher levels of very low-density lipoprotein (VLDL) and serum hormones. Further research showed that the mRNA of miR-27b-5p was highly expressed in fatty livers. By exploring the function of miR-27b-5p in chicken livers, we discovered that it promotes lipogenesis, oxidative stress, and inflammatory responses, leading to hepatocyte apoptosis. Our study also established the mechanism by which miR-27b-5p interacts with its target gene, and found that miR-27b-5p targets insulin receptor substrate 2 (IRS2) and modulates the PI3K/AKT signaling pathway. Additionally, our investigation of IRS2in chicken hepatocytes revealed that knocking down IRS2has the same effects as overexpressing miR-27b-5p. In conclusion, our study revealed that miR-27b-5p directly binds to IRS2, inhibiting the PI3K/AKT signaling pathway and causing steatosis, oxidative stress, inflammation, and apoptosis in chicken liver.

The highly energy-intensive iron and steel industry contributed about 25% (ref. 1) of global industrial CO2emissions in 2019 and is therefore critical for climate-change mitigation. Despite discussions of decarbonization potentials at national and global levels2–6, plant-specific mitigation potentials and technologically driven pathways remain unclear, which cumulatively determines the progress of net-zero transition of the global iron and steel sector. Here we develop a CO2emissions inventory of 4,883 individual iron and steel plants along with their technical characteristics, including processing routes and operating details (status, age, operation-years etc.). We identify and match appropriate emission-removal or zero-emission technologies to specific possessing routes, or what we define thereafter as a techno-specific decarbonization road map for every plant. We find that 57% of global plants have 8–24 operational years, which is the retrofitting window for low-carbon technologies. Low-carbon retrofitting following the operational characteristics of plants is key for limiting warming to 2 °C, whereas advanced retrofitting may help limit warming to 1.5 °C. If each plant were retrofitted 5 years earlier than the planned retrofitting schedule, this could lead to cumulative global emissions reductions of 69.6 (±52%) gigatonnes (Gt) CO2from 2020 to 2050, almost double that of global CO2emissions in 2021. Our results provide a detailed picture of CO2emission patterns associated with production processing of iron and steel plants, illustrating the decarbonization pathway to the net-zero-emissions target with the efforts from each plant.

Comprehensive semantic segmentation on renal pathological images is challenging due to the heterogeneous scales of the objects. For example, on a whole slide image (WSI), the cross-sectional areas of glomeruli can be 64 times larger than that of the peritubular capillaries, making it impractical to segment both objects on the same patch, at the same scale. To handle this scaling issue, prior studies have typically trained multiple segmentation networks in order to match the optimal pixel resolution of heterogeneous tissue types. This multi-network solution is resource-intensive and fails to model the spatial relationship between tissue types. In this article, we propose the Omni-Seg network, a scale-aware dynamic neural network that achieves multi-object (six tissue types) and multi-scale (5× to 40× scale) pathological image segmentation via a single neural network. The contribution of this article is three-fold: (1) a novel scale-aware controller is proposed to generalize the dynamic neural network from single-scale to multi-scale; (2) semi-supervised consistency regularization of pseudo-labels is introduced to model the inter-scale correlation of unannotated tissue types into a single end-to-end learning paradigm; and (3) superior scale-aware generalization is evidenced by directly applying a model trained on human kidney images to mouse kidney images, without retraining. By learning from 150,000 human pathological image patches from six tissue types at three different resolutions, our approach achieved superior segmentation performance according to human visual assessment and evaluation of image-omics (i.e., spatial transcriptomics).

The peripheral T cell repertoire of healthy individuals contains self-reactive T cells1,2. Checkpoint receptors such as PD-1 are thought to enable the induction of peripheral tolerance by deletion or anergy of self-reactive CD8 T cells3–10. However, this model is challenged by the high frequency of immune-related adverse events in patients with cancer who have been treated with checkpoint inhibitors11. Here we developed a mouse model in which skin-specific expression of T cell antigens in the epidermis caused local infiltration of antigen-specific CD8 T cells with an effector gene-expression profile. In this setting, PD-1 enabled the maintenance of skin tolerance by preventing tissue-infiltrating antigen-specific effector CD8 T cells from (1) acquiring a fully functional, pathogenic differentiation state, (2) secreting significant amounts of effector molecules, and (3) gaining access to epidermal antigen-expressing cells. In the absence of PD-1, epidermal antigen-expressing cells were eliminated by antigen-specific CD8 T cells, resulting in local pathology. Transcriptomic analysis of skin biopsies from two patients with cutaneous lichenoid immune-related adverse events showed the presence of clonally expanded effector CD8 T cells in both lesional and non-lesional skin. Thus, our data support a model of peripheral T cell tolerance in which PD-1 allows antigen-specific effector CD8 T cells to co-exist with antigen-expressing cells in tissues without immunopathology.

Data processing and analytics are fundamental and pervasive. Algorithms play a vital role in data processing and analytics where many algorithm designs have incorporated heuristics and general rules from human knowledge and experience to improve their effectiveness. Recently, reinforcement learning, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in particular, is increasingly explored and exploited in many areas because it can learn better strategies in complicated environments it is interacting with than statically designed algorithms. Motivated by this trend, we provide a comprehensive review of recent works focusing on utilizing DRL to improve data processing and analytics. First, we present an introduction to key concepts, theories, and methods in DRL. Next, we discuss DRL deployment on database systems, facilitating data processing and analytics in various aspects, including data organization, scheduling, tuning, and indexing. Then, we survey the application of DRL in data processing and analytics, ranging from data preparation, natural language processing to healthcare, fintech, etc. Finally, we discuss important open challenges and future research directions of using DRL in data processing and analytics.

With the explosive growth of various images, large-scale image retrieval has attracted ever-growing attention. Deep hashing methods have achieved great success on single-label retrieval. However, the multi-level similarities between samples in multi-label scenarios have not been fully explored. In this letter, based on the in-depth analysis of the complex semantic similarities of multi-label images, the Multi-Central Ranking Loss (MCR Loss) for deep hashing is proposed to construct a powerful metric space that not only preserves the fine-grained similarities of multi-label images but also has low quantization error. The proposed MCR Loss utilizes learnable hash centers and similarities of data-to-data pairs to optimize the metric space, which greatly alleviates the embedding conflict caused by proxy-based supervision, and reduces the quantization error. The proposed method is compared with several existing state-of-the-art hashing methods on two public multi-label benchmarks. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several ranking evaluation metrics.

CO2emission inventory provides fundamental data for climate research and emission mitigation. Currently, most global CO2emission inventories were developed with energy statistics from International Energy Agency (IEA) and were available at country level with limited source categories. Here, as the first step toward a high-resolution and dynamic updated global CO2emission database, we developed a data-driven approach to construct seamless and highly-resolved energy consumption data cubes for 208 countries/territories, 797 sub-country administrative divisions in 29 countries, 42 fuel types, and 52 sectors, with the fusion of activity data from 24 international statistics and 65 regional/local statistics. Global CO2emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production in 1970–2021 were then estimated with highly-resolved source category (1,484 of total) and sub-country information (797 of total). Specifically, 73% of global CO2emissions in 2021 were estimated with sub-country information, providing considerably improved spatial resolution for global CO2emission accounting. With the support of detailed information, the dynamics of global CO2emissions across sectors and fuel types were presented, representing the evolution of global economy and progress of climate mitigation. Remarkable differences of sectoral contribution were found across sub-country administrative divisions within a given country, revealing the uneven distribution of energy and economic structure among different regions. Our estimates were generally consistent with existing databases at aggregated level for global total or large emitters, while large discrepancies were observed for middle and small emitters. Our database, named the Multi-resolution Emission Inventory model for Climate and air pollution research (MEIC) is publicly available through http://meicmodel.org.cnwith highly-resolved information and timely update, which provides an independent carbon emission accounting data source for climate research.

Ion insertion in host layered materials is the foundation of energy storage mechanism of commercial lithium-ion batteries. Contrary to general view that small lithium (Li) diffuses freely between large interlayer, here, we in situvisualize Li diffusion pathways into the layered germanium phosphide (GeP) crystal flake along different directions via a microbattery device. Surprisingly, a more preferential Li diffusion pathway along zigzag [010] direction than armchair [102] direction is observed, demonstrating a strong in-plane diffusion anisotropy up to 7.0. And an interlayered Li diffusion coefficient of 3.4 × 10−7cm2s−1is obtained for GeP flake, over 1,000 times faster than that measured for graphite flake (2.4 × 10−11cm2s−1), suggesting a high potential of GeP as an attractive fast-charging material. The visualizing and quantitative strategy for the intrinsic diffusion process provides solid and scientific guidance on high-through material screening for fast-charging batteries.

Family history of coronary artery disease (FHxCAD) is a critical risk factor for CAD, underscoring the contribution of genetic factors to disease pathogenesis and susceptibility. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy (TCM) simulates the clinical features of and frequently coexists with CAD. However, the association between FHxCAD and TCM is unclear. Here, we retrospectively examined the impact of FHxCAD on in-hospital outcomes of patients with TCM. Using the National Inpatient Sample database (2016–2018), we identified 4733 patients admitted to hospital with a primary diagnosis of TCM. We compared in-hospital outcomes and complications between TCM patients with (n=646, 13.7%) and without FHxCAD (n=646) in the unmatched and in a propensity-score matched cohort (1:1 ratio). TCM with FHxCAD patients had a reduced incidence of cardiogenic shock, acute kidney injury (AKI), and acute respiratory failure (ARF); lower mortality rates; shorter length of stay (LOS); and decreased total charge compared with TCM without FHxCAD patients (p<0.05). In the matched cohort, TCM with FHxCAD patients (vs TCM without FHxCAD patients) had a lower incidence of cardiogenic shock (2.2% vs 6.3%, p<0.001; OR 0.33, 95% CI 0.18 to 0.61), AKI (5.1% vs 8.7%, p=0.016; OR 0.57, 95% CI 0.36 to 0.88), and ARF (5.7% vs 12.7%, p<0.001; OR 0.42, 95% CI 0.28 to 0.63); decreased in-hospital mortality (<11% vs 3.1%, p=0.002; OR 0.2, 95% CI 0.07 to 0.57); shorter LOS (2.66±1.96 days vs 3.40±3.05 days, p<0.001); and a reduced total charge (p=0.001), respectively. FHxCAD was associated with favorable outcomes in both unmatched and propensity-matched cohorts.

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are a class of endogenous non-coding RNAs that have been implicated in mediating granulosa cell (GC) proliferation and apoptosis. CircRAB11A was found to have a significantly higher expression in normal follicles compared to atrophic follicles. In this study, we determined that the knockdown of circRAB11A resulted in the inhibition of proliferation and promotion of apoptosis in GCs of chicken. Moreover, circRAB11A was found to act as a sponge for miR-24-5p, both member RAS oncogene family (RAB11A) and epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) were revealed to be targets of miR-24-5p through a dual-luciferase reporter assay. RAB11A or EGFR promoted proliferation and suppressed apoptosis in GCs through the phosphatidylinositol-kinase (PI3K)/AKT or extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK)1/2 pathway. These findings suggest that circRAB11A may function as a competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) by targeting the miR-24-5p/RAB11A and miR-24-5p/EGFR axes and activating the ERK1/2 and PI3K/AKT pathways, offering a potential avenue for exploring the mechanism of follicle development.

As a new class of solid electrolytes, halide solid electrolytes have the advantages of high ionic conductivity at room temperature, stability to high-voltage cathodes, and good deformability, but they generally show a problem of being unstable to a lithium anode. Here, we report the use of Li3N as an interface modification layer to improve the interfacial stability of Li2ZrCl6to the Li anode. We found that commercial Li3N can be easily transformed into an α-phase and a β-phase by ball-milling and annealing, respectively, in which β-phase Li3N simultaneously has high room-temperature ionic conductivity and good stability to both Li and Li2ZrCl6, making it a good choice for an artificial interface layer material. After the modification of the β-Li3N interfacial layer, the interfacial impedance between Li2ZrCl6and the Li anode decreased from 1929 to ∼400 Ω. At a current density of 0.1 mA cm–2, the overpotential of the Li symmetric cell decreased from 250 to ∼50 mV, which did not show an obvious increase for at least 300 h, indicating that the β-Li3N interface layer effectively improves the interfacial stability between Li2ZrCl6and Li.

All fracture repairs start with the innate immune system with the inflammatory response known as the inflammatory stage guided and driven by the secretion of chemokine by the ruptured tissue, followed by the sequential recruitment of neutrophils, monocytes and macrophages. These innate immune cells would infiltrate the fracture site and secrete inflammatory cytokines to stimulate recruitment of more immune cells to arrive at the fracture site coordinating subsequent stages of the repair process. In which, subsidence of pro-inflammatory M1 macrophage and transformation to anti-inflammatory M2 macrophages promotes osteogenesis that marks the start of the anabolic endochondral stage.

Sarcopenia is a hallmark of the ageing process, which is characterized by the decline in muscle mass and strength. Growing evidence indicates that mitochondria dysfunction play core roles in this process. Meanwhile, physical exercise is regarded as one of the efficiency therapies to attenuate sarcopenia via regulating mitochondrial function during ageing. However, the specific mechanisms among exercise, mitochondrial function and sarcopenia are still unclear. The aim of this systematic review is to delineate the effects of physical exercise on mitochondria during ageing in order to explore potential target for rescuing sarcopenia.

PVDF is used as the functional skin of PEO for both anode and cathode side. The PVDF skin can reduce interface resistance for Li anode and improve anti-oxidation capability for high-voltage cathodes.

Metallic lithium is considered as the ultimate anode material for lithium-based batteries due to its highest energy density. However, as an anode, commercial Li metal foils are too thick, with a large amount of trouble to balance its exorbitant areal capacity with common cathodes in full cells. Here, a new chemical thinning strategy is proposed via a simple surface dissolving reaction between lithium and naphthalene, which enables scalable, continuous, and roll-to-roll preparation of ultrathin Li foil. A Li foil less than 15 μm with a clean surface can be successfully obtained within 20 min. The thinning rate and thickness of the lithium foil can be easily adjusted by changing the concentration, temperature, and operation mode. The produced Li-Naph solution after thinning can also be used as a multifunctional reagent of great value, and the Li ions in the final waste solution can be further extracted in the form of Li2CO3, showing superior lithium atom economy of our strategy.