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Because of the blood–brain barrier and the high infiltration of glioma cells, the diagnostic accuracy and treatment efficiency of gliomas are still facing challenges. There is an urgent need to explore the integration of diagnostic and therapeutic methods to achieve an accurate diagnosis, guide surgery, and inhibit postoperative recurrence. In this work, we developed a macrophage loaded with a photothermal nanoprobe (MFe3O4-Cy5.5), which is able to cross the blood–brain barrier and accumulate into deep gliomas to achieve multimodal imaging and guided glioma surgery purposes. With desirable probing depth and high signal-to-noise ratio, Fe3O4-Cy5.5 can perform fluorescence, photoacoustic, and magnetic resonance imaging, which can distinguish brain tumors from the surrounding normal tissues and accurately guide glioma resection. Meanwhile, Fe3O4-Cy5.5 can effectively induce local photothermal therapy and inhibit the recurrence of glioma after surgery. These results demonstrate that the macrophage-mediated Fe3O4-Cy5.5, which can achieve a multimodal diagnosis, accurate imaging-guided surgery, and effective photothermal therapy, is a promising nanoplatform for gliomas.

Electrochemical energy storage devices are of interest, especially aqueous sodium ion batteries (ASIBs), due to their safety, low-cost, and environmental friendliness. However, ASIBs suffer from poor cyclic stability and a narrow electrochemical window, which hinders their large-scale application. Compared to the traditional dilute saline electrolytes, high concentration electrolytes show a wider potential window. In this study, we designed a novel NaClO4-H2O/DMSO-Urea hybrid electrolyte to suppress these problems, in which DMSO and Urea create a synergistic effect. The formation of hydrogen bonds between DMSO and H2O reduced water activity, thereby suppressing the hydrogen evolution reaction. The addition of DMSO resulted in the reduction from −1.2 to −1.6 V for the hydrogen evolution potential. Therefore, we were able to expand the electrochemical window on the basis of reducing the concentration of sodium salts. Moreover, the addition of Urea facilitated formation of a stable solid electrolyte interface on the electrode surface, which improved the cycling stability of NVP/C (Na3V2(PO3)4/C) symmetric cell which exhibited a specific capacity of 59.7 mAh g−1with the retention capacity of 80.1% after 200 cycles at 1 C. This work points out a promising strategy for developing stable and wide voltage aqueous electrolyte.

Layered germanium phosphide (GeP), a recently developed two-dimensional material, promises highly attractive theoretical capacity for use as a lithium-ion battery anode. Here, we comprehensively investigate its electrochemical performance and the modification mechanism. GeP flakes demonstrate large initial discharge/charge capacity and high initial Coulombic efficiency. However, the cycling performance is disappointing in the potential window of 0.001–3 V in which capacity retention is only ∼18% after 100 cycles. In situ transmission electron microscopy reveals that the poor cycling behavior results in the unexpected large volume change induced by complex reaction processes in cycles. Serious cracking and fracture appear clearly on the electrode surface after cycling. Narrowing the working voltage window to 0.001–0.85 V, cycling stability will be greatly enhanced, with 75% capacity retaining after 100 cycles and ∼50% left after 350 cycles due to the absence of the dealloying of Li3P in the narrowed working voltage window. Additionally, the electric contact among the electrode components has been enhanced by the alleviation of the electrode volume change in the narrowed working voltage window. Our work provides one effective method to give a deep understanding of the high-energy-density electrode failure and helps to narrow the huge gap between the microstructure and the performance of the electrode.

Many intracellular signal transduction processes involve the reversible translocation from the cytoplasm to the nucleus of transcription factors. The advent of fluorescently tagged protein derivatives has revolutionized cell biology, such that it is now possible to follow the location of such protein molecules in individual cells in real time. However, the quantitative analysis of the location of such proteins in microscopic images is very time consuming. We describe CellTracker, a software tool designed for the automated measurement of the cellular location and intensity of fluorescently tagged proteins. CellTracker runs in the MS Windows environment, is freely available (at http://www.dbkgroup.org/celltracker/), and combines automated cell tracking methods with powerful image-processing algorithms that are optimized for these applications. When tested in an application involving the nuclear transcription factor NF-κB, CellTracker is competitive in accuracy with the manual human analysis of such images but is more than 20 times faster, even on a small task where human fatigue is not an issue. This will lead to substantial benefits for time-lapse-based high-content screening.

Wet granulation and direct compression are two processes employed in tablet preparation. In this paper, pyrolysis-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (Py-GC-MS) is used to discriminate these processes with the help of chemometric techniques. The data analysis procedure is as follows. First, deconvolute the Py-GC-MS data of each sample into concentration profiles and spectra, and then construct a matrix with each compound corresponding to one column; those contained only in a small number of samples are then removed. Second, the main principal components are kept after excluding three variables and one sample, and further processed by Fisher discriminant analysis. Third, the resultant data are assigned to classes using unsupervised and supervised classification methods. Results from cross-validation show that only 3 of 20 samples are misclassified by the Mahalanobis distance measure.

Data from LC/NMR have some distinct characteristics, differing from those of LC/MS and LC/DAD. This paper compares several approaches for resolution on both a three‐component and a seven‐component case study. Non‐iterative methods based on principal component analysis (EFA, WFA, HELP) and iterative approaches using constraints (ALS, Gentle) are compared with a new proposed method, constrained key variable regression (CKVR), which involves refining key variables and then using constraints of non‐negativity and equality to obtain optimized spectral resolution. In LC/NMR the reconstruction of detailed spectral profiles is important, requiring specific refinement of existing tools. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A three‐component mixture of naphthalene, anthracene and pyrene with the middle peak embedded was recorded using LC/1H NMR. Two case‐studies, one with tailing peaks and one without, were analysed. A procedure was developed involving apodization, Fourier transformation, phasing and baseline correction of raw data, preprocessing by frequency shift and peak shape correction, variable selection, determination of key variables, eigenvalue plots to determine the number and position of components, and finally resolution using factor analysis. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.