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Polymer-stabilized liquid crystal (PSLC) is a promising material toward the practical application of serving as energy-saving reverse-mode smart windows owing to its superior electro-optical (E–O) properties, simple and efficient processability, and compatibility to most practical circumstances. However, its feeble peel strength originated from low polymer content and poor adhesion between polymer networks and substrates inhibited its large-scale flexible film production. It is still a challenging task to derive good mechanical properties and superior E–O performance for PSLCs at the same time. In this study, a highly durable liquid crystal/polymer composite film showing enhanced peel strength and excellent E–O properties was attained by simultaneously building photoreactive self-assemble alignment layers through an efficient one-step method and the sculpture of a patterned polymer wall structure. This film has comprehensive ascendant E–O properties of lower driving voltages, faster response times, and higher contrast ratio, together with an over 30 times lift of the peel strength. The effectuation mechanisms of the alignment, E–O properties, peel-strength, microstructures, and cyclic durability of the films have been systematically studied. This novel liquid crystal/polymer composite film demonstrates advantages in every aspect of performance compared to traditional PSLC devices, which hoards promising applications in smart windows for cars and buildings.

The development and application of biomaterial tissue engineering technology provide new ideas and approaches in the rehabilitation of a cruciate ligament injury. Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) fibre meets biosafety requirements, has no toxicity, no irritation, no genotoxicity, no carcinogenicity, and good biocompatibility to the human body. This study investigated and verified the growth of the human anterior cruciate ligament (hACL) cells on the ligament scaffold material PVA. This study shows that a PVA fibre as a tissue engineering scaffold ligament, cultured hACL cells in vitro proliferative capacity and a strong ability to secrete collagen matrix. The scaffold material has good cell compatibility, has certain swelling and mechanical properties, and is expected to develop into an ideal tissue for engineering anterior cruciate ligament scaffold material for rehabilitation treatment of a cruciate ligament injury during exercise.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic disease with complex molecular network of pathophysiology, single drug is usually not full satisfactory because it is almost impossible to target the whole molecular network of the disease. Drug combinations that act synergistically with each another is an effective strategy in RA therapy. In this study, we aimed to establish a new strategy to search effective synergized compounds from Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) used in RA. Based on multi‐information integrative approaches, imperatorin (IMP) and β‐sitosterol (STO) were predicted as the most effective pair for RA therapy. Further animal experiments demonstrated that IMP+STO treatment ameliorated arthritis severity of collagen‐induced arthritis (CIA) rats in a synergistic manner, whereas IMP or STO administration separately had no such effect. RNA sequencing and IPA analysis revealed that the synergistic mechanism of IMP+STO treatment was related to its regulatory effect on 5 canonical signaling pathways, which were not found when IMP or STO used alone. Moreover, LTA, CD83, and SREBF1 were 3 important targets for synergistic mechanism of IMP+STO treatment. The levels of these 3 genes were significantly up‐regulated in IMP+STO group compared to model group, whereas IMP or STO administration separately had no effect on them. In conclusion, this study found that IMP and STO were 2 synergistic compounds from the CHM in RA therapy, whose synergistic mechanism was closely related to regulate the levels of LTA, CD83, and SREBF1. Imperatorin and beta‐sitosterol, two synergistic compounds from Chinese herbal medicine, were an effective pair in rheumatoid arthritis therapy.

The dense co‐occurrence of psychiatric disorders questions the categorical classification tradition and motivates efforts to establish dimensional constructs with neurobiological foundations that transcend diagnostic boundaries. In this study, we examined the genetic liability for eight major psychiatric disorder phenotypes under both a disorder‐specific and a transdiagnostic framework. The study sample (n= 513) was deeply phenotyped, consisting of 452 patients from tertiary care with mood disorders, anxiety disorders (ANX), attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorders, and/or substance use disorders (SUD) and 61 unaffected comparison individuals. We computed subject‐specific polygenic risk score (PRS) profiles and assessed their associations with psychiatric diagnoses, comorbidity status, as well as cross‐disorder behavioral dimensions derived from a rich battery of psychopathology assessments. High PRSs for depression were unselectively associated with the diagnosis of SUD, ADHD, ANX, and mood disorders (p< 1e‐4). In the dimensional approach, four distinct functional domains were uncovered, namely the negative valence, social, cognitive, and regulatory systems, closely matching the major functional domains proposed by the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework. Critically, the genetic predisposition for depression was selectively reflected in the functional aspect of negative valence systems (R2= 0.041, p =5e‐4) but not others. This study adds evidence to the ongoing discussion about the misalignment between current psychiatric nosology and the underlying psychiatric genetic etiology and underscores the effectiveness of the dimensional approach in both the functional characterization of psychiatric patients and the delineation of the genetic liability for psychiatric disorders.

High-temperature water electrolysis in a solid oxide electrolysis cell (SOEC) can be an efficient way of producing hydrogen, especially if it can be coupled with a renewable energy source. In this study, the performance of a nickel-doped, A-site deficient lanthanum strontium ferrite (La0.7Sr0.2FeO3) was investigated as an SOEC cathode. Electrolysis of H2O was carried out using a cathode stream containing 3% H2O/He at 800 °C and at various current densities. It was found that La0.7Sr0.2FeO3has a lower Faradaic efficiency for hydrogen production than the Ni-doped cathode for which the efficiency reaches 100%. XRD shows that the undoped sample forms a nonconducting La2O3secondary phase which affects the electrochemical performance negatively. On the nickel-doped sample, however, a B-site metal phase and a Ruddlesden–Popper phase with mixed electronic and ionic conductivity are formed, which enhances the electrochemical performance of the cathode.

Hierarchical ZSM-5 (HZ) zeolites with different SiO2/Al2O3ratios (SiO2/Al2O3= 50, 100, 150, 200, 250 and 300) were synthesized using a two-step hydrothermal treatment method, and the Al and Si were obtained from fly ash by the alkali melting and acid leaching method. On this basis, the 10 wt% LaMnO3/HZ catalysts were prepared by impregnation. The all the synthesized catalysts were investigated for the low-temperature (200 °C) catalytic oxidation of pentanal, which was selected as a typical odorous volatile organic compound (VOC) in cooking fumes. In addition, the physicochemical properties of HZ zeolites were characterized by several techniques (XRD, N2physical adsorption–desorption, ICP-OES, SEM,TEM,NH3-TPD and 27Al MAS-NMR). The results showed that the HZ zeolite, which was micro-mesoporous material and had high specific surface area, provided a higher diffuser efficiency for long-chain VOC gas. The catalytic performance of HZ zeolite was better than that of the traditional ZSM-5 zeolite. Compared with the dry atmosphere, HZ-100 zeolite, which possessed more proper medium strong acid sites and the appropriate amount of acid sites, had the higher pentanal catalytic combustion conversion of above 92% and the relatively superior stability with 2 V% water steam in air, indicating that the suitable acid sites can form the best synergistic catalytic effect with water molecules for purifying long-chainVOC gas. In addition, the catalytic conversion of pentanal on 10 wt% LaMnO3/HZ-100 was 100% with no deactivation, and compared with HZ under a dry atmosphere, the average CO2yields of 10 wt% LaMnO3/HZ catalysts in the steady catalytic oxidation stage under a dry atmosphere and 2 V% water steam in air were improved by 6–18% and 13–20%.

Companies like Alibaba operate tens of data centers (DCs) across geographically distributed locations. These DCs collectively provide the storage space and computing power for the company, storing EBs of data and serving millions of batch analytics jobs every day. In Alibaba, as our businesses grow, there are more and more cross-DC dependencies caused by jobs reading data from remote DCs. Consequently, the precious wide area network bandwidth becomes a major bottleneck for operating geo-distributed DCs at scale. In this paper, we present Yugong --- a system that manages data placement and job placement in Alibaba's geo-distributed DCs, with the objective to minimize cross-DC bandwidth usage. Yugong uses three methods, namely project placement, table replication, and job outsourcing, to address the issues of high bandwidth consumption across the DCs. We give the details of Yugong's design and implementation for the three methods, and describe how it cooperates with other systems (e.g., Alibaba's big data analytics platform and cluster scheduler) to improve the productivity of the DCs. We also report comprehensive performance evaluation results, which validate the design of Yugong and show that significant reduction in cross-DC bandwidth usage has been achieved.

This research empirically explores whether the intensity of social networks affects the wages of workers or not using survey data from the Chinese households’ income project in 2002. After controlling for gender, work experience, political affiliation, marital status, years of education and other factors, we show that the social networks are useful for the job hunter to find jobs, but they have little contributions to higher wages. Further studies indicate that the social networks with “strong ties” for job seekers are not conducive to enhancing the wages of workers. However, the social networks with “weak ties” have a lower job hunting probability and heterogeneity benefit for improving wage levels. Furthermore, we employ family dynamic survey data from China in 2006 to make robustness check, and results are still robust.

In this paper, three hybridoma cell lines that secrete monoclonal antibodies against fumonisin B1(FB1), specifically antibody subtypes IgA (heavy-chain) and kappa (light-chain), were obtained by immunization and cell cloning procedures. And the surfaces of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) were modified with mercaptoundecanoic acid (MUA) to obtain AuNPs–MUA, which was used as a carrier for horseradish peroxidase (HRP)-goat anti-mouse IgA to develop an enhanced indirect competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (IC-ELISA) for the detection of FB1. The 50% inhibitory concentration (IC50) and the limit of detection (LOD, 15% inhibitory concentration, IC15) of this method were 0.93 ± 0.058 and 0.078 ± 0.013 μg L−1, respectively. The detection sensitivity was approximately 10 times higher than that of the traditional IC-ELISA (IC50is 9.57 μg L−1). The cross-reactivity rates of AuNP enhanced IC-ELISA with FB1, FB2, and FB3were 100%, 86.9%, and 79.5%, respectively, and did not cross with other mycotoxins. The total amount of fumonisins (FB1, FB2, and FB3) in actual contaminated maize samples was determined by AuNP enhanced IC-ELISA, and the results were consistent with liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) with R2= 0.9989. AuNP enhanced IC-ELISA showed good accuracy and stability, which made it one of the solutions to quantitatively detect the total content of fumonisins (FB1, FB2, and FB3) in maize.

We have proposed a sensitive fluorescence immunoassay for detecting bisphenol A (BPA) in barreled drinking water, bottled mineral water, and river water using the anti-BPA antibody conjugated carboxyl-functionalized NaYF4:Yb/Tm upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) (emission maximum at 454 nm with excitation at 980 nm) as the signal probe and the coating antigen conjugated carboxyl-functionalized magnetic polystyrene microspheres (MPMs) as the capture probe. The proposed assay has a linear detection range of 0.1 to 500 μg L−1(R2= 0.9954). The water samples without any pretreatment can be directly analyzed. The limit of detection (LOD) of BPA in the water samples is 0.02 μg L−1. The recoveries of BPA from spiked water samples for the proposed assay range from 85.35% to 108.35%. Low concentrations of BPA have been detected in the real barreled drinking water and river water samples, and the results are validated by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) to be reliable, reflecting the good practicability of the proposed assay. The proposed fluorescence immunoassay can serve as a useful detection approach for the simple, rapid, sensitive, and accurate determination of BPA in drinking and environmental water.

AbstractThe rank of a dependent fuzzy set in a closed fuzzy matroid is discussed and several useful results for the rank of a dependent fuzzy set are given in this paper. Based on these theorems, an algorithm of obtaining the rank of a dependent fuzzy set is presented.

Hierarchical ZSM-5 (HZ) molecular sieves based on fly ash were synthesized using a method combining water heat treatment with step-by-step calcination. The coupling catalysts between La1−xCexMn0.8Ni0.2O3(x ≤ 0.5) perovskites and HZ were prepared through the impregnation method, which were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM), N2adsorption, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), NH3-temperature programmed desoprtion (NH3-TPD), H2-temperature programmed reduction (H2-TPR) and O2-TPD techniques and investigated regarding pentanal oxidation at 120−390 °C to explore the effects of Ce doping on the catalytic activity and the active oxygen species of the coupling catalysts, meanwhile, the reaction mechanism and pathway of pentanal oxidation were also studied. The results reveal that Ce substitution at La sites can change the electronic interactions between all the elements and promote the electronic transfer among La, Ce, Ni, Mn and HZ, influencing directly the physicochemical characteristics of the catalysts. Moreover, the amount and transfer ability of surface adsorbed oxygen (O2–and O–) regarded as the reactive oxygen species and the low temperature reducibility are the main influence factors in pentanal oxidation. Additionally, La0.8Ce0.2Mn0.8Ni0.2O3/HZ exhibits the best catalytic activity and deep oxidation capacity as well as a better water resistance due to its larger amount of surface adsorbed oxygen species and higher low temperature reducibility. What’s more, appropriate Ce substitution can significantly enhance the amount of O2–ions, which can distinctly enhance the catalytic activity of the catalyst, and moderate acid strength and appropriate acid amount can also facilitate the improvement of the pentanal oxidation activity. It is found that there is a synergic catalytic effect between surface acidity and redox ability of the catalyst. According to the in situDRIFTS and GC/MS analyses, pentanal can be oxidized gradually to CO2and H2O by the surface oxygen species with the form of adsorption in air following the Langmuir–Hinshelwood (L-H) reaction mechanism. Two reaction pathways for the pentanal oxidation process are proposed, and the conversion of the formates to carbonates may be one of the main rate-determining steps.