Search

Conventional self-assembled monolayer (SAM) hole transporters in organic solar cells (OSCs) generally suffer from poor uniformity and limited thickness tolerance, hindering their large-scale production. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel polymeric hole transporter synthesized by polymerizing carbazole phosphonic acid (PACz). The resultant Poly-2PACz material exhibits exceptional conductivity, high tolerance for variations in layer thickness, and improved film uniformity compared with conventional SAMs. Consequently, the OSCs utilizing Poly-2PACz achieve a remarkable power conversion efficiency of 19.1% and a high fill factor of 81.2%, surpassing the devices based on 2PACz. Moreover, Poly-2PACz-based OSCs demonstrate excellent operational stability, retaining over 80% of their initial efficiency after 1,400 h of continuous light exposure in ambient conditions. This work presents a novel strategy for designing hole transporters, paving the way for more efficient and stable OSCs.

This paper studied the thermal physical properties of foundation materials in the molten salt tank of thermal energy storage system after molten salt leakage by Transient plane source experiment and X-ray computed microtomography simulation methods. The microstructure, thermal properties and pressure resistance with different particle diameters were addressed. The measured heat conductivities from Transient plane source experiment for three cases are 0.49 W/(m·K), 0.48 W/(m·K), and 0.51 W/(m·K), and the porosity is 30.1%, 30.7%, and 31.2% respectively. The heat conductivity simulating results of three cases are 0.471 W/(m·K), 0.482 W/(m·K), and 0.513 W/(m·K). The ratio of difference between the results of simulation and Transient plane source measurement is as low as 1.2%, verifying the reliability of experimental and simulation results to a certain degree. Compared with the heat conductivity of 0.097–0.129 W/(m·K) and porosity of 71.6%–78.9% without leaking salt, the porosity is reduced by more than 50% while the heat conductivity increased by 4 to 5 times after molten salt leakage. This significant increase in heat conductivity has a great impact on security operation, structure design, and modeling of the tank foundation for solar power plants.

Microcystin-degrading bacteria first degrade microcystins by microcystinase A (MlrA) to cleave the cyclic structure of microcystins at the Adda-Arg site of microcystin-LR, microcystin-RR, and microcystin-YR, but the cleavage of the other microcystins was not clear. In our study, the microcystin-degrading bacterium Sphingopyxissp. C-1 as wild type and that of mlrA-disrupting mutant, Sphingopyxissp. CMS01 were used for microcystins biodegradation. The results showed MlrA degraded microcystin-LA, microcystin-LW, microcystin-LY, microcystin-LF, and nodularin. MlrA could cleave the Adda-L-amino acid site.

Eosinophils are essential innate immune cells in allergic responses. Accumulating evidence indicates that eosinophils also participate in the pathogenesis of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). In clinical studies, high blood eosinophil counts and eosinophil cationic protein levels have been associated with an increased risk of CVD, including myocardial infarction (MI), cardiac hypertrophy, atrial fibrillation, abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) and atherosclerosis. However, low blood eosinophil counts have also been reported to be a risk factor for MI, heart failure, aortic dissection, AAA, deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism and ischaemic stroke. Although these conflicting clinical observations remain unexplained, CVD status, timing of eosinophil data collection, and tissue eosinophil phenotypic and functional heterogeneities might account for these discrepancies. Preclinical studies suggest that eosinophils have protective actions in MI, cardiac hypertrophy, heart failure and AAA. By contrast, cationic proteins and platelet-activating factor from eosinophils have been shown to promote vascular smooth muscle cell proliferation, vascular calcification, thrombomodulin inactivation and platelet activation and aggregation, thereby exacerbating atherosclerosis, atrial fibrillation, thrombosis and associated complications. Therefore, eosinophils seem to promote calcification and thrombosis in chronic CVD but are protective in acute cardiovascular settings. In this Review, we summarize the available clinical and preclinical data on the different roles of eosinophils in CVD.

The leakage accident of molten salt in the thermal storage tank will cause the shutdown and enormous economic losses of Concentrated Solar Power plants. This study investigates the heat transfer and flow characteristic of commercial molten nitrates leaking in the thermal state porous foundation material. The migration width and depth of three molten nitrates, Solar Salt (60 wt% NaNO3-40 wt%KNO3), Hitec XL (7 wt% NaNO3-45 wt% KNO3-48 wt% Ca(NO3)2) and Hitec (7 wt% NaNO3-53 wt%KNO3-40 wt%NaNO2), are obtained at different operating temperatures. Experimental results indicate that the temperature rising rate of foundation material in the nitrate leaking process has a trend of first increasing rapidly and then decreasing, and then it increases slightly as the depth increases. The temperature rising rate increases obviously with increasing operating temperature of the molten salt. With the increase of the operating temperature, the distances from the storage tank bottom to solid salt in foundation and the total migration depths both increase obviously, while the average migrating widths change slightly. At the same operating temperature, the temperature rising rate of the foundation material where Hitec XL and Hitec salt leak is significantly greater than that with Solar Salt, which is closely related to the melting points of molten salts. The migration depth of Hitec is 95.03% greater than that of Solar Salt and 19.11% larger than that of Hitec XL at the operating temperature of 300°C. Compared with Hitec XL, the leakage of Hitec with a smaller viscosity has a larger temperature rising rate and a wider and deeper transporting range during the leakage process. This work could guide the installation locations of the leak detection devices for high temperature storage tank and the environmental treatment of leaking accident.

In this brief, a low-profile triple-fed high-isolation triplex filtering antenna is proposed based on the substrate integrated waveguide (SIW), for the first time. By co-sharing radiators, constructing common feeding resonant cavities and loading additional metal via holes, a closely-spaced-channel triplexer topology is developed with three adjustable frequency passbands. To verify the proposed concept, a prototype operating at 6.68 GHz, 7.52 GHz and 8.0 GHz is designed, simulated and measured. It exhibits high channel-to-channel isolation of over 21.83 dB as well as good passband gains of 7.1 dBi, 4.55 dBi and 5.99 dBi, respectively.

Software-defined networking (SDN) introduces centralized controllers to increase network programmability drastically. Distributed control planes, in which multiple SDN controllers work together to manage a network, have been proposed to satisfy the requirements of large-scale networks, and different kinds of load-balancing approaches have been proposed to balance the workloads among these controllers. Current load-balancing approaches generally use switch migration, which adjusts the mapping between switches and controllers dynamically according to controller workloads. These switch migration-based approaches face challenges under burst traffic as a result of their overhead and longer detection periods. This paper proposes Flow Stealer, a lightweight load-balancing method for distributed SDN controllers. Flow Stealer uses a low-cost flow-stealing method, in which idle controllers share workloads temporarily with overloaded controllers by stealing flow events from them. The flow-stealing method not only can react to changes of network traffic more quickly, but can also reduce the frequency of switch migration. In addition, Flow Stealer incorporates both flow stealing and switch migration to adapt to burst traffic and long-term traffic changes. Experimental results show that Flow Stealer can balance the workloads among controllers more efficiently, especially under burst traffic. 创新点: 软件定义网络(SDN)提出了集中式的控制器,极大地提高了网络可编程性。为了满足大规模网络的需求,现有研究提出了分布式SDN控制层。其中,多个控制器协同工作,共同实现对网络的管理。为了均衡分布式控制层中控制器的负载,多种负载均衡算法被提出。当前的负载均衡算法通常使用交换机迁移的方式进行实现,即根据控制器的负载情况,动态地调整交换机与控制器之间的映射关系。由于开销、检测周期等问题,当网络发生突发流量时,这些基于交换机迁移的方法将面临挑战。本文提出了Flow Stealer,一种轻量级负载均衡方法,均衡控制器间的负载。Flow Stealer使用一种低开销的flow stealing方法,该方法可以使空闲的控制器通过窃取超载控制器中的流事件,临时地分担超载控制器的负载。flow stealing方法不仅可以及时地响应网络流量变化,而且可以降低交换机迁移的频率。另外,Flow Stealer将flow stealing方法与交换机迁移方法相互结合,同时满足突发流量以及长期流量变化的处理需求。实验结果显示,Flow Stealer可以有效地均衡控制器之间的负载,尤其是在突发流量的情况下。

Intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) treatment plans generated by segmental multileaf collimator (SMLC) and helical tomotherapy (HT) techniques for patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma were compared using standardized criteria proposed by Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG) protocol 0225. The goal was to deliver a prescribed dose of 70 Gy to at least 95% of the planning target volume (PTV) encompassing gross tumor, and 59.4 Gy and 50.4 Gy, respectively, to areas at high and low risk for microscopic disease, over 33 treatments while respecting constraints to organs at risk (OAR). HT-IMRT significantly reduced dose to the contralateral parotid gland and improved dose homogeneity to the PTVs. Mean doses to the inner and middle ears were also reduced by 18% and 24%, respectively, on the ipsilateral side, and 24%, and 35%, respectively, on the contralateral side using HT-IMRT compared to SMLC-IMRT. Additionally, HT-IMRT reduced mean doses to brainstem (p = 0.02), larynx (p = 0.03), and oral cavity (p = 0.03). These findings suggest that HT-IMRT may be of improve the therapeutic ratio in the radiotherapeutic treatment of nasopharyngeal carcinoma.

Introduction:Lowering low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) to <1.4 mmol/L is an important strategy for most patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in secondary prevention of cardiovascular diseases. The association between admission LDL-C levels and all-cause mortality during acute period of AMI is not well established. This study aims to examine the relation between admission LDL-C levels and the risk of in-hospital all-cause mortality among patients with AMI.Methods:The Improving Care for Cardiovascular Disease in China-Acute Coronary Syndrome Project is a nationwide registry study. Admission LDL-C level associated with in-hospital all-cause mortality were evaluated on a continuous scale with restricted cubic splines and by categories with multivariate Cox regression models among 94623 inpatients with AMI in 159 tertiary hospitals and 82 secondary hospitals in 30 provinces from November 2014 to December 2019.Results:Among total inpatients, 1852 cases (2.0%) died, 5434 patients (5.7%) have LDL-C level<1.4 mmol/L. The association between LDL-C levels and the risk of all-cause mortality was U shaped, with low and high LDL-C levels associated with an increased risk. Compared with inpatients with LDL-C level of 1.4-1.8 mmol/L, the adjusted hazard ratio was 1.48 (95% confidence interval: 1.18 to 1.87) for patients with LDL-C< 1.4 mmol/L, and 1.50 (95%CI: 1.19 to 1.90) for patients with LDL-C≥ 4.1 mmol/L. Propensity score matched analysis confirmed these associations. Similar results were seen in both gender, in patients with and without diabetes, across age groups and triglycerides groups, across ST-segment elevation AMI and non-ST-segment elevation AMI patients, and after excluding patients who died within 24 hours after admission. However, such association was not observed in patients received lipid-lowering treatment before hospitalization and those treated with percutaneous coronary intervention during hospitalization.Conclusions:Lower LDL-C is associated with increased risk of in hospital all-cause mortality among patients hospitalized for AMI. Lower LDL-C levels may help identify patients at higher risk for in-hospital mortality, who could potentially benefit from intensification of treatment strategies.