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Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are widely used in portable energy storage. The capacity of commercial graphite is difficult to improve due to the stoichiometry limit of LiC6 of graphite, thus new anodes need to be developed to meet the demand of high-energy–density LIB. The growing interest in graphitized carbon nitride (g-C3N4) stems from its structural resemblance to graphite and its capacity to offer abundant adsorption and intercalation sites. However, g-C3N4, as a semiconductor, has a low lithium transfer rate due to its poor conductivity and high diffusion resistance. Improving the electron transport rate of g-C3N4 and reducing the adsorption energy barrier of Li+ in g-C3N4 are the keys to improving the electrochemical performances of g-C3N4. In this study, lignin and melamine were homogeneously mixed using the spray drying method, followed by the preparation of covalently bonded C3N4/LC material through a one-step carbonization process. The uniform dispersion of g-C3N4 in amorphous carbon can improve the conductivity and reduce the diffusion energy barrier of Li+. As a result, the C3N4/LC-x anode has better electrochemical behavior, including higher reversible capacity, better rate performance, and cycle stability. Highlights: • The covalently bonded C3N4/LC-x material was prepared through a one-step carbonization method. • The uniform dispersion of g-C3N4 in amorphous carbon could improve the electronic conductivity and reduce the diffusion energy barrier of Li+ ions. • C3N4/LC-2 showed high reversible capacity, ideal rate performance, and cycle life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: High-grade serous ovarian carcinoma (HGSOC) is the most aggressive and prevalent subtype of ovarian cancer and accounts for a significant portion of ovarian cancer-related deaths worldwide. Despite advancements in cancer treatment, the overall survival rate for HGSOC patients remains low, thus highlighting the urgent need for a deeper understanding of the molecular mechanisms driving tumorigenesis and for identifying potential therapeutic targets. Whole-exome sequencing (WES) has emerged as a powerful tool for identifying somatic mutations and alterations across the entire exome, thus providing valuable insights into the genetic drivers and molecular pathways underlying cancer development and progression. Methods: Via the analysis of whole-exome sequencing results of tumor samples from 90 ovarian cancer patients, we compared the mutational landscape of ovarian cancer patients with that of TCGA patients to identify similarities and differences. The sequencing data were subjected to bioinformatics analysis to explore tumor driver genes and their functional roles. Furthermore, we conducted basic medical experiments to validate the results obtained from the bioinformatics analysis. Results: Whole-exome sequencing revealed the mutational profile of HGSOC, including BRCA1, BRCA2 and TP53 mutations. AP3S1 emerged as the most weighted tumor driver gene. Further analysis of AP3S1 mutations and expression demonstrated their associations with patient survival and the tumor immune response. AP3S1 knockdown experiments in ovarian cancer cells demonstrated its regulatory role in tumor cell migration and invasion through the TGF-β/SMAD pathway. Conclusion: This comprehensive analysis of somatic mutations in HGSOC provides insight into potential therapeutic targets and molecular pathways for targeted interventions. AP3S1 was identified as being a key player in tumor immunity and prognosis, thus providing new perspectives for personalized treatment strategies. The findings of this study contribute to the understanding of HGSOC pathogenesis and provide a foundation for improved outcomes in patients with this aggressive disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. In this study, we utilized gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogue-modified indocyanine green (GnRHa-ICG) to improve the accuracy of intraoperative recognition and resection of endometriotic lesions. Methods. Gonadotropin-releasing hormone receptor (GnRHR) expression was detected in endometriosis tissues and cell lines via immunohistochemistry and western blotting. The in vitro binding capacities of GnRHa, GnRHa-ICG, and ICG were determined using fluorescence microscopy and flow cytometry. In vivo imaging was performed in mouse models of endometriosis using a near-infrared fluorescence (NIRF) imaging system and fluorescence navigation system. The ex vivo binding capacity was determined using confocal fluorescence microscopy. Results. GnRHa-ICG exhibited a significantly stronger binding capacity to endometriotic cells and tissues than ICG. In mice with endometriosis, GnRHa-ICG specifically imaged endometriotic tissues (EMTs) after intraperitoneal administration, whereas ICG exhibited signals in the intestine. GnRHa-ICG showed the highest fluorescence signals in the EMTs at 2 h and a good signal-to-noise ratio at 48 h postadministration. Compared with traditional surgery under white light, targeted NIRF imaging-guided surgery completely resected endometriotic lesions with a sensitivity of 97.3% and specificity of 77.8%. No obvious toxicity was observed in routine blood tests, serum biochemicals, or histopathology in mice. Conclusions. GnRHa-ICG specifically recognized and localized endometriotic lesions and guided complete resection of lesions with high accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to study the characteristics of fire smoke spread and temperature distribution of a large indoor pedestrian street under different heat release rates and smoke exhaust modes, this paper focuses on the analysis of fire smoke spread, visibility, smoke temperature distribution and variation curves in an atrium. This paper uses a numerical simulation method to conduct research. PyroSim fire simulation software is used to calculate this project, which is based on a full-scale experimental design scheme. The numerical simulation results show that under the conditions of higher heat release rate, the smoke spread rate is greater than that under the conditions of lower heat release rate. Furthermore, the average temperature of smoke in the atrium is also greater, up to about 400 °C. The conditions of a higher heat release rate also show the characteristics of faster generation, faster spread and a larger volume of smoke. When the smoke exhaust system is turned on, the thickness of the smoke layer and the smoke temperature decrease. There then comes a situation where the stabile section of the fire ends in advance. The simulation results of vertical temperature distribution in an atrium can fit the modified McCaffrey plume model in any case. Under all cases, the smoke temperature reaches the maximum directly above the fire source. The horizontal dimensionless smoke temperature rises under the atrium roof, and decreases exponentially with the dimensionless distance from the fire source. The greater the heat release rate of fire source is, the smaller the attenuation coefficient is, with a more than 50% change. When the smoke exhaust system is turned on, the smoke flow accelerates and the smoke is cooled rapidly. Thus, the attenuation coefficient increases. Additionally, the effect of mechanical smoke exhaust is better than natural smoke exhaust, because mechanical smoke exhaust makes air flow and heat exchange more intense. The variation amplitudes of the attenuation coefficient under natural smoke exhaust and mechanical smoke exhaust are 13% and 22%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electrochemical water splitting is considered to be an important method for efficient hydrogen production to alleviate energy shortage and environmental pollution, but its development is currently limited by the slow oxygen evolution reaction (OER). To solve the sluggish reaction kinetics of OER, the focus is on the exploration of low-cost and efficient electrocatalysts, which is quite significant for the development of electrochemical water splitting. Herein, a NiFe layered double hydroxides (LDH) electrocatalyst (denoted as FNH) is achieved by a simple one-step hydrothermal method. The experimental results show that due to the synergistic interaction of introduced Fe species, the FNH possesses a special three-dimensional (3D) vertical nanosheet array structure, which results in efficient ion access. More importantly, the strong electronic interaction between Fe and Ni sites results in the optimized electronic structure of the Ni sites, which not only generates abundant Ni3+ sites as optimized active sites for OER, but also decrease the charge transfer resistance. Thus, the FNH catalyst exhibits an extraordinary overpotential of 386.8 mV to deliver 100 mA cm−2, showing better activity than that of RuO2, and satisfactory cycling stability after continuous operation for 28 h. Our work provides an easy-to-implement method to obtain high-efficiency OER electrocatalysts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, a series of numerical simulations were carried out to investigate the effect of fire shutter descending height on the smoke extraction efficiency in a large space atrium. Based on the full-scale fire experiments, this paper carried out more numerical simulations to explore factors affecting the smoke extraction efficiency in the atrium. The smoke flow characteristics, temperature distribution law and smoke extraction efficiency of natural and mechanical smoke exhaust systems were discussed under different heat release rates and fire shutter descending heights. The results show that the smoke spread rate and the average temperature of the smoke are higher with a greater heat release rate. After the mechanical smoke exhaust system is activated, the smoke layer thickness and smoke temperature decrease, and the stable period of heat release rate is shorter. In the condition of natural smoke exhaust, the smoke extraction efficiency increases exponentially with the increase of heat release rate and the descending height of the fire shutter, and the maximum smoke extraction efficiency is 48.8%. In the condition of mechanical smoke exhaust, the smoke extraction efficiency increases with the increase of mechanical exhaust velocity. When the velocity increases to the critical value (8 m/s), the smoke extraction efficiency is essentially stable. The smoke extraction efficiency is increased first with the increase of fire shutter descending height and then has a downward trend when the descending height drops to half, and the maximum smoke extraction efficiency is 70.3% in the condition of mechanical smoke exhaust. Empirical correlations between the smoke extraction efficiency and the dimensionless fire shutter descending height, the dimensionless heat release rate and the dimensionless smoke exhaust velocity have been established. The results of this study can provide a reference for the design of smoke prevention and exhaust systems in the atrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deterioration of a composite insulator's mandrel will cause a serious power-grid accident, so it is necessary to find the defect as soon as possible. Infrared imaging is an effective means to detect mandrel-deterioration defects, but sheath-aging defects will cause trouble to screen mandrel deterioration. Therefore, it is urgent to distinguish the two defects. In this paper, two composite insulators that are out of service with different heating characteristics are tested and analyzed, and the temperature-rise characteristics are analyzed by building a simulation model. The results show that the temperature rise of composite insulators with oxidative decomposition of epoxy resin is large, and the range usually extends from the hardware of the high-voltage side to several umbrella skirts. The temperature rise caused by the composite insulator with the fiber completely wrapped by epoxy resin is small, which mainly occurs from the hardware to the first umbrella skirt. The simulation model constructed in this paper is consistent with the experimental results, which verifies the accuracy of the model. The model can distinguish the mandrel-deterioration defect and sheath-aging defect, and has guiding significance and important reference value for the detection rate of the mandrel-deterioration composite insulator and ensuring the safe and stable operation of the power grid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sonodynamic therapy (SDT) typically suffers from compromised anticancer efficacy owing to the low reactive oxygen species (ROS) yield and complicated tumor microenvironment (TME) which can consume ROS and support the occurrence and development of tumors. Herein, ultrathin‐FeOOH‐coated MnO2 nanospheres (denoted as MO@FHO) as sonosensitizers which can not only facilitate ultrasound (US)‐triggered ROS but also tune the TME by hypoxia alleviation, H2O2 consumption as well as glutathione (GSH) depletion are designed. The FeOOH coating will boost the production yield of singlet oxygen (1O2) and hydroxyl radicals (•OH) by inhibiting the recombination of US‐initiated electron–hole pairs and Fenton‐like reaction, respectively. Additionally, the catalase‐like and GSH peroxidase‐like activities of MO@FHO nanospheres enable them to break the TME equilibrium via hypoxia alleviation and GSH depletion. The combination of high ROS yield and fundamental destruction of TME equilibrium results in satisfactory antitumor outcomes, as demonstrated by the high tumor suppression efficacy of MO@FHO on MDA‐MB‐231‐tumor‐bearing mice. No obvious toxicity is detected to normal tissues at therapeutic doses in vivo. The capability to modulate the ROS production and TME simultaneously can afford new probability for the development of advanced sonosensitizers for synergistic comprehensive cancer therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lung cancer accounts for the greatest number of cancer-related mortality, while the accurate evaluation of pulmonary nodules in computed tomography (CT) images can significantly increase the 5-year relative survival rate. Despite deep learning methods that have recently been introduced to the identification of malignant nodules, a substantial challenge remains due to the limited datasets. In this study, we propose a cascaded-recalibrated multiple instance learning (MIL) model based on multiattribute features transfer for pathologic-level lung cancer prediction in CT images. This cascaded-recalibrated MIL deep model incorporates a cascaded recalibration mechanism at the nodule level and attribute level, which fuses the informative attribute features into nodule embeddings and then the key nodule features can be converged into the patient-level embedding to improve the performance of lung cancer prediction. We evaluated the proposed cascaded-recalibrated MIL model on the public Lung Image Database Consortium and Image Database Resource Initiative (LIDC-IDRI) benchmark dataset and compared it to the latest approaches. The experimental results showed a significant performance boost by the cascaded-recalibrated MIL model over the higher-order transfer learning, instance-space MIL, and embedding-space MIL models and the radiologists. In addition, the recalibration coefficients of the nodule and attribute feature for the final decision were also analyzed to reveal the underlying relationship between the confirmed diagnosis and its highly-correlated attributes. The cascaded recalibration mechanism enables the MIL model to pay more attention to those important nodules and attributes while suppressing less-useful feature embeddings, and the cascaded-recalibrated MIL model provides substantial improvements for the pathologic-level lung cancer prediction by using the CT images. The identification of the important nodules and attributes also provides better interpretability for model decision-making, which is very important for medical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selective hydrolysis of crystalline cellulose to cello-oligosaccharides in molten salt hydrates (MSHs) is a promising method for valorization of lignocellulose. However, the by-products derived from cellulose hydrolysis can facilitate cello-oligosaccharide degradation and decrease its selectivity. To address this issue, lignin-based hyper cross-linked polymers (LHCPs) were prepared to in situ adsorb by-products during hydrolysis and thus prevent cello-oligosaccharides from degradation. The synthesized LHCP‐33%, with a high lignin content of 33%, showed a remarkable surface area of 708.7 m2 g−1 and good hydrophilicity, exhibiting a promising adsorption capacity of 340 mg g−1 towards 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (5-HMF), which is supposed to be the major cellulose-derived by-product. We showed that 5-HMF adsorption was driven by the formation of CH-π bonds between 5-HMF and aromatic rings on LHCP. When LHCP‐33% was employed in cellulose hydrolysis, the yield of cello-oligosaccharide can be efficiently enhanced from 39.5% to 78.2%. This work offered a new application of lignin in enhanced cello-oligosaccharide production from cellulose. [Display omitted] • 78.2 % yield of cello-oligosaccharide can be selectively produced from crystalline cellulose saccharification via in situ adsorption of by-products on lignin-based hyper cross-linked polymer (LHCP). • The synthesized LHCP shows a high surface area and good hydrophilcity which is beneficial for by-products adsorption. • The adsorption of hydrolysis-derived 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (5-HMF) on LHCP is driven by the formation of CH-π bonds rather than hydrogen bonds. • This approach provides a new alternative in utilization of lignin for high-valued cello-oligosaccharide production from cellulose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]