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Abstract As our planet is entering into the “global boiling” era, understanding regional climate change becomes imperative. Effective downscaling methods that provide localized insights are crucial for this target. Traditional approaches, including computationally-demanding regional dynamical models or statistical downscaling frameworks, are often susceptible to the influence of downscaling uncertainty. Here, we address these limitations by introducing a diffusion probabilistic downscaling model (DPDM) into the meteorological field. This model can efficiently transform data from 1° to 0.1° resolution. Compared with deterministic downscaling schemes, it not only has more accurate local details, but also can generate a large number of ensemble members based on probability distribution sampling to evaluate the uncertainty of downscaling. Additionally, we apply the model to generate a 180-year dataset of monthly surface variables in East Asia, offering a more detailed perspective for understanding local scale climate change over the past centuries.

Summary: In recent years, two-dimensional (2D) materials have been extensively studied and applied in the field of catalysis on account of their high specific surface areas, high exposure of metal active sites, and readily tunable structures. This article introduces various 2D materials (including materials composed of a few atomic layers) and the related synthesis methods and discusses their catalytic performances for hydrogen fuel cells, in particular, for oxygen reduction reaction and hydrogen oxidation reaction. At the end of this review, the advantages and current challenges of 2D materials are summarized, and the prospects of 2D electrocatalytic materials are proposed.

ObjectiveInflammation is a central driver of atherogenesis and eventual plaque rupture. This study aimed to evaluate the association between residual inflammatory risk (RIR) and vulnerable plaques in the carotid artery in patients with ischemic stroke.MethodsPatients with acute ischemic stroke were enrolled from January 2021 to July 2022. They were divided into four groups: RIR only (LDL-C 1.1, which indicated a positive remodeling.ResultsOut of the 468 enrolled patients, 157 (33.5%) were detected to have vulnerable plaques. The proportion of patients with neither risk, RIR, RCR, and RCIR were 32.9%, 28.6%, 18.8%, and 19.7%, respectively. Patients with vulnerable plaques exhibited a higher prevalence of hyperlipidemia (P = 0.026), higher proportion of RIR (P = 0.015), a higher ratio of stroke subtypes of large artery atherosclerosis (P = 0.012), and high leukocyte counts (P < 0.001). The logistic regression analysis detected that RIR was associated with vulnerable plaques after adjusted for major confounding factors (OR 1.98, 95% CI 1.13–3.45, P = 0.016), especially in the large artery atherosclerosis subtype (OR 2.71, 95% CI 1.08–6.77, P = 0.034).ConclusionsIn patients with ischemic stroke, RIR is associated with the vulnerability of carotid plaques, especially for those with the large artery atherosclerosis subtype. Therefore, further studies investigating the interventions to modulate inflammation in these patients may be warranted.

Abstract Peculiar hierarchical microstructures in creatures inspire modern material design with distinct functionalities. Creatures can effortlessly construct sophisticated yet long‐range ordered microstructure across bio‐membrane through ion secretion and precipitation. However, microstructure biomimicry in current technology generally requires elaborate, point‐by‐point fabrication. Herein, a spontaneous yet controllable strategy is developed to achieve surface microstructure engineering through a natural surface phenomenon similar to ion secretion‐precipitation, that is, coupled dissolution‐precipitation. A series of hierarchical microstructures on mineral surfaces in fluids with tunable morphology, orientation, dimension, and spatial distribution are achieved by simply controlling initial dissolution and fluid chemistry. In seawater, long‐range ordered film of vertically aligned brucite flakes forms through interfacial dissolution, nucleation, and confinement‐induced orientation of flakes with vertically grown {110} plane, on the edge of which, fusiform aragonite epitaxially precipitates. With negligible initial surface dissolution, prismatic aragonite epitaxially grows on a calcite polyhedron‐packed surface. By tuning fluid chemistry, closely packed calcite polyhedron and loosely packed calcite micro‐pillars are engineered through rapid and retarded precipitation, respectively. Surprisingly, the spontaneously grown microstructures resemble those deliberately created by human or found in nature, and tremendously modulate surface functionality. These findings open new possibilities for facile and customizable engineering of microstructural surfaces, hierarchical heterostructures, and biomimetic materials.

Due to recent innovations in gene editing technology, great progress has been made in livestock breeding, with researchers rearing gene-edited pigs, cattle, sheep, and other livestock. Gene-editing technology involves knocking in, knocking out, deleting, inhibiting, activating, or replacing specific bases of DNA or RNA sequences at the genome level for accurate modification, and such processes can edit genes at a fixed point without needing DNA templates. In recent years, although clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/Cas9 system-mediated gene-editing technology has been widely used in research into the genetic breeding of animals, the system’s efficiency at inserting foreign genes is not high enough, and there are certain off-target effects; thus, it is not appropriate for use in the genome editing of large livestock such as cashmere goats. In this study, the development status, associated challenges, application prospects, and future prospects of CRISPR/Cas9-mediated precision gene-editing technology for use in livestock breeding were reviewed to provide a theoretical reference for livestock gene function analysis, genetic improvement, and livestock breeding that account for characteristics of local economies.