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Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) molecule, a neuromodulator in the central nervous system and the immune system, plays a vital role in the neural signal transmission, immune response and cell apoptosis. Real-time detecting H2O2 with high accuracy and sensitivity way is critically significant for the assessments of biological functions and pathogenic mechanisms towards diseases diagnostics. The in-situ electrochemical analysis has been widely used in the real-time sensing and detection of H2O2 for miniaturization feasibility and superior temporal spatial resolution. In this review paper, we summarized the recent advances in in vivo electrochemical analysis on H2O2, specifically including the electrochemical redox process of H2O2 on the electrode surface and variety of catalysts used for the electrochemical analysis with effectively improved selectivity and sensitivity. In particular, the novel technique of the photoelectrochemical (PEC) method for H2O2 detection was thoroughly discussed. The developments on the high selectivity analysis of H2O2 at the cellular and in vivo levels was summarized in details. Lastly, the challenges and prospects of the electrochemical sensors for H2O2 was proposed. This review is greatly helpful for the advancement of H2O2 electrochemical sensing towards biomedical applications.

Surplus biomass is one of the most attractive feedstock as it is renewable and sustainable, which can be used for the production of biofuels/chemicals. However, biomass is contents higher oxygen, which is hindered in application as a fuel. For improving the bio-oil quality, a process parameter such as catalyst needs to be endured for production of fuel-grade bio-oil. Catalytic fast pyrolysis of rice straw (RS) and wheat straw (WS) were performed using basic (MgO and CaO) and acidic (ZSM-5 and Y-zeolite) catalyst at different reaction temperature. It was found the different compositions of feeds reacted differently with presence of different catalysts. Pyrolysis products were grouped as carbonyls, phenolics heterocyclic and aromatic hydrocarbons. Carbonyls were observed as major compounds under the non-catalytic condition. Higher amount of carbonyls (62.91%) was obtained at 400 °C in case RS, while in case of WS lower amount was found (57.72%) without use of catalysts. However, catalysts such as basic metal oxide are encouraged to formation of phenolics and ketones compound, while acidic catalysts were encouraged to formation of aromatic hydrocarbons. Moreover, higher amount of aromatic hydrocarbon (52.9%) was found with RS using Y-zeolite, whereas higher amount of phenolics (48.5%) was obtained with WS using CaO catalysts.

Catalytic depolymerization of lignin has been investigated in the presence of egg shell derived CaO/TiO2 catalysts. Reaction was carried out for different reaction temperatures (250, 280 and 310 °C) at different reaction holding time at presence of N2 and H2 gas under ethanol, methanol and water solvent. Highest bio-oil yield was found with CaO/TiO2-800 catalyst in ethanol solvent under N2 (74.8 wt%), and H2 (82.8 wt%) environment compared to the water solvent. Under hydrogen environment very less amount of unreacted residue was produced. Bio-oil analysis showed that in under nitrogen environment catalytic depolymerization of lignin produced alkyl phenolic monomer compounds 68.0% with methoxy phenolic compounds 24.0%. Interestingly hydrogen promoted the deoxygenating and hydrogenation reaction which produced higher cyclohexane compounds 38.2% and aromatic hydrocarbon 19%. This is suggesting that the effectively breaking of β-O-4 bond by the catalysts which has an excellence character for the industrial application. Elemental analysis shows that hydrogen enhanced the bio-oil quality compared to the nitrogen environment. This work introduces new perspectives for the efficient production of functional compounds from lignin assisted by egg shell derived green catalysts.

In this work, we propose a modulation doping strategy for simultaneous achievement of low lattice thermal conductivity and high Seebeck coefficient in the Cu2GeSe3 compound. The Ag and In dual-doping can optimize the hole carrier concentration to balance electrical conductivity and Seebeck coefficient, achieving a high power factor of ∼6.4 μW cm−1 K−2 for the Cu2GeSe3 compound. The Ag point defect makes a great contribution to blocking the propagation of phonons besides the phonon-phonon Umklapp process, yielding a minimum lattice thermal conductivity of ∼0.38 W m–1 K–1. Remarkably, a maximum ZT value of ∼0.97 at 723 K is achieved for Cu1.8Ag0.2Ge0.95In0.05Se3 compound, which is the highest value for the Cu2GeSe3-based systems in the temperature range of 323–723 K.

Cu2GeSe3 is an eco-friendly material, but pristine Cu2GeSe3 has poor thermoelectric properties. Here, the effects of magnetic Ni ion with unpaired 3d electrons on the electrical and thermal transport properties of Cu2GeSe3 are reported. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations indicate that the unpaired Ni 3d states cause the hybridization of Ni 3d orbitals with Se 4p orbitals near the Fermi level, giving rise to an increase in density of states (DOS). Combined with the significantly increased carrier concentration, a power factor (S2σ) value of ∼8.0 μWcm−1 K−2 at 723 K is achieved in Cu2Ge0.8Ni0.2Se3 sample, seeming to be the highest compared with the other Cu2GeSe3 systems. Meanwhile, the substitution of Ni for Ge causes the obvious local distortions in Cu2GeSe3 lattice, which yields the large strain fluctuations to suppress the lattice thermal conductivity. Consequently, a peak ZT value of ∼0.38 at 723 K is obtained in Cu2Ge0.9Ni0.1Se3 sample.

Polygoni Multiflori Radix Praeparata (Zhiheshouwu) has been a Wudang Taoist medicine for tonifying the liver and kidney, resolving turbidity and reducing lipid. Emodin is one of the active anthraquinones in Zhiheshouwu. Our previous studies showed that emodin (EM) and the other anthraquinones in Zhiheshouwu extract (HSWE) exerted similar inhibitory effects on liver cancer cells in vitro. However, it is still unknown if the other anthraquinones enhance pharmacokinetics (PK) of EM in HSWE in vivo.In this study, we compared the PK characteristics of EM alone with that in Zhiheshouwu aiming to explore which anthraquinones in HSWE contribute to the changed PK of EM in rats.Quality control of HSWE was determined using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The ratios of emodin to other anthraquinones, physcion (PH), chrysophanol (CH), rhein (RH), aloe-emodin (AE), emodin-8-O-β-D-glycoside (EMG), physcion-1-O-β-D-glycoside (PHG) and chrysophanol-8-O-β-D-glycoside (CHG) in HSWE were determined and analyzed using UPLC combined with tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC/MS). The PK parameters and intestinal tissue concentration of EM alone, EM in HSWE, or with other anthraquinones in SD rats were analyzed using UPLC/MS.The quality of the Zhiheshouwu samples met the quality standard of the Chinese Pharmacopoeia (Version 2020). The PK results showed that compared with EM alone, CIn conclusion, compared with treatment of EM alone, the AUC

In this paper, we propose a triple intersecting U-Nets (TIU-Nets) for brain glioma segmentation. First, the proposed TIU-Nets is composed of binary-class segmentation U-Net (BU-Net) and multi-class segmentation U-Net (MU-Net), in which MU-Net reuses multi-resolution features from BU-Net. Second, we introduce a segmentation soft-mask predicted by BU-Net, that is, candidate glioma region is generated by removing most of non-glioma backgrounds, which guides multi-category segmentation of MU-Net in a weighted manner. Third, an edge branch in MU-Net is leveraged to enhance boundary information of glioma substructure, which facilitates to locate glioma true boundaries and improve segmentation accuracy. Finally, we propose a sigmoid-evolution based polarized cross-entropy loss (S-CE) to resolve class unbalance problem, and apply S-CE loss to soft-mask prediction loss in BU-Net, multi-class segmentation loss in MU-Net and edge prediction loss in edge branch. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed 2D/3D TIU-Nets achieves a higher segmentation accuracy than corresponding 2D/3D state-of-the-art segmentation methods including FCN, U-Net, SegNet, CRDN, IVD-Net, FCDenseNet, DeepMedic, DMFNet, etc, evaluating on publicly available brain tumor segmentation challenge 2015 (BRATS2015) datasets. To show the universality of the proposed method, we also give a comparison of segmentation performance on BrainWeb dataset.

Objective: To characterize the relationship between diabetic retinopathy (DR) and diabetic nephropathy (DN) in Chinese patients and to determine whether the severity of DR predicts end-stage renal disease (ESRD). Methods: Bilateral fundic photographs of 91 Chinese type 2 diabetic patients with biopsy-confirmed DN, not in ESRD stage, were obtained at the time of renal biopsy in this longitudinal study. The baseline severity of DR was determined using the Lesion-aware Deep Learning System (RetinalNET) in an open framework for deep learning and was graded using the Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study severity scale. Cox proportional hazard models were used to estimate the hazard ratio (HR) for the effect of the severity of diabetic retinopathy on ESRD. Results: During a median follow-up of 15 months, 25 patients progressed to ESRD. The severity of retinopathy at the time of biopsy was a prognostic factor for progression to ESRD (HR 2.18, 95% confidence interval 1.05 to 4.53, P = .04). At baseline, more severe retinopathy was associated with poor renal function, and more severe glomerular lesions. However, 30% of patients with mild retinopathy and severe glomerular lesions had higher low-density lipo-protein-cholesterol and more severe proteinuria than those with mild glomerular lesions. Additionally, 3% of patients with severe retinopathy and mild glomerular changes were more likely to have had diabetes a long time than those with severe glomerular lesions. Conclusion: Although the severity of DR predicted diabetic ESRD in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and DN, the severities of DR and DN were not always consistent, especially in patients with mild retinopathy or microalbuminuria. Abbreviations: CI = confidence interval; DM = diabetic mellitus; DN = diabetic nephropathy; DR = diabetic retinopathy; eGFR = estimated glomerular filtration rate; ESRD = end-stage renal disease; HbA1c = hemoglobin A1c; HR = hazard ratio; NPDR = nonproliferative diabetic retinopathy; PDR = proliferative diabetic retinopathy; SBP = systolic blood pressure; T2DM = type 2 diabetes mellitus; VEGF = vascular endothelial growth factor.

Objective: Our study sought to investigate the clinicopathologic features and renal prognosis of patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and diabetic nephropathy (DN) in different age groups. Methods: A total of 315 patients with T2DM and biopsy-proven DN were enrolled and divided into three groups by age: the Youth group (≤44 years old), the Middle-aged group (45 to 59 years old), and the Elderly group (≥60 years old). Results: The Youth group, Middle-aged group, and Elderly group accounted for 19.05% (60/315), 59.37% (187/315), and 21.59% (68/315) of the patients in our study, respectively. The patients in the Youth group had a higher estimated glomerular filtration rate (calculated using the Chronic Kidney Disease–Epidemiology collaboration formula) (P .05). Conclusion: This study indicated that there were different clinicopathologic features among Chinese DN patients in different age groups. Although the Youth group had a relatively lower rapid kidney disease progression rate, there were no significant differences in renal survival rate among the three groups, which calls more attention to early supervision and prevention for younger DN patients. Abbreviations: CKD = chronic kidney disease; DN = diabetic nephropathy; DR = diabetic retinopathy; eGFR = estimated glomerular filtration rate; ESRD = end-stage renal disease; GY IFTA = interstitial fibrosis and tubular atrophy; T2DM = type 2 diabetes mellitus

Recently, lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) have been considered as an extremely important energy source for abundant smart electronic devices. Even so, lower cycle life of LIBs and capacitance performance remains rough challenges due to dramatic structure degradation. Rational structure design is highly desirable to fully improve the electrochemical performance of LIBs. Herein, a hybrid structure of carbon network adorned with nickel particles (Ni/CN) was developed. The ultra-thin interconnected CNs not only provide robust support for ultra-tiny Ni nanoparticles, but also enhance the electrical conductivity network of hybrid structure. The carbon around the Ni nanoparticles is graphitized as soft carbon with large interlayer spacing and good electrical conductivity, which benefits Li+ ion insertion/extraction. Furthermore, large specific surface area, open internal space are favorable for shorten Li+ ion diffusion channel and rapid charge transfer are favorable for accelerating Li+ ion diffusion and accommodating volume strain during the repeated lithiation/delithiation process. Benefiting from these structural and compositional advantages, the Ni/CN anode displays an ultra-stable cyclic lifespan with a specific capacity of 544.7 mAh g−1 (at 1 A g−1) even after 2000 cycles, excellent capacity retention of 121.1%. Therefore, high-energy storage and long lifespan of Ni/CN materials display a bright prospect.

The mechanical and anisotropic properties of BiM2VO6 (M = Mg, Ca and Cu) ceramics were explored using the first-principles calculations. The 3D (three dimensional) surfaces and 2D (two dimensional) projections of Young's modulus confirm that BiM2VO6 ceramics exhibit the strong anisotropy along the different directions. The minimum thermal conductivity on the different crystal planes strongly depends on the directions for BiM2VO6 ceramics. Three BiM2VO6 ceramics are anisotropic in sound velocities along the different directions. We hope that the present results will be useful for the further development and applications of BiM2VO6 ceramics.

Boneless pork shoulder were injected with marinate and treated with one of the three following curing treatments: (1) injection without tumbling, (2) vacuum tumbling, or (3) pressure-transform tumbling. The effect of pressure-transform tumbling treatment on porcine tissue microstructure, protein denaturation, water-holding capacity and textural properties of restructured pork chops was investigated. Results showed that pressure-transform tumbling with gas composition of CO2: N2 = 1 : 1 resulted in favorable yield of 118.22% of restructured pork chops. Tenderness was improved by 39% and 25% compared to the control group that was injected but not tumbled, and the vacuum tumbled group, respectively. Myofibers remained well-organized an the diameter was reduced by pressure-transform tumbling. FT-IR results showed that pressure-transform tumbling can modify protein conformation by increasing the amount of ɑ-helical and ẞ -sheet structures, but did not alter the secondary structure of proteins. The method has potential to benefit both consumers and manufacturers, by including reduction in processing time, improvement in product quality, and potential cost savings.

In this paper, color-depth conditional generative adversarial networks (CDcGAN) are proposed to resolve the problems of simultaneous color image super-resolution and depth image super-resolution in 3D videos. Firstly, a generative network is presented to leverage the mutual information of the low-resolution color image and low-resolution depth image so that they can enhance each other considering their geometric structural similarity in the same scene. Secondly, three auxiliary losses of data loss, total variation loss, and 8-connected gradient difference loss are introduced to train this generative network to ensure that the generated images are close to the real ones in addition to the adversarial loss. Finally, we study the CDcGAN and its variants. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can produce the high-quality color image and depth image from a pair of low-quality images, and it is superior to several other leading methods. Additionally, it has also been used to resolve the problems of concurrent image smoothing and edge detection, as well as the problem of HR-color-image-guided depth super-resolution to show the effectiveness and universality of the proposed method.

In this paper, a local activity measurement of the clipped and normalized variance or standard deviation is proposed to drive anisotropic diffusion and relative total variation (RTV) to work better for structural preservation. Firstly, two novel edge-stop functions are introduced for our local activity-driven anisotropic diffusion (LAD-AD) to efficiently remove severe artifacts and preserve the fine geometry structures in HEVC-compressed depth images. Secondly, we propose a simple yet effective local activity-driven RTV (LAD-RTV) with the way of the product between gradient and the local activity measurement for image smoothing and scale representation. Meanwhile, both color-sharing information and each-channel discriminative information are considered, which are significant to color image edge-preserving but not included in the RTV model. Besides, LAD-RTV leverages the form of the division of gradient and the local activity measurement to resolve the problem of general image de-noising by regarding the noises as the duplicate texture elements. Experimental results have validated that the proposed LAD-AD can greatly improve the precision of the HEVC-compressed depth image and the quality of its synthesized image. Additionally, large numbers of results have shown our LAD-RTV is superior to several existing methods.

First principles method were used to explore the structural stability, mechanical properties, anisotropic properties and thermodynamic properties of RETi2Al20 (RE = La, Ce, Gd and Ho) intermetallics. The calculated formation enthalpy and phonon frequencies indicate that RETi2Al20 intermetallics are satisfied with the structural stability. The elastic constants Cijs and elastic moduli (B, G, E) confirm that RETi2Al20 intermetallics possess the better elastic properties than pure Al. The values of B/G demonstrate that RETi2Al20 intermetallics are all brittle materials. The anisotropy in elastic constants, Young's modulus and acoustic velocities indicate that RETi2Al20 intermetallics are anisotropic and the degree of anisotropy of four compounds are larger than that of pure Al. Importantly, the calculated thermal quantities demonstrate that these RETi2Al20 intermetallics possess the better thermo-physical properties at high temperature.

Food-grade titanium dioxide (E171) has been reported to induce changes in some intestinal metabolites related to development of atherosclerosis (AS). However, little is known about the effects of chronic dietary intake of E171 on AS development, particularly in AS-prone populations with high-choline western diet (HCD). Herein, we disclosed that E171 obviously exacerbated HCD-induced AS through increasing production of trimethylamine (TMA) and pro-atherogenic trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO) via remodeling gut microbiota structure in APOE

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as one of powerful materials for in vivo electrochemistry sensing. However, the construction of CNTs as the bio-interface on the electrode surface is still limited because of the toxicity. On the other hand, the adsorption of proteins also renders a great challenge against the stability and sensitivity of implanted electrode. In this work, we validated the protein pre-treated strategy as an effective pre-correction way for the in vivo monitoring of neurochemical small molecule using the gelatin-MWCNTs functionalized carbon fiber microelectrodes (gelatin-MWCNTs/CFME). The gelatin-MWCNTs/CFME presented excellent stability and selectivity with well-maintained sensitivity, which was almost the same as that of the pre-correction. In addition, the well-maintained sensitivity enabled the gelatin-MWCNTs/CFME to detect the ascorbate in human blood sample and be interference-free from proteins. More remarkable, the gelatin-MWCNTs presented excellent biocompatibility. The superior properties along with an improvement in the biocompatibility of CNTs has made the gelatin-MWCNTs a promising candidate to be used as in in vivo electrochemical sensing.

Aqueous zinc ion batteries (ZIBs) have attracted extensive attention because of its high cost-performance and high safety. This study reports a structural engineering method that embeds Mn ions as pillars into the VO2 layered structure, and improves the morphology through polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) to increase the specific surface area, thereby obtaining MnVO2-PVP. Increasing the number of electrochemically active sites allows it to have faster ion diffusion kinetics and better long-term cycle stability. The synthesized MnVO2-PVP with nanoprism and nanosheet composite structure shows a remarkable capacity of 470.2 mAh g-1 at 0.5 A g-1, and also has excellent cycle stability at 5000 times at 10 A g-1. The capacity after cycling is 176.5 mAh g-1, with high energy density (179 W h kg-1) and power density (7000 W kg-1). The synthesis method and marvelous performance of MnVO2-PVP can lay a foundation for the improvement of the synthesis method of ZIBs cathode materials in the future.

The importance of shore leave and Port-based welfare service and facilities (PBWS) for seafarers have been widely acknowledged by the maritime industry and appropriate requirements have been included in Part Four of Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 (MLC 2006). According to the Convention, as a port State, each Member shall promote the development of welfare facilities in designated ports and provide seafarers visiting its ports with access to adequate welfare facilities and services. China is the largest port State and seafarer-supplying State. China is also a Member State of MLC 2006. Providing visiting seafarers with decent welfare services is of great significance for visiting seafarers from all over the world, including those from China. This research report presents the key findings of our research project “Seafarers Welfare in Chinese Ports (SWiC Project)” between April 2017 and March 2018, with follow-up interviews conducted by social media and the Internet update to 1 January 2020. This report consists of four parts. Part I focuses on the background of the study, the objectives of the research and the research methods employed for the primary data collection. Part II reports key findings from the institutional stakeholders which include the Chinese government, the trade unions and PBWS under the trade unions’ auspice. Part III provides a space for seafarers’ voices to be heard – seafarers’ voices concerning their needs for PBWS and their experiences in Chinese ports. Part IV presents the conclusion for the report and its recommendations.

In the past decades, energy storage devices have drawn widespread attention in diverse fields including hybrid electric vehicles and smart portable electronics. By taking advantage of two different electrode materials, asymmetric supercapacitors (ASCs) can extend their operating voltage window and display more excellent energy-storage capacity than those of symmetric supercapacitors. Recent developments demonstrated that transition metal sulfides (TMSs) have emerged as a promising class of materials for ASCs due to their low cost, fascinating redox reversibility and electronic conductivity. In this review, the latest progresses in various types of TMS-based electrode materials for ASCs are summarized. Particularly, the study places emphasis on the impact of morphological control and composite engineering on the final electrochemical performances of the materials. Moreover, some effective strategies and potential challenges for further development of TMS-based electrode materials are discussed. It is believed that an in-depth understanding would be a guide for designing TMSs with ideal electrochemical performances in the future.

The consumption of food infected with food-borne pathogens has become a global public health problem. Therefore, it is monitor food-borne infections to avoid health and financial consequences. The rapid detection and differentiation of bacteria for biomedical and food safety applications continues to be a significant challenge. Herein, we present a label-free surface-enhanced Raman scattering approach for separating harmful bacteria from food. The method relies on the ascorbic acid reduction method to synthesize silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) and a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) multi-hole filter membrane chip (AgNPs@PDMS multi-hole filter membrane chip). Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) was used, followed by multivariate statistical analysis to differentiate five important food-borne pathogens, including Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella typhimurium, Listeria monocytogenes, Clostridium difficiles and Clostridium perfringens. The results demonstrated that compared to normal Raman signals, the intensity of the SERS signal was greatly enhanced with an analytical enhancement factor of 5.2 × 103. The spectral ranges of 400-1800 cm-1 were analyzed using principal component analysis (PCA) and stepwise linear discriminant analysis (SWLDA) were used to determine the optimal parameters for the discrimination of food-borne pathogens. The first three principal components (PC1, PC2, and PC3) accounted for 87.3% of the total variance in the spectra. The established SWLDA model had 100% accuracy and cross-validation accuracy, which accurately distinguished the SERS spectra of the five species. In conclusion, the SERS technology based on the AgNPs@PDMS multi-hole filter membrane chip was useful for the rapid identification of food-borne pathogens and can be employed for food quality management.

NiFe layered double hydroxide (LDH) based materials arouses great attention because of their outstanding catalytic activity for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) under alkaline condition. However, its catalytic activity for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) under alkaline condition is relatively poor. Herein, in order to improve the HER catalytic activity of NiFe LDH under alkaline condition, we design a heterostructure of NiS and NiS2 on NiFe LDH, and successfully achieve Mo element doping. The catalyst named NiFe-LDH@Mo-NiS-NiS2/NF possesses a three-dimensional nano-flower-like structure and shows an outstanding catalytic performance for both HER and OER. Specifically, in 1 M KOH solution, it requires the low overpotentials of 261 and 120 mV to achieve the current density of 50 and 10 mA cm-2 for OER and HER, respectively. Simultaneously, when NiFe-LDH@Mo-NiS2-NiS/NF is used as the bifunctional catalysts, it only needs a low voltage of 1.63 V to achieve a current density of 10 mA cm-2. The outstanding catalytic performance is attributed to its special heterostructure and the synergy between Mo and NiSx, resulting in comparability with most reported non-noble metal-based catalysts. The doping of metal elements and the construction of heterostructures provide new ideas for the structure regulation and performance improvement of bifunctional electrocatalysts.