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The lithium-sulfur battery (LSB) is a highly promising energy storage system with merits of exceptional theoretical specific capacity and energy density. However, challenges including insufficient sulfur conductivity, volume expansion, and the polysulfide shuttle effect result in rapid capacity decay and limited cycle life of the LSB, which significantly hinders its development. Inspired by the structure and forming process of paper, a fiber double network skeleton was constructed using flexible pulp fiber (PF) and highly conductive carbon fiber (CF). Following the principles of wet end chemistry in papermaking, MXene nanosheets with high adsorption and catalytic capacity for polysulfides were self-assembled on the surfaces of PF and CF to fabricate composite paper-based materials. The interwoven mesh of PF exhibited strong binding force and stable structure, providing support and protection for the CF interwoven mesh, resulting in a composite material with abundant porosity and excellent structural stability. Moreover, the CF interweaving network combined with an overlaid MXene interweaving network established an effective three-dimensional conductive pathway. When utilized as a self-supporting cathode in LSB, this composite paper-based material demonstrated outstanding cyclic stability. Under conditions of sulfur load at 2.3 mg·cm−2 and discharge at 0.2 C, the specific discharge capacity remained at 952 mAh·g−1 after 200 cycles with a capacity retention rate reaching 95.4%. The CF/PF@Mxene (CPCMX) also exhibited excellent tensile strength measured at 7.19 MPa while maintaining exceptional flexibility and electrolyte wettability. This research presents a highly promising solution for advancing the development of LSB with superior cycle stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intelligent electronic devices have urgent demands for electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding films with excellent heat dissipation capability. However, it is challenging to obtain excellent EMI shielding and thermal conductivity performances simultaneously. Herein, inspired by mille-feuille structure, the multifunctional EMI shielding films developed by a layer-by-layer self-assembly and hot-pressing strategy. The ingenious introduction of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) with large specific surface area and highly conductive into the network formed by TEMPO-oxidized cellulose nanofibrils (TOCNFs) with large aspect ratio to form the TOCNFs/AgNPs. And the graphene nanoplates (GNPs) with high conductivity loss distributed alternately with TOCNFs/AgNPs to construct mille-feuille structure, which had highly efficient conductive network, complete thermally conduction pathway and rich heterogeneous interfaces. Consequently, the designed films presented high electrical conductivity of 8520 S/cm, superb EMI effectiveness (SE) of 98.05 dB, and excellent thermal conductivity of 18.82 W/(m·K). Furthermore, the films possessed outstanding Joule heating performances with low voltages, including high heating temperature (100 °C), fast response time (< 20 s), and impressive heating stability and reliability. Thus, such high-performance EMI shielding films with fascinating thermal conductivity and Joule heating performances have substantial application in flexible electronics, electromagnetic waves shielding and thermal management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) models have been successfully utilised to solve various classification problems. However, these models have never been applied to customer credit scoring in peer-to-peer (P2P) lending. Moreover, the imbalanced class distribution in experience replay, which may affect the performance of DRL models, has rarely been considered. Therefore, this article proposes a novel DRL model, namely a deep Q-network based on a balanced stratified prioritized experience replay (DQN-BSPER) model, for customer credit scoring in P2P lending. Firstly, customer credit scoring is formulated as a discrete-time finite-Markov decision process. Subsequently, a balanced stratified prioritized experience replay technology is presented to optimize the loss function of the deep Q-network model. This technology can not only balance the numbers of minority and majority experience samples in the mini-batch by using stratified sampling technology but also select more important experience samples for replay based on the priority principle. To verify the model performance, four evaluation measures are introduced for the empirical analysis of two real-world customer credit scoring datasets in P2P lending. The experimental results show that the DQN-BSPER model can outperform four benchmark DRL models and seven traditional benchmark classification models. In addition, the DQN-BSPER model with a discount factor γ of 0.1 has excellent credit scoring performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike developed countries, we find a bell-shaped curve for the average frequency of depressive symptoms from the Indonesian Family Life Survey where the same people are followed over 14 years (2000–2014). This incidence is at a high level around the age of 60 and lower for younger and older people. If we may assume that a high incidence of depressive symptoms goes together with a low average of mental health then we may conclude that the average mental health is at at a low level around 60 and higher for younger and older people (U-shape). In addition, we provide evidence for the first time that positive future expectations of one's physical health significantly reduces incidence of depressive symptoms after accounting for reverse causality. This is however contingent on gender as optimistic health expectation is effective for male but not for female. This effect is also more pronounced for those 60 years and below as well as urban residents. However, the association of health optimism with incidence of depressive symptoms weakens with age. Results from this paper show that a focus on rural/urban residency, younger and older age cohorts and gender can provide targeted social policies to effectively promote better mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the causal effect of parents' education on three outcomes of their adolescent offspring aged 10–15 years in China. Empirical results from propensity score matching show that only mothers with a college degree have an effect on the emotional well-being of adolescents. Mothers' educational influence on health and emotional well-being of adolescents is also greater than fathers but in rural areas, only father's education has an impact on health and education of the adolescents. Sons however benefit more than daughters in the domains of health and educational well-being from parents' education. Evidence indicates that promoting women's education is a key urban policy although in rural areas, empowering women and providing an enabling environment through communities and schools is critical to improving various well-being outcomes of the next generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The higher level of Glucose-6-phosphate isomerase (G6PI) has been found in both synovial tissue and synovial fluid of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients, while the function of G6PI in RA remains unclear. Herein we found the enrichment of G6PI in microvascular endothelial cells of synovial tissue in RA patients, where a 3% O2 hypoxia environment has been identified. In order to determine the correlation between the high G6PI level and the low oxygen concentration in RA, a hypoxia condition (~3% O2) in vitro was applied to mimic the RA environment in vivo. Hypoxia promoted cellular proliferation of rheumatoid arthritis synovial fibroblasts (RASFs), and induced cell migration and angiogenic tube formation of human dermal microvascular endothelial cells (HDMECs), which were accompanied with the increased expression of G6PI and HIF-1α. Through application of G6PI loss-of-function assays, we confirmed the requirement of G6PI expression for those hypoxia-induced phenotype in RA. In addition, we demonstrated for the first time that G6PI plays key roles in regulating VEGF secretion from RASFs to regulate the hypoxia-induced angiogenesis in RA. Taken together, we demonstrated a novel pathway regulating hypoxia-induced angiogenesis in RA mediated by G6PI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]