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In order to explore the differences of microstructure，composition and performances of different fatty acid salt superhydrophobic coatings，three kinds of fatty acid salt superhydrophobic coatings were prepared by electrodeposition on rough surface of TC4 alloy.The microstructure，chemical composition，phase and wettability of such superhydrophobic coatings were characterized and analyzed by scanning electron microscopy，X-ray diffraction，X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy，Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and contact angle tester.The wear resistance，heat resistance and corrosion resistance of the superhydrophobic coatings were investigated by linear friction test，long time heating experiment and electrochemical experiment respectively.Results showed that fatty acid salt coatings obtained by anodic and cathodic deposition both had non-adhesion superhydrophobicity.The surface color and state of the three fatty acid salt coatings were different，but the micromorphology was all ＂cauliflower＂ cluster，and there was an obvious micro nano hierarchical structure.The wear resistance and heat resistance of the three superhydrophobic coatings were different due to different fatty acid salts.Corrosion resistance of three superhydrophobic coatings was better than that of the substrate.CSHS-Cu had the best corrosion resistance.The Jcorr of CSHS-Cu was 1/5 of that of the bare substrate，and its Rct was 25 times that of the bare substrate.

The public key infrastructure (PKI), as an significant component of the current Internet security infrastructure, guarantees the information transmission with the necessary authenticity, integrity, confidentiality and non-repudiation.However, the existing PKI also has shortcomings of excessive power of certification authority and difficulties in revoking and querying.Blockchain can be used to solve those problems by leveraging its advantages, such as decentralization, high transparency and flat structure.Furthermore, the ability and efficiency of the entire Internet to establish trust relationships may be improved.The transparent public key infrastructure (PKI) certification protocol based on the blockchain was proposed.The TS-PBFT algorithm was designed in the proposed protocol by adopting the threshold signature technology to the Practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) algorithm.The TS-PBFT algorithm reduced the communication overhead via reducing the communication complexity, strengthened the supervision via introducing external monitoring mechanism in the master node election of the view change protocol, and also improved the performance of the consensus mechanism via adding a batch processing mechanism.Moreover, a transparent blockchain-based PKI certification protocol was designed.The proposed protocol increased the security of certificate revocation and query, it also improved the efficiency of the certificate query by the introduction of counting bloom filters.Besides, the proposed protocol added audit function into the certificate lifecycle management.Accordingly, it can supervise the behavior of the certificate authority (CA), prompt it to improve security standards, and then achieve the purpose of limiting its authority.According to the security analysis and efficiency experiments, the proposed protocol was equipped with security properties, such as the resistance to spoofing certificate application attacks, and it achieved the best performance on TLS/SSL handshake time compared with existing PKI protocols.

The bHLH (basic helix–loop–helix) transcription factor AtCFLAP2 regulates epidermal wax accumulation, but the underlying molecular mechanism remains unknown. We obtained BnUC1mut (BnaA05g18250D homologous to AtCFLAP2) from a Brassica napus mutant with up-curling leaves (Bnuc1) and epidermal wax deficiency via map-based cloning. BnUC1mut contains a point mutation (N200S) in the conserved dimerization domain. Overexpressing BnUC1mut in ZS11 (Zhongshuang11) significantly decreased the leaf epidermal wax content, resulting in up-curled and glossy leaves. In contrast, knocking out BnUC1mut in ZS11-NIL (Zhongshuang11-near-isogenic line) restored the normal leaf phenotype (i.e., flat) and significantly increased the leaf epidermal wax content. The point mutation weakens the ability of BnUC1mut to bind to the promoters of VLCFA (very-long-chain fatty acids) synthesis-related genes, including KCS (β-ketoacyl coenzyme synthase) and LACS (long-chain acyl CoA synthetase), as well as lipid transport-related genes, including LTP (non-specific lipid transfer protein). The resulting sharp decrease in the transcription of genes affecting VLCFA biosynthesis and lipid transport disrupts the normal accumulation of leaf epidermal wax. Thus, BnUC1 influences epidermal wax formation by regulating the expression of LTP and genes associated with VLCFA biosynthesis. Our findings provide a foundation for future investigations on the mechanism mediating plant epidermal wax accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selective pressures have given rise to a number of SARS-CoV-2 variants during the prolonged course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently evolved variants differ from ancestors in additional glycosylation within the spike protein receptor-binding domain (RBD). Details of how the acquisition of glycosylation impacts viral fitness and human adaptation are not clearly understood. Here, we dissected the role of N354-linked glycosylation, acquired by BA.2.86 sub-lineages, as a RBD conformational control element in attenuating viral infectivity. The reduced infectivity is recovered in the presence of heparin sulfate, which targets the 'N354 pocket' to ease restrictions of conformational transition resulting in a 'RBD-up' state, thereby conferring an adjustable infectivity. Furthermore, N354 glycosylation improved spike cleavage and cell–cell fusion, and in particular escaped one subset of ADCC antibodies. Together with reduced immunogenicity in hybrid immunity background, these indicate a single spike amino acid glycosylation event provides selective advantage in humans through multiple mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the realm of Ceph distributed storage systems, ensuring swift and symmetrical data recovery during severe data corruption scenarios is pivotal for data reliability and system stability. This paper introduces an innovative FPGA-based Multi-Dimensional Elastic Recovery Acceleration method, termed AMDER-Ceph. Utilizing FPGA technology, this method is a pioneer in accelerating erasure code data recovery within such systems symmetrically. By harnessing the parallel computing power of FPGAs and optimizing Cauchy matrix binary operations, AMDER-Ceph significantly enhances data recovery speed and efficiency symmetrically. Our evaluations in real-world Ceph environments show that AMDER-Ceph achieves up to 4.84 times faster performance compared with traditional methods, especially evident in the standard 4 MB block size configurations of Ceph systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although histone proteins are widely known for their intranuclear functions where they organize DNA, all five histone types can also be released into the extracellular space from damaged cells. Extracellular histones can interact with pattern recognition receptors of peripheral immune cells, including toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), causing pro-inflammatory activation, which indicates they may act as damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) in peripheral tissues. Very limited information is available about functions of extracellular histones in the central nervous system (CNS). To address this knowledge gap, we applied mixed histones (MH) to cultured cells modeling neurons, microglia, and astrocytes. Microglia are the professional CNS immunocytes, while astrocytes are the main support cells for neurons. Both these cell types are critical for neuroimmune responses and their dysregulated activity contributes to neurodegenerative diseases. We measured effects of extracellular MH on cell viability and select neuroimmune functions of microglia and astrocytes. MH were toxic to cultured primary murine neurons and also reduced viability of NSC-34 murine and SH-SY5Y human neuron-like cells in TLR4-dependent manner. MH did not affect the viability of resting or immune-stimulated BV-2 murine microglia or U118 MG human astrocytic cells. When applied to BV-2 cells, MH enhanced secretion of the potential neurotoxin glutamate, but did not modulate the release of nitric oxide (NO), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF), C-X-C motif chemokine ligand 10 (CXCL10), or the overall cytotoxicity of lipopolysaccharide (LPS)- and/or interferon (IFN)-γ-stimulated BV-2 microglial cells towards NSC-34 neuron-like cells. We demonstrated, for the first time, that MH downregulated phagocytic activity of LPS-stimulated BV-2 microglia. However, MH also exhibited protective effect by ameliorating the cytotoxicity of LPS-stimulated U118 MG astrocytic cells towards SH-SY5Y neuron-like cells. Our data demonstrate extracellular MH could both damage neurons and alter neuroimmune functions of glial cells. These actions of MH could be targeted for treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the value effects of FinTech innovations on the finance industry in China, focussing on the banking system. We use a crawler-like application programme to grab patent filing information and manually identify and classify FinTech innovations based on their application fields. FinTech patents generally bring adverse value effects to various finance sectors, revealing a competitive relationship between innovators and financial firms. FinTech innovations applied to insurance and asset management cause the most harm to the industry, especially to state-owned and joint-stock commercial banks. Moreover, disruptive FinTech innovations by start-up firms appear to pose more potential threats to commercial banks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributed storage systems such as Ceph have been widely adopted, with erasure coding technology being an essential fault-tolerance technique. While ensuring data reliability and security, it significantly reduces the cost of data storage. Due to the computational overhead and encoding latency introduced by the erasure coding process, the data encoding rate is often constrained. To address this issue, an FPGA-accelerated erasure coding encoding scheme in Ceph, based on an efficient layered strategy (FPGA-Accelerated Erasure Coding Encoding in Ceph with an Efficient Layered Strategy, LFEC-Accelerator), is proposed and implemented. This approach takes full advantage of FPGA's parallel computing capabilities to accelerate the erasure coding algorithm at the hardware level. Furthermore, to maximize the utilization of the FPGA controller's resources and ensure that all processing steps are properly managed and scheduled, our approach introduces a hierarchical structure comprising a communication interface layer, task scheduling layer, and hardware acceleration layer. Experimental results indicate that, under the same erasure coding configurations and file sizes, our solution outperforms native Ceph-supported erasure coding libraries such as Jerasure, Clay, Shec and ISA, with an encoding rate improvement of up to 3.04 times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two-dimensional (2D) hybrid perovskites have been garnering increasing attention across various fields due to their rich optical, electrical, optoelectronic, and magnetic properties. Current growth techniques only offer millimeter-scale or polycrystalline perovskites, which present a major barrier to the practical large-scale applications of these materials. In this study, we successfully prepared a series of BA2CuCl4–xBrx perovskite single-crystalline nanosheets with centimeter size using a controlled cooling growth method. Characterization results suggest that the obtained single-crystalline nanosheets are of high quality and that Br is uniformly doped. Moreover, these single-crystalline nanosheets exhibit ferromagnetic ordering at low temperatures, with the Curie–Weiss temperature increasing from 14.2 to 16.5 K as Br-doping concentration increases. Our approach provides a potential solution for the scalable synthesis and application of hybrid perovskites. At the same time, this family of 2D magnetic perovskites with tunable optical properties holds great potential for future spintronics applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) XBB lineages have achieved dominance worldwide and keep on evolving. Convergent evolution of XBB lineages on the receptor-binding domain (RBD) L455F and F456L is observed, resulting in variants with substantial growth advantages, such as EG.5, FL.1.5.1, XBB.1.5.70, and HK.3. Here, we show that neutralizing antibody (NAb) evasion drives the convergent evolution of F456L, while the epistatic shift caused by F456L enables the subsequent convergence of L455F through ACE2 binding enhancement and further immune evasion. L455F and F456L evade RBD-targeting Class 1 public NAbs, reducing the neutralization efficacy of XBB breakthrough infection (BTI) and reinfection convalescent plasma. Importantly, L455F single substitution significantly dampens receptor binding; however, the combination of L455F and F456L forms an adjacent residue flipping, which leads to enhanced NAbs resistance and ACE2 binding affinity. The perturbed receptor-binding mode leads to the exceptional ACE2 binding and NAb evasion, as revealed by structural analyses. Our results indicate the evolution flexibility contributed by epistasis cannot be underestimated, and the evolution potential of SARS-CoV-2 RBD remains high. Author summary: The continuous evolution of SARS-CoV-2 presents a challenge to global public health and the development of vaccines and treatments against COVID-19. Recently, an adjacent residue alteration, L455F+F456L, also known as "FLip", on the receptor-binding domain of the virus, which has been identified in multiple strains of the virus, alters how the virus interacts with human cells and immune response. We show that the combination of these mutations synergistically increases the virus's ability to bind to ACE2, the primary receptor on cell surfaces, enabling it to specifically escape a public type of neutralizing antibodies elicited by vaccination and infection, and the molecular mechanisms are explained by structural analyses. The enhancement of receptor binding increases the potential of the virus to further accumulate immune evasive mutations. These findings broaden our understanding of SARS-CoV-2 evolution and highlight the importance of paying attention to these ongoing antigenic drifts in the virus as we continue to develop and evaluate current antibody therapeutics and vaccines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that cash dividend is a type of arbitraging cost that short sellers tend to avoid. We find that dividend announcements lead to temporary short squeezes, causing the prices of highly shorted stocks to overshoot and fully revert over time. These stocks also experience excessive buy‐initiated trades and abnormal trading volume in response to dividend announcements. These results are driven mainly by stocks with unpredicted dividends, low lending fees, and high dividend yields. Overall, results suggest that news of a dividend distribution is magnified by short squeezes due to increased short costs and generates excessive nonfundamentals‐driven price fluctuations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]