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Plasmonic effect-enhanced Z-type heterojunction photocatalysts comprise a promising solution to the two fundamental problems of current TiO2-based photocatalysis concerning low-charge carrier separation efficiency and low utilization of solar illumination. A plasmonic effect-enhanced TiN@anatase-TiO2/rutile-TiO2 Z-type heterojunction photocatalyst with the strong interface of the N–O chemical bond was synthesized by hydrothermal oxidation of TiN. The prepared photocatalyst shows desirable visible light absorption and good visible-light-photocatalytic activity. The enhancement in photocatalytic activities contribute to the plasma resonance effect of TiN, the N–O bond-connected charge transfer channel at the TiO2/TiN heterointerface, and the synergistically Z-type charge transfer pathway between the anatase TiO2 (A-TiO2) and rutile TiO2 (R-TiO2). The optimization study shows that the catalyst with a weight ratio of A-TiO2/R-TiO2/TiN of approximately 15:1:1 achieved the best visible light photodegradation activity. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of fabricating plasmonic effect-enhanced Z-type heterostructure semiconductor photocatalysts with enhanced visible-light-photocatalytic activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neutralizing antibodies exert a potent inhibitory effect on viral entry; however, they are less effective in therapeutic models than in prophylactic models, presumably because of their limited efficacy in eliminating virus-producing cells via Fc-mediated cytotoxicity. Herein, we present a SARS-CoV-2 spike-targeting bispecific T-cell engager (S-BiTE) strategy for controlling SARS-CoV-2 infection. This approach blocks the entry of free virus into permissive cells by competing with membrane receptors and eliminates virus-infected cells via powerful T cell-mediated cytotoxicity. S-BiTE is effective against both the original and Delta variant of SARS-CoV2 with similar efficacy, suggesting its potential application against immune-escaping variants. In addition, in humanized mouse model with live SARS-COV-2 infection, S-BiTE treated mice showed significantly less viral load than neutralization only treated group. The S-BiTE strategy may have broad applications in combating other coronavirus infections. A SARS-CoV-2 spike-targeting bispecific T-cell engager (S-BiTE) strategy is presented that effectively reduces SARS-CoV-2 viral load in a humanized mouse model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a vehicle routing problem with time windows (TWVRP). In this problem, we consider a hard time constraint that the fleet can only serve customers within a specific time window. To solve this problem, a hybrid ant colony (HACO) algorithm is proposed based on ant colony algorithm and mutation operation. The HACO algorithm proposed has three innovations: the first is to update pheromones with a new method; the second is the introduction of adaptive parameters; and the third is to add the mutation operation. A famous Solomon instance is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results show that HACO algorithm is effective against solving the problem of vehicle routing with time windows. Besides, the proposed algorithm also has practical implications for vehicle routing problem and the results show that it is applicable and effective in practical problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We evaluate the prognostic value of chemotherapy and other prognostic factors on overall survival among colon patients with deficient mismatch repair (dMMR), and determine the optimum time to start chemotherapy after surgery. Data of 306 colon cancer patients with dMMR who received radical surgery were collected from three Chinese centers between August 2012 and January 2018. Overall survival (OS) was assessed with the Kaplan–Meier method and log-rank. Cox regression analysis were used to assess influencing prognosis factors. The median follow-up time for all patients was 45.0 months (range, 1.0–100). There was a nonsignificant OS benefit from chemotherapy for patients with stage I and stage II disease, including high-risk stage II disease (log-rank p: 0.386, 0.779, 0.921), and a significant OS benefit for patients with stage III and stage IV disease for receiving post-operation chemotherapy (log-rank p = 0.002, 0.019). Stage III patients benefitted from chemotherapy regimens that contained oxaliplatin (log-rank p = 0.004), and Starting chemotherapy with oxaliplatin treatment earlier resulted in better outcomes (95% CI 0.013–0.857; p = 0.035). Chemotherapy regimens containing oxaliplatin can prolong the survival time of stage III and IV dMMR colon cancer patients. This beneficial manifestation was more pronounced after starting chemotherapy treatment early post operation. High risk stage II dMMR colon patients including T4N0M0 cannot benefit from chemotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fabrication of Z-scheme heterojunction photocatalysts is an ideal strategy for solving environmental problems by providing inexhaustible solar energy. A direct Z-scheme anatase TiO2/rutile TiO2 heterojunction photocatalyst was prepared using a facile B-doping strategy. The band structure and oxygen-vacancy content can be successfully tailored by controlling the amount of B-dopant. The photocatalytic performance was enhanced via the Z-scheme transfer path formed between the B doped anatase-TiO2 and rutile-TiO2, optimized band structure with markedly positively shifted band potentials, and the synergistically-mediated oxygen vacancy contents. Moreover, the optimization study indicated that 10% B-doping with the R-TiO2 to A-TiO2 weight ratio of 0.04 could achieve the highest photocatalytic performance. This work may provide an effective approach to synthesize nonmetal-doped semiconductor photocatalysts with tunable-energy structures and promote the efficiency of charge separation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single image deraining work has attracted a lot of attention. So an effective single image deraining network model, RFCTNet, is designed. Specifically, the residual Fast Fourier Transform convolution module is used as a baseline for the deraining network. The advantage is its ability to capture both long and short‐term information interactions and to integrate high and low‐frequency background information for delivery. And a novel Transformer module, the Contextual Transformer module, is introduced. Contextual knowledge of the rain streaks neighbourhood is learned to improve the recovery of textures and information in the image background based on focusing on the rain pattern features. Because of the overlap between rain streaks, removing them in one stage is difficult, so a multi‐stage progressive rain removal method is used. Considering the catastrophic forgetting problem of deep learning, a continuous learning method, PIGWM, is adopted, which is c and enables the network model to memorize of the previous data set. Also, the rain removal method RFCTNet has been proven through extensive experiments to outperform other advanced methods' evaluation metrics on both synthetic and real datasets. The source code can be found on https://github.com/SUTwu/RFCTNet [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of pre-annealing temperature on the crystallization and nitridation of amorphous will be investigated. Sm2Fe17ZrNb0.4Cu0.2B0.2 amorphous alloy ribbons were prepared by melt spinning at the speed of 40 m/s, and the ribbons were two-step annealed after nitridation. The phase composition and microstructure of the material were characterized, glass-forming ability (GFA) was analyzed and the nitrogen content of ribbons were detected. The results indicate that pre-annealing treatment is effective in inhibiting the rapid precipitation of the α-Fe phase. The equiaxed grains with uniform size were obtained by two-step annealed, of which the pre-annealing treatment is at 773 K for 90 minutes and crystallization treatment is at 873 K for 10 minutes. The initial crystallization temperature is reduced from 908 K to 793 K. The nitrogen content is ~ 2.68 pct after two-step annealing, which increases ~ 5.6 pct than that of the direct crystallization (~ 2.53 pct). Therefore, pre-annealing treatment at 773 K for 90 minutes can achieve microstructural reconstruction of Sm2Fe17ZrNb0.4Cu0.2B0.2, the reduced crystallization temperature inhibits the overflow of nitrogen atoms and improves the nitriding efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]