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As a representative of Exponential Organizations, MI went from obscurity to the Fortune 500 in just ten years. Mi's success is inextricably linked to its outstanding business model. This paper summarizes the elements of MI's business model from four perspectives: value proposition, value creation, value delivery, and value capture, as well as its measures for developing into an exponential organization. Expecting to provide theoretical references for the transformation and upgrading of manufacturing organizations.

Four interrelated issues have been arising with the development of modern industry, namely environmental pollution, the energy crisis, the greenhouse effect and the global food crisis. Photocatalysis is one of the most promising methods to solve them in the future. To promote high photocatalytic reaction efficiency and utilize solar energy to its fullest, a well-designed photoreactor is vital. Photocatalytic optofluidic microreactors, a promising technology that brings the merits of microfluidics to photocatalysis, offer the advantages of a large surface-to-volume ratio, a short molecular diffusion length and high reaction efficiency, providing a potential method for mitigating the aforementioned crises in the future. Although various photocatalytic optofluidic microreactors have been reported, a comprehensive review of microreactors applied to these four fields is still lacking. In this paper, we review the typical design and development of photocatalytic microreactors in the fields of water purification, water splitting, CO2 fixation and coenzyme regeneration in the past few years. As the most promising tool for solar energy utilization, we believe that the increasing innovation of photocatalytic optofluidic microreactors will drive rapid development of related fields in the future.

The combination of medical treatment and endowment aims to combine medical resources and elderly care resources to maximize the use of social resources. It is a key rehabilitation project in the reform and innovation of human medical care, and it is a practical and feasible new model of medical reform. The paper integrated and combed the connotation of the combination of medical treatment and endowment, and put forward views and suggestions to improve the current model of combination of medical treatment and endowment in China. The paper combines the future development trend of medical treatment and endowment, creatively adding science and education, and proposes a sharing mechanism of science and technology guidance, resource sharing, channel construction, and cost sharing. The research of the project is conducive to enriching the theoretical and practical results of the combination of medical treatment and endowment, and is of great significance to the construction of a harmonious society.

Lithium–sulfur batteries (LSBs) are considered as one of the most promising next-generation high-energy rechargeable batteries due to their ultrahigh energy density and low cost, however, their practical application has been severely hindered due to the rigorous shuttle effect of soluble polysulfides and sluggish reaction kinetics. Here, a novel flexible 3D nitrogen-doped graphene supported V2O3/VN heterogeneous host was constructed by a facile topochemical nitridation strategy. Such unique architecture endowed the V2O3 with strong adsorption activity and the highly conductive VN with superior catalytic capability, synergistically promotes the redox kinetics and effectively restrains the shuttle effect of polysulfides. Impressively, the designed V2O3@VN-20 electrode exhibited a high reversible capacity of 1130 mA h g−1 and 980 mA h g−1 at 1C and 2C respectively, and maintained long-term cyclability with a low capacity decay of 0.1% per cycle after 300 cycles at 5C. More importantly, the heterostructured electrode still retained a high capacity of 862 mA h g−1 with a high sulfur loading of 5 mg cm−2 after 100 cycles at 0.5C. Our work might provide a general approach for guiding the rational design of heterostructured materials with multifunctionality towards high-energy flexible Li–S batteries.

The paper discusses the influence of individual self-construction on entrepreneurial intention from the perspective of self-cognition while considering the institutional context at the national level. The research contends that individual entrepreneurial self-construction has a positive impact on entrepreneurial intentions and the institutional context moderates the relationship between individual entrepreneurial self-construal and entrepreneurial intention. These relationships are stronger in countries with regulation, cognition, and normative which favour the creation, growth, and management of new businesses. Analysis of Global Entrepreneurship Monitoring (GEM) survey data from 60 countries and regions supports the hypotheses. The conclusions provide important implications for research of entrepreneurial intentions and the soundness of the entrepreneurial system.

Plasmon-induced hot carriers have recently attracted considerable interest, but the energy efficiency in visible light is often low due to the short lifetime of hot carriers and the limited optical absorption of plasmonic architectures. To increase the generation of hot carriers, we propose to exert multiple plasmonic resonant modes and their strong coupling using a metal-dielectric-metal (MDM) nanocavity that comprises an Au nanohole array (AuNHA), a TiO2 thin film and an Au reflector. Unlike common MDM structures, in addition to the Fabry-Perot mode in the dielectric layer, AuNHA as the top layer is special because it excites the localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) mode in the Au nanoholes and launches the gap surface plasmon polariton (GSPP) mode in the Au reflector surface. The spatial field overlapping of the three resonance modes enables strong mode coupling by optimizing the TiO2 thickness, which leads to notably enhanced average IPCE (∼1.5%) and broadband photocurrent (170 μA·cm-2). This MDM structure would be useful for photochemistry and photovoltaics using sunlight.

This paper successfully prepared a unique titanium dioxide nanorod arrays nanocomposite doped with carbon quantum dots and gold nanoparticles as a high‐efficiency photocatalyst. Due to their enhanced electron–hole separation efficiency and strong light‐scattering effects, one‐dimensional nanostructured titanium dioxide nanorods were utilised as the basic material for photocatalysis. Furthermore, gold nanoparticles and carbon quantum dots modified on the surface of titanium dioxide nanorods were used as visible light absorbers and photosensitisers, respectively. As a result, a photocurrent of 14 mA·cm‐2 was achieved by Au/CQDs‐TiO2 nanorods composite in the photoelectrochemical measurements, which exceed five times that of pure titanium dioxide nanorods. The synergistic effect of gold nanoparticles and carbon quantum dots was demonstrated by several characterisation techniques. The proposed Au/CQDs‐TiO2 nanorods nanocomposite film developed by simple successive ionic layer adsorption and reaction and hydrothermal methods offers a practical solution for current environmental and energy issues.

The design and synthesis of two semiconducting bis (4-ethynyl-bridging 1, 8-naphthalimide) bolaamphiphiles (BENI-COO- and BENI-NH3 + ) to fabricate supramolecular metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) nanostructures for biomimetic hydrogen evolution under visible light irradiation is presented. A H2 evolution rate of ca. 3.12 mmol g-1 ⋅h-1 and an apparent quantum efficiency (AQE) of ca. 1.63 % at 400 nm were achieved over the BENI-COO- -NH3 + -Ni MIS photosystem prepared by electrostatic self-assembly of BENI-COO- with the opposite-charged DuBois-Ni catalysts. The hot electrons of photoexcited BENI-COO- nanofibers were tunneled to the molecular Ni collectors across a salt bridge and an alkyl region of 2.2-2.5 nm length at a rate of 6.10×108 s-1 , which is five times larger than the BENI-NH3 + nanoribbons (1.17×108 s-1 ). The electric field benefited significantly the electron tunneling dynamics and compensated the charge-separated states insufficient in the BENI-COO- nanofibers.

At present, both the scale and intension for agricultural production are being largely developed, releasing a large amount of NH3 which causes people with malodor and health problems. In this article, the efficiency and products of ammonia removal in a dielectric barrier discharge reactor were studied experimentally, at different energy density, relative humidity, and ammonia concentration. The results show that the removal of ammonia increases with the increase of energy density, while the increase of NH3 concentration or humidity inhibits the ammonia removal. The conversion products of ammonia are mainly NO x and NH4NO3. More importantly, we found that under optimal conditions, nearly 80% of NH3 can be converted into NH4NO3. This discovery provides a new way for ammonia treatment and resource utilization in an eutrophic environment.

Sorafenib (SORA), a multi kinase inhibitor, is the standard first-line targeted therapy approved by the Food and Drug Administration for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). However, emerging evidence from clinical practice indicates that SORA alone has only moderate antitumor effects and could not completely inhibit the progression of the disease. Therefore, it is very necessary and urgent to develop novel combination therapy to improve the clinical outcomes of SORA. The pharmacological study on the chemosensitizing effects of natural products has become a hotspot in recent years, which is commonly thought to be a potential way to improve the effectiveness of drugs in clinical use. Berbamine (BBM) has potential sensitizing effects in multiple chemotherapies and target therapy. However, it remains unclarified whether the combination of BBM and SORA as a treatment could exert a synergistic effect on HCC cell lines. In this study, we first investigated whether BBM can increase the sensitivity of HCC cell lines to SORA. The results revealed that the combination of BBM and SORA could synergistically inhibit the growth of two HCC cell lines and promoted their apoptosis. Mechanistically, our results showed that BBM exerted a dose-dependent inhibitory effect on the basal and IL-6-induced STAT3 activation of HCC cell lines. In addition, the combined treatment of BBM and SORA synergistically suppressed STAT3 phosphorylation at Tyr705 and knockdown of STAT3 abolished the sensitization effect of BBM, indicating that BBM's sensitization effect is mainly mediated by its inhibition of STAT3. These findings identify a new type of natural STAT3 inhibitor and provide a novel approach to the enhancement of SORA efficacy by blocking the activation of STAT3.

Porous silicon (Si) nanostructures have aroused much interest as lithium-ion battery anodes because of the large space to accommodate the volume change in lithiation and delithiation and shorter ion transfer distance. However, fabrication of porous structures tends to be difficult to control and complex, so, the final electrochemical performance can be compromised. Herein, a modest magnesiothermic reduction (MMR) reaction is demonstrated to produce blackberry-like porous Si nanospheres (PSSs) controllably using magnesium silicide (Mg2Si) as Mg source and SiO2 nanospheres as the reactant. This improved MR method provides good control of the kinetics and heat release compared to the traditional MR (TMR) method using Mg powder as the reactant. The PSSs obtained by MMR reaction has higher structural integrity than that fabricated by TMR. After encapsulation with reduced graphene oxide, the Si/C composite exhibits superior cycling stability and rates such as a high reversible capacity of 1034 mAh·g−1 at 0.5C (4200 mAh·g−1 at 1.0C) after 1000 cycles, capacity retention of 79.5%, and high rate capacity of 497 mAh·g−1 at 2.0C. This strategy offers a new route to fabricate high-performance porous Si anodes and can be extended to other materials such as germanium.

Developing low-cost and high efficient electrocatalysts for both oxygen and hydrogen evolution reaction in an alkaline electrolyte toward overall water splitting is still a significant challenge. Here, a novel hierarchically heterostructured catalyst composed of ultrasmall Mo2C and metallic Co nanoparticles confined within a carbon layer is produced by a facile phase separation strategy. During thermal reduction of CoMoO4 nanosheets in CO ambient, in-situ generated nanoscale Co and ultrafine Mo2C conformally encapsulated in a conductive carbon layer. In addition, some carbon nanotubes catalyzed by Co nanoparticles vertically grew on its surface, creating 3D interconnected electron channels. More importantly, the integrated C@Mo2C/Co nanosheets assembled into the hierarchical architecture, providing abundant active surface and retaining the structural integrity. Benefiting from such unique structure, the constructed hierarchical heterostructure shows low overpotentials of 280 mV and 145 mV to reach a current density of 10 mA cm−2 for OER and HER in an alkaline electrolyte. Furthermore, the symmetrical electrolyzer assembled with catalyst exhibits a small cell voltage of 1.67 V at 10 mA cm−2 in addition to outstanding durability, demonstrating the great potential as a high efficient bifunctional electrocatalyst for overall water splitting.

In this paper, B2O3 was used as a fluxing agent to reduce the melting temperature of municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI) fly ash and promote the glassy phase formation. Ash fusion temperature (AFT) test, atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS), X-ray diffraction(XRD), scanning electron microscope (SEM) and thermodynamic calculation were carried out. The results showed that the flow temperature decreased from 1211 °C to 986 °C with an increase in the B2O3 content from 0 to 15 wt%. The melting slag lead to a decrease in the surface area and an increase in the mass transfer resistance of heavy metals. Thus, the agglomeration of the fly ash particles became easier with the reduced viscosity of the liquid slag. The volatilization of Pb, Cd and Zn in fly ash was inhibited. The leaching behavior of heavy metals was evaluated, the results indicated that Zn and Cu were stable whereas the Pb and Cd were soluble in glassy slag.

Cost-effective electrocatalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) spanning a wide pH range are highly desirable but still challenging for hydrogen production via electrochemical water splitting. Herein, Mo

The latest trend in today’s organizational development is to become exponential organizations. As a new organizational paradigm for the Internet society and sharing economy era, it is a more flexible, streamlined, and entrepreneurial organization that efficiently integrates global resources and achieves rapid growth. While existing literature has explored how exponential organization success is inextricably linked to its business model, little attention has been paid to and summarized regarding each stage of the exponential organizations’ innovation in the context of the business operation cycle. Meanwhile, the limitations of previous studies were not providing sufficient explanation or strategies for Chinese manufacturing organizations’ exponential transformation to make them sustainable, and not upgrading to relate to organizations in general rather than focusing on a representative Chinese organization. This work aims to deeply analyze a single case of Xiaomi, the representative of exponential organizations, through a case study, summarizing the business model innovation strategies of exponential organizations from four perspectives—value proposition, value creation, value delivery, and value capture—and 11 elements of exponential organizations. The findings are as follows: (1) Making full use of Internet digital technology and effectively integrating and utilizing social resources can help exponential organizations to build an innovation ecology and (2) The 11 attributes of exponential organizations and the corresponding requirements provide more options and space for business model innovation. As a result, these findings add to the current discourse regarding exponential transformation and upgrading, with the expectation of providing theoretical references for the Chinese manufacturing organizations’ exponential transformation and upgrading.

D-π-A type 4-((9-phenylcarbazol-3-yl)ethynyl)-N-dodecyl-1,8-naphthalimide (CZNI) with a large dipole moment of 8.49 D and A-π-A type bis[(4,4'-1,8-naphthalimide)-N-dodecyl]ethyne (NINI) with a negligible dipole moment of 0.28 D, were smartly designed and synthesized to demonstrate the evidence of a molecular dipole as the dominant mechanism for controlling charge separation of organic semiconductors. In aqueous solution, these two novel naphthalimides can self-assemble to form nanoribbons (NRs) that present significantly different traces of exciton dissociation dynamics. Upon photoexcitation of NINI-NRs, no charge-separated excitons (CSEs) are formed due to the large exciton binding energy, accordingly there is no hydrogen evolution. On the contrary, in the photoexcited CZNI-NRs, the initial bound Frenkel excitons are dissociated to long-lived CSEs after undergoing ultrafast charge transfer within ca. 1.25 ps and charge separation within less than 5.0 ps. Finally, these free electrons were injected into Pt co-catalysts for reducing protons to H

There is a growing need to measure respiratory rate (RR) in a variety of applications, including in clinical and occupational settings, as well as during physical exercises. Fiber optic sensors (FOSs) is an attractive solution for wearable RR monitoring because of their small size, multiplexing capability, chemical inertness, and immunity to electromagnetic fields. Here, we review recent advances in FOSs for breath monitoring. We presented the sensing mechanisms of state-of-the-art sensors and analyze their advantages and disadvantages. We classified recently reported FOSs based on sensing principles and then critically analyze the strengths and weaknesses of representative recent works. Finally, we summarized the challenges and future prospects of breath FOSs, with the aim of applying them to real applications.

Solar water splitting by photoelectrochemical (PEC) reactions is promising for hydrogen production. The gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are often applied to promote the visible response of wideband photocatalysts. However, in a typical TiO2/AuNPs structure, the opposite transfer direction of excited electrons between AuNPs and TiO2 under visible light and UV light severely limits the solar PEC performance. Here we present a unique Pt/TiO2/Cu2O/NiO/AuNPs photocathode, in which the NiO hole transport layer (HTL) is inserted between AuNPs and Cu2O to achieve unidirectional transport of charge carriers and prominent plasmon-induced resonance energy transfer (PIRET) between AuNPs and Cu2O. The measured applied bias photon-to-current efficiency and the hydrogen production rate under AM 1.5G illumination can reach 1.5% and 16.4 μmol·cm-2·h-1, respectively. This work is original in using the NiO film as the PIRET spacer and provides a promising photoelectrode for energy-efficient solar water splitting.

Academic institutions and companies generally consider HRD competency to be an essential indicator of whether HR can play its role effectively and has a close relationship with organizational performance. Based on this, this paper explores the impact of HRD competency on the performance of exponential organizations. The relationship between HRD competency and exponential organization performance was examined using structural equation modeling with five scales to evaluate 570 HRDs in exponential organizations: competency, organizational identity, self-efficacy, organizational politics perception, and exponential organization performance. Our findings suggest that HRD competency influences exponential organizational performance and that organizational identity and self-efficacy play continuous mediating roles. In addition, organizational politics negatively moderates the relationship between HRD competency and organizational identity. Our findings enrich and extend the research on the impact of HRD competency on the performance of exponential organizations and provide a theoretical basis and empirical support to understand and help organizations with their strategic decisions.

In this work, the Co-Ni basic carbonate nanowires were in-situ grown on carbon nanotube (CNT) network through a facile chemical bath deposition method, which could be further converted into active hydroxide via cyclic voltammetry strategy. A series of carbonate nanowire/nanotube with different Co/Ni ratio revealed the different growth status of the nanowires on CNT network. The nanostructures of the as-synthesized samples were examined via powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) techniques. The Co/Ni ratio of the carbonate largely affected the size of the nanowires, that the low Co/Ni ratio was beneficial for thin nanowire formation and the nanowires loading on CNT network. Subsequently, the electrochemical performance of the Co-Ni basic hydroxides was studied in a three-electrode test system. The nanowires with low Co/Ni ratio 1/2 can form nanowire array on individual CNTs, which exhibited better electrochemical capacitive performance than the composite network with high Co/Ni ratio nanowires after electrochemical activation. The addition of Co enhanced the rate performance of the hydroxide/CNT, especially improved the long cycle stability largely compared to the rate performance of pure Ni converted hydroxide/CNT composite film reported by our previous research. This result is valuable for the design of inorganic electrochemical active composites based on conductive networks for energy conversion/storage applications.

A novel mechanism of sensitivity enhancement of D-shaped fiber-based surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensors for the optofluidic device has been proposed. The sandwiched structure optofluidic platform is developed with metal-coated D-shaped fiber as the sensing device, while another thin metal layer is situated under the inner wall of the substrate as a second metal layer to construct the sandwiched microchannel. It has been found that the sensitivity of the D-type fiber SPR sensor is enhanced significantly with the sandwiched metal-coated structure of microchannel. In the proposed structure, the measurand analyte is considered as a sandwich channel layer between two thin metal layers. The sensitivity of the proposed structure is dependent on the volume of the measurand and the thickness of the metal layers. The computed sensitivity with a double metal layer and sandwich measurand layer concept is 4085 nm/RIU in the region of 1.33 to 1.36. The sensitivity is enhanced by more than a factor of `2.3' in comparison with the sensitivity of the normal D-shape fiber SPR sensor. It can be enhanced further up to ~12,500 nm/RIU by the deposition of higher RI polymeric overlay just above the second metal layer. The computed resolution of the proposed sensor with standard interrogation technique is ~1 × 10-7 which is quite competitive within the optical fiber sensor domain. A detailed numerical analysis has been accomplished. This structure will be useful in distinct chemical and biological sensing applications where the volume of an analyte is critical. This new concept of enhancement of sensitivity with limited measurand volume will open a new designing methodology for optical fiber biosensors.

Non-thermal plasma technology has great potential for the removal of the emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). However, the plasma-alone process may produce various undesired by-products that cause secondary pollutions. Here, a coaxial dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) reactor has been developed for the removal of xylene over an Al2O3-based catalyst (Mn/Al2O3, Co/Al2O3, Ce/Al2O3) at low temperatures. Compared with the plasma-alone process and other plasma-catalytic combined process, the combination of plasma and the Mn/Al2O3 catalyst obviously enhanced xylene conversion and substantially restrained the formation of by-product organic aerosol (up to 100%), and what is more is that our setup was more efficient than those in other studies. In the meantime, ozone could be effectively converted by the Mn/Al2O3 catalyst; as the main active group with a long period of existence during discharge, ozone adsorbed onto the surface of the catalyst under the action of Mn/Al2O3 and participated in the oxidation of xylene. Mn4+ and the high lattice oxygen content were the reasons for the highest efficiency of 1% Mn.

A metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) photosystem based on covalent organic framework (COF) semiconductors was designed for robust and efficient hydrogen evolution under visible-light irradiation. A maximal H2 evolution rate of 8.42 mmol h-1 g-1 and a turnover frequency of 789.5 h-1 were achieved by using a MIS photosystem prepared by electrostatic self-assembly of polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) insulator-capped Pt nanoparticles (NPs) with the hydrophilic imine-linked TP-COFs having =C=O-H-N= hydrogen-bonding groups. The hot π-electrons in the photoexcited n-type TP-COF semiconductors can be efficiently extracted and tunneled to Pt NPs across an ultrathin PVP insulating layer to reduce protons to H2 . Compared to the Schottky-type counterparts, the COF-based MIS photosystems give a 32-fold-enhanced carrier efficiency, attributed to the combined enhancement of photoexcitation rate, charge separation, and oxidation rate of holes accumulated in the valence band of the TP-COF semiconductor.

A unique type of refractive index (RI) sensor is proposed using a dual Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) structure based on side-hole fibers (SHFs). The MZI structure contains two single-mode fibers (SMFs), two coreless fiber (CLF) sections and an SHF section, which are spliced together in the order of SMF-CLF-SHF-CLF-SMF. The SMFs and the CLFs enable light lead in/out and beam splitting/combining, respectively. As a special feature of the structure, one hole of SHF is exposed for liquid filling and to form two MZIs as well. Three types of sensors are fabricated, namely S1, S2 and S3. Numerical simulation and experimental studies have been conducted to characterize the sensing performance. The RI sensitivity of the S1 using the ∼550 μm long SHF section reaches 14,000 nm/RIU. When a shorter SHF section is used in S2, the detectable RI range is broadened due to larger FSR. When the closed hole of SHF in S3 is filled with liquid to introduce the Vernier effect, the sensitivity can be further enhanced to over 44,000 nm/RIU (i.e., Refractive Index Unit), which corresponds to the detection limit at the level of 1.0 × 10−5 RIU. This sensor design is original and easy to package, which gives it potential for label-free biochemical analyses.

Hot-electron injection is widely used in plasmonic devices. However, it is still lack of a direct theoretical model for performance prediction. This paper measures the surface potential of Au/TiO2 film by Kelvin probe force microscope (KPFM) under various conditions, and then develops a theoretical model for quantitative interpretation. The model can well fit the relationship of surface potential versus light power under various irradiation wavelengths. The study in this paper opens the pathway for quantitative characterization of the efficiency of hot-electron injection and sheds light on improving the plasmonic efficiency of photoelectric conversion and photocatalysis.

Bifunctional electrocatalysts that are cost effective and naturally abundant and have high electroactivities in both the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) in alkaline electrolytes are very desirable. Herein, we describe a general technique to fabricate thin oxide layer coated NiCo alloy nanochain arrays (NCAs) on Ni foam by a hydrothermal reaction and subsequent low-temperature reduction. The hybrid NiCo-300 electrocatalyst shows excellent bifunctional HER and OER activities in overall water electrolysis in an alkaline medium. It shows lower overportential and better electrocatalytic kinetics than pristine NiCo2O4 nanorod arrays (NRAs) and bare NiCo alloy, reaching 10 mA cm−2 and 100 mA cm−2 at low overpotentials of 156 mV and 245 mV in HER and 320 mV and 390 mV in OER, respectively. The thin oxide layer on the NiCo-300 surface produces synergistic effects to enhance the HER and OER activities. In a two-electrode system, the symmetrical electrolyzer needs a cell voltage of 1.688 V for a 10 mA cm−2 water-splitting current and exhibits good long-term stability. The results reveal a facile way to fabricate nanostructured transition metal alloys with thin oxide coatings as highly efficient bifunctional electrocatalysts promising for overall water electrolysis.

The plasma-catalytic oxidation of methane (CH4) is a potential reaction for controlling CH4 emissions at low temperatures. However, the mechanism of the CH4 plasma-catalytic oxidation is still unknown, which inhibits the further optimization of the oxidation process. Herein, a CH4 oxidation mechanism over an Au/γ-Al2O3 catalyst was proposed based on our experimental findings. CH4 is first decomposed to CH3 and H by the discharge, and a fraction of the CH3 is adsorbed on γ-Al2O3 surface for deep oxidation. The oxygen atoms produced by the discharge react with H2O to yield surface reactive OH groups that contribute to the CH3 oxidation. Oxygen atoms also promote the release of H2O from the surfaces of the γ-Al2O3 and Au/γ-Al2O3 and especially promote CO2 desorption from the surface of the Au/γ-Al2O3. When γ-Al2O3 was used as the catalyst, the CO2 selectivity was only 15 vol.%, and the CH4 conversion decreased after 7 h of plasma-catalytic oxidation. In contrast, when Au/γ-Al2O3 was used, the CO2 selectivity was 80 vol.%, long-term CH4 conversion was obtained. Experimental results revealed that Au was beneficial for the decomposition of surface carbonate species into gaseous CO2, whereas the carbonate species accumulated on γ-Al2O3 when Au was absent.

This paper presents an original design for a volume refractive index (RI) sensor for cell concentration detection based on the unique resonant optical tunneling effect (ROTE). In this design, the solution sample is introduced into the ROTE resonant cavity, whose reflection spectrum presents a large shift of its resonant dip in response to the tiny change of the solution RI. Performance calibration using the polystyrene particle solution indicates that the sensitivity is 19,000 nm/RIU and the total Q factor is 620. Experiments with hepatoma cells have obtained sensitivity values as high as 2.53 nm/(amol/ml) and a detection limit of 1.2 × 105 cells/ml. Compared with previously reported optical cell sensors, this original work implements the ROTE mechanism for the first time and presents superior device performance. Thus, the proposed design has a high potential for use in biomedical applications, such as drug discovery, cell research, and medical diagnoses.

Developing acid-resistant magnesium alloys is challenging because of the high chemical reactivity of magnesium in acidic media. In this work, a bio-inspired strategy by taking advantage of the super-hydrophobic effects on lotus leaves is described. The self-layered coating consisting of an inner compact layer and outer Mg-Al layered double hydroxide (LDH) microsheet-based layer prepared hydrothermally exhibits enhanced corrosion resistance in saline solutions but cannot resist corrosion in sulfuric acid. After depositing a fluorocarbon polymer film on the microsheets using a polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) target by magnetron sputtering, a super-hydrophobic surface is created on the magnesium alloy. Compared to the surface modified hydrothermally, the super-hydrophobic surface provides better corrosion protection in H2SO4 due to trapped air pockets in the microsheet array. The dual process offers a promising means to mitigate corrosion of magnesium alloys in acidic media.

Although silicon (Si) is regarded as one of promising anode materials in next-generation lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) due to the high specific capacity, commercial application is stifled by the large volume effect and small electric conductivity. Using rice husk (RH) biomass as nano Si source (RH-Nano Si), here we designed and fabricated the three-dimensional (3D) carbon-hybridized nano-Si hierarchical architecture composite (RH-Nano Si@C/CNT) via assembling Si with CNT by the self-electrostatic route, reinforcing by hydrothermal treating in a glucose solution, and calcination in Ar. In RH-Nano Si@C/CNT, the Si nanoparticles are anchored on the 3D conductive CNT network by the glucose-derived carbon through welding and coating, thus providing enhanced electrical contact and high structural integrity. As anode materials, RH-Nano Si@C/CNT exhibits improved rate capability and prolonged cycling stability compared to Si and CNT self-electrostatic sample. Boasting a high reversible capacity of 989.5 mAh g−1 at 0.5C (1C = 4.2 A g−1) and 345 mAh g−1 at 3C as well as low capacity decay of 0.035% per cycles after 1000 cycles, RH-Nano Si@C/CNT produced by this technique is promising as anodes in LIBs.

Pt-free metal carbide electrocatalysts with high activity are highly desirable for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) in economical and large-scale water splitting. However, pure-phase carbides suffer from mismatching hydrogen adsorption/desorption kinetics. Herein, Mo2C and VC nanoparticles are embedded in a three-dimensional (3D) graphitic carbon network (Mo2C/VC@C) via phase separation of V2MoO8 with NaHCO3 as the carbon source in a magnesiothermic reduction process. The Mo2C/VC heterojunction with abundant interfacial area and exposed active sites not only lead to moderate hydrogen adsorption energy and enhanced deasorption kinetics, but also facilitate efficient electron transfer. Moreover, the 3D carbon network provides high conductivity and structural support. The Mo2C/VC@C catalyst exhibits a low overpotential of 122 mV at a current density of 10 mV cm−2 with a small Tafel slope of 43.8 mV dec−1 in addition to outstanding stability for over 10,000 cycles. Density-functional theory calculations reveal that the heterointerface of Mo2C/VC adjusts the electronic structures of Mo2C and VC and lowers the binding energy with hydrogen to enhance the HER performance. The concept, synthesis method, and materials properties described here provide insights into future development of high-efficiency HER catalysts for commercial water splitting.

Heterostructured semiconductor photocatalysts are desirable for applications such as purification of pollutants and water splitting due to the enhanced charge separation. In this work, porous TiO2 nanotube arrays loaded with MgTiO3 nanoparticles (MgTiO3/P-TiO2 NTAs) are prepared hydrothermally by anodization of TiO2 NTAs in the magnesium acetate (Mg(AC)2) solution. The photocatalytic (PC) activity of MgTiO3/P-TiO2 NTAs evaluated by monitoring the degradation of methyl blue (MB) reveals that the effectiveness is related to the thickness of MgTiO3 layer on TiO2. The best PC activity is observed from the MgTiO3/P-TiO2 NTAs hydrothermally treated at 200 °C for 1 h, the degradation rate is twice that of pristine anatase TiO2 NTAs and the transient photocurrent is three times higher. The heterostructured MgTiO3/P-TiO2 NTAs with good PC characteristics have large potential in photoelectrochemical (PEC) water decomposition and solar cell applications.

Highly ordered porous N-doped TiO2 nanotubes arrays (N-TiO2 NTAs) are produced via reverse oxidation of porous TiN NTAs in air atmosphere. The band gap of produced porous N-TiO2 NTAs was reduced from 3.04 eV for TiO2 NTAs to 2.94 eV. Photocatalytic (PC) investigations indicate that the porous N-TiO2 NTAs exhibit three times larger visible light PC kinetic rate constant than that of anatase TiO2 NTAs as a result of the enhanced visible light activity and the large surface area. The results demonstrate that reverse oxidation of nitride is an applicable method for the preparation of nitrogen doping oxide and could be potential using for the fabrication of other carbon or sulfur doped oxide by oxidation of corresponding carbide and sulfide for high efficient visible light photocatalyst.

Support vector machine (SVM) is a powerful cognitive and learning algorithm in the domain of pattern recognition and image classification. However, the generalization ability of SVM is limited when processing classification of high-resolution remote sensing images. One chief reason for this is that the Euclidean distance-based distance matrix in traditional SVM treats different samples equally and overlooks the global distribution of samples. To construct a more effective SVM-based classification method, this paper proposes a multi-scale Mahalanobis kernel-based SVM classifier. In this new method, we first introduce a Mahalanobis distance kernel to improve the global cognitive learning ability of SVM. Then, the Mahalanobis distance kernel is embedded to the multi-scale kernel learning (MSKL) to construct a novel multi-scale Mahalanobis kernel, in which the parameters are optimized by a bio-inspired algorithm, named differential evolution. Finally, the new method is extended to the classification of high-resolution remote sensing images based on the spatial-spectral features. The comparison experiments of five public UCI datasets and two high-resolution remote sensing images verify that the Mahalanobis distance-based method can obtain more accurate classification results than that of the Euclidean distance-based method. In addition, the proposed method produced the best classification results in all the experiments. The global cognitive learning ability of Mahalanobis distance-based method is stronger than that of the Euclidean distance-based method. In addition, this study indicates that the optimized MSKL are potential for the interpretation and understanding of complicated high-resolution remote sensing scene.

In the proposed network, the features were first extracted from the gonioscopically obtained anterior segment photographs using the densely-connected high-resolution network. Then the useful information is further strengthened using the hybrid attention module to improve the classification accuracy. Between October 30, 2020, and January 30, 2021, a total of 146 participants underwent glaucoma screening. One thousand seven hundred eighty original images of the ACA were obtained with the gonioscope and slit lamp microscope. After data augmentation, 4457 images are used for the training and validation of the HahrNet, and 497 images are used to evaluate our algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed HahrNet exhibits a good performance of 96.2% accuracy, 99.0% specificity, 96.4% sensitivity, and 0.996 area under the curve (AUC) in classifying the ACA test dataset. Compared with several deep learning-based classification methods and nine human readers of different levels, the HahrNet achieves better or more competitive performance in terms of accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity. Indeed, the proposed ACA classification method will provide an automatic and accurate technology for the grading of glaucoma.