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Abstract 2-dimensional (2D) piezoelectric materials have gained significant attention due to their potential applications in flexible energy harvesting and storage devices. Recently, niobium oxide dihalides NbOI2 stands out as a multifunctional anisotropic semiconductor family with an exceptionally high lateral piezoelectric constant (~21.8 pm/V), making it a promising candidate for energy conversion applications. Here we report the experimental observation of anisotropic in-plane piezoelectricity in multilayer NbOI2. Current-voltage relationships reveal a significant piezotronic effect in two typical crystalline orientations. Additionally, cyclic tensile and release experiments demonstrate an intrinsic current output of up to 140 pA when subjected to a tensile strain of 0.51%. A flexible piezoelectric nanogenerator prototype is demonstrated on the human finger and wrist, which opens up new avenues for the development of wearable electronic devices and provides valuable insights for further exploration in this field.

BackgroundPatients with schizophrenia and depressive disorders exhibit abnormalities in perceptual processing. Previous perceptual studies are mainly based on asking participants to fill in a questionnaire， and little research has been undertaken on objective behavior in patients with schizophrenia and depressive disorders.ObjectiveTo explore the behavioral changes in vibrotactile sense among patients with schizophrenia and depressive disorders， so as to enrich relevant findings in objective behavioral research.MethodsFrom March 2021 to September 2023， 33 patients with schizophrenia and 31 patients with depressive disorders in the outpatient and inpatient departments of Beijing Huilongguan Hospital and met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders， fifth edition （DSM-5） diagnostic criteria were enrolled. And another 34 healthy controls were concurrently recruited at Beihang University and Beijing Huilongguan Hospital. Patients with schizophrenia were assessed using Positive and Negative Symptom Scale （PANSS）， and patients with depressive disorders were assessed using Hamilton Depression Scale-17 item （HAMD-17）. The vibrotactile sensitivity of the left hand in all participants was tested in a delay match-to-sample procedure， and the correct rate of vibrotactile delayed discrimination task was compared among the three groups.ResultsCompared with healthy controls， a reduction was found in the correct rates at index finger， middle finger and ring finger in patients with schizophrenia （P0.05）. The average correct rate of vibrotactile sense in schizophrenia group was not significantly correlated with the duration of disease， age of onset， chlorpromazine equivalent doses and PANSS score （r=0.058、0.045、0.114、-0.194， P>0.05）. The average correct rate in depressive group was negatively correlated with age of onset （r=-0.415， P=0.020）， but not significantly correlated with the duration of disease and HAMD-17 score （r=-0.044， 0.142， P>0.05）.ConclusionPatients with schizophrenia and depressive disorders have impaired vibrotactile sense. The vibrotactile sense is impaired in index， middle and ring fingers among patients with schizophrenia， and in thumbs of patients with depressive disorders. Moreover， the impairment in patients with depressive disorders may be related to the age of onset. ［Funded by 2023 Hebei Provincial Graduate Innovation Funding Project （number， CXZZSS2023140）］

A hallmark of working memory (WM) is its limited capacity. While visual and verbal domains of WM are able to store multiple items, the capacity of parametric vibrotactile WM (vtWM) has not yet been established for supra-threshold, one-dimensional sensory vibrotactile frequencies. The present study extends the standard delayed match-to-sample vibrotactile discrimination task to determine the capacity of the vtWM and its cognitive mechanism. Here, by presenting subjects with 2 to 6 vibratory frequencies sequentially in each trial, the present study demonstrates that it is possible to retain about only two vibrotactile frequencies information in vtWM. The results also showed that the capacity of vtWM does not depend on whether sequentially presented vibrotactile frequencies are delivered to the same or to different fingers. At the same time, the rate of correct report depends on sequence length and when in the sequence the stimuli are presented, suggesting the dynamic updating of vtWM similar to that of visual WM., Author(s): Chundi Wang [sup.1] [sup.2] [sup.3] , Hu Deng [sup.2] , Yu Dong [sup.3] , Xuemin Zhang [sup.4] , Da-Hui Wang [sup.3] [sup.5] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.64939.31, 0000 0000 9999 [...]

Abstract Background In response to therapeutic treatments, cancer cells can exhibit a variety of resistance phenotypes including neuroendocrine differentiation (NED). NED is a process by which cancer cells can transdifferentiate into neuroendocrine‐like cells in response to treatments, and is now widely accepted as a key mechanism of acquired therapy resistance. Recent clinical evidence has suggested that non‐small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) can also transform into small cell lung cancer (SCLC) in patients treated with EGFR inhibitors. However, whether chemotherapy induces NED to confer therapy resistance in NSCLC remains unknown. Methods We evaluated whether NSCLC cells can undergo NED in response to chemotherapeutic agents etoposide and cisplatin. By Knock‐down of PRMT5 or pharmacological inhibition of PRMT5 to identify its role in the NED process. Results We observed that both etoposide and cisplatin can induce NED in multiple NSCLC cell lines. Mechanistically, we identified protein arginine methyltransferase 5 (PRMT5) as a critical mediator of chemotherapy‐induced NED. Significantly, the knock‐down of PRMT5 or pharmacological inhibition of PRMT5 suppressed the induction of NED and increased the sensitivity to chemotherapy. Conclusion Taken together, our results suggest that targeting PRMT5 may be explored as a chemosensitization approach by inhibiting chemotherapy‐induced NED.

Accurate and comprehensive reconstruction of in-cylinder combustion process is essential for timely monitoring of engine combustion state. This article developed a method based on the zero-dimensional (0-D) physical model integrated with big data. The traditional 0-D prediction model based on cumulative fuel mass is improved, the factor of in-cylinder temperature is introduced to adjust the heat release rate, which solves the problem of difficulty in calibrating the heat release rate. Then, convolutional neural network-gated recurrent unit (CNN-GRU), as a deep neural network, including a special convolutional layer and a gated recurrent unit (GRU) neural network is designed for the parameters to be calibrated in the model. The 0-D predictive combustion model is constructed by combining the physical model with CNN-GRU, the combustion process is simplified and reconstructed. The fitting results show that the 0-D physical model based on improved cumulative fuel mass approach is an effective method to reflect the heat release law. Under non-calibration conditions, the root mean square error (RMSE) value of peak firing pressure (PFP) based on CNN-GRU prediction model is 0.5862. The prediction model is a promising method to realize online fitting and optimization of combustion process.

The physics of Terahertz (THz) technology is the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum band between the infrared and the microwave band with frequencies of about 0.1 to 30 THz. THz signals have gained adoption in medicine, telecommunications, security monitoring and imaging. THz imaging technology has the advantages of rapid imaging, strong penetration, and harmless to the human body hence widely used in a variety of security environments and has become an alternative technology for X-ray imaging. However, THz is characterized by low resolution of THz images of which noise is an integral factor constituting a defect. Clarity of THz image is therefore essential at various security checkpoints to avoid life’s dangers and treats. In this paper, we propose an efficient and high-performance defect detection model based on RetinaNet to recognize defects from captured images. The strategy of transfer learning is introduced to improve detection performance accuracy, which enhances the average precision (AP) by 19.2%. Contrary to existing THz image detection techniques on image recognition pertaining to the whole region of the image, we adopt a different approach via differential evolution search algorithm for optimization given the small proportion of defect area which improves the AP by 9.9% comparing with the fine-tuned model. For the problem of the lack of defect data samples, image augmentation is adopted to enrich our training samples, which improves the AP by 9.5%. As for the problem of low precision and recall in detecting blurred images, we firstly manually generate clear-blurred image pairs to train a GAN. Then, the blurred images are deblurred using a trained generator. We get 5.5% AP improvement on the testset using our approach. Compared with existing works, the optimized model based on RetinaNet has better detection performance, subsequently, proving the practicability and effectiveness of the proposed method.

The niobium oxide dihalides have recently been identified as a new class of van der Waals materials exhibiting exceptionally large second-order nonlinear optical responses and robust in-plane ferroelectricity. In contrast to second-order nonlinear processes, third-order optical nonlinearities can arise irrespective of whether a crystal lattice is centrosymmetric. Here, we report third harmonic generation (THG) in two-dimensional (2D) transition metal oxide iodides, namely NbOI2 and TaOI2. We observe a comparable THG intensity from both materials. By benchmarking against THG from monolayer WS2, we deduce that the third-order susceptibility is approximately on the same order. THG resonances are revealed at different excitation wavelengths, likely due to enhancement by excitonic states and band edge resonances. The THG intensity increases for material thicknesses up to 30 nm, owing to weak interlayer coupling. After this threshold, it shows saturation or a decrease, due to optical interference effects. Our results establish niobium and tantalum oxide iodides as promising 2D materials for third-order nonlinear optics, with intrinsic in-plane ferroelectricity and thickness-tunable nonlinear efficiency.

Graphical Abstract

G-quadruplex (G4) has been previously observed to be associated with gene expression. In this study, we performed integrative analysis on G4 multi-omics data from in-silicon prediction and ChIP-seq in human genome. Potential G4 sites were classified into three distinguished groups, such as one group of high-confidence G4-forming locations (G4-II) and groups only containing either ChIP-seq detected G4s (G4-I) or predicted G4 motif candidates (G4-III). We explored the associations of different-confidence G4 groups with other epigenetic regulatory elements, including CpG islands, chromatin status, enhancers, super-enhancers, G4 locations compared to the genes, and DNA methylation. Our elastic net regression model revealed that G4 structures could correlate with gene expression in two opposite ways depending on their locations to the genes as well as G4-forming DNA strand. Some transcription factors were identified to be over-represented with G4 emergence. The motif analysis discovered distinct consensus sequences enriched in the G4 feet, the flanking regions of two groups of G4s. We found high GC content in the feet of high-confidence G4s (G4-II) when compared to high TA content in solely predicted G4 feet of G4-III. Overall, we uncovered the comprehensive associations of G4 formations or predictions with other epigenetic and transcriptional elements which potentially coordinate gene transcription.

Clarity of Terahertz image is essential at various security checkpoints to avoid life’s dangers and treats. However, Terahertz images are distorted by noise. Noise is frequently present in digital images during the image collection, coding, delivery, and processing phases. It is extremely difficult to remove noise from digital images without prior knowledge of the noise model. Wavelet transforms have gained popularity as a tool for image denoising. In this paper, we advance a solution to this challenge using Global Threshold selection as well as wavelet transform filters. When compared to denoising Gaussian noise at the same percentage induced, biorthogonal is the most effective denoising filter for salt and pepper noise. As the salt and pepper noise increases from 20% to 60%, the hidden security image as our target varnishes or is overpowered by the induced salt and pepper noise. We discover that despite the fact that the bior 4.4 and sym4.0 wavelet transform filters prove powerful in denoising the image, it is still not clearer and that when an image is tainted by Gaussian noise, wavelet shrinkage denoising is nearly perfect in both bior4.4 and sym 4.0, whereas when the image is tainted by salt & pepper noise, wavelet shrinkage denoising is nearly perfect in both bior4.4 and sym 4.0.

The Global Evaluation of SARS-CoV-2/hCoV-19 Sequences 2 (GESS v2 https://shiny.ph.iu.edu/GESS_v2/) is an updated version of GESS, which has offered a handy query platform to analyze single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) on millions of high coverages and high-quality severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) complete genomes provided by the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID). Including the tools in the first version, the GESS v2 is embedded with new functions, which allow users to search SNVs, given the viral nucleotide or amino acid sequence. The GESS v2 helps users to identify SNVs or SARS-CoV-2 lineages enriched in countries of user’s interest and show the migration path of a selected lineage on a world map during specific time periods chosen by the users. In addition, the GESS v2 can recognize the dynamic variations of newly emerging SNVs in each month to help users monitor SNVs, which will potentially become dominant soon. More importantly, multiple sets of analyzed results about SNVs can be downloaded directly from the GESS v2 by which users can conduct their own independent research. With these significant updates, the GESS v2 will continue to serve as a public open platform for researchers to explore SARS-CoV-2 evolutionary patterns from the perspectives of the prevalence and impact of SNVs.