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Semicoke, a coal pyrolysis product, is a cost‐effective and high‐yield precursor for hard carbon used as anode in sodium‐ion batteries (SIBs). However, as a thermoplastic precursor, semicoke inevitably graphitizes during high‐temperature carbonization, so it is not easy to form the hard carbon structure. Herein, we propose an oxidation‐crosslinking strategy to realize fusion‐to‐solid‐state pyrolysis of semicoke. The semicoke is first preoxidized using a modified alkali‐oxygen oxidation method to enrich its surface with carboxyl groups, which are localization points and the cross‐linking reactions occur with citric acid to build the semicoke precursor with homogeneous and abundant ‐C‐(O)–O‐ groups (up to 21 at% oxygen content). The ‐C‐(O)–O‐ groups effectively prevent the rearrangement of carbon microcrystals in semicoke during carbonization, resulting in the formation of an abundant pseudographite structure with larger carbon interlayer spacing and micropores. The optimized semicoke‐based hard carbon shows both a high initial Coulombic efficiency of 81% and a specific capacity of 307 mAh g−1, with low‐voltage plateau capacity increased to 2.5 times, compared to that of the unmodified semicoke carbon. By the combination of detailed discharge curves and in situ X‐ray diffraction analysis, the plateau capacity of semicoke‐based hard carbon is mainly derived from interlayer intercalation of Na+ ion. The proposed oxidation‐crosslinking strategy can contribute to the usage of low‐cost and high‐performance hard carbons in advanced SIBs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a group of disorders that cause chronic inflammation in the intestines, with the primary types including ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. The link between autophagy, a catabolic mechanism in which cells clear protein aggregates and damaged organelles, and intestinal health has been widely studied. Experimental animal studies and human clinical studies have revealed that autophagy is pivotal for intestinal homeostasis maintenance, gut ecology regulation and other aspects. However, few articles have summarized and discussed the pathways by which autophagy improves or exacerbates IBD. Here, we review how autophagy alleviates IBD through the specific genes (e.g., ATG16L1, IRGM, NOD2 and LRRK2), crosstalk of multiple phenotypes with autophagy (e.g., Interaction of autophagy with endoplasmic reticulum stress, intestinal antimicrobial defense and apoptosis) and autophagy-associated signaling pathways. Moreover, we briefly discuss the role of autophagy in colorectal cancer and current status of autophagy-based drug research for IBD. It should be emphasized that autophagy has cell-specific and environment-specific effects on the gut. One of the problems of IBD research is to understand how autophagy plays a role in intestinal tract under specific environmental factors. A better understanding of the mechanism of autophagy in the occurrence and progression of IBD will provide references for the development of therapeutic drugs and disease management for IBD in the future.

Fe‐based sulfate materials have attracted much attention in the cathode of sodium‐ion batteries (SIBs) due to their low cost and high operating voltage, as well as possessing application prospects comparable to hard carbon in the anode based on Fe0/Fe2+/Fe3+ redox properties. However, the poor conductivity and the tendency to agglomerate have limited their further application. Herein, the study constructs a dual‐conductive structure that the Na2.31Fe1.72(SO4)3 particles with amorphous carbon in situ‐coated embedded in ketjen black (KB) conducting carbon networks (NFS/KB) via a solid phase ball‐milling strategy, which effectively enhanced inherent conductivity and electron transfer efficiency among particles of the Fe‐based sulphate. The NFS/KB can provide a reversible capacity of 92 mAh g−1 at 0.1 C and stable cycling stability at high current (85% retention after 500 cycles at 20 C) as cathode of SIBs. Surprisingly, as anode of SIBs, the NFS/KB delivers a rate performance (149 mAh g−1 at 10 C) that is superior to that of hard carbon. Notably, further application of the material to symmetric SIBs also achieves favorable results. This work effectively enhances the performance of Fe‐based sulphate materials in SIBs with a low‐cost carbon modification method, providing a new approach for the low‐cost symmetric SIBs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Multitargeted tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) have been approved as second‐line therapy in refractory sarcoma, prolonging progression‐free survival (PFS) but with short‐lived duration of disease control. Fruquintinib is a TKI that specifically inhibits vascular endothelial growth factor receptor‐1,2,3 with no metabolism by liver enzymes. In this retrospective study, we assessed the efficacy and safety of fruquintinib‐based treatment in patients with refractory sarcoma after developing several lines of TKI resistance. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed the clinical data of patients with refractory sarcoma after they had developed several lines of resistance to TKIs and who received fruquintinib‐based treatment from November 2021 to August 2023. The primary endpoint was the progression‐free survival rate at 4 months (4m‐PFSR). Secondary endpoints were the median PFS, overall survival (OS), objective response rate, disease control rate, and adverse effects (AEs). PFS and OS were estimated using the Kaplan–Meier method. A log‐rank test was used to compare survival curves between different clinical and pathological factors. Cox proportional hazards analysis was performed to identify PFS‐related prognostic factors. Results: We included 124 patients: 56 (45.2%) with osteosarcoma, 28 (22.6%) with Ewing sarcoma, seven (5.6%) with chondrosarcoma, and 33 (26.6%) with soft tissue sarcomas (STS). Only 18 (14.5%) patients received monotherapy with fruquintinib. With a median follow‐up time of 6.8 (interquartile range [IQR], 4.6–9.4) months, 22 (17.7%) patients had partial response and 78 (62.9%) had stable disease. The 4m‐PFSR was 58.4% (95% confidence interval [CI], 49.6%–67.1%). The median PFS and OS were 4.4 (95% CI, 3.9–5.0) months and 11.4 (95% CI, 10.3–12.5) months. In multivariate analysis, a high hazard ratio for progression was associated with target lesions located outside the lung and bone with 1.79 (95% CI, 1.10–2.93; p = 0.020). Eighty‐eight AEs were recorded in 47 (37.9%) patients; the most common were pneumothorax (18/124, 14.5%), diarrhea (8/124, 6.5%), oral mucositis (7/124, 5.6%), and thrombocytopenia (7/124, 5.6%). Conclusions: Fruquintinib may be a potential option for patients with refractory sarcoma after developing several lines of TKI resistance, with a satisfactory efficacy and safety profile in combination therapy. However, the degree of contribution of fruquintinib to results is unclear when combined with other effective substances. Additional prospective trials of fruquintinib should be conducted, especially involving different pathological types and combination regimens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fe‐group nanoalloys are one of the most promising next‐generation anodes for lithium‐ion batteries (LIBs) due to their low cost, high capacity, excellent electrical conductivity, and lithium‐storage capability. However, the difficulties in constructing nanostructures and the tendency for alloy nanoparticles to agglomerate limit their practical application. Herein, a hybrid embedding structure with microporosity–mesoporosity is constructed by using thin‐walled carbon nanotubes (CNT) as the support. Within this structure, ultrasmall FeNi/CoNi alloy nanoparticles (10 nm) are uniformly embedded into the walls of thin‐walled CNTs (FNNT/CNNT). Benefit from this hybrid structure is that the agglomeration of FNNT/CNNT is effectively suppressed, leading to excellent cycling stability and high capacity (596.6 mA h g−1 for FNNT and 557.1 mA h g−1 for CNNT after 300 cycles at 1 A g−1) as anodes for LIBs. In the present method, a reference can be provided for the preparation of metal alloy/carbon nanocomposites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel type of polyimide foams (PIFs) with chemically inserted flexible aliphatic diamine (1,6-diaminohexane (HMDA)) segments was successfully synthesized and characterized in this research. The aliphatic HMDA segments were randomly incorporated in the long chain aromatic imide bonds. The obtained PIFs containing various HMDA contents (0 to 20 mol%) exhibited different morphologies such as lowered density and larger cell diameter (with higher HMDA content), and open cell ratio was increased as well. HMDA rendered flexibility to the copolymer leading to decreased rigidity. Compared to using 4,4′-oxydianiline (ODA) as the sole diamine source, incorporating low cost of HMDA would increase the PIF’s flexibility and improve its processibility while making the production more cost effective. Within some range of compromised thermal and mechanical properties, this proposed method could be feasible for industrial applications.

Haze or cloud always shrouds satellite images, obscuring valuable geographic information for military surveillance, natural calamity surveillance and mineral resource exploration. Satellite image dehazing (SID) provides the possibility for better applications of satellite images. Most of the existing dehazing methods are tailored for natural images and are not very effective for satellite images with non-homogeneous haze since the semantic structure information and inconsistent attenuation are not fully considered. To tackle this problem, this study proposes a hierarchical semantic-guided contextual structure-aware network (SCSNet) for spectral satellite image dehazing. Specifically, a hybrid CNN–Transformer architecture integrated with a hierarchical semantic guidance (HSG) module is presented to learn semantic structure information by synergetically complementing local representation from non-local features. Furthermore, a cross-layer fusion (CLF) module is specially designed to replace the traditional skip connection during the feature decoding stage so as to reinforce the attention to the spatial regions and feature channels with more serious attenuation. The results on the SateHaze1k, RS-Haze, and RSID datasets demonstrated that the proposed SCSNet can achieve effective dehazing and outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constitutive model of materials is one of the most requisite mathematical model in the finite element analysis, which describes the relationships of flow behaviors with strain, strain rate and temperature. In order to construct such constitutive relationships of ultra-high-strength BR1500HS steel at medium and low temperature regions, the true stress-strain data over a wide temperature range of 293–873 K and strain rate range of 0.01–10 s−1 were collected from a series of isothermal uniaxial tensile tests. The experimental results show that stress-strain relationships are highly non-linear and susceptible to three parameters involving temperature, strain and strain rate. By considering the impacts of strain rate and temperature on strain hardening, a modified constitutive model based on Johnson-Cook model was proposed to characterize flow behaviors in medium and low temperature ranges. The predictability of the improved model was also evaluated by the relative error (W(%)$W(\%)$), correlation coefficient (R) and average absolute relative error (AARE). The R-value and AARE-value for modified constitutive model at medium and low temperature regions are 0.9915 & 1.56 % and 0.9570 & 5.39 %, respectively, which indicates that the modified constitutive model can precisely estimate the flow behaviors for BR1500HS steel in the medium and low temperature regions.

In order to research the spatial-temporal change of soil moisture during the critical growth period of summer harvest crops in North China, this paper designs a high-frequency regional soil moisture monitoring experiment, implements the experiment from April 28 to May 21, 2019 in Yongnian District, Hebei, and analyzes the spatial change by Kriging interpolation method based on measured data. The results indicate that: The soil moisture in the eastern part is higher than that in the western part during the critical growth of regional summer harvest crops, the soil moisture of garlic planting area is higher than that of winter wheat; Moisture in 0~20 cm soil layer shows significant dynamic and porphyritic characteristics in time and space, while the moisture in 20~40 cm soil layer is highly similar to that of 40~60 cm soil layer in time and space; The irrigation time during critical growth period of summer harvest crops in Yongnian district is early May, and the regional soil moisture changes slowly after mid-May. The crops enter a mature period. The research results can provide reference for the change of soil moisture in the critical growth period of regional summer harvest crops and the irrigation water management.

Notably, spinel Li2CuTi3O8 with higher theoretical capacity inherits the characteristics of Li4Ti5O12, which is a promising anode material for lithium ion batteries with high energy density. However, the reversible migration of Cu2+ in Li2CuTi3O8 during the discharge process limits the diffusion of Li+, resulting in poor electrochemical performance. Space confinement is a desirable successful strategy to reduce the size of electroactive materials in return for getting improved kinetics and capacity for secondary ion batteries. Here, we develop a strategy by controlling the precursor of Li2CuTi3O8 in the walls of sulfonated polymer nanotubes, and the highly crosslinked copolymer network in the process of pyrolysis caused strong space confinement for the nanoparticles, which effectively prevented the agglomeration of Li2CuTi3O8 during the calcination process. The hybrid porous nanotubes consisting of Li2CuTi3O8 nanoparticles (5–50 nm) embedded in carbon nanotubes exhibit superior performance (402.8 mA h g−1 at 0.2 A g−1, 101 mA h g−1 at 10 A g−1 after 1000 cycles). This work provides a rapid and durable Li2CuTi3O8 electrochemistry, holding great promise in developing a practically viable Li2CuTi3O8 anode and enlightening material engineering in related energy storage and conversion areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]