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Aqueous zinc ion batteries have attracted much attention due to their advantages of higher energy density, low cost and environmental friendliness. Among the commonly used cathode materials for zinc ion batteries, vanadium-based composites have a promising research prospect due to their multiple valence states (V5+, V1+, V3+, V2+) and different structural features, which provide high specific capacity when playing the role of cathode materials for zinc ion batteries. However, vanadium-based composites are limited in the application of zinc-ion batteries due to poor cycling stability and low electrical conductivity. To address this issue, nanoparticles with a larger specific surface area than commercial vanadium pentoxide (V2O3) were prepared in this study using a simple hydrothermal method. Such V2O5 nanoparticles as cathode materials for zinc ion batteries provide an excellent specific capacity of 364 mAh/g at lower current densities and exhibits a high reversible specific capacity of 156 mAh/g at high current densities. After 200 cycles, its capacity can still maintain 85% of the initial capacity, not only provide better cycling stability than commercial V2O5, but also possess higher specific capacity. Based on its simple preparation method and good electrochemical stability, the nanoparticles demonstrate potential applications in negative electrode materials for zinc ion batteries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In simple mechanical events, we can directly perceive causal interactions of the physical objects. Physical cues (especially spatiotemporal features of the display) are found to associate with causal perception. Here, we demonstrate that cues of a completely different domain--"social cues"--also impact the causal perception of "physical" events: The causally ambiguous events are more likely to be perceived as causal if the faces superimposed on the objects change from neutral to fearful. This effect has the following major properties: (a) The effect is caused by social information because it disappears when the faces are inverted or when the expression changes are unreasonable; (b) the social cues are integrated in a temporal window different from physical cues; and (c) the social cues impact the perception process rather than the decision process as the impact also appears in the causality-induced illusion. These findings suggest that the visual system relies on social information to infer the causal structure of the physical world. (Contains 6 figures and 4 footnotes.)

The present study investigates the similarities and differences between professional and student interpreters in their use of self-repairs, in terms of form and motivation, and analyzes the impact of expertise on fluency. To this end, a retrospective interview-based Chinese-to-English consecutive interpreting experiment has been carried out, of which the results are as follows. First, both groups adopt repetition, restart, replacement, rephrasing and delayed repair as repair techniques. Second, repair of errors and appropriateness constitute major motivations for self-repair, and repair for output idiomaticity and repair due to errors in the original speech are also observed, enriching the classification of repair motivations in the C-E consecutive interpreting context. Third, in comparison with the student group, the professional interpreters pay more attention to semantic reproduction and are more proficient in syntactic structure conversion, leading to fewer syntactic error repairs and D-repairs in the professional group. The differences in repair models between the two groups can thus be attributed to their varying capabilities in processing syntactic structures and semantic representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical simplification parameters, labeled as representative of the cognitive load in various processes, have been applied in corpus-based studies on translation universals and interpreting outputs. We speculate that the output of simultaneous interpreting (SI), the extreme situation of language control, might be more simplified than that of consecutive interpreting (CI) due to the high cognitive load. To test this hypothesis, the present study examines the simplification patterns of rendered texts, based on a corpus composed of SI and CI output texts, read-out translated speeches and non-interpreted, original English speeches in three dimensions: information density, lexical repetitiveness and lexical sophistication. The results demonstrate that all of the parameters apply more to CI than to SI, indicating that the CI output is more simplified than the SI output. This pattern of results implies that the cognitive load of CI, if not higher, may be as high as that of SI. The research reported here is the first to compare quantitatively the lexical features of the output of CI versus SI. The counterintuitive results lend support to the modification of the established Effort Model of CI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]