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A simple, reliable, and self-switchable spin-orbit torque (SOT)-induced magnetization switching in a ferromagnetic single layer is needed for the development of next generation fully electrical controllable spintronic devices. In this work, field-free SOT-induced magnetization switching in a CoPt single layer is realized by broken multiple inversion symmetry through simultaneously introducing both oblique sputtering and a vertical composition gradient. A quantitative analysis indicates that multiple inversion asymmetries can produce dynamical bias fields along both

Sepsis is recognized as an inflammation-related syndrome in response to invading pathogens. Many patients suffer from sepsis including transplant recipients. Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is known to trigger sepsis-related organ dysfunction. This study expounded on the possible effect of microRNA (miR)-338-3p in sepsis-induced acute lung injury (ALI). Firstly, human bronchial epithelial cell line 16HBE received LPS treatment to establish the cell models of sepsis-induced ALI. The expression patterns of miR-338-3p, long non-coding RNA OPA-interacting protein 5 antisense transcript 1 (lncRNA OIP5-AS1), and activating transcription factor 4 (ATF4) in 16HBE cells were examined. Afterwards, 16HBE cell viability, the apoptosis rate, and the levels of inflammation and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) were determined to assess the degree of cell injury. We disclosed that LPS treatment triggered 16HBE cell injury, downregulated miR-338-3p, and upregulated OIP5-AS1 and ATF4. miR-338-3p overexpression repressed LPS-induced 16HBE cell injury. miR-338-3p diminished OIP5-AS1 stability via binding to OIP5-AS1 and downregulated OIP5-AS1 expression and OIP5-AS1 can enhance ATF4 mRNA stability and upregulate ATF4 mRNA level. The rescue experiments showed that ATF4 overexpression aggravated LPS-induced 16HBE cell injury. Overall, miR-338-3p overexpression decreased OIP5-AS1 expression and stability and further downregulated ATF4 mRNA level, thereby mitigating LPS-induced 16HBE cell injury.

Electromagnetic wave CT technology, serving as an emerging geophysical method, is an effective way in detecting underground karst caves. In this paper, a numerical model for electromagnetic wave CT detection was established using Finite Difference Time Domain algorithm to interpret the propagation mechanism of electromagnetic wave in karst cave detection. The saturated sands with high porosity are adopted as the filling medium of the cave while the limestone is selected as the surrounding rock in this simulation. Propagation rules obtained from numerical simulation are drawn as follows: (1) when electromagnetic wave propagates inside the karst cave, refraction, reflection, diffraction, and obstacle gain behavior will occur. (2) The refraction phenomenon has relatively more influence on the energy absorption of electromagnetic wave while the disturbance of the waveform is principally attributed to the reflection phenomenon. (3) The influence of the factors such as the type of filling material and water content should be taken into account if the absorption coefficient of karst caves to electromagnetic wave is inconsistent. Furthermore, the tomographic images gained from experiment are interpreted according to the simulation conclusions. It is found that the analysis of tomographic images show general agreement with the previous exploration results, so it is feasible to use electromagnetic wave CT technology in karst cave exploration. The research presented herein aimed to serve as a based theory for analyzing tomography results in the field of karst caves exploration.

We report that the unusual behavior of anomalous Hall effect (AHE) in permalloy (Fe20Ni80, Py) thin film with silicon oxide (SiO2) as an adjacent layer. It is found that sign of AHE changes from positive to negative with decrement in thickness of Py. Through the AHE measurement, we demonstrate that this unusual behavior originates from the interface of Py/SiO2 rather from the structural inversion asymmetry. In the Pt/YIG/Cu/Py/SiO2 multilayer structure with a charge current injected in the Py layer, the information on spin accumulation at the YIG/Cu interface induced by the AHE in Py, can be obtained from the nonlocal voltage measured in the Pt layer. Through the nonlocal measurement, it is found, however, the electrons with same spin for interfacial Py near the SiO2 layer and bulk Py are scattered to the same direction. Hence we can deduce that the sign of spin polarization of the conductivity closely related to the asymmetry in density of states at the Fermi level for interfacial Py and bulk Py should be opposite to each other, which is responsible for the abnormal AHE observed. Our results demonstrate that oxide layer can drive the change of sign of AHE of Py, which provide an alternative way of manipulating the spin-related transport.

Recently antiferromagnetic materials become very attractive due to their new applications in spintronic devices. High-quality single crystal epitaxial ZnxCo1−xO (1 1 1) thin films were grown by co-evaporating Zn and Co and simultaneously oxidizing in oxygen plasma. It is found that the exchange bias fields of Co/as-prepared ZnxCo1−xO bilayers decrease with increasing Zn composition. When as-prepared ZnxCo1−xO layer was annealed in oxygen plasma to remove oxygen vacancies, the exchange bias field of Co/oxygen-plasma-annealed ZnxCo1−xO bilayers can be further enhanced. Moreover, a weak ferromagnetism was observed at 300 K in the as-prepared antiferromagnetic ZnxCo1−xO film with oxygen vacancies, but it did not exist in oxygen-plasma-annealed ZnxCo1−xO film. This indicates that oxygen vacancies can simultaneously weaken the antiferromagnetism but enhance the ferromagnetism of ZnxCo1−xO layer. Therefore, we offer a method of manipulating the antiferromagnetism of ZnxCo1−xO films by changing Zn composition and oxygen vacancies, which is useful for designing antiferromagnetic spintronic devices.

To explore the clinical feature, diagnosis and phenotype of Majeed syndrome.Clinical manifestation, diagnostic process, imaging feature and genetic testing of an ethnic Han Chinese patient with Majeed syndrome were reviewed.The patient, a 3-year-9-month-old boy, had featured psychomotor retardation and developed bone pain from 8 month on. The child had tenderness of the lower limbs and presented with repeatedly joint swelling and pain accompanied by fever. Physical signs included limb muscle weakening, slightly decreased muscle tone, reduced muscle volume and positive Gower sign. High-throughput sequencing revealed that the child has carried compound heterozygous variants of the LPIN2 gene, including c.1966AG and c.2534delG. MRI showed multiple lesions in bilateral knee joints and distal middle tibia presenting as patchy SPAIR high signals with unclear edge, in addition with edema of soft tissue surrounding the right distal femur.Majeed syndrome is characterized by chronic and recurrent multifocal osteomyelitis, congenital dyserythropoietic anemia, and growth retardation. Surrounding muscle tissue of osteomyelitis may also be involved. The syndrome may also affect the central nervous system, resulting in delayed language and motor development. Discovery of multiple pathological variants of the LPIN2 gene suggested that the clinical phenotype of this syndrome may vary between patients to some extent.

Neuroblastoma is a common malignant tumor in children, and patients often have a poor prognosis. Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are involved in the regulation of neuroblastoma progression. However, the regulatory effect of lncRNA differentiation antagonizing nonprotein coding RNA (DANCR) on neuroblastoma is still not clear. The expression levels of DANCR, miR-338-3p and β-1, 4-galactosyltransferase III (B4GALT3) were determined by quantitative real-time PCR. 3-(4, 5-dimethyl-2 thiazolyl)-2, 5-diphenyl-2-H-tetrazolium bromide, flow cytometry and transwell assays were used to evaluate the proliferation, apoptosis, migration and invasion abilities of neuroblastoma cells. Moreover, western blot analysis was performed to assess the levels of B4GALT3 and the proliferation, apoptosis and migration-related proteins. Besides, a dual-luciferase reporter assay was used to verify the interactions among DANCR, miR-338-3p and B4GALT3. Mice xenograft models were used to ascertain the effect of DANCR on neuroblastoma tumor growth in vivo. Our results revealed that DANCR was highly expressed in neuroblastoma tissues and cells, and its silencing impeded the progression of neuroblastoma cells. DANCR could interact with miR-338-3p. Knockdown of miR-338-3p recovered the inhibitory effect of DANCR knockdown on neuroblastoma progression. B4GALT3 was a target of miR-338-3p. B4GALT3 overexpression reversed the suppression effect of DANCR silencing on neuroblastoma progression. In-vivo experiments further confirmed that DANCR silencing inhibited neuroblastoma tumor growth. Our results indicated that DANCR promoted B4GALT3 expression to increase the proliferation, migration and invasion of neuroblastoma cells via sponging miR-338-3p, which provided a theoretical basis for the targeted therapy of neuroblastoma.

To summarize the clinical phenotype and genotype of a Chinese child affected with Mowat-Wilson syndrome (MWS).Clinical data of the patient were collected. The patient was analyzed by whole-exome sequencing (WES) as well as Sanger sequencing.The patient was a male infant with recurrent fever and slow growth. He also had characteristic facies, recurrent spasm, and growth retardation. WES revealed that he has carried a heterozygous nonsense c.2609CG (p.Ser870X) variant of the ZEB2 gene (30% mosaicism). Based on the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics standards and guidelines, the variant was predicted to be pathogenic (PVS1+PS1+PS2+PM2).The c.2609CG variant of the ZEB2 gene probably underlay the MWS in this child. The mosaicism of the variant may explain his mild symptoms.

The design of crystal structures aids the discovery of interesting physical phenomena in organic crystals. In this work, the optimization of the coronene-tetracyanoquinodimethane (TCNQ) structure generates non-degenerate energy levels of spin-up and spin-down electrons after charge transfer, producing spontaneous spin polarization, leading to pronounced ferromagnetism. The deformed crystal lattice can significantly affect the saturation magnetization of organic ferromagnets to present a remarkable magnetoelastic coupling. Furthermore, the magnetic-field-induced lattice shrinkage of the ferromagnetic crystals supports a spin-lattice-interaction-dependent magnetoelastic coupling. This concept of organic magnetoelastic coupling will pave the way for the rapid mechanical control of spin polarization in organic multiferroic magnetoelastic materials.

Bulk spin–orbit torque (SOT) driven memristive switching is demonstrated in perpendicularly magnetized CoPt alloy films by introducing a composition gradient to break the inversion symmetry in the out-of-plane direction. An analog-like magnetization switching consisting of multiple intermediate states can be robustly formed by applying current pulses with different amplitudes or repetition number. The programmable magnetization manipulation is also presented in a continuous manner to simulate the weight update of biology synapses by means of ramped pulses. Furthermore, controllable switching probability dependent on pulse frequency or repetition number is manifested to emulate the integrate-and-fire function of a biological neuron. With the capability to reproduce both functionalities of synapses and neurons in commonly used CoPt films, it will be a promising candidate to advance the SOT-based neuromorphic hardware.

High performance of many spintronic devices strongly depends on the spin-polarized electrical transport, especially the magnetoresistance (MR) in magnetic heterojunctions. However, it has been a great challenge to distinguish the bulk MR and interface MR by transport measurements because the bulk resistance and interface resistance formed a series circuit in magnetic heterojunctions. Here, a unique interface-sensitive rectification MR method is proposed to distinguish the interface MR and bulk MR of nonmagnetic In/GeOx/n-Ge and magnetic Co/GeOx/n-Ge diode-like heterojunctions. It is demonstrated that the low-field “butterfly” hysteresis loop observed only in the conventional MR curve originates from the anisotropic MR of ferromagnetic bulk Co layer, whereas the orbit-related large nonsaturating positive MR contains contributions from both the Schottky interface and bulk Ge substrate. This rectification MR method could be extended to magnetic heterojunctions with asymmetric potential barriers to realize a ...

Rare-earth-free manganese bismuth (MnBi) is a promising candidate as an earth abundant permanent magnet for its large magnetocrystalline anisotropy and high energy density. A facile aqueous solution method was designed to synthesize MnBi@Bi nanoparticles, which exhibits a saturation magnetization of 2.37 emu g−1, the coercivity of 8 kOe at 5 K and superparamagnetism at 300 K. This processing approach eliminates severe synthesis equipment and makes it a versatile scalable strategy for preparing MnBi nanoparticles.

Heterostructures consisting of ferromagnetic metal and antiferromagnetic insulator have exhibited novel properties in interface exchange coupling, magnetoresistance and spin injection due to their fundamental physics of magnetism. However, as compared with bilayer heterostructures, it is very challenging in experiments to prepare single crystal epitaxial ultrathin superlattices consisting of ferromagnetic metal and antiferromagnetic insulator, where the interface exchange coupling, magnetic order, and electrical transport properties are expected to be greatly modulated due to the multiple interfaces and periodical structures. Here we prepared single crystal epitaxial [Co/CoO]n superlattices consisting of ferromagnetic metal Co and antiferromagnetic insulator CoO by molecular beam epitaxy. It is found that the saturation magnetization of [Co 0.6 nm/CoO 1.2 nm]5 superlattice is robust against temperature increase, which only shows a slight decrease of 1.5% from 5 K to 300 K. Moreover, we found that the longitudinal resistivity and anomalous Hall resistivity of [Co/CoO]n superlattices are strongly modulated by the short-period Co/CoO heterostructure, which are quite distinguished from the electrical transport properties of Co bulk ferromagnetic metal. The [Co/CoO]n superlattices provide a new insight into heterostructures consisting of ferromagnetic metal and antiferromagnetic insulator, which are beneficial for designing future spintronics devices.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11434006, 11774199, and 51871112), the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2015CB921502), the 111 ProjectB13029, and the Taishan Scholar Program of Shandong Province. H.Z. was supported by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) during his visit to KAUST. X.X.Z. acknowledges the support from KAUST.