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Electroplating Nickel-Molybdenum (Ni-Mo) coatings with superior corrosion and wear resistance has remained a challenge in materials sciences and engineering. Cracks caused by excessive Mo content and hydrogen evolution reaction during electroplated process are still abounded, resulting in properties degradation. Here, we develop a facile approach to produce crack-free Ni-Mo coatings with excellent properties by using ultrasound-assisted pulse electrodeposition. Effect of current density on microstructure, chemical composition, microhardness, corrosion and wear resistance of Ni-Mo coatings is systematically investigated. With the increase in current density, Mo content increases, grain size decreases and Ni-Mo coatings change from colony-like to cauliflower type morphology. The higher Mo content and smaller gain size enhance the microhardness and endow Ni-Mo coatings with superior corrosion resistance for electrochemical tests in 0.5 M H2SO4 solution. The higher microhardness improves the wear resistance of Ni-Mo coatings in tribological tests sliding against GCr15 steel ball under dry sliding condition.

A novel biochar, whose precursor is popped rice, was produced to remove oil pollution in water. Popped rice biochar is characteristic with large pores. When popped rice was carbonized at 300 °C, its oil absorption capacity for paraffin oil is up to 10.88 ± 0.51 g/g, being much higher than that of the original popped rice (4.03 ± 0.39 g/g). In order to improve the oil-water separation property of popped rice biochar to absorb oil selectively, epoxy resin was used as a binder to make superhydrophobic SiO2 coated on the surface of popped rice biochar. The water contact angle of superhydrophobic SiO2 / popped rice biochar is 153 ± 0.9°, and it has good oil-absorption capacity with low water-absorption ratio. As the oil-absorption material is environmentally friendly, it will be a good select for the removal of oil pollution.

Objective: Spectral power analysis plays a predominant role in electroencephalogram-based emotional recognition. It can reflect activity differences among multiple brain regions. In addition to activation difference, different emotions also involve different large-scale network during related information processing. In this paper, both information propagation patterns and activation difference in the brain were fused to improve the performance of emotional recognition. Methods: We constructed emotion-related brain networks with phase locking value and adopted a multiple feature fusion approach to combine the compensative activation and connection information for emotion recognition. Results: Recognition results on three public emotional databases demonstrated that the combined features are superior to either single feature based on power distribution or network character. Furthermore, the conducted feature fusion analysis revealed the common characters between activation and connection patterns involved in the positive, neutral, and negative emotions for information processing. Significance: The proposed feasible combination of both information propagation patterns and activation difference in the brain is meaningful for developing the effective human–computer interaction systems by adapting to human emotions in the real world applications.

Coatings with low friction coefficient and excellent anti-wear and anticorrosion performances are of great interest for fundamental research and practical applications. In the present study, Cobalt–nickel–phosphorus/graphene oxide (Co–Ni–P/GO) composite coating is prepared by a pulse electrodeposition method. Effect of the embedded GO sheets on the microstructures, microhardness, and electrochemical and tribological behaviors of the Co–Ni–P/GO composite coating are researched in detail. The results reveal that the co-deposition of GO sheets significantly improves the microhardness of the as-prepared Co–Ni–P/GO composite coating and changes the morphology of the Co–Ni–P coating from hemispheric structure to nodule structure with smaller globular particles for the Co–Ni–P/GO composite coating. In addition, friction and wear tests show that the incorporation of GO sheets endows the Co–Ni–P/GO composite coating with remarkable friction reduction and improved wear resistance. Electrochemical corrosion tests demonstrate that the Co–Ni–P/GO composite coating possesses better corrosion resistance than the Co–Ni–P coating.

Superhydrophobic surfaces possess low mechanical strength, and can be easily contaminated by fluids with low surface tension, such as oil, this hinders their practical applications. In this study, fluorinated epoxy was prepared through the thiol-ene click reaction at first. The superhydrophobic surface with high oil-repellency was prepared by the addition of unmodified nano-SiO2 and micron-SiO2 to the fluorinated epoxy. The effect of the ratio of micro- and nano-silica particles on the morphology and wettability of the coating was investigated. It was shown that a re-entrant structure appears and FEP-S coating has good liquid repellency when the amounts of nano-SiO2 and micro-SiO2 are equal. The contact angles of the FEP-S coating (coating with the best liquid repellent performance) for water, glycerol, ethylene glycol, and diiodomethane were 158.6° ± 1.1°, 152.4° ± 0.9°, 153.4° ± 1.3°, and 140.7° ± 0.9°, respectively. In addition, the superhydrophobic coatings possess excellent mechanical and chemical durability, excellent performance in self-cleaning, corrosion resistance, and anti-icing properties. The preparation method of superhydrophobic coating is relatively simple, therefore, it has a wide range of applications and can also be applied to various substrates.

Rapid tests for pathogen identification and spread assessment are critical for infectious disease control and prevention. The control of viral outbreaks requires a nucleic acid diagnostic test that is sensitive and simple and delivers fast and reliable results. Here, we report a one-pot direct reverse transcript loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP) assay of SARS-CoV-2 based on a lateral flow assay in clinical samples. The entire contiguous sample-to-answer workflow takes less than 40 min from a clinical swab sample to a diagnostic result without professional instruments and technicians. The assay achieved an accuracy of 100% in 12 synthetic and 12 clinical samples compared to the data from PCR-based assays. We anticipate that our method will provide a universal platform for rapid and point-of-care detection of emerging infectious diseases.

Background: Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a complex, heritable, and devastating psychiatric disorder. Mutations in the members of ABC transporters have been associated with psychiatric illnesses. Aims: In this study, we investigated whether 9 SNPs in ABCB1 (rs6946119, rs28401781, rs4148739, and rs3747802), ABCB6 (rs1109866, rs1109867, rs3731885, and rs3755047), and ABCG1 (rs182694) contribute to the risk of SCZ in a Han Chinese population. Methods: We conducted a case-control study in a Han Chinese population, involving 1,034 SCZ patients and 1,034 unrelated healthy controls to genotype 9 SNPs. Results: The analysis demonstrated that rs182694 of ABCG1 was significantly different between SCZ patients and controls as to allele (rs182694: p = 0.0070, χ2 = 7.27) and genotype frequencies (rs182694: p = 0.0013, χ2 = 13.35). Conclusions: Our findings support an association between ABCG1 polymorphism and SCZ in a Han Chinese population.

Partial directed coherence (PDC), which is capable of estimating directed brain networks in the frequency domain, has been widely used in various physiological recordings such as electroencephalograms (EEGs) and functional magnetic resonance imaging. However, clinical data from EEGs are inevitably contaminated with unexpected outlier artifacts. This will result in biased networks, which are different from the original physiological mechanism because of the L2 norm structure utilized in PDC to estimate the directed links. In this work, we define a new PDC model in the Lp norm (p ≤ 1) space to restrict outlier influence and use a feasible iteration procedure to solve this model for directed network construction. The quantitative evaluation using a predefined simulation network demonstrates that Lp-PDC is more consistent with the predefined networks than LS-PDC and Lasso-PDC under various simulated outlier conditions. Applying the Lp-PDC model to resting-state EEGs with ocular artifacts also show that the proposed PDC can effectively restrict the ocular artifacts to recover the networks, which is also more consistent with the physiological basis. Both simulation and real-life EEG applications demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed PDC in suppressing the influence of outliers in EEG signals, and the proposed Lp-PDC may be helpful to capture reliable causal relationships for related studies contaminated with outlier artifacts.

Granger analysis (GA) is widely used to construct directed brain networks based on various physiological recordings, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, and electroencephalogram (EEG). However, in real applications, EEGs are inevitably contaminated by unexpected artifacts that may distort the networks because of the L2 norm structure utilized in GAs when estimating directed links. Compared with the L2 norm, the Lp ( ${p} \le \mathsf {1}$ ) norm can compress outlier effects. In this paper, an extended GA is constructed by applying the Lp ( ${p} \le \mathsf {1}$ ) norm strategy to estimate robust causalities under outlier conditions, and a feasible iteration procedure is utilized to solve the new GA model. A quantitative evaluation using a predefined simulation network demonstrates smaller bias errors and higher linkage consistence for the Lp ( ${p} = \mathsf {1.0}$ , 0.8, 0.6, 0.4, 0.2) -GAs compared with both the Lasso- and L2-GAs under various simulated outlier conditions. Applications in resting-state EEGs that contain ocular artifacts also show that the proposed GA can effectively compress the ocular outlier influence and recover the reliable networks. The proposed Lp-GA may be helpful in capturing the reliable network structure when EEGs are contaminated with artifacts in related studies.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a common and complex mental disorder. Recent studies found that genetic variants located in GRIK4, which encoded glutamate ionotropic receptor kainate type subunit 4, was associated with the MDD. In this study, we intended to investigate whether GRIK4 gene was associated with MDD. So five single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were selected and genotyped (rs79526501, rs11218016, rs4582985, rs6589847, rs56275759) in 568 MDD patients and 846 healthy controls from Chinese Han population. The results showed that rs56275759 demonstrated statistically significant differences between MDD patients and control subjects both in allelic frequencies (p value = 0.011) and genotypic frequencies (p value = 0.029). Rs4582985 was excluded from the further analysis for its deviation from the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Strong linkage disequilibrium (LD) was found among rs11218016, rs6589847 and rs56275759, and this block was significantly associated with MDD. In summary, our results firstly indicated that rs56275759 of GRIK4 gene might be associated with MDD in Chinese Han population.

A potential new quenchant - glycerol solution was developed and its quenching characteristics were evaluated by comparing with the traditional water, oil and polymer - PAG quenchants. Their cooling rate curve, hardening power, and quenching crack resistance were tested, and then the cooling mechanism of the glycerol solution was discussed by analyzing its quenching severity and heat transfer coefficient. Results show that the cooling characteristics of the glycerol solution are largely affected by its concentration. The increase of the concentration leads to a serious decrease of the cooling rate avoiding the pearlite transformation region. The 5 mass% glycerol solution has high quenching severity and combines the advantages of water and PAG, behaving a high CRmax (the maximum cooling rate) and a low CR300 (the cooling rate at 300 °C). The 5 mass% glycerol solution has superior quenching performance including better hardening power than PAG and higher cracking resistance than water. The excellent quenching properties of the 5 mass% glycerol solution are due to its high heat transfer coefficient (h) during the high temperature zone and its low h during the low temperature zone.

In this work, we have presented a detailed study on the effect of shot peening on anodization of medium carbon steel. Anodization has been conducted on both non-shot-peened and shot-peened steel. The results show that shot peening procedure facilitates the subsequent anodization significantly. The mechanism for promoting anodization by shot peening has been discussed. After anodization, the shot-peened steel forms an amorphous α-Fe2O3 film with a geometric pattern. More importantly, the α-Fe2O3 film and the shot-peened layer constitute an anodized shot-peened layer, which exhibits a multi-scale structure. Due to this multi-scale structure, the anodized shot-peened layer shows a controllable wettability. It can be used as a hydrophilic or a hydrophobic coating.

Schizophrenia is a severe and complex mental disorder with high heritability. There is evidence that mutations in the gene of Nmethyl-d-aspartate-type glutamate receptors (NMDAR) are associated with schizophrenia. GRIN2B encodes a subunit of NMDARs, and has been identified as a candidate gene for many psychiatric disorders, especially schizophrenia. In this study, we investigated whether single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in GRIN2B were associated with schizophrenia. Four SNPs (rs890, rs1806191, rs219872, rs172677) were genotyped in 752 schizophrenic patients and 846 healthy controls of the Chinese Han population. Our results indicate differences in allele and genotype frequencies of rs890 between case and control. These results were assessed by adapting different genetic models (codominant, dominant, recessive, overdominant, log-additive models). After controlling for confounding factors including sex and age, rs890 remained associated with schizophrenia. In addition, rs890 and rs1806191 were found to form a haplotype associated with schizophrenia. In summary, our results indicate that the GRIN2B SNP rs890 might be associated with schizophrenia in the Chinese Han population.

This study was intended to ascertain whether SNPs in dopaminergic and serotoninergic pathway genes SLC6A2, SLC6A3 and DRD2 are associated with schizophrenia in Han Chinese people. We conducted a case-control study by genotyping 7 SNPs of the three genes in 1034 schizophrenia patients and 1034 controls. No significant difference in the allelic or genotypic frequency was detected between cases and controls despite one positive haplotype (rs1362621-rs2242446-rs5564). Stratified analysis of gender and gene-gene interaction analysis showed no positive results. In summary, our study denies the major role of these SNPs within the three genes for schizophrenia in Han Chinese.

Background Cognitive processes involve information integration among multiple encephalic regions, which can be measured by causal networks. However, the estimation of causal networks by means of some traditional methods with the least square will lead to distorted networks because of the unexpected outlier noise and the small number of signal samples in real applications. New method In this work, we adopted Bayesian inference to estimate parameters in a multivariate autoregression model (MVAR), to restrain the influence of outliers. Results Through the simulation study, we observed that our proposed method can efficiently suppress outlier influence and shows stable performance when sample sizes become small. Application to real motor imagery functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) also revealed that the proposed approach can capture the inherent hemispheric lateralization of motor imagery even with a small number of fMRI samples. Comparison with existing methods We compared our proposed Bayesian-based Granger analysis with traditional Granger causality analysis. Conclusions The analyses conducted in the current work demonstrate the robustness of Bayesian-based Granger analysis to outlier conditions or physiological signals with small sample sizes.

Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a complex, heritable, and devastating psychiatric disorder. Mutations in the members of ABC transporters have been associated with psychiatric illnesses.In this study, we investigated whether 9 SNPs in ABCB1 (rs6946119, rs28401781, rs4148739, and rs3747802), ABCB6 (rs1109866, rs1109867, rs3731885, and rs3755047), and ABCG1 (rs182694) contribute to the risk of SCZ in a Han Chinese population.We conducted a case-control study in a Han Chinese population, involving 1,034 SCZ patients and 1,034 unrelated healthy controls to genotype 9 SNPs.The analysis demonstrated that rs182694 of ABCG1 was significantly different between SCZ patients and controls as to allele (rs182694: p = 0.0070, χ2 = 7.27) and genotype frequencies (rs182694: p = 0.0013, χ2 = 13.35).Our findings support an association between ABCG1 polymorphism and SCZ in a Han Chinese population.

Artifacts in biomedical signal recordings, such as gene expression, sonar image and electroencephalogram, have a great influence on the related research because the artifacts with large value usually break the neighbor structure in the datasets. However, the conventional graph embedding (GE) used for dimension reduction such as linear discriminant analysis, principle component analysis and locality preserving projections is essentially defined in the L2 norm space and is prone to the presence of artifacts, resulting in biased sub-structural features. In this work, we defined graph embedding in the L1 norm space and used the maximization strategy to solve this model with the aim of restricting the influence of outliers on the dimension reduction of signals. The quantitative evaluation with different outlier conditions demonstrates that an L1 norm-based GE structure can estimate hyperplanes, which are more stable than those of conventional GE-based methods. The applications to a variety of datasets also show that the proposed L1 GE is more robust to outlier influence with higher classification accuracy estimated. The proposed L1 GE may be helpful for capturing reliable mapping information from the datasets that have been contaminated with outliers.

Schizophrenia is a severe and complex mental disorder with high heritability. There is an evidence that metabotropic glutamate receptors (GRM) are associated with schizophrenia. GRM7 has been identified as a candidate gene for many psychiatric disorders especially schizophrenia. In this study, we investigated whether single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in GRM7 were associated with schizophrenia. Four SNPs (rs9814881, rs13353402, rs9870680 and rs1531939) were genotyped in 1034 schizophrenic patients and 1034 healthy controls of Chinese Han origin. The results showed that the two SNPs rs13353402 and rs1531939 demonstrated significant difference between schizophrenic patients and control subjects in allele frequencies (rs13353402: P value=0.0307, rs1531939: P value=0.0328, respectively). Nevertheless, there was no significant discrepancies in genotype distribution. In summary, our results indicate that the GRM7 SNPs rs13353402 and rs1531939 might be associated with schizophrenia in Chinese Han population.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are widely used drugs for major depressive disorder (MDD), although the treatment outcomes vary in different people. The vesicular glutamate transporter 1 coded by SLC17A7 gene has been reported associated with MDD. According to its role in glutamate transmission, it is reasonable to consider it as a potential pharmacogenetic candidate in SSRI treatment. A total of 290 MDD patients who had been taking SSRIs for 6 weeks were recruited. Their genotypes were assessed for the presence of 4 single-nucleotide polymorphisms, which were selected from either the HapMap Chinese ethnic group or the literature report. Treatment effects were evaluated by the change rate of Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression. After the adjustment for the false discovery rate, 1 single-nucleotide polymorphism (rs74174284, false discovery rate; P = 0.032) demonstrated significant association with SSRI treatment response at week 6. Our results suggest that genetic variants in the SLC17A7 gene may be indicators of treatment response in MDD patients treated by SSRIs.

Evidence has indicated that the incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC) among schizophrenia is lower than normal. To explore this potential protective effect, we employed an innovative strategy combining association study with allele-specific expression (ASE) analysis in MCC gene. We first genotyped four polymorphisms within MCC in 312 CRC patients, 270 schizophrenia patients and 270 controls. Using the MassArray technique, we performed ASE measurements in a second sample series consisting of 50 sporadic CRC patients, 50 schizophrenia patients and 52 controls. Rs2227947 showed significant differences between schizophrenia cases and controls, and haplotype analysis reported some significant discrepancies among these three subject groups. ASE values of rs2227948 and rs2227947 presented consistently differences between CRC (or schizophrenia) patients and controls. Of the three groups, highest frequencies of ASE in MCC were concordantly found in CRC group, whereas lowest frequencies of ASE were observed in schizophrenia group. Similar trends were confirmed in both haplotype frequencies and ASE frequencies (i.e. CRC > control > schizophrenia). We provide a first indication that MCC might confer alterative genetic susceptibility to CRC in individuals with schizophrenia promising to shed more light on the relationship between schizophrenia and cancer progression.

Schizophrenia (SZ) and major depressive disorder (MDD) are two common severe mental disorders that have arisen to public awareness in recent years. Serotonin (5-HT) receptors have been implicated in the pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders especially in MDD and SZ. The aim of this study is to explore whether the variants in the 5-HT1A and 5-HT2A gene are susceptible to SZ or MDD in the Chinese Han population. Five SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms) (rs1364043, rs10042486, rs6313, rs6311, rs17289304) in these genes were genotyped from 752 SZ patients, 568 MDD patients, and 846 normal controls of Chinese Han origin. The results showed that the 5-HT1A rs10042486 was significantly associated with SZ ( P allele = 0.0369, P genotype = 0.0098). Moreover, the haplotype (C-T) composed of rs10042486 and rs1364043 showed significant difference between SZ cases and healthy controls ( P = 0.0302) while another haplotype (T-G) was significant for MDD ( P = 0.0247). Our study is the first to suggest a positive association of the 5-HT1A gene with SZ in the Han Chinese population.

To investigate the roles of Domain I and Domain II of hepatitis C virus (HCV) 5' untranslated region (UTR) in the translation initiation activity of HCV 5'UTR in different host cell lines.The eukaryotic expression plasmid pCMVNCRLuc (pCN1), in which full-length HCV 5'UTR regulates firefly luciferase expression, was modified by deleting Domain I and the downstream single-stranded sequence (43 bp in total) from the UTR (pCNl-d2), Domain I with the downstream single-stranded sequence and Domain II (118 bp in total) from the UTR (pCNl-d3), or the total UTR (pCNl-d5). The modified plasmids were transfected via liposome into different cell lines with pRL-TK plasmid co-transfected as the normalization control. At 36 h after the transfection, the total cellular RNA was harvested for semi-quantitative RT-PCR, and the relative expression activities of luciferase were assayed with a dual luciferase reporter gene assay system. The translation initiation activities of the truncated HCV 5'UTRs in different translation systems were analyzed.Deletion of Domain I and the downstream single-stranded sequence caused no significant changes of the translational activity of HCV 5'UTR in Hela or C6 cells, but decreased the translational activity by 46% in L-02 cells and increased the translational activity by 46% in 293T cells. Deletion of both Domain I and Domain II resulted in decreased translational activity of HCV 5'UTR by 51% in HeLa cells, but increased the translational activity by 40% in L-02 cells, 60% in C6 cells and 135% in 293T cells.Domain I and Domain II of HCV 5'UTR perform cell type-specific roles in HCV IRES-driven translation initiation.

The SLC6A3 and SLC6A4 genes are members of a class of neurotransmitter transporters for the release, re-uptake and recycling of neurotransmitters in synapses. SLC6A3 and SLC6A4 encode a dopamine transporter and serotonin transporter, respectively. Abnormal expression and genetic polymorphism of SLC6A3 and SLC6A4 genes may increase the risk of developing mental illness, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and aggressive behavior in Alzheimer disease, etc. Nevertheless, association between SLC6A3, SLC6A4 genes polymorphism and schizophrenia patients have not been well studied in Han Chinese people. In this study, we examined whether single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in SLC6A3, SLC6A4 were associated with schizophrenia in Han Chinese people (893 schizophrenia patients and 611 healthy controls). No significant difference in allelic or genotypic frequency was found between schizophrenia patients and healthy controls. No positive linkage disequilibrium (LD) was detected either. No haplotypic distributions were positive. Accordingly, our study suggests that the 10 SNPs within both genes we examined do not play a major role in schizophrenia in the Han Chinese population.

Objective Bipolar disorder (BPD) is a serious and common mental disorder with high heritability. The serotonergic system is known to be implicated in the etiology of the disorder. Tryptophan hydroxylase isoform-2 (TPH2), which controls the synthesis of serotonin in the brain, has been suggested as a candidate gene for BDP. The aim of this study was to examine the association between the polymorphisms in TPH2 and BPD. Methods We conducted a case–control study by genotyping six SNPs (rs10784941, rs1386494, rs2171363, rs4760816, rs1386486, and rs1872824) in 506 bipolar patients and 507 controls of Chinese Han origin. Results rs10784941 was not in the Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium and therefore excluded from further analysis. rs1386486 and rs1872824 showed statistically significant differences between cases and controls in genotype frequencies (rs1386486: p = 0.043351; rs1872824: p = 0.016563), but no association in allele frequencies. Strong LD was found among rs1386494, rs2171363 and rs4760816, but no positive association with BPD was found for haplotypes. Conclusion Our results indicate that in the Han Chinese population TPH2 may be a potential susceptibility gene for bipolar disorder. Further studies are needed to validate this association.