Effect of Ischemic Preconditioning on Endurance Running Performance in the Heat.

Ischemic preconditioning (IPC) is a strategy that may enhances endurance performance in thermoneutral environments. Exercising in the heat increases thermoregulatory and cardiovascular strain, decreasing endurance performance. The current study aimed to determine whether IPC administration improves endurance performance in the heat.

Acupuncture and moxibustion intervention in functional dyspepsia: Gastric and duodenal regulation.

Functional dyspepsia (FD) is a brain-gut interaction disorder located in the stomach and duodenum, which has complex pathophysiological mechanisms, and there is no effective treatment for FD. Acupuncture and moxibustion have been proven to have definite and significant efficacy on FD. Focusing on the affected area and combined with the potential pathophysiology of FD, here we discuss the possible mechanisms of acupuncture and moxibustion in treating FD to guide future clinical and experimental research.

The effect of ischemic preconditioning on repeated sprint cycling performance: a randomized crossover study.

Background: Ischemic preconditioning (IPC) has been suggested to improve exercise performance by 1-8%. Prior research concerning its impact on short-duration exercises, such as sprints, has been limited and yielded conflicting results. The aim of this study, which included a non-occlusion-based placebo control, was to determine whether IPC improves repeated sprint performance in a manner that accounted for psychophysiological effects.

Bi-modified Cu-Based Catalysts for Acetylene Hydrogenation: Leveraging Dispersion and Hydrogen Spillover.

Removing trace acetylene from the ethylene stream through selective hydrogenation is a crucial process in the production of polymer-grade ethylene. However, achieving high selectivity while maintaining high activity remains a significant challenge, especially for nonprecious metal catalysts. Herein, the trade-off between activity and selectivity is solved by synergizing enhanced dispersion and hydrogen spillover.

Association of lysine pathway metabolites with moyamoya disease.

Background And Objective: Lysine and its pathway metabolites have been identified as novel biomarkers for metabolic and vascular diseases. The role of them in the identification of moyamoya disease (MMD) has not been elucidated. This study aimed to determine the association between lysine pathway metabolites and the presence of MMD.

miR-10a induces inflammatory responses in epileptic hippocampal neurons of rats via PI3K/Akt/mTOR signaling pathway.

Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disorder worldwide. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play an important role in the pathogenesis of epilepsy. However, the mechanism of the regulatory effect of miR-10a on epilepsy is unclear.

A highly active catalyst derived from CuO particles for selective hydrogenation of acetylene in large excess ethylene.

The removal of acetylene impurities is indispensable in the production of ethylene. An Ag-promoted Pd catalyst is industrially used to remove acetylene impurities by selective hydrogenation. It is highly desirable to replace Pd with non-precious metals.

Application of blood flow restriction in hypoxic environment augments muscle deoxygenation without compromising repeated sprint exercise performance.

New Findings: What is the central question of this study? Does applying blood flow restriction during the rest periods of repeated sprint exercise in a hypoxic environment lead to greater local hypoxia within exercising muscles without compromising training workload? What is the main finding and its importance? Repeated sprint exercise with blood flow restriction administered during rest periods under systemic hypoxia led to severe local hypoxia within the exercised muscles without a reduction in power output. The maintained power output might be due to elevated neuromuscular activation. Accordingly, the proposed repeated sprint exercise in the current study may be an effective training modality.

An efficient NiCu@C/AlO catalyst for selective hydrogenation of acetylene.

The development of non-noble metal catalysts for selective hydrogenation still remains a challenge. Herein, NiCu@carbon core-shell nanoparticles supported on AlO (NiCu@C/AlO) were prepared, which showed enhanced catalytic performance of acetylene-selective hydrogenation in comparison with NiCu/AlO without carbon encapsulation. In detail, NiCu@C/AlO displayed high ethylene selectivity (>86%) even at an acetylene conversion of 100% and excellent stability (>90 h).

Topical Analgesic Containing Methyl Salicylate and L-Menthol Accelerates Heat Loss During Skin Cooling for Exercise-Induced Hyperthermia.

Hyperthermia impairs physical performance and, when prolonged, results in heat stroke or other illnesses. While extensive research has investigated the effectiveness of various cooling strategies, including cold water immersion and ice-suit, there has been little work focused on overcoming the cutaneous vasoconstriction response to external cold stimulation, which can reduce the effectiveness of these treatments. Over-the-counter (OTC) topical analgesics have been utilized for the treatment of muscle pain for decades; however, to date no research has examined the possibility of taking advantage of their vasodilatory functions in the context of skin cooling.

Hydrogenative Ring-Rearrangement of Furfural to Cyclopentanone over Pd/UiO-66-NO with Tunable Missing-Linker Defects.

Upgrading furfural (FAL) to cyclopentanone (CPO) is of great importance for the synthesis of high-value chemicals and biomass utilization. The hydrogenative ring-rearrangement of FAL is catalyzed by metal-acid bifunctional catalysts. The Lewis acidity is a key factor in promoting the rearrangement of furan rings and achieving a high selectivity to CPO.

Copper-Based Catalysts for Selective Hydrogenation of Acetylene Derived from Cu(OH).

Replacing precious metals with cheap metals in catalysts is a topic of interest in both industry and academia but challenging. Here, a selective hydrogenation catalyst was prepared by thermal treatment of Cu(OH) nanowires with acetylene-containing gas at 120 °C followed by hydrogen reduction at 150 °C. The characterization by means of transmission electron microscopy observation, X-ray diffraction, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy revealed that two crystallites were present in the resultant catalyst.

Preparation of an Unsupported Copper-Based Catalyst for Selective Hydrogenation of Acetylene from CuO Nanocubes.

Designing cheap, earth-abundant, and nontoxic metal catalysts for acetylene hydrogenation is of pivotal importance, but challenging. Here, a nonprecious metal catalyst for selective hydrogenation of acetylene in excess ethylene was prepared from CuO nanocubes. The preparation includes two steps: (1) thermal treatment in acetylene-containing gas at 160 °C and (2) hydrogen reduction at 180 °C.

Transition Metal Oxodiperoxo Complex Modified Metal-Organic Frameworks as Catalysts for the Selective Oxidation of Cyclohexane.

In this work, a series of modified metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have been prepared by pre- and post-treatment with transition metal oxodiperoxo complexes (MoO(O), WO(O), and KVO(O)). The obtained materials are characterized by XRD, FTIR, SEM, TEM, inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES), and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), as well as by N adsorption/desorption measurement. The characterization results show that transition metal oxodiperoxo complexes are uniformly incorporated into the MOF materials without changing the basic structures.

Adversarial Learning for Joint Optimization of Depth and Ego-Motion.

In recent years, supervised deep learning methods have shown a great promise in dense depth estimation. However, massive high-quality training data are expensive and impractical to acquire. Alternatively, self-supervised learning-based depth estimators can learn the latent transformation from monocular or binocular video sequences by minimizing the photometric warp error between consecutive frames, but they suffer from the scale ambiguity problem or have difficulty in estimating precise pose changes between frames.

Interwoven Molecular Chains Obtained by Ionic Self-Assembly of Two Iron(III) Porphyrins with Opposite and Mismatched Charges.

We report ionic self-assembly of positively charged Fe -tetra(-methyl-4-pyridyl) porphyrin (FeNMePyP) with negatively charged Fe -tetra(4-sulfonatophenyl) porphyrin (FeTPPS), leading to the formation of flower-like nanostructures composed of unprecedented three-dimensional (3D) entangled chains of porphyrin dimers. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations show that the 3D entanglement of porphyrin chains closely correlates to mismatched charges present in porphyrin dimers like [Fe(HO)NMePyP]/[Fe(HO)TPPS] that requires extra interactions or entanglement with neighboring ones to achieve electric neutrality. Interestingly, the interwoven chains bring in excellent thermal stability as evidenced by well maintenance of the flower-like morphology after pyrolysis at 775 °C in argon, which is in good agreement of high-temperature MD simulations.

Construction of 2D/2D BiVO/g-CN nanosheet heterostructures with improved photocatalytic activity.

In this work, a two dimensional (2D)/2D BiVO/g-CN heterostructure with strong interfacial interaction was successfully constructed. The as-prepared BiVO/g-CN heterostructures exhibit distinctly enhanced visible light photocatalytic performance toward the degradation of Rodanmin B (RhB) and water splitting to oxygen (O) as compared to pristine g-CN and BiVO, which can be attributed to the strong interfacial interaction and abundant 2D coupling interfaces, facilitating efficient charge separation. Among the composites with various ratios, the BiVO-10/g-CN sample achieves the optimum photocatalytic activity for the degradation of RhB, and reached 15.

Cost-effective promoter-doped Cu-based bimetallic catalysts for the selective hydrogenation of CH to CH: the effect of the promoter on selectivity and activity.

In order to probe into the effect of the promoter on the selectivity and activity towards C2H4 formation in the selective hydrogenation of C2H2 over cost-effective Cu-based bimetallic catalysts, different metal promoter M-modified Cu catalysts including Ni, Ag, Au, Pt, Pd and Rh have been employed to fully investigate the selective hydrogenation of C2H2 using density functional theory calculations together with microkinetic modeling. The results show that the adsorption ability of C2H2 is far stronger than that of C2H4 on different Cu-based catalysts, which favors the activation and hydrogenation of C2H2. The type of promoter obviously affects the preferable pathway of C2H2 selective hydrogenation, and ultimately alters the selectivity of the products; only on PdCu(211) and AgCu(211) surfaces, the C2H4 desorption pathway is the most favorable for gaseous C2H4 formation, suggesting that the promoter Pd or Ag has good selectivity towards C2H4 formation.

Phase Effect of NiP Hybridized with g-CN for Photocatalytic Hydrogen Generation.

The use of noble metal-free nickel phosphides (NiP) as suitable cocatalysts in photocatalytic hydrogen (H) generation has gained a lot of interest. In this paper, for the first time, three different crystalline phases of nickel phosphides, NiP, NiP, and NiP, were synthesized and then hybridized with g-CN to investigate the phase effect of NiP on photocatalytic H generation. It has been found that all three phases of NiP work as effective cocatalysts for the enhancement of visible light H generation with g-CN.

Disproportionation of hypophosphite and phosphite.

The disproportionation of NaHPO, NaHPO, NaHPO and their mixtures was studied by TG-DSC, XRD and P NMR. NaHPO reacted in three steps to yield PH, NaPO and H by disproportionation and oxidation with water released in condensation reactions. In the first step at 310 °C NaHPO reacted to yield PH, NaHPO, NaHPO, NaPO and H.

Facile Preparation of Ni2P with a Sulfur-Containing Surface Layer by Low-Temperature Reduction of Ni2P2S6.

Preparation of Ni2P by temperature-programmed reduction (TPR) of a phosphate precursor is challenging because the P-O bond is strong. An alternative approach to synthesizing Ni2P, by reduction of nickel hexathiodiphosphate (Ni2P2S6), is presented. Conversion of Ni2P2S6 into Ni2P occurs at 200-220 °C, a temperature much lower than that required by the conventional TPR method (typically 500 °C).

Carbonization of self-assembled nanoporous hemin with a significantly enhanced activity for the oxygen reduction reaction.

The scarcity and high cost of Pt-based electrocatalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) hinder the practical application of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). It is critical to replace platinum with non-noble metal electrocatalysts (NNMEs). Carbonized metalloporphyrins represent an important class of NNMEs, but most metalloporphyrins are costly and the corresponding NNMEs do not possess a high ORR activity.

Bioinspired superhydrophobic carbonaceous hairy microstructures with strong water adhesion and high gas retaining capability.

Various hydrophobic hairy carbonaceous fibers are obtained by a low-temperature CVD process on catalyst-patterned surface patches which are selectively coated with silica to make the surface superhydrophobic and yet allow strong water adhesion for the "Salvinia effect". The versatility of the functional hairy fiber surfaces is demonstrated with a liquid barrier grid for cell microarray, a gas retaining capability under water/liquid for a membrane-free microfluidic chemical process, and functionalized papillae for cell immobilization with green algae.

Practical approach for macroporous structure embedded microfluidic system and the catalytic microchemical application.

We present a low cost and practical approach to integrate 3D ordered macroporous polyfluoropolyether (PFPE) patterns into a microchannel by a series of porous pattern fabrication processes and subsequent photolithography in a site- and shape-selective manner. The 3D ordered macroporous patterns with high-resolution edges were firstly fabricated by microtransfer molding (μ-TM) of the sacrificial polystyrene (PS) template infiltrated with PFPE as a non-adhesive and solvent-resistant skeletal material. The resulting robust PFPE porous structures with high solvent resistance on a silicon wafer can easily be embedded into the microchannel with the aid of conventional photolithography, leading to a microfluidic system with a built-in microstructure.