Global assessment of marine plastic exposure risk for oceanic birds.

Plastic pollution is distributed patchily around the world's oceans. Likewise, marine organisms that are vulnerable to plastic ingestion or entanglement have uneven distributions. Understanding where wildlife encounters plastic is crucial for targeting research and mitigation.

Nanoscale Bilayer Mechanical Lithography Using Water as Developer.

Sustainability has become a critical concern in the semiconductor industry as hazardous wastes released during the manufacturing process of semiconductor devices have an adverse impact on human beings and the environment. The use of hazardous solvents in existing fabrication processes also restricts the use of polymer substrates because of their low chemical resistance to such solvents. Here, we demonstrate an environmentally friendly mechanical, bilayer lithography that uses just water for development and lift-off.

Filamentary High-Resolution Electrical Probes for Nanoengineering.

Confining electric fields to a nanoscale region is challenging yet crucial for applications such as high-resolution probing of electrical properties of materials and electric-field manipulation of nanoparticles. State-of-the-art techniques involving atomic force microscopy typically have a lateral resolution limit of tens of nanometers due to limitations in the probe geometry and stray electric fields that extend over space. Engineering the probes is the most direct approach to improving this resolution limit.

Direct Laser Patterning and Phase Transformation of 2D PdSe Films for On-Demand Device Fabrication.

Heterophase homojunction formation in atomically thin 2D layers is of great importance for next-generation nanoelectronics and optoelectronics applications. Technologically challenging, controllable transformation between the semiconducting and metallic phases of transition metal chalcogenides is of particular importance. Here, we demonstrate that controlled laser irradiation can be used to directly ablate PdSe thin films using high power or trigger the local transformation of PdSe into a metallic phase PdSe using lower laser power.

Chemical Vapor Deposition Growth of Two-Dimensional Monolayer Gallium Sulfide Crystals Using Hydrogen Reduction of GaS.

Two-dimensional gallium sulfide (GaS) crystals are synthesized by a simple and efficient ambient pressure chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method using a single-source precursor of GaS. The synthesized GaS structures involve triangular monolayer domains and multilayer flakes with thickness of 1 and 15 nm, respectively. Regions of continuous films of GaS are also achieved with about 0.

High-Performance All 2D-Layered Tin Disulfide: Graphene Photodetecting Transistors with Thickness-Controlled Interface Dynamics.

Tin disulfide crystals with layered two-dimensional (2D) sheets are grown by chemical vapor deposition using a novel precursor approach and integrated into all 2D transistors with graphene (Gr) electrodes. The Gr:SnS:Gr transistors exhibit excellent photodetector response with high detectivity and photoresponsivity. We show that the response of the all 2D photodetectors depends upon charge trapping at the interface and the Schottky barrier modulation.

Revealing Strain-Induced Effects in Ultrathin Heterostructures at the Nanoscale.

Two-dimensional materials are being increasingly studied, particularly for flexible and wearable technologies because of their inherent thickness and flexibility. Crucially, one aspect where our understanding is still limited is on the effect of mechanical strain, not on individual sheets of materials, but when stacked together as heterostructures in devices. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of Kelvin probe microscopy in capturing the influence of uniaxial tensile strain on the band-structures of graphene and WS (mono- and multilayered) based heterostructures at high resolution.

Design parameters for voltage-controllable directed assembly of single nanoparticles.

Techniques to reliably pick-and-place single nanoparticles into functional assemblies are required to incorporate exotic nanoparticles into standard electronic circuits. In this paper we explore the use of electric fields to drive and direct the assembly process, which has the advantage of being able to control the nano-assembly process at the single nanoparticle level. To achieve this, we design an electrostatic gating system, thus enabling a voltage-controllable nanoparticle picking technique.

Repeatedly pairing vagus nerve stimulation with a movement reorganizes primary motor cortex.

Although sensory and motor systems support different functions, both systems exhibit experience-dependent cortical plasticity under similar conditions. If mechanisms regulating cortical plasticity are common to sensory and motor cortices, then methods generating plasticity in sensory cortex should be effective in motor cortex. Repeatedly pairing a tone with a brief period of vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) increases the proportion of primary auditory cortex responding to the paired tone (Engineer ND, Riley JR, Seale JD, Vrana WA, Shetake J, Sudanagunta SP, Borland MS, Kilgard MP.

Discrimination of brief speech sounds is impaired in rats with auditory cortex lesions.

Auditory cortex (AC) lesions impair complex sound discrimination. However, a recent study demonstrated spared performance on an acoustic startle response test of speech discrimination following AC lesions (Floody et al., 2010).

Effects of damage to auditory cortex on the discrimination of speech sounds by rats.

The intensity of a noise-induced startle response can be reduced by the presentation of an otherwise neutral stimulus immediately before the noise ("prepulse inhibition" or PPI). We used a form of PPI to study the effects of damage to auditory cortex on the discrimination of speech sounds by rats. Subjects underwent control surgery or treatment of the auditory cortex with the vasoconstrictor endothelin-1.

Effect of the environment on the dendritic morphology of the rat auditory cortex.

The present study aimed to identify morphological correlates of environment-induced changes at excitatory synapses of the primary auditory cortex (A1). We used the Golgi-Cox stain technique to compare pyramidal cells dendritic properties of Sprague-Dawley rats exposed to different environmental manipulations. Sholl analysis, dendritic length measures, and spine density counts were used to monitor the effects of sensory deafness and an auditory version of environmental enrichment (EE).

Chronic stress induces dendritic atrophy in the rat medial geniculate nucleus: effects on auditory conditioning.

Chronic stress induces dendritic atrophy in the inferior colliculus (IC, auditory mesencephalon) and impairs auditory avoidance conditioning. The aim of this study was to determine in Golgi preparations and in cued fear conditioning whether stress affects other auditory components, like the thalamic medial geniculate nucleus (MG) or the posterior thalamic nucleus (PO), in Sprague-Dawley rats. Chronic restraint stress produced a significant dendritic atrophy in the MG (stress: 407+/-55 microm; control: 808+/-120 microm; p<0.