Antifreeze Protein-Inspired Zwitterionic Graphene Oxide Nanosheets for a Photothermal Anti-icing Coating.

Organisms that survive at freezing temperatures produce antifreeze proteins (AFPs) to manage ice nucleation and growth. Inspired by AFPs, a series of synthetic materials have been developed to mimic these proteins in order to avoid the limitations of natural AFPs. Despite their great importance in various antifreeze applications, the relationship between structure and performance of AFP mimics remains unclear, especially whether their molecular charge-specific effects on ice inhibition exist.

A Lionfish-Skin-Inspired Intrinsic Antifouling Coating for Full-Ocean-Depth up to 7730 Meters.

As marine equipment advances from shallow to deep-sea environments, the demand for high-performance antifouling materials continues to increase. The lionfish, a species inhabiting both deep-sea and shallow coral reefs, prevents fouling organism adhesion via its smooth, mucus-covered skin, which contains antimicrobial peptides. Inspired by lionfish skin, this work integrates zwitterionic segments with hydration-based fouling-release properties and the furan oxime ester structure with intrinsic antibacterial activity to develop a silicone-based antifouling coating capable of operating from shallow to deep-sea environments.

Amphiphilic Marine Antifouling Coatings Based on Zwitterion-Modified Silicone Polymers.

Silicone coatings are widely employed in marine antifouling applications due to their low surface energy. However, in static marine environments, pure silicone coatings are ineffective in preventing the adhesion of marine biofilms, which consist of proteins, marine bacteria, and extracellular matrices, ultimately promoting the attachment of macrofouling organisms. To address the limitations in antifouling performance under static conditions, this study introduces a silicone-based antifouling coating modified with zwitterionic polymers.

HCGAN: hierarchical contrast generative adversarial network for unpaired sketch face synthesis.

Transforming optical facial images into sketches while preserving realism and facial features poses a significant challenge. The current methods that rely on paired training data are costly and resource-intensive. Furthermore, they often fail to capture the intricate features of faces, resulting in substandard sketch generation.

Zwitterionic-hydrogel-based sensing system enables real-time ROS monitoring for ultra-long hypothermic cell preservation.

Hypothermic preservation (HP) is highly desired for the maintenance of the viability of living cell specimens, e.g. rare cells in whole-blood samples or therapeutic cells, in an unfrozen state.

Malleable, Ultrastrong Antibacterial Thermosets Enabled by Guanidine Urea Structure.

Dynamic covalent polymers (DCPs) that strike a balance between high performance and rapid reconfiguration have been a challenging task. For this purpose, a solution is proposed in the form of a new dynamic covalent supramolecular motif-guanidine urea structure (GUAs). GUAs contain complex and diverse chemical structures as well as unique bonding characteristics, allowing guanidine urea supramolecular polymers to demonstrate advanced physical properties.

Metal-organic framework (MOF)-based materials for pyroptosis-mediated cancer therapy.

Pyroptosis is regarded as a promising strategy to modulate tumor immune microenvironments for anticancer therapy. Although pyroptosis inducers have been extensively explored in the biomedical field, their drug resistance, off-targeting capacity, and adverse effects do not fulfill the growing demands of therapy. Nowadays, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) with unique structures and facile synthesis/functionalization characteristics have shown great potential in anticancer therapy.

Ag-modified CuO cavity arrays as a SERS-electrochemical dual signal platform for thiram detection.

Rapid and sensitive determination of pesticide residues in fruits and vegetables is critical for human health and ecosystems. This paper used an Ag-modified CuO sphere-cavity array (CuO@Ag) electrode as a thiram SERS/electrochemical dual readout detection platform. Numerous Raman "hotspots" generated by uniformly distributed silver nanoparticles, charge transfer at the CuO@Ag interface, and the formation of Ag-thiram complexes contribute to the significant enhancement of this SERS substrate, which results in excellent SERS performance with an enhancement factor up to 1.

Highly Stretchable, Self-Healing, and Sensitive E-Skins at -78 °C for Polar Exploration.

Ultralow temperature-tolerant electronic skins (e-skins) can endow polar robots with tactile feedback for exploring in extremely cold polar environments. However, it remains a challenge to develop e-skins that enable sensitive touch sensation and self-healing at ultralow temperatures. Herein, we describe the development of a sensitive robotic hand e-skin that can stretch, self-heal, and sense at temperatures as low as -78 °C.

Neuroprotective effects of cordycepin on MPTP-induced Parkinson's disease mice via suppressing PI3K/AKT/mTOR and MAPK-mediated neuroinflammation.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a prevalent progressive and multifactorial neurodegenerative disorder. Cordycepin is known to exhibit antitumor, anti-inflammatory, antioxidative stress, and neuroprotective effects; however, few studies have explored the neuroprotective mechanism of cordycepin in PD. Using a 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP)-induced mouse model, we investigated the impact of cordycepin on PD and its underlying molecular mechanisms.

Design and fabricate freeform holographic optical elements on curved optical surfaces using holographic printing.

Freeform holographic optical elements (HOEs), due to the high degrees of design freedom, can be used to enhance performance of display systems. In this Letter, we propose a method for designing and fabricating freeform HOEs on curved optical surfaces that can be utilized to implement curved augmented reality (AR) displays. In our method, the phase profile of the freeform HOE laminated on a curved surface is first optimized to achieve a good image performance.

Reusable Zwitterionic Porous Organic Polymers for Bilirubin Removal in Serum.

Herein, we report a straightforward strategy to construct reusable, hemocompatible, and highly efficient bilirubin adsorbents by installing zwitterionic modules into a porous organic polymer (POP) for hemoperfusion application. Three types of zwitterions with different amounts are used to evaluate their impacts on the characteristics of POPs, including carboxybetaine methacrylate (CB), sulfobetaine methacrylate (SB), and 2-methacryloyloxyethyl phosphorylcholine (MPC). Results show that zwitterions can improve hemocompatibility, hydrophilicity, and bilirubin uptake of the POP.

Information Theoretic Learning-Enhanced Dual-Generative Adversarial Networks With Causal Representation for Robust OOD Generalization.

Recently, machine/deep learning techniques are achieving remarkable success in a variety of intelligent control and management systems, promising to change the future of artificial intelligence (AI) scenarios. However, they still suffer from some intractable difficulty or limitations for model training, such as the out-of-distribution (OOD) issue, in modern smart manufacturing or intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). In this study, we newly design and introduce a deep generative model framework, which seamlessly incorporates the information theoretic learning (ITL) and causal representation learning (CRL) in a dual-generative adversarial network (Dual-GAN) architecture, aiming to enhance the robust OOD generalization in modern machine learning (ML) paradigms.

Multicity comparative assessment and optimized management path of sustainability of the economy-energy-environment system: A case study of core cities in China's three major economic circles.

Coordinated and stable development of economy-energy-environment (3E) systems represents a long-term strategy for the sustainable development of humankind. Following the research idea of "indicator system construction-3E system evaluation-obstacles identification-optimization management," this article innovatively constructs a multiangle and comparable methodology system for evaluation and optimized management of the 3E system and considers the core cities of three economic circles in China as cases for empirical research. The results show that all the coordination degree levels were of good or high quality, which was at the highest level in the country.

The Association of the Neutrophil-to-Lymphocyte Ratio, Platelet-to-Lymphocyte Ratio, Lymphocyte-to-Monocyte Ratio and Systemic Inflammation Response Index with Short-Term Functional Outcome in Patients with Acute Ischemic Stroke.

Background And Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between functional prognosis and the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR), lymphocyte-to-monocyte ratio (LMR) and systemic inflammatory response index (SIRI) in patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS) at discharge.

Methods: A total of 861 patients with AIS were enrolled between January 2019 and December 2021. Blood cell counts were collected on admission.

Two severe complications post-percutaneous intramyocardial septal radiofrequency ablation in a patient with failed alcohol septal ablation: pulseless electrical activity cardiac arrest and pericardial tamponade-a case report.

Background: Alcohol septal ablation (ASA) can be recommended for patients with drug-refractory hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy (HOCM). Recently, percutaneous intramyocardial septal radiofrequency ablation (PIMSRA) was reported as a safe and effective treatment for HOCM.

Case Summary: We present a case report of pulseless electrical activity (PEA), cardiac arrest, and pericardial tamponade occurring post-PIMSRA.

Zwitterionic microgel preservation platform for circulating tumor cells in whole blood specimen.

The immediate processing of whole blood specimen is required in circulating tumor cell-based liquid biopsy. Reliable blood specimen stabilization towards preserving circulating tumor cells can enable more extensive geographic sharing for precise rare-cell technology, but remains challenging due to the fragility and rarity of circulating tumor cells. Herein, we establish a zwitterionic magnetic microgel platform to stabilize whole blood specimen for long-term hypothermic preservation of model circulating tumor cells.

Visfatin aggravates transverse aortic constriction-induced cardiac remodelling by enhancing macrophage-mediated oxidative stress in mice.

Previous studies have reported that visfatin can regulate macrophage polarisation, which has been demonstrated to participate in cardiac remodelling. The aims of this study were to investigate whether visfatin participates in transverse aortic constriction (TAC)-induced cardiac remodelling by regulating macrophage polarisation. First, TAC surgery and angiotensin II (Ang II) infusion were used to establish a mouse cardiac remodelling model, visfatin expression was measured, and the results showed that TAC surgery or Ang II infusion increased visfatin expression in the serum and heart in mice, and phenylephrine or hydrogen peroxide promoted the release of visfatin from macrophages in vitro.

Faster SCDNet: Real-Time Semantic Segmentation Network with Split Connection and Flexible Dilated Convolution.

Recently, semantic segmentation has been widely applied in various realistic scenarios. Many semantic segmentation backbone networks use various forms of dense connection to improve the efficiency of gradient propagation in the network. They achieve excellent segmentation accuracy but lack inference speed.

Research on sustainable development evaluation and improvement path of resource-based cities based on coupling of emergy and system dynamics.

The evaluation of the sustainable development of resource-based cities is still one of the hotspots in today's social research. Taking Jining, Shandong Province, as the research object, this work combines a relevant emergy evaluation index system with system dynamics, establishes a resource-based city emergy flow system dynamics model, and studies sustainable development path in the next planning year. In the work, the key factors affecting the sustainable development of Jining are obtained through the coupling of regression and SD sensitivity analysis, and some scenarios are set up by combining them with the local 14th Five-year plan.