Plasmonics Meets Perovskite Photovoltaics: Innovations and Challenges in Boosting Efficiency.

Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have garnered immense attention in recent years due to their outstanding optoelectronic properties and cost-effective fabrication methods, establishing them as promising candidates for next-generation photovoltaic technologies. Among the diverse strategies aimed at enhancing the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of PSCs, the incorporation of plasmonic nanoparticles has emerged as a pioneering approach. This review summarizes the latest research advancements in the utilization of plasmonic nanoparticles to enhance the performance of PSCs.

Emergent Differential Organization of Airway Smooth Muscle Cells on Concave and Convex Tubular Surface.

Airway smooth muscle cells (ASMCs) exist in a form of helical winding bundles within the bronchial airway wall. Such tubular tissue provides cells with considerable curvature as a physical constraint, which is widely thought as an important determinant of cell behaviors. However, this process is difficult to mimic in the conventional planar cell culture system.

Inflammatory mediators mediate airway smooth muscle contraction through a G protein-coupled receptor-transmembrane protein 16A-voltage-dependent Ca channel axis and contribute to bronchial hyperresponsiveness in asthma.

Background: Allergic inflammation has long been implicated in asthmatic hyperresponsiveness of airway smooth muscle (ASM), but its underlying mechanism remains incompletely understood. Serving as G protein-coupled receptor agonists, several inflammatory mediators can induce membrane depolarization, contract ASM, and augment cholinergic contractile response. We hypothesized that the signal cascade integrating on membrane depolarization by the mediators might involve asthmatic hyperresponsiveness.

Evaluation of pharmacological relaxation effect of the natural product naringin on cultured airway smooth muscle cells and ovalbumin-induced asthma Balb/c mice.

Asthma has become a common chronic respiratory disease worldwide and its prevalence is predicted to continue increasing in the next decade, particularly in developing countries. A key component in asthma therapy is to alleviate the excessive bronchial airway narrowing ultimately due to airway smooth muscle contraction, which is often facilitated by a smooth muscle relaxant, such as the β-adrenergic agonists. Recently, bitter taste receptor (TAS2R) agonists, including saccharin and chloroquine, have been found to potently relax the airway smooth muscle cells (ASMCs) via intracellular Ca signaling.

Distinctive pharmacological differences between liver cancer cell lines HepG2 and Hep3B.

As cellular models for in vitro liver cancer and toxicity studies, HepG2 and Hep3B are the two most frequently used liver cancer cell lines. Because of their similarities they are often treated as the same in experimental studies. However, there are many differences that have been largely over-sighted or ignored between them.

Fibre-matrix interaction in the human annulus fibrosus.

Although the mechanical behaviour of the human annulus fibrosus has been extensively studied, the interaction between the collagen fibres and the ground matrix has not been well understood and is therefore ignored by most constitutive models. The objective of this study is to identify the significance of the fibre-matrix interaction in the human annulus fibrosus by careful investigation of the experimental data, the theoretical constitutive models, and the numerical simulation results in the literature. Based on the experimental results from biaxial and uniaxial tests, it is shown that the mechanical behaviour of the matrix can be well simulated by an incompressible neo-Hookean type model, but the effective stiffness of the matrix depends on fibre stretch ratio, which can only be explained by fibre-matrix interaction.

[LLE-PLS nonlinear modeling method for near infrared spectroscopy and its application].

The traditional near infrared (NIR) spectra modeling algorithm-partial least squares (PLS) can't effectively reflect the nonlinear correlations existing between the near infrared spectra and the chemical or physical properties of samples. Locally linear embedding (LLE) is a newly proposed nonlinear dimension reduction algorithm, which is a kind of manifold learning algorithm. It can find out the intrinsic dimension from high dimensional data effectively, and map the high dimensional input data points to a global low dimensional coordinates while keeping the spatial relations of the adjacent points, i.