Table1_Path analysis method in an epidemic model and stability analysis.docx

In this paper, a new method for obtaining the basic reproduction number is proposed, called the path analysis method. Compared with the traditional next-generation method, this method is more convenient and less error-prone. We develop a general model that includes most of the epidemiological characteristics and enumerate all disease transmission paths. The path analysis method is derived by combining the next-generation method and the disease transmission paths. Three typical examples verify the effectiveness and convenience of the method. It is important to note that the path analysis method is only applicable to epidemic models with bilinear incidence rates. The Volterra-type Lyapunov function is given to prove the global stability of the system. The simulations prove the correctness of our conclusions.</p

High-Performance 1 cm² Perovskite-Organic Tandem Solar Cells with a Solvent-Resistant and Thickness-Insensitive Interconnecting Layer

Organic solar cells (OSCs) and perovskite solar cells (PVSCs) are promising candidates for next-generation thin film photovoltaic technologies. The integration of OSCs with PVSCs in tandem devices is now attracting significant attention due to their similar fabrication procedures and the potential to afford a higher device performance. Here, a thickness-insensitive and solvent-resistant interconnecting layer is developed to efficiently connect perovskite and organic subcells with low contact resistance. The resultant perovskite-organic tandem devices maintain high efficiencies over a wide thickness range of the interconnecting layer, from ∼20 nm to ∼50 nm, providing an easily fabricated, solvent-resistant platform to integrate perovskite and organic active layers with low-temperature solution processing techniques. The tandem devices containing an ultrathin PVSC and a typical non-fullerene OSC give a maximum efficiency of 19.2%, which is much higher than those of the single-junction devices. Moreover, highly reproducible 1 cm2 perovskite-organic tandem devices are achieved using the thickness-insensitive and solvent-resistant interconnecting layer, and an efficiency of 17.8% is realized. These 1 cm2 tandem solar cells are used successfully in solar-to-hydrogen systems to afford a solar-to-fuel conversion efficiency of 11.2%. Overall, these advances represent significant progress in the design of ultrathin and facile solution processed perovskite-organic tandem solar cells

High-Performance 1 cm² Perovskite-Organic Tandem Solar Cells with a Solvent-Resistant and Thickness-Insensitive Interconnecting Layer

Organic solar cells (OSCs) and perovskite solar cells (PVSCs) are promising candidates for next-generation thin film photovoltaic technologies. The integration of OSCs with PVSCs in tandem devices is now attracting significant attention due to their similar fabrication procedures and the potential to afford a higher device performance. Here, a thickness-insensitive and solvent-resistant interconnecting layer is developed to efficiently connect perovskite and organic subcells with low contact resistance. The resultant perovskite-organic tandem devices maintain high efficiencies over a wide thickness range of the interconnecting layer, from ∼20 nm to ∼50 nm, providing an easily fabricated, solvent-resistant platform to integrate perovskite and organic active layers with low-temperature solution processing techniques. The tandem devices containing an ultrathin PVSC and a typical non-fullerene OSC give a maximum efficiency of 19.2%, which is much higher than those of the single-junction devices. Moreover, highly reproducible 1 cm2 perovskite-organic tandem devices are achieved using the thickness-insensitive and solvent-resistant interconnecting layer, and an efficiency of 17.8% is realized. These 1 cm2 tandem solar cells are used successfully in solar-to-hydrogen systems to afford a solar-to-fuel conversion efficiency of 11.2%. Overall, these advances represent significant progress in the design of ultrathin and facile solution processed perovskite-organic tandem solar cells

High-Performance 1 cm² Perovskite-Organic Tandem Solar Cells with a Solvent-Resistant and Thickness-Insensitive Interconnecting Layer

Organic solar cells (OSCs) and perovskite solar cells (PVSCs) are promising candidates for next-generation thin film photovoltaic technologies. The integration of OSCs with PVSCs in tandem devices is now attracting significant attention due to their similar fabrication procedures and the potential to afford a higher device performance. Here, a thickness-insensitive and solvent-resistant interconnecting layer is developed to efficiently connect perovskite and organic subcells with low contact resistance. The resultant perovskite-organic tandem devices maintain high efficiencies over a wide thickness range of the interconnecting layer, from ∼20 nm to ∼50 nm, providing an easily fabricated, solvent-resistant platform to integrate perovskite and organic active layers with low-temperature solution processing techniques. The tandem devices containing an ultrathin PVSC and a typical non-fullerene OSC give a maximum efficiency of 19.2%, which is much higher than those of the single-junction devices. Moreover, highly reproducible 1 cm2 perovskite-organic tandem devices are achieved using the thickness-insensitive and solvent-resistant interconnecting layer, and an efficiency of 17.8% is realized. These 1 cm2 tandem solar cells are used successfully in solar-to-hydrogen systems to afford a solar-to-fuel conversion efficiency of 11.2%. Overall, these advances represent significant progress in the design of ultrathin and facile solution processed perovskite-organic tandem solar cells

Sodium glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitor dapagliflozin depressed adiposity and ameliorated hepatic steatosis in high-fat diet induced obese mice

With the increasing obesity prevalence, the rates of obesity-related diseases, including type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), and cardiovascular diseases, have increased dramatically. Dapagliflozin, one of the sodium glucose cotransporter inhibitors, not only exerts hypoglycaemic effects through increasing urinary glucose excretion but alsoreprograms the metabolic system, leading to benefits in metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. In this study, pre-established obese mice on a high-fat diet were given dapagliflozin by gavage for fourweeks. It showed that dapagliflozin can enhance fat utilization and browning of adipose tissue and improve local oxidative stress, thus inhibiting fat accumulation and hepatic steatosis without disturbance in body weight or plasma glycolipid level. Overall, our study highlights the potential clinical application of SGLT2 inhibition in the prevention of obesity and related metabolic diseases, such as insulin resistance, NAFLD, and diabetes.</p

Piezotronic Effect-Augmented Cu_2–<i>x</i>O–BaTiO₃ Sonosensitizers for Multifunctional Cancer Dynamic Therapy

Ultrasound (US)-triggered sonodynamic therapy (SDT) based on semiconductor nanomaterials has attracted considerable attention for cancer therapy. However, most inorganic sonosensitizers suffer from low efficiency due to the rapid recombination of electron–hole pairs. Herein, the Cu2–xO–BaTiO3 piezoelectric heterostructure was fabricated as a sonosensitizer and chemodynamic agent, simultaneously, for improving reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation and cancer therapeutic outcome. Under US irradiation, the Cu2–xO–BaTiO3 heterojunction with a piezotronic effect exhibits high-performance singlet oxygen (1O2) and hydroxyl radical (•OH) generation to enhance SDT. Moreover, it possesses Fenton-like reaction activity to convert endogenous H2O2 into •OH for chemodynamic therapy (CDT). The integration of SDT and CDT substantially boosts ROS generation and cellular mitochondria damage, and the in vitro and in vivo results demonstrate high cytotoxicity and tumor inhibition on murine refractory breast cancer. This work realizes improvement in cancer therapy using piezoelectric heterostructures with piezotronic effects

HPL-ESS: hybrid pseudo-labeling for unsupervised event-based semantic segmentation

Event-based semantic segmentation has gained popularity due to its capability to deal with scenarios under high-speed motion and extreme lighting conditions, which cannot be addressed by conventional RGB cameras. Since it is hard to annotate event data, previous approaches rely on event-to-image reconstruction to obtain pseudo labels for training. However, this will inevitably introduce noise, and learning from noisy pseudo labels, especially when generated from a single source, may reinforce the errors. This drawback is also called confirmation bias in pseudo-labeling. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid pseudo-labeling framework for unsupervised event-based semantic segmentation, HPL-ESS, to alleviate the influence of noisy pseudo labels. Specifically, we first employ a plain unsupervised domain adaptation framework as our baseline, which can generate a set of pseudo labels through self-training. Then, we incorporate offline event-to-image reconstruction into the framework, and obtain another set of pseudo labels by predicting segmentation maps on the reconstructed images. A noisy label learning strategy is designed to mix the two sets of pseudo labels and enhance the quality. Moreover, we propose a soft prototypical alignment (SPA) module to further improve the consistency of target domain features. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on benchmarks (e.g., +5.88% accuracy, +10.32% mIoU on DSEC-Semantic dataset), and even surpasses several supervised methods.</p

HPL-ESS: hybrid pseudo-labeling for unsupervised event-based semantic segmentation

Event-based semantic segmentation has gained popularity due to its capability to deal with scenarios under high-speed motion and extreme lighting conditions, which cannot be addressed by conventional RGB cameras. Since it is hard to annotate event data, previous approaches rely on event-to-image reconstruction to obtain pseudo labels for training. However, this will inevitably introduce noise, and learning from noisy pseudo labels, especially when generated from a single source, may reinforce the errors. This drawback is also called confirmation bias in pseudo-labeling. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid pseudo-labeling framework for unsupervised event-based semantic segmentation, HPL-ESS, to alleviate the influence of noisy pseudo labels. Specifically, we first employ a plain unsupervised domain adaptation framework as our baseline, which can generate a set of pseudo labels through self-training. Then, we incorporate offline event-to-image reconstruction into the framework, and obtain another set of pseudo labels by predicting segmentation maps on the reconstructed images. A noisy label learning strategy is designed to mix the two sets of pseudo labels and enhance the quality. Moreover, we propose a soft prototypical alignment (SPA) module to further improve the consistency of target domain features. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on benchmarks (e.g., +5.88% accuracy, +10.32% mIoU on DSEC-Semantic dataset), and even surpasses several supervised methods.</p

NASR: An Effective Approach for Simultaneous Noise and Artifact Suppression in NMR Spectroscopy

As a powerful tool for biological analysis, especially protein structure and dynamic studies, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy suffers from intrinsic low signal to nose ratio (SNR) and long acquisition time required for multidimensional (<i>n</i>D) experiments. Nonuniform sampling (NUS) can effectively speed up the experiment but often introduces artifacts into the spectrum. In addition to the development of highly sensitive hardware and NMR pulse sequences, data postprocessing is a relative simple and cost-effective method to improve the SNR and suppress the artifacts. In this work, we propose an effective approach for simultaneously suppressing noise and artifacts based on the resampling principle. The method is named NASR for short and tested using one-, two-, and three-dimensional (1D, 2D, and 3D) NMR spectra that were acquired using ether conventional or NUS (spiral and random, for 3D) approaches. The results reveal that the NASR is fast and applicable for improving the quality of 1D to <i>n</i>D NMR spectra with all kinds of sampling schemes

Multiple Immunomodulatory Strategies Based on Targeted Regulation of Proprotein Convertase Subtilisin/Kexin Type 9 and Immune Homeostasis against Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Immunotherapy is the most promising systemic therapy for hepatocellular carcinoma. However, the outcome remains poor. Proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9) plays a role in altering cell-surface protein levels, potentially undermining the efficacy of immunotherapy against tumors. This highlights its potential as a target for antitumor therapy. Herein, CaCO3-based nanoparticles coencapsulated with DOX, an immunogenic cell death (ICD) inducer, and evolocumab was developed to enhanced the efficacy of immunotherapy. The obtained DOX/evolocumab-loaded CaCO3 nanoparticle (named DECP) exhibits a good capacity of acid neutralization and causes ICD of cancer cells. In addition, DECP is able to evaluate the cell-surface level of MHC-I, a biomarker that correlates positively with patients’ overall survival. Upon intravenous injection, DECP accumulates within the tumor site, leading to growth inhibition of hepa1-6 bearing subcutaneous tumors. Specifically, DECP treatment causes augmented ratios of matured dendritic cells, tumor-infiltrating CD8+ T cells and natural killing cells, while concurrently depleting Foxp3+ regulatory T cells. Peritumoral delivery of DECP enhances the immune response of distant tumors and exhibits antitumor effects when combined with intravenous αPD-L1 therapy in a bilateral tumor model. This study presents CaCO3-based nanoparticles with multiple immunomodulatory strategies against hepatocellular carcinoma by targeting PCSK9 inhibition and modulating immune homeostasis in the unfavorable TME