Revisiting Olivine Phosphate and Blend Cathodes in Lithium Ion Batteries for Electric Vehicles

As electric vehicle market growing fast, lithium ion batteries demand is increasing rapidly. Sufficient battery materials supplies including cathode, anode, electrolyte, additives, et al. are required accordingly. Although layered cathode is welcome in high energy density batteries, it is challenging to balance the high energy density and safety beside cost. As consequence, olivine phosphate cathode is coming to the stage center again along with battery technology development. It is important and necessary to revisit the olivine phosphate cathode to understand and support the development of electric vehicles utilized lithium ion batteries. In addition, blend cathode is a good strategy to tailor and balance cathode property and performance. In this chapter, blend cathode using olivine phosphate cathode will be discussed as well as olivine phosphate cathode

Computational Insights into Mg-Cl Complex Electrolytes for Rechargeable Magnesium Batteries

DFT calculations were conducted to provide insightful and unprecedented thermodynamic insights on tetrahydrofuran (THF) solvation, isomerization, chlorination, and complexation of possible Mg-Cl coordination species for the popular Mg-Cl electrolytes. Computational results using the M06-2x functional with the 6-31+G(d) basis set indicate trigonal bipyramidal e, e-cis-tbp-MgCl2(THF)3 dichloride species and octahedral [MgCl(THF)5]+ monochloride species are the dominant mononuclear species. These two can combine to form the active dinuclear species, [(μ-Cl)3Mg2(THF)6]+ with a free energy -6.30 kcal/mol, which is calculated to be the dominant Mg-Cl species in solution. Two mono-cation species, [(μ-Cl)3Mg2(THF)6]+ and [MgCl(THF)5]+ have comparable LUMO energies, thus both of them can act as active species for Mg deposition. However, the significant dominance of the dinuclear species in the electrolyte indicates that it is the primary species involved in reversible Mg deposition

PARTNER: Level up the Polar Representation for LiDAR 3D Object Detection

Recently, polar-based representation has shown promising properties in perceptual tasks. In addition to Cartesian-based approaches, which separate point clouds unevenly, representing point clouds as polar grids has been recognized as an alternative due to (1) its advantage in robust performance under different resolutions and (2) its superiority in streaming-based approaches. However, state-of-the-art polar-based detection methods inevitably suffer from the feature distortion problem because of the non-uniform division of polar representation, resulting in a non-negligible performance gap compared to Cartesian-based approaches. To tackle this issue, we present PARTNER, a novel 3D object detector in the polar coordinate. PARTNER alleviates the dilemma of feature distortion with global representation re-alignment and facilitates the regression by introducing instance-level geometric information into the detection head. Extensive experiments show overwhelming advantages in streaming-based detection and different resolutions. Furthermore, our method outperforms the previous polar-based works with remarkable margins of 3.68% and 9.15% on Waymo and ONCE validation set, thus achieving competitive results over the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: ICCV 202

Successful transplantation of guinea pig gut microbiota in mice and its effect on pneumonic plague sensitivity

Microbiota-driven variations in the inflammatory response are predicted to regulate host responses to infection. Increasing evidence indicates that the gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts have an intimate relationship with each other. Gut microbiota can influence lung immunity whereby gut-derived injurious factors can reach the lungs and systemic circulation via the intestinal lymphatics. The intestinal microbiota’s ability to resist colonization can be extended to systemic infections or to pathogens infecting distant sites such as the lungs. Unlike the situation with large mammals, the microtus Yersinia pestis 201 strain exhibits strong virulence in mice, but nearly no virulence to large mammals (such as guinea pigs). Hence, to assess whether the intestinal microbiota from guinea pigs was able to affect the sensitivity of mice to challenge infection with the Y. pestis 201 strain, we fed mice with guinea pig diets for two months, after which they were administered 0.5 ml of guinea pig fecal suspension for 30 days by oral gavage. The stools from each mouse were collected on days 0, 15, and 30, DNA was extracted from them, and 16S rRNA sequencing was performed to assess the diversity and composition of the gut microbiota. We found that the intestinal microbiota transplants from the guinea pigs were able to colonize the mouse intestines. The mice were then infected with Yersinia pestis 201 by lung invasion, but no statistical difference was found in the survival rates of the mice that were colonized with the guinea pig’s gut microbiota and the control mice. This indicates that the intestinal microbiota transplantation from the guinea pigs did not affect the sensitivity of the mice to pneumonic plague

Histopathological Observation of Immunized Rhesus Macaques with Plague Vaccines after Subcutaneous Infection of Yersinia pestis

In our previous study, complete protection was observed in Chinese-origin rhesus macaques immunized with SV1 (20 µg F1 and 10 µg rV270) and SV2 (200 µg F1 and 100 µg rV270) subunit vaccines and with EV76 live attenuated vaccine against subcutaneous challenge with 6×106 CFU of Y. pestis. In the present study, we investigated whether the vaccines can effectively protect immunized animals from any pathologic changes using histological and immunohistochemical techniques. In addition, the glomerular basement membranes (GBMs) of the immunized animals and control animals were checked by electron microscopy. The results show no signs of histopathological lesions in the lungs, livers, kidneys, lymph nodes, spleens and hearts of the immunized animals at Day 14 after the challenge, whereas pathological alterations were seen in the corresponding tissues of the control animals. Giemsa staining, ultrastructural examination, and immunohistochemical staining revealed bacteria in some of the organs of the control animals, whereas no bacterium was observed among the immunized animals. Ultrastructural observation revealed that no glomerular immune deposits on the GBM. These observations suggest that the vaccines can effectively protect animals from any pathologic changes and eliminate Y. pestis from the immunized animals. The control animals died from multi-organ lesions specifically caused by the Y. pestis infection. We also found that subcutaneous infection of animals with Y. pestis results in bubonic plague, followed by pneumonic and septicemic plagues. The histopathologic features of plague in rhesus macaques closely resemble those of rodent and human plagues. Thus, Chinese-origin rhesus macaques serve as useful models in studying Y. pestis pathogenesis, host response and the efficacy of new medical countermeasures against plague

Cell Membrane Is Impaired, Accompanied by Enhanced Type III Secretion System Expression in Yersinia pestis Deficient in RovA Regulator

BACKGROUND: In the enteropathogenic Yersinia species, RovA regulates the expression of invasin, which is important for enteropathogenic pathogenesis but is inactivated in Yersinia pestis. Investigation of the RovA regulon in Y. pestis at 26 °C has revealed that RovA is a global regulator that contributes to virulence in part by the direct regulation of psaEFABC. However, the regulatory roles of RovA in Y. pestis at 37 °C, which allows most virulence factors in mammalian hosts to be expressed, are still poorly understood. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: The transcriptional profile of an in-frame rovA mutant of Y. pestis biovar Microtus strain 201 was analyzed under type III secretion system (T3SS) induction conditions using microarray techniques, and it was revealed that many cell-envelope and transport/binding proteins were differentially expressed in the ΔrovA mutant. Most noticeably, many of the T3SS genes, including operons encoding the translocon, needle and Yop (Yersinia outer protein) effectors, were significantly up-regulated. Analysis of Yop proteins confirmed that YopE and YopJ were also expressed in greater amounts in the mutant. However, electrophoresis mobility shift assay results demonstrated that the His-RovA protein could not bind to the promoter sequences of the T3SS genes, suggesting that an indirect regulatory mechanism is involved. Transmission electron microscopy analysis indicated that there are small loose electron dense particle-like structures that surround the outer membrane of the mutant cells. The bacterial membrane permeability to CFSE (carboxyfluorescein diacetate succinimidyl ester) was significantly decreased in the ΔrovA mutant compared to the wild-type strain. Taken together, these results revealed the improper construction and dysfunction of the membrane in the ΔrovA mutant. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We demonstrated that the RovA regulator plays critical roles in the construction and functioning of the bacterial membrane, which sheds considerable light on the regulatory functions of RovA in antibiotic resistance and environmental adaptation. The expression of T3SS was upregulated in the ΔrovA mutant through an indirect regulatory mechanism, which is possibly related to the altered membrane construction in the mutant