Designing materials for electrochemical carbon dioxide recycling

Electrochemical carbon dioxide recycling provides an attractive approach to synthesizing fuels and chemical feedstocks using renewable energy. On the path to deploying this technology, basic and applied scientific hurdles remain. Integrating catalytic design with mechanistic understanding yields scientific insights and progresses the technology towards industrial relevance. Catalysts must be able to generate valuable carbon-based products with better selectivity, lower overpotentials and improved current densities with extended operation. Here, we describe progress and identify mechanistic questions and performance metrics for catalysts that can enable carbon-neutral renewable energy storage and utilization

Midtropospheric frontogenesis associated with antecedent indirect precipitation ahead of tropical cyclones over the Korean Peninsula

On the Korean Peninsula (KP), heavy rainfall often precedes the landfall of a tropical cyclone (TC). This rainfall is called antecedent indirect precipitation (AIP), because it occurs well beyond the effective radius of the TC. The present study examines the statistical characteristics and physical mechanism of the AIP produced by TCs that influenced the KP during the period 1993-2004. Composite analyses demonstrate that the AIP events were accompanied by midtropospheric frontogenesis due to the TC-mid-latitude environment interaction. When an approaching TC encountered an approaching mid-latitude upper-level trough, this encounter resulted in confluent and deformed flows at the mid-level by the combination of westerlies from the trough and southerlies from the TC. The delicate balance of horizontal winds related to the two systems at the mid-level led to the midtropospheric frontogenesis to the north of the KP. The frontogenetic feature related to the AIP was in marked contrast to those of the remote rainfall event over the KP and the predecessor rainfall event over the United States suggested by previous studies. Quasi-geostrophic analysis demonstrates that the midtropospheric front induced thermally direct circulation, which led to ascending motion over the KP. Consequently, the midtropospheric front helped to intensify the AIP, together with the convective instability that was amplified by the transport of warm and moist air along the conduit between the TC and subtropical high.open110Ysciescopu

CGIntrinsics: Better Intrinsic Image Decomposition through Physically-Based Rendering

Intrinsic image decomposition is a challenging, long-standing computer vision problem for which ground truth data is very difficult to acquire. We explore the use of synthetic data for training CNN-based intrinsic image decomposition models, then applying these learned models to real-world images. To that end, we present \ICG, a new, large-scale dataset of physically-based rendered images of scenes with full ground truth decompositions. The rendering process we use is carefully designed to yield high-quality, realistic images, which we find to be crucial for this problem domain. We also propose a new end-to-end training method that learns better decompositions by leveraging \ICG, and optionally IIW and SAW, two recent datasets of sparse annotations on real-world images. Surprisingly, we find that a decomposition network trained solely on our synthetic data outperforms the state-of-the-art on both IIW and SAW, and performance improves even further when IIW and SAW data is added during training. Our work demonstrates the suprising effectiveness of carefully-rendered synthetic data for the intrinsic images task.Comment: Paper for 'CGIntrinsics: Better Intrinsic Image Decomposition through Physically-Based Rendering' published in ECCV, 201

Use of archival versus newly collected tumor samples for assessing PD-L1 expression and overall survival : an updated analysis of KEYNOTE-010 trial

Background: In KEYNOTE-010, pembrolizumab versus docetaxel improved overall survival (OS) in patients with programmed death-1 protein (PD)-L1-positive advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). A prespecified exploratory analysis compared outcomes in patients based on PD-L1 expression in archival versus newly collected tumor samples using recently updated survival data. Patients and methods: PD-L1 was assessed centrally by immunohistochemistry (22C3 antibody) in archival or newly collected tumor samples. Patients received pembrolizumab 2 or 10 mg/kg Q3W or docetaxel 75 mg/m2 Q3W for 24 months or until progression/intolerable toxicity/other reason. Response was assessed by RECIST v1.1 every 9 weeks, survival every 2 months. Primary end points were OS and progression-free survival (PFS) in tumor proportion score (TPS) 50% and 1%; pembrolizumab doses were pooled in this analysis. Results: At date cut-off of 24 March 2017, median follow-up was 31 months (range 23-41) representing 18 additional months of follow-up from the primary analysis. Pembrolizumab versus docetaxel continued to improve OS in patients with previously treated, PD-L1-expressing advanced NSCLC; hazard ratio (HR) was 0.66 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.57, 0.77]. Of 1033 patients analyzed, 455(44%) were enrolled based on archival samples and 578 (56%) on newly collected tumor samples. Approximately 40% of archival samples and 45% of newly collected tumor samples were PD-L1 TPS 50%. For TPS 50%, the OS HRs were 0.64 (95% CI: 0.45, 0.91) and 0.40 (95% CI: 0.28, 0.56) for archival and newly collected samples, respectively. In patients with TPS 1%, OS HRs were 0.74 (95% CI: 0.59, 0.93) and 0.59 (95% CI: 0.48, 0.73) for archival and newly collected samples, respectively. In TPS 50%, PFS HRs were similar across archival [0.63 (95% CI: 0.45, 0.89)] and newly collected samples [0.53 (95% CI: 0.38, 0.72)]. In patients with TPS 1%, PFS HRs were similar across archival [0.82 (95% CI: 0.66, 1.02)] and newly collected samples [0.83 (95% CI: 0.68, 1.02)]. Conclusion: Pembrolizumab continued to improve OS over docetaxel in intention to treat population and in subsets of patients with newly collected and archival samples

Abnormal M1/M2 macrophage phenotype profiles in the small airway wall and lumen in smokers and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)

© 2017 The Author(s). We explore potential dysregulation of macrophage phenotypes in COPD pathogenesis through integrated study of human small airway tissue, bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) and an experimental murine model of COPD. We evaluated human airway tissue and BAL from healthy controls, normal lung function smokers (NLFS), and COPD subjects. Both small airways and BAL cells were immunohistochemically stained with anti-CD68 for total macrophages and with anti-CD163 for M2, and anti-iNOS for M1 macrophages. Multiplex ELISA measured BAL cytokines. Comparable cigarette smoke-induced experimental COPD mouse model was assessed for relevant mRNA profiles. We found an increase in pro-inflammatory M1s in the small airways of NLFS and COPD compared to controls with a reciprocal decrease in M2 macrophages, which remained unchanged among pathological groups. However, luminal macrophages showed a dominant M2 phenotype in both NLFS and COPD subjects. BAL cytokine skewed towards an M2 profile with increase in CCL22, IL-4, IL-13, and IL-10 in both NLFS and COPDs. The mouse-model of COPD showed similar increase in mRNA for M2 markers. Our finding suggests abnormal macrophage switching in both mucosal and luminal areas of COPD patients, that strongly associated with cytokine balance. There may be potential for beneficial therapeutic cytokine manipulation of macrophage phenotypes in COPD

Top-up operation at Pohang Light Source-II

After three years of upgrading work, PLS-II (S. Shin, Commissioning of the PLS-II, JINST, January 2013) is now successfully operating. The top-up operation of the 3 GeV linear accelerator had to be delayed because of some challenges encountered, and PLS-II was run in decay mode at the beginning in March 2012. The main difficulties encountered in the top-up operation of PLS-II are different levels between the linear accelerator and the storage ring, the 14 narrow gap in-vacuum undulators in operation, and the full energy injection by 3 GeV linear accelerator. Large vertical emittance and energy jitter of the linac were the major obstacles that called for careful control of injected beam to reduce beam loss in the storage ring during injection. The following measures were taken to resolve these problems: (1) The high resolution Libera BPM (see http://www.i-tech.si) was implemented to measure the beam trajectory and energy. (2) Three slit systems were installed to filter the beam edge. (3) De-Qing circuit was applied to the modulator system to improve the energy stability of injected beam. As a result, the radiation by beam loss during injection is reduced drastically, and the top-up mode has been successfully operating since 19th March 2013. In this paper, we describe the experimental results of the PLS-II top-up operation and the improvement plan. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.open111011sciescopu

Signal transducer and activator of transcription 3-mediated CD133 up-regulation contributes to promotion of hepatocellular carcinoma

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