Oxygen-containing functional groups on bioelectrode surface enhance expression of c-type cytochromes in biofilm and boost extracellular electron transfer

Introducing oxygen-containing functional groups is a common and convenient method to increase the hydrophilicity of bioelectrodes. In this study, the effect of oxygen-containing functional groups on biofilm was systematically studied to understand how the electron transfer between electrochemically active bacteria (EAB) and bioelectrode was boosted. After electrolysis pretreatment in sulfuric and nitric acid mixture, the oxygen content of the carbon fiber brushes increased from 4.6% to 30.9%. Comparing with the control, the maximum power density increased by 27.7%, while the anode resistance decreased by 21.8%, because charge transfer resistance significantly reduced. The analysis results showed that the content of c-type cytochromes (c-Cyts) in the EAB biofilm was four times higher than that in the control, while the biomass just slightly increased and the bacteria community was similar with that of the control. These findings suggested that the fundamental reason for the enhanced extracellular electron transfer between EAB and electrode was the increased c-Cyts

Dynamic sediment discharge in the Hekou-Longmen region of Yellow River and soil and water conservation implications

The middle reaches of the Yellow River Basin transport the vast majority of sediment (>85% of the basin's total available sediment load), which has had profound effects on the characteristics of the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River. Since the late 1950s, soil and water conservation measures have been extensively implemented in the Loess Plateau, China, especially since the 1970s. This has resulted in sediment discharge changing significantly. In this study, data from 22 catchments in the region of the Loess Plateau from Hekou to Longmen in the middle reaches of the Yellow River were analyzed to investigate the responses of the sediment regime to climate change and human activities. The non-parametric Mann-Kendall test and the Pettitt test were used to identify trends and shifts in sediment discharge. All 22 catchments had a significantly decreasing trend (P < 0.01) in annual sediment discharge. Change point years were detected between 1971 and 1994, and were concentrated between 1978 and 1984 in 17 catchments. Moreover, erosive rainfall exhibited a tendency to decrease, but this was not a significant trend. Compared to rainfall, human activities, primarily soil and water conservation and environmental rehabilitation campaigns, have played a more prominent role in the changes in sediment regimes. In order to reduce soil erosion and sediment yield, more attention should be paid to proper and rational soil and water conservation and eco-restoration in this region. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Inter-Continental Transfer of Pre-Trained Deep Learning Rice Mapping Model and Its Generalization Ability

Monitoring of rice planting areas plays an important role in maintaining food security. With powerful automatic feature extraction capability, crop mapping based on deep learning methods has become one of the most important research directions of crop remote sensing recognition. However, the training of deep learning models often requires a large number of samples, which restricts the application of these models in areas with a lack of samples. To address this problem, based on time-series Sentinel-1 SAR data, this study pre-trained the temporal feature-based segmentation (TFBS) model with an attention mechanism (attTFBS) using abundant samples from the United States and then performed an inter-continental transfer of the pre-trained model based on a very small number of samples to obtain rice maps in areas with a lack of samples. The results showed that an inter-continental transferred rice mapping model was feasible to achieve accurate rice maps in Northeast China (F-score, kappa coefficient, recall, and precision were 0.8502, 0.8439, 0.8345, and 0.8669, respectively). The study found that the transferred model exhibited a strong spatiotemporal generalization capability, achieving high accuracy in rice mapping in the three main rice-producing regions of Northeast China. The phenological differences of rice significantly affected the generalization capability of the transferred model, particularly the significant differences in transplanting periods, which could have resulted in a decrease in the generalization capability of the model. Furthermore, the study found that the model transferred based on an extremely limited number of samples could attain a rice recognition accuracy equivalent to that of the model trained from scratch with a substantial number of samples, indicating that the proposed method possessed strong practicality, which could dramatically reduce the sample requirements for crop mapping based on deep learning models, thereby decreasing costs, increasing efficiency, and facilitating large-scale crop mapping in areas with limited samples

STING Agonist‐Loaded Nanoparticles Promotes Positive Regulation of Type I Interferon‐Dependent Radioimmunotherapy in Rectal Cancer

Abstract Hypoxia‐associated radioresistance in rectal cancer (RC) has severely hampered the response to radioimmunotherapy (iRT), necessitating innovative strategies to enhance RC radiosensitivity and improve iRT efficacy. Here, a catalytic radiosensitizer, DMPtNPS, and a STING agonist, cGAMP, are integrated to overcome RC radioresistance and enhance iRT. DMPtNPS promotes efficient X‐ray energy transfer to generate reactive oxygen species, while alleviating hypoxia within tumors, thereby increasing radiosensitivity. Mechanistically, the transcriptomic and immunoassay analysis reveal that the combination of DMPtNPS and RT provokes bidirectional regulatory effects on the immune response, which may potentially reduce the antitumor efficacy. To mitigate this, cGAMP is loaded into DMPtNPS to reverse the negative impact of DMPtNPS and RT on the tumor immune microenvironment (TiME) through the type I interferon‐dependent pathway, which promotes cancer immunotherapy. In a bilateral tumor model, the combination treatment of RT, DMPtNPS@cGAMP, and αPD‐1 demonstrates a durable complete response at the primary site and enhanced abscopal effect at the distant site. This study highlights the critical role of incorporating catalytic radiosensitizers and STING agonists into the iRT approach for RC

Dynamic sediment discharge in the Hekou-Longmen region of Yellow River and soil and water conservation implications

The middle reaches of the Yellow River Basin transport the vast majority of sediment (>85% of the basin's total available sediment load), which has had profound effects on the characteristics of the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River. Since the late 1950s, soil and water conservation measures have been extensively implemented in the Loess Plateau, China, especially since the 1970s. This has resulted in sediment discharge changing significantly. In this study, data from 22 catchments in the region of the Loess Plateau from Hekou to Longmen in the middle reaches of the Yellow River were analyzed to investigate the responses of the sediment regime to climate change and human activities. The non-parametric Mann-Kendall test and the Pettitt test were used to identify trends and shifts in sediment discharge. All 22 catchments had a significantly decreasing trend (P < 0.01) in annual sediment discharge. Change point years were detected between 1971 and 1994, and were concentrated between 1978 and 1984 in 17 catchments. Moreover, erosive rainfall exhibited a tendency to decrease, but this was not a significant trend. Compared to rainfall, human activities, primarily soil and water conservation and environmental rehabilitation campaigns, have played a more prominent role in the changes in sediment regimes. In order to reduce soil erosion and sediment yield, more attention should be paid to proper and rational soil and water conservation and eco-restoration in this region. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

A room temperature polar ferromagnetic metal

The advent of long-range magnetic order in non-centrosymmetric compounds has stimulated interest in the possibility of exotic spin transport phenomena and topologically protected spin textures for applications in next-generation spintronics. This work reports a novel wurtzite-structure polar magnetic metal, identified as AA'-stacked (Fe0.5Co0.5)5-xGeTe2, which exhibits a Neel-type skyrmion lattice as well as a Rashba-Edelstein effect at room temperature. Atomic resolution imaging of the structure reveals a structural transition as a function of Co-substitution, leading to the polar phase at 50% Co. This discovery reveals an unprecedented layered polar magnetic system for investigating intriguing spin topologies and ushers in a promising new framework for spintronics