Green polymers toward nanobiotechnology(I): synthesis of glycopolypeptides and their analogues

Harnessing natural-based renewable molecular resources to construct functional synthetic green polymers is a promising research frontier at the interface of sustainable/green chemistry, polymer chemistry and nanobiotechnology. As natural glycoprotein mimics/analogues and biocompatible building blocks of nanobio- materials, synthetic functional glycopolypeptides and their structural/functional analogues have attracted great attentions in recent years. This mini-perspective article reviewed current synthetic strategies and methods of glycopolypeptides and their analogues. The pros and cons of the synthesis protocols were discussed, moreover, possible future perspectives in this field were also stated.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Example-Guided Style-Consistent Image Synthesis from Semantic Labeling

Example-guided image synthesis aims to synthesize an image from a semantic label map and an exemplary image indicating style. We use the term “style” in this problem to refer to implicit characteristics of images, for example: in portraits “style” includes gender, racial identity, age, hairstyle; in full body pictures it includes clothing; in street scenes it refers to weather and time of day and such like. A semantic label map in these cases indicates facial expres- sion, full body pose, or scene segmentation. We propose a solution to the example-guided image synthesis problem us- ing conditional generative adversarial networks with style consistency. Our key contributions are (i) a novel style consistency discriminator to determine whether a pair of im- ages are consistent in style; (ii) an adaptive semantic con- sistency loss; and (iii) a training data sampling strategy, for synthesizing style-consistent results to the exemplar. We demonstrate the efficiency of our method on face, dance and street view synthesis tasks

Insights into technical challenges in the field of microplastic pollution through the lens of early career researchers (ECRs) and a proposed pathway forward

Early career researchers (ECR) face a series of challenges related to the inherent difficulties of starting their careers. Microplastic (MP) research is a topical field attracting high numbers of ECRs with diverse backgrounds and expertise from a wealth of disciplines including environmental science, biology, chemistry and ecotoxicology. In this perspective the challenges that could hinder scientific, professional, or personal development are explored, as identified by an international network of ECRs, all employed in MP research, that was formed following a bilateral workshop for scientists based in the UK and China. Discussions amongst the network were grouped into four overarching themes of technical challenges: in the field, in the laboratory, in the post data collection phase, and miscellaneous. The three key areas of representativeness, access to appropriate resources, training, and clean labs, and the use of databases and comparability, as well as the overarching constraint of available time were identified as the source of the majority of challenges. A set of recommendations for pathways forward are proposed based on the principles of research openness, access to information and training, and widening collaborations. ECRs have great capacity to promote research excellence in the field of MPs and elsewhere, when provided with appropriate opportunities and suitable support

Evidence for lunar tide effects in Earth’s plasmasphere

Tides are universal and affect spatially distributed systems, ranging from planetary to galactic scales. In the Earth–Moon system, effects caused by lunar tides were reported in the Earth’s crust, oceans, neutral gas-dominated atmosphere (including the ionosphere) and near-ground geomagnetic field. However, whether a lunar tide effect exists in the plasma-dominated regions has not been explored yet. Here we show evidence of a lunar tide-induced signal in the plasmasphere, the inner region of the magnetosphere, which is filled with cold plasma. We obtain these results by analysing variations in the plasmasphere’s boundary location over the past four decades from multisatellite observations. The signal possesses distinct diurnal (and monthly) periodicities, which are different from the semidiurnal (and semimonthly) variations dominant in the previously observed lunar tide effects in other regions. These results demonstrate the importance of lunar tidal effects in plasma-dominated regions, influencing understanding of the coupling between the Moon, atmosphere and magnetosphere system through gravity and electromagnetic forces. Furthermore, these findings may have implications for tidal interactions in other two-body celestial systems

Insights into technical challenges in the field of microplastic pollution through the lens of early career researchers (ECRs) and a proposed pathway forward

Early career researchers (ECR) face a series of challenges related to the inherent difficulties of starting their careers. Microplastic (MP) research is a topical field attracting high numbers of ECRs with diverse backgrounds and expertise from a wealth of disciplines including environmental science, biology, chemistry and ecotoxicology. In this perspective the challenges that could hinder scientific, professional, or personal development are explored, as identified by an international network of ECRs, all employed in MP research, that was formed following a bilateral workshop for scientists based in the UK and China. Discussions amongst the network were grouped into four overarching themes of technical challenges: in the field, in the laboratory, in the post data collection phase, and miscellaneous. The three key areas of representativeness, access t

Evidence-based PET for thoracic tumours

AbstractFluorine-18 fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography (18F-FDG PET/CT) is a robust imaging tool that is currently used in daily clinical practice for the evaluation of thoracic malignancies. This chapter provides an overview of the current evidence-based data on the usefulness of PET/CT for the evaluation of patients with thoracic tumours including lung cancer, pleural and thymic tumours, and esophageal cancer

All-optical controllable electromagnetically induced transparency in coupled silica microbottle cavities

An all-optical control scheme of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) based on two coupled silica microbottle cavities coated with iron oxide nanoparticles is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The specially designed and fabricated silica microbottle cavity with a short and spherical end, which is coated with iron oxide nanoparticles, possesses a quality (Q) factor of 1.39×108 and large all-optical tunability in a range of 282.32 GHz (2.25 nm) arising from the strong photothermal effect of the nanoparticles. Based on two coupled silica microbottle cavities, we achieve the EIT spectrum with a transparency window bandwidth of 2.3 MHz. The transparency window can be flexibly controlled by tuning the resonant frequency of the higher-Q microcavity. Besides, by tuning the resonant frequencies of the two microcavities separately, the whole EIT spectrum can be shifted with a range of 71.52 GHz, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time. Based on this scheme, we have realized all-optical and independent control of the transparency window and the whole EIT spectrum. We believe this work has great potential in applications such as light storage, optical sensing, and quantum optics