Development of Boron (Carbon) Nitride Nanocomposites for Energy Applications

This research focuses on the development of advanced nanomaterials and nanocomposites for energy applications ranging from electric power conversion and storage to thermal energy management and regulation, which is meaningful to not only materials design and engineering, but also the energy saving and efficiency improving

Generalizable Neural Voxels for Fast Human Radiance Fields

Rendering moving human bodies at free viewpoints only from a monocular video is quite a challenging problem. The information is too sparse to model complicated human body structures and motions from both view and pose dimensions. Neural radiance fields (NeRF) have shown great power in novel view synthesis and have been applied to human body rendering. However, most current NeRF-based methods bear huge costs for both training and rendering, which impedes the wide applications in real-life scenarios. In this paper, we propose a rendering framework that can learn moving human body structures extremely quickly from a monocular video. The framework is built by integrating both neural fields and neural voxels. Especially, a set of generalizable neural voxels are constructed. With pretrained on various human bodies, these general voxels represent a basic skeleton and can provide strong geometric priors. For the fine-tuning process, individual voxels are constructed for learning differential textures, complementary to general voxels. Thus learning a novel body can be further accelerated, taking only a few minutes. Our method shows significantly higher training efficiency compared with previous methods, while maintaining similar rendering quality. The project page is at https://taoranyi.com/gneuvox .Comment: Project page: http://taoranyi.com/gneuvo

Assembly of colloidal clusters driven by the polyhedral shape of metal-organic framework particles

Altres ajuts: This work was supported by the CERCA Program/Generalitat de Catalunya.Control of the assembly of colloidal particles into discrete or higher-dimensional architectures is important for the design of myriad materials, including plasmonic sensing systems and photonic crystals. Here, we report a new approach that uses the polyhedral shape of metal-organic-framework (MOF) particles to direct the assembly of colloidal clusters. This approach is based on controlling the attachment of a single spherical polystyrene particle on each face of a polyhedral particle via colloidal fusion synthesis, so that the polyhedral shape defines the final coordination number, which is equal to the number of faces, and geometry of the assembled colloidal cluster. As a proof of concept, we assembled six-coordinated (6-c) octahedral and 8-c cubic clusters using cubic ZIF-8 and octahedral UiO-66 core particles. Moreover, we extended this approach to synthesize a highly coordinated 12-c cuboctahedral cluster from a rhombic dodecahedral ZIF-8 particle. We anticipate that the synthesized colloidal clusters could be further evolved into spherical core-shell MOF@polystyrene particles under conditions that promote a higher fusion degree, thus expanding the methods available for the synthesis of MOF-polymer composites

Role of Nanolaminated Crystal Structure on the Radiation Damage Tolerance of Ti 3

Nanolaminated Ti3SiC2, a representative MAX phase, shows excellent tolerance to radiation damage. In this paper, first-principles calculations were used to investigate the mechanism of intrinsic point defects in order to explain this outstanding property. Formation energies of intrinsic point defects are calculated and compared; and the results establish a low-energy disorder mechanism in Ti3SiC2. In addition, the migration energy barriers of Si vacancy, Si interstitial, and TiSi antisite yield very low values: 0.9, 0.6, and 0.3 eV, respectively. The intercalation of Si atomic plane between Ti3C2 nanotwinning structures dominates the formation and migration of intrinsic native point defects in Ti3SiC2. The present study also highlights a novel method to improve radiation damage tolerance by developing nanoscale-layered structure which can serve as a sink or rapid recovery channel for point defects

Fast High Dynamic Range Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes

Neural Radiances Fields (NeRF) and their extensions have shown great success in representing 3D scenes and synthesizing novel-view images. However, most NeRF methods take in low-dynamic-range (LDR) images, which may lose details, especially with nonuniform illumination. Some previous NeRF methods attempt to introduce high-dynamic-range (HDR) techniques but mainly target static scenes. To extend HDR NeRF methods to wider applications, we propose a dynamic HDR NeRF framework, named HDR-HexPlane, which can learn 3D scenes from dynamic 2D images captured with various exposures. A learnable exposure mapping function is constructed to obtain adaptive exposure values for each image. Based on the monotonically increasing prior, a camera response function is designed for stable learning. With the proposed model, high-quality novel-view images at any time point can be rendered with any desired exposure. We further construct a dataset containing multiple dynamic scenes captured with diverse exposures for evaluation. All the datasets and code are available at \url{https://guanjunwu.github.io/HDR-HexPlane/}.Comment: 3DV 2024. Project page: https://guanjunwu.github.io/HDR-HexPlan

GaussianEditor: Editing 3D Gaussians Delicately with Text Instructions

Recently, impressive results have been achieved in 3D scene editing with text instructions based on a 2D diffusion model. However, current diffusion models primarily generate images by predicting noise in the latent space, and the editing is usually applied to the whole image, which makes it challenging to perform delicate, especially localized, editing for 3D scenes. Inspired by recent 3D Gaussian splatting, we propose a systematic framework, named GaussianEditor, to edit 3D scenes delicately via 3D Gaussians with text instructions. Benefiting from the explicit property of 3D Gaussians, we design a series of techniques to achieve delicate editing. Specifically, we first extract the region of interest (RoI) corresponding to the text instruction, aligning it to 3D Gaussians. The Gaussian RoI is further used to control the editing process. Our framework can achieve more delicate and precise editing of 3D scenes than previous methods while enjoying much faster training speed, i.e. within 20 minutes on a single V100 GPU, more than twice as fast as Instruct-NeRF2NeRF (45 minutes -- 2 hours).Comment: Project page: https://GaussianEditor.github.i

PRMT7 inhibits proliferation and migration of bladder cancer cells by regulating Notch signaling pathway

Background and purpose: Bladder cancer is one of the common tumor of the urinary system. The protein arginine methyltransferase 7 (PRMT7) has been reported in gastrointestinal tumors, but its biological role and mechanism in bladder cancer are still unknown. In this study, the effect of PRMT7 on the proliferation and migration of human bladder cancer cells and its possible mechanism were investigated. Methods: Human bladder cancer cell lines 5637, T24, RT112, UM-UC-3 and ureteral epithelial immortalized cells SV-HUC-1 were cultured in vitro, and the expression of PRMT7 was detected by Western blot. The expression of PRMT7 gene was silenced by RNA interference, and the negative control group (si-NC) and experimental group (siPRMT7#1 and siPRMT7#2) were established. PRMT7 gene were overexpressed by plasmid transfection, and the negative control group (p-PCMV3) and experimental group (p-PRMT7) were established. The transfection efficiency of PRMT7 was verified by real-time fluorescence quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RTFQ-PCR) and Western blot, cell proliferation was detected by cell counting kit-8 (CCK-8) assay and colony formation assay, and cell migration was detected by Transwell assay. Western blot was used to detect the expressions of proliferation and migration related target proteins including Cyclin D1, CDK4 and MMP9, as well as the key proteins Notch1, HEY1 and Hes1 in Notch signaling pathway. Notch signaling specific inhibitors γ-secretase inhibitor DAPT was added to siPRMT7#2 transfected cells to further verify PRMT7 expression in bladder cancer. Results: Western blot results showed that PRMT7 expression was low in bladder cancer cells (P<0.05). After silencing PTMT7 in 5637 cells, cell proliferation and migration were significantly enhanced (P<0.05), and the expressions of proliferation and migration related target proteins including Cyclin D1, CDK4 and MMP9, and the key proteins of Notch signaling pathway Notch1, HEY1 and Hes1 were significantly increased (P<0.05). The overexpression of PRMT7 in T24 cells showed an opposite trend. DAPT significantly reversed the expression of PRMT7 in bladder cancer cells. Conclusion: PRMT7 inhibits the proliferation and migration of bladder cancer cells, and its mechanism is related to Notch signaling pathway