Nitrogen-enriched hierarchically porous carbon materials fabricated by graphene aerogel templated Schiff-base chemistry for high performance electrochemical capacitors

This article presents a facile and effective approach for synthesizing three-dimensional (3D) graphenecoupled Schiff-base hierarchically porous polymers (GS-HPPs). The method involves the polymerization of melamine and 1,4-phthalaldehyde, yielding Schiff-base porous polymers on the interconnected macroporous frameworks of 3D graphene aerogels. The as-synthesized GS-HPPs possess hierarchically porous structures containing macro-/meso-/micropores, along with large specific surface areas up to 776 m² g⁻¹ and high nitrogen contents up to 36.8 wt%. Consequently, 3D nitrogen-enriched hierarchically porous carbon (N-HPC) materials with macro-/meso-/micropores were obtained by the pyrolysis of the GS-HPPs at a high temperature of 800 °C under a nitrogen atmosphere. With a hierarchically porous structure, good thermal stability and a high nitrogen-doping content up to 7.2 wt%, the N-HPC samples show a high specific capacitance of 335 F g⁻¹ at 0.1 A g⁻¹ in 6 M KOH, a good capacitance retention with increasing current density, and an outstanding cycling stability. The superior electrochemical performance means that the N-HPC materials have great potential as electrode materials for supercapacitors

Silk-Derived Graphene-Like Carbon with High Electrocatalytic Activity for Oxygen Reduction Reaction

A facile method to prepare the nanoporous and graphene-like carbon material from a natural silk fiber was developed by a potassium intercalation and carbonization procedure. The as-synthesized graphene-like fiber was employed for oxygen reduction reaction and exhibited impressive electrocatalytic activity

Exploiting Emotion-Semantic Correlations for Empathetic Response Generation

Empathetic response generation aims to generate empathetic responses by understanding the speaker's emotional feelings from the language of dialogue. Recent methods capture emotional words in the language of communicators and construct them as static vectors to perceive nuanced emotions. However, linguistic research has shown that emotional words in language are dynamic and have correlations with other grammar semantic roles, i.e., words with semantic meanings, in grammar. Previous methods overlook these two characteristics, which easily lead to misunderstandings of emotions and neglect of key semantics. To address this issue, we propose a dynamical Emotion-Semantic Correlation Model (ESCM) for empathetic dialogue generation tasks. ESCM constructs dynamic emotion-semantic vectors through the interaction of context and emotions. We introduce dependency trees to reflect the correlations between emotions and semantics. Based on dynamic emotion-semantic vectors and dependency trees, we propose a dynamic correlation graph convolutional network to guide the model in learning context meanings in dialogue and generating empathetic responses. Experimental results on the EMPATHETIC-DIALOGUES dataset show that ESCM understands semantics and emotions more accurately and expresses fluent and informative empathetic responses. Our analysis results also indicate that the correlations between emotions and semantics are frequently used in dialogues, which is of great significance for empathetic perception and expression.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, Findings of EMNLP 202

Dynamic Context-guided Capsule Network for Multimodal Machine Translation

Multimodal machine translation (MMT), which mainly focuses on enhancing text-only translation with visual features, has attracted considerable attention from both computer vision and natural language processing communities. Most current MMT models resort to attention mechanism, global context modeling or multimodal joint representation learning to utilize visual features. However, the attention mechanism lacks sufficient semantic interactions between modalities while the other two provide fixed visual context, which is unsuitable for modeling the observed variability when generating translation. To address the above issues, in this paper, we propose a novel Dynamic Context-guided Capsule Network (DCCN) for MMT. Specifically, at each timestep of decoding, we first employ the conventional source-target attention to produce a timestep-specific source-side context vector. Next, DCCN takes this vector as input and uses it to guide the iterative extraction of related visual features via a context-guided dynamic routing mechanism. Particularly, we represent the input image with global and regional visual features, we introduce two parallel DCCNs to model multimodal context vectors with visual features at different granularities. Finally, we obtain two multimodal context vectors, which are fused and incorporated into the decoder for the prediction of the target word. Experimental results on the Multi30K dataset of English-to-German and English-to-French translation demonstrate the superiority of DCCN. Our code is available on https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/MM-DCCN

Effects of Anacetrapib in Patients with Atherosclerotic Vascular Disease

BACKGROUND: Patients with atherosclerotic vascular disease remain at high risk for cardiovascular events despite effective statin-based treatment of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels. The inhibition of cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) by anacetrapib reduces LDL cholesterol levels and increases high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels. However, trials of other CETP inhibitors have shown neutral or adverse effects on cardiovascular outcomes. METHODS: We conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial involving 30,449 adults with atherosclerotic vascular disease who were receiving intensive atorvastatin therapy and who had a mean LDL cholesterol level of 61 mg per deciliter (1.58 mmol per liter), a mean non-HDL cholesterol level of 92 mg per deciliter (2.38 mmol per liter), and a mean HDL cholesterol level of 40 mg per deciliter (1.03 mmol per liter). The patients were assigned to receive either 100 mg of anacetrapib once daily (15,225 patients) or matching placebo (15,224 patients). The primary outcome was the first major coronary event, a composite of coronary death, myocardial infarction, or coronary revascularization. RESULTS: During the median follow-up period of 4.1 years, the primary outcome occurred in significantly fewer patients in the anacetrapib group than in the placebo group (1640 of 15,225 patients [10.8%] vs. 1803 of 15,224 patients [11.8%]; rate ratio, 0.91; 95% confidence interval, 0.85 to 0.97; P=0.004). The relative difference in risk was similar across multiple prespecified subgroups. At the trial midpoint, the mean level of HDL cholesterol was higher by 43 mg per deciliter (1.12 mmol per liter) in the anacetrapib group than in the placebo group (a relative difference of 104%), and the mean level of non-HDL cholesterol was lower by 17 mg per deciliter (0.44 mmol per liter), a relative difference of -18%. There were no significant between-group differences in the risk of death, cancer, or other serious adverse events. CONCLUSIONS: Among patients with atherosclerotic vascular disease who were receiving intensive statin therapy, the use of anacetrapib resulted in a lower incidence of major coronary events than the use of placebo. (Funded by Merck and others; Current Controlled Trials number, ISRCTN48678192 ; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01252953 ; and EudraCT number, 2010-023467-18 .)

Comparative Analysis of the Spectral Response to Soil Salinity of Saline-Sodic Soils under Different Surface Conditions

Desiccation cracking is a very common surface soil phenomenon of saline-sodic land. The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of salt content on the spectral reflectance of soil with and without desiccation cracks. To achieve our objective, a cracking test was performed using 17 soil samples. Following the tests, crack parameters were extracted, and correlation analysis was then performed between crack parameters and four soil properties: Na+, salinity (total concentration of ions), pH, and electric conductivity (EC). In order to select the optimum spectral measurement method and develop prediction models, spectral response to different soil properties were compared between the cracked soil samples and the comparative soil samples composed of the 2 mm particle size fraction processed by traditional methods. The results indicate that soil salinity dominated cracking propagation with a positive correlation. Since area and volume scattering are closer to what occurs in the field, a greater spectral response to soil properties was found for cracked soil samples relative to the comparative soil samples in the near-infrared and shortwave-infrared regions. The R2 of optimal linear prediction models based on the cracked soil samples were 0.74, 0.67, 0.58, and 0.67 for Na+, salinity, pH, and EC, respectively

Determination of the Stability of a High and Steep Highway Slope in a Basalt Area Based on Iron Staining Anomalies

In recent years, geological disasters have frequently occurred on basarlt highway slopes. Studying the stability of highway slopes in this type of area is of great significance for traffic safety. However, due to the high cost and low efficiency of traditional monitoring and experimental methods for slope engineering, these methods are not conducive to the quick and comprehensive identification of regional slope stability. Due to the high iron content of basalt, iron staining anomalies in the ore prospecting field are reinterpreted from an engineering perspective in this study. Taking the S3K section of a highway in Changbai County, China, as an example, Landsat8 remote sensing (RS) images from 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2021 are selected, and principal component analysis is used to extract iron staining anomalies in the region. Combined with field investigation and evidence collection, the corresponding rock mass fragmentation is distinguished via iron staining anomalies. Then, according to previous research results, eight indexes including annual rainfall, slope, topographic relief, surface roughness, vegetation index, leaf area index (LAI), root depth of vegetation, and human activity intensity are selected for investigation. The artificial neural network–cellular automata (ANN-CA) model is established, and the rock fragmentation classification data obtained based on iron staining anomalies are used to simulate the area. Next, the calculation formula of slope stability is determined based on the simulation results, and the stability of a high and steep slope in the area is calculated and analyzed. Finally, a comparison with an actual field investigation shows that the effect of the proposed method is good. The research findings reveal that it is feasible to judge the stability of a high and steep slope in a basalt area via the use of iron staining anomalies as an indicator. The findings are tantamount to expanding the application scope of RS in practical engineering