Synergistic effect between ceria and tungsten oxide on WO3–CeO2–TiO2 catalysts for NH3-SCR reaction

AbstractWO3–CeO2–TiO2 catalysts for NO (nitrogen monoxide) reduction by ammonia were prepared by a sol–gel method. The catalysts were characterized by BET, XRD, Raman, NH3/NO adsorption and H2-TPR to investigate the relationships among the catalyst composition, structure, redox property, acidity and deNOx activity. WO3–CeO2–TiO2 catalysts show a high activity in a broad temperature range of 200–480°C. The low-temperature activity of catalysts is sensitive to the catalyst composition especially under low-O2-content atmospheres. It may be related to the synergistic effect between CeOx and WOx in the catalysts. On one hand, the interaction between ceria and tungsten oxide promotes the activation of gaseous oxygen to compensate the lattice oxygen consumed in NH3-SCR (selective catalytic reduction) reaction at low temperatures. Meanwhile, the Brønsted acid sites mainly arise from tungsten oxides, Lewis acid sites mainly arise from ceria. Both of the Brønsted and Lewis acid sites facilitate the adsorption of NH3 on catalysts and improve the stability of the adsorbed ammonia species, which are beneficial to the NH3-SCR reaction

Circulating MicroRNA Expression Profiles in Patients with Stable and Unstable Angina

OBJECTIVES: High incidence and case fatality of unstable angina (UA) is, to a large extent, a consequence of the lack of highly sensitive and specific non-invasive markers. Circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) have been widely recommended as potential biomarkers for numerous diseases. In the present study, we characterized distinctive miRNA expression profiles in patients with stable angina (SA), UA, and normal coronary arteries (NCA), and identified promising candidates for UA diagnosis. METHODS: Serum was collected from patients with SA, UA, and NCA who visited the Department of Cardiovascular Diseases of the Meizhou People’s Hospital. Small RNA sequencing was carried out on an Illumina HiSeq 2500 platform. miRNA expression in different groups of patients was profiled and then confirmed based on that in an independent set of patients. Functions of differentially expressed miRNAs were predicted using gene ontology classification and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway analysis. RESULTS: Our results indicated that circulating miRNA expression profiles differed between SA, UA, and NCA patients. A total of 36 and 161 miRNAs were dysregulated in SA and UA patients, respectively. miRNA expression was validated by reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction. CONCLUSION: The results suggest that circulating miRNAs are potential biomarkers of UA

CD133 expression in cancer cells predicts poor prognosis of non-mucin producing intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma

Background; CD133 is a marker of stem cells as well cancer stem cells. This study investigated the association between CD133 expression in cancer cells and the clinical outcome of non-mucin producing intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC). Methods: Fifty-seven non-mucin producing ICC patients were enrolled in this study. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) and immunofluorescence staining for CD133 as well as other cancer-associated proteins, including cytokeratin 19, TGF-β1, p-Smad2 and epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) markers S100A4, E-Cadherin and Vimentin were analyzed. Results: IHC staining showed that tumor cells in 52.6% of patients expressed CD133. The CD133+ patients had significantly higher metastasis rate than those without CD133+ tumor cells (36.7% vs. 10.1%, p = 0.03). The CD133+ patients had shorter overall and disease-free survival time as compared to the CD133− patients. Furthermore, 90.9% of CD133+ patients developed cancer recurrence, as compared to 64.3% of CD133− patients (p = 0.02). As compared to CD133− patients, tumor cells in CD133+ patients demonstrated high levels of TGF-β/p-Smad2 as well as EMT-like alteration, characterized by loss of E-Cadherin and expression of Vimentin and S100A4. Conclusions: CD133 expression in ICC tumor cells indicates poor prognosis of the disease and might be associated with TGF-β related EMT alterations

Evolution from unconventional spin density wave to superconductivity and a novel gap-like phase in NaFe1-xCoxAs

Similar to the cuprate high TC superconductors, the iron pnictide superconductors also lie in close proximity to a magnetically ordered phase. A central debate concerning the superconducting mechanism is whether the local magnetic moments play an indispensable role or the itinerant electron description is sufficient. A key step for resolving this issue is to acquire a comprehensive picture regarding the nature of various phases and interactions in the iron compounds. Here we report the doping, temperature, and spatial evolutions of the electronic structure of NaFe1-xCoxAs studied by scanning tunneling microscopy. The spin density wave gap in the parent state is observed for the first time, which shows a strongly asymmetric lineshape that is incompatible with the conventional Fermi surface nesting scenario. The optimally doped sample exhibits a single, symmetric energy gap, but in the overdoped regime another asymmetric gap-like feature emerges near the Fermi level. This novel gap-like phase coexists with superconductivity in the ground state, persists deep into the normal state, and shows strong spatial variations. The characteristics of the three distinct low energy states, in conjunction with the peculiar high energy spectra, suggest that the coupling between the local moments and itinerant electrons is the fundamental driving force for the phases and phase transitions in the iron pnictides.Comment: 4 figures + supplementary informatio

Towards Vehicular Digital Forensics from Decentralized Trust: An Accountable, Privacy-preservation, and Secure Realization

With the increasing number of traffic accidents and terrorist attacks by modern vehicles, vehicular digital forensics (VDF) has gained significant attention in identifying evidence from the related digital devices. Ensuring the law enforcement agency to accurately integrate various kinds of data is a crucial point to determine the facts. However, malicious attackers or semi-honest participants may undermine the digital forensic procedures. Enabling accountability and privacy-preservation while providing secure data access control in VDF is a non-trivial challenge. To mitigate this issue, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based decentralized solution for VDF named BB-VDF, in which the accountable protocols and algorithm are constructed. The desirable security properties and fine-grained data access control are achieved based on smart contract and the customized cryptographic construction. Specifically, we design a distributed key-policy attribute based encryption scheme with partially hidden access structures, named DKP-ABE-H, to realize the secure fine-grained forensics data access control. Further, a novel smart contract is designed to model the forensics procedures as a finite state machine, which guarantees accountability that each participant performs auditable cooperation under tamper-resistant and traceable transactions. Systematic security analysis and extensive experimental results show the feasibility and practicability of our proposed BB-VDF scheme

Animate-A-Story: Storytelling with Retrieval-Augmented Video Generation

Generating videos for visual storytelling can be a tedious and complex process that typically requires either live-action filming or graphics animation rendering. To bypass these challenges, our key idea is to utilize the abundance of existing video clips and synthesize a coherent storytelling video by customizing their appearances. We achieve this by developing a framework comprised of two functional modules: (i) Motion Structure Retrieval, which provides video candidates with desired scene or motion context described by query texts, and (ii) Structure-Guided Text-to-Video Synthesis, which generates plot-aligned videos under the guidance of motion structure and text prompts. For the first module, we leverage an off-the-shelf video retrieval system and extract video depths as motion structure. For the second module, we propose a controllable video generation model that offers flexible controls over structure and characters. The videos are synthesized by following the structural guidance and appearance instruction. To ensure visual consistency across clips, we propose an effective concept personalization approach, which allows the specification of the desired character identities through text prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach exhibits significant advantages over various existing baselines.Comment: Github: https://github.com/VideoCrafter/Animate-A-Story Project page: https://videocrafter.github.io/Animate-A-Stor

VideoCrafter1: Open Diffusion Models for High-Quality Video Generation

Video generation has increasingly gained interest in both academia and industry. Although commercial tools can generate plausible videos, there is a limited number of open-source models available for researchers and engineers. In this work, we introduce two diffusion models for high-quality video generation, namely text-to-video (T2V) and image-to-video (I2V) models. T2V models synthesize a video based on a given text input, while I2V models incorporate an additional image input. Our proposed T2V model can generate realistic and cinematic-quality videos with a resolution of $1024 \times 576$, outperforming other open-source T2V models in terms of quality. The I2V model is designed to produce videos that strictly adhere to the content of the provided reference image, preserving its content, structure, and style. This model is the first open-source I2V foundation model capable of transforming a given image into a video clip while maintaining content preservation constraints. We believe that these open-source video generation models will contribute significantly to the technological advancements within the community.Comment: Tech Report; Github: https://github.com/AILab-CVC/VideoCrafter Homepage: https://ailab-cvc.github.io/videocrafter

The Change of Immunoactivity of Dendritic Cells Induced by Mouse 4-1BBL Recombinant Adenovirus

*These authors contributed equally to this work. ∙The authors have no financial conflicts of interest. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to construct a recombinant adenovirus vector carrying mouse 4-1BBL and observe its effects in dendritic cells. Materials and Methods: Mouse 4-1BBL cDNA was taken from the plasmid pcDNA3-m4-1BBL and subcloned into adenovirus shuttle plasmid pAdTrack-CMV, and then transformed into competent BJ5183 with plasmid pAdEasy-1. After recombination in E. coli, Ad-4-1BBL was packaged and amplified in HEK 293 cells. The expression of 4-1BBL in Ad-4-1BBL-transfected mouse prostate cancer cell line RM-1 was detected by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and Western blot. After the co-culture of dendritic cells (DCs) with Ad-4-1BBLtransfected RM-1 cells, interleukin (IL)-6 and IL-12 production were assessed by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and co-stimulatary moleculs (CD80 and CD86) on DCs were analyzed by flow cytometry. Results: The levels of IL-6 (3,960 pg/mL) and IL-12 (249 pg/mL) production in Ad-m4-1BBL-pulsed DCs were more than those in none-pulsed DCs. The differences were statistically significant (p < 0.05). The expression of co-stimulatary molecules (CD80 and CD86) was up-regulated in Ad-m4-1BBL-pulsed DCs. Conclusion: The results indicated the recombinant mouse 4-1BBL can effectively activate DCs

In situ infrared Spectroscopy of active oxygen species for oxidative coupling of methane over BaF2/La2O3 catalyst

In situ IR spectroscopy was used to study the superoxide species (O-2(-)) for oxidative coupling of methane (OCM) over the BaF2,/La2O3 catalyst. After the pretreatment of the catalyst with O-2, the IR peak at 1108-1118 cm(-1) appeared, which was assigned to O-O bond stretching vibration in O-2(-) species. After the introduction Of 1802 isotope, the IR peak at 1.108-1118 cm-1 was weakened, and the absorption peaks appeared at 1086 and 1051 cm(-1), which was consistent with the assignment of the O-18O bond and O-18 O-18 bond stretching vibrations in the superoxide species, respectively. At 700 degrees C, the superoxide species could react with CH4, accompanied by the formation of gas phase C2H4. A good correlation between the rate of O-2 consumption and the rate of C2H4 formation was observed, so the superoxide species was believed to be responsible for the OCM reaction over the BaF2/La2O3 catalyst