A Typha Angustifolia-like MoS2/carbon nanofiber composite for high performance Li-S batteries

A Typha Angustifolia-like MoS2/carbon nanofiber composite as both a chemically trapping agent and redox conversion catalyst for lithium polysulfides has been successfully synthesized via a simple hydrothermal method. Cycling performance and coulombic efficiency have been improved significantly by applying the Typha Angustifolia-like MoS2/carbon nanofiber as the interlayer of a pure sulfur cathode, resulting in a capacity degradation of only 0.09% per cycle and a coulombic efficiency which can reach as high as 99%

Are males and females of Populus cathayana differentially sensitive to Cd stress?

This study clarifies the mechanisms of Cd uptake, translocation and detoxification in Populus cathayana Rehder females and males, and reveals a novel strategy for dioecious plants to cope with Cd contamination. Females exhibited a high degree of Cd uptake and root-to-shoot translocation, while males showed extensive Cd accumulation in roots, elevated antioxidative capacity, and effective cellular and bark Cd sequestration. Our study also found that Cd is largely located in epidermal and cortical tissues of male roots and leaves, while in females, more Cd was present in vascular tissues of roots and leaves, as well as in leaf mesophyll. In addition, the distributions of sulphur (S) and phosphorus (P) were very similar as that of Cd in males, but the associations were weak in females. Scanning electron microscopy and energy spectroscopy analyses suggested that the amounts of tissue Cd were positively correlated with P and S amounts in males, but not in females (a weak correlation between S and Cd). Transcriptional data suggested that Cd stress promoted the upregulation of genes related to Cd uptake and translocation in females, and that of genes related to cell wall biosynthesis, metal tolerance and secondary metabolism in males. Our results indicated that coordinated physiological, microstructural and transcriptional responses to Cd stress endowed superior Cd tolerance in males compared with females, and provided new insights into mechanisms underlying sexually differential responses to Cd stress.Peer reviewe

ViewFool: Evaluating the Robustness of Visual Recognition to Adversarial Viewpoints

Recent studies have demonstrated that visual recognition models lack robustness to distribution shift. However, current work mainly considers model robustness to 2D image transformations, leaving viewpoint changes in the 3D world less explored. In general, viewpoint changes are prevalent in various real-world applications (e.g., autonomous driving), making it imperative to evaluate viewpoint robustness. In this paper, we propose a novel method called ViewFool to find adversarial viewpoints that mislead visual recognition models. By encoding real-world objects as neural radiance fields (NeRF), ViewFool characterizes a distribution of diverse adversarial viewpoints under an entropic regularizer, which helps to handle the fluctuations of the real camera pose and mitigate the reality gap between the real objects and their neural representations. Experiments validate that the common image classifiers are extremely vulnerable to the generated adversarial viewpoints, which also exhibit high cross-model transferability. Based on ViewFool, we introduce ImageNet-V, a new out-of-distribution dataset for benchmarking viewpoint robustness of image classifiers. Evaluation results on 40 classifiers with diverse architectures, objective functions, and data augmentations reveal a significant drop in model performance when tested on ImageNet-V, which provides a possibility to leverage ViewFool as an effective data augmentation strategy to improve viewpoint robustness.Comment: NeurIPS 202

Interregional and intersectoral interaction of digital economy in China

With the continuous advancement of the integration of the world’s digital economy, the economic development of various regions has become increasingly interdependent. However, the interregional interactions of digital industries have yet to be further elucidated. Here, based on the Multi-Regional Input-Output model, we take China, for example, and analyze the impact of digital industries on the economy from the industrial and regional. At the industry level, we discuss the economic spillover relationship between the digital industry and the three traditional industries, and analyzes the spatial and temporal differentiation in the inter-industry spillover status of China’s 30 provinces; at the regional level, we discuss the digital industrial economic spillover links and spillover states. The results show that: 1) The self-generating ability within the digital industry sector is the most significant factor influencing the industrial growth of China’s digital economy, followed by the interrelated effect between industry sectors, while the inter-industry feedback effect has a weak impact on the economic system. 2) There is a clear gap in the economic spillover capacity of the digital industry in 30 provinces, and the overall performance is decreasing in the eastern, central and western regions. 3) The intra-regional multiplier effect of digital industry shows a slowly decreasing trend, and the intra-regional digital economic spillover-feedback effect shows a growing trend. At the same time, the inter-regional digital economy interaction tends to decay in distance, indicating that regional accessibility has a significant impact on the inter-regional spillover effect

Maximizing the visible light photoelectrochemical activity of B/N-doped anatase TiO2 microspheres with exposed dominant {001} facets

This work was supported by the Major Basic Research Program, Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2014CB239401), the National Natural Science Fundation of China (51422210, 21633009, 51629201 and 51521091), the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences CAS (QYZDB-SSW-JSC039). Liu G thanks Newton Advanced Fellowship.Anatase TiO2 microspheres with exposed dominant BBBBB001BBBBB facets were doped with interstitial boron to have a concentration gradient with the maximum concentration at the surface. They were then further doped with substitutional nitrogen by heating in an ammonia atmosphere at different temperatures from 440 to 560°C to give surface N concentrations ranging from 7.03 to 15.47 at%. The optical absorption, atomic and electronic structures and visible-light photoelectrochemical water oxidation activity of these materials were investigated. The maximum activity of the doped TiO2 was achieved at a nitrogen doping temperature of 520°C that gave a high absorbance over the whole visible light region but with no defect-related background absorption.PostprintPostprintPeer reviewe

Nitrogen Doped Carbon Nanosheets Encapsulated in situ Generated Sulfur Enable High Capacity and Superior Rate Cathode for Li-S Batteries

Lithium-sulfur batteries (LSBs), with large specific capacity (1,675 mAh g−1), are regarded as the most likely alternative to the traditional Lithium-ion batteries. However, the intrinsical insulation and dramatic volume change of sulfur, as well as serious shuttle effect of polysulfides hinder their practical implementation. Herein, we develop three-dimensional micron flowers assembled by nitrogen doped carbon (NC) nanosheets with sulfur encapsulated (S@NC-NSs) as a promising cathode for Li-S to overcome the forementioned obstacles. The in situ generated S layer adheres to the inner surface of the hollow and micro-porous NC shell with fruitful O/N containing groups endowing both efficient physical trapping and chemical anchoring of polysulfides. Meanwhile, such a novel carbon shell helps to bear dramatic volume change and provides a fast way for electron transfer during cycling. Consequently, the S@NC-NSs demonstrate a high capacity (1,238 mAh g−1 at 0.2 C; 1.0 C = 1,675 mA g−1), superior rate performance with a capacity retention of 57.8% when the current density increases 25 times from 0.2 to 5.0 C, as well as outstanding cycling performance with an ultralow capacity fading of only 0.064% after 200 cycles at a high current density of 5.0 C

Numerical study on inertial effects on liquid-vapor flow using lattice Boltzmann method

Liquid-vapor flow in porous media is studied in this article. To fulfill this goal, a double-distribution-function lattice Boltzmann (LB) model is proposed based on the separate-phase governing equations at the representative elementary volume (REV) scale. Importantly, besides the Darcy force and capillary force, which were commonly included in previous studies, the LB model in this article also considers the inertial force characterized by the Forchheimer term. This feature enables the model to offer an effective description of liquid-vapor flow in porous media at low, intermediate and even high flow rates. We validated the LB model by simulating a single-phase flow in porous media driven by a pressure difference and found its results are in good agreement with the available analytical solutions. We then applied the model to study water-vapor flow in a semi-infinite porous region bounded by an impermeable and heated wall. The numerical simulation reveals the flow and mass transfer characteristics under the compounding effects of inertial, Darcy and capillary forces. Through a comparison with the results given by the generalized Darcy’s law, our numerical results directly evidence that the inertial force is a dominating factor when a fluid passes through porous media at an intermediate or high flow rate

Epstein-Barr Virus-Induced Gene 3 (EBI3) Blocking Leads to Induce Antitumor Cytotoxic T Lymphocyte Response and Suppress Tumor Growth in Colorectal Cancer by Bidirectional Reciprocal-Regulation STAT3 Signaling Pathway

Epstein-Barr virus-induced gene 3 (EBI3) is a member of the interleukin-12 (IL-12) family structural subunit and can form a heterodimer with IL-27p28 and IL-12p35 subunit to build IL-27 and IL-35, respectively. However, IL-27 stimulates whereas IL-35 inhibits antitumor T cell responses. To date, little is known about the role of EBI3 in tumor microenvironment. In this study, firstly we assessed EBI3, IL-27p28, IL-12p35, gp130, and p-STAT3 expression with clinicopathological parameters of colorectal cancer (CRC) tissues; then we evaluated the antitumor T cell responses and tumor growth with a EBI3 blocking peptide. We found that elevated EBI3 may be associated with IL-12p35, gp130, and p-STAT3 to promote CRC progression. EBI3 blocking peptide promoted antitumor cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) response by inducing Granzyme B, IFN-γ production, and p-STAT3 expression and inhibited CRC cell proliferation and tumor growth to associate with suppressing gp130 and p-STAT3 expression. Taken together, these results suggest that EBI3 may mediate a bidirectional reciprocal-regulation STAT3 signaling pathway to assist the tumor escape immune surveillance in CRC

Pervasive hybridization during evolutionary radiation of Rhododendron subgenus Hymenanthes in mountains of southwest China

Radiations are especially important for generating species biodiversity in mountainous ecosystems. The contribution of hybridization to such radiations has rarely been examined. Here, we use extensive genomic data to test whether hybridization was involved in evolutionary radiation within Rhododendron subgenus Hymenanthes, whose members show strong geographic isolation in the mountains of southwest China. We sequenced genomes for 143 species of this subgenus and 93 species of four other subgenera, and found that Hymenanthes was monophyletic and radiated during the late Oligocene to middle Miocene. Widespread hybridization events were inferred within and between the identified clades and subclades. This suggests that hybridization occurred both early and late during diversification of subgenus Hymenanthes, although the extent to which hybridization, speciation through mixing-isolation-mixing or hybrid speciation, accelerated the diversification needs further exploration. Cycles of isolation and contact in such and other montane ecosystems may have together promoted species radiation through hybridization between diverging populations and species. Similar radiation processes may apply to other montane floras in this region and elsewhere

Simulation of Three-Fold Symmetric Photonic Crystal Structures on Top of GaN LEDs

A 3-fold symmetric photonic-crystal grating is simulated using improved FDTD-model. Transmission gratings are optimized. Then, the best cases are simulated in GaN-LED models. The maximum extraction efficiency improvement is 40× greater compared to conventional LEDs