Ultrathin aerogel-structured micro/nanofiber metafabric via dual air-gelation synthesis for self-sustainable heating.

Incorporating passive heating structures into personal thermal management technologies could effectively mitigate the escalating energy crisis. However, current passive heating materials struggle to balance thickness and insulating capability, resulting in compromised comfort, space efficiency, and limited thermoregulatory performance. Here, a dual air-gelation strategy, is developed to directly synthesize ultrathin and self-sustainable heating metafabric with 3D dual-network structure during electrospinning. Controlling the interactions among polymer, solvent, and water enables the microphase separation of charged jets, while adjusting the distribution of carbon black nanoparticles within charged fluids to form fibrous networks composed of interlaced aerogel micro/nanofibers with heat storage capabilities. With a low thickness of 0.18 mm, the integrated metafabric exhibits exceptional thermal insulation performance (15.8 mW m-1K-1), superhydrophobicity, enhanced mechanical properties, and high breathability while maintaining self-sustainable radiative heating ability (long-lasting warming of 8.8 °C). This strategy provides rich possibilities to develop advanced fibrous materials for smart textiles and thermal management.

Fe3O4@R837 Nanoplatform Enhances Chemical Dynamic Therapy and Immunotherapy: Integrated Transcriptomic Analysis Reveals Key Genes in Breast Cancer Prognosis.

Breast cancer represents a substantial contributor to mortality rates among women with cancer. Chemical dynamic therapy is a promising anticancer strategy that utilizes the Fenton reaction to transform naturally occurring hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) into hydroxyl radicals (•OH). Additionally, cancer immunotherapy using immune drugs, such as imiquimod (R837), has shown promise in activating T cells to kill tumor cells. In this study, we proposed a Fe3O4@R837 smart nanoplatform that can trigger the Fenton reaction and induce immune responses in breast cancer treatment. Furthermore, we performed transcriptome sequencing on breast cancer samples and used the R package (limma) to analyze differential expression profiles and select differentially expressed genes (DEGs). We obtained clinical information and RNA expression matrix data from The Cancer Genome Atlas database to perform survival analysis and identify prognostic-related genes (PRGs) and molecular subtypes with distinct prognoses. We used the TIMER 2.0 web and other methods to determine the tumor immune microenvironment and immune status of different prognostic subtypes. We identified DPGs by taking the intersection of DEGs and PRGs and performed functional analyses, including gene ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes enrichment analysis, to elucidate potential mechanisms. Subsequently, we constructed a protein-protein interaction network using the STRING database to visualize the interactions between the DPGs. We screened hub genes from the DPGs using the Cytoscape plugin and identified six hub genes: CD3E, GZMK, CD27, SH2D1A, ZAP70, and TIGIT. Our results indicate that these six key genes regulate immune cell recruitment to increase T-cell cytotoxicity and kill tumors. Targeting these key genes can enhance immunotherapy and improve the breast cancer prognosis.

Prediction of Residual Life of In-Service P91 Steel Joints Based on Fracture Behavior.

P91 steel and P91 steel joints experience performance degradation after serving for 30,000 h in working conditions. To clarify the damage and failure behavior and remaining life of the joints during subsequent service, further creep testing was conducted on the welded joints of P91 steel that had been in service for 30,000 h at three temperatures: 550 °C, 575 °C, and 600 °C. The fracture surface and the cross-section damage behavior were characterized by SEM and EBSD methods. The results show that there are two types of fracture modes in the joints at different temperatures: ductile cracking occurring at the BM, and type IV cracking occurring in the FGHAZ. The threshold stress for fracture mode transition decreases with an increase in working temperature. Type IV cracking near the HAZ is the main reason for the premature failure of joints during service. And based on the fracture mode, the dual-constant L-M method was proposed to predict the strength of in-service joint materials. The testing data are discussed and classified based on the fracture mode in this method, which has high accuracy and can prevent the premature failure of joints.

Two-Dimensional Piezoelectric Nanofibrous Webs by Self-Polarized Assembly for High-Performance PM0.3 Filtration.

Particulate matter (PM) pollution has posed a serious threat to public health, especially the global spread of infectious diseases. Most existing air filtration materials are still subjected to a compromise between removal efficiency and air permeability on account of their stacking bulk structures. Here, we proposed a self-polarized assembly technique to create two-dimensional piezoelectric nanofibrous webs (PNWs) directly from polymer solutions. The strategy involves droplets deforming into ultrathin liquid films by inertial flow, liquid films evolving into web-like architectures by instantaneous phase inversion, and enhanced dipole alignment by cluster electrostatics. The assembled continuous webs exhibit integrated structural superiorities of nanoscale diameters (∼20 nm) of the internal fibers and through pores (∼100 nm). Combined with the wind-driven electrostatic property derived from the enhanced piezoelectricity, the PNW filter shows high efficiency (99.48%) and low air resistance (34 Pa) against PM0.3 as well as high transparency (84%), superlight weight (0.7 g m-2), and long-term stable service life. This creation of such versatile nanomaterials may offer insight into the design and upgrading of high-performance filters.

Hemodialysis bilayer bionic blood vessels developed by the mechanical stimulation of hepatitis B viral X(HBX) gene- transfected hepatic stellate cells. / é€šè¿‡æœºæ¢°åŠ›åˆºæ¿€ä¹™åž‹è‚ç‚Žç— æ¯’XåŸºå› (HBX)转染的肝星状细胞制备血液透析用双层仿生血管.

Artificial vascular graft (AVG) fistula is widely used for hemodialysis treatment in patients with renal failure. However, it has poor elasticity and compliance, leading to stenosis and thrombosis. The ideal artificial blood vessel for dialysis should replicate the structure and components of a real artery, which is primarily maintained by collagen in the extracellular matrix (ECM) of arterial cells. Studies have revealed that in hepatitis B virus (HBV)-induced liver fibrosis, hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) become hyperactive and produce excessive ECM fibers. Furthermore, mechanical stimulation can encourage ECM secretion and remodeling of a fiber structure. Based on the above factors, we transfected HSCs with the hepatitis B viral X (HBX) gene for simulating the process of HBV infection. Subsequently, these HBX-HSCs were implanted into a polycaprolactone-polyurethane (PCL-PU) bilayer scaffold in which the inner layer is dense and the outer layer consists of pores, which was mechanically stimulated to promote the secretion of collagen nanofiber from the HBX-HSCs and to facilitate crosslinking with the scaffold. We obtained an ECM-PCL-PU composite bionic blood vessel that could act as access for dialysis after decellularization. Then, the vessel scaffold was implanted into a rabbit's neck arteriovenous fistula model. It exhibited strong tensile strength and smooth blood flow and formed autologous blood vessels in the rabbit's body. Our study demonstrates the use of human cells to create biomimetic dialysis blood vessels, providing a novel approach for creating clinical vascular access for dialysis.

Designing 3D SnS@Cu-Ni Nanoporous Column Array Electrode for High-Capacity and High-Rate Lithium-Ion Batteries.

Sn-based materials with high capacity showcase great potential for next-generation lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Yet, the large volume change and limited ion/electron transfer efficiency of Sn-based materials upon operation significantly compromises the battery performance. In this study, a unique 3D copper-nickel nanoporous column array current collector is rationally developed via a facile template-free galvanostatic electrodeposition method, followed by electrodepositing SnS active material onto it (denoted as 3D SnS@CNCA). Excitingly, the morphology of the 3D SnS@CNCA electrode perfectly inherited the nanoporous column array structure of the 3D current collector, which not only endows the electrode with a large specific surface area to provide more active sites and sufficient ion/electron transport pathways, but also effectively alleviates the volume expansion of SnS upon repeated charge-discharge cycles. Therefore, the binder-free 3D SnS@CNCA electrode showcases a significantly enhanced Li storage performance, showing a high initial reversible capacity of 1019.7 mAh g-1 with noteworthy cycling stability (a capacity retention rate of 89.4% after 200 cycles). Moreover, the designed electrode also manifests high rate performance with a high capacity of 570.6 mAh g-1 at 4 A g-1. This work provides a novel design idea for the preparation of high-performance electrodes beyond LIBs.

Pretrained Quantum-Inspired Deep Neural Network for Natural Language Processing.

Natural language processing (NLP) may face the inexplicable "black-box" problem of parameters and unreasonable modeling for lack of embedding of some characteristics of natural language, while the quantum-inspired models based on quantum theory may provide a potential solution. However, the essential prior knowledge and pretrained text features are often ignored at the early stage of the development of quantum-inspired models. To attacking the above challenges, a pretrained quantum-inspired deep neural network is proposed in this work, which is constructed based on quantum theory for carrying out strong performance and great interpretability in related NLP fields. Concretely, a quantum-inspired pretrained feature embedding (QPFE) method is first developed to model superposition states for words to embed more textual features. Then, a QPFE-ERNIE model is designed by merging the semantic features learned from the prevalent pretrained model ERNIE, which is verified with two NLP downstream tasks: 1) sentiment classification and 2) word sense disambiguation (WSD). In addition, schematic quantum circuit diagrams are provided, which has potential impetus for the future realization of quantum NLP with quantum device. Finally, the experiment results demonstrate QPFE-ERNIE is significantly better for sentiment classification than gated recurrent unit (GRU), BiLSTM, and TextCNN on five datasets in all metrics and achieves better results than ERNIE in accuracy, F1-score, and precision on two datasets (CR and SST), and it also has advantage for WSD over the classical models, including BERT (improves F1-score by 5.2 on average) and ERNIE (improves F1-score by 4.2 on average) and improves the F1-score by 8.7 on average compared with a previous quantum-inspired model QWSD. QPFE-ERNIE provides a novel pretrained quantum-inspired model for solving NLP problems, and it lays a foundation for exploring more quantum-inspired models in the future.

Lipopolysaccharide modification enhances the inhibitory effect of clodronate liposomes on hepatic fibrosis by depletion of macrophages and hepatic stellate cells.

Hepatic fibrosis is a complex chronic liver disease in which both macrophages and hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) play important roles. Many studies have shown that clodronate liposomes (CLD-lipos) effectively deplete macrophages. However, no liposomes have been developed that target both HSCs and macrophages. This study aimed to evaluate the therapeutic efficacy of lipopolysaccharide-coupled clodronate liposomes (LPS-CLD-lipos) and the effects of liposomes size on hepatic fibrosis. Three rat models of hepatic fibrosis were established in vivo; diethylnitrosamine (DEN), bile duct ligation (BDL), and carbon tetrachloride (CCl4). Hematoxylin and eosin staining and serological liver function indices were used to analyze pathological liver damage. Masson's trichrome and Sirius red staining were used to evaluate the effect of liposomes on liver collagen fibers. The hydroxyproline content in liver tissues was determined. In vitro cell counting kit-8 (CCK-8) and immunofluorescence assays were used to further explore the effects of LPS modification and liposomes size on the killing of macrophages and HSCs. Both in vitro and in vivo experiments showed that 200 nm LPS-CLD-lipos significantly inhibited hepatic fibrosis and the abnormal deposition of collagen fibers in the liver and improved the related indicators of liver function. Further results showed that 200 nm LPS-CLD-lipos increased the clearance of macrophages and induced apoptosis of hepatic stellate cells, significantly. The present study demonstrated that 200 nm LPS-CLD-lipos could significantly inhibit hepatic fibrosis and improve liver function-related indices and this study may provide novel ideas and directions for hepatic fibrosis treatment.

The Efficacy of Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction with Peroneus Longus Tendon and its Impact on Ankle Joint Function.

OBJECTIVE: Peroneus Longus Tendon (PLT), a viable anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) graft, shares similar biomechanics, making it suitable for reconstruction. Controversy exists over whether PLT transplants affects the donor ankle joint. The purpose of this study was to examine the recovery of knee joint function following arthroscopic ACL restoration using autologous PLT and its influence on the donor ankle joint. METHODS: A retrospective analysis was conducted on 65 patients with ACL rupture who underwent PLT graft reconstruction in our hospital from January 2016 to December 2021. A three-dimensional gait analysis of the bilateral knee and ankle joints was performed postoperatively using an Opti_Knee three-dimensional motion measurement and analysis system-Yidong Medical Infrared Motion Gait Analyzer. Knee function scores and changes in the range of motion of the bilateral knee and ankle joints were collected. The analysis of preoperative and postoperative joint function scores, bilateral knee and ankle mobility was performed by t-tests. RESULTS: One year after surgery, the patients' International Knee Documentation Committee (IKDC) scores, Knee Injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Scores (KOOSs), and Lysholm scores were significantly improved compared to preoperative scores, with statistically significant differences (p < 0.05). There was no statistical difference in the American Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Society (AOFAS) score of the donor ankle joint before and after surgery (p > 0.05). During different gait cycles, there was no statistical difference in knee joint mobility between the affected and healthy sides (p > 0.05), but there was a statistical difference in the inversion and eversion angle of the donor ankle joint during the support phase (p < 0.05). CONCLUSION: ACL reconstruction using the PLT can yield satisfactory knee joint function. However, it does affect inversion and eversion in the donor ankle joint, necessitating postoperative exercises. Similar subjective function ratings for both operated and non-operated feet, despite increased inversion-eversion motion in the operated foot, may be influenced by the subjective nature and margin of error in the AOFAS Ankle-hindfoot score, along with the relatively small variation in ankle inversion-eversion angles.

Cellulose/silica composite microtubular superfoam with excellent flame retardancy, thermal insulation and ablative resistance.

Thermal insulation materials with good flame-retardant properties have attracted widespread attention because of their huge application potential. Traditional petrochemical-based polymer insulation materials are flammable and have problems with environmental pollution. The microtubule structure is a perfect microstructure with excellent thermal insulation performance. In addition, the microtubule structure also has low density and high elasticity. Therefore, the microtubule structure is an important reference microstructure for the development of efficient thermal insulation materials. In this paper, a cellulose/SiO2 composite microtube thermal insulation superfoam has been successfully prepared. Cellulose microtubules were successfully prepared from poplar sawdust by chemical methods. The SiO2 aerogel precursor solution can be quickly adsorbed by the delignified cellulose microtubes. The SiO2 aerogel shells are evenly distributed only on the inner and outer walls of the delignified cellulose microtubes. The cellulose/SiO2 microtube composite (CSMC) superfoam exhibits low density, good mechanical properties, and low thermal conductivity (as low as 0.042 ± 0.0018 W m-1 K-1). The CSMC superfoam exhibits excellent self-extinguishing and flame-retardant properties. After being burned by a butane flame, the superfoam still has certain mechanical properties. The thermal conductivity of the B-CSMC superfoam (the CSMC superfoam burned by a butane flame) is about 0.050 W m-1 K-1. The B-CSMC superfoam remained almost unchanged after being continuously ablated by a butane flame for 3600 seconds.

Self-Catalyzed Growth of Co4N and N-Doped Carbon Nanotubes toward Bifunctional Cathode for Highly Safe and Flexible Li-Air Batteries.

The practical application of high-energy density lithium-oxygen (Li-O2) batteries is severely impeded by the notorious cycling stability and safety, which mainly comes from slow kinetics of oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) at cathodes, causing inferior redox overpotentials and reactive lithium metal in flammable liquid electrolyte. Herein, a bifunctional electrode, a safe gel polymer electrolyte (GPE), and a robust lithium anode are proposed to alleviate above problems. The bifunctional electrode is composed of N-doped carbon nanotubes (N-CNTs) and Co4N by in situ chemical vapor deposition self-catalyzed growth on carbon cloth (N-CNTs@Co4N@CC). The self-supporting, binder-free N-CNTs@Co4N@CC electrode has a strong and stable three-dimensional (3D) interconnected conductive structure, which provides interconnectivity between the active sites and the electrode to promote the transfer of electrons. Furthermore, the N-CNT-intertwined Co4N ensures efficient catalytic activity. Hence, the electrode demonstrates improved electrochemical properties even under a large current density (2000 mA g-1) and long cycling operation (250 cycles). Moreover, a highly safe and flexible rechargeable cell using the 3D N-CNTs@Co4N@CC electrode, GPE, and robust lithium anode design has been explored. The open circuit voltage is stable at ∼3.0 V even after 9800 cycles, which proves the mechanical durability of the integrated GPE cell. The stable cable-type Li-air battery was demonstrated to stably drive the light-emitting diodes (LEDs), highlighting the reliability for practical use.

Select Your Own Counterparts: Self-Supervised Graph Contrastive Learning With Positive Sampling.

Contrastive learning (CL) has emerged as a powerful approach for self-supervised learning. However, it suffers from sampling bias, which hinders its performance. While the mainstream solutions, hard negative mining (HNM) and supervised CL (SCL), have been proposed to mitigate this critical issue, they do not effectively address graph CL (GCL). To address it, we propose graph positive sampling (GPS) and three contrastive objectives. The former is a novel learning paradigm designed to leverage the inherent properties of graphs for improved GCL models, which utilizes four complementary similarity measurements, including node centrality, topological distance, neighborhood overlapping, and semantic distance, to select positive counterparts for each node. Notably, GPS operates without relying on true labels and enables preprocessing applications. The latter aims to fuse positive samples and enhance representative selection in the semantic space. We release three node-level models with GPS and conduct extensive experiments on public datasets. The results demonstrate the superiority of GPS over state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines and debiasing methods. In addition, the GPS has also been proven to be versatile, adaptive, and flexible.

Carbon/ZrO2 aerogel composite microtube superfoam.

High-performance thermal insulation materials with broad application prospects have attracted great attention. The introduction of new microstructures into thermal protection materials can significantly improve the thermal insulation performance. The tubular microstructure has obvious advantages such as thermal insulation, lightweight, mechanical, and other properties. Therefore, the microtubular structure has become an important reference microstructure for the development of high-performance thermal insulation materials. In this paper, the carbon/ZrO2 aerogel composite microtube superfoams with excellent thermal protection properties were prepared by a vacuum filtration and high-temperature carbonization method. The ZrO2 aerogel precursor solution can be quickly and uniformly adsorbed on the inner and outer walls of cellulose microtubules. These adsorbed ZrO2 aerogel precursor solution films can be converted into ZrO2 alcohol gel shells under the acceleration and promotion effect of citric acid at 65 °C. The micromorphology of the ZrO2 aerogel shell on the inner and outer walls of the composite microtubes can be efficiently controlled by the concentration of the ZrO2 aerogel precursor solution and the carbonization temperature. The carbon/ZrO2 aerogel composite microtube superfoam exhibits a lower thermal conductivity, lower density, good mechanical properties, and high ablation resistance. The thermal conductivity of the carbon/ZrO2 aerogel composite microtube superfoam is as low as 0.040 ± 0.001 W m-1 K-1. The residual rate of the carbon/ZrO2 aerogel composite microtube superfoam is still as high as 84.33% after butane flame ablation for up to 3600 seconds.

Study of Fatigue Crack Initiation and the Propagation Mechanism Induced by Pores in a Powder Metallurgy Nickel-Based FGH96 Superalloy.

Thermally induced pores (TIPs) are generally the source of fatigue crack initiation in the powder metallurgy (PM) Ni-based FGH96 superalloy. The effect of TIPs on fatigue crack initiation on the surface of the FGH96 superalloy was detected using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The cause of fatigue crack deflection was studied using electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) analysis. The results indicated that there are two states of TIPs including isolated TIPs and clustered TIPs located at the grain boundary. The investigation of crack initiation and propagation around TIPs was conducted in detail through the comprehensive integration of experimental findings and computational results. For cracks initiated by isolated TIPs, the maximum equivalent size and the ratio of the vertical-parallel axis to the loading direction of the TIPs reveal a linear relationship, and both of them determine crack initiation. Regarding clustered TIPs, the constituent pores of the clustered TIPs will compete to initiate cracks based on the experimental results, and the largest pore will be more likely to initiate cracking. Moreover, the results showed that fatigue crack propagation can be hindered by hard-orientation grains and twins with a low Schmid factor (SF). Large-angle crack deflection due to twins with a low SF can significantly increase crack length and resistance to crack propagation.

P2X7 receptor antagonists modulate experimental autoimmune neuritis via regulation of NLRP3 inflammasome activation and Th17 and Th1 cell differentiation.

BACKGROUND: Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), a post-infectious, immune-mediated, acute demyelinating disease of the peripheral nerves and nerve roots, represents the most prevalent and severe acute paralyzing neuropathy. Purinergic P2X7 receptors (P2X7R) play a crucial role in central nervous system inflammation. However, little is known about their role in the immune-inflammatory response within the peripheral nervous system. METHODS: Initially, we assessed the expression of purinergic P2X7R in the peripheral blood of patients with GBS using flow cytometry and qRT-PCR. Next, we explored the expression of P2 X7R in CD4+ T cells, CD8+ T cells, and macrophages within the sciatic nerves and spleens of rats using immunofluorescence labeling and flow cytometry. The P2X7R antagonist brilliant blue G (BBG) was employed to examine its therapeutic impact on rats with experimental autoimmune neuritis (EAN) induced by immunization with the P0180 - 199 peptide. We analyzed CD4+ T cell differentiation in splenic mononuclear cells using flow cytometry, assessed Th17 cell differentiation in the sciatic nerve through immunofluorescence staining, and examined the expression of pro-inflammatory cytokine mRNA using RT-PCR. Additionally, we performed protein blotting to assess the expression of P2X7R and NLRP3-related inflammatory proteins within the sciatic nerve. Lastly, we utilized flow cytometry and immunofluorescence labeling to examine the expression of NLRP3 on CD4+ T cells in rats with EAN. RESULTS: P2X7R expression was elevated not only in the peripheral blood of patients with GBS but also in rats with EAN. In rats with EAN, inhibiting P2X7R with BBG alleviated neurological symptoms, reduced demyelination, decreased inflammatory cell infiltration of the peripheral nerves, and improved nerve conduction. BBG also limited the production of pro-inflammatory molecules, down-regulated the expression of P2X7R and NLRP3, and suppressed the differentiation of Th1 and Th17 cells, thus protecting against EAN. These effects collectively contribute to modifying the inflammatory environment and enhancing outcomes in EAN rats. CONCLUSIONS: Suppression of P2X7R relieved EAN manifestation by regulating CD4+ T cell differentiation and NLRP3 inflammasome activation. This finding underscores the potential significance of P2X7R as a target for anti-inflammatory treatments, advancing research and management of GBS.

SSLDTI: A novel method for drug-target interaction prediction based on self-supervised learning.

Many computational methods have been proposed to identify potential drug-target interactions (DTIs) to expedite drug development. Graph neural network (GNN) methods are considered to be one of the most effective approaches. However, shallow GNN methods can only aggregate local information from nodes. Also, deep GNN methods may result in over-smoothing while obtaining long-distance neighbourhood information. As a result, existing GNN methods struggle to extract the complete features of the graph. Additionally, the number of known DTIs is insufficient, and there are far more unknown drug-target pairs than known DTIs, leading to class imbalance. This article proposes a model that combines graph autoencoder and self-supervised learning to accurately encode multilevel features of graphs using only a small number of labelled samples. We introduce a positive sample compensation coefficient to the objective function to mitigate the impact of class imbalance. Experiments on two datasets demonstrated that our model outperforms the four baseline methods, and the new DTIs predicted by the SSLDTI model were verified by the DrugBank database.

Stress-Relief Engineering in a N-Doped C-Modified Hierarchical Nanoporous Si Anode with a Microcurved Pore Wall Structure for Enhanced Lithium Storage.

The commercialization of alloy-type anodes has been hindered by rapid capacity degradation due to volume fluctuations. To address this issue, stress-relief engineering is proposed for Si anodes that combines hierarchical nanoporous structures and modified layers, inspired by the phenomenon in which structures with continuous changes in curvature can reduce stress concentration. The N-doped C-modified hierarchical nanoporous Si anode with a microcurved pore wall (N-C@m-HNP Si) is prepared from inexpensive Mg-55Si alloys using a simple chemical etching and heat treatment process. When used as the anode for lithium-ion batteries, the N-C@m-HNP Si anode exhibits initial charge/discharge specific capacities of 1092.93 and 2636.32 mAh g-1 at 0.1 C (1 C = 3579 mA g-1), respectively, and a stable reversible specific capacity of 1071.84 mAh g-1 after 200 cycles. The synergy of the hierarchical porous structure with a microcurved pore wall and the N-doped C-modified layer effectively improves the electrochemical performance of N-C@m-HNP Si, and the effectiveness of stress-relief engineering is quantitatively analyzed through the theory of elastic bending of thin plates. Moreover, the formation process of Li15Si4 crystals, which causes substantial mechanical stress, is investigated using first-principles molecular dynamic simulations to reveal their tendency to occur at different scales. The results demonstrate that the hierarchical nanoporous structure helps to inhibit the transformation of amorphous LixSi into metastable Li15Si4 crystals during lithiation.

A Breathable Fibrous Membrane with Coaxially Heterogeneous Conductive Networks toward Personal Thermal Management and Electromagnetic Interference Shielding.

The expeditious growth of wearable electronic devices has boomed the development of versatile smart textiles for personal health-related applications. In practice, integrated high-performance systems still face challenges of compromised breathability, high cost, and complicated manufacturing processes. Herein, a breathable fibrous membrane with dual-driven heating and electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding performance is developed through a facile process of electrospinning followed by targeted conformal deposition. The approach constructs a robust hierarchically coaxial heterostructure consisting of elastic polymers as supportive "core" and dual-conductive components of polypyrrole and copper sulfide (CuS) nanosheets as continuous "sheath" at the fiber level. The CuS nanosheets with metal-like electrical conductivity demonstrate the promising potential to substitute the expensive conductive nano-materials with a complex fabricating process. The as-prepared fibrous membrane exhibits high electrical conductivity (70.38 S cm-1), exceptional active heating effects, including solar heating (saturation temperature of 69.7 °C at 1 sun) and Joule heating (75.2 °C at 2.9 V), and impressive EMI shielding performance (50.11 dB in the X-band), coupled with favorable air permeability (161.4 mm s-1 at 200 Pa) and efficient water vapor transmittance (118.9 g m-2 h). This work opens up a new avenue to fabricate versatile wearable devices for personal thermal management and health protection.

AMPKα2 promotes tumor immune escape by inducing CD8+ T-cell exhaustion and CD4+ Treg cell formation in liver hepatocellular carcinoma.

BACKGROUND: Adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK) is associated with the development of liver hepatocellular carcinoma (LIHC). AMPKα2, an α2 subunit of AMPK, is encoded by PRKAA2, and functions as the catalytic core of AMPK. However, the role of AMPKα2 in the LIHC tumor immune environment is unclear. METHODS: RNA-seq data were obtained from the Cancer Genome Atlas and Genotype-Tissue Expression databases. Using the single-cell RNA-sequencing dataset for LIHC obtained from the China National Genebank Database, the communication between malignant cells and T cells in response to different PRKAA2 expression patterns was evaluated. In addition, the association between PRKAA2 expression and T-cell evolution during tumor progression was explored using Pseudotime analysis, and the role of PRKAA2 in metabolic reprogramming was explored using the R "scMetabolis" package. Functional experiments were performed in LIHC HepG2 cells. RESULTS: AMPK subunits were expressed in tissue-specific and substrate-specific patterns. PRKAA2 was highly expressed in LIHC tissues and was associated with poor patient prognosis. Tumors with high PRKAA2 expression displayed an immune cold phenotype. High PRKAA2 expression significantly promoted LIHC immune escape. This result is supported by the following evidence: 1) the inhibition of major histocompatibility complex class I (MHC-I) expression through the regulation of interferon-gamma activity in malignant cells; 2) the promotion of CD8+ T-cell exhaustion and the formation of CD4+ Treg cells in T cells; 3) altered interactions between malignant cells and T cells in the tumor immune environment; and 4) induction of metabolic reprogramming in malignant cells. CONCLUSIONS: Our study indicate that PRKAA2 may contribute to LIHC progression by promoting metabolic reprogramming and tumor immune escape through theoretical analysis, which offers a theoretical foundation for developing PRKAA2-based strategies for personalized LIHC treatment.

Primary study of the relative and compound biological effectiveness model for boron neutron capture therapy based on nanodosimetry.

BACKGROUND: The current radiobiological model employed for boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) treatment planning, which relies on microdosimetry, fails to provide an accurate representation the biological effects of BNCT. The precision in calculating the relative biological effectiveness (RBE) and compound biological effectiveness (CBE) plays a pivotal role in determining the therapeutic efficacy of BNCT. Therefore, this study focuses on how to improve the accuracy of the biological effects of BNCT. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to propose new radiation biology models based on nanodosimetry to accurately assess RBE and CBE for BNCT. METHODS: Nanodosimetry, rooted in ionization cluster size distributions (ICSD), introduces a novel approach to characterize radiation quality by effectively delineating RBE through the ion track structure at the nanoscale. In the context of prior research, this study presents a computational model for the nanoscale assessment of RBE and CBE. We establish a simplified model of DNA chromatin fiber using the Monte Carlo code TOPAS-nBio to evaluate the applicability of ICSD to BNCT and compute nanodosimetric parameters. RESULTS: Our investigation reveals that both homogeneous and heterogeneous nanodosimetric parameters, as well as the corresponding biological model coefficients α and ß, along with RBE values, exhibit variations in response to varying intracellular 10B concentrations. Notably, the nanodosimetric parameter M 1 C 2 $M_1^{{{\mathrm{C}}}_2}$ effectively captures the fluctuations in model coefficients α and RBE. CONCLUSION: Our model facilitates a nanoscale analysis of BNCT, enabling predictions of nanodosimetric quantities for secondary ions as well as RBE, CBE, and other essential biological metrics related to the distribution of boron. This contribution significantly enhances the precision of RBE calculations and holds substantial promise for future applications in treatment planning.