A General Synthesis Strategy for Hollow Metal Oxide Microspheres Enabled by Gel-Assisted Precipitation.

Hollow metal oxide microspheres (HMMs) have drawn enormous attention in different research fields. Reliable and scalable synthetic protocols applicable for a large variety of metal oxides are in emergent demand. Here we demonstrated that polymer hydrogel, such as the resorcinol formaldehyde (RF) one, existed as an efficient synthetic platform to build HMMs. Specifically, the RF gel forms stacked RF microspheres enlaced with its aqueous phase, where the following evaporation of the highly dispersed water leads to a gel-assisted precipitation (GAP) of the dissolved metal precursor onto the embedded polymeric solids suited for the creation of HMMs. By taking advantage of the structural features of hydrogel, this synthesis design avoids the delicate control on the usually necessitated coating process and provides a simple and effective synthetic process versatile for functional HMMs, particularly Nb2 O5 as a high-performance electrode material in Li-ion intercalation pseudocapacitor.

Prostate cancer risk prediction models in Eastern Asian populations: current status, racial difference, and future directions.

Prostate cancer (PCa) risk calculators (RCs) with prostate-specific antigen (PSA) and other risk factors can greatly improve the accurate prediction of potential risk of PCa compared to PSA. The European Randomized Study of Screening for PCa Risk Calculator (ERSPC-RC) and the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial Risk Calculator (PCPT-RC) are developed on the Western population. However, the Western RCs showed limited diagnostic efficacy in the Eastern Asian population, mainly due to racial differences between the two populations. We aimed to review the application of Western RCs and Eastern Asian RCs in Eastern Asian cohorts and to identify the characteristics and efficacy of these RCs.

A facile synthetic strategy for the creation of hollow noble metal/transition metal oxide nanocomposites.

We have reported an efficient synthetic protocol to build different hollow hybrid nanocomposites with tunable compositions, such as Au/TiO2, Pt/ZrO2, and Au/CexTi1-xO2. The noble metal nanoparticles were well encapsulated in a wall composed of the designated transition metal oxides, showing promising potential as stable catalysts as demonstrated by Pt/ZrO2 for methane combustion.

Construction of uniform ZrO2 nanoshells by buffer solutions.

We identified that the growth kinetics of ZrO2 could be well-tuned in a CH3COOH-CH3COONa based buffer solution, which provided an efficient way to build uniform ZrO2 nanoshells on various substrates. Using this synthetic strategy, yolk-shell structured Pd@ZrO2 is demonstrated as a promising catalyst for methane oxidation.