Self-Limiting Synthesis of Ultrathin Ge(110) Single Crystal via Liquid Metal.

Germanium, the prime applied semiconductor, is widely used in solid-state electronics and photoelectronics. Unfortunately, since the 3D diamond-like structure with strong covalent bonds impedes the 2D anisotropic growth, only the examples of ultrathin Ge along the (111) plane have been investigated, much less to the controllable synthesis along another crystal surface. Meanwhile, Ge(111) flakes are limited in semiconductor applications because of their gapless property. Here, ultrathin Ge(110) single crystal is synthesized with semiconductive property via gallium-associated self-limiting growth. The obtained ultrathin Ge(110) single crystal exhibits anisotropic honeycomb structure, uniformly incremental lattice, wide tunable direct-bandgap, blue-shifted photoluminescence emission, and unique phonon modes, which are consistent with the previous theoretical predictions. It also confirms excellent second harmonic generation and high hole mobility of 724 cm2 V-1 s-1 . The realization of ultrathin Ge(110) single crystal will provide an excellent candidate for application in electronics and optoelectronics.

Resveratrol lowers blood pressure in spontaneously hypertensive rats via calcium-dependent endothelial NO production.

OBJECTIVE: Resveratrol, a polyphenol of natural compounds, has beneficial cardiovascular effects, many of which are mediated by nitric oxide (NO). Resveratrol increases intracellular calcium and activates AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), all of which could increase NO production. We hypothesized that resveratrol via a calcium-dependent NO production lowers blood pressure (BP) in spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR). METHODS: Acetylcholine (Ach)-induced endothelium-dependent relaxations in rat aortas were examined by organ chamber. Blood pressures were determined by radiotelemetry methods. RESULTS: Incubation of isolated aortas from SHR with resveratrol dramatically improved vasorelaxation induced by Ach. Preincubation of aortas with endothelial NO synthase (eNOS) inhibitor or calcium chelant blunted the effects of resveratrol on Ach-induced relaxation, as wells as NO production and eNOS phosphorylation. In animal studies, administration of resveratrol significantly lowered systemic BP in SHR. CONCLUSION: Resveratrol increases endothelial NO production to improve endothelial dysfunction and lowers BP in hypertensive rats, which depends on calcium-eNOS activation.

Disassembly of 2D Vertical Heterostructures.

As one of the most widely discussed fields, the assembly of nanomaterials has always been extensively studied. However, its inverse process, namely disassembly, is still limited in the ambit of biomolecules. Specifically, in the emerging 2D research field, disassembly still remains unexplored. Inspired by the disassembly of DNA molecules via breaking intermolecular hydrogen bonds, the disassembly of 2D vertical heterostructures (2DVHs) is first achieved through the weakening of the interlayer van der Waals interactions. As a demonstration, ReS2 /WS2 VHs is successfully disassembled into individual building blocks. Density functional theory calculations are performed to study the disassembly of the 2DVHs, which simulate that 2DVHs are first activated by the disassembly promoters and then disassembled with weakened interlayer van der Waals interactions. Such a disassembly process demonstrates that it has great potential to be expanded as a general strategy to achieve the disassembly of other 2D superstructures.

AIPNet: Image-to-Image Single Image Dehazing with Atmospheric Illumination Prior.

The atmospheric scattering and absorption gives rise to the natural phenomenon of haze, which severely affects the visibility of scenery. Thus, the image taken by the camera can easily lead to over brightness and ambiguity. To resolve an illposed and intractable problem of single image dehazing, we propose a straightforward but remarkable prior-atmospheric illumination prior in this paper. The extensive statistical experiments for different colorspaces and theoretical analyses indicate that the atmospheric illumination in hazy weather mainly has a great influence on the luminance channel in YCrCb colorspace, and has less impact on the chrominance channels. According to this prior, we try to maintain the intrinsic color of hazy scene and enhance its visual contrast. To this end, we apply the multiscale convolutional networks that can automatically identify hazy regions and restore deficient texture information. Compared with previous methods, the deep CNNs not only achieve an end-to-end trainable model, but also accomplish an easy imageto-image system architecture. The extensive comparisons and analyses with existing approaches demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance on several dehazing effects.