Advanced BIFs with Co, B, N, and S for Electrocatalytic Oxygen Reduction and Oxygen Evolution Reactions.

In this work, a new alkaline-stable boron imidazolate framework (BIF-90) was rationally designed and successfully synthesized by solvothermal reaction. Due to its potential electrocatalytic active sites (Co, B, N, and S) and chemical stabilities, BIF-90 was explored as a bifunctional electrocatalyst toward electrochemical oxygen reactions, namely, oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). This work will open new avenues toward the design of stable, cheap, and more active BIFs as bifunctional catalysts.

A Novel Indole Derivative with Superior Photophysical Performance for Fluorescent Probe, pH-Sensing, and Logic Gates.

An indole-related molecules have been considered as the potential fluorescent probes for biological and electrochemical sensing. However, most of the indole probes have been usually used in a single detection mode. Indolium probes that enable accurate detection in complex environments are rarely reported. Here, four novel indole derivatives including the phenyl group substituted with different functional moieties were designed on the basis of the donor-π-acceptor (D-π-A) concept. These derivatives exhibit positive solvatochromism owing to their varied molecular conformations upon contacting to various solvents and the different HOMO-LUMO gaps caused by the difference in electronic push-pull capability of the substituents. Their solid-state fluorescence emissions and multiple chromisms are observed due to the inherent twisted geometries and aggregation modes. In addition, these derivatives show dramatic color and fluorescence responses due to the protonation of the nitrogen and oxygen containing groups, and thus novel colorimetric pH sensors, fluorescent papers and logic gates have been designed.

A Bismuth-Based Zeolitic Organic Framework with Coordination-Linked Metal Cages for Efficient Electrocatalytic CO2 Reduction to HCOOH.

Zeolitic metal-organic frameworks (ZMOFs) have emerged as one of the most promsing catalysts for energy conversion, but they suffer from either weak bonding between metal-organic cubes (MOCs) that decrease their stability during catalysis processes or low activity due to inadequate active sites. In this work, through ligand-directing strategy, we successfully obtain an unprecedented bismuth-based ZMOF (Bi-ZMOF) featuring a ACO topological crystal structure with strong coordination bonding between the Bi-based cages. As a result, it enables efficient reduction of CO2 to formic acid (HCOOH) with Faradaic efficiency as high as 91 %. A combination of in situ surface-enhanced infrared absorption spectroscopy and density functional theory calculation reveals that the Bi-N coordination contributes to facilitating charge transfer from N to Bi atoms, which stabilize the intermediate to boost the reduction efficiency of CO2 to HCOOH. This finding highlights the importance of the coordination environment of metal active sites on electrocatalytic CO2 reduction. We believe that this work will offer a new clue to rationally design zeolitic MOFs for catalytic reaction.

Active Sites In Situ Implanted Hybrid Zeolitic Imidazolate Frameworks for a Water Oxidation Catalyst.

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have been a focus of research because of their unique porous structure, but they are usually not directly for electrocatalysis. Herein, we prepared a special class of Fe/Zn/Mo-based trimetallic hybrid zeolitic imidazolate frameworks by in situ solvothermal synthesis that have the potential to act directly as highly efficient oxygen evolution reaction electrocatalysts. This work provides a foundation for the preparation of multimetal MOFs and expands the investigation of electrocatalysts.

Ag nanoparticles decorated urchin-like cobalt carbonate hydroxide composites for highly efficient oxygen evolution reaction.

Herein, a novel composite of small amounts of Ag nanoparticles (NPs) decorated urchin-like cobalt carbonate hydroxide hydrate (CCHH) was developed for highly-efficient alkaline oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Not only can Ag colloids, as template agents, modify the morphologies of urchin-like CCHH microspheres to expose more active sites available, but also the supported Ag NPs formed by Ag colloids can transfer the electron to CCHH surfaces, accelerating the transformation of surface CoII to CoIII/CoIV (proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) process). The urchin-like Ag/CCHH (0.013 mmol) precatalyst (before cyclic voltammetry (CV) activation) exhibits a better OER performance (a low overpotential of 273 mV at 10 mA cm-2 and small Tafel slope of 65 mV dec-1) as compared with commercial RuO2. Furthermore, the dynamic surface self-reconstruction (surface CO3 2- and OH - exchange) can further enhance the activities of Ag/CCHH precatalysts. Consequently, the optimal Ag/CCHH (0.013 mmol) catalyst presents a superior activity (a lower overpotential of 267 mV at 10 mA cm-2 and markedly reduced Tafel slope to 56 mV dec-1) along with an excellent stability after CV cycles. The study provides a feasible strategy to fully realize the low overpotential of CCHH-based OER electrocatalysts.

Acupuncture methods for insomnia disorder in the elderly: protocol for a systematic review and network meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND: Insomnia disorder remains one of the most common sleep disorders in the elderly, with high prevalence and substantial consequences for patients' general health. Despite that increasing clinical trials have indicated that acupuncture seems to be effective for insomnia disorder in the elderly, comparative efficacy and safety of different acupuncture methods for elderly individuals with insomnia disorder has been unclear. Therefore, this protocol outlined a plan to evaluate and rank the efficacy and safety of various acupuncture approaches for insomnia disorder in the elderly. METHODS: A systematic search of 8 bibliographic databases will be conducted from their inception to 18 June 2023, including Cochrane Library, MEDLINE (via PubMed), Embase, Web of Science, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Wanfang Database, VIP Database, and Chinese Biomedical Literature Database (CBM). Randomized controlled trials investigating acupuncture methods for insomnia disorder in the elderly, published in English or Chinese will be included. The primary outcome is sleep quality measured by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). Two reviewers will independently perform study selection, data extraction and risk assessment of bias. The quality of included literatures will be appraised using Cochrane risk-of-bias tool (ROB 2.0). ADDIS (Aggregate Data Drug Information System) V.1.16.8 will be used to conduct Bayesian network meta-analysis. The quality of evidence will be evaluated using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation System (GRADE). DISCUSSION: In this study, the results will provide credible evidence to assess the efficacy and safety of acupuncture therapies for elderly patients with insomnia disorder, assisting patients, physicians and clinical research investigators to select the most appropriate acupuncture method. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: The protocol has been registered at OSF ( https://osf.io/3kjpq/ ) with a registration number https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/3KJPQ .

Interconnected magnetic carbon@NixCo1-xFe2O4 nanospheres with core-shell structure: An efficient and thin electromagnetic wave absorber.

The applications of cobalt ferrite and nickel ferrite composite materials on electromagnetic (EM) wave absorption are the research hotspot currently. However, the systematical comparison study between these two ferrites composites have rarely been carried out. Thus, the EM wave absorption performance of interconnected carbon@NixCo1-xFe2O4 composites with core-shell structures were investigated comprehensively in this work. A series of magnetic nanospheres including NiFe2O4, cobalt-doped nickel ferrite, nickel-cobalt ferrite, nickel-doped cobalt ferrite and CoFe2O4 were synthesized firstly, and then uniformly encapsulation by carbon rendered the corresponding C@NixCo1-xFe2O4 composites nanospheres. Synthesis reactions involved for C@NixCo1-xFe2O4 formation were investigated in detail, and afterwards their magnetic behavior, EM wave absorption performance and absorbing mechanism were thoroughly explored and analyzed. Results show that when nickel is dominant element and cobalt is doping element (Ni0.75Co0.25Fe2O4), the composite nanosphere exhibits optimum EM wave absorption performance. When the sample thickness is just 1.9 mm, its RLmin value can reach -51 dB, and the corresponding EAB width is 3.3 GHz. The synthesized C@Ni0.75Co0.25Fe2O4 can be qualified as an efficient and thin electromagnetic wave absorber, which is mainly attributed to its special structure, fair electromagnetic matching and impedance matching.

Efficacy and safety of tai chi for hyperlipidaemia: a protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis.

INTRODUCTION: The prevalence of hyperlipidaemia is increasing, and patients with hyperlipidaemia are at increased risk of cardiovascular disease and atherosclerosis. In recent years, there has been a growing number of studies on tai chi for hyperlipidaemia. However, a systematic review on its efficacy and safety is not available. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the efficacy and safety of tai chi for hyperlipidaemia. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: Four English databases and four Chinese databases will be searched from their inception to May 2021: PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Chinese Biomedical Literature Database, VIP Database and Wanfang Database. Chinese and English randomised controlled trials related to tai chi for hyperlipidaemia will be included. Two reviewers should independently carry out study selection, data extraction and risk assessment of bias. The risk of bias in the study will be assessed by the Cochrane risk of bias tool. RevMan (V.5.4) statistical software will be applied for meta-analysis. The Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation system approach will be employed to assess the quality of evidence. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Ethical approval is not required because this protocol will not involve patients' individual information and jeopardise the rights of patients. The meta-analysis result will be reported in peer-reviewed journals or disseminated at related conferences. OSF REGISTRATION NUMBER: DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/79D2S.

Detecting cerebral microbleeds via deep learning with features enhancement by reusing ground truth.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Cerebral microbleeds (CMBs) are cerebral small vascular diseases and are often used to diagnose symptoms such as stroke and dementia. Manual detection of cerebral microbleeds is a time-consuming and error-prone task, so the application of microbleed detection algorithms based on deep learning is of great significance. This study presents the feature enhancement technology applying to improve the performances of detecting CMBs. The primary purpose of the feature enhancement is emphasizing the meaningful features, leading deep learning network easier and correctly to optimize. METHOD: In this study, we applied feature enhancement in detecting CMBs from brain MRI images. Feature enhancement enhanced specific intervals and suppressed the useless intervals of the feature map. This method was applied in SSD-512 and SSD-300 algorithm, using VGG architecture pre-trained in the ImageNet dataset. RESULTS: The proposed method was applied in SSD-512. Moreover, the model was trained and tested on the sequence of SWAN images of brain MRI images. The results of the experiment demonstrate that our method effectively improves the detection performance of the SSD network in detecting CMBs. We train SSD-512 120000 iterations and test results on the test datasets, by applying the feature enhancement layer, improving the precision with 3.3% and the mAP of 2.3%. In the same way, we trained SSD-300, improving the mAP of 2.0%. 2.8% and 7.4% precision are improved by applying feature enhancement layer In ResNet-34 and MobileNet. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed method achieved more effective performance, demonstrated that feature enhancement can be a helpful algorithm to enhance the deep learning model.

Design of molybdenum disulfide@polypyrrole compsite decorated with Fe3O4 and superior electromagnetic wave absorption performance.

The MoS2@polypyrrole@Fe3O4 composite was skillfully synthesized via a novel one pot method. No any separation step during the synthesis process, and the Fe2+ was successively utilized to prepare the Ppy and Fe3O4, which can achieve a high utilization of raw materials. The characterization about microstructure, crystal form, elemental composition and surface functional groups verify the structure of MoS2@polypyrrole@Fe3O4. Its hysteresis loop indicates that the composite performs typical soft magnetism behavior, with a magnetic saturation value of 20.3 emu.g-1, which is helpful to improve the magnetic loss for EM wave absorbing. The reflection loss curve suggested that the composite exhibits superior EM wave absorption performance, with a minimum reflection loss value of -32 dB at the specimen thickness of just 2.0 mm due to the fair electromagnetic matching, interface polarization and interface relaxation. In addition, the one pot method used in this work can promisingly be applied to prepare other similar composites such as carbon fiber@polypyrrole@Fe3O4, graphene@polypyrrole@Fe3O4.

Efficacy and safety of acupuncture for recurrent aphthous stomatitis: a systematic review protocol.

INTRODUCTION: Recurrent aphthous stomatitis (RAS) is a distressing symptom. There are many ways to treat RAS, such as pudilan anti-inflammatory oral liquid and doxycycline and laser therapy, but these take a long time to produce positive effects and compliance is low. Previous reviews of acupuncture treatment for RAS has been growing, but a systematic review is not available. To assess the efficacy and safety of acupuncture for the management of RAS. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: The following databases will be searched from their inception to 1 February 2020: PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, CINAHL, Chinese Biomedical Literature Database, VIP Database for Chinese Technical Periodicals, China National Knowledge Infrastructure and Wanfang. The randomised controlled trials in English or Chinese associated with acupuncture for patients with RAS will be included. Eligible study conference abstracts and reference lists of manuscripts will also be searched. Two reviewers will select the studies, extract data independently. The Cochrane risk of bias tool will be used to assess the risk of bias for the studies. According to heterogeneity testing, data will be synthesised using a random-effects model. A meta-analysis will be performed using Rev Man V.5.3.5 statistical software for each outcome. Subgroup analysis and sensitivity analysis are planned according to clinical evidence. Mean difference or standardised mean difference for continuous data and risk ratio for dichotomous data will be calculated. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: No ethical approval is required. This protocol will not involve individual patient information and endangering participant rights. The results will be reported in a peer-reviewed journal or disseminated in relevant conferences. OSF REGISTRATION NUMBER: DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/QASUY.

Hierarchical Fe3O4@carbon@MnO2 hybrid for electromagnetic wave absorber.

In this work, a novel Fe3O4@C@MnO2 hybrid was successfully synthesized via facile method. The morphology, structure, chemical composition, magnetic behavior and EM wave absorbing performance of the hybrid were systematically investigated. Results indicate that the hybrid possesses uniform hierarchical and mesoporous structure. The magnetic saturation(Ms) value of the hybrid is 19.8 emu g-1, which is beneficial to improve magnetic loss. According to its reflection loss curve, the hybrid performs superior EM wave absorption capacity, with a minimum reflection loss value and effective absorbing bandwidth of -35 dB and 5 GHz when the specimen thickness is 2.7 mm. The excellent performance of this hybrid can mainly be attributed to its ideal matching of magnetic loss and dielectric loss, large specific surface area, mesoporous structure and interfacial polarizations. Such new material has the potential to be a superior electromagnetic wave absorber, or applied as a functional filler to modify resin matrix.

Ultrathin Ni(ii)-based coordination polymer nanosheets as a co-catalyst for promoting photocatalytic H2-production.

Ni(ii) coordination polymer nanosheets (Ni-CPNS) were prepared via a top-down liquid ultrasonication exfoliation method. For the first time, Ni-CPNS was used as a co-catalyst (Ni-CPNS@CdS) via a mechanical grinding strategy. The optimized Ni-CPNS@CdS catalyst reached a super high visible-light photocatalytic hydrogen production activity of 10 210 µmol h-1 g-1, exceeding that of bare CdS nanoparticles by 1480%. Our work can open new avenues towards the design of stable and cheap CPNS co-catalysts to replace expensive and rare noble metals for photocatalysis processes.