In-Situ Spontaneous Electropolymerization Enables Robust Hydrogel Electrolyte Interfaces in Aqueous Batteries.

Hydrogels hold great promise as electrolytes for emerging aqueous batteries, for which establishing a robust electrode-hydrogel interface is crucial for mitigating side reactions. Conventional hydrogel electrolytes fabricated by ex situ polymerization through either thermal stimulation or photo exposure cannot ensure complete interfacial contact with electrodes. Herein, we introduce an in situ electropolymerization approach for constructing hydrogel electrolytes. The hydrogel is spontaneously generated during the initial cycling of the battery, eliminating the need of additional initiators for polymerization. The involvement of electrodes during the hydrogel synthesis yields well-bonded and deep infiltrated electrode-electrolyte interfaces. As a case study, we attest that, the in situ-formed polyanionic hydrogel in Zn-MnO2 battery substantially improves the stability and kinetics of both Zn anode and porous MnO2 cathode owing to the robust interfaces. This research provides insight to the function of hydrogel electrolyte interfaces and constitutes a critical advancement in designing highly durable aqueous batteries.

Local Renal Treatments for Acute Kidney Injury: A Review of Current Progress and Future Translational Opportunities.

Acute kidney injury (AKI) constitutes a significant public health concern, with limited therapeutic options to mitigate injury or expedite recovery. A novel therapeutic approach, local renal treatment, encompassing pharmacotherapy and surgical interventions, has exhibited positive outcomes in AKI management. Peri-renal administration, employing various delivery routes, such as the renal artery, intrarenal, and subcapsular sites, has demonstrated superiority over peripheral intravenous infusion. This review evaluates different drug delivery methods, analyzing their benefits and limitations, and proposes potential improvements. Renal decapsulation, particularly with the availability of minimally invasive techniques, emerges as an effective procedure warranting renewed consideration for AKI treatment. The potential synergistic effects of combined drug delivery and renal decapsulation could further advance AKI therapies. Clinical studies have already begun to leverage the benefits of local renal treatments, and with ongoing technological advancements, these modalities are expected to increasingly outperform systemic intravenous therapy.

Cation-Conduction Dominated Hydrogels for Durable Zinc-Iodine Batteries.

Zinc-iodine batteries have the potential to offer high energy-density aqueous energy storage, but their lifetime is limited by the rampant dendrite growth and the concurrent parasite side reactions on the Zn anode, as well as the shuttling of polyiodides. Herein, a cation-conduction dominated hydrogel electrolyte is designed to holistically enhance the stability of both zinc anode and iodine cathode. In this hydrogel electrolyte, anions are covalently anchored on hydrogel chains, and the major mobile ions in the electrolyte are restricted to be Zn2+ . Specifically, such a cation-conductive electrolyte results in a high zinc ion transference number (0.81) within the hydrogel and guides epitaxial Zn nucleation. Furthermore, the optimized Zn2+ solvation structure and the reconstructed hydrogen bond networks on hydrogel chains contribute to the reduced desolvation barrier and suppressed corrosion side reactions. On the iodine cathode side, the electrostatic repulsion between negative sulfonate groups and polyiodides hinders the loss of the iodine active material. This all-round electrolyte design renders zinc-iodine batteries with high reversibility, low self-discharge, and long lifespan.

Higher urinary glyphosate exposure is associated with increased risk of liver dysfunction in adults: An analysis of NHANES, 2013-2016.

Glyphosate (GLY) exposure, both exogenous and endogenous, is a global concern. Multiple studies of model systems in vitro and in vivo have demonstrated the potential toxic effects of GLY exposure on human organs, particularly the liver and renal system. However, there is currently limited epidemiological evidence establishing a link between GLY exposure and hepatorenal function in the general population. In this study, a multivariable linear regression model and forest plots were employed to evaluate the connection between urinary GLY and biomarkers of hepatorenal function in 2241 participants from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2013-2016. Additionally, subgroup analyses were conducted based on age, gender, race, BMI, and chronic kidney disease (CKD). Alkaline phosphatase (ALP), alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), AST/ALT and fibrosis 4 score (FIB-4) all increased with elevated urinary GLY concentrations after adjusting for potential confounders, while albumin (ALB) exhibited the opposite trend, particularly among younger, female, non-Hispanic white, overweight, and CKD participants. Furthermore, individuals in the third tertile had a greater risk of liver dysfunction than those in the first tertile after categorizing urinary GLY concentrations. However, our study showed no proof that GLY exposure affects the ratio of urine albumin to creatinine (ACR) or serum creatinine levels. Overall, these results imply that GLY exposure may have adverse effects on human liver function.

Hetero-Polyionic Hydrogels Enable Dendrites-Free Aqueous Zn-I2 Batteries with Fast Kinetics.

Rechargeable aqueous Zn-I2 batteries (ZIB) are regarded as a promising energy storage candidate. However, soluble polyiodide shuttling and rampant Zn dendrite growth hamper its commercial implementation. Herein, a hetero-polyionic hydrogel is designed as the electrolyte for ZIBs. On the cathode side, iodophilic polycationic hydrogel (PCH) effectively alleviates the shuttle effect and facilitates the redox kinetics of iodine species. Meanwhile, polyanionic hydrogel (PAH) toward Zn metal anode uniformizes Zn2+ flux and prevents surface corrosion by electrostatic repulsion of polyiodides. Consequently, the Zn symmetric cells with PAH electrolyte demonstrate remarkable cycling stability over 3000 h at 1 mA cm-2 (1 mAh cm-2 ) and 800 h at 10 mA cm-2 (5 mAh cm-2 ). Moreover, the Zn-I2 full cells with PAH-PCH hetero-polyionic hydrogel electrolyte deliver a low-capacity decay of 0.008 ‰ per cycle during 18 000 cycles at 8 C. This work sheds light on hydrogel electrolytes design for long-life conversion-type aqueous batteries.

Single-cell dissection of cellular and molecular features underlying mesenchymal stem cell therapy in ischemic acute kidney injury.

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) exert beneficial therapeutic effects in acute kidney injury (AKI), while the detailed repair mechanism remains unclear. Herein, we probed the underlying mechanisms of MSC therapy in AKI by performing unbiased single-cell RNA sequencing in IRI model with/without MSC treatment. Our analyses uncovered the tubular epithelial cells (TECs) and immune cells transcriptomic diversity and highlighted a repair trajectory involving renal stem/progenitor cell differentiation. Our findings also suggested that profibrotic TECs expressing pro-fibrotic factors such as Zeb2 and Pdgfb promoted the recruitment of inflammatory monocytes and Th17 cells to injured kidney tissue, inducing TGF-ß1 secretion and renal fibrosis. Finally, in addition to activating the repair properties of renal progenitor/stem cells, we uncovered a role for MSC-derived miR-26a-5p in mediating the therapeutic effects of MSCs by inhibiting Zeb2 expression and suppressing pro-fibrotic TECs and its subsequent recruitment of immune cell subpopulations. These findings may help to optimize future AKI treatment strategies.

Rationally designing a Ti3C2Tx/CNTs-Co9S8 heterostructure as a sulfur host with multi-functionality for high-performance lithium-sulfur batteries.

Lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries have been regarded as potential next-generation batteries owing to their ultrahigh theoretical capacity and abundance of sulfur. However, polysulfide shuttling, poor electronic conductivity, and severe volume expansion limit their commercial prospects. In this work, we rationally constructed a 3D porous Ti3C2Tx/CNTs-Co9S8 heterostructure derived from a zeolite imidazole framework (ZIF)/Ti3C2Tx MXene composite via carbonization and subsequent sulfidation. In this 3D porous Ti3C2Tx/CNTs-Co9S8 heterostructure, the 3D porous Ti3C2Tx MXene structure can provide facilitated ion and electron transport, good structural stability, and polar bonds to anchor sulfur and polysulfides. The formed CNTs can enhance ion diffusion and electron transport. The Co9S8 nanoparticles can accelerate the conversion reaction of polysulfides to Li2S, which can further prevent polysulfide shuttling. The 3D porous structure can buffer the electrode volume change upon cycling. This rationally designed Ti3C2Tx/CNTs-Co9S8/S cathode exhibits a high initial capacity of 1389.8 mA h g-1 at 0.1C, good cyclic stability (730.7 mA h g-1 at 0.2C after 100 cycles), and excellent rate capacities (530.7 mA h g-1 at 1C). When the S loading was 2.5 mg cm-2, the Ti3C2Tx/CNTs-Co9S8/S cathode still exhibited a reversible capacity of 472.8 mA h g-1 at 0.5C after 300 cycles.

Hierarchical MXene/transition metal chalcogenide heterostructures for electrochemical energy storage and conversion.

MXenes have gained rapidly increasing attention owing to their two-dimensional (2D) layered structures and unique mechanical and physicochemical properties. However, MXenes have some intrinsic limitations (e.g., the restacking tendency of the 2D structure) that hinder their practical applications. Transition metal chalcogenide (TMC) materials such as SnS, NiS, MoS2, FeS2, and NiSe2 have attracted much interest for energy storage and conversion by virture of their earth-abundance, low costs, moderate overpotentials, and unique layered structures. Nonetheless, the intrinsic poor electronic conductivity and huge volume change of TMC materials during the alkali metal-ion intercalation/deintercalation process cause fast capacity fading and poor-rate and poor-cycling performances. Constructing heterostructures based on metallic conductive MXenes and highly electrochemically active TMCs is a promising and effective strategy to solve these problems and enhance the electrochemical performances. This review highlights and discusses the recent research development of MXenes and hierarchical MXene/TMC heterostructures, with a focus on the synthesis strategies, surface/heterointerface engineering, and potential applications for lithium-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries, lithium-sulfur batteries, supercapacitors, electrocatalysis, and photocatalysis. The critical challenges and perspectives of the future development of MXenes and hierarchical MXene/TMC heterostructures for electrochemical energy storage and conversion are forecasted.

Joint Content Placement and Storage Allocation Based on Federated Learning in F-RANs.

With the rapid development of mobile communication and the sharp increase of smart mobile devices, wireless data traffic has experienced explosive growth in recent years, thus injecting tremendous traffic into the network. Fog Radio Access Network (F-RAN) is a promising wireless network architecture to accommodate the fast growing data traffic and improve the performance of network service. By deploying content caching in F-RAN, fast and repeatable data access can be achieved, which reduces network traffic and transmission latency. Due to the capacity limit of caches, it is essential to predict the popularity of the content and pre-cache them in edge nodes. In general, the classic prediction approaches require the gathering of users' personal information at a central unit, giving rise to users' privacy issues. In this paper, we propose an intelligent F-RANs framework based on federated learning (FL), which does not require gathering user data centrally on the server for training, so it can effectively ensure the privacy of users. In the work, federated learning is applied to user demand prediction, which can accurately predict the content popularity distribution in the network. In addition, to minimize the total traffic cost of the network in consideration of user content requests, we address the allocation of storage resources and content placement in the network as an integrated model and formulate it as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem. Due to the high computational complexity of the ILP problem, two heuristic algorithms are designed to solve it. Simulation results show that the performance of our proposed algorithm is close to the optimal solution.

Reuse performance of granular-activated carbon and activated carbon fiber in catalyzed peroxymonosulfate oxidation.

Recently, activated carbon was investigated as an efficient heterogeneous metal-free catalyst to directly activate peroxymonosulfate (PMS) for degradation of organic compounds. In this paper, the reuse performance and the possible deactivation reasons of granular-activated carbon (GAC) and activated carbon fiber (ACF) in PMS activation were investigated. As results indicated, the reusability of GAC, especially in the presence of high PMS dosage, was relatively superior to ACF in catalyzed PMS oxidation of Acid Orange 7 (AO7), which is much more easily adsorbed by ACF than by GAC. Pre-oxidation experiments were studied and it was demonstrated that PMS oxidation on ACF would retard ACF's deactivation to a big extent. After pre-adsorption with AO7, the catalytic ability of both GAC and ACF evidently diminished. However, when methanol was employed to extract the AO7-spent ACF, the catalytic ability could recover quite a bit. GAC and ACF could also effectively catalyze PMS to degrade Reactive Black 5 (RB5), which is very difficult to be adsorbed even by ACF, but both GAC and ACF have poor reuse performance for RB5 degradation. The original organic compounds or intermediate products adsorbed by GAC or ACF would be possibly responsible for the deactivation.