Observing and Modeling the Wear Process of Heterogeneous Interface.

Understanding and controlling the wear process of heterogeneous interfaces between soft and hard phases is crucial for designing and fabricating materials, such as improving the wear resistance of particle reinforced metal matrix composites and the accuracy and efficiency of chemical mechanical polishing. However, the wear process can be hardly observed, as interfaces are buried under the surface. Here, we proposed a nanowear test method by combining focused ion beam cutting to expose interfaces, atomic force microscopy to rub against interfaces, and scanning electron microscope to characterize the interface damage. Using this method, three typical wear forms had been observed in Al/SiC composite, i.e., merely matrix wear, particle fracture, and particle pullout. A theoretical model was proposed that revealed that the increasing interfacial friction would induce particle fracture or pullout, depending on the particle edge angle and tip edge angle. This work sheds light on wear control in composites and nanofabrication.

[Lung parenchyma segmentation based on double scale parallel attention network].

[Abstract]Automatic and accurate segmentation of lung parenchyma is essential for assisted diagnosis of lung cancer. In recent years, researchers in the field of deep learning have proposed a number of improved lung parenchyma segmentation methods based on U-Net. However, the existing segmentation methods ignore the complementary fusion of semantic information in the feature map between different layers and fail to distinguish the importance of different spaces and channels in the feature map. To solve this problem, this paper proposes the double scale parallel attention (DSPA) network (DSPA-Net) architecture, and introduces the DSPA module and the atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module in the "encoder-decoder" structure. Among them, the DSPA module aggregates the semantic information of feature maps of different levels while obtaining accurate space and channel information of feature map with the help of cooperative attention (CA). The ASPP module uses multiple parallel convolution kernels with different void rates to obtain feature maps containing multi-scale information under different receptive fields. The two modules address multi-scale information processing in feature maps of different levels and in feature maps of the same level, respectively. We conducted experimental verification on the Kaggle competition dataset. The experimental results prove that the network architecture has obvious advantages compared with the current mainstream segmentation network. The values of dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and intersection on union (IoU) reached 0.972 ± 0.002 and 0.945 ± 0.004, respectively. This paper achieves automatic and accurate segmentation of lung parenchyma and provides a reference for the application of attentional mechanisms and multi-scale information in the field of lung parenchyma segmentation.

SLT-Net: A codec network for skin lesion segmentation.

Automatic segmentation of skin lesions is beneficial for improving the accuracy and efficiency of melanoma diagnosis. However, due to variation in the size and shape of the lesion areas and the low contrast between the edges of the lesion and the normal skin tissue, this task is very challenging. The traditional convolutional neural network based on codec structure lacks the capability of multi-scale context information modeling and cannot realize information interaction of skip connections at the various levels, which limits the segmentation performance. Therefore, a new codec structure of skin lesion Transformer network (SLT-Net) was proposed and applied to skin lesion segmentation in this study. Specifically, SLT-Net used CSwinUnet as the codec to model the long-distance dependence between features and used the multi-scale context Transformer (MCT) as the skip connection to realize information interaction between skip connections across levels in the channel dimension. We have performed extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method on three public skin lesion datasets, including the ISIC-2016, ISIC-2017, and ISIC-2018. The DSC values on the three data sets reached 90.45%, 79.87% and 82.85% respectively, higher than most of the state-of-the-art methods. The excellent performance of SLT-Net on these three datasets proved that it could improve the accuracy of skin lesion segmentation, providing a new benchmark reference for skin lesion segmentation tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/FengKaili-fkl/SLT-Net.git.

P2K1 Receptor, Heterotrimeric Gα Protein and CNGC2/4 Are Involved in Extracellular ATP-Promoted Ion Influx in the Pollen of Arabidopsis thaliana.

As an apoplastic signal, extracellular ATP (eATP) is involved in plant growth and development. eATP promotes tobacco pollen germination (PG) and pollen tube growth (PTG) by stimulating Ca2+ or K+ absorption. Nevertheless, the mechanisms underlying eATP-stimulated ion uptake and their role in PG and PTG are still unclear. Here, ATP addition was found to modulate PG and PTG in 34 plant species and showed a promoting effect in most of these species. Furthermore, by using Arabidopsis thaliana as a model, the role of several signaling components involved in eATP-promoted ion (Ca2+, K+) uptake, PG, and PTG were investigated. ATP stimulated while apyrase inhibited PG and PTG. Patch-clamping results showed that ATP promoted K+ and Ca2+ influx into pollen protoplasts. In loss-of-function mutants of P2K1 (dorn1-1 and dorn1-3), heterotrimeric G protein α subunit (gpa1-1, gpa1-2), or cyclic nucleotide gated ion channel (cngc2, cngc4), eATP-stimulated PG, PTG, and ion influx were all impaired. Our results suggest that these signaling components may be involved in eATP-promoted PG and PTG by regulating Ca2+ or K+ influx in Arabidopsis pollen grains.

Extracellular ATP promoted pollen germination and tube growth of Nicotiana tabacum through promoting K+ and Ca2+ absorption.

Extracellular ATP (eATP) plays an essential role in plant growth, development, and stress tolerance. Here, we report that eATP participated in Nicotiana tabacum pollen germination (PG) and pollen tube growth (PTG) by regulating K+ and Ca2+ influx. Exogenous ATP or ADP effectively promoted PG and PTG in a dose-dependent manner; weakly hydrolysable ATP analog (ATPγS) showed a similar effect. AMP, adenosine, adenine, and phosphate did not affect PG or PTG. Within a certain range, higher concentrations of K+ or Ca2+ in the medium increased the effect of ATP in promoting PG and PTG. However, in mediums containing K+ or Ca2+ concentrations above this range, the effect of ATP was reversed, resulting in PG and PTG inhibition. Ca2+ chelators (EGTA), Ca2+ channel blockers, and K+ channel blockers suppressed ATP-promoted PG and PTG. Results from a patch clamp showed that ATP activated a K+ and Ca2+ influx in pollen protoplasts. These results suggest that, as an apoplastic signal, eATP may be involved in PG and PTG via regulating Ca2+ and K+ absorption.

Enhanced photocatalytic activities of the heterostructured upconversion photocatalysts with cotton mediated on TiO2/ZnWO4:Yb3+,Tm3.

To improve the photocatalytic efficiency and make full use of solar energy, ZnWO(4):Yb(3+),Tm(3+) (ZYT) was introduced as the upconversion luminescence agent on TiO(2) with a cotton template, and novel upconversion photocatalysts of TiO(2)/ZnWO(4):Yb(3+),Tm(3+) (TZYT-C) were synthesized and optimized with 5%-30% of ZYT. The heterostructure between ZYT and TiO(2) was formed in the TZYT-C composites with the presence of tube-like morphologies due to the addition of the cotton template. UV (364 nm) and blue (484 nm) light was emitted from ZYT upon 980 nm NIR irradiation. The BET specific surface areas of all the TZYT-C composites increased from 37 m(2) g(-1) (TiO(2)-C) to the maximum value of 75 m(2) g(-1) on 5%TZYT-C. The photocatalytic activities of the TZYT-C composites were tested using the degradation process of methyl orange (MO). 5%TZYT-C showed the highest degradation efficiency, with a value of 55.6% under sun-like irradiation for 210 min. The same performance was observed on 5%TZYT-C under NIR (λ ≥ 780 nm) irradiation, with a maximum removal rate of 9.02%, since 5%TZYT-C showed the most efficient electron-hole (e(-)/h(+)) pair separation, compared to ZYT and other TZYT-C composites.