Rational design of natural leather-based water evaporator for electricity generation and functional applications

In recent years,water evaporation-induced electricity has attracted a great deal of attention as an emerging green and renewable energy harvesting technology.Although abundant materials have been developed to fabricate hydrovoltaic devices,the limitations of high costs,inconvenient storage and transport,low environmental benefits,and unadaptable shape have restricted their wide applications.Here,an electricity generator driven by water evaporation has been engineered based on natural biomass leather with inherent properties of good moisture permeability,excellent wettability,physicochemical stability,flexibility,and biocompatibility.Including numerous nano/microchannels together with rich oxygen-bearing functional groups,the natural leather-based water evaporator,Leather_(Emblic-NPs-SA/CB),could continuously produce electricity even staying outside,achieving a maximum output voltage of∼3 V with six-series connection.Furthermore,the leather-based water evaporator has enormous potential for use as a flexible self-powered electronic floor and seawater demineralizer due to its sensitive pressure sensing ability as well as its excellent photothermal conversion efficiency(96.3%)and thus fast water evaporation rate(2.65 kg m^(−2)h^(−1)).This work offers a new and functional material for the construction of hydrovoltaic devices to harvest the sustained green energy from water evaporation in arbitrary ambient environments,which shows great promise in their widespread applications.

Exploring Variational Auto-encoder Architectures, Configurations, and Datasets for Generative Music Explainable AI

Generative AI models for music and the arts in general are increasingly complex and hard to understand.The field of ex-plainable AI(XAI)seeks to make complex and opaque AI models such as neural networks more understandable to people.One ap-proach to making generative AI models more understandable is to impose a small number of semantically meaningful attributes on gen-erative AI models.This paper contributes a systematic examination of the impact that different combinations of variational auto-en-coder models(measureVAE and adversarialVAE),configurations of latent space in the AI model(from 4 to 256 latent dimensions),and training datasets(Irish folk,Turkish folk,classical,and pop)have on music generation performance when 2 or 4 meaningful musical at-tributes are imposed on the generative model.To date,there have been no systematic comparisons of such models at this level of com-binatorial detail.Our findings show that measureVAE has better reconstruction performance than adversarialVAE which has better musical attribute independence.Results demonstrate that measureVAE was able to generate music across music genres with inter-pretable musical dimensions of control,and performs best with low complexity music such as pop and rock.We recommend that a 32 or 64 latent dimensional space is optimal for 4 regularised dimensions when using measureVAE to generate music across genres.Our res-ults are the first detailed comparisons of configurations of state-of-the-art generative AI models for music and can be used to help select and configure AI models,musical features,and datasets for more understandable generation of music.

生物质基离子热电器件

以生物质为基体的新型离子热电材料因具有较高的离子塞贝克系数、较好的柔韧性,成本低,绿色可生物降解等优势,在构建安全、稳定、高效的柔性可穿戴热电器件方面具有广阔的应用前景。本文综述了以纤维素、明胶等生物质材料为基体的离子热电电容器和离子热电池的制备方法、热电原理、热电性能及其近五年在可穿戴体热收集装置、柔性温度传感器和自驱动人体监测系统领域的应用。结合当前研究现状,进一步总结了生物质基离子热电材料研究的难点与不足,以及生物质基离子热电器件未来推广应用面临的困难与挑战,并就上述存在的问题提出了针对性的解决思路,为本领域相关研究提供理论指导与技术借鉴。

STX5 Inhibits Hepatocellular Carcinoma Adhesion and Promotes Metastasis by Regulating the PI3K/mTOR Pathway

Background and Aims:Syntaxin 5(STX5)is a member of the syntaxin or target-soluble SNAP receptor(t-SNARE)fam-ily and plays a critical role in autophagy.However,its function and molecular mechanism in tumor cell migration are still un-known.The role of STX5 in influencing hepatocellular carci-noma(HCC)is an important topic in our research.Methods:By using quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction(qPCR),western blotting,and immunohistochemical analysis of RNA and protein in tissues,we comprehensively evaluated data sets from public databases and clinical patient cohorts for STX5.The correlation of STX5 expression with the clinicopathological characteristics of HCC patients were assessed.In addition,we predicted signal pathways from dif-ferentially expressed genes(DEGs)and the Cancer Genome Atlas(TCGA)databases,and confirmed the prediction using integrated transcriptome and RNA-seq.We further investi-gated the underlying mechanisms of STX5 in the migration and adhesion of HCC cells both in vitro and in vivo.Results:In the TCGA dataset and our patient cohort,STX5 levels were significantly higher in HCC tissues than in adjacent normal liver tissues.At the same time,high expression of STX5 pre-dicted worse prognosis in patients with liver cancer.High ex-pression of STX5 indicates the decrease of adhesion and the increase of migration of HCC cells,and the conversion of epi-thelial-mesenchymal transition(EMT)in vitro via PI3K/mTOR pathway activation.Conversely,when Sirolimus,a phospho-inositide 3-kinase(PI3K)/AKT/mechanistic target of rapa-mycin(mTOR)inhibitor acts on cells simultaneously,STX5 overexpression-mediated enhancement of HCC metastasis is reversed.Double-negative regulation of STX5 and mTOR further enhanced the inhibitory effect of STX5 on HCC me-tastasis.In vivo,STX5 knockdown inhibited the metastasis of HCC cells.Conclusions:Our study demonstrates a novel research result that STX5 promotes HCC metastasis through PI3K/mTOR pathway.We believe that combined inhibition of STX5 and mTOR is a potential treatment for effectively pro-longing patient survival and inhibiting HCC metastasis.

Cyclic and Linear Thiopeptides from Soil-Derived Streptomyces sp.CPCC 203702 with Antiviral and Antibacterial Activities

A new cyclic thiopeptide,berninamycin F(3),three new linear thiopeptides,berninamycins G—I(4-6),and two known berninamycin derivatives,berninamycins C and D(1 and 2)were isolated from Streptomyces sp.CPCC 203702.Their structures were elucidated through HRESIMS and one-and two-dimensional NMR data,and the absolute configurations were assigned using Marfey's method.Compounds 4-6 are the first examples of linear berninamycin analogs.Notably,compound 4 is the first example of linear thiopeptide with a 1-(oxazol-2-yl)ethan-1-one group,compound 6 is the first linear thiopeptide derivative with methylated oxoacetate moiety.Compounds 1-6 exhibited excellent anti-Zika virus activities with IC_(50) values in the range of 4.4-10.5μmol/L,which were superior to that of the positive control ribavirin(IC_(50)=49.2μmol/L).Compounds 1 and 3 showed strong anti-influenza A virus activities with the IC_(50) values of 15.6 and 3.2μmol/L,respectively.Compound 1 exhibited good antibacterial activities against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus spp.pathogens.

Tapered Optical Fiber-Based LSPR Biosensor for Ascorbic Acid Detection

The ascorbic acid(AA)is a biomarker that can be used to detect the symptoms of severe disorders such as scurvy,Parkinson’s,Alzheimer’s,and cardiovascular diseases.In this work,a simple and effective sensor model is developed to diagnose the presence of AA samples.To develop the sensor,a tapered single-mode optical fiber has been used with the well-known phenomenon of localized surface plasmon resonance(LSPR).For LSPR,the tapered region is immobilized with synthesized gold nanoparticles(AuNPs)and zinc oxide nanoparticles(ZnO-NPs)whose absorbance peak wavelengths appear at 519nm and 370nm,respectively.On the basis of nanoparticles(NPs)configurations,two different biosensor probes are developed.In the first one,the sensing region is immobilized with AuNPs and named Probe I.In the second probe,the immobilized layer of AuNPs is further coated with a layer of ZnO-NPs,and a resultant probe is termed as Probe II.The characterizations of synthesized AuNPs and developed fiber probes are done by the ultraviolet-visible(UV-vis)spectrophotometer,high-resolution transmission electron microscope(HR-TEM),atomic force microscopy(AFM),and scanning electron microscope(SEM).To enhance the selectivity,a sensing region of probes is functionalized with ascorbate oxidase enzyme that oxidizes the AA in the presence of oxygen.The response of developed sensor probes is authenticated by sensing the samples of AA in the range from 500 nM to 1 mM,which covers the range of AA found in human bodies,i.e.,40μM-120μM.The performance analysis of the developed sensor probes has been done in terms of their stability,reproducibility,reusability,and selectivity.To observe the stability of AA,a pH-test has also been done that results in a better solubility of AA molecules in phosphate-buffered saline(PBS)solution.