Supergravity-Steered Generic Manufacturing of Nanosheets-Embedded Nanocomposite Hydrogel with Highly Oriented, Heterogeneous Architecture.

Designing nanocomposite hydrogels with oriented nanosheets has emerged as a promising toolkit to achieve preferential performances that go beyond their disordered counterparts. Although current fabrication strategies via electric/magnetic force fields have made remarkable achievements, they necessitate special properties of nanosheets and suffer from an inferior orientation degree of nanosheets. Herein, a facile and universal approach is discovered to elaborate MXene-based nanocomposite hydrogels with highly oriented, heterogeneous architecture by virtue of supergravity to replace conventional force fields. The key to such architecture is to leverage bidirectional, force-tunable attributes of supergravity containing coupled orthogonal shear and centrifugal force field for steering high-efficient movement, pre-orientation, and stacking of MXene nanosheets in the bottom. Such a synergetic effect allows for yielding heterogeneous nanocomposite hydrogels with a high-orientation MXene-rich layer (orientation degree, f = 0.83) and a polymer-rich layer. The authors demonstrate that MXene-based nanocomposite hydrogels leverage their high-orientation, heterogeneous architecture to deliver an extraordinary electromagnetic interference shielding effectiveness of 55.2 dB at 12.4 GHz yet using a super-low MXene of 0.3 wt%, surpassing most hydrogels-based electromagnetic shielding materials. This versatile supergravity-steered strategy can be further extended to arbitrary nanosheets including MoS2, GO, and C3N4, offering a paradigm in the development of oriented nanocomposites.

Poly(N,N-diethylacrylamide)-endowed spontaneous emulsification during the breath figure process and the formation of membranes with hierarchical pores.

The spontaneous emulsification for the formation of water-in-oil (W/O) or oil-in-water (O/W) emulsions needs the help of at least one kind of the third component (surfactant or cosolvent) to stabilize the oil-water interface. Herein, with the water/CS2-soluble polymer poly(N,N-diethylacrylamide) (PDEAM) as a surfactant, the spontaneous formation of water-in-PDEAM/CS2 emulsions is reported for the first time. The strong affinity between PDEAM and water or the increase of PDEAM concentration will accelerate the emulsification process with high dispersed phase content. It is demonstrated that the spontaneous emulsification of condensed water droplets into the PDEAM/CS2 solution occurs during the breath figure process, resulting in porous films with two levels of pore sizes (i.e., micron and submicron). The emulsification degree and the amounts of submicron-sized pores increase with PDEAM concentration and solidifying time of the solution. This work brings about incremental interest in spontaneous emulsification that may happen during the breath figure process. The combination of these two simultaneous processes provides us with an option to build hierarchically porous structures with condensed and emulsified water droplets as templates. Such porous membranes may have great potential in fields such as separation, cell culture, and biosensing.

Urbanization expands the fluctuating difference in gross primary productivity between urban and rural areas from 2000 to 2018 in China.

Urban and rural vegetation are affected by both climate change and human activities, but the role of urbanization in vegetation productivity is unclear given the dual impacts. Here, we delineated urban area (UA) and rural area (RA), quantified the relative impacts of climate change and human activities on gross primary production (GPP) in 34 major cities (MCs) in China from 2000 to 2018, and analyzed the intrinsic impacts of urbanization on GPP. First, we found that the total urban impervious surface coverage (ISC) of the 34 MCs increased by 13.25 % and the mean annual GPP increased by 211 gC m-2 during the study period. GPP increased significantly in urban core areas, but decreased significantly in urban expansion areas, which was mainly due to a large amount of vegetation loss due to land use conversion. Second, the variability of GPP in UA was generally lower than in RA. Both climate change and human activities had a positive impact on GPP in UA and RA in the 34 MCs, of which the contribution was 49 % and 51 % in UA, and 76 % and 24 % in RA, respectively. Third, under climate change and human activities, the increase in GPP offset 4.96 % and 12.35 % of the impact of land use conversion on GPP in 2000 and 2018, respectively, which indicated that the offset strengthened over time. These findings emphasize the role of human activities in promoting carbon sequestration in urban vegetation, which is crucial for better understanding the processes and mechanisms of urban carbon cycles. Decision-makers can manage urban vegetation based on vegetation carbon sequestration potential as regions urbanize, aiding comprehensive decision-making.

Integrating Preoperative Computed Tomography and Clinical Factors for Lymph Node Metastasis Prediction in Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma by Feature-Wise Attentional Graph Neural Network.

PURPOSE: This study aimed to propose a regional lymph node (LN) metastasis prediction model for patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) that can learn and adaptively integrate preoperative computed tomography (CT) image features and nonimaging clinical parameters. METHODS AND MATERIALS: Contrast-enhanced CT scans taken 2 weeks before surgery and 20 clinical factors, including general, pathologic, hematological, and diagnostic information, were collected from 357 patients with ESCC between October 2013 and November 2018. There were 999 regional LNs (857 negative, 142 positive) with pathologically confirmed status after surgery. All LNs were randomly divided into a training set (n = 738) and a validation set (n = 261) for testing. The feature-wise attentional graph neural network (FAGNN) was composed of (1) deep image feature extraction by the encoder of 3-dimensional UNet and high-level nonimaging factor representation by the clinical parameter encoder; (2) a feature-wise attention module for feature embedding with learnable adaptive weights; and (3) a graph attention layer to integrate the embedded features for final LN level metastasis prediction. RESULTS: Among the 4 models we constructed, FAGNN using both CT and clinical parameters as input is the model with the best performance, and the area under the curve (AUC) reaches 0.872, which is better than manual CT diagnosis method, multivariable model using CT only (AUC = 0.797), multivariable model with combined CT and clinical parameters (AUC = 0.846), and our FAGNN using CT only (AUC = 0.853). CONCLUSIONS: Our adaptive integration model improved the metastatic LN prediction performance based on CT and clinical parameters. Our model has the potential to foster effective fusion of multisourced parameters and to support early prognosis and personalized surgery or radiation therapy planning in patients with ESCC.

CRISPR-induced miRNA156-recognition element mutations in TaSPL13 improve multiple agronomic traits in wheat.

Increase in grain yield is always a major objective of wheat genetic improvement. The SQUAMOSA promoter-binding protein-like (SPL) genes, coding for a small family of diverse plant-specific transcription factors, represent important targets for improving grain yield and other major agronomic traits in rice. The function of the SPL genes in wheat remains to be investigated in this respect. In this study, we identified 56 wheat orthologues of rice SPL genes belonging to 19 homoeologous groups. Like in rice, nine orthologous TaSPL genes harbour the microRNA156 recognition elements (MRE) in their last exons except for TaSPL13, which harbour the MRE in its 3'-untranslated region (3'UTR). We modified the MRE of TaSPL13 using CRISPR-Cas9 and generated 12 mutations in the three homoeologous genes. As expected, the MRE mutations led to an approximately two-fold increase in the TaSPL13 mutant transcripts. The phenotypic evaluation showed that the MRE mutations in TaSPL13 resulted in a decrease in flowering time, tiller number, and plant height, and a concomitantly increase in grain size and number. The results show that the TaSPL13 mutants exhibit a combination of different phenotypes observed in Arabidopsis AtSPL3/4/5 mutants and rice OsSPL13/14/16 mutants and hold great potential in improving wheat yield by simultaneously increasing grain size and number and by refining plant architecture. The novel TaSPL13 mutations generated can be utilized in wheat breeding programmes to improve these agronomic traits.

Haze Occurrence Caused by High Gas-to-Particle Conversion in Moisture Air under Low Pollutant Emission in a Megacity of China.

Haze occurred in Zhengzhou, a megacity in the northern China, with the PM2.5 as high as 254 µg m-3 on 25 December 2019, despite the emergency response measure of restriction on the emission of anthropogenic pollutants which was implemented on December 19 for suppressing local air pollution. Air pollutant concentrations, chemical compositions, and the origins of particulate matter with aerodynamic diameter smaller than 2.5 µm (PM2.5) between 5-26 December were investigated to explore the reasons for the haze occurrence. Results show that the haze was caused by efficient SO2-to-suflate and NOx-to-nitrate conversions under high relative humidity (RH) condition. In comparison with the period before the restriction (5-18 December) when the PM2.5 was low, the concentration of PM2.5 during the haze (19-26 December) was 173 µg m-3 on average with 51% contributed by sulfate (31 µg m-3) and nitrate (57 µg m-3). The conversions of SO2-to-sulfate and NOx-to-nitrate efficiently produced sulfate and nitrate although the concentration of the two precursor gases SO2 and NOx was low. The high RH, which was more than 70% and the consequence of artificial water-vapor spreading in the urban air for reducing air pollutants, was the key factor causing the conversion rates to be enlarged in the constriction period. In addition, the last 48 h movement of the air parcels on 19-26 December was stagnant, and the air mass was from surrounding areas within 200 km, indicating weather conditions favoring the accumulation of locally-originated pollutants. Although emergency response measures were implemented, high gas-to-particle conversions in stagnant and moisture circumstances can still cause severe haze in urban air. Since the artificial water-vapor spreading in the urban air was one of the reasons for the high RH, it is likely that the spreading had unexpected side effects in some certain circumstances and needs to be taken into consideration in future studies.

Dynamic Multi-projection Mapping Based on Parallel Intensity Control.

Projection mapping using multiple projectors is promising for spatial augmented reality; however, it is difficult to apply it to dynamic scenes. This is because the conventional method decides all pixel intensities of multiple images simultaneously based on the global optimization method, and it is hard to reduce the latency from motion to projection. To mitigate this, we propose a novel method of controlling the intensity based on a pixel-parallel calculation for each projector in real-time with low latency. This parallel calculation leverages the insight that the projected pixels from different projectors in overlapping areas can be approximated independently if the pixel is sufficiently small relative to the surface structure. Additionally, our pixel-parallel calculation method allows a distributed system configuration, such that the number of projectors can be increased to form a network for high scalability. We demonstrate a seamless mapping into dynamic scenes at 360 fps with a 9.5-ms latency using ten cameras and four projectors.

Integrating Clinical Data and Attentional CT Imaging Features for Esophageal Fistula Prediction in Esophageal Cancer.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: This study aims to develop a risk model to predict esophageal fistula in esophageal cancer (EC) patients by learning from both clinical data and computerized tomography (CT) radiomic features. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In this retrospective study, computerized tomography (CT) images and clinical data of 186 esophageal fistula patients and 372 controls (1:2 matched by the diagnosis time of EC, sex, marriage, and race) were collected. All patients had esophageal cancer and did not receive esophageal surgery. 70% patients were assigned into training set randomly and 30% into validation set. We firstly use a novel attentional convolutional neural network for radiographic descriptor extraction from nine views of planes of contextual CT, segmented tumor and neighboring structures. Then clinical factors including general, diagnostic, pathologic, therapeutic and hematological parameters are fed into neural network for high-level latent representation. The radiographic descriptors and latent clinical factor representations are finally associated by a fully connected layer for patient level risk prediction using SoftMax classifier. RESULTS: 512 deep radiographic features and 32 clinical features were extracted. The integrative deep learning model achieved C-index of 0.901, sensitivity of 0.835, and specificity of 0.918 on validation set with superior performance than non-integrative model using CT imaging alone (C-index = 0.857) or clinical data alone (C-index = 0.780). CONCLUSION: The integration of radiomic descriptors from CT and clinical data significantly improved the esophageal fistula prediction. We suggest that this model has the potential to support individualized stratification and treatment planning for EC patients.

Enhanced Electrochemical Kinetics with Highly Dispersed Conductive and Electrocatalytic Mediators for Lithium-Sulfur Batteries.

Lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries are promising energy-storage devices because of their high theoretical energy densities. However, the practical application of Li-S batteries is still impeded by the poor cycling performance and rate capability at practical conditions. In order to improve the performance of practical Li-S batteries, a hierarchical Mo2 C nanocluster/carbon nanosheets hybrid based hollow spherical material (Mo2 C/CHS) is designed and prepared. The hollow spheres composed of stacked carbon nanosheets can facilitate the infiltration of electrolyte. The ultrasmall and highly conductive Mo2 C nanocrystals are confined in the carbon nanosheets and expose more active sites for anchoring and conversion of lithium polysulfides and increase the number of the nuclei for Li2 S2 /Li2 S precipitation. Benefitting from the synergistic effects, Mo2 C/CHS greatly promotes electrochemical kinetics in Li-S batteries with high sulfur loading (5 mg cm-2 ). Even under lean electrolyte conditions (E/S = 7 µL mgsulfur -1 ), the Li-S batteries with Mo2 C/CHS added exhibit a discharge capacity of 904 mAh g-1 at the high current rate of 0.5 C, and with 894 mAh g-1 maintained after 200 cycles. This work provides a fundamental understanding of the electrochemical processes and guides the rational design of host and additive materials for practical Li-S batteries.

Physiological and Transcriptomic Characterization of Sea-Wheatgrass-Derived Waterlogging Tolerance in Wheat.

Waterlogging, causing hypoxia stress and nitrogen depletion in the rhizosphere, has been an increasing threat to wheat production. We developed a wheat-sea wheatgrass (SWG) amphiploid showing superior tolerance to waterlogging and low nitrogen. Validated in deoxygenated agar medium for three weeks, hypoxia stress reduced the dry matter of the wheat parent by 40% but had little effect on the growth of the amphiploid. To understand the underlying mechanisms, we comparatively analyzed the wheat-SWG amphiploid and its wheat parent grown in aerated and hypoxic solutions for physiological traits and root transcriptomes. Compared with its wheat parent, the amphiploid showed less magnitude in forming root porosity and barrier to radial oxygen loss, two important mechanisms for internal O2 movement to the apex, and downregulation of genes for ethylene, lignin, and reactive oxygen species. In another aspect, however, hypoxia stress upregulated the nitrate assimilation/reduction pathway in amphiploid and induced accumulation of nitric oxide, a byproduct of nitrate reduction, in its root tips, and the amphiploid maintained much higher metabolic activity in its root system compared with its wheat parent. Taken together, our research suggested that enhanced nitrate assimilation and reduction and accumulation of nitric oxide play important roles in the SWG-derived waterlogging tolerance.

Clinical implications of germline BCL2L11 deletion polymorphism in pretreated advanced NSCLC patients with osimertinib therapy.

INTRODUCTION: B-cell lymphoma 2-like 11 (BCL-2-like 11, BCL2L11, also known as BIM) deletion polymorphism (BIM-del) has been associated with resistance to first-generation epidermal growth factor receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitors (EGFR-TKIs), and is a poor prognostic factor for EGFR-mutant non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. Nevertheless, the impact of BIM-del in advanced NSCLC patients treated with the third-generation EGFR-TKI osimertinib remains undetermined. This study aims to evaluate the relationship between BIM-del and therapeutic efficacy of osimertinib in pretreated NSCLC patients. METHODS: Patients subjected to EGFR T790 M detection and prior osimertinib treatment between December 2015 and December 2019 in our hospital were enrolled in this study. Peripheral blood samples from these patients were collected to detect BIM-del by polymerase chain reaction. Cox proportional hazards models were used to analyze the clinical outcomes of patients with and without BIM-del. RESULTS: In total, 152 Chinese Han NSCLC patients-including 143 T790M-positive and nine T790M-negative patients-were enrolled. BIM-del was detected in only 17.5 % of T790M-positive patients (25/143). The majority of patients were aged <65 years (81.8 %, 117/143), were female (58.7 %, 84/143), were non-smokers (82.5 %, 118/143), had Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) performance status (PS) 0-1 (88.8 %, 129/143), and exhibited metastases in the central nervous system (CNS) (54.5 %, 78/143). There were no associations between the BIM-del and clinical characteristics (including age, sex, histology, smoking status, stage, ECOG PS score, and CNS metastases). Patients with BIM-del had a poorer objective response rate than those without (28.0 % versus 52.5 %, p = 0.026). Besides, BIM-del was associated with a significantly shorter progression-free survival (PFS) and a moderately shorter overall survival (OS) (8.3 versus 10.5 months, p = 0.031 and 15.9 versus 25.2 months, p = 0.1, respectively). Multivariate analysis indicated that BIM-del was an independent prognostic factor for PFS but not for OS in EGFR T790 M NSCLC patients. CONCLUSIONS: BIM-del is associated with poor clinical responses and outcomes, and might be a negative predictive and prognostic biomarker in EGFR T790 M NSCLC patients with osimertinib treatment.

Chickpea derived Co nanocrystal encapsulated in 3D nitrogen-doped mesoporous carbon: Pressure cooking synthetic strategy and its application in lithium-sulfur batteries.

Lithium-sulfur batteries, as a next-generation energy storage system, could deliver much higher energy density than traditional lithium-ion batteries. Although many scientific issues have been well solved, the low-cost and green synthesis of the sulfur host to realize efficient electrochemical conversions between polysulfides and sulfur needs more consideration for commercial application. Herein, Co nanocrystal encapsulated in 3D nitrogen-doped mesoporous carbon (Co@NC) is produced in gram-scale via a simple pressure-cooking strategy by using biomass as raw material. The heterogeneous catalyst was featured by an oval morphology consisting of a tremendous amount of mesopores. The Co nanocrystals in the 3D mesoporous carbon could promote the confinement and fast conversion of polysulfides; simultaneously, the 3D hollow oval morphologies could not only substantially relieve the volume change of the cathode part but also enhance the lithium-ion transportation. Consequently, a sulfur cathode within Co@NC with a sulfur loading of 2.5 mg/cm2 exhibits significantly improved cycle stability with a fade of 0.17% per cycle over 200 cycles. Our works prove the beneficial effects of heterogeneous catalysis in polysulfide conversion reactions and provide a green, facile, scalable, and low-cost synthetic strategy of advanced hollow carbon monolith for high-performance Li-S batteries.

Multiple origins of Indian dwarf wheat by mutations targeting the TREE domain of a GSK3-like kinase for drought tolerance, phosphate uptake, and grain quality.

KEY MESSAGE: Multiple origins of Indian dwarf wheat were due to two mutations targeting the same TREE domain of a GSK3-like kinase, and these mutations confer to enhanced drought tolerance and increased phosphate and nitrogen accumulation for adaptation to the dry climate of Indian and Pakistan. Indian dwarf wheat, featured by the short stature, erect leaves, dense spikes, and small, spherical grains, was a staple crop in India and Pakistan from the Bronze Age until the early 1900s. These morphological features are controlled by a single locus Sphaerococcum 1 (S1), but the genetic identity of the locus and molecular mechanisms underlying the selection of this wheat type are unknown. In this study, we showed that the origin of Indian dwarf wheat was due to two independent missense mutations targeting the conserved TREE domain of a GSK3-like kinase, which is homologous to the Arabidopsis BIN2 protein, a negative regulator in brassinosteroid signaling. The S1 protein is involved in brassinosteroid signaling by physical interaction with the wheat BES1/BZR1 proteins. The dwarf alleles are insensitive to brassinosteroid, upregulates brassinosteroid biosynthetic genes, significantly enhanced drought tolerance, facilitated phosphate accumulation, and increased high molecular weight glutenins. It is the enhanced drought tolerance and accumulation of nitrogen and phosphate that contributed to the adaptation of such a small-grain form of wheat to the dry climate of India and Pakistan. Thus, our research not only identified the genetic events underlying the origin of the Indian dwarf wheat, but also revealed the function of brassinosteroid in the regulation of drought tolerance, phosphate homeostasis, and grain quality.

Multiple Immune Features-Based Signature for Predicting Recurrence and Survival of Inoperable LA-NSCLC Patients.

INTRODUCTION: The immune status of the tumor microenvironment is extremely complex. One single immune feature cannot reflect the integral immune status, and its prognostic value was limited. We postulated that the immune signature based on multiple immuno-features could markedly improve the prediction of post-chemoradiotherapeutic survival in inoperable locally advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (LA-NSCLC) patients. METHODS: In this study, 100 patients who were diagnosed as having inoperable LA-NSCLC between January 2005 and January 2016 were analyzed. A five immune features-based signature was then constructed using the nested repeat 10-fold cross validation with least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) Cox regression model. Nomograms were then established for predicting prognosis. RESULTS: The immune signature combining five immuno-features was significantly associated with overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) (P = 0.002 and P = 0.014, respectively) in patients with inoperable LA-NSCLC, and at a cutoff of -0.05 stratified patients into two groups with 5-year OS rates of 39.8 and 8.8%, and 2-year PFS rates of 22.2 and 5.5% for the high- and low-immune signature groups, respectively. Integrating immune signature, we proposed predictive nomograms that were better than the traditional TNM staging system in terms of discriminating ability (OS: 0.692 vs. 0.588; PFS: 0.672 vs. 0.586, respectively) or net weight classification (OS: 32.96%; PFS: 9.22%), suggesting that the immune signature plays a significant role in improving the prognostic value. CONCLUSION: Multiple immune features-based immune signature could effectively predict recurrence and survival of inoperable LA-NSCLC patients and complemented the prognostic value of the TNM staging system.

Prognostic Value of a Nomogram Based on the Dynamic Albumin-to-Alkaline Phosphatase Ratio for Patients with Extensive-Stage Small-Cell Lung Cancer.

PURPOSE: Small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) is known as the characteristics of high invasion, rapid progression, and poor prognosis. Therefore, identification of patients with high risk of progression and death is critical to improve the survival of patients with extensive-stage SCLC (ES-SCLC). This study was designed to determine the prognostic importance of the albumin-to-alkaline phosphatase ratio (AAPR) in the survival of patients with ES-SCLC and to develop a nomogram based on AAPR dynamics for ES-SCLC prognosis. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Characteristics were reviewed from 300 patients with ES-SCLC. Training and validation cohorts included 200 and 100 patients, respectively. We applied univariate and multivariate Cox models to assess the prognostic value of AAPR for ES-SCLC. The nomogram for progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) of ES-SCLC patients was developed based on the multivariate survival analysis of the training cohort. External validation of the established nomogram was performed using the validation cohort. RESULTS: N3 stage, thoracic radiotherapy, and post-AAPR were the independent factors identified for PFS. T stage, thoracic radiotherapy, and high post-AAPR were the independent risk factors identified for death. The prognostic nomogram was established by integrating the independent significant factors for PFS and OS in the training cohort with the c-indices of 0.675 and 0.662, respectively, and validated in the validation cohort. The nomogram had superior prognosis prediction ability than did TNM stage. Decision curve analysis (DCA) also indicated clinical net benefits from the nomogram. CONCLUSION: AAPR was valuable for prognosis prediction in patients with ES-SCLC and was recommended to be dynamically evaluated to guide patient treatment. Additionally, the nomogram covering post-AAPR accurately predicted individual survival probability.

Development and validation of a nomogram prognostic model for esophageal cancer patients with oligometastases.

Platinum-based chemotherapy is recommended as the standard treatment for metastatic esophageal cancer (EC) patients; however, the outcome is poor. Oligometastasis is less aggressive and has limited growth potential. However, the prognostic factors for EC patients with oligometastases was largely unknown. Thus, we intend to determine the prognostic factors, and develop and validate nomograms for prediction of survival for EC patients with oligometastases. In this study, characteristics of 273 oligometastatic EC patients were analyzed using univariate and multivariate Cox models to determine the independent prognostic factors for progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS). The result showed that history of alcohol consumption, longer tumor, no local radiotherapy for EC, and no local treatment for metastases were independent factors for PFS. Sex, esophageal fistula, number of metastatic organs, and local radiotherapy for EC were independent prognostic factors for OS. On the basis of Cox models, the respective nomogram for prediction of PFS and OS was established with the corrected concordance index of 0.739 and 0.696 after internal cross-validation. In conclusion, local treatment for metastases and local radiotherapy for EC were demonstrated to be beneficial for oligometastatic EC patients, and the validated nomograms are valuable in prognosis prediction and could guide individualized management for these patients.

In vitro and in vivo evaluation of the safety and efficacy of a novel liquid fiducial marker for image-guided radiotherapy.

The true extent of a tumor is difficult to visualize, during radiotherapy, using current modalities. In the present study, the safety and feasibility of a mixture of N-butyl cyanoacrylate and lipiodol (NBCA/Lip) was evaluated in order to investigate the optimal combination for application as a fiducial marker for radiotherapy. Four combinations of NBCA/Lip injection (1:1-0.1, 1:1-0.15, 1:3-0.1 and 1:3-0.15 ml) were injected into the subcutaneous tissue of BALB/c mice. The changes in gross histopathology, body weight, skin score, marker volume, neutrophil and macrophage counts were observed to analyze the effects of the different mixing ratios and injection volumes, in order to identify the best combination. Evaluation according to the International Organization for Standardization criteria was further conducted in order to test the biocompatibility of the mixture, including an acute systematic assay with mice, cytotoxicity with L929 fibroblasts and delayed-type hypersensitivity tests with guinea pigs and an intradermal test with rabbits. The results revealed that at the seventh week, 42 markers (42/48; 87.5%) were still visible using computed tomography (CT) imaging. No serious adverse effects were observed throughout the study period; however, the combination of 1:1-0.1 ml had the lowest body weight and worst skin score. A review of the histopathological reaction to NBCA/Lip revealed a combination of acute inflammation, chronic inflammation, granulation tissue, foreign-body reaction and fibrous capsule formation. The 1:1 NBCA combination ratio resulted in the most intense tissue repair reaction and a slower degradation rate of markers. In general, the combination of 1:3-0.15 ml had a better fusion with local tissue, maintained a stable imaging nodule on CT images for 7 weeks and the final biocompatibility test demonstrated its safety. Overall, the findings of the present study demonstrated NBCA/Lip as a safe and feasible fiducial marker, when using the 1:3-0.15 ml combination.

Cobalt nanoparticles shielded in N-doped carbon nanotubes for high areal capacity Li-S batteries.

N-Doped carbon nanotubes with embedded cobalt nanoparticles (Co-NCNTs) were prepared by thermally annealing a mixture of ZIF-67 and dicyandiamide precursors. Because of the dual chemical affinity of Co and N to S species, Li-S batteries with a Co-NCNT modified separator revealed enhanced redox kinetics of lithium polysulfide conversion and achieved a high areal capacity of 3.73 mA h cm-2 after 100 cycles at 0.1C at a sulfur loading of 4.3 mg cm-2.

Development and validation of a risk prediction model for radiotherapy-related esophageal fistula in esophageal cancer.

OBJECTIVES: We aimed to identify the risk factors and provide a nomogram for the prediction of radiotherapy-related esophageal fistula in patients with esophageal cancer (EC) using a case-control study. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Patients with esophageal fistula who received radiotherapy or chemoradiotherapy between 2003 and 2017 were retrospectively collected in two institutions. In the training cohort (TC), clinical, pathologic, and serum data of 136 patients (cases) who developed esophageal fistula during or after radiotherapy were enrolled and compared with 272 controls (1:2 matched with the diagnosis time of EC, sex, marriage, and race). After the univariable and multivariable logistic regression analyses, the independent risk factors were identified and incorporated into a nomogram. Then the nomogram for the risk prediction was externally validated in the validation cohort (VC; 47 cases and 94 controls) using bootstrap resampling. RESULTS: Multivariable analyses demonstrated that ECOG PS, BMI, T4, N2/3 and re-radiotherapy were independent factors for esophageal fistula. Then a nomogram was constructed with the C-index of 0.805 (95% CI, 0.762-0.848) for predicting the risk of developing esophageal fistula in EC patients receiving radiotherapy. Importantly, the C-index maintained 0.764 (95% CI, 0.683-0.845) after the external validation. CONCLUSIONS: We created and externally validated the first risk nomogram of esophageal fistula associated with radiotherapy. This will aid individual risk stratification of patients with EC developing esophageal fistula.

Boosting High-Rate Li-S Batteries by an MOF-Derived Catalytic Electrode with a Layer-by-Layer Structure.

Rechargeable high-energy lithium-sulfur batteries suffer from rapid capacity decay and poor rate capability due to intrinsically intermediate polysulfides' shuttle effect and sluggish redox kinetics. To tackle these problems simultaneously, a layer-by-layer electrode structure is designed, each layer of which consists of ultrafine CoS2-nanoparticle-embedded porous carbon evenly grown on both sides of reduced graphene oxide (rGO). The CoS2 nanoparticles derived from metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have an average size of ≈10 nm and can facilitate the conversion between Li2S6 and Li2S2/Li2S in the liquid electrolyte by a catalytic effect, leading to improved polysulfide redox kinetics. In addition, the interconnected conductive frameworks with hierarchical pore structure afford fast ion and electron transport and provide sufficient space to confine polysulfides. As a result, the layer-by-layer electrodes exhibit good rate capabilities with 1180.7 and 700 mAh g-1 at 1.0 and 5.0 C, respectively, and maintain an impressive cycling stability with a low capacity decay of 0.033% per cycle within ultralong 1000 cycles at 5.0 C. Even with a high sulfur loading of 3.0 mg cm-2, the electrodes still show high rate performance and stable cycling stability over 300 cycles.