The CuSCN layer between BiVO4 and NiFeOx for facilitating photogenerated carrier transfer and water oxidation kinetics.

Modification of oxygen evolution co-catalyst (OEC) on the surface of bismuth vanadate (BiVO4) can effectively improve the kinetics of water oxidation, but it is still limited by the small hole extraction driving force at the BiVO4/OEC interface. Modulating the BiVO4/OEC interface with a hole transfer layer (HTL) is expected to facilitate hole transport from BiVO4 to the OEC surface. Herein, a copper(I) thiocyanate (CuSCN) HTL is inserted between BiVO4 and NiFeOx OEC to create BiVO4/CuSCN/NiFeOx photoanode, resulting in a significant enhancement of photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting performance. From electrochemical analyses and density functional theory (DFT) simulations, the markedly enhanced PEC performance is attributed to the insertion of CuSCN as an HTL, which promotes the extraction of holes from BiVO4 surface and boosts the water oxidation kinetics. The optimal photoanode achieves a photocurrent density of 5.6 mA cm-2 at 1.23 V versus the reversible hydrogen electrode (vs. RHE) and an impressive charge separation efficiency of 96.2 %. This work offers valuable insights into the development of advanced photoanodes for solar energy conversion and emphasizes the importance of selecting an appropriate HTL to mitigate recombination at the BiVO4/OEC interface.

Repetitions in online doctor-patient communication: Frequency, functions, and reasons.

OBJECTIVES: To attain insights into language repetition during online doctor-patient communication (DPC), understand why doctors and patients use repetition, and improve the current deficiencies in online medical platforms. METHODS: The study performed a content analysis of 72 sets of textual doctor-patient conversations on the Chinese online medical consultation platform Chunyu Doctor. RESULTS: Repetitions occurred 1412 times in the 72 sets of online DPC. Patient self-repetitions were the most prevalent (30.7 %), while patient repetitions of doctors were the least common (17.1 %). Doctors used repetitions for explanations and affirmations. Patients used repetition for emphasis, verification, and turn-taking. The repetition frequencies of doctors and patients were primarily influenced by personal factors. However, doctor-dimension factors exerted a greater impact on the frequency of patient repetitions. CONCLUSIONS: The reasons for repetitions in online DPC differ from those offline. Online DPC increases patient initiative and reduces doctor authority. Nevertheless, it could be affected by gender stereotypes generated during offline consultations. Doctors still dominated the conversations but attended sufficiently to the patient discourse. Online DPC is gradually attempting to fulfill the expectations of a new patient-centered healthcare pattern. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: The findings yield suggestions for healthcare providers and the designers of online healthcare platforms.

A study of parental decision-making over the vaccination of girls, based on the protection motivation theory and the elaboration likelihood model.

This study proposed a new theoretical framework that combines the protection motivation theory and the elaboration likelihood model to examine how health information processing patterns influence parents' vaccination decision-making on behalf of their daughters. Based on survey data from 359 parents of girls aged 9-15, we tested the theoretical model by using structural equation model. The results showed that the central route, represented by information quality, affected the parents' perceptions of HPV severity and susceptibility; the peripheral route, represented by source credibility, influenced their perceptions of HPV severity, HPV susceptibility, vaccine response efficacy, and secondary risks. Also, Chinese parents' perceptions of HPV vaccines, not perceptions of HPV, affected their intention to vaccinate their daughters. The study suggests in addition to improving the quality of health information, the peripheral route, such as the release of vaccination photos, public immunization evaluations, and case narratives, should also be used to change parents' perceptions. Besides, reducing the traditional stigmatization of female sexuality and improving parents' understanding of the new generation's sexual attitudes will increase parents' intention to have their daughters vaccinated against HPV.

Templated Assembly of pH-Labile Covalent Organic Framework Hierarchical Particles for Intracellular Drug Delivery.

Covalent organic frameworks (COF), a class of emerging microporous polymers, have been restrained for drug delivery applications due to their limited controllability over particle sizes and degradability. Herein, a dendritic mesoporous silica nanosphere (DMSN)-mediated growth strategy is proposed to fabricate hierarchical DMSN@COF hybrids through in situ growing of 1,3,5-tris(4-aminophenyl)benzene and 2,5-dimethoxyterephthaldehyde connected COF with acid cleavable C=N bonds. After the removal of the DMSN template, COF hierarchical particles (COF HP) with tailored particle sizes and degradability were obtained. Notably, the COF HP could be degraded by 55% after 24 h of incubation at pH 5.5, whereas the counterpart bulk COF only showed 15% of degradation in the same conditions. Due to the improved porosity and surface area, the COF HP can be utilized to load the chemotherapeutic drug, doxorubicin (DOX), with a high loading (46.8 wt%), outperforming the bulk COF (32.1 wt%). Moreover, around 90% of the loaded DOX can be discharged from the COF HP within 8 h of incubation at pH 5.5, whereas, only ~55% of the loaded DOX was released from the bulk COF. Cell experiments demonstrated that the IC50 value of the DOX loaded in COF HP was 2-3 times lower than that of the DOX loaded in the bulk COF and the hybrid DMSN@COF. Attributed to the high loading capacity and more pH-labile particle deconstruction properties, COF HP shows great potential in the application as vehicles for drug delivery.

Attachment anxiety and smartphone addiction among university students during confinement: Teacher-student relationships, student-student relationships and school connectedness as mediators.

Learning at home during the COVID-19 confinement might affect students' relationships with their peers, teachers, and schools and increase the possibility of smartphone addiction. We hypothesized that attachment anxiety directly and indirectly affects smartphone addiction, with teacher-student relationships, student-student relationships, and school connectedness as mediators. The participants were 999 university students from different regions of China. The results showed that six of the paths were significant except the one between student-student relationships and smartphone addiction. Also, the association between attachment anxiety and smartphone addiction was mediated by teacher-student relationships and school connectedness not but student-student relationships. The current study highlights the mediating effect of school connectedness and teacher-student relationships in the multiple mediation model, and suggests that universities can alleviate the risk of smartphone addiction in distance teaching by cultivating good teacher-student relationships and strengthening students' sense of belonging to their schools.

Portrayals of 2v, 4v and 9vHPV vaccines on Chinese social media: a content analysis of hot posts on Sina Weibo.

Rather than receive the effective 2vHPV vaccines that are readily available in China, Chinese women usually wait to receive 4v and 9vHPV vaccines, which are difficult to acquire. This means that Chinese women miss the opportunity for optimal protection from cervical cancer. As social media platforms are the main channel by which Chinese women learn about HPV vaccines, this study aimed to explore how HPV vaccines are described on social media, and in particular how they discuss or distinguish 2 v, 4 v and 9vHPV vaccines. The Octopus Web crawler tool was used to capture hot Weibo posts from 2013-2021, and 1,164 valid data were obtained. Results suggested that there are very few posts with great influence on Weibo about HPV vaccines among 9 years and much of them are created by "lay people." HPV-related topics lacked persistent popularity, comprised highly repetitive content and the spread of information was geographically diverse. There were significant differences in the media descriptions of different kinds of HPV vaccines. Price was mentioned more often in the descriptions of 2vHPV vaccines, whereas appointments were referred to most often in the descriptions of 9vHPV vaccines. There was little media attention paid to the safety and effectiveness of HPV vaccines. Chinese media should develop better collaborations with public health professionals, pay more attention to the originality of their news coverage of HPV vaccines and strive to promote HPV vaccination. Such collaboration will help news media to better understand the key points of HPV information that need to be disseminated.

Engineering of dendritic mesoporous silica nanoparticles for efficient delivery of water-insoluble paclitaxel in cancer therapy.

The efficacy of hydrophobic chemotherapy drugs in cancer treatment is often hampered by their poor solubility in the physiological environment, which causes their low delivery efficiency in the body. This manuscript develops an intelligent nanocarrier (~100 nm) drug delivery system that can highly load a water-insoluble drug, and possesses desirable tumor-targeting properties for cancer therapy. In this system, highly porous silica nanoparticles (pore volume ~ 1.4 cm3 g-1) with a dendritic pore structure (denoted as DMSN) are applied as a matrix for drug loading. A facile, vacuum rotary evaporation-mediated casting method is applied to quantitatively load a high content of a hydrophobic drug (i.e., paclitaxel) in the DMSN matrix. A thiol-modified poly(methacrylic acid) (denoted as PMAsh) shell is then assembled and crosslinked via disulfide bonds on the particle surface to improve the dispersibility of the particles in an aqueous environment. After functionalization of the PMAsh shell with the targeting ligand transferrin (Tf), the nanocarriers exhibit accumulation ability on tumor cells, both in vitro and in vivo. Combining the fascinating properties of high drug-loading, excellent colloidal stability, low cytotoxicity, targeting ability and glutathione-responsive PMAsh shell deconstruction properties, the nanocarriers described here hold great promise for the efficient delivery of hydrophobic drugs and tumor treatment.

Polylysine-modified MXene nanosheets with highly loaded glucose oxidase as cascade nanoreactor for glucose decomposition and electrochemical sensing.

Two-dimensional (2D) nanoreactors with cascade catalytic activity for glucose oxidation and hydrogen peroxide decomposition are prepared via immobilizing glucose oxidase (GOx) on Ti3C2 MXene nanosheets. Amino-rich polypeptide, poly-l-lysine (PLL), is applied to modify the ultra-thin Ti3C2 MXene nanosheets with a compatible surface for GOx immobilization. The PLL-modified Ti3C2 nanosheets possess a positively charged surface and show an excellent GOx loading capacity as high as 50 wt% of the Ti3C2 nanosheets. The physically adsorbed enzymes are then cross-linked with the amine groups in the PLL chains to form a robust GOx-PLL network covered on the MXene nanosheets. The GOx-conjugated Ti3C2-PLL (Ti3C2-PLL-GOx) nanosheets showed superior enzymatic activities than the activities of GOx immobilized on an inert porous silica substrate, largely because that the Ti3C2 nanosheets can catalyze the decomposition of the toxic intermediate H2O2 generated from the glucose oxidation. Given the excellent electrical conductivity of Ti3C2 MXene, the Ti3C2-PLL-GOx nanosheets are further deposited on glassy carbon electrode to construct a high-performance biosensor with a glucose detection limit of 2.6 µM.

Hierarchically porous graphitic carbon membrane with homogeneously encapsulated metallic nanoparticles as monolith electrodes for high-performance electrocatalysis and sensing.

We report a facile and versatile method to homogeneously deposit monolith membrane with uniform, high density of metallic nanoparticles via a "ship-in-a-bottle" strategy. Polyamidoamine (PAMAM) dendrimer, an excellent matrix for complexing with metal ions, is pre-infiltrated and applied as the directing agent for in-situ confined-formation of palladium nanoparticles (PdNPs) inside the mesopores. Efficiency of this method is demonstrated to prepare homogeneous PdNPs-deposited hierarchically porous graphitic carbon (HPGC) membrane with uniform metallic particle size (2.0-2.5 nm) and high palladium loading (~34.4 wt%). Taking advantages of fast molecule diffusion rate in hierarchically porous structure and high conductivity of graphitic carbon substance, the PdNPs-dispersed HPGC membranes are applied as monolith electrodes for electrochemical applications. The PdNPs-deposited HPGC membrane electrode exhibits excellent electrocatalytic activity toward the catalytic oxidation of dopamine, uric acid and ascorbic acid, as well as high sensitivity and selectivity in simultaneous determination of these compounds in real serum samples. The limit of detections for dopamine, uric acid and ascorbic acid are 1.3 × 10-8, 2.6 × 10-8 and 3.7 × 10-8 M, respectively, at least one order lower than that achieved on electrochemical sensors reported previously. This work provides a versatile method for efficient preparation and stabilization of monodisperse metallic NPs in diverse porous materials, leading to possible applications in devices, catalysis, and electrochemical sensing.

Improvement of J(sc) in a Cu2ZnSnS4 Solar Cell by Using a Thin Carbon Intermediate Layer at the Cu2ZnSnS4/Mo Interface.

Back contact modification plays an important role in improving energy conversion efficiency of Cu2ZnSnS4 (CZTS) thin film solar cells. In this paper, an ultrathin carbon layer is introduced on molybdenum (Mo)-coated soda lime glass (SLG) prior to the deposition of CZTS precursor to improve the back contact and therefore enhance CZTS solar cell efficiency. By introducing this layer, the short circuit current (Jsc) and device conversion efficiency increase for both nonvacuum (sol-gel) and vacuum (sputtering) methods. Specifically, for the sol-gel based process, Jsc increases from 13.60 to 16.96 mA/cm(2) and efficiency from 4.47% to 5.52%, while for the sputtering based process, Jsc increases from 17.50 to 20.50 mA/cm(2) and efficiency from 4.10% to 5.20%. Furthermore, introduction of this layer does not lead to any deterioration of either open circuit voltage (Voc) or fill factor (FF).

Hybrid nanospheres and vesicles based on pectin as drug carriers.

A novel strategy was developed to prepare nanospheres and vesicles as drug carriers. The drug-loaded pectin nanospheres and vesicles were fabricated in aqueous media containing Ca2+ and CO3(2-) ions under very mild conditions, which did not involve any surfactant. Through adjusting the preparation conditions, nanosized drug delivery systems with diverse morphologies, that is, nanospheres and vesicles, could be obtained. This technique could offer good control over the morphology and the size of nanospheres and vesicles. The morphologies of the aggregates were observed by environmental scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. 5-Fluorouracil (5-FU), an antineoplastic drug, was encapsulated in the nanospheres and vesicles, and the in vitro drug release at different pH values was investigated. With the presence of Ca2+ and CO3(2-) ions in the pectin-based nanospheres/vesicles, the release of the low molecular weight drug could be effectively sustained from the highly hydrolyzed polysaccharide-based drug delivery systems.

Sustained release of antineoplastic drugs from chitosan-reinforced alginate microparticle drug delivery systems.

Alginate based microparticle drug delivery systems were prepared for the sustained release of antineoplastic drugs. Two drugs, 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) and tegafur, were encapsulated into the microparticles. The drug loaded microparticles were fabricated using a very convenient method under very mild conditions, i.e., directly shredding the drug loaded beads into microparticles in a commercial food processor. The mean sizes of the obtained microparticles were between 100 and 200 microm. To effectively sustain the drug release, alginate microparticles were reinforced by chitosan during gelation. The drug release from the chitosan-reinforced alginate microparticles was obviously slower than that from the unreinforced microparticles. The effect of the reinforcement conditions on the drug release property of the microparticles was studied, and the optimized concentration of chitosan solution for reinforcement was identified. The effects of drug feeding concentration and pH value of the release medium on the drug release were investigated.