Electrolyte modification method induced atomic arrangement in FeOx/NF nanosheets for efficient overall water splitting.

To explore transition metal-based electrocatalysts with remarkable energy storage and conversion performance, the rational design and synthesis of electrodes with rich active sites and favorable electrical conductivity are crucial. Herein, using fluoroethylene carbonate (FEC) additive in electrochemical conversion reaction (electrolyte modification method) is proposed as an effective strategy to enhance the catalytic activity of FeOx/NF. The optimal sample FeOx/NF-Li-FEC1 shows optimized HER activity with remarkably low overpotential of 222 mV at a current density of 200 mA cm-2. By employing FeOx/NF-Li-FEC1 as bifunctional electrocatalysts, the overall water-splitting device reaches a current density of 10 mA cm-2 at a low cell voltage of 1.56 V. The outstanding performance is mainly attributed to the atomic arrangement to offer rich active sites as well as the evolved electronic structure and the thin SEI layer to accelerate charge transfer process. This study opens up a novel avenue to rationally design and synthesize low-cost and high-performance electrode materials for electrochemical energy conversion and storage devices.

A flexible and visually meaningful multi-image compression, encryption and hiding scheme based on 2D compressive sensing.

Background: Encrypting plain images into noise-like cipher images is a common method in image encryption. However, when noise-like images appear in public networks, they are more likely to attract attention and suffer more cryptanalysis. To solve this problem, researchers propose the concept of visually meaningful image encryption scheme, which encrypts a plain image into a visually meaningful cipher image. Objective: In order to realize the visual security of cipher image and increase information capacity, this paper proposes a flexible visually secure multi-image compression, encryption and hiding scheme based on two-dimensional compressive sensing (2DCS), which can flexibly complete the compression and encryption of multiple plain images without increasing the amount of ciphertext data. Methods: The scheme is divided into encryption process and embedding process. In the encryption process, the plain image is randomly scrambled and non-linear gray value transformed to obtain a pre-encrypted integer matrix, then 2DCS is used to compress the pre-encrypted integer matrix to get the secret image. Repeat this process for multiple plain images to obtain multiple secret images. In the embedding process, integer wavelet transform and bit-plane decomposition are used to embed multiple secret images into the quantized coefficient matrix of host image to get the modified coefficient matrix, and then the inverse integer wavelet transform is used to transform the modified coefficient matrix into spatial space to get the visually meaningful cipher image. Result: The simulation experiment verifies the feasibility and effectiveness of the visually meaningful multi-image encryption scheme, and users can choose to improve the system's encryption capacity or cipher image's visual security according to their own needs.

Author Correction: Pressure-Induced Crystallization and Phase Transformation of Para-xylene.

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper.

A case-control study on association of nucleotide excision repair polymorphisms and its interaction with environment factors with the susceptibility to non-melanoma skin cancer.

AIMS: To investigate the association of several single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within nucleotide excision repair (NER) gene and additional gene- gene and gene- smoking interaction with non-melanoma skin cancer (NMSC) risk in a Chinese population. METHODS: A total of 1322 participants (939 males, 383 females) were selected, including 660 NMSC patients and 662 control participants. Generalized multifactor dimensionality reduction (GMDR) was used to screen the best interaction combination among SNPs and smoking. Logistic regression was performed to investigate association between 4 SNPs within NER gene, additional gene- gene and gene- smoking interaction on NMSC risk. RESULTS: NMSC risk was significantly higher in carriers with G allele of rs2228527 than those with AA genotype (AG + GG versus AA), adjusted OR (95%CI) =1.76 (1.24-2.37), and higher in carriers with the G allele of rs2228529 than those with AA genotype (AG + GG versus AA), adjusted OR (95%CI) = 1.66 (1.24-2.13). However, we did not find any direct association of the rs4134822 and rs1799793 with NMSC risk after covariates adjustment. GMDR model indicated a significant interaction combination (p=0.0010), including rs2228529 and current smoking. Overall, the cross-validation consistency of this model was 9/ 10, and the testing accuracy was 60.72%. Current smokers with rs2228529- GA or GG genotype have the highest NMSC risk, compared to never- smokers with rs2228529- AA genotype, OR (95%CI) = 2.92 (1.61-4.29). CONCLUSIONS: We found that the G allele of rs2228527 and the G allele of rs2228529 within NER gene, interaction between rs2228529 and current smoking were all associated with increased NMSC risk.

Pressure-Induced Crystallization and Phase Transformation of Para-xylene.

Static pressure is an alternative method to chemical pressure for tuning the crystal structure, bonds, and physical properties of materials, and is a significant technique for the synthesis of novel materials and fundamental research. In this letter, we report the crystallization and phase transformation of p-xylene under high pressure. Our optical micrographic observations and the appearance of lattice modes in the Raman and infrared (IR) spectra indicated that p-xylene crystallizes at ∼0.1 GPa. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) pattern at 0.84 GPa suggests that the crystallized p-xylene had a monoclinic phase with the Cc(9) space group. The sharp shrinkage of the lattice at ~13 GPa and the solid state of the decompressed sample we observed suggests a new crystalline phase of p-xylene. The in situ XRD showed that the new crystalline phase was still a monoclinic structure but with a different space group of C2(5), indicating that a phase transition occurred during further compression. The mass spectrometry experiment confirmed phase transition polymerization, with mainly trimer and tetramer polymers. Our findings suggest an easy and efficient method for crystallizing and polymerizing p-xylene under high pressure.