Clay-Coated Meshes with Superhydrophilicity and Underwater Superoleophobicity for Highly Efficient Oil/Water Separation.

A novel clay-coated mesh was fabricated via a simple brush-coating method without the use of special equipment, chemical reagents, and complex chemical reactions and operation processes. Possessing superhydrophilicity and underwater superoleophobicity, the clay-coated mesh can be used for efficiently separating various light oil/water mixtures. The clay-coated mesh also exhibits excellent reusability, maintaining a high separation efficiency of 99.4% after 30 repeated separations of the kerosene/water mixture.

Bioactivity-Driven Synthesis of the Marine Natural Product Naamidine J and Its Derivatives as Potential Tumor Immunological Agents by Inhibiting Programmed Death-Ligand 1.

The total synthesis of the marine natural product naamidine J and a rapid structure modification toward its derivatives were achieved on the basis of several rounds of structure-relationship analyses of their tumor immunological activities. These compounds were tested for programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) protein expression in human colorectal adenocarcinoma RKO cells. Among them, compound 11c was found to efficiently suppress constitutive PD-L1 expression in RKO cells with low toxicity and further exerted its antitumor effect in MC38 tumor-bearing C57BL/6 mice by reducing PD-L1 expression and enhancing tumor-infiltrating T-cell immunity. This research work may provide insight for the discovery of new marine natural product-derived tumor immunological drug leads.

Zero-Material Cost Production of Soil-Coated Fabrics with Underwater Superoleophobicity for Antifouling Oil/Water Separation.

Soil-coated fabrics were fabricated by scrape-coating of soil slurry onto cotton fabrics. The raw materials, soil, and cotton fabrics were, respectively, obtained from farmland and waste bed sheets, making the method a zero-material cost way to produce superwetting membrane. The superhydrophilic/underwater superoleophobic soil-coated fabrics exhibit high efficiency (>99%), ultra-high flux (~45,000 L m-2 h-1), and excellent antifouling behavior for separating water from various oils driven by gravity. The simple fabrication and superior performance suggest that the soil-coated fabric could be a promising candidate as a filtration membrane for practical applications in industrial oily wastewater and oil spill treatments.

Bayesian Fully Convolutional Networks for Brain Image Registration.

The purpose of medical image registration is to find geometric transformations that align two medical images so that the corresponding voxels on two images are spatially consistent. Nonrigid medical image registration is a key step in medical image processing, such as image comparison, data fusion, target recognition, and pathological change analysis. Existing registration methods only consider registration accuracy but largely neglect the uncertainty of registration results. In this work, a method based on the Bayesian fully convolutional neural network is proposed for nonrigid medical image registration. The proposed method can generate a geometric uncertainty map to calculate the uncertainty of registration results. This uncertainty can be interpreted as a confidence interval, which is essential for judging whether the source data are abnormal. Moreover, the proposed method introduces group normalization, which is conducive to the network convergence of the Bayesian neural network. Some representative learning-based image registration methods are compared with the proposed method on different image datasets. Experimental results show that the registration accuracy of the proposed method is better than that of the methods, and its antifolding performance is comparable to that of fast image registration and VoxelMorph. Furthermore, the proposed method can evaluate the uncertainty of registration results.