Inflammatory Pathogenesis of Post-stroke Depression.

Post-stroke depression (PSD) is a complex mood disorder that emerges in individuals following a stroke, characterized by the development of depressive symptoms. The pathogensis of PSD is diverse, with inflammation playing a vital role in its onset and progression. Emerging evidence suggests that microglial activation, astrocyte responses, nuclear factor κB(NF-κB) signaling, dysregulation of the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis, alterations in brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) expression, neurotransmitter imbalances, adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and its receptors and oxidative stress are intricately linked to the pathogenesis of PSD. The involvement of inflammatory cytokines in these processes highlights the significance of the inflammatory pathway. Integrating these hypotheses, the inflammatory mechanism offers a novel perspective to expand therapeutic strategies for PSD.

Effect of biochar on biochemical properties of saline soil and growth of rice.

To amend physical properties of coastal saline soil for rice production, six biochar treatments (0, 0.5, 1, 2, 4 and 6 kg biochar per m2 soil) were set up as CK, T1, T2, T3, T4 and T5, respectively and their effect on the biochemical properties of coastal saline soil and rice growth characteristics were evaluated in a barrel planting experiment. The results showed that compared with CK (with no biochar added), the soil EC of T1 and T2-T5 was reduced by 11.5 %, but increased by 8.8-62.9 %, respectively. The available potassium and organic matter contents of T1-T5 increased ranging from 3.7-10.2 % to 8.0-46.8 %, respectively. With the increase of the biochar amount, the urease activity of soil in the 0-10 cm deep soil showed an increasing trend by 194.8-744.6 % with T1-T5, compared with that of the CK treatment. The activity of alkaline phosphatase in soil increased first and then decreased, and its increment with T1-T5 was between 28.2 and 64.8 % in comparison with that of CK. With more biochar added to soil, the leaf dry weight, root dry weight, total dry matter mass, total root length, single panicle quality and weight per 100 grains showed a trend of increase first and then decrease. The highest incremental values of all measurements were obtained with T1 by 21.8 %, 23.9 %, 13.8 %, 33.9 %, 30.8 % and 11.6 % respectively, compared with those with CK. However, adding biochar in soil demonstrated insignificant effect on the weight of single panicle, panicle length, stem thickness, tillers, setting rate, soil hydrolyzable nitrogen, available phosphorus content, rice protein, amylose, and taste quality among all treatments. In summary, the application of 0.5 kg m-2 biochar can improve the biochemical properties of saline soil and therefore increase rice yield.

Exogenous Chemicals Used to Alleviate or Salvage Plants under Flooding/Waterlogging Stress: Their Biochemical Effects and Perspectives.

Plant flooding/waterlogging stress (FWS) can be a threat to food security worldwide due to climate change. To mitigate its potential devastation, numerous exogenous chemicals (ECs) have been used to demonstrate their effectiveness on alleviating FWS for the last 20 years. This review has summarized the most recent findings on use of various ECs as either nutrients or regulatory substances on crop plants under FWS and their roles involved in improving root respiration of seedlings, optimizing nutritional status, synthesizing osmotic regulators, enhancing the activity of antioxidant enzymes, adjusting phytohormone levels, maintaining photosynthetic systems, and activating flood-tolerance related gene expressions. The effect of ESs on alleviating plants under FWS proves to be beneficial and useful but rather limited unless they are applied on appropriate crops, at the right time, and with optimized methods. Further research should be focused on use of ESs in field settings and on their potential synergetic effect for more FWS tolerance.

Hybrid Polymer-Alloy-Fluoride Interphase Enabling Fast Ion Transport Kinetics for Low-Temperature Lithium Metal Batteries.

Low-temperature lithium metal batteries are of vital importance for cold-climate condition applications. Their realization, however, is plagued by the extremely sluggish Li+ transport kinetics in the vicinity of Li metal anode at low temperatures. Different from the widely adopted electrolyte engineering, a functional interphase design concept is proposed in this work to efficiently improve the low-temperature electrochemical reaction kinetics of Li metal anodes. As a proof of concept, we design a hybrid polymer-alloy-fluoride (PAF) interphase featuring numerous gradient fluorinated solid-solution alloy composite nanoparticles embedded in a polymerized dioxolane matrix. Systematic experimental and theoretical investigations demonstrate that the hybrid PAF interphase not only exhibits superior lithiophilicity but also provides abundant ionic conductive pathways for homogeneous and fast Li+ transport at the Li-electrolyte interface. With enhanced interfacial dynamics of Li-ion migration, the as-designed PAF-Li anode works stably for 720 h with low voltage hysteresis and dendrite-free electrode morphology in symmetric cell configurations at -40 °C. The full cells with PAF-Li anode display a commercial-grade capacity of 4.26 mAh cm-2 and high capacity retention of 74.7% after 150 cycles at -20 °C. The rational functional interphase design for accelerating ion-transfer kinetics sheds innovative insights for developing high-areal-capacity and long-lifespan lithium metal batteries at low temperatures.

A study of EEG non-stationarity on inducing false memory in different emotional states.

False memory leads to inaccurate decisions and unnecessary challenges. Researchers have conventionally used electroencephalography (EEG) to study false memory under different emotional states. However, EEG non-stationarity has scarcely been investigated. To address this problem, this study utilized the nonlinear method of recursive quantitative analysis to analyze the non-stationarity of EEG signals. Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm experiments were used to induce false memory wherein semantic words were highly correlated. The EEG signals of 48 participants with false memory associated with different emotional states were collected. Recurrence rate (RR), determination rate (DET), and entropy recurrence (ENTR) data were generated to characterize EEG non-stationarity. Behavioral outcomes exhibited significantly higher false-memory rates in the positive group than in the negative group. The prefrontal, temporal, and parietal regions yielded significantly higher RR, DET, and ENTR values than other brain regions in the positive group. However, only the prefrontal region had significantly higher values than other brain regions in the negative group. Therefore, positive emotions enhance non-stationarity in brain regions associated with semantics compared with negative emotions, leading to a higher false-memory rate. This suggests that non-stationary alterations in brain regions under different emotional states are correlated with false memory.

Vina-GPU 2.0: Further Accelerating AutoDock Vina and Its Derivatives with Graphics Processing Units.

Modern drug discovery typically faces large virtual screens from huge compound databases where multiple docking tools are involved for meeting various real scenes or improving the precision of virtual screens. Among these tools, AutoDock Vina and its numerous derivatives are the most popular and have become the standard pipeline for molecular docking in modern drug discovery. Our recent Vina-GPU method realized 14-fold acceleration against AutoDock Vina on a piece of NVIDIA RTX 3090 GPU in one virtual screening case. Further speedup of AutoDock Vina and its derivatives with graphics processing units (GPUs) is beneficial to systematically push their popularization in large-scale virtual screens due to their high benefit-cost ratio and easy operation for users. Thus, we proposed the Vina-GPU 2.0 method to further accelerate AutoDock Vina and the most common derivatives with new docking algorithms (QuickVina 2 and QuickVina-W) with GPUs. Caused by the discrepancy in their docking algorithms, our Vina-GPU 2.0 adopts different GPU acceleration strategies. In virtual screening for two hot protein kinase targets, RIPK1 and RIPK3, from the DrugBank database, our Vina-GPU 2.0 reaches an average of 65.6-fold, 1.4-fold, and 3.6-fold docking acceleration against the original AutoDock Vina, QuickVina 2, and QuickVina-W while ensuring their comparable docking accuracy. In addition, we develop a friendly and installation-free graphical user interface tool for their convenient usage. The codes and tools of Vina-GPU 2.0 are freely available at https://github.com/DeltaGroupNJUPT/Vina-GPU-2.0, coupled with explicit instructions and examples.

Nanocomposite of Conducting Polymer and Li Metal for Rechargeable High Energy Density Batteries.

The structure and electrochemical performance of lithium (Li) metal degrade quickly owing to its hostless nature and high reactivity, hindering its practical application in rechargeable high energy density batteries. In order to enhance the electrochemical reversibility of metallic Li, we designed a Li/Li2S-poly(acrylonitrile) (LSPAN) composite foil via a facile mechanical kneading approach using metallic Li and sulfurized poly(acrylonitrile) as the raw materials. The uniformly dispersed Li2S-poly(acrylonitrile) (Li2S-PAN) in a metallic Li matrix buffered the volume change on cycling, and its high Li ion conductivity enabled fast Li ion diffusion behavior of the composite electrode. As expected, the LSPAN electrode showed reduced voltage polarization, enhanced rate capability, and prolonged cycle life compared with the pure Li electrode. It exhibited stable cycling for 600 h with a symmetric cell configuration at 1 mA cm-2 and 1 mA h cm-2, far outperforming the pure metallic Li counterpart (400 h). Also, the LiCoO2||LSPAN full cells with a cathode mass loading of ∼16 mg cm-2 worked stably for 100 cycles at 0.5 C with a high capacity retention of 96.5%, while the LiCoO2||Li full cells quickly failed within only 50 cycles.

Biomimetic Total Synthesis of the Spiroindimicin Family of Natural Products.

A unified strategy for the biomimetic total synthesis of the spiroindimicin family of natural products was reported. Key transformations include a one-pot two-enzyme-catalyzed oxidative dimerization of L-tryptophan/5-chloro-L-tryptophan to afford the bis-indole precursors chromopyrrolic acid/5',5''-dichloro-chromopyrrolic acid, and regioselective C3'-C2'' and C3'-C4'' bond formation converting a common bis-indole skeleton to two skeletally different natural products, including (±)-spiroindimicins D and G with a [5,5] spiro-ring skeleton, and (±)-spiroindimicins A and H with a [5,6] spiro-ring skeleton, respectively.

From Intricacy to Conciseness: A Progressive Transfer Strategy for EEG-Based Cross-Subject Emotion Recognition.

Emotion plays a significant role in human daily activities, and it can be effectively recognized from EEG signals. However, individual variability limits the generalization of emotion classifiers across subjects. Domain adaptation (DA) is a reliable method to solve the issue. Due to the nonstationarity of EEG, the inferior-quality source domain data bring negative transfer in DA procedures. To solve this problem, an auto-augmentation joint distribution adaptation (AA-JDA) method and a burden-lightened and source-preferred JDA (BLSP-JDA) approach are proposed in this paper. The methods are based on a novel transfer idea, learning the specific knowledge of the target domain from the samples that are appropriate for transfer, which reduces the difficulty of transfer between two domains. On multiple emotion databases, our model shows state-of-the-art performance.

Addressing the Low Solubility of a Solid Electrolyte Interphase Stabilizer in an Electrolyte by Composite Battery Anode Design.

Metallic sodium (Na) has been regarded as one of the most attractive anodes for Na-based rechargeable batteries due to its high specific capacity, low working potential, and high natural abundance. However, several important issues hinder the practical application of the metallic Na anode, including its high reactivity with electrolytes, uncontrolled dendrite growth, and poor processability. Metal nitrates are common electrolyte additives used to stabilize the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) on Na anodes, though they typically suffer from poor solubility in electrolyte solvents. To address these issues, a Na/NaNO3 composite foil electrode was fabricated through a mechanical kneading approach, which featured uniform embedment of NaNO3 in a metallic Na matrix. During the battery cycling, NaNO3 was reduced by metallic Na sustainably, which addressed the issue of low solubility of an SEI stabilizer. Due to the supplemental effect of NaNO3, a stable SEI with NaNxOy and Na3N species was produced, which allowed fast ion transport. As a result, stable electrochemical performance for 600 h was achieved for Na/NaNO3||Na/NaNO3 symmetric cells at a current density of 0.5 mA cm-2 and an areal capacity of 0.5 mAh cm-2. A Na/NaNO3||Na3V2(PO4)2O2F cell with active metallic Na of ∼5 mAh cm-2 at the anode showed stable cycling for 180 cycles. In contrast, a Na||Na3V2(PO4)2O2F cell only displayed less than 80 cycles under the same conditions. Moreover, the processability of the Na/NaNO3 composite foil was also significantly improved due to the introduction of NaNO3, in contrast to the soft and sticky pure metallic Na. Mechanical kneading of soft alkali metals and their corresponding nitrates provides a new strategy for the utilization of anode stabilizers (besides direct addition into electrolytes) to improve their electrochemical performance.

[Research on the effect of background music on spatial cognitive working memory based on cortical brain network].

Background music has been increasingly affecting people's lives. The research on the influence of background music on working memory has become a hot topic in brain science. In this paper, an improved electroencephalography (EEG) experiment based on n-back paradigm was designed. Fifteen university students without musical training were randomly selected to participate in the experiment, and their behavioral data and the EEG data were collected synchronously in order to explore the influence of different types of background music on spatial positioning cognition working memory. The exact low-resolution brain tomography algorithm (eLORETA) was applied to localize the EEG sources and the cross-correlation method was used to construct the cortical brain function networks based on the EEG source signals. Then the characteristics of the networks under different conditions were analyzed and compared to study the effects of background music on people's working memory. The results showed that the difference of peak periods after stimulated by different types of background music were mainly distributed in the signals of occipital lobe and temporal lobe ( P < 0.05). The analysis results showed that the brain connectivity under the condition with background music were stronger than those under the condition without music. The connectivities in the right occipital and temporal lobes under the condition of rock music were significantly higher than those under the condition of classical music. The node degrees, the betweenness centrality and the clustering coefficients under the condition without music were lower than those under the condition with background music. The node degrees and clustering coefficients under the condition of classical music were lower than those under the condition of rock music. It indicates that music stimulation increases the brain activity and has an impact on the working memory, and the effect of rock music is more remarkable than that of classical music. The behavioral data showed that the response accuracy in the state of no music, classical music and rock music were 86.09% ± 0.090%, 80.96% ± 0.960% and 79.36% ± 0.360%, respectively. We conclude that background music has a negative impact on the working memory, for it takes up the cognitive resources and reduces the cognitive ability of spatial location.

Developing a New Spectral Index for Detecting Cadmium-Induced Stress in Rice on a Regional Scale.

In natural farmland ecosystems, cadmium (Cd) pollution in rice has attracted increasing attention because of its high toxicity, relative mobility, and high water solubility. This study aims to develop a spectral index for detecting Cd stress in rice on a regional scale. Three experimental sites are selected in Zhuzhou City, Hunan Province. The hyperspectral data, chlorophyll (Chl) content, leaf area index, average leaf angle, Cd concentration in soil, and Sentinel-2A images from 2017 and 2018 are collected. A new spectral index sensitive to Cd stress in rice is established based on the global sensitivity analysis of the radiative transfer model PROSPECT + SAIL (commonly called PROSAIL) model with the auxiliary of the field-measured data. The heavy metal Cd stress-sensitive spectral index (HCSI) is devised as an indicator of the degree of Cd stress in rice. Results indicate that (1) the HCSI developed based on Chl is a good indicator of rice damage caused by Cd stress, that is, low values of HCSI occur in rice subject to relatively high pollution; (2) compared with common spectral indices, such as red-edge position and red-edge Chl index, HCSI is more sensitive to Chl content with higher Pearson correlation coefficients with respect to Chl content, ranging from 0.85 to 0.95; (3) HCSI is successfully applied in Sentinel-2A images from the two different years of monitoring rice Cd stress on a regional scale. Cd stress levels in rice stabilized, and the largest area percentage of each pollution levels of Cd decreased in the following order: No pollution (i.e., 40%), low pollution (i.e., 35%), and high pollution (i.e., 25%). This study indicates that a combination of simulation data from the PROSAIL model and measured data appears to be a promising method for establishing a sensitivity spectral index to heavy metal stress, which can accurately detect regional Cd stress in crops.

Phosphorus release during alkaline treatment of waste activated sludge from wastewater treatment plants with Al salt enhanced phosphorus removal: Speciation and mechanism clarification.

Chemical phosphorus removal (CPR) is being increasingly adopted in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) to enhance P elimination to comply with stringent discharge limits. However, strategies to recover P enriched in the produced waste activated sludge (WAS) are not well developed. In this study, we investigated the release of P in WAS from three WWTPs employing Al salt enhanced CPR by alkaline treatment. We also monitored P mobilization by tracking the dynamics of P fractions and species, the dissolution of major metals, and sludge cell integrities as pH was altered. The level of aqueous total phosphorus (TPaq) in the sludge increased significantly to >200 mg/L (from <11 mg/L in the raw sludge) as the pH was increased to 12, with the majority being PO4-Paq especially at high pHs. The dominance of non-apatite inorganic phosphorus (NAIP) in the sludge-P, a good correlation observed between aqueous PO4-P and aqueous Al, and the reversibility of P mobilization all suggest that the dissolution of Al-bound P was largely responsible for the sludge-P release. Sludge cell integrity, on the other hand, was not closely correlated with TPaq concentrations. Although the level of TP released in this study is among the highest, a more efficient strategy still needs to be developed to further enhance sludge-P release when TP content in the sludge mixture (TPmx) is considered (TPmx was >800 mg/L in this work).