Rapid resurgence of syphilis in Japan after the COVID-19 pandemic: A descriptive study.

Some countries have reported a post-pandemic resurgence in syphilis prevalence, but trend data in the World Health Organization Western Pacific Region (WHO-WPRO), including Japan, are severely lacking. Thus, the present study compares the number of syphilis cases before and after the COVID-19 pandemic in some WHO-WPRO countries. In addition, temporal trends in the number of syphilis cases in Japan pre- and post-pandemic are described. Annual numbers of syphilis cases during the study periods from China, New Zealand, Australia and Japan were compared. Annual trends of the numbers of syphilis cases during the same study periods were examined in Japan. In 2020, the number of syphilis-positive cases decreased in all four countries. In 2021, though, China, Australia and Japan all showed an increase in the numbers of syphilis cases. However, the rate of increase in China (+2.8%) and Australia (+4.8%) was low compared to Japan (+36.0%). The number of syphilis cases in New Zealand in 2021 was 12.6% lower than in 2020. In 2022, the number of cases of syphilis in China was 7.4% lower than in 2021. The increase of syphilis-positive cases was approximately 6.3-fold higher in Japan compared to Australia (+66.2% vs. +10.5%) in 2022. In conclusion, post-pandemic resurgence of syphilis occurred in Australia and Japan, but not in China and New Zealand. The reason for the substantial increase in syphilis-positive cases in Japan remains unclear. Post-pandemic, prevention and control of sexually transmitted infections still require attention.

Organohydrogel-based transparent terahertz absorber via ionic conduction loss.

The fast-growing terahertz technologies require high-performance terahertz absorber for suppressing electromagnetic interference. Since the dissipation mechanism in terahertz band usually focuses on electronic conduction loss, almost all terahertz absorbers are constructed with electronically conducting materials being opaque, which limits their applications in scenarios requiring high visible transmittance. Here, we demonstrate a transparent terahertz absorber based on permittivity-gradient elastomer-encapsulated-organohydrogel. Our organohydrogel-based terahertz absorber exhibits a high absorbing property (average reflection loss of 49.03 dB) in 0.5-4.5 THz band with a thin thickness of 700 µm and a high average visible transmittance of 85.51%. The terahertz absorbing mechanism mainly derives from the ionic conduction loss of the polar liquid in organohydrogel. Besides, the hydrophobic and adhesive elastomer coating endows this terahertz absorber high absorbing stability and interfacial adhesivity. This work paves a viable way to designing transparent terahertz absorbers.

Asymmetric Cu-N-La Species Enabling Atomic-Level Donor-Acceptor Structure and Favored Reaction Thermodynamics for Selective CO2 Photoreduction to CH4.

Photocatalytic CO2 reduction into ideal hydrocarbon fuels, such as CH4 , is a sluggish kinetic process involving adsorption of multiple intermediates and multi-electron steps. Achieving high CH4 activity and selectivity therefore remains a great challenge, which largely depends on the efficiency of photogenerated charge separation and transfer as well as the intermediate energy levels in CO2 reduction. Herein, we construct La and Cu dual-atom anchored carbon nitride (LaCu/CN), with La-N4 and Cu-N3 coordination bonds connected by Cu-N-La bridges. The asymmetric Cu-N-La species enables the establishment of an atomic-level donor-acceptor structure, which allows the migration of electrons from La atoms to the reactive Cu atom sites. Simultaneously, intermediates during CO2 reduction on LaCu/CN demonstrate thermodynamically more favorable process for CH4 formation based on theoretical calculations. Eventually, LaCu/CN exhibits a high selectivity (91.6 %) for CH4 formation with a yield of 125.8 µmol g-1 , over ten times of that for pristine CN. This work presents a strategy for designing multi-functional dual-atom based photocatalysts.

Efficient ultrafast laser writing with appropriate polarization.

Appropriate polarization utilization makes the electric field vector direction and the statistically oriented localized states suitable for enhancing light-matter interactions so as to improve the efficiency of ultrafast laser writing, which will remarkably reduce the pulse energy and increase the processing speed for high density optical data storage, as well as manufacturing three-dimensional integrated optics and geometric phase optical elements.

P-Mediated Cu-N4 Sites in Carbon Nitride Realizing CO2 Photoreduction to C2 H4 with Selectivity Modulation.

Photocatalytic CO2 reduction to high value-added C2 products (e.g., C2 H4 ) is of considerable interest but challenging. The C2 H4 product selectivity strongly hinges on the intermediate energy levels in the CO2 reduction pathway. Herein, Cu-N4 sites anchored phosphorus-modulated carbon nitride (CuACs/PCN) is designed as a photocatalyst to tailor the intermediate energy levels in the the C2 H4 formation reaction pathway for realizing its high production with tunable selectivity. Theoretical calculations combined with experimental data demonstrate that the formation of the C-C coupling intermediates can be realized on Cu-N4 sites and the surrounding doped P facilitates the production of C2 H4 . Thus, CuACs/PCN exhibits a high C2 H4 selectivity of 53.2% with a yielding rate of 30.51 µmol g-1 . The findings reveal the significant role of the coordination environment and surrounding microenvironment of Cu single atoms in C2 H4 formation and offer an effective approach for highly selective CO2 photoreduction to produce C2 H4 .

Free-space remote detection of a spinning object using the combined vortex beam.

The rotational Doppler effect (RDE) associated with orbital angular momentum (OAM) has been used for remote sensing of a spinning object. However, one of the challenges of long-range detection stems from the low echo signal power. In this paper, we propose a new detection scheme that uses the combined vortex beam (CVB) generated by coherent beam combining (CBC) technology as the probe beam to enhance the echo signal power. Furthermore, we establish a rotational speed remote sensing model based on RDE, the emitted power and emission diameter of the probe beam are investigated in detail. The results show that, compared with the superposition vortex beam (SVB) generated by a single laser beam, the CVB detection scheme can significantly enhance the echo signal intensity and detection distance. The measuring range and accuracy of rotational speed are also studied in detail. And finally, we present the first experimental demonstration of the RDE arising directly from the interaction of the CVB with a rotating rough surface. The scheme proposed in our paper offers a good reference for practical application of the remote detection based on RDE.

A Novel Fabrication of Single Electron Transistor from Patterned Gold Nanoparticle Array Template-Prepared by Polystyrene Nanospheres.

In this paper, polystyrene microspheres were firstly prepared by seeded emulsion polymerization, and the uniform monolayer of polystyrene microspheres was prepared on the substrate by the dipping method. Then, polystyrene monolayer film was used as a mask and a low dimensional array structure of gold was prepared by bottom-up self-assembly process. After that, the method of solution etching and annealing was used, and the gold nanoparticle array was post-processed. As a result, gold nanoparticles were recrystallized, with an average diameter of about 50 nm. Subsequently, the semiconductor process was adopted, with focused ion beams induced deposition and electron beam evaporation, and single electron transistors were fabricated, based on self-assembled gold nanoparticles. Finally, the devices were fixed in a liquid helium cryostat and Coulomb blockade was observed at 320 mK. It is a novel fabrication of a single electron transistor based on gold nanoparticle array template and prepared with polystyrene nanospheres.

Utility of a shortened Hasegawa Dementia Scale Revised questionnaire to rapidly screen and diagnose Alzheimer's disease.

AIMS: The aim of this study was to analyze the sensitivity and specificity of a shortened Hasegawa Dementia Scale Revised (shortened HDS-R) questionnaire and explore its utility for the rapid screening and diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). METHODS: We included 113 patients over the age of 60 years who visited our hospital from June 2018 to January 2021 including 70 subjects with AD and 43 healthy subjects. AD was diagnosed in accordance with the diagnostic criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, and the standard HDS-R questionnaire was used as a neuropsychological examination. The shortened HDS-R questionnaire was composed of the first seven subdomains (1 to 7) of the HDS-R questionnaire and excluded subdomains 8 and 9. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was performed to calculate the degree of atrophy of the whole brain, hippocampus, and parahippocampal gyrus. RESULTS: The cumulative contribution ratio of subdomains 1 to 7 of the HDS-R questionnaire was as high as 94%, indicating that the construct validity of the shortened HDS-R was very good. The correlation coefficient of the total scores of the shortened HDS-R and the HDS-R was 0.96, indicating that the criterion-related validity was also very good. Furthermore, the shortened HDS-R was significantly negatively correlated with the degree of atrophy in the whole brain, hippocampus, and parahippocampal gyrus, indicating that its concurrent validity was very good in relation to imaging parameters. Cronbach's α coefficient of the shortened HDS-R was 0.76, and the correlation coefficient of the item-total correlation analysis was between 0.68 and 0.76, indicating that this questionnaire has high internal consistency and reliability. The total shortened HDS-R score of the normal group (17.0 ± 1.9) was significantly higher than that of the AD group (8.6 ± 3.8), demonstrating that the total shortened HDS-R score can be used to identify healthy individuals and patients with AD. When the cutoff score was 14 of 15, the sensitivity was 92.9% and the specificity was 88.4%. The diagnostic ability of the shortened HDS-R was 91.2%, which indicates that it is similar to the full HDS-R questionnaire as an AD screening tool. CONCLUSION: As a neuropsychological examination questionnaire for the screening and diagnosis of AD, the shortened HDS-R had very high validity and reliability. Its sensitivity, specificity, and diagnostic ability were similar to those of the gold standard HDS-R; therefore, it can be considered a concise and useful questionnaire for AD screening and diagnosis in the older population.

Charge-Gradient Hydrogels Enable Direct Zero Liquid Discharge for Hypersaline Wastewater Management.

Zero liquid discharge (ZLD), which maximizes water recovery and eliminates environmental impact, is an urgent wastewater management strategy for alleviating freshwater shortage. However, because of the high concentration of salts and broad-spectrum foulants in wastewater, a huge challenge for ZLD is lack of a robust membrane-based desalination technology that enables direct wastewater recovery without costly pretreatment processes. Here, a paradigm-shift membrane distillation (MD) strategy is presented, wherein the traditional hydrophobic porous membrane is replaced with a hydrophilic nonporous charge-gradient hydrogel (CGH) membrane that possesses hypersaline tolerance, fouling/scaling-free properties, and negligible vapor transfer resistance inside the membrane, simultaneously. Therefore, the CGH-based MD with high water flux enables direct desalination of hypersaline wastewater (130 g L-1 ) containing broad-spectrum foulants (500 mg L-1 ) during continuous long-term operation (200 h), and this technology paves a promising way to direct ZLD for wastewater management.

Nickel-Cobalt Hydroxides with Tunable Thin-Layer Nanosheets for High-Performance Supercapacitor Electrode.

Layered double hydroxides as typical supercapacitor electrode materials can exhibit superior energy storage performance if their structures are well regulated. In this work, a simple one-step hydrothermal method is used to prepare diverse nickel-cobalt layered double hydroxides (NiCo-LDHs), in which the different contents of urea are used to regulate the different nanostructures of NiCo-LDHs. The results show that the decrease in urea content can effectively improve the dispersibility, adjust the thickness and optimize the internal pore structures of NiCo-LDHs, thereby enhancing their capacitance performance. When the content of urea is reduced from 0.03 to 0.0075 g under a fixed precursor materials mass ratio of nickel (0.06 g) to cobalt (0.02 g) of 3:1, the prepared sample NiCo-LDH-1 exhibits the thickness of 1.62 nm, and the clear thin-layer nanosheet structures and a large number of surface pores are formed, which is beneficial to the transmission of ions into the electrode material. After being prepared as a supercapacitor electrode, the NiCo-LDH-1 displays an ultra-high specific capacitance of 3982.5 F g-1 under the current density of 1 A g-1 and high capacitance retention above 93.6% after 1000 cycles of charging and discharging at a high current density of 10 A g-1. The excellent electrochemical performance of NiCo-LDH-1 is proved by assembling two-electrode asymmetric supercapacitor with carbon spheres, displaying the specific capacitance of 95 F g-1 at 1 A g-1 with the capacitance retention of 78% over 1000 cycles. The current work offers a facile way to control the nanostructure of NiCo-LDHs, confirms the important affection of urea on enhancing capacitive performance for supercapacitor electrode and provides the high possibility for the development of high-performance supercapacitors.

Orbital angular momentum mode detection of the combined vortex beam generated by coherent combining technology.

Coherent beam combining (CBC) technology has distinct advantages in generating high power vortex beam. In this paper, a circularly arranged coherent beam array (CBA) with discrete vortex phases is constructed to generate vortex beams. We demonstrated that the combined vortex beam (CVB) generated by the CBA is a multiplexing vortices optical field, which sidelobe is the coaxial interference pattern of these spiral harmonic components. Using the designed Dammam vortex grating (DVG), the orbital angular momentum (OAM) spectrum of the CVB is detected. Moreover, taking the target OAM mode purity of the CVB as the evaluation function of active phase control system, we realized the closed-loop phase control of the CBA and obtained the phase-locked output of the CVB.

Thermosensitive crystallization-boosted liquid thermocells for low-grade heat harvesting.

Low-grade heat (below 373 kelvin) is abundant and ubiquitous but is mostly wasted because present recovery technologies are not cost-effective. The liquid-state thermocell (LTC), an inexpensive and scalable thermoelectric device, may be commercially viable for harvesting low-grade heat energy if its Carnot-relative efficiency (ηr) reaches ~5%, which is a challenging metric to achieve experimentally. We used a thermosensitive crystallization and dissolution process to induce a persistent concentration gradient of redox ions, a highly enhanced Seebeck coefficient (~3.73 millivolts per kelvin), and suppressed thermal conductivity in LTCs. As a result, we achieved a high ηr of 11.1% for LTCs near room temperature. Our device demonstration offers promise for cost-effective low-grade heat harvesting.

All-Day Thermogalvanic Cells for Environmental Thermal Energy Harvesting.

Direct conversion of the tremendous and ubiquitous low-grade thermal energy into electricity by thermogalvanic cells is a promising strategy for energy harvesting. The environment is one of the richest and renewable low-grade thermal source. However, critical challenges remain for all-day electricity generation from environmental thermal energy due to the low frequency and small amplitude of temperature fluctuations in the environment. In this work, we report a tandem device consisting of a polypyrrole (PPy) broadband absorber/radiator, thermogalvanic cell, and thermal storage material (Cu foam/PEG1000) that integrates multiple functions of heating, cooling, and recycling of thermal energy. The thermogalvanic cell enables continuous utilization of environmental thermal energy at both daytime and nighttime, yielding maximum outputs as high as 0.6 W m-2 and 53 mW m-2, respectively. As demonstrated outdoors by a large-scale prototype module, this design offers a feasible and promising approach to all-day electricity generation from environmental thermal energy.

One-Step Synthesis of Mesoporous Chlorine-Doped Carbonated Cobalt Hydroxide Nanowires for High-Performance Supercapacitors Electrode.

Self-stabilized and well-defined chlorine-doped carbonated cobalt hydroxide nanowires have been obtained as a binder-free electrode via a facile method. The Co material has a unique well-defined needle-like structure, composed of highly aligned monomer with the diameter of about 3-10 nm and numerous surface pores, which makes it have potential for high-performance electrochemical capacitors. The test results show the directly acquired Co-ClNWs(NiE) electrode in three-electrode system can reach the specific capacity of more than 2150 F/g under the current density of 1 A/g, accompanied by a good cycling stability of 94.3% capacitance retention after 500 cycles, and exhibits a high energy density of 41.8 W h/kg at the power density of 1280.7 W/kg when using it as the positive electrode of an asymmetric supercapacitor. After making a comparison of the current material with the conventional electrodes, we can find that a better electrochemical performance can be achieved with a more convenient one-step method. Therefore, we, in this work, may provide a new type of manufacturing concept for future electrode treatment.

Design of broadband graphene-metamaterial absorbers for permittivity sensing at mid-infrared regions.

In this paper, a tunable broadband metamaterial absorber (MA) based on graphene is investigated theoretically and numerically at mid-infrared regions. Compared with the previously reported multiband graphene-based MAs, a broad bandwidth of 11.7 THz with the absorption over 90% is obtained in the proposed MA, which is composed of a Jerusalem cross (JC) metal encrusting into the slot graphene layer in the top layer. The results show that the origin of broadband absorption is caused by coupling effect between metal and graphene, and this effect is explained by the two-mode waveguide coupling theory. The tunability of MA is achieved via changing the external gate voltage to modify the Fermi energy of graphene. Further results show that the proposed MA can be used as the permittivity sensor with a high absorption. This work indicates that the proposed MA has the potential applications with respect to sensors and infrared absorbers.

Electrokinetic Supercapacitor for Simultaneous Harvesting and Storage of Mechanical Energy.

Energy harvesting and storage are two distinct processes that are generally achieved using two separated parts based on different physical and chemical principles. Here we report a self-charging electrokinetic supercapacitor that directly couples the energy harvesting and storage processes into one device. The device consists of two identical carbon nanotube/titanium electrodes, separated by a piece of anodic aluminum oxide nanochannels membrane. Pressure-driven electrolyte flow through the nanochannels generates streaming potential, which can be used to charge the capacitive electrodes, accomplishing simultaneous energy generation and storage. The device stores electric charge density of 0.4 mC cm-2 after fully charging under pressure of 2.5 bar. This work may offer a train of thought for the development of a new type of energy unit for self-powered systems.

Generating a Bessel-Gaussian beam for the application in optical engineering.

Bessel beam is the important member of the family of non-diffracting beams and has many novel properties which can be used in many areas. However, the source of Bessel beam generated by the existing methods can be used only in a short distance due to its low power. In this paper, based on the coherent combining technology, we have proposed a method which can be used to generate a high-power Bessel beam. Even more, we give an innovative idea to form vortex phase by using discontinuous piston phase. To confirm the validity of this method, the intensity evolution of the combined beam and the Bessel-Gaussian beam at different propagation distance have been studied and compared. Meanwhile, the experimental realization has been discussed from the existing experimental result related to the coherent combining technology.

Ultra-directional forward scattering by individual core-shell nanoparticles.

We study the angular scattering properties of individual core-shell nanoparticles that support simultaneously both electric and optically-induced magnetic resonances of different orders. In contrast to the approach to suppress the backward scattering and enhance the forward scattering relying on overlapping electric and magnetic dipoles, we reveal that the directionality of the forward scattering can be further improved through the interferences of higher order electric and magnetic modes. Since the major contributing electric and magnetic responses can be tuned to close magnitudes, ultra-directional forward scattering can be achieved by single nanoparticles without compromising the feature of backward scattering suppression, which may offer new opportunities for nanoantennas, photovoltaic devices, bio-sensing and many other interdisciplinary researches.

Correcting the aero-optical aberration of the supersonic mixing layer with adaptive optics: concept validation.

We describe an adaptive optics (AO) system for correcting the aero-optical aberration of the supersonic mixing layer and test its performance with numerical simulations. The AO system is based on the measurement of distributed Strehl ratios and the stochastic parallel gradient descent (SPGD) algorithm. The aero-optical aberration is computed by the direct numerical simulation of a two-dimensional supersonic mixing layer. When the SPGD algorithm is applied directly, the AO cannot give effective corrections. This paper suggests two strategies to improve the performance of the SPGD algorithm for use in aero-optics. The first one is using an iteration process keeping finite memory, and the second is based on the frozen hypothesis. With these modifications, the performance of AO is improved and the aero-optical aberration can be corrected to some noticeable extent. The possibility of experimental implementation is also discussed.