A buffering PVDF-HFP-based gel polymer electrolyte for stable and flexible lithium batteries.

Flexible lithium batteries (FLBs) are highly regarded as potential candidates for next-generation batteries due to their versatility in various applications. However, the main focus in the development of FLBs lies in addressing mechanical challenges such as crack propagation under conditions of flexibility and stretchability. Herein, this work presents a novel design of a gel polymer electrolyte (GPE112) film prepared by solution-casting methods. The GPE112 film shows high ion conductivity of 2.12 × 10-4 S cm-1, a window voltage stability of ∼4.6 V, and compatibility with various commercial cathodes such as LiFePO4, LiCoO2 and LiNi0.8Co0.1Mn0.1O2. On the other hand, the mechanically robust GPE112 film exhibits elongation at break of ∼41%, making it a potentially superior alternative to a commercial polypropylene (PP) separator. Furthermore, through finite element method (FEM) simulation, the utilization of a hot-pressed polymer electrolyte in conjunction with a cathode active layer demonstrates the potential to mitigate crack propagation and prevent delamination, leading to the development of flexible batteries with robust structures. Generally, the investigation demonstrates that the prepared GPE112 film provides potential application in safe FLBs no matter the electrochemical or mechanical properties.

Relationship of Fracture Morphological Characteristics with Posterolateral Corner Injuries in Hyperextension Varus Tibial Plateau Fractures.

BACKGROUND: Hyperextension varus tibial plateau fracture (HVTPF) is known to present with concomitant injuries to the posterolateral corner (PLC). However, the exact rate and characteristics of these injuries remain unclear. The primary objective of this study was to explore the rate and characteristics of PLC injuries in HVTPFs. The secondary objective was to investigate the relationship between the fracture morphological features and the associated PLC injuries. METHODS: Patients with HVTPFs were subdivided into 2 groups: group I (without fracture of the posterior column cortex) and group II (with fracture of the posterior column cortex). Fracture characteristics were summarized qualitatively based on fracture maps and quantitatively based on the counts of morphological parameters. Knee ligamentous and meniscal injuries were assessed using magnetic resonance imaging. The association between fracture characteristics and PLC injuries was analyzed. RESULTS: We included a total of 50 patients with HVTPFs in our study: 28 in group I and 22 in group II. The rate of PLC injuries was 28.6% in group I and 27.3% in group II. In group I, patients with PLC injuries showed fracture lines closer to the anterior rim of the medial plateau and had smaller fracture areas. Furthermore, 6 of the 8 patients with PLC injuries in group I also had posterior cruciate ligament injuries. CONCLUSIONS: The rate of PLC injuries is relatively high in HVTPFs. In HVTPFs without fracture of the posterior column cortex, a small fracture area strongly suggests an accompanying PLC injury, and PLC injury is frequently combined with posterior cruciate ligament injury. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Prognostic Level III. See Instructions for Authors for a complete description of levels of evidence.

TMEM100 acts as a TAK1 receptor that prevents pathological cardiac hypertrophy progression.

Pathological cardiac hypertrophy is the primary cause of heart failure, yet its underlying mechanisms remain incompletely understood. Transmembrane protein 100 (TMEM100) plays a role in various disorders, such as nervous system disease, pain and tumorigenesis, but its function in pathological cardiac hypertrophy is still unknown. In this study, we observed that TMEM100 is upregulated in cardiac hypertrophy. Functional investigations have shown that adeno-associated virus 9 (AAV9) mediated-TMEM100 overexpression mice attenuates transverse aortic constriction (TAC)-induced cardiac hypertrophy, including cardiomyocyte enlargement, cardiac fibrosis, and impaired heart structure and function. We subsequently demonstrated that adenoviral TMEM100 (AdTMEM100) mitigates phenylephrine (PE)-induced cardiomyocyte hypertrophy and downregulates the expression of cardiac hypertrophic markers in vitro, whereas TMEM100 knockdown exacerbates cardiomyocyte hypertrophy. The RNA sequences of the AdTMEM100 group and control group revealed that TMEM100 was involved in oxidative stress and the MAPK signaling pathway after PE stimulation. Mechanistically, we revealed that the transmembrane domain of TMEM100 (amino acids 53-75 and 85-107) directly interacts with the C-terminal region of TAK1 (amino acids 1-300) and inhibits the phosphorylation of TAK1 and its downstream molecules JNK and p38. TAK1-binding-defective TMEM100 failed to inhibit the activation of the TAK1-JNK/p38 pathway. Finally, the application of a TAK1 inhibitor (iTAK1) revealed that TAK1 is necessary for TMEM100-mediated cardiac hypertrophy. In summary, TMEM100 protects against pathological cardiac hypertrophy through the TAK1-JNK/p38 pathway and may serve as a promising target for the treatment of cardiac hypertrophy.

Wearable bio-adhesive metal detector array (BioMDA) for spinal implants.

Dynamic tracking of spinal instrumentation could facilitate real-time evaluation of hardware integrity and in so doing alert patients/clinicians of potential failure(s). Critically, no method yet exists to continually monitor the integrity of spinal hardware and by proxy the process of spinal arthrodesis; as such hardware failures are often not appreciated until clinical symptoms manifest. Accordingly, herein, we report on the development and engineering of a bio-adhesive metal detector array (BioMDA), a potential wearable solution for real-time, non-invasive positional analyses of osseous implants within the spine. The electromagnetic coupling mechanism and intimate interfacial adhesion enable the precise sensing of the metallic implants position without the use of radiation. The customized decoupling models developed facilitate the precise determination of the horizontal and vertical positions of the implants with incredible levels of accuracy (e.g., <0.5 mm). These data support the potential use of BioMDA in real-time/dynamic postoperative monitoring of spinal implants.

A model integrating attention mechanism and generative adversarial network for image style transfer.

Image style transfer is an important way to combine different styles and contents to generate new images, which plays an important role in computer vision tasks such as image reconstruction and image texture synthesis. In style transfer tasks, there are often long-distance dependencies between pixels of different styles and contents, and existing neural network-based work cannot handle this problem well. This paper constructs a generation model for style transfer based on the cycle-consistent network and the attention mechanism. The forward and backward learning process of the cycle-consistent mechanism could make the network complete the mismatch conversion between the input and output of the image. The attention mechanism enhances the model's ability to perceive the long-distance dependencies between pixels in process of learning feature representation from the target content and the target styles, and at the same time suppresses the style feature information of the non-target area. Finally, a large number of experiments were carried out in the monet2photo dataset, and the results show that the misjudgment rate of Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) perceptual studies achieves 45%, which verified that the cycle-consistent network model with attention mechanism has certain advantages in image style transfer.

RELA-mediated upregulation of LINC03047 promotes ferroptosis in silica-induced pulmonary fibrosis via SLC39A14.

Long non-coding RNAs play a key role in silicosis, a fatal fibrotic lung disease, and there is an urgent need to develop new treatment targets. Long intergenic non-protein-coding RNA 3047 (LINC03047) is associated with cancer, but its role and mechanism in the progression of silicosis require further elucidation. This study investigated the function of LINC03047 in the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) during silicosis progression. LINC03047 expression was upregulated in SiO2-treated BEAS-2B and A549 cells, promoting SiO2-induced ferroptosis and subsequent EMT. Moreover, knockdown of LINC03047 significantly decreased the expression of solute carrier family 39 member 14 (SLC39A14), a ferrous iron transporter, and inhibition of SLC39A14 alleviated the ferroptosis and EMT caused by LINC03047 overexpression. We further investigated that NF-κB p65 (RELA) was critical for LINC03047 transcription in SiO2-treated BEAS-2B and A549 cells. In vivo experiments showed that SLC39A14 deficiency improved SiO2-induced lipid peroxidation and EMT. Collectively, our study reveals the function of the RELA/LINC03047/SLC39A14 axis in SiO2-induced ferroptosis and EMT, thereby contributing to the identification of novel drug targets for silicosis therapy.

Predicting lncRNA-Disease Associations Based on a Dual-Path Feature Extraction Network with Multiple Sources of Information Integration.

Identifying the associations between long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) and disease is critical for disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment. However, conducting wet experiments to discover these associations is time-consuming and costly. Therefore, computational modeling for predicting lncRNA-disease associations (LDAs) has become an important alternative. To enhance the accuracy of LDAs prediction and alleviate the issue of node feature oversmoothing when exploring the potential features of nodes using graph neural networks, we introduce DPFELDA, a dual-path feature extraction network that leverages the integration of information from multiple sources to predict LDA. Initially, we establish a dual-view structure of lncRNAs and disease and a heterogeneous network of lncRNA-disease-microRNA (miRNA) interactions. Subsequently, features are extracted using a dual-path feature extraction network. In particular, we employ a combination of a graph convolutional network, a convolutional block attention module, and a node aggregation layer to perform multilayer topology feature extraction for the dual-view structure of lncRNAs and diseases. Additionally, we utilize a Transformer model to construct the node topology feature residual network for obtaining node-specific features in heterogeneous networks. Finally, XGBoost is employed for LDA prediction. The experimental results demonstrate that DPFELDA outperforms the benchmark model on various benchmark data sets. In the course of model exploration, it becomes evident that DPFELDA successfully alleviates the issue of node feature oversmoothing induced by graph-based learning. Ablation experiments confirm the effectiveness of the innovative module, and a case study substantiates the accuracy of DPFELDA model in predicting novel LDAs for characteristic diseases.

Precisely Designed Morphology and Surface Chemical Structure of Fe-N-C Electrocatalysts for Enhanced Oxygen Reaction Reduction Activity.

Fe-N-C materials have been regarded as one of the potential candidates to replace traditional noble-metal-based electrocatalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). It is believed that the structure of carbon support in Fe-N-C materials plays an essential role in highly efficient ORR. However, precisely designing the morphology and surface chemical structure of carbon support remains a challenge. Herein, we present a novel synthetic strategy for the preparation of porous carbon spheres (PCSs) with high specific surface area, well-defined pore structure, tunable morphology and controllable heteroatom doping. The synthesis involves Schiff-based polymerization utilizing octaaminophenyl polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane (POSS-NH2) and heteroatom-containing aldehydes, followed by pyrolysis and HF etching. The well-defined pore structure of PCS can provide the confinement field for ferroin and transform into Fe-N-C sites after carbonization. The tunable morphology of PCS can be easily achieved by changing the solvents. The surface chemical structure of PCS can be tailored by utilizing different heteroatom-containing aldehydes. After optimizing the structure of PCS, Fe-N-C loading on N,S-codoped porous carbon sphere (NSPCS-Fe) displays outstanding ORR activity in alkaline solution. This work paves a new path for fabrication of Fe-N-C materials with the desired morphology and well-designed surface chemical structure, demonstrating significant potential for energy-related applications.

Transparent Superhydrophobic and Self-Cleaning Coating.

Surface roughness and low surface energy are key elements for the artificial preparation of biomimetic superhydrophobic materials. However, the presence of micro-/nanostructures and the corresponding increase in roughness can increase light scattering, thereby reducing the surface transparency. Therefore, designing and constructing superhydrophobic surfaces that combine superhydrophobicity with high transparency has been a continuous research focus for researchers and engineers. In this study, a transparent superhydrophobic coating was constructed on glass substrates using hydrophobic fumed silica (HF-SiO2) and waterborne polyurethane (WPU) as raw materials, combined with a simple spray-coating technique, resulting in a water contact angle (WCA) of 158.7 ± 1.5° and a sliding angle (SA) of 6.2 ± 1.8°. Characterization tests including SEM, EDS, LSCM, FTIR, and XPS revealed the presence of micron-scale protrusions and a nano-scale porous network composite structure on the surface. The presence of HF-SiO2 not only provided a certain roughness but also effectively reduced surface energy. More importantly, the coating exhibited excellent water-repellent properties, extremely low interfacial adhesion, self-cleaning ability, and high transparency, with the light transmittance of the coated glass substrate reaching 96.1% of that of the bare glass substrate. The series of functional characteristics demonstrated by the transparent superhydrophobic HF-SiO2@WPU coating designed and constructed in this study will play an important role in various applications such as underwater observation windows, building glass facades, automotive glass, and goggles.

Biomechanical evaluation of different medial column fixation patterns for valgus pilon fractures.

BACKGROUND: The purpose of this study was to perform a biomechanical analysis to compare different medial column fixation patterns for valgus pilon fractures in a case-based model. METHODS: Based on the fracture mapping, 48 valgus pilon fracture models were produced and assigned into four groups with different medial column fixation patterns: no fixation (NF), K-wires (KW), intramedullary screws (IS), and locking compression plate (LCP). Each group contained wedge-in and wedge-out subgroups. After fixing each specimen on the machine, gradually increased axial compressive loads were applied with a load speed of one millimeter per minute. The maximum peak force was set at 1500 N. Load-displacement curves were generated and the axial stiffness was calculated. Five different loads of 200 N, 400 N, 600 N, 800 N, 1000 N were selected for analysis. The specimen failure was defined as resultant loading displacement over 3 mm. RESULTS: For the wedge-out models, Group-IS showed less displacement (p < 0.001), higher axial stiffness (p < 0.01), and higher load to failure (p < 0.001) than Group-NF. Group-KW showed comparable displacement under loads of 200 N, 400 N and 600 N with both Group-IS and Group-LCP. For the wedge-in models, no statistical differences in displacement, axial stiffness, or load to failure were observed among the four groups. Overall, wedge-out models exhibited less axial stiffness than wedge-in models (all p < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: Functional reduction with stable fixation of the medial column is essential for the biomechanical stability of valgus pilon fractures and medial column fixation provides the enough biomechanical stability for this kind of fracture in the combination of anterolateral fixation. In detail, the K-wires can provide a provisional stability at an early stage. Intramedullary screws are strong enough to provide the medial column stability as a definitive fixation. In future, this technique can be recommended for medial column fixation as a complement for holistic stability in high-energy valgus pilon fractures.