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The electrolyte solvation structure and the solid-electrolyte interphase (SEI) formation are critical to dictate the morphology of lithium deposition in organic electrolytes. However, the link between the electrolyte solvation structure and SEI composition and its implications on lithium morphology evolution are poorly understood. Herein, we use a single-salt and single-solvent model electrolyte system to systematically study the correlation between the electrolyte solvation structure, SEI formation process and lithium deposition morphology. The mechanism of lithium deposition is thoroughly investigated using cryo-electron microscopy characterizations and computational simulations. It is observed that, in the high concentration electrolytes, concentrated Li + and anion-dominated solvation structure initiate the uniform Li nucleation kinetically and favor the decomposition of anions rather than solvents, resulting in inorganic-rich amorphous SEI with high interface energy, which thermodynamically facilitates the formation of granular Li. On the contrary, solvent-dominated solvation structure in the low concentration electrolytes tends to exacerbate the solvolysis process, forming organic-rich mosaic SEI with low interface energy, which leads to aggregated whisker-like nucleation and growth. These results are helpful to tackle the long-standing question on the origin of lithium dendrite formation and guide the rational design of high-performance electrolytes for advanced lithium metal batteries. The origin of dendrite growth and lithium deposition behavior remains not well understood. Here, authors use a single-salt and single-solvent model electrolyte system to study the correlations between the electrolyte solvation structure, interphase structure and lithium deposition morphology.

This publication concerns large-scale urban area development in general, and in particular with gaining an understanding of the role played by global-local interaction in shaping the area development strategies in one particularly explosive urban project, the development of Shanghai's Pudong New Area. The Pudong development provides an extreme example of a situation in which interaction between global and local forces took place in a location whose boundaries had been closed to the outside world for almost forty years and in a period when doors and windows were beginning to open. The research led to a concrete interpretation of the tensions developing at district level and provided an example capable of representing the complexity and dynamics of current area developments. The practical question addressed by the research was: What were the main factors responsible for the speed achieved by the Pudong development? The associated theoretical question was To what extent did the development of the Pudong New Area reflect the characteristics of a developmental state?.

Urban and rural relations are important for the sustainable development of a nation or region. Urban and rural integration (URI), as a conceptual framework and strategic tool for managing urban–rural relations, is supposed to play a role in linking urban and rural socio-economic systems to promote the two-way flow of resources, facilitate spatial restructuring and functional transformation, enhance resource allocation efficiency, and shorten the gap between urban and rural areas. This article takes agriculture technological innovation in China as an example, and discuss whether and how URI can promote agricultural technological innovation (ATI). Based on a dataset of 288 prefecture-level cities spanning the years from 1999 to 2018, this article analyzes the mechanism and effect of URI on the development of ATI by using the negative binomial regression model and other models based on measuring the level of URI in the municipal area. The main conclusions are as follows. (1) URI positively promotes the development of ATI and exhibits significant heterogeneity across various dimensions, regions, and agricultural production areas. (2) The mechanism analysis shows that governance systems and mature markets positively moderate the impact of URI on promoting ATI, which also exhibits heterogeneous characteristics across various regions. (3) The impact of URI on the development of ATI exhibits a double threshold effect, and its marginal impact on the development of ATI increases with the deepening of URI. Moreover, the threshold effect of URI demonstrates significant heterogeneity. In central and urban areas, after surpassing the threshold value, the influence of URI on agricultural technological innovation becomes greater. Therefore, it is crucial to continuously deepen the development of URI, smooth the channels of factor flow, enhance resource sharing, break down the urban and rural barriers, and create a new engine for ATI development.

Timely and accurate recognition of tomato diseases is crucial for improving tomato yield. While large deep learning models can achieve high-precision disease recognition, these models often have a large number of parameters, making them difficult to deploy on edge devices. To address this issue, this study proposes an ensemble self-distillation method and applies it to the lightweight model ShuffleNetV2. Specifically, based on the architecture of ShuffleNetV2, multiple shallow models at different depths are constructed to establish a distillation framework. Based on the fused feature map that integrates the intermediate feature maps of ShuffleNetV2 and shallow models, a depthwise separable convolution layer is introduced to further extract more effective feature information. This method ensures that the intermediate features from each model are fully preserved to the ensemble model, thereby improving the overall performance of the ensemble model. The ensemble model, acting as the teacher, dynamically transfers knowledge to ShuffleNetV2 and the shallow models during training, significantly enhancing the performance of ShuffleNetV2 without changing the original structure. Experimental results show that the optimized ShuffleNetV2 achieves an accuracy of 95.08%, precision of 94.58%, recall of 94.55%, and an F1 score of 94.54% on the test set, surpassing large models such as VGG16 and ResNet18. Among lightweight models, it has the smallest parameter count and the highest recognition accuracy. The results demonstrate that the optimized ShuffleNetV2 is more suitable for deployment on edge devices for real-time tomato disease detection. Additionally, multiple shallow models achieve varying degrees of compression for ShuffleNetV2, providing flexibility for model deployment.

Lateral instability is a key problem that restricts vehicle motion safety of distributed electric vehicles (DEV). This paper designs a new lateral control system composed of subsystems of high, middle and low levels and brings forth an improved sliding mode controller (SMC) method. The similar reference longitudinal velocity generation system is designed via neural network observer and fuzzy logic controller to ensure the smooth and safe driving of the vehicle on low adhesion roads. Relevant working simulation also is carried out to verify the effectiveness of the control method above. The results show that the new control system based on the improved SMC method brings about good yaw rate and speed tracking performance of vehicles and strong robustness of the control system, and can still ensure excellent lateral driving stability on the low adhesion roads, or when making a turn or the friction coefficient is changed.

Secondary renal involvement in chronic exposure to metallic mercury is well known. Mercury also causes central nervous system damage and demyelinating polyneuropathy. Here, we describe a case of a patient with daily exposure to mercury in skin lightening cream and hair dyes who was diagnosed with Guillain–Barre syndrome and then developed nephrotic syndrome because of membranous neuropathy. By reviewing the literature describing mercury-associated diseases, we found that mercury components have an immunomodulatory activity, which is also involved in both peripheral neuropathy and glomerulonephritis.

Background Efficacy of conventional sequential chemotherapy paradigm for advanced gastric cancer (AGC) patients has largely plateaued. Dynamic molecular changes during and after sequential chemotherapy have not been fully delineated. We aimed to profile the molecular evolutionary process of AGC patients during sequential chemotherapy by next generation sequencing (NGS) of plasma circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA). Methods A total of 30 chemo-naïve patients who were diagnosed with unresectable advanced or metastatic stomach adenocarcinoma were enrolled. All patients received sequential chemotherapy regimens following the clinical guideline. One hundred and eight serial peripheral blood samples were collected at baseline, radiographical assessment and disease progression. Plasma ctDNA was isolated and a customized NGS panel was used to detect the genomic features of ctDNA including single nucleotide variants (SNVs) and gene-level copy number variations (CNVs). KEGG pathway enrichment analysis was performed. Results Platinum-based combination chemotherapy was administrated as first-line regimen. Objective response rate was 50% (15/30). Patients with higher baseline values of copy number instability (CNI), CNVs and variant allel frequency (VAF) were more sensitive to platinum-based first-line regimens. Tumor mutation burden (TMB), CNI and CNV burden at partial response and stable disease were significantly lower than those at baseline, where at progressive disease they recovered to baseline levels. Dynamic change of TMB (ΔTMB) was correlated with progression-free survival of first-line treatment. Fluctuating changes of SNVs and gene-level CNVs could be observed during sequential chemotherapy. Under the pressure of conventional chemotherapy, the number of novel gene-level CNVs were found to be higher than that of novel SNVs. Such novel molecular alterations could be enriched into multiple common oncologic signaling pathways, including EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor resistance and platinum drug resistance pathways, where their distributions were found to be highly heterogenous among patients. The impact of subsequent regimens, including paclitaxel-based and irinotecan-based regimens, on the molecular changes driven by first-line therapy was subtle. Conclusion Baseline and dynamic changes of genomic features of ctDNA could be biomarkers for predicting response of platinum-based first-line chemotherapy in AGC patients. After treatment with standard chemotherapy regimens, convergent oncologic pathway enrichment was identified, which is yet characterized by inter-patient heterogenous gene-level CNVs.

CNTs and CNT-MgO, CNT-MgO-Ag, and CNT-MgO-Ag-BaO nanocomposites were grown on alloy substrates using an electrophoretic deposition method and their field emission (FE) and hydrogen sensing performances were investigated. The obtained samples were characterized by SEM, TEM, XRD, Raman, and XPS characterizations. The CNT-MgO-Ag-BaO nanocomposites showed the best FE performance with turn-on and threshold fields of 3.32 and 5.92 V.μm−1, respectively. The enhanced FE performances are mainly attributed to the reductions of the work function, and the enhancement of the thermal conductivity and emission sites. The current fluctuation of CNT-MgO-Ag-BaO nanocomposites was only 2.4% after a 12 h test at the pressure of 6.0 × 10−6 Pa. In addition, for the hydrogen sensing performances, the CNT-MgO-Ag-BaO sample showed the best increase in amplitude of the emission current among all the samples, with the mean IN increases of 67%, 120%, and 164% for 1, 3, and 5 min emissions, respectively, under the initial emission currents of about 1.0 μA.

We propose a distributed optimization method based on a unified momentum method combined with the heavy ball method and optimized gradient method. We first prove that the stochastic version of the unified momentum method converges, and then prove the convergence of proposed distributed accelerated algorithm. Numerical experiments show that our algorithm has better performance than other methods.

Background: We investigated the mutational landscape of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in predicting tumor response to first-line treatment in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC). Methods: We included 41 patients with initially unresectable mCRC, treated with 5-fluorouracil/leucovorin/oxaliplatin (FOLFOX)/5-fluorouracil/leucovorin/irinotecan (FOLFIRI) with/without bevacizumab (Bev)/cetuximab (Cet). Blood samples were prospectively collected at two timepoints: at baseline and after four cycles of first-line treatment. Mutational status of 1086 genes were studied in ctDNA by targeted next-generation sequencing (NGS). Molecular mutational burden (MMB) was defined as mean mutation frequency among obtained mutations for each gene. To evaluate the association between molecular characteristics of cfDNA and therapeutic response better, we divided these patients into MMB-high and MMB-low group according to the median value of MMB (0.3). Results: Among the 41 enrolled patients, alterations of six genes (TRIM24, SPEN, RNF43, PRKAR1A, KRAS, and KDM5 C) were found at baseline. Baseline MMB of six genes was significantly lower in partial response (PR)/stable disease (SD) patients than progression disease (PD) patients (p = 0.0012). Further analysis demonstrated that genomic profiling of ctDNA from pretreatment blood samples was significantly different between PR/SD (non-PD) group and PD group. By comparing the baseline levels of KRAS MMB in the two subgroups, we found that PD cases were all MMB-high, whereas non-PD cases were mainly in MMB-low subgroup. Furthermore, patients with low-KRAS MMB had superior response rate, significantly longer progression-free survival (PFS) and longer overall survival (OS) than high-KRAS MMB group. Conclusions: This prospective and serial genomic profiling study revealed the utility of ctDNA in predicting clinical outcomes in mCRC patients under first-line treatment. Levels of KRAS MMB might aid in monitoring therapeutic efficacy in mCRC patients at pretreatment/after four cycles of first-line treatment.