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As the number of older people globally increases, health systems need to be reformed to meet the growing need for medical resources. A few previous studies reported varying health impacts of population ageing, but they focused only on limited countries and diseases. We comprehensively quantify the impact of population ageing on mortality for 195 countries/territories and 169 causes of death. Using data from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017 (GBD 2017), this study derived the total number of deaths and population size for each year from 1990 to 2017. A decomposition method was used to attribute changes in total deaths to population growth, population ageing, and mortality change between 1990 and each subsequent year from 1991 through 2017, for 195 countries/territories and for countries grouped by World Bank economic development level. For countries with increases in deaths related to population ageing, we calculated the ratio of deaths attributed to mortality change to those attributed to population ageing. The proportion of people aged 65 years and older increased globally from 6.1% to 8.8%, and the number of global deaths increased by 9 million, between 1990 and 2017. Compared to 1990, 12 million additional global deaths in 2017 were associated with population ageing, corresponding to 27.9% of total global deaths. Population ageing was associated with increases in deaths in high-, upper-middle-, and lower-middle-income countries but not in low-income countries. The proportions of deaths attributed to population ageing in 195 countries/territories ranged from -43.9% to 117.4% for males and -30.1% to 153.5% for females. The 2 largest contributions of population ageing to disease-specific deaths globally between 1990 and 2017 were for ischemic heart disease (3.2 million) and stroke (2.2 million). Population ageing was related to increases in deaths in 152 countries for males and 159 countries for females, and decreases in deaths in 43 countries for males and 36 countries for females, between 1990 and 2017. The decreases in deaths attributed to mortality change from 1990 to 2017 were more than the increases in deaths related to population ageing for the whole world, as well as in 55.3% (84/152) of countries for males and 47.8% (76/159) of countries for females where population ageing was associated with increased death burden. As the GBD 2017 does not provide variances in the estimated death numbers, we were not able to quantify uncertainty in our attribution estimates. In this study, we found that population ageing was associated with substantial changes in numbers of deaths between 1990 and 2017, but the attributed proportion of deaths varied widely across country income levels, countries, and causes of death. Specific preventive and therapeutic techniques should be implemented in different countries and territories to address the growing health needs related to population ageing, especially targeting the diseases associated with the largest increase in number of deaths in the elderly.

Cell membrane coated nanoparticles (NPs) have recently been recognized as attractive nanomedical tools because of their unique properties such as immune escape, long blood circulation time, specific molecular recognition and cell targeting. However, the integrity of the cell membrane coating on NPs, a key metrics related to the quality of these biomimetic-systems and their resulting biomedical function, has remained largely unexplored. Here, we report a fluorescence quenching assay to probe the integrity of cell membrane coating. In contradiction to the common assumption of perfect coating, we uncover that up to 90% of the biomimetic NPs are only partially coated. Using in vitro homologous targeting studies, we demonstrate that partially coated NPs could still be internalized by the target cells. By combining molecular simulations with experimental analysis, we further identify an endocytic entry mechanism for these NPs. We unravel that NPs with a high coating degree (≥50%) enter the cells individually, whereas the NPs with a low coating degree (<50%) need to aggregate together before internalization. This quantitative method and the fundamental understanding of how cell membrane coated NPs enter the cells will enhance the rational designing of biomimetic nanosystems and pave the way for more effective cancer nanomedicine. Cell membrane coating of nanomaterials has become an attractive method of improving targeting, residence and biocompatibility. Here, the authors demonstrated that most nanoparticles are only partially coated by standard methods, and show the coating degree can impact the biological fate of nanoparticles.

Microfluidic methods are powerful platforms for synthesizing advanced functional materials because they allow for precise control of microscale reaction environments. Microfluidics manipulates reactants in lab-on-a-chip systems to enable the fabrication of highly uniform materials with tunable properties, which are crucial for drug delivery, diagnostics, catalysis, and nanomaterial design. This review emphasizes recent progress in microfluidic technologies for synthesizing functional materials, with a focus on polymeric, hydrogel, lipid-based, and inorganic particles. Microfluidics provides exceptional control over the size, morphology, composition, and surface chemistry of materials, thereby enhancing their performance through uniformity, tunability, hierarchical structuring, and on-chip functionalization. Our review provides novel insights by linking material design strategies with fabrication methods tailored to biomedical applications. We also discuss emerging trends, such as AI-driven optimization, automation, and sustainable microfluidic practices, offering a practical and forward-looking perspective. As the field advances toward robust, standardized, and user-friendly platforms, microfluidics has the potential to increase industrial adoption and enable on-demand solutions in nanotechnology and personalized medicine.

Microfluidic chips have become a central technology in modern chemical analysis, biomedical engineering, materials synthesis, and point-of-care diagnostics [...].Microfluidic chips have become a central technology in modern chemical analysis, biomedical engineering, materials synthesis, and point-of-care diagnostics [...].

Two decomposition methods have been widely used to attribute death differences between two populations to population size, age structure of the population, and age-specific mortality rate (ASMR), but their properties remain uninvestigated. We assess how the two established decomposition methods yield varying results with three-factor factorial experimental designs, illustrating that they are sensitive to the choice of the reference group. We then propose a novel decomposition method to obtain robust decomposition results and use three cases to demonstrate its advantage. The three decomposition methods differ fundamentally in their allocation of interactions to the contributions of the three factors. In comparison with the existing methods, the new method is robust to the choice of the reference group. Three case studies showed inconsistent attribution results for the two existing methods but robust results for the new method when the choice of the reference population changes. The proposed method offers robust and more justifiable attribution results compared to the two existing methods. This method could be generalized to attribution of group differences of other health indicators.

Adverse weather and low illumination remain major challenges for autonomous driving perception, where semantic segmentation must stay reliable despite severe appearance degradation. In unsupervised domain adaptation without target annotations, self-training is widely used, but it is often limited by the inconsistent quality of teacher-generated pseudo labels across samples, regions, and training stages. This paper presents RaDA, a reliability-aware self-training framework that regulates pseudo supervision at three levels. First, a progressive exposure strategy determines which target images are admitted for training. Second, spatial reliability weighting suppresses gradients from degraded regions while retaining informative supervision. Third, adaptive teacher update scheduling stabilizes pseudo label generation over time. Experiments on real-world adverse driving benchmarks show that RaDA improves robustness, training stability, and cross-dataset generalization compared with strong baselines. Compared with the previous state-of-the-art method MIC, RaDA achieves mIoU gains of 10.6 percentage points on Foggy Zurich and 8.8 percentage points on the Foggy Driving benchmark. These results indicate that explicit reliability regulation can strengthen self-training domain adaptation for semantic segmentation in autonomous driving under challenging environmental conditions.

Changes in biogeochemical cycles and the climate system due to human activities are expected to change the quantity and quality of plant litter inputs to soils. How changing quality of fresh organic matter (FOM) might influence the priming effect (PE) on soil organic matter (SOM) mineralization is still under debate. Here we determined the PE induced by two 13 C-labeled FOMs with contrasting nutritional quality (leaf vs. stalk of Zea mays L.). Soils from two different forest types yielded consistent results: soils amended with leaf tissue switched faster from negative PE to positive PE due to greater microbial growth compared to soils amended with stalks. However, after 16 d of incubation, soils amended with stalks had a higher PE than those amended with leaf. Phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA) results suggested that microbial demand for carbon and other nutrients was one of the major determinants of the PE observed. Therefore, consideration of both microbial demands for nutrients and FOM supply simultaneously is essential to understand the underlying mechanisms of PE. Our study provided evidence that changes in FOM quality could affect microbial utilization of substrate and PE on SOM mineralization, which may exacerbate global warming problems under future climate change.

Heterogeneous reactions associated with porous solid films are ubiquitous and play an important role in both nature and industrial processes. However, due to the no-slip boundary condition in pressure-driven flows, the interfacial mass transfer between the porous solid surface and the environment is largely limited to slow molecular diffusion, which severely hinders the enhancement of heterogeneous reaction kinetics. Herein, we report a hierarchical-structure-accelerated interfacial dynamic strategy to improve interfacial gas transfer on hierarchical conductive metal-organic framework ( c -MOF) films. Hierarchical c -MOF films are synthesized via the in-situ transformation of insulating MOF film precursors using π -conjugated ligands and comprise both a nanoporous shell and hollow inner voids. The introduction of hollow structures in the c -MOF films enables an increase of gas permeability, thus enhancing the motion velocity of gas molecules toward the c -MOF film surface, which is more than 8.0-fold higher than that of bulk-type film. The c -MOF film-based chemiresistive sensor exhibits a faster response towards ammonia than other reported chemiresistive ammonia sensors at room temperature and a response speed 10 times faster than that of the bulk-type film. Heterogeneous reactions associated with porous films are vital in nature and industry. A hierarchical-structure-accelerated interfacial dynamic strategy is reported to improve interfacial gas transfer on conductive metal-organic framework films.

Microfluidic techniques are effective tools for precise manipulation of particles and cells, whose enrichment and separation is crucial for a wide range of applications in biology, medicine, and chemistry. Recently, lateral particle migration induced by the intrinsic hydrodynamic effects in microchannels, such as inertia and elasticity, has shown its promise for high-throughput and label-free particle manipulation. The particle migration can be engineered to realize the controllable focusing and separation of particles based on a difference in size. The widespread use of inertial and viscoelastic microfluidics depends on the understanding of hydrodynamic effects on particle motion. This review will summarize the progress in the fundamental mechanisms and key applications of inertial and viscoelastic particle manipulation.

Background: Physicians play a primary role in patients’ health. Heavy workloads can threaten the health of physicians and their patients. This study examined workload changes among physicians in Chinese health institutions from 1998–2016. Methods: This study examined data from the online China Statistical Yearbook of 1999–2017, which is released annually by the National Bureau of Statistics of the People’s Republic of China. Three relevant and available indicators were retrieved: (1) number of physicians, (2) number of patient visits and (3) number of inpatient admissions. Patient visits per physician and inpatient admissions per physician from 1998–2016 were calculated to approximate physician workloads in Chinese health institutions. Results: Between 1998 and 2016, patient visits per physician in China increased by 135% and inpatient admissions per physician rose by 184%. Both indicators demonstrate a stabilizing trend in the most recent five years, including a slight decrease (7%) in patient visits per physician since 2012. Conclusions: Physician workload increased dramatically for Chinese physicians from 1998–2016, a trend that could potentially threaten physicians’ health and the quality of patient care. The findings highlight the importance of interventions and efforts to relieve physician workloads in China.