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Studying the spatiotemporal distribution pattern of carbon storage, balancing land development and utilization with ecological protection, and promoting urban low-carbon sustainable development are important topics under China’s “dual carbon strategy” (Carbon emissions stabilize and harmonize with natural carbon absorption). However, existing research has paid little attention to the impact of land use changes under different spatial policies on the provincial-scale ecosystem carbon storage. In this study, we established a carbon density database for Liaoning Province and obtained the spatial and temporal distribution of carbon storage over the past 20 years. Then, based on 16 driving factors and multiple spatial policies in Liaoning Province, we predicted land use and land cover changes (LUCC) under three scenarios for 2050 and analyzed the spatiotemporal distribution characteristics and response mechanisms of carbon storage under different scenarios. The results showed that (1) LUCC directly affected carbon storage, with a 35.61% increase in construction land and a decrease in carbon storage of 0.51 Tg over the 20-year period. (2) From 2020 to 2050, the carbon storage varied significantly among the natural trend scenario (NTS), ecological restoration scenario (ERS), and economic priority scenario (EPS), with values of 2112.05 Tg, 2164.40 Tg, and 2105.90 Tg, respectively. Carbon storage in the ecological restoration scenario exhibited positive growth, mainly due to a substantial increase in forest area. (3) The spatial pattern of carbon storage in Liaoning Province was characterized by “low in the center, high in the east, and balanced in the west”. Therefore, Liaoning Province can consider rationally formulating and strictly implementing the spatial policy of ecological protection in the future land planning so as to control the disorderly growth of construction land, realize the growth of ecological land area, effectively enhance carbon storage, and ensure the realization of the goal of “dual carbon strategy”.

This study presents a comprehensive horizon-sensitive empirical comparison of Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) algorithms for movie recommendation systems. Using the Movie Lens 1M dataset, this study systematically evaluates this representative algorithm—Explore-then-Commit (ETC), Upper Confidence Bound (UCB), Asymptotically Optimal UCB, and Thompson Sampling (TS)—across varying time horizons from 500 to 5,000,000 interactions. The experiments assess algorithm performance through multiple dimensions, including cumulative regret, convergence behavior, variance across runs, and computational efficiency. Results demonstrate that Thompson Sampling consistently outperforms other approaches, achieving approximately 40% lower regret than standard UCB at extended horizons (7,500 vs. 12,000 at n=1,000,000), while exhibiting more rapid logarithmic regret scaling. This study's data shows that TS achieves logarithmic regret at n≥50,000, compared to n≥100,000 for UCB, providing substantial advantages in applications where user interactions are limited. The performance advantages of different algorithms are strongly horizon-dependent: UCB variants provide reasonable performance at moderate horizons (regret ~1,450 at n=50,000), while ETC shows substantial limitations beyond short-term deployments with linear regret growth reaching ~25,000 at n=1,000,000. This study provides practical recommendations for algorithm selection based on deployment context, time horizon, and computational constraints. These findings emphasize the importance of horizon-sensitive algorithm selection in real-world recommender systems.

Various mitigation measures have been implemented to fight the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, including widely adopted social distancing and mandated face covering. However, assessing the effectiveness of those intervention practices hinges on the understanding of virus transmission, which remains uncertain. Here we show that airborne transmission is highly virulent and represents the dominant route to spread the disease. By analyzing the trend and mitigation measures in Wuhan, China, Italy, and New York City, from January 23 to May 9, 2020, we illustrate that the impacts of mitigation measures are discernable from the trends of the pandemic. Our analysis reveals that the difference with and without mandated face covering represents the determinant in shaping the pandemic trends in the three epicenters. This protective measure alone significantly reduced the number of infections, that is, by over 78,000 in Italy from April 6 to May 9 and over 66,000 in New York City from April 17 to May 9. Other mitigation measures, such as social distancing implemented in the United States, are insufficient by themselves in protecting the public. We conclude that wearing of face masks in public corresponds to the most effective means to prevent interhuman transmission, and this inexpensive practice, in conjunction with simultaneous social distancing, quarantine, and contact tracing, represents the most likely fighting opportunity to stop the COVID-19 pandemic. Our work also highlights the fact that sound science is essential in decision-making for the current and future public health pandemics.

Liquid biopsy, characterized by minimally invasive detection through biofluids such as blood, saliva, and urine, has emerged as a revolutionary strategy for cancer diagnosis and prognosis prediction. Exosomes are a subset of extracellular vesicles (EVs) that shuttle molecular cargoes from donor cells to recipient cells and play a crucial role in mediating intercellular communication. Increasing studies suggest that exosomes have a great promise to serve as novel biomarkers in liquid biopsy, since large quantities of exosomes are enriched in body fluids and are involved in numerous physiological and pathological processes. However, the further clinical application of exosomes has been greatly restrained by the lack of high-quality separation and component analysis methods. This review aims to provide a comprehensive overview on the conventional and novel technologies for exosome isolation, characterization and content detection. Additionally, the roles of exosomes serving as potential biomarkers in liquid biopsy for the diagnosis, treatment monitoring, and prognosis prediction of cancer are summarized. Finally, the prospects and challenges of applying exosome-based liquid biopsy to precision medicine are evaluated.

Covalent organic frameworks with designable periodic skeletons and ordered nanopores have attracted increasing attention as promising cathode materials for rechargeable batteries. However, the reported cathodes are plagued by limited capacity and unsatisfying rate performance. Here we report a honeycomb-like nitrogen-rich covalent organic framework with multiple carbonyls. The sodium storage ability of pyrazines and carbonyls and the up-to twelve sodium-ion redox chemistry mechanism for each repetitive unit have been demonstrated by in/ex-situ Fourier transform infrared spectra and density functional theory calculations. The insoluble electrode exhibits a remarkably high specific capacity of 452.0 mAh g −1 , excellent cycling stability (~96% capacity retention after 1000 cycles) and high rate performance (134.3 mAh g −1 at 10.0 A g −1 ). Furthermore, a pouch-type battery is assembled, displaying the gravimetric and volumetric energy density of 101.1 Wh kg −1 cell and 78.5 Wh L −1 cell , respectively, indicating potentially practical applications of conjugated polymers in rechargeable batteries. Covalent organic frameworks are receiving increasing attention as promising cathode materials for rechargeable batteries. Here the authors report a honeycomb-like nitrogen-rich COF design in which the pyrazines and carbonyls enable favorable redox chemistry and remarkable Na-ion storage performance.

Audio-driven talking-head video generation is a critical task in cross-modal expressive synthesis, with applications in virtual humans, digital content creation, and human-computer interaction. Existing methods, however, often suffer from unnatural lip movements and distortions in non-speech facial regions, especially under exaggerated expressions or emotional variations. These issues arise due to the entanglement of linguistic content, prosodic emotion, and speaker-specific attributes within the audio signal. To address these challenges, we propose ExpNet, a Transformer-based expression regression framework that decouples global head motion from local facial expressions using 3DMM coefficients. The method employs a conditional VAE for robust head pose coefficient generation, while a CNN-Transformer architecture regresses expression coefficients. ExpNet introduces ALiBi-based relative positional bias in the self-attention mechanism, which captures long-range dependencies while focusing on local temporal context. It also conditions on the first-frame expression coefficient to preserve identity and emotion consistency throughout the video. Experimental evaluations on multiple datasets, including HDTF, MEAD, and LRS3, demonstrate that the method presented in this paper outperforms existing methods in terms of expression realism, lip synchronization, and video quality. Ablation studies reveal that key components such as ALiBi, landmark supervision, and the Transformer module are crucial for improving temporal stability, reducing lip jitter, and enhancing overall facial animation consistency.

How to improve the quality of the new retail service supply chain (RSSC) has become a hot topic for enterprises and consumers. Considering the influence of the new RSSC enterprises’ emotional attitude on the decision-making of quality improvement, the theory of rank-dependent expected utility (RDEU) is combined with an evolutionary game, constructing an evolutionary game model of collaborative quality improvement of new RSSC, and analyzing the game strategy choice of each participant in collaborative quality improvement of new RSSC. The study shows that when only one party is emotional, the rationality of retail service integrators will promote the synergistic improvement of the quality of the new RSSC more than functional service providers. Moreover, pessimism and optimism have an inverted U-shaped effect on quality decisions. When both parties have emotions, functional service providers remain optimistic, and retail service integrators remain pessimistic or rational can promote the collaborative improvement of new RSSC quality. In addition, the effects of quality preference, peer mechanism, feedback mechanism, and risk mechanism on the collaborative quality improvement of new RSSC are analyzed. Based on the research findings, relevant countermeasures are proposed to incentivize new retailers to conduct collaborative improvement in quality in terms of establishing an open mechanism for negotiation and consultation, strengthening the emotion management of new retail node firms, and adjusting the transmission of quality signals, with a view to realizing the quality collaborative improvement of the new RSSC.

The negative impact of used batteries of new energy vehicles on the environment has attracted global attention, and how to effectively deal with used batteries of new energy vehicles has become a hot issue. This paper combines the rank-dependent expected utility with the evolutionary game theory, constructs an evolutionary game model based on the interaction mechanism between decision makers' emotions and decision making, and studies the recycling strategy of new energy automobile trams under the heterogeneous combination of emotions. The study shows that: (1) In addition to the establishment of effective external norms, the subjective preference of decision makers can also positively affect the recycling strategy of new energy vehicle batteries. (2) Fairness preferences can have a significant nonlinear effect on new energy vehicle battery recycling strategies by changing the utility function of decision makers. (3) When new energy vehicle manufacturers remain optimistic and new energy vehicle demanders remain rational or pessimistic, the new energy vehicle battery recycling strategy can reach the optimal steady state.

Lung cancer is a highly heterogeneous disease. Cancer cells and cells within the tumor microenvironment together determine disease progression, as well as response to or escape from treatment. To map the cell type-specific transcriptome landscape of cancer cells and their tumor microenvironment in advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), we analyze 42 tissue biopsy samples from stage III/IV NSCLC patients by single cell RNA sequencing and present the large scale, single cell resolution profiles of advanced NSCLCs. In addition to cell types described in previous single cell studies of early stage lung cancer, we are able to identify rare cell types in tumors such as follicular dendritic cells and T helper 17 cells. Tumors from different patients display large heterogeneity in cellular composition, chromosomal structure, developmental trajectory, intercellular signaling network and phenotype dominance. Our study also reveals a correlation of tumor heterogeneity with tumor associated neutrophils, which might help to shed light on their function in NSCLC. Comprehensive profiles of tumour and microenvironment are critical to understand heterogeneity in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Here, the authors profile 42 late-stage NSCLC patients with single-cell RNA-seq, revealing immune landscapes that are associated with cancer subtype or heterogeneity.

The nonradiative energy loss (∆ E nr ) is a critical factor to limit the efficiency of organic solar cells. Generally, strong electron-phonon coupling induced by molecular motion generates fast nonradiative decay and causes high ∆ E nr . How to restrict molecular motion and achieve a low ∆ E nr is a sticking point. Herein, the free volume ratio (FVR) is proposed as an indicator to evaluate molecular motion, providing new molecular design rationale to suppress nonradiative decay. Theoretical and experimental results indicate proper proliferation of alkyl side-chain can decrease FVR and restrict molecular motion, leading to reduced electron-phonon coupling while maintaining ideal nanomorphology. The reduced FVR and favorable morphology are simultaneously obtained in AQx-6 with pinpoint alkyl chain proliferation, achieving a high PCE of 18.6% with optimized V OC , J SC and FF. Our study discovered aggregation-state regulation is of great importance to the reduction of electron-phonon coupling, which paves the way to high-efficiency OSCs. Reducing non-radiative energy loss is critical to improving power conversion efficiency in organic solar cells. Jiang et al. show that alkyl side-chain engineering in acceptors reduces the free volume ratio, lowering non-radiative decay, to achieve 18.6% efficiency in bulk-heterojunction binary cells.