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Macrophages are highly heterogeneous and exhibit a diversity of functions and phenotypes. They can be divided into pro‐inflammatory macrophages (M1) and anti‐inflammatory macrophages (M2). Diabetic wounds are characterized by a prolonged inflammatory phase and difficulty in healing due to the accumulation of pro‐inflammatory (M1) macrophages in the wound. Therefore, hydrogel dressings with macrophage heterogeneity regulation function hold great promise in promoting diabetic wound healing in clinical applications. However, the precise conversion of pro‐inflammatory M1 to anti‐inflammatory M2 macrophages by simple and biosafe approaches is still a great challenge. Here, an all‐natural hydrogel with the ability to regulate macrophage heterogeneity is developed to promote angiogenesis and diabetic wound healing. The protocatechuic aldehyde hybridized collagen‐based all‐natural hydrogel exhibits good bioadhesive and antibacterial properties as well as reactive oxygen species scavenging ability. More importantly, the hydrogel is able to convert M1 macrophages into M2 macrophages without the need for any additional ingredients or external intervention. This simple and safe immunomodulatory approach shows great application potential for shortening the inflammatory phase of diabetic wound repair and accelerating wound healing. An all‐natural hydrogel composed of small molecules pro‐catechol and collagen is developed to promote diabetic wound healing by modulating macrophage heterogeneity. The hydrogel exhibits good bioadhesive, antibacterial, and reactive oxygen species scavenging abilities. In vitro and in vivo experiments show that the hydrogel is able to promote the conversion of pro‐inflammatory (M1) macrophages to anti‐inflammatory (M2) macrophages and the expression of anti‐inflammatory factors.

Polymer dielectrics with enhanced thermal stability and electrical insulation are urgently needed for capacitive energy storage applications in electric power systems. There is a persistent challenge to break the contradictory correlation between high heat resistance and low electrical conduction in polymers. Here, we employ benzyl-induced crosslinking to rearrange short-range structural units in polyimide chains, reducing electrical conduction loss. The designed polymer exhibits an electrical conductivity more than 3 orders of magnitude lower than that of commercial heat-resistant polymers, while its glass transition temperature ( T g ) increases from 236.31 °C (for polyetherimide) to 289.72 °C. Consequently, a discharged energy densities of 6.38 J cm −3 and 3.04 J cm −3 , with charge-discharge efficiencies above 90%, are achieved at 200 °C and 250 °C, respectively, demonstrating among the best in all-organic dielectric polymers. This work presents a feasible approach to break the adverse correlation between thermal stability and electrical insulation in polyimide materials. Polymer dielectrics have potential in capacitive energy storage applications, but achieving the required thermal stability and electrical insultation is challenging. Here, the authors report a method to rearrange short-range structural units within polyimide chains to give improved properties.

As a renewable and environment-friendly technology for seawater desalination and wastewater purification, solar energy triggered steam generation is attractive to address the long-standing global water scarcity issues. However, practical utilization of solar energy for steam generation is severely restricted by the complex synthesis, low energy conversion efficiency, insufficient solar spectrum absorption and water extraction capability of state-of-the-art technologies. Here, for the first time, we report a facile strategy to realize hydrogen bond induced self-assembly of a polydopamine (PDA)@MXene microsphere photothermal layer for synergistically achieving wide-spectrum and highly efficient solar absorption capability (≈ 96% in a wide solar spectrum range of 250–1,500 nm wavelength). Moreover, such a system renders fast water transport and vapor escaping due to the intrinsically hydrophilic nature of both MXene and PDA, as well as the interspacing between core-shell microspheres. The solar-to-vapor conversion efficiencies under the solar illumination of 1 sun and 4 sun are as high as 85.2% and 93.6%, respectively. Besides, the PDA@MXene photothermal layer renders the system durable mechanical properties, allowing producing clean water from seawater with the salt rejection rate beyond 99%. Furthermore, stable light absorption performance can be achieved and well maintained due to the formation of ternary TiO2/C/MXene complex caused by oxidative degradation of MXene. Therefore, this work proposes an attractive MXene-assisted strategy for fabricating high performance photothermal composites for advanced solar-driven seawater desalination applications.

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown their advantages in the single image de-raining task. However, most existing CNNs-based methods utilize only local spatial information without considering long-range contextual information. In this paper, we propose a graph convolutional networks (GCNs)-based model to solve the above problem. We specifically design two graphs to extract representations from new dimensions. The first graph models the global spatial relationship between pixels in the feature, while the second graph models the interrelationship across the channels. By integrating conventional CNNs and our GCNs into a single framework, the proposed method is able to explore comprehensive feature representations from three aspects, i.e., local spatial patterns, global spatial coherence and channel correlation. To better exploit the explored rich feature representations, we further introduce a simple yet effective recurrent operations to perform the de-raining process in a successive manner. Benefiting from the rich information exploration and exploitation, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on both synthetic and real-world data sets.

Weakly supervised object localization and semantic segmentation aim to localize objects using only image-level labels. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged by generating a foreground prediction map (FPM) to achieve pixel-level localization. While existing FPM-based methods use cross-entropy to evaluate the foreground prediction map and to guide the learning of the generator, this paper presents two astonishing experimental observations on the object localization learning process: For a trained network, as the foreground mask expands, (1) the cross-entropy converges to zero when the foreground mask covers only part of the object region. (2) The activation value continuously increases until the foreground mask expands to the object boundary. Therefore, to achieve a more effective localization performance, we argue for the usage of activation value to learn more object regions. In this paper, we propose a background activation suppression (BAS) method. Specifically, an activation map constraint module is designed to facilitate the learning of generator by suppressing the background activation value. Meanwhile, by using foreground region guidance and area constraint, BAS can learn the whole region of the object. In the inference phase, we consider the prediction maps of different categories together to obtain the final localization results. Extensive experiments show that BAS achieves significant and consistent improvement over the baseline methods on the CUB-200-2011 and ILSVRC datasets. In addition, our method also achieves state-of-the-art weakly supervised semantic segmentation performance on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/wpy1999/BAS-Extension.

Electroactive polymer (EAP) is a kind of smart material, which can change its shape under the stimulation of electric field. Dielectric elastomer (DE) is an important member of the EAP. DE has the characteristics of excellent performance, such as light weight, low noise, low cost, and so on, which guarantee its wide applications in the fields of actuators, generators, sensors. In this review, the principles of energy conversion, the research status and latest development of new technologies for DEs, and the performance characteristics of DEs are summarised. Simultaneously, it points out the development problems and feasible countermeasures. At last, the application prospects of DE are discussed, combined with the research direction of the international frontier.

Acute kidney injury (AKI), as a common oxidative stress‐related renal disease, causes high mortality in clinics annually, and many other clinical diseases, including the pandemic COVID‐19, have a high potential to cause AKI, yet only rehydration, renal dialysis, and other supportive therapies are available for AKI in the clinics. Nanotechnology‐mediated antioxidant therapy represents a promising therapeutic strategy for AKI treatment. However, current enzyme‐mimicking nanoantioxidants show poor biocompatibility and biodegradability, as well as non‐specific ROS level regulation, further potentially causing deleterious adverse effects. Herein, the authors report a novel non‐enzymatic antioxidant strategy based on ultrathin Ti3C2‐PVP nanosheets (TPNS) with excellent biocompatibility and great chemical reactivity toward multiple ROS for AKI treatment. These TPNS nanosheets exhibit enzyme/ROS‐triggered biodegradability and broad‐spectrum ROS scavenging ability through the readily occurring redox reaction between Ti3C2 and various ROS, as verified by theoretical calculations. Furthermore, both in vivo and in vitro experiments demonstrate that TPNS can serve as efficient antioxidant platforms to scavenge the overexpressed ROS and subsequently suppress oxidative stress‐induced inflammatory response through inhibition of NF‐κB signal pathway for AKI treatment. This study highlights a new type of therapeutic agent, that is, the redox‐mediated non‐enzymatic antioxidant MXene nanoplatforms in treatment of AKI and other ROS‐associated diseases. A novel non‐enzymatic antioxidant MXene nanoplatform with excellent biocompatibility and great chemical reactivity toward multiple ROS is developed to potentially scavenge the overexpressed ROS and subsequently suppress oxidative stress‐induced inflammatory response through the inhibition of NF‐κB signaling pathway in the prevention and treatment of AKI and other ROS‐related diseases.

Myocardial fibrosis is the characteristic pathology of diabetes-induced cardiomyopathy. Therefore, an in-depth study of cardiac heterogeneity and cell-to-cell interactions can help elucidate the pathogenesis of diabetic myocardial fibrosis and identify treatment targets for the treatment of this disease. In this study, we investigated intercellular communication drivers of myocardial fibrosis in mouse heart with high-fat-diet/streptozotocin-induced diabetes at single-cell resolution. Intercellular and protein–protein interaction networks of fibroblasts and macrophages, endothelial cells, as well as fibroblasts and epicardial cells revealed critical changes in ligand–receptor interactions such as Pdgf(s)–Pdgfra and Efemp1–Egfr, which promote the development of a profibrotic microenvironment during the progression of and confirmed that the specific inhibition of the Pdgfra axis could significantly improve diabetic myocardial fibrosis. We also identified phenotypically distinct Hrc hi and Postn hi fibroblast subpopulations associated with pathological extracellular matrix remodeling, of which the Hrc hi fibroblasts were found to be the most profibrogenic under diabetic conditions. Finally, we validated the role of the Itgb1 hub gene-mediated intercellular communication drivers of diabetic myocardial fibrosis in Hrc hi fibroblasts, and confirmed the results through AAV9-mediated Itgb1 knockdown in the heart of diabetic mice. In summary, cardiac cell mapping provides novel insights into intercellular communication drivers involved in pathological extracellular matrix remodeling during diabetic myocardial fibrosis.

Aramid paper, due to its lightweight structure, mechanical strength, and excellent dielectric performance, is widely employed in insulation systems of electronic devices and high‐voltage equipment. However, its inherently poor thermal conductivity (λ) restricts its applicability in modern high‐power systems with demanding thermal management needs. Additionally, conventional blending approaches often yield poor filler‐matrix interfaces, which severely limit the enhancement of λ and simultaneously deteriorate other properties. Herein, a plasma‐assisted amino functionalization approach is reported for boron nitride nanosheets to reinforce its interfacial affinity with 1D aramid nanofibers (ANF). Together with Silk Fibroin (SK), serving as a flexible molecular binder, a biomimetic nacre‐inspired architecture is achieved through a self‐assembly process. The synergistic effect of strong interfacial interactions and a 3D hydrogen bonding network endows the composite films with outstanding thermal conductivity of 13.89 Wm−1K−1, excellent tensile strength of 307.08 MPa, as well as superior thermal resistance and long‐term operational stability. Moreover, the highly ordered microstructure results in an ultrahigh breakdown strength (up to 430 kVmm−1) and a low dielectric loss. The findings of this study provide a rational design strategy for multifunctional polymer‐based dielectric materials aimed at next‐generation high‐power electronic devices. A bio‐inspired strategy is proposed to fabricate high‐performance composite films by plasma‐assisted amino‐functionalized boron nitride nanosheets (BNNS‐NH2) with aramid nanofibers (ANF) and Silk Fibroin (SK). The synergistic effect of a 3D hydrogen‐bonding network and strong interfacial adhesion results in superior thermal conductivity of 13.89 Wm−1K−1, tensile strength of 307.08 MPa, breakdown strength (up to 430 kV mm−1), excellent thermal reliability and dielectric stability.

A series of high‐performance linear and cross‐linked polyimide (PI) aerogels with different molecular structures have been successfully synthesised using the freeze‐drying process. In this study, the comprehensive regulation of microstructure, thermodynamic, thermal insulation and dielectric properties of PI aerogels are achieved by controlling the rigid/flexible structure and composition of polymerised monomers. The increase in rigidity of PI molecular structure could promote the formation of denser pores, which is beneficial to improve the thermodynamic and thermal insulation properties of aerogels. Notably, the cross‐linked PI aerogel prepared by introducing cross‐linking agent (tris(4‐aminophenyl) amine, [TPA]) into linear PI exhibits high thermal stability ( T d 5% > 560°C), excellent ultralow permittivity ( ε r  = 1.31, f  = 10 6  Hz) and good thermal insulation property ( k  = 0.056 W/m · K). This innovative strategy promotes the wider application of the cross‐linked polyimide aerogel in the field of integrated circuits and aerospace exploration.