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LiCoO2 is one of the most important cathode materials for high energy density lithium ion batteries. The compressed behavior of LiCoO2 under high pressure has been investigated using synchrotron radiation x-ray diffraction. It is found that LiCoO2 maintains hexagonal symmetry up to the maximum pressure of 30.1 GPa without phase transition. The elastic modulus at ambient pressure is 159.5(2.2) GPa and its first derivative is 3.92(0.23). In addition, the high-pressure compression behavior of LiCoO2 has been studied by first principles calculations. The derived bulk modulus of LiCoO2 is 141.6 GPa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its launch in 2011, the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) has drawn the attention of researchers from academia, government, and industry worldwide. As one of the three tools of the MGI, the use of materials data, for the first time, has emerged as an extremely significant approach in materials discovery. Data science has been applied in different disciplines as an interdisciplinary field to extract knowledge from data. The concept of materials data science has been utilized to demonstrate its application in materials science. To explore its potential as an active research branch in the big data era, a three-tier system has been put forward to define the infrastructure for the classification, curation and knowledge extraction of materials data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate identification of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is crucial so as to improve diagnosis techniques and to better understand the neurodegenerative process. In this work, we aim to apply the machine learning method to individual identification and identify the discriminate features associated with AD and MCI. Diffusion tensor imaging scans of 48 patients with AD, 39 patients with late MCI, 75 patients with early MCI, and 51 age-matched healthy controls (HCs) are acquired from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database. In addition to the common fractional anisotropy, mean diffusivity, axial diffusivity, and radial diffusivity metrics, there are two novel metrics, named local diffusion homogeneity that used Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient and Kendall’s coefficient concordance, which are taken as classification metrics. The recursive feature elimination method for support vector machine (SVM) and logistic regression (LR) combined with leave-one-out cross validation are applied to determine the optimal feature dimensions. Then the SVM and LR methods perform the classification process and compare the classification performance. The results show that not only can the multi-type combined metrics obtain higher accuracy than the single metric, but also the SVM classifier with multi-type combined metrics has better classification performance than the LR classifier. Statistically, the average accuracy of the combined metric is more than 92% for all between-group comparisons of SVM classifier. In addition to the high recognition rate, significant differences are found in the statistical analysis of cognitive scores between groups. We further execute the permutation test, receiver operating characteristic curves, and area under the curve to validate the robustness of the classifiers, and indicate that the SVM classifier is more stable and efficient than the LR classifier. Finally, the uncinated fasciculus, cingulum, corpus callosum, corona radiate, external capsule, and internal capsule have been regarded as the most important white matter tracts to identify AD, MCI, and HC. Our findings reveal a guidance role for machine-learning based image analysis on clinical diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nb-doped SrTiO3 thermoelectric ceramics with different niobium concentrations, sintering temperatures and Sr-site vacancies are successfully prepared by high energy ball milling combined with carbon burial sintering. For fully understanding the effect of niobium doping on SrTiO3, thermoelectric transport properties are systematically investigated in a temperature range from 300 K to 1100 K. The carrier mobility can be significantly enhanced, and the electrical conductivity is quadrupled, when the sintering temperature rises from 1673 K to 1773 K (beyond the eutectic temperature (1713 K) of SrTiO3–TiO2). The lattice vibration can be suppressed by the lattice distortion introduced by the doped niobium atoms. However, Sr-site vacancies compensate for the lattice distortion and increase the lattice thermal conductivity more or less. Finally, we achieve a maximum value of figure-of-merit zT of 0.21 at 1100 K for SrTi0.9Nb0.1O3 ceramic sintered at 1773 K. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feed-forward gene transcriptional regulatory networks, as a set of common signal motifs, are widely distributed in the biological systems. In this paper, the noise characteristics and propagation mechanism of various feed-forward gene transcriptional regulatory loops are investigated, including (i) coherent feed-forward loops with AND-gate, (ii) coherent feed-forward loops with OR-gate logic, and (iii) incoherent feed-forward loops with AND-gate logic. By introducing logarithmic gain coefficient and using linear noise approximation, the theoretical formulas of noise decomposition are derived and the theoretical results are verified by Gillespie simulation. From the theoretical and numerical results of noise decomposition algorithm, three general characteristics about noise transmission in these different kinds of feed-forward loops are observed. i) The two-step noise propagation of upstream factor is negative in the incoherent feed-forward loops with AND-gate logic, that is, upstream factor can indirectly suppress the noise of downstream factors. ii) The one-step propagation noise of upstream factor is non-monotonic in the coherent feed-forward loops with OR-gate logic. iii) When the branch of the feed-forward loop is negatively controlled, the total noise of the downstream factor monotonically increases for each of all feed-forward loops. These findings are robust to variations of model parameters. These observations reveal the universal rules of noise propagation in the feed-forward loops, and may contribute to our understanding of design principle of gene circuits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectroscopic measurements and terahertz imaging of the cornea are carried out by using a rapid scanning terahertz time domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) system. A voice coil motor stage based optical delay line (VCM-ODL) is developed to provide a rather simple and robust structure with both the high scanning speed and the large delay length. The developed system is used for THz spectroscopic measurements and imaging of the corneal tissue with different amounts of water content, and the measurement results show the consistence with the reported results, in which the measurement time using VCM-ODL is a factor of 360 shorter than the traditional motorized optical delay line (MDL). With reducing the water content a monotonic decrease of the complex permittivity of the cornea is observed. The two-term Debye relaxation model is employed to explain our experimental results, revealing that the fast relaxation time of a dehydrated cornea is much larger than that of a hydrated cornea and its dielectric behavior can be affected by the presence of the biological macromolecules. These results demonstrate that our THz spectrometer may be a promising candidate for tissue hydration sensing and practical application of THz technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A ray tracing method is introduced for helping adjustment and spectra analysis of the grazing incidence flat-field imaging soft X-ray spectrometer. For a single point source, the spectra images obtained by separate components, the toroidal mirror, and the grazing incidence flat-field concave grating with varied line spaces are given respectively. The calculated spectral images of the single point source by the spectrometer are also given for comparison with measurements with different experimental alignments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the motion of a spiral wave controlled by a local periodic forcing imposed on a region around the spiral tip in an excitable medium. Three types of trajectories of spiral tip are observed: the epicycloid-like meandering, the resonant drift, and the hypocycloid-like meandering. The frequency of the spiral is sensitive to the local periodic forcing. The dependency of spiral frequency on the amplitude and size of local periodic forcing are presented. In addition, we show how the drift speed and direction are adjusted by the amplitude and phase of local periodic forcing, which is consistent with a theoretical analysis based on the weak deformation approximation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]