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YAs China advances its transition towards green and low-carbon energy, the proportion of new energy generation in the power grid is gradually increasing, leading to a significant rise in the demand for power resource scheduling. However, due to the scarcity of historical load response data from users, it is challenging to effectively predict user-responsive loads. To address this issue, this study proposes a method of augmenting historical load response data in a weakly supervised manner. Taking into account the unique circumstances of high-voltage users, a sparse CNN for anomaly detection is introduced, along with a multi-branch parallel CNN model capable of weighted output of prediction results from both global and local perspectives. Subsequently, effective iterative training of the model is performed using the EM algorithm. Ultimately, accurate prediction of user-responsive loads is achieved. Based on historical 96-point load data and load response data from high-voltage users in a specific city in China, the predicted results are compared with actual load response data, validating the rationality and accuracy of this method in predicting user-responsive loads.

Melamine‐formaldehyde (MF) foam, while intrinsically flame retardant, necessitates further refinement to meet stringent fire safety standards, particularly in terms of heat release rate and thermal stability. In this study, an innovative approach was adopted wherein an inorganic substance, potassium water glass (WG), was employed to create an encapsulation layer on the surface of the MF foam structure via a straightforward dip‐coating technique. The composite foam underwent a comprehensive analysis of its structure and flame retardant characteristics, using test evaluations such as micro‐scale combustion calorimeter (MCC) testing, cone calorimeter testing (CCT), and thermogravimetric‐Fourier infrared spectrometer (TG‐IR) assessments. It was found that the even coating of WG on the MF foam surface profoundly enhanced the foam's structural integrity. Utilizing the shielding properties of this inorganic layer, the hybrid foam's thermal stability experiences a remarkable augmentation. The peak of heat release rate (pHRR) and the total heat release rate (THR) of the MF foam experienced an impressive reduction of 85.2% and 78.8%, correspondingly. Notably, this advancement is concomitant with a substantial decrease of 39.2% in the total smoke release (TSR) and a notable amelioration in mechanical characteristics. Such developments undeniably broaden their application horizons across diverse domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manufacturing of a flexible, durable, large-area, and multifunctional textile material in a straightforward and cost-effective manner remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a stable Ag nanowire (Ag NW)-containing nanocomposite paint using cellulose nanofibril (CNF) as a dispersant and stabilizer for fabric coating on different substrates, including commercial cotton, polyacrylonitrile, polyphenylene sulfide, polyester, and polyurethane fabrics. Air plasma treatment applied to the fabrics ensured sufficient physical and chemical contact with the paint during the coating process to obtain homogeneous and stable Ag NW-decorated fabrics. The conductive Ag NW networks endowed the fabrics with a low resistivity of 70 mΩ·cm and a high electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding performance of 58.37 dB in the frequency range of 8.2–12.4 GHz. The modified fabrics also had excellent ultraviolet (UV) protection ability, observable thermal insulation performance, and outstanding underwater durability after multiple washing cycles. The bonding mechanism between the selected fabrics and CNF was also intensively investigated, wherein hydrogen bonding was found to play a significant role. This work provides a universal and scalable method for the design of durable, multifunctional textiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The entire world has been reshaped with the development of wireless communication. From present to future, 5G to 6G, gigahertz (GHz) to terahertz (THz), electromagnetic waves with higher frequency penetrate our daily life more intensively and are increasingly expected to do so in the future. Thus, a huge demand has arisen for future electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding materials. Herein, we report a facile approach to prepare sponges from PEDOT:PSS and konjac glucomannan (KGM) revealing excellent EMI shielding performance in both GHz and THz bands. The cross-linked bi-hierarchically porous microstructure dominated by the dimethyl sulfoxide ratio with tunable hydrogen-bond behavior possesses a complicated air interface with highly polarization relaxation and massive conductive loops with negative permeability, resulting in great dielectric loss and magnetic loss with no magnetic filler, respectively. As a result, the purely organic sponge shows an ultra-high average EMI shielding effectiveness (SE) of 109.84 dB in the GHz band (8.2–12.4 GHz), and an ultra-broad qualified frequency bandwidth of 0.2–4 THz with maximum EMI SE in 57.67 dB. The combined contributions of solvent modulated pure organic sponge with multiple shielding mechanisms are conducive to facilitating the development of ultra-broadband EMI shielding materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video saliency prediction (VSP) aims to imitate eye fixations of humans. However, the potential of this task has not been fully exploited since existing VSP methods only focus on modeling visual saliency of the input previous frames. In this paper, we present the first attempt to extend this task to video saliency forecasting (VSF) by forecasting attention regions of consecutive future frames. To tackle this problem, we propose a video saliency forecasting transformer (VSFT) network built on a new encoder-decoder architecture. Different from existing VSP methods, our VSFT is the first pure-transformer based architecture in the VSP field and is freed from the dependency of the pretrained S3D model. In VSFT, the attention mechanism is exploited to capture spatial-temporal dependencies between the input past frames and the target future frame. We propose cross-attention guidance blocks (CAGB) to aggregate multi-level representation features to provide sufficient guidance for forecasting. We conduct comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, DHF1K and Hollywoods-2. We investigate the saliency forecasting and predicting abilities of existing VSP methods by modifying the supervision signals. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance on both VSF and VSP tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, hydrogels have been widely used as drug carriers, especially in the area of protein delivery. The natural silk fibroin produced from cocoons of the Bombyx mori silkworm possesses excellent biocompatibility, significant bioactivity, and biodegradability. Therefore, silk fibroin-based hydrogels are arousing widespread interest in biomedical research. In this study, a process for extracting natural silk fibroin from raw silk textile yarns was established, and three aqueous solutions of silk fibroin with different molecular weight distributions were successfully prepared by controlling the degumming time. Silk fibroin was dispersed in the aqueous solution as "spherical" aggregate particles, and the smaller particles continuously accumulated into large particles. Finally, a silk fibroin hydrogel network was formed. A rheological analysis showed that as the concentration of the silk fibroin hydrogel increased its storage modulus increased significantly. The degradation behavior of silk fibroin hydrogel in different media verified its excellent stability, and the prepared silk fibroin hydrogel had good biocompatibility and an excellent drug-loading capacity. After the protein model drug BSA was loaded, the cumulative drug release within 12 h reached 80%. We hope that these investigations will promote the potential utilities of silk fibroin hydrogels in clinical medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heat-stable antifungal factor (HSAF) isolated from Lysobacter enzymogenes has shown a broad-spectrum of antifungal activities. However, little is known about its mode of action. In this study, we used the model filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa to investigate the antifungal mechanism of HSAF. We first used HSAF to treat the N. crassa strain at different time points. Spore germination, growth phenotype and differential gene expression analysis were conducted by utilizing global transcriptional profiling combined with genetic and physiological analyses. Our data showed that HSAF could significantly inhibit the germination and aerial hyphae growth of N. crassa. RNA-seq analysis showed that a group of genes, associated with cell wall formation and remodeling, were highly activated. Screening of N. crassa gene deletion mutants combined with scanning electron microscopic observation revealed that three fungal cell wall integrity-related genes played an important role in the interaction between N. crassa and L. enzymogens. In addition, Weighted Gene Co-Expression Network Analysis (WGCNA), accompanied by confocal microscopy observation revealed that HSAF could trigger autophagy-mediated degradation and eventually result in cell death in N. crassa. The findings of this work provided new insights into the interactions between the predatory Lysobacter and its fungal prey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One-dimensional rod-shaped Ag 2 Mo 2 O 7 /BiOI composite photocatalysts were prepared via a facile hydrothermal-calcining method. The structure, morphologies, and elemental nature of the photocatalysts were characterized. Ag 2 Mo 2 O 7 /BiOI was formed through the attachment of BiOI nanosheets on the surface of Ag 2 Mo 2 O 7 rods, resulting in a 1D/2D heterojunction with larger interface area, more surface-active sites, and faster charge transfer channel. The Ag 2 Mo 2 O 7 /BiOI heterogeneous exhibited excellent and stable photodegradation performances for Rhodamine B (RhB) and Tetracycline (TC) under visible light irradiation. At the optimum composition of 15 wt% BiOI, the Ag 2 Mo 2 O 7 /BiOI heterojunction exhibited a highest degradation rate for RhB and TC, which were 70 times and 16 times higher than those of Ag 2 Mo 2 O 7 , respectively. The improved photocatalytic performance can be attribute to the efficient separation of photoinduced charges caused by the formation of the n-n heterojunction between Ag 2 Mo 2 O 7 and BiOI. Additionally, the dominant active species of photocatalytic reaction were determined to be •O 2 − and h+ by free radical capture experiments and ESR test. In addition, a toxicity test with E. coli was carried out, which shows that the photodegraded Tetracycline solution is basically harmless to E. coli. Based on the experimental results and hybrid density functional theory calculation, a plausible photocatalytic mechanism of n-n heterojunction was proposed. [Display omitted] • One-dimensional rod-shaped Ag 2 Mo 2 O 7 /BiOI were synthesized by a solvothermal method. • Ag 2 Mo 2 O 7 /BiOI can efficiently degrade Tetracycline. • The toxicity of the degraded tetracycline solution was low by E. coli activity detection. • Charge carriers were separated due to the n-n heterojunction and large interface area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the nucleation mechanism of domains is essential for domain engineering of perovskite ferroelectric materials. We proposed and examined atomistic details for nucleating ferroelastic (FS) domains by integrating topological analysis and first-principles calculations. FS domains are crystallographically treated as deformation twins. The conventional shear-shuffle nucleation mechanism under simple shear deformation is ruled out because the 1-layer elementary twinning disconnection (TD) cannot nucleate and glide in a perfect matrix. Thus, the pure-shuffle nucleation mechanism under pure shear deformation is proposed due to kinetically favored atomic shuffling. The coherency stress associated with the coherent nucleus is relaxed via forming misfit dislocations, accompanied by formation and sharpening of diffused (110) m ∥(110) d domain walls (DWs). The sharp DWs enable growth of the FS nucleus through successive nucleation and gliding of TDs. These findings enrich the knowledge of domain behavior in perovskite ferroelectric materials.

Introduction: Soybean cyst nematode (SCN, Heterodera glycines Ichinohe) is an important disease affecting soybean yield in the world. Potential SCN-related QTLs and QTL-by-environment interactions (QEIs) have been used in SCN-resistant breeding., Methods: In this study, a compressed variance component mixed model, 3VmrMLM, in genome-wide association studies was used to detect QTLs and QEIs for resistance to SCN HG Type 0 and HG Type 1.2.3.5.7 in 156 different soybean cultivars materials., Results and Discussion: The results showed that 53 QTLs were detected in single environment analysis; 36 QTLs and 9 QEIs were detected in multi-environment analysis. Based on the statistical screening of the obtained QTLs, we obtained 10 novel QTLs and one QEI which were different from the previous studies. Based on previous studies, we identified 101 known genes around the significant/suggested QTLs and QEIs. Furthermore, used the transcriptome data of SCN-resistant (Dongnong L-10) and SCN-susceptible (Suinong 14) cultivars, 10 candidate genes related to SCN resistance were identified and verified by Quantitative real time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) analysis. Haplotype difference analysis showed that Glyma.03G005600 was associated with SCN HG Type 0 and HG Type 1.2.3.5.7 resistance and had a haplotype beneficial to multi-SCN-race resistance. These results provide a new idea for accelerating SCN disease resistance breeding., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Jiang, Lv, Zhou, Qu, Liu, Sun, Zhao and Han.)

Introduction: The soybean cyst nematode (SCN) is a major disease in soybean production thatseriously affects soybean yield. At present, there are no studies on weighted geneco-expression network analysis (WGCNA) related to SCN resistance., Methods: Here, transcriptome data from 36 soybean roots under SCN HG Type 0 (race 3) stresswere used in WGCNA to identify significant modules., Results and Discussion: A total of 10,000 differentially expressed genes and 21 modules were identified, of which the module most related to SCN was turquoise. In addition, the hub gene GmHg1 with high connectivity was selected, and its function was verified. GmHg1 encodes serine/threonine protein kinase (PK), and the expression of GmHg1 in SCN-resistant cultivars ('Dongnong L-204') and SCN-susceptible cultivars ('Heinong 37') increased significantly after HG Type 0 stress. Soybean plants transformed with GmHg1-OX had significantly increased SCN resistance. In contrast, the GmHg1-RNAi transgenic soybean plants significantly reduced SCN resistance. In transgenic materials, the expression patterns of 11 genes with the same expression trend as the GmHg1 gene in the 'turquoise module' were analyzed. Analysis showed that 11genes were co-expressed with GmHg1, which may be involved in the process of soybean resistance to SCN. Our work provides a new direction for studying the Molecular mechanism of soybean resistance to SCN., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Jiang, Zhou, Ma, Qu, Liu, Sun, Zhao and Han.)

Objectives: Endometritis is the inflammation of the uterine lining that is associated with infertility. It affects milk production and reproductive performance and leads to huge economic losses in dairy cows. Dimethyl itaconate (DI), a promising chemical agent, has recently been proved to have multiple health-promoting effects. However, the effects of DI on endometritis remain to be unknown., Materials and Methods: In this study, we assessed the anti-inflammatory effects of DI on Lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced endometritis in mice. The endometritis was induced by LPS treatment for 24 hr, and DI was given 24 hr before induction of LPS., Results: As a result, DI administered mice significantly suffered less impairment of uterine tissue and less recruitment of inflammatory cells than LPS administered mice. In addition, DI markedly inhibited uterine myeloperoxidase (MPO) activity and pro-inflammatory cytokines of tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) and interleukin 6 (IL-6) induced by LPS. Moreover, LPS-induced toll-like receptor 4/ nuclear factor-kappa B (TLR4/NF-κB) activation was suppressed by DI. In addition, the expressions of nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2) and heme oxygenase (HO-1) were upregulated by DI., Conclusion: These findings suggest that DI has anti-inflammatory functions in the LPS-induced mice and may be a therapeutic agent against endometritis.