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Pesticide misuse and overuse severely pollute agricultural soils, water, and crop yields, harming people and animals. This situation raises serious concerns about environmental pollution on a global scale. As an eco-friendly material for soil remediation, biochar can efficiently immobilize pesticides in the soil. Several studies have focused on the feasibility of biochar in remediating polluted soil. However, its influences during the remediation of pesticide-polluted soils remain indistinct. The present review illuminates the positive and negative influences of biochar on the dissemination of pesticides, the underlying mechanisms, the regulating factors, and critical considerations in the ongoing development of biochar for pesticide use. It also delineates the positive and negative impacts of biochar on pesticides in the soil, evaluates potential pitfalls based on recent research, and offers suggestions for prospective biochar applications crucial for remediating contaminated soil. This review reveals that the fate and types of pesticides, along with the physicochemical properties of soil and biochar types, can significantly influence the remediation of pesticide-polluted soil using biochar. Biochar has the potential to enhance the abundance of certain bacteria and the colonization of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, both of which play crucial roles in soil remediation. Biochar can also modify soil moisture, microbial communities, and other factors that impact the rate of pesticide degradation while simultaneously reducing other types of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. This review underscores the importance of thoroughly understanding the properties of biochar before its application to polluted soils. This review can serve as a basis for subsequent studies on the biochar-mediated remediation of contaminated soils. Highlights: Biochar can significantly reduce the leaching and decomposition of pesticides in the soil. The efficacy of biochar in the soil depends on its biological, physical, and chemical features. The aging of biochar diminishes its adsorption capacity for pesticides in the soil environment. Modification of biochar could enhance its capacity to remediate soil polluted by pesticides. Biochar alters the structure and function of microbial communities that regulate pesticides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid the flourishing digital economy, digital finance overcomes the constraints of the conventional financial model and largely improves the supply efficiency and use of funds. This provides new opportunities for manufacturing corporations to improve their green innovation efficiency. Employing Chinese Shenzhen and Shanghai A-share listed manufacturing corporations between 2011 and 2021, this paper conducts an empirical analysis to study the effect of digital finance on corporate green innovation efficiency. Discoveries suggest that digital finance significantly improves manufacturing corporations' green innovation efficiency. After a few robustness tests, the results are still accurate. According to a mechanism analysis, digital finance increases the effectiveness of green innovation in manufacturing corporations by removing financing constraints. According to the heterogeneity analysis, the impact of digital finance on manufacturing corporations exhibits distinctive financial and geographical regional heterogeneity, particularly accentuated in Zhejiang Province and the central and western regions. This paper can provide a valuable reference for digital finance in supporting manufacturing corporations in green innovation ventures and improving the level of green innovation in the context of digitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of dockless shared bikes (DSB) has led to their use as an important transfer mode to urban rail transit (URT) stations. However, in highly populated areas such as subway stations in peak hours, there is increasing concern about the imbalance between the demand and supply of shared bikes. To promote smoother subway transfer trips using shared bikes, it is very important to estimate the DSB demand, especially the disparity in the volume of bike pick-up and drop-off demand around subway stations. This research first utilizes the Shenzhen metro usage data and DSB usage data, analyzes data regarding subway and shared bike usage, discusses their potential transfer uses, and finds great disparity in DSB demand between different subway stations. The catchment area method is used to estimate bike usage as a potential transfer mode to the subway, where the catchment area is defined as a radius of 150 m from the subway station center. The DSB trip demand is categorized into two types: pick-up and drop-off. The most recent deep learning method, adaptive graph convolutional recurrent network (AGCRN), is used to predict the DSB demand more accurately because of its ability in enabling the modeling of relationships between entities in a self-adapted graph, and the prediction is compared with long short-term memory (LSTM), spatiotemporal neural network (STNN), diffusion convolutional recurrent neural network (DCRNN), and Graph WaveNet. Results show that methods with graphs (STNN, DCRNN, Graph WaveNet, and AGCRN) perform better than LSTM, and methods with adaptive graphs (Graph WaveNet and AGCRN) outperform methods with static graphs in terms of mean absolute error (MAE), root-mean-square error (RMSE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). DSB prediction results show that AGCRN performs the best in this study. More data, particularly land use data and URT station volume data, are expected to improve the predictive accuracy of the method due to potentially improved graph representation of station characteristics and subway station volume correlations. And with more accurate prediction results, it will be possible to achieve a better balancing strategy for bike operation optimization for better bike usage, and thus for a higher transfer rate of DSB to subway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The operation of traditional aqueous-electrolyte zinc-ion batteries is adversely affected by the uncontrollable growth of zinc dendrites and the occurrence of side reactions. These problems can be avoided by the development of functional hydrogel electrolytes as replacements for aqueous electrolytes. However, the mechanism by which most hydrogel electrolytes inhibit the growth of zinc dendrites on a zinc anode has not been investigated in detail, and there is a lack of a large-scale recovery method for mainstream hydrogel electrolytes. In this paper, we describe the development of a recyclable and biodegradable hydrogel electrolyte based on natural biomaterials, namely chitosan and polyaspartic acid. The distinctive adsorptivity and inducibility of chitosan and polyaspartic acid in the hydrogel electrolyte triggers a double coupling network and an associated synergistic inhibition mechanism, thereby effectively inhibiting the side reactions on the zinc anode. In addition, this hydrogel electrolyte played a crucial role in an aqueous acid-based Zinc/MnO2 battery, by maintaining its interior two-electron redox reaction and inhibiting the formation of zinc dendrites. Furthermore, the sustainable biomass-based hydrogel electrolyte is biodegradable, and could be recovered from the Zinc/MnO2 battery for subsequent recycling. Functional hydrogel electrolytes show promising potential for enhancing the sustainability of aqueous zinc-ion batteries. Here, the authors introduce a biomass-based hydrogel electrolyte that not only prevents side reactions on the zinc anode but also enables easy retrieval from the zinc batteries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single degradation systems based on dielectric barrier discharge plasma (DBDP) or persulfate (PS) oxidation cannot achieve the desired goals (high degradation efficiency, high mineralization rate, and low product toxicity) of degrading atrazine (ATZ) in river sediment. In this study, DBDP was combined with a PS oxidation system (DBDP/PS synergistic system) to degrade ATZ in river sediment. A Box–Behnken design (BBD) including five factors (discharge voltage, air flow, initial concentration, oxidizer dose, and activator dose) and three levels (− 1, 0, and 1) was established to test a mathematical model by response surface methodology (RSM). The results confirmed that the degradation efficiency of ATZ in river sediment was 96.5% in the DBDP/PS synergistic system after 10 min of degradation. The experimental total organic carbon (TOC) removal efficiency results indicated that 85.3% of ATZ is mineralized into CO2, H2O, and NH4+, which effectively reduces the possible biological toxicity of the intermediate products. Active species (sulfate (SO4•−), hydroxy (•OH), and superoxide (•O2−) radicals) were found to exert positive effects in the DBDP/PS synergistic system and illustrated the degradation mechanism of ATZ. The ATZ degradation pathway, composed of 7 main intermediates, was clarified by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC–MS). This study indicates that the DBDP/PS synergistic system is a highly efficient, environmentally friendly, novel method for the remediation of river sediment containing ATZ pollution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is inherently a complex immune-inflammatory condition, and heightened inflammation and immune dysfunction are closely related to an increased risk of death. However, evidence regarding the relationship between immune-inflammatory levels and all-cause, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality among patients with CKD is scarce. Methods: Patients with non-dialysis dependent CKD undergoing coronary angiography (CAG) were included from five Chinese tertiary hospitals. Systemic immune inflammation index (SII) was calculated by multiplying peripheral platelet count with neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio, and patients were categorized into four groups by SII quartiles. Cox regression models and competing risk Fine and Gray models were used to examining the relationships between SII levels and all-cause, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality. Results: A total of the 19,327 patients (68.8 ± 10.03 years, female 32.0%) were included in this study. During a median follow-up of 4.5 years, 5,174 deaths occurred, including 2,861 cardiovascular deaths and 375 cancer deaths. Controlling for confounders, all-cause mortality (Q2, Q3, Q4: hazard ratio(HR) [95 CI%] = 1.15 [1.06–1.26], 1.30 [1.19–1.42], 1.48 [1.35–1.62], respectively; p for trend < 0.001) and cardiovascular mortality (Q2, Q3, Q4: HR [95 CI%] = 1.16 [1.03–1.31], 1.40 [1.24–1.58], 1.64 [1.44–1.85], respectively; p for trend < 0.001) increased with higher SII levels, and SII levels was related to cancer mortality comparing last quartile to first quartile of SII (Q2, Q3, Q4: HR [95 CI%] = 1.12 [0.83–1.52], 1.22 [0.90–1.67], 1.50 [1.09–2.08], respectively; p for trend < 0.001). Conclusion: Elevated immune inflammation level on admission was an independent risk factor for all-cause, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality among CKD patients. Further research is needed to validate the predictive value of SII for mortality risk among CKD patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bio-inspired reversible adhesion has significant potential in many fields requiring flexible grasping and manipulation, such as precision manufacturing, flexible electronics, and intelligent robotics. Despite extensive efforts for adhesive synthesis with a high adhesion strength at the interface, an effective strategy to actively tune the adhesion capacity between a strong attachment and an easy detachment spanning a wide range of scales has been lagged. Herein, we report a novel soft-hard-soft sandwiched composite design to achieve a stable, repeatable, and reversible strong adhesion with an easily scalable performance for a large area ranging from ∼1.5 to 150 cm2 and a high load ranging from ∼20 to 700 N. Theoretical studies indicate that this design can enhance the uniform loading for attachment by restraining the lateral shrinkage in the natural state, while facilitate a flexible peeling for detachment by causing stress concentration in the bending state, yielding an adhesion switching ratio of ∼54 and a switching time of less than ∼0.2 s. This design is further integrated into versatile grippers, climbing robots, and human climbing grippers, demonstrating its robust scalability for a reversible strong adhesion. This biomimetic design bridges microscopic interfacial interactions with macroscopic controllable applications, providing a universal and feasible paradigm for adhesion design and control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dysregulation of microRNAs (miRNAs) is a crucial molecular signature of disease development. The potential implication of miRNAs in neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) remains poorly investigated. The expression levels of miR-27a-3p, miR-27b-3p, and neurofibromin 1 (NF1) were detected by real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) analysis. The functional roles of miR-27a-3p and miR-27b-3p in NF1 were explored by CCK8 (Cell Counting Kit-8), 5-ethynyl-2′-deoxyuridine (EdU), terminal deoxynucleoitidyl transferase dUTP nick-end labeling (TUNEL), and transwell assays. Luciferase reporter, RNA pull-down, and RNA binding protein immunoprecipitation (RIP) assays were employed to study the probable target relationship between miRNA and messenger RNA (mRNA). MiR-27b-3p and miR-27a-3p were upregulated in dermal and plexiform human Schwann cells (HSC) from NF1 neurofibromas as well as cell lines of malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors (MPNSTs). MiR-27a-3p/miR-27b-3p mimics promoted the proliferative, migratory, and invasive ability of dermal HSC and MPNST cell ST88-14, while inhibiting the apoptotic capacity. MiR-27a-3p/miR-27b-3p inhibitors elicited the opposite impacts on the above cellular behaviors in dermal HSC and ST88-14. Intriguingly, NF1 was revealed to be the target of both miR-27a-3p and miR-27b-3p, and was negatively modulated by them. MiR-27a-3p/miR-27b-3p upregulation suppressed the expression of NF1 in dermal HSC and ST88-14. Furthermore, NF1 depletion counterbalanced the functional alteration induced by miR-27a-3p/miR-27b-3p inhibition. Our study suggests that both miR-27b-3p and miR-27a-3p are involved in upstream molecular activity responsible for the depletion of NF1, representing promising targets for therapeutic application in NF1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]