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One approach that shows promising for producing hydrogen fuel from solar energy is photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting. The main challenge is to design effective photoanodes. Although bismuth vanadate (BiVO4) is an ideal photoanode in terms of absorbing visible light, serious electron–hole recombination and poor charge transport limit its application as a photoanode of PEC. Dye sensitization is the key method to improve electron transfer and light utilization. Herein, an enhanced dye (rhodamine B, RhB)-sensitized BiVO4/BiOCl system was explored. The results show that the process of RhB sensitization BiVO4 requires BiOCl as a bridge. The RhB-sensitized BiVO4/BiOCl system exhibits excellent photoelectrochemical activity, which is attributed to its enhanced photoinduced electron transport and wider visible light response range. This inspiration comes from the mythical story of China, "Cowherd and the Weaver Girl Meet at the Magpie Bridge". The combination of dye sensitization and BiVO4/BiOCl heterojunction explored an energy-saving, efficient and green light-induced system to improve the PEC efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aurora kinase B (AURKB) is an attractive and potential molecular target for cervical cancer therapy. To date, a variety of AURKB inhibitors are developed to suppress cervical tumors. Nevertheless, direct use of these small molecule inhibitors may cause severe side effects to patients, limiting their further clinical applications. Herein, a rationally designed hydrogelator Nap‐Phe‐Phe‐Arg‐Arg‐Lys‐Ser‐OH (S) is employed to co‐assemble AZD1152‐HQPA (AZD, an AURKB inhibitor) to develop an AURKB‐responsive hydrogel Gel S/AZD for enhanced cervical tumor suppression. Upon AURKB activation, hydrogelator S in Gel S/AZD evolves into its hydrophilic phosphate Nap‐Phe‐Phe‐Arg‐Arg‐Lys‐Ser(H2PO3)‐OH (Sp), triggering the disassembly of Gel S/AZD to release AZD in a sustained manner. Cell assays reveal that AURKB‐responsive release of AZD from Gel S/AZD potently induces the growth arrest and apoptosis of cervical cancer cells by downregulating the expression level of AURKB downstream protein phospho‐histone H3 (pH3). In vivo studies demonstrate that compared with free AZD, Gel S/AZD shows a superior tumor suppressive effect in orthotropic cervical tumor models. It is envisioned that the Gel S/AZD might be applied in clinic cervical cancer treatment in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is a highly prevalent and aggressive malignancy, and timely diagnosis of ESCC contributes to an increased cancer survival rate. However, current detection methods for ESCC mainly rely on endoscopic examination, limited by a relatively low participation rate. Herein, ferric‐particle‐enhanced laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (FPELDI MS) is utilized to record the serum metabolic fingerprints (SMFs) from a retrospective cohort (523 non‐ESCC participants and 462 ESCC patients) to build diagnostic models toward ESCC. The PFELDI MS achieved high speed (≈30 s per sample), desirable reproducibility (coefficients of variation < 15%), and high throughput (985 samples with ≈124 200 data points for each spectrum). Desirable diagnostic performance with area‐under‐the‐curves (AUCs) of 0.925–0.966 is obtained through machine learning of SMFs. Further, a metabolic biomarker panel is constructed, exhibiting superior diagnostic sensitivity (72.2–79.4%, p < 0.05) as compared with clinical protein biomarker tests (4.3–22.9%). Notably, the biomarker panel afforded an AUC of 0.844 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.806–0.880) toward early ESCC diagnosis. This work highlighted the potential of metabolic analysis for accurate screening and early detection of ESCC and offered insights into the metabolic characterization of diseases including but not limited to ESCC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perovskite solar cell (PSC) has the benefits of flexibility, inexpensiveness, and high efficiency, and has important prospective applications. However, serious optical losing and low solar energy-utilizing efficiency remain a challenge for the ultra-thin PSCs because of the interface reflection of traditional planar structure. In this study, a hierarchical pore structure with a confined resonant mode is introduced and optimized by electromagnetic theory to improve the solar energy absorbing and utilizing efficiency of ultra-thin PSCs. The large pores in the top layer that support a whispering gallery mode can focus and guide the incident light into the solar cell. The small pores in the bottom layer enable backward scattering of the unabsorbed light and can improve the effective absorption of active layer. The finite-difference time-domain method is employed to optimize the geometric parameters of hierarchical pore structure to improve the light absorption of PSCs. The proposed resonant hierarchical pore structure can greatly improve sunlight absorption of ultra-thin PSCs, and the effective light absorption and photocurrent of PSCs with a hierarchical pore structure is 20.7% higher than that of PSCs with traditional planar structure. This work can offer a beneficial guideline for improving solar energy utilizing efficiency of various thin-film solar cells.