Search

High winds are a type of catastrophic weather characterized by wind speeds over 10.8 m·s−1, occurring in all seasons, and have become more frequent, impacting crop growth, agricultural production and quality of life. It is crucial to understand the spatial and temporal distribution patterns of high winds, as well as their speed and other characteristics, for logical planning of agricultural production and the creation of disaster resilience measures. This study applied the climate tendency, accumulative anomalies, theory of run, Mann–Kendall trend and Theil–Sen median to analyse the spatial and temporal distribution characteristics of the average wind speed and high wind days in Jilin Province, the probability of occurrence of high winds of various magnitudes in different eras, and the gale concentration degree (GCD) throughout Jilin Province for a total of 40 years from 1982 to 2021. The average wind speed and number of high wind days in Jilin Province have decreased over the past 40 years, and this trend has slowed over time. The average GCD in Jilin Province has shown an increasing trend over the last 40 years, with the average GCD being highest in Liouhe and lowest in Linjiang. In general, level six high winds were the main wind hazard level in Jilin Province, with the highest frequency occurring in different seasons and decades. In addition, the occurrence of high wind days is affected by global climate change and different underlying surfaces, which leads to maize and yield reduction. Research on the spatiotemporal distribution of high winds can provide important suggestions for the prevention and management of high wind disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scalable fabrication of spherical particles at both the micro- and nanoscales is of significant importance for applications spanning optical devices, electronics, targeted drug delivery, biodevices, sensors, and cosmetics. However, current top-down and bottom-up fabrication methods are unable to provide the full spectrum of uniformly sized, well-ordered, and high-quality spheres due to their inherent restrictions. Here, a generic, scalable, and precisely controllable fabrication method is demonstrated for generating spherical particles in a full range of diameters from microscale to nanoscale. This method begins with a macroscopic composite multimaterial solid-state preform drawn into a fiber that defines precisely the initial conditions for the process. It is then followed by CO2 laser heating to enable the transformation from a continuous fiber core into a series of homogeneous spheres via Plateau-Rayleigh capillary instability inside the fiber. This physical breakup method applies to a wide range of functional materials with different melting temperatures from 400 to 2400 K and 10 orders of difference in fiber core/cladding viscosity ratio. Furthermore, an ordered array of silicon-based whispering-gallery mode resonators with the Q factor as high as 7.1 × 105 is achieved, owing to the process induced ultrasmooth surface and highly crystalline nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of soft electronics and soft fiber devices has significantly advanced flexible and wearable technology. However, they still face the risk of damage when exposed to sharp objects in real‐life applications. Taking inspiration from nature, self‐healable materials that can restore their physical properties after external damage offer a solution to this problem. Nevertheless, large‐scale production of self‐healable fibers is currently constrained. To address this limitation, this study leverages the thermal drawing technique to create elastic and stretchable self‐healable thermoplastic polyurethane (STPU) fibers, enabling cost‐effective mass production of such functional fibers. Furthermore, despite substantial research into the mechanisms of self‐healable materials, quantifying their healing speed and time poses a persistent challenge. Thus, transmission spectra are employed as a monitoring tool to observe the real‐time self‐healing process, facilitating an in‐depth investigation into the healing kinetics and efficiency. The versatility of the fabricated self‐healable fiber extends to its ability to be doped with a wide range of functional materials, including dye molecules and magnetic microparticles, which enables modular assembly to develop distributed strain sensors and soft actuators. These achievements highlight the potential applications of self‐healable fibers that seamlessly integrate with daily lives and open up new possibilities in various industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the population ages, the worldwide prevalence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) as the most common dementia in the elderly is increasing dramatically. However, a long‐term challenge is to achieve rapid and accurate early diagnosis of AD by detecting hallmarks such as amyloid beta (Aβ42). Here, a multi‐channel microfluidic‐based plasmonic fiber‐optic biosensing platform is established for simultaneous detection and differentiation of multiple AD biomarkers. The platform is based on a gold‐coated, highly‐tilted fiber Bragg grating (TFBG) and a custom‐developed microfluidics. TFBG excites a high‐density, narrow‐cladding‐mode spectral comb that overlaps with the broad absorption of surface plasmons for high‐precision interrogation, enabling ultrasensitive monitoring of analytes. In situ detection and in‐parallel discrimination of different forms of Aβ42 in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) are successfully demonstrated with a detection of limit in the range of ≈30–170 pg mL−1, which is one order of magnitude below the clinical cut‐off level in AD onset, providing high detection sensitivity for early diagnosis of AD. The integration of the TFBG sensor with multi‐channel microfluidics enables simultaneous detection of multiple biomarkers using sub‐µL sample volumes, as well as combining initial binding rate and real‐time response time to differentiate between multiple biomarkers in terms of binding kinetics. With the advantages of multi‐parameter, low consumption, and highly sensitive detection, the sensor represents an urgently needed potentials for large‐scale diagnosis of diseases at early stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrates are well known for their supreme electromagnetic enhancements and ultrahigh sensitivity in detecting molecules at low concentrations. However, large‐area quasi‐uniform SERS substrates are difficult to achieve by standard top‐down nanofabrication techniques, resulting in fluctuant SERS responses and unwanted fluorescence interferences, which severely limit their performances in practical applications. To tackle these challenges, a large‐scale quasi‐uniform hybrid graphene fragmented‐gold substrate with stable and reproducible SERS readouts as well as large enhancement factors over an ultrawideband spectrum is developed. The hybrid substrate is fabricated via cold‐etching through a controllable break up of a thin gold film followed by a graphene transfer. The stimulated localized surface plasmons interact strongly with the graphene layer, leading to spectrally and spatially modified graphene‐mediated surface enhanced Raman scattering (GSERS) responses. The perfect monolayer graphene of the GSERS substrate prevents adsorbates from the atmosphere and direct contact between bonded molecules and gold, thus reducing the catalytic activity of gold and producing clean, stable, and reproducible molecular Raman signals. The easy‐fabricated hybrid GSERS substrate not only provides a powerful platform to collect robust molecular Raman spectra but also shows great potentials for future mass production of high‐performance nanophotonic devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A scalable and precisely controllable in‐fiber fabrication method, described by Lei Wei and co‐workers in article number 1703245, produces uniformly‐sized, high‐quality, and globally ordered spherical particles in a full spectrum of diameters from micro‐ to nano‐scale. Harnessing a fluid instability phenomenon in fiber drawing achieves spherical particles from a variety of materials with disparate optical, electronic, and thermoelectric properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maize is susceptible to drought and low temperatures. In recent years, drought, low temperatures, and their composite events have often occurred during the growth period of maize, causing a huge impact. In this study, maize in the Songliao Plain was used as the research object. Based on the crop water surplus deficit index (CWSDI) and heat index (F(T)), combined with the Theil–Sen median and Mann–Kendall tests (Sen–MK) and empirical orthogonal function (EOF), the temporal trends and spatial patterns of drought and low temperatures in different growth periods of maize were obtained. Copula modelling was used to analyse the joint probability distribution and return period of drought and low temperatures. The results showed that the temporal variation trend of the CWSDI was significantly different at different growth periods of maize, and there were different trends and spatial modal distributions. However, the temporal variation trend of F(T) was similar, showing a downward trend over the entire region. There was no obvious asymmetry or skew‐dependent structure in the distribution of concurrent events of drought and low temperature; however, the joint probability contours of different growth periods were biased to the upper left. The recurrence period of drought and low‐temperature concurrent events was within 2 years, and the recurrence period was basically between 2 and 5 years, with a reduction in drought or low temperatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by nature, various self‐healing materials that can recover their physical properties after external damage have been developed. Recently, self‐healing materials have been widely used in electronic devices for improving durability and protecting the devices from failure during operation. Moreover, self‐healing materials can integrate many other intriguing properties of biological systems, such as stretchability, mechanical toughness, adhesion, and structural coloration, providing additional fascinating experiences. All of these inspirations have attracted extensive research on bioinspired self‐healing soft electronics. This review presents a detailed discussion on bioinspired self‐healing soft electronics. Firstly, two main healing mechanisms are introduced. Then, four categories of self‐healing materials in soft electronics, including insulators, semiconductors, electronic conductors, and ionic conductors, are reviewed, and their functions, working principles, and applications are summarized. Finally, human‐inspired self‐healing materials and animal‐inspired self‐healing materials as well as their applications, such as organic field‐effect transistors (OFETs), pressure sensors, strain sensors, chemical sensors, triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), and soft actuators, are introduced. This cutting‐edge and promising field is believed to stimulate more excellent cross‐discipline works in material science, flexible electronics, and novel sensors, accelerating the development of applications in human motion monitoring, environmental sensing, information transmission, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

www. advancedscience. comVol. 11 • No. 24 • June 26 • 2024 [Extracted from the article]

www. advancedscience. comVol. 11 • No. 24 • June 26 • 2024 [Extracted from the article]

Abstract: Advances in functional fabrics enable the realization of wearable devices in the form factor of fibers that can be seamlessly adapted in our daily lives. For mechanical‐related sensing and power generation, piezoelectric materials are particularly favorable because they can convert mechanical shape changes into electric outputs. Electrospinning is a widely applied technique to produce extended length of fiber‐shaped piezoelectric devices. However, this versatile process normally results in randomly distributed fibers with poor electrical properties and limited response to mechanical stimuli. Here, a stretching‐induced alignment method is demonstrated to achieve highly oriented electrospun poly[(vinylidenefluoride‐co‐trifluoroethylene] P(VDF‐TrFE) fibers on a large scale. These globally aligned electrospun P(VDF‐TrFE) fibers exhibit an enhanced piezoelectric property and high mechanical endurance. Using this simple stretching method, a high average output voltage of 80% aligned electrospun P(VDF‐TrFE) fibers is 84.96 mV, about 266% of their original randomly distributed counterpart. Furthermore, when woven into an outfit, the aligned electrospun P(VDF‐TrFE) fiber bundle can work both individually and combined to monitor body gestures including angles of elbow bending and directions of a swinging arm, which may lead to the further development of motion‐tracking technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]