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EMT dysfunction is a dominant mechanisms of hypospadias. Thus, identification of EMT‐related lncRNAs based on transcriptome sequencing data of hypospadias might provide novel molecular markers and therapeutic targets for hypospadias. First, the microarray data related to hypospadias were downloaded from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). Besides, the differentially expressed lncRNAs and messenger RNAs (mRNAs) related to EMT were screened to construct lncRNA‐mRNA co‐expression interaction pairs. In addition, the microRNA (miRNA) prediction analysis was performed through bioinformatics methods to construct a ceRNA network. Moreover, function prediction and function enrichment and pathway analyses were also performed. Finally, the core EMT‐related lncRNAs were verified based on mRNA expression changes and cell functions. A total of 6 EMT‐related lncRNAs were identified and 123 mRNA‐lncRNA co‐expression interaction pairs were screened in this study. Additionally, a ceRNA regulatory network comprising 17 mRNAs, 4 lncRNAs, and 28 miRNAs was constructed based on the prediction of hypospadias‐related miRNAs. The validation results of the dataset GSE121712 revealed that only BEX1 was positively correlated with the expression of the lncRNA GNAS‐AS1 (r = 0.874, P < 0.01), both of which had high expression. The cell experiment results demonstrated that interfering with the expression of GNAS‐AS1 significantly promoted the proliferation, migration, and EMT of cells. Importantly, it was confirmed that GNAS‐AS1 can serve as a ceRNA and play an important role in the EMT of hypospadias. Hence, it may be considered as a potential target in the treatment of this disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heterogeneous catalysts for catalytic ozonation are elaborately designed with commendable intrinsic activity, while their industrial applications are limited by inadequate mass transfer of ozone (O3). In this work, it is demonstrated that engineering the surface aerophilicity of heterogeneous catalyst enables fast mass transfer of O3 reactant, giving rise to much enhanced catalytic ozonation performance. Taking active 4A zeolite catalyst as an example, the aerophilicity of spherical 4A zeolite can be greatly enhanced by coating polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) with low surface energy, and the optimized sample exhibits a 99.5% removal of atrazine (ATZ) within 20 min (corresponding to a k of 0.269 min−1), much better than 4A zeolite without surface aerophilicity engineering (k≈0.156 min−1). The PTFE coating does not change the ozone activation mechanism and degradation pathways for ATZ, further demonstrating that the enhanced ozonation activity is attributed to the enhanced mass transfer process. In addition, the general applicability of this surface aerophilicity and the potential ozonation application for industrial wastewater treatment are both demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designing efficient and bifunctional electrocatalysts for water splitting conforms to the concept of energy conservation and emission reduction but remains challenging now. Herein, the fabrication of a heterostructure by anchoring cobalt‐polyoxometalates (Co‐POM) on NiFe layered double hydroxide (NiFe‐LDH) nanoplates in situ on nickel foam (NF) is first reported (Co‐POM@LDH/NF). The surface area, electron transfer ability, and stability of the heterostructure are increased due to the synergistic effect between Co‐POM and NiFe‐LDH. Particularly, Co‐POM@LDH/NF can deliver a current density of 100 mA cm−2 with an overpotential of only 220 mV for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and 226 mV for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) in 1.0 m KOH electrolytes. Impressively, the outstanding stability of Co‐POMs in heterostructures is verified by the experimental observations after electrolysis, indicating the successful construction of stable POMs‐based heterogeneous electrocatalysts. More attractively, the electrolyzer composed by Co‐POM@LDH/NF as anode and cathode shows a much lower operating voltage of 1.51 V at the current density of 10 mA cm−2 for overall water splitting. This study provides a feasible and extensible idea for the design of the POM‐based heterostructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This study deals with the state observer design for a class of linear time‐delay distributed parameter systems (DPSs) modeled by a parabolic partial differential equation (PDE) via mobile sensors. Initially, under the assumption that the spatial domain is decomposed into multiple subdomains according to the number of mobile sensors, the estimation scheme including a state observer and the guidance of mobile sensors is proposed for the linear time‐delay DPS. Then, by using Lyapunov direct technique and the projection modification algorithm, a design of the state observer plus mobile sensor guidance laws is developed, such that the resulting state estimation error system is exponentially stable and the mobile sensor guidance can improve the transient response of state estimation error. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electrochemical hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) with cost‐effectiveness, high performance, and repeatable scale‐up production hold promises for large‐scale green hydrogen generation technology. Herein, a convenient method for scaling up Cu2S@NiS@Ni/NiMo electrocatalysts on Cu foam with high geometric area over 100 cm2 is presented. The hybrid electrode exhibits high hydrogen evolution activity with 190 and 250 mV overpotential at 1000 mA cm−2 and superior stability with negligible overpotential loss after over 2000 h at 500 mA cm−2 under steady‐state conditions in both artificial seawater and real seawater. Detailed characterizations and simulations demonstrate that high intrinsic activity resulting from the unique boundary interface, enhance mass transport resulting from superaerophobic nanoarray architecture, and corrosion resistance resulting from polyanion‐rich passivating layers together lead to the outstanding performance. The practicability is also demonstrated in an alkaline seawater electrolyzer coupling with the hybrid electrode and stable commercial anode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reuse of powdered activated carbon (PAC) vitally determines the economics and security of the PAC‐based adsorption process, while state‐of‐the‐art PAC regeneration technologies are usually unsatisfactory. Here, it is demonstrated that isolated Fe sites anchored on commercial PAC enable fast H2O2 activation to produce Fe‐based reactive oxygen species for highly efficient PAC regeneration at room temperature. Taking rhodamine B as a representative pollutant, PAC decorated with isolated Fe sites realize H2O2 based regeneration with negligible adsorption capacity degradation for 10 cycles. Moreover, in terms of the PAC loss rate, this technology is greatly superior to traditional Fenton‐based regeneration technology. Further operando experiments and theoretical calculations reveal that the high regeneration performance can be attributed to the isolated HOFeO motifs, which activate H2O2 via a nonradical reaction pathway. These findings provide a very promising strategy toward reducing the cost of H2O2‐based PAC regeneration technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seawater electrolysis to produce hydrogen is a critical technology in marine energy projects; however, the severe anode corrosion caused by the highly concentrated chloride is a key issue should be addressed. In this work, we discover that the addition of sulfate in electrolyte can effectively retard the corrosion of chloride ions to the anode. We take nickel foam as the example and observe that the addition of sulfate can greatly improve the corrosion resistance, resulting in prolonged operating stability. Theoretical simulations and in situ experiments both demonstrate that sulfate anions can be preferentially adsorbed on anode surface to form a negative charge layer, which repulses the chloride ions away from the anode by electrostatic repulsion. The repulsive effect of the adsorbed sulfate is also applicable in highly‐active catalyst (nickel iron layered double hydroxide) on nickel foam, which shows ca. 5 times stability of that in traditional electrolyte. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) are key processes in various renewable-energy technologies and call for high-performance bifunctional ORR/OER electrocatalysts. In this study, a highly efficient bifunctional oxygen catalyst, which was made of bamboo-like nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes with embedded cobalt nanoparticles (Co@NCNTs), was fabricated by a one-step pyrolysis route. Systematic electrochemical results demonstrated that the optimized electrocatalyst only needed a small potential hysteresis of about 0.834 V to achieve 1 mA cm−2 ORR current and 10 mA cm−2 OER current, and simultaneously gave superior stability and methanol tolerance to those of commercial metal catalysts. The major factors that influenced the bifunctional catalyst performance of Co@NCNTs are discussed, among which the nitrogen chemical state and metal element play important roles. Moreover, the catalyst showed good activity and stability in rechargeable zinc-air batteries, which indicated their potential applications in metal-air batteries, fuel cells, and water-splitting devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Layered double hydroxides (LDHs) are a family of high-profile layer materials with tunable metal species and interlayer spacing, and herein the LDHs are first investigated as bifunctional electrocatalysts. It is found that trinary LDH containing nickel, cobalt, and iron (NiCoFe-LDH) shows a reasonable bifunctional performance, while exploiting a preoxidation treatment can significantly enhance both oxygen reduction reaction and oxygen evolution reaction activity. This phenomenon is attributed to the partial conversion of Co2+ to Co3+ state in the preoxidation step, which stimulates the charge transfer to the catalyst surface. The practical application of the optimized material is demonstrated with a small potential hysteresis (800 mV for a reversible current density of 20 mA cm−2) as well as a high stability, exceeding the performances of noble metal catalysts (commercial Pt/C and Ir/C). The combination of the electrochemical metrics and the facile and cost-effective synthesis endows the trinary LDH as a promising bifunctional catalyst for a variety of applications, such as next-generation regenerative fuel cells or metal-air batteries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The morphology and phase transformation of CoAl layered double hydroxide (denoted CAL) nanoplates are systematically investigated in highly concentrated basic solution. Characterization results reveal that this is a time-dependent process, in which CALs are gradually converted to β-Co(OH)2 and CoOOH, and the structure becomes increasingly porous. This process could be caused by the dissolution of the Al part of CoAl LDHs, recrystallization of the Co part, and subsequent oxidation of Co. It is found that the pseudocapacitive performance of the products vary with the immersion time. CALs already show a reasonable performance, whereas short-term treatment would lead to the enhanced capacitance of 1123 F g−1 with both remarkable rate capability and stability. However, the formation of CoOOH will significantly degrade the supercapacitive performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A pine-shaped Pt nanostructured electrode with under-water superaerophobicity for ultrahigh and steady hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) performance is successfully fabricated by a facile and easily scalable electrodeposition technique. Due to the lower bubble adhesive force (11.5 ± 1.2 μN), the higher bubble contact angle (161.3° ± 3.4°) in aqueous solution, and the smaller size of bubbles release for pine-shaped Pt nanostructured electrode, the incomparable under-water superaerophobicity for final repellence of bubbles from submerged surface with ease, is successfully achieved, compared to that for nanosphere electrode and for Pt flat electrode. With the merits of superior under-water superaerophobicity and excellent nanoarray morphology, pine-shaped Pt nanostructured electrode with the ultrahigh electrocatalytic HER performance, excellent durability, no obvious current fluctuation, and dramatically fast current density increase at overpotential range (3.85 mA mV−1, 2.55 and 13.75 times higher than that for nanosphere electrode and for Pt flat electrode, respectively), is obtained, much superior to Pt nanosphere and flat electrodes. The successful introduction of under-water superaerophobicity to in-time repel as-formed H2 bubbles may open up a new pathway for designing more efficient electrocatalysts with potentially practical utilization in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]