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Thermoresponsive microgels are a kind of soft and wet material exhibiting various potential applications such as smart windows. As a concept of proof, poly(N‐isopropylacrylamide) based thermoresponsive microgel shows excellent promise in thermochoromic smart windows. While relatively expensive monomers lead to an unacceptable cost when they are used as building materials. In this work, efforts are made to exploration of an alternative for poly(N‐isopropylacrylamide) reducing the cost of thermoresponsive microgels. For this purpose, industrial chemicals acrylamide (AM) and diacetone acrylamide (DAAM) are employed to synthesize microgels through free radical precipitation polymerization. Although both homopolymers of acrylamide and diacetone acrylamide are not thermoresponsive. Their copolymers exhibit typical lower solution temperature solution (LCST) behaviors, which confirm the feasibility of the envisaged. Further, the influence of synthetic conditions including monomer ratio, concentration of surfactant, and polymerization temperature, on the size and responsive temperature of microgels is investigated. Ultimately, cost‐effective thermoresponsive microgels are prepared with adjustable diameters from 1.6 to 4.5 µm and responsive temperature from 19.3 to ≈70.0 °C. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microbiome has emerged as a promising indicator or predictor of human diseases. However, previous studies have typically labeled each specimen as either healthy or with a specific disease, ignoring prevalence of complications or comorbidities in actual cohorts, which may confound the microbial–disease associations. For instance, a patient may suffer from multiple diseases, making it challenging to detect their health status accurately. Furthermore, host phenotypes like physiological characteristics and lifestyles can alter microbiome structure, but such information has not yet been fully utilized in data models. To address these issues, a highly explainable deep learning (DL) method called Meta‐Spec is proposed. Using a deep neural network (DNN)‐based approach, it encodes and embeds refined host variables with microbiome features, enabling the detection of multiple diseases simultaneously. Experiments show that Meta‐Spec outperforms regular machine learning (ML) strategies for multilabel disease screening in several cohorts. More importantly, Meta‐Spec successfully detects comorbidities that are often missed by other approaches. In addition, for its high interpretability, Meta‐Spec captures key factors that shape disease patterns from host variables and microbes. Hence, these efforts improve the feasibility and sensitivity of microbiome‐based disease screening in practical scenarios, representing a significant step toward personalized medicine and better health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aqueous zinc ion batteries have been considered as the prominent candidate in the next‐generation batteries for its low cost, safety and high theoretical capacity. Nonetheless, formation of zinc dendrites and side reactions at the electrode/electrolyte interface during the zinc plating/stripping process affect the cycling reversibility of the zinc anode. Regulation of the zinc plating/stripping process and realizing a highly reversible zinc anode is a great challenge. Herein, we applied a simple and effective approach of controlled‐current zinc pre‐deposition at copper mesh. At the current density of 40 mA cm−2, where the electron/ion transfers are both continuous and balanced, the Zn@CM‐40 electrode with the (002) crystal plane orientation and the compactly aligned platelet morphology was successfully obtained. Compared with the zinc foil, the Zn@CM‐40 exhibits greatly enhanced reversibility in the repeated plating/stripping (850 h at 1 mA cm−2) for the symmetric battery test. A series of characterization techniques including electrochemical analyses, XRD, SEM and optical microscopy observation, were used to demonstrate the correlation between the structure of pre‐deposited zinc layer and the cycling stability. The COSMOL Multiphysics modeling demonstrates a more uniform electric field distribution in the Zn@CM than the zinc foil due to the aligned platelet morphology. Furthermore, the significant improvement is also achieved in a Zn||MnO2 full battery with a high capacity‐retention (87% vs 47.8%). This study demonstrates that controlled‐current electrodeposition represents an important strategy to regulate the crystal plane orientation and the morphology of the pre‐deposited zinc layer, hence leading to the highly reversible and dendrite‐free zinc anode for high‐performance zinc ion batteries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]