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Abstract Immunotherapy has emerged as a highly effective treatment for various tumors. However, the variable response rates associated with current immunotherapies often restrict their beneficial impact on a subset of patients. Therefore, more effective treatment approaches that can broaden the scope of therapeutic benefits to a larger patient population are urgently needed. Studies have shown that some parasites and their products, for example, Plasmodium, Toxoplasma, Trypanosoma, and Echinococcus, can effectively transform "cold" tumors into "hot" battlefields and reshape the tumor microenvironment, thereby stimulating innate and adaptive antitumor immune responses. These parasitic infections not only achieve the functional reversal of innate immune cells, such as neutrophils, macrophages, myeloid-derived suppressor cells, regulatory T cells, and dendritic cells, in tumors but also successfully activate CD4+/CD8+ T cells and even B cells to produce antibodies, ultimately resulting in an antitumor-specific immune response and antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity. Animal studies have confirmed these findings. This review discusses the abovementioned content and the challenges faced in the future clinical application of antitumor treatment strategies based on parasitic infections. With the potential of these parasites and their byproducts to function as anticancer agents, we anticipate that further investigations in this field could yield significant advancements in cancer treatment.

BackgroundThe most effective approach to managing Alzheimer's disease (AD) lies in identifying reliable biomarkers for AD to forecast the disease in advance, followed by timely early intervention for patients.MethodsTranscriptomic data on peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from patients with AD and the control group were collected, and preliminary data processing was completed using standardized analytical methods. PBMCs were initially segmented into distinct subpopulations, and the divisions were progressively refined until the most significantly altered cell populations were identified. A combination of high-dimensional weighted gene co-expression analysis (hdWGCNA), cellular communication, pseudotime analysis, and single-cell regulatory network inference and clustering (SCENIC) analysis was used to conduct single-cell transcriptomics analysis and identify key gene modules from them. Genes were screened using machine learning (ML) in the key gene modules, and internal and external dataset validations were performed using multiple ML methods to test predictive performance. Finally, bidirectional Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis, regional linkage analysis, and the Steiger test were employed to analyze the key gene.ResultA significant decrease in non-classical monocytes was detected in PMBC of AD patients. Subsequent analyses revealed the inherent connection of non-classical monocytes to AD, and the NAP1L1 gene identified within its gene module appeared to exhibit some association with AD as well.ConclusionThe NAP1L1 gene is a potential predictive biomarker for AD.

Abstract Laser powder-bed fusion (L-PBF) additive manufacturing presents ample opportunities to produce net-shape parts. The complex laser-powder interactions result in high cooling rates that often lead to unique microstructures and excellent mechanical properties. Refractory high-entropy alloys show great potential for high-temperature applications but are notoriously difficult to process by additive processes due to their sensitivity to cracking and defects, such as un-melted powders and keyholes. Here, we present a method based on a normalized model-based processing diagram to achieve a nearly defect-free TiZrNbTa alloy via in-situ alloying of elemental powders during L-PBF. Compared to its as-cast counterpart, the as-printed TiZrNbTa exhibits comparable mechanical properties but with enhanced elastic isotropy. This method has good potential for other refractory alloy systems based on in-situ alloying of elemental powders, thereby creating new opportunities to rapidly expand the collection of processable refractory materials via L-PBF.

Abstract This paper proposes a 256‐bit speed‐area‐efficient hardware elliptic curve point‐multiplication engine (ECPM‐engine) in GF(p) over generic Weierstrass curves, which is optimized by a new speed‐area‐efficient radix‐64 Montgomery modular multiplication (R64MMM) and a novel Montgomery ladder scheduling. The R64MMM calls one 129‐bit adder and one (64x64+129)‐bit multiply‐accumulator (64‐129‐MAC) in parallel to make a trade‐off between speed and area. The novel Montgomery ladder scheduling is used to improve the utilization of MAC in ECPM operation. In this ECPM‐engine, both MAC utilization in R64MMM operations and R64MMM utilization in ECPM operations are close to 100%. The result shows that the proposed ECPM‐engine consumes 72k gates when the clock frequency is 714 MHz with a 90 nm standard cell library, and it computes one 256‐bit ECPM in 0.14 ms.

The drying is an important part of the processing of Ziziphi Spinosae Semen (ZSS) in the producing area and has an important effect on the quality of ZSS. In this study, an integrated 1H nuclear magnetic resonance and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry method was developed to reveal the effects of vacuum drying (VD), freeze-drying (FD), and hot air drying (HAD) method on the chemical composition and antioxidant activity of ZSS. Then the effects of different drying methods on the quality of ZSS were investigated. The results showed that the VD produced high contents of 6 fatty acids (palmitic acid, linoleic acid, oleinic acid, stearic acid, squalene, and γ-tocopherol), 7 amino acids (leucine, isoleucine, valine, alanine, γ-aminobutyric acid, glutamine, and threonine), and 2 carbohydrates (α-glucose and β-glucose), but exhibited weak DPPH radical scavenging activity, ABTS cation radical scavenging activity and FRAP antioxidant activity (FD>VD>HAD). However, FD gave an improved secondary metabolite profile retention, such as jujuboside A, betulinic acid, magnoflorine, and 6ʹʹʹ-feruloylspinosin, thereby resulting in a superior DPPH radical scavenging activity (IC50: 2.82±0.15 mg/mL), ABTS cation radical scavenging activity (IC50: 0.86±0.02 mg/mL) and FRAP antioxidant activity (58.91±2.87 mg VC/g). Thus, FD was a suitable drying method to maximize the product quality retention of ZSS. This study can provide a scientific reference for the establishment of reasonable processing technical specifications of ZSS and provide an experimental basis for improving the quality of ZSS.

In recent years, public sports services have attracted great attention owing to their increasingly important role in public health. However, effective evaluation metrics measuring the efficiency of such services from a spatial perspective (e.g., accessibility and distribution of sports parks) remain absent. Indeed, most designs of sports park distribution in urban areas did not consider practical factors such as local road networks, population distribution, and resident preference, resulting in low utilization rates of these parks. In this study, a spatial accessibility-based method is proposed for evaluation of the distributions of sports parks. As a demonstration, the distribution of sports parks in the central urban area of Changsha, China was investigated using the proposed method by the GIS network analysis. Additionally, optimization strategies for sports park distribution (in terms of spatial distribution and overall accessibility) were developed by using spatial syntax.

Abstract Red and near‐infrared (NIR) organic light‐emitting diodes (OLED) have gained remarkable interest due to their numerous applications. However, the construction of highly emissive emitters is hampered by the energy‐gap law and aggregation‐caused quenching (ACQ) effect. Whereas, aggregation‐induced emission (AIE) materials could avoid the undesirable ACQ effect and emit bright light in aggregated state, which is one class of the most promising materials to fabricate high‐performance OLED with a high external quantum efficiency and low efficiency roll‐off. This review summarizes recent advances in red and NIR OLED with AIE property, including the traditional fluorescence, thermally activated delayed fluorescence, and hybridized local and charge transfer compounds. Meanwhile, the emphasis attention is paid to the molecular design principles, as well as the molecular structure‐photophysical characteristics. We also briefly further outlook the challenges and perspective of red and NIR AIE luminogens.

How to improve the yield of crops has always been the focus of breeding research. Due to the population growth and global climate change, the demand for food has increased sharply, which has brought great challenges to agricultural production. In order to make up for the limitation of global cultivated land area, it is necessary to further improve the output of crops. Photosynthesis is the main source of plant assimilate accumulation, which has a profound impact on the formation of its yield. This review focuses on the cultivation of high light efficiency plants, introduces the main technical means and research progress in improving the photosynthetic efficiency of plants, and discusses the main problems and difficulties faced by the cultivation of high light efficiency plants. At the same time, in view of the frequent occurrence of high-temperature disasters caused by global warming, which seriously threatened plant normal production, we reviewed the response mechanism of plants to heat stress, introduced the methods and strategies of how to cultivate heat tolerant crops, especially rice, and briefly reviewed the progress of heat tolerant research at present. Given big progress in these area, the era of cultivating smart rice with high light efficiency and heat tolerance has come of age.

In recent years, deep learning based crowd counting networks have achieved significant progress. However, most of them generate rough crowd density maps due to low-resolution features used for estimating crowd distribution, which affects the performance of crowd counting. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Attention Guided Network (HAGN) for crowd counting. We apply the first 13 layers of VGG-16 to extract base features. Then, the extracted features are processed by the Hierarchical Attention Mechanism (HAM), which guided the extracted features to enlarge step by step via our proposed attention guided branch. Finally, the outputs of HAM are fed to 1 × 1 convolutional layer for final crowd density estimation. Experiments are performed on ShanghaiTech and UCF-QNRF datasets, and our HAGN achieves promising performance compared with the other state-of-the-art methods on crowd counting and crowd localization, respectively.

The emergence, in recent decades, of an entirely new area of “Mitochondrial dynamics”, which consists principally of fission and fusion, reflects the recognition that mitochondria play a significant role in human tumorigenesis and response to therapeutics. Proteins that determine mitochondrial dynamics are referred to as “shaping proteins”. Marked heterogeneity has been observed in the response of tumor cells to chemotherapy, which is associated with imbalances in mitochondrial dynamics and function leading to adaptive and acquired resistance to chemotherapeutic agents. Therefore, targeting mitochondria-shaping proteins may prove to be a promising approach to treat chemotherapy resistant cancers. In this review, we summarize the alterations of mitochondrial dynamics in chemotherapeutic processing and the antitumor mechanisms by which chemotherapy drugs synergize with mitochondria-shaping proteins. These might shed light on new biomarkers for better prediction of cancer chemosensitivity and contribute to the exploitation of potent therapeutic strategies for the clinical treatment of cancers.

Conventional crystal growth models assume crystals grow into a structure-less liquid, even though liquid metals have shown evidence of structural ordering. Here, the authors show crystal growth can be influenced by the presence of thermodynamically unstable local structural order in the liquid.

Graph convolutional networks are widely used in recommendation tasks owing to their ability to learn user and item embeddings using collaborative signals from high-order neighborhoods. Most of the graph convolutional recommendation tasks in existing studies have specialized in modeling a single type of user–item interaction preference. Meanwhile, graph-convolution-network-based recommendation models are prone to over-smoothing problems when stacking increased numbers of layers. Therefore, in this study we propose a multi-behavior recommendation method based on graph transformer collaborative filtering. This method utilizes an unsupervised subgraph generation model that divides users with similar preferences and their interaction items into subgraphs. Furthermore, it fuses multi-headed attention layers with temporal coding strategies based on the user–item interaction graphs in the subgraphs such that the learned embeddings can reflect multiple user–item relationships and the potential for dynamic interactions. Finally, multi-behavior recommendation is performed by uniting multi-layer embedding representations. The experimental results on two real-world datasets show that the proposed method performs better than previously developed systems.

Prefabricated beam–column connections are the most vulnerable components of prefabricated buildings during earthquake events. The seismic performance of the beam–column connection is functional as the critical component plays a key role in structural safety. This study aimed to develop a novel hybrid prefabricated concrete (HPC) connection, combining with wet and dry connection techniques, to enhance the seismic performance of prefabricated concrete frames. A quasi-static experimental investigation was carried out to examine the seismic performance of the proposed connection. Two full-scale prefabricated connection specimens utilizing the proposed HPC connection and another code-defined monolithic prefabricated concrete (PC) connection were tested under cyclic loading, keeping the axial load on the column constant. The ductility, stiffness degradation, energy dissipation capacity, post-tensioned force, and residual displacement were obtained based on the experimental output. The results indicated that the HPC connection developed had high construction efficiency and better seismic performance than the conventional PC connection. The strength and energy dissipation capacity were significantly improved by up to 52% and 10%, respectively. The cracking and stiffness degradation were well-controlled.

Purely organic circularly polarized luminescent (CPL) materials have attracted much attention owing to their fascinating photophysical properties and potential applications in the fields of optical data storage, smart sensors/probers, high‐resolution 3D display, and so on. With the development of photophysical science, the emergence of some novel emission phenomena, such as thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) and room‐temperature phosphorescence (RTP), have become hot topics and enriched CPL materials. However, there is no systematic review that summarizes the recent development of chiral small organic molecules (SOMs) with TADF and RTP characters. In this minireview, the progress of purely organic CPL materials in the last 5 years is reviewed by categorizing into chiral fluorescence molecules, chiral TADF molecules, and chiral RTP molecules. Furthermore, the design strategy of chiral TADF emitters is discussed and the correlation between chirality and RTP properties is concluded.

Abstract Colloidal CsPbX3 (X = Br, Cl, and I) perovskite nanocrystals exhibit tunable bandgaps over the entire visible spectrum and high photoluminescence quantum yields in the green and red regions. However, the lack of highly efficient blue‐emitting perovskite nanocrystals limits their development for optoelectronic applications. Herein, neodymium (III) (Nd3+) doped CsPbBr3 nanocrystals are prepared through the ligand‐assisted reprecipitation method at room temperature with tunable photoemission from green to deep blue. A blue‐emitting nanocrystal with a central wavelength at 459 nm, an exceptionally high photoluminescence quantum yield of 90%, and a spectral width of 19 nm is achieved. First principles calculations reveal that the increase in photoluminescence quantum yield upon doping is driven by an enhancement of the exciton binding energy due to increased electron and hole effective masses and an increase in oscillator strength due to shortening of the PbBr bond. Putting these results together, an all‐perovskite white light‐emitting diode is successfully fabricated, demonstrating that B‐site composition engineering is a reliable strategy to further exploit the perovskite family for wider optoelectronic applications.

For the first time, electroplex emission is utilized to enhance the performance of nondoped blue organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). By decorating the twisted blue-emitting platform and adjusting the electronic structure, three molecules of 3Cz-Ph-CN, 3Cz-mPh-CN, and 3Ph-Cz-CN with a donor-acceptor structure are synthesized and investigated. When external voltage is applied, electroplex emission, which contributes to the emission performance of OLED, can be realized at the interface between the emitting layer and the electron-transporting layer. Accordingly, high external quantum efficiency of 18.1% can be achieved, while the emission wavelength of the device can be controlled in the blue region. Our results provide the possibility to enhance the performance of OLED through electroplex emission, in addition to the generally investigated thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF). Excitedly, when 3Ph-Cz-CN is used as host material in orange-emitting phosphorous OLEDs (PO-01 as the dopant), unprecedented high external quantum efficiency of 27.4% can also be achieved.

Due to the increased surface to volume ratios, topological nanomaterials can enhance contributions from the topological surface states in transport measurements, which is critical for device applications that exploit the topological properties. It is particularly important for topological semimetals in which bulk carriers are unavoidable to make them into nanostructures to reveal the nature of the topological surface states, such as the Fermi arcs or nodal lines. Here, we report the nanostructure synthesis of the recently discovered triple-point topological metal MoP by direct conversion of MoO3 nanostructures and study their transport properties. We observe that the initial size of the MoO3 templates critically determines the crystalline quality of the resulting MoP nanostructures: large MoO3 flakes lead to porous MoP flakes, while narrow MoO3 nanowires lead to MoP nanowires without pores. The size-dependent porosity observed in MoP nanostructures is attributed to the volume change during the conversion reaction and nanoscale confinement effects. For MoO3 nanowires with diameters less than 10 nm, the resulting MoP nanowires are single crystalline. The resistivity values of MoP nanostructures are higher than the reported values of MoP bulk crystals owing to the porous nature. However, despite the high porosity present in MoP flakes, the residual resistance ratio is ∼2 and the temperature-dependent resistivity curves do not show any strong surface or grain-boundary scattering. Demonstration of the facile synthesis of MoP nanostructures provides opportunities for careful investigations of the surface states in transport measurements and exploration of future electronic devices, including nanoscale interconnects.

Organic luminogens with persistent room temperature phosphorescence will find wide applications in optoelectronic devices and bioimaging, but they are still scarce. Here, the authors synthesize seven organic luminogens and investigate their different properties and potential imaging applications.

Crystallising a bulk metallic glass usually results in separate phases. Here, the authors use metallic glass nanorods to show that as the sample size approaches the nucleation scale lengths, the crystallization behavior is dictated by the lack of nuclei and nanorods crystallise into a single phase.

Layered black phosphorous has gained significant attention in the 2D materials community, and dynamical control of its bandgap is key to enable novel applications. Here, the authors demonstrate continuous electrical bandgap tuning using moderate displacement fields.

Pressure and temperature are powerful tools applied to perovskites to achieve recrystallization. Lamination, based on recrystallization of perovskites, avoids the limitations and improves the compatibility of materials and solvents in perovskite device architectures. In this work, we demonstrate tightly compacted perovskite laminates on flexible substrates via hot-pressing and investigate the effect of hot-pressing conditions on the lamination qualities and optical properties of perovskite laminates. The optimized laminates achieved at a temperature of 90 °C and a pressure of 10 MPa could sustain a horizontal pulling pressure of 636 kPa and a vertical pulling pressure of 71 kPa. Perovskite laminates exhibit increased crystallinity and a crystallization orientation preference to the (100) direction. The optical properties of laminated perovskites are almost identical to those of pristine perovskites, and the photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) survives the negative impact of thermal degradation. This work demonstrates a promising approach to physically laminating perovskite films, which may accelerate the development of roll-to-roll printed perovskite devices and perovskite tandem architectures in the future.

InxSn1−xTe is a time-reversal invariant candidate 3D topological superconductor derived from doping the topological crystalline insulator SnTe with indium. The ability to synthesize low-dimensional nanostructures of indium-doped SnTe is key for realizing the promise they hold in future spintronic and quantum information processing applications. But hitherto only bulk synthesized crystals and nanoplates have been used to study the superconducting properties. Here for the first time we synthesize InxSn1−xTe nanostructures including nanowires and nanoribbons, which show superconducting transitions. In some of the lower dimensional morphologies, we observe signs of more than one superconducting transition and the absence of complete superconductivity. We propose that material inhomogeneity, such as indium inhomogeneity and possible impurities from the metal catalyst, is amplified in the transport characteristics of the smaller nanostructures and is responsible for this mixed behavior. Our work represents the first demonstration of InxSn1−xTe nanowires with the onset of superconductivity, and points to the need for improving the material quality for future applications.

Raspberry-like structure, providing a high degree of symmetry and strong interparticle coupling, has received extensive attention from the community of functional material synthesis. Such structure constructed in the nanoscale using gold nanoparticles has broad applicability due to its tunable collective plasmon resonances, while the synthetic process with precise control of the morphology is critical in realizing its target functions. Here, we demonstrate a synthetic strategy of seed-mediated space-confined self-assembly using the virus-like silica (V-SiO2) nanoparticles as the templates, which can yield gold nanoraspberries (AuNRbs) with uniform size and controllable morphology. The spikes on V-SiO2 templates serve dual functions of providing more growth sites for gold nanoseeds and activating the space-confined effect for gold nanoparticles. AuNRbs with wide-range tunability of plasmon resonances from the visible to near infrared (NIR) region have been successfully synthesized, and how their geometric configurations affect their optical properties is thoroughly discussed. The close-packed AuNRbs have also demonstrated huge potential in Raman sensing due to their abundant “built-in” hotspots. This strategy offers a new route towards synthesizing high-quality AuNRbs with the capability of engineering the morphology to achieve target functions, which is highly desirable for a large number of applications.