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Autoimmune and inflammatory diseases place a huge burden on the healthcare system. Small molecule (SM) therapeutics provide much needed complementary treatment options for these diseases. This digest series highlights the latest progress in the discovery and development of safe and efficacious SMs to treat autoimmune and inflammatory diseases with each part representing a class of SMs, namely: 1) protein kinases; 2) nucleic acid-sensing pathways; and 3) soluble ligands and receptors on cell surfaces. In this first part of the series, the focus is on kinase inhibitors that emerged between 2018 and 2020, and which exhibit increased target and tissue selectivity with the aim of increasing their therapeutic index.

Maze robot is a kind of miniature autonomous mobile robot, which can find shortest path in an unknown environment. A novel maze robot is developed in the paper as well as its hardware architecture presented here. The triangle reflection distance measurement method is adopted to eliminate the influence of sunlight on distance measurement. Meanwhile, an improved flood algorithm for maze exploration is also proposed in the paper. Simulation and experimental results show that the efficiency of maze exploration is significantly improved.

Nucleic acid sensing pathways play an important role in the innate immune system, protecting hosts against infections. However, a large body of evidence supports a close association between aberrant activation of those pathways and autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Part II of the digest series on small molecule approaches to autoimmune and inflammatory diseases concentrates on recent advances with respect to small molecule antagonists or inhibitors of the nucleic acid sensing pathways, including endosomal TLRs, NLRP3 inflammasome and cGAS-STING.

The heterogeneous undercooling degree of interstitial-free steel (IF steel) on various substrates was measured through observing the recalescence phenomenon by sessile drop method at the oxygen partial pressure of 10−23 atm, where there was no obvious interaction between the steel and the substrate. The wetting behavior of liquid IF steel against different substrates was also studied during the sessile drop test. The results suggested that the undercooling degree increased with the increase of cooling rate, and the effective contact surface area between the liquid steel and the solid substrate could not fully explain the undercooling behavior of the designed cases as there is no interaction layer. Furthermore, a method to calculate the critical contact angle for IF steel against its substrate was developed in this study, which could be adapted to explain the undercooling variance of IF steel with the change of its substrate. The undercooling degree increased with the increase of the critical contact angle, and the critical contact angle was also improved with the increase of lattice disregistry.

In order to evaluate the operation effect of grid-side energy storage power station scientifically and reasonably, an evaluation method based on TOPSIS model is proposed. Firstly, a relatively perfect evaluation index system is established, including charge-discharge effect, energy efficiency and reliability. Secondly, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and entropy weight are used to calculate the subjective weight and objective weight of indicators respectively. Then TOPSIS model is set up to evaluate the actual operation effect of energy storage power station. At last, the actual operation data of an energy storage power station in Central China are analyzed. Rationality and effectiveness of the proposed index and evaluation method are verified by the results.

With the rapid development of integrated photonics, expensive and bulky commercial spectrometers force people to make more efforts to investigate high-performance, integrated and low-cost spectrometers. Spectrometers benefiting from the complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology have greatly enriched the applications of spectrum detection while devices based on optical fibers still have potential development room. Owing to the strong dependence of multimode interference on wavelength generated in a multimode fiber, probe signals of arbitrary spectra could be detected by a detector array integrated on the top and reconstructed by using a compressive sensing (CS) algorithm. The CS algorithm has been widely used in signal processing, which saves more computing storage and time but maintains the same precision. With the interference pattern system, our spectrometer based on a fiber taper achieves a spectral resolution of 20 pm (one order of magnitude better than commercial spectrometers) and a detection bandwidth of more than 200 nm on a device length of 1 mm. After optimizing the energy function, the spectral reconstruction results show excellent detection capability and metamerism effect superior to RGB cameras or human eyes, providing a significant role for portable multi-functional on-chip systems in future.

Because of the high voltage, high current and easy to be driven, IGBT become the optimal selection of the power convert system. As the improvement of power electronics, the voltage becomes higher and higher, such as high inverter, HVDC and Flexible HVDC system. The voltage should be dozens of kilo-volt. Single device cannot be used in these occasions. Thus, IGBTs for series connection is necessary.In the series connection of IGBTs, as the result of the different parameters and the delay of the drive signals, the main problem is unequal sharing of voltage respectively. The devices which withstand over voltage might be broken down and result in the fault of the whole circuit. Therefore， it is necessary to protect the over voltage of the IGBT.The method of active voltage clamping for the High-Voltage IGBTs for series connection is presented. The transient voltage suppressor(TVS) lied between the collector and gate of IGBT is adopted as active clamping circuit, and the clamping voltage value is decided by rated IGBT voltage and the working voltage. When turning of on the IGBT, TVS is broken down by over voltage, and the voltage between collector and emitter is clamped．

A new α-pyrone, nocapyrone S (1), together with five known compounds (2-6), were isolated from the deep-sea actinomycete Nocardiopsis dassonvillei subsp. dassonvillei DSM 43111(T). Their structures were determined by spectroscopic analyses. The absolute configuration of 1 was established by quantum approaches. Cytotoxic activity of 1 was evaluated against K562, MCF-7, SGC7901, A375, Hela, and HepG2 cell lines.