To develop more economical and efficient heavy metal adsorbents, natural bentonite was employed as a raw material, and triethoxyvinylsilane served as a grafting agent to achieve the grafting bonding of sodium polyacrylate and bentonite. Structural alterations in the modified bentonite were analyzed through thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The adsorption and desorption characteristics of SAPAS-Bentonite and raw bentonite were compared and tested under various conditions, including time, temperature, pH, and lead ion concentration. The adsorption and desorption properties of sodium polyacrylate-grafted bentonite (SAPAS-Bentonite) were compared under various conditions (time, temperature, pH, and lead ion concentration). The results revealed that the modified method successfully achieved nano-scale coating of bentonite particles with sodium polyacrylate, leading to an increase in the maximum adsorption capacity of lead ions by 47.5%, reaching 165.73 mg g. A greater adsorption affinity for lead ions was exhibited by the outer sodium polycarboxylate portion of SAPAS-Bentonite compared with the inner bentonite. The adsorption of internal bentonite was limited by blocking when the adsorption of sodium polyacrylate did not reach the upper limit. The adsorption isotherm shifted from the Langmuir monolayer characteristic of the original bentonite to the S-shaped isotherm, reflecting the sodium polycarboxylate properties of SAPAS-Bentonite. Both bentonites demonstrated strong retention capacity for lead, with SAPAS-Bentonite surpassing raw bentonite in performance. This study provides valuable insights into the potential of SAPAS-Bentonite in the treatment of heavy metal pollution.

As a photocatalyst with good prospects, TiO2 has the shortcomings of easy agglomeration and no catalytic performance under visible light. The purpose of the present study was to help solve these problems by employing muscovite as a carrier for N-doped TiO2 in a nanocomposite. The nanocomposites were prepared by a liquid precipitation-grinding method using muscovite as the matrix and urea as the nitrogen source. The crystal structures, chemical bonding, and micromorphology of the nanocomposites were analyzed by X-ray diffraction, infrared absorption spectrometry, and field emission scanning electron microscopy, respectively. Visible and ultraviolet (UV-Vis) light absorption of the nanocomposites was analyzed by solid ultraviolet diffuse reflectance spectroscopy. The photocatalytic effect of the nanocomposites was studied based on the degradation of rhodamine B (RhB) solution. The photocatalytic degradation product of RhB was detected by high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry, revealing that N-doping inhibits the growth of TiO2 nanoparticles. The photocatalytic performance of N-TiO2/muscovite composite nanomaterials decreased with increasing heat-treatment temperature. N-doped TiO2/muscovite nanocomposites that were heated at 400°C showed the best photocatalytic performance under visible-light illumination with an RhB degradation of 97%.

We investigate experimentally and theoretically the interactions between a cavitation bubble and a hemispherical pendant oil droplet immersed in water. In experiments, the cavitation bubble is generated by a focused laser pulse right below the pendant droplet with well-controlled bubble–wall distances and bubble–droplet size ratios. By high-speed imaging, four typical interactions are observed, namely: oil droplet rupture; water droplet entrapment; oil droplet large deformation; and oil droplet mild deformation. The bubble jetting at the end of collapse and the migration of the bubble centroid are particularly different in each bubble–droplet interaction. We propose theoretical models based on the method of images for calculating the Kelvin impulse and the anisotropy parameter which quantitatively reflects the migration of the bubble centroid at the end of the collapse. Finally, we explain that a combination of the Weber number and the anisotropy parameter determines the regimes of the bubble–droplet interactions.

Breast cancer is a high-risk disease with a high mortality rate among women. Chemotherapy plays an important role in the treatment of breast cancer. However, chemotherapy eventually results in tumours that are resistant to drugs. In recent years, many studies have revealed that the activation of Wnt/β-catenin signalling is crucial for the emergence and growth of breast tumours as well as the development of drug resistance. Additionally, drugs that target this pathway can reverse drug resistance in breast cancer therapy. Traditional Chinese medicine has the properties of multi-target and tenderness. Therefore, integrating traditional Chinese medicine and modern medicine into chemotherapy provides a new strategy for reversing the drug resistance of breast tumours. This paper mainly reviews the possible mechanism of Wnt/β-catenin in promoting the process of breast tumour drug resistance, and the progress of alkaloids extracted from traditional Chinese medicine in the targeting of this pathway in order to reverse the drug resistance of breast cancer.

Instrument delivery is critical part in vascular intervention surgery. Due to the soft-body structure of instruments, the relationship between manipulation commands and instrument motion is non-linear, making instrument delivery challenging and time-consuming. Reinforcement learning has the potential to learn manipulation skills and automate instrument delivery with enhanced success rates and reduced workload of physicians. However, due to the sample inefficiency when using high-dimensional images, existing reinforcement learning algorithms are limited on realistic vascular robotic systems. To alleviate this problem, this paper proposes discrete soft actor-critic with auto-encoder (DSAC-AE) that augments SAC-discrete with an auxiliary reconstruction task. The algorithm is applied with distributed sample collection and parameter update in a robot-assisted preclinical environment. Experimental results indicate that guidewire delivery can be automatically implemented after 50k sampling steps in less than 15 h, demonstrating the proposed algorithm has the great potential to learn manipulation skill for vascular robotic systems.

To address the shortcomings of existing methods for rotorcraft searching, positioning, tracking and landing on a ship at sea, a dual-channel LIDAR searching, positioning, tracking and landing system (DCLSPTLS) is proposed in this paper, which utilises the multi-pulse laser echoes accumulation method and the physical phenomenon that the laser reflectivity of the ship deck in the near-infrared band is four orders of magnitude higher than that of the sea surface. The DCLSPTLS searching and positioning model, tracking model and landing model are established, respectively. The searching and positioning model can provide estimates of the azimuth angle, the distance of the ship relative to the rotorcraft and the ship's course. With the above parameters as inputs, the total tracking time and the direction of the rotorcraft tracking speed can be obtained by using the tracking model. The landing model can calculate the pitch and the roll angles of the ship's deck relative to the rotorcraft by using the least squares method and the laser irradiation coordinates. The simulation shows that the DCLSPTLS can realise the functions of rotorcraft searching, positioning, tracking and landing by using the above parameters. To verify the effectiveness of the DCLSPTLS, a functional test is performed using a rotorcraft and a model ship on a lake. The test results are consistent with the results of the simulation.

This study is performed to figure out how the presence of diabetes affects the infection, progression and prognosis of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), and the effective therapy that can treat the diabetes-complicated patients with COVID-19. A multicentre study was performed in four hospitals. COVID-19 patients with diabetes mellitus (DM) or hyperglycaemia were compared with those without these conditions and matched by propensity score matching for their clinical progress and outcome. Totally, 2444 confirmed COVID-19 patients were recruited, from whom 336 had DM. Compared to 1344 non-DM patients with age and sex matched, DM-COVID-19 patients had significantly higher rates of intensive care unit entrance (12.43% vs. 6.58%, P = 0.014), kidney failure (9.20% vs. 4.05%, P = 0.027) and mortality (25.00% vs. 18.15%, P < 0.001). Age and sex-stratified comparison revealed increased susceptibility to COVID-19 only from females with DM. For either non-DM or DM group, hyperglycaemia was associated with adverse outcomes, featured by higher rates of severe pneumonia and mortality, in comparison with non-hyperglycaemia. This was accompanied by significantly altered laboratory indicators including lymphocyte and neutrophil percentage, C-reactive protein and urea nitrogen level, all with correlation coefficients >0.35. Both diabetes and hyperglycaemia were independently associated with adverse prognosis of COVID-19, with hazard ratios of 10.41 and 3.58, respectively.

We have proposed and experimentally demonstrated a novel scheme for efficient mid-infrared difference-frequency generation based on passively synchronized fiber lasers. The adoption of coincident seeding pulses in the nonlinear conversion process could substantially lower the pumping threshold for mid-infrared parametric emission. Consequently, a picosecond mid-infrared source at 3.1 μm was prepared with watt-level average power, and a maximum power conversion efficiency of 77% was realized from pump to down-converted light. Additionally, the long-term stability of generated power was manifested with a relative fluctuation as low as 0.17% over one hour. Thanks to the all-optical passive synchronization and all-polarization-maintaining fiber architecture, the implemented laser system was also featured with simplicity, compactness and robustness, which would favor subsequent applications beyond laboratory operation.

The dependence of fishbone cycle on energetic particle intensity has been investigated in EAST low-magnetic-shear plasmas. It is observed that the fishbone mode growth rate, saturation amplitude as well as fishbone cycle frequency clearly increase with increasing neutral beam injection (NBI) power. Moreover, enhanced electron density and temperature perturbations as well as energetic particle loss were observed with greater injected NBI power. Simulation results using M3D-K code show that as the NBI power increases, the resonant frequency and the energy of the resonant particles become higher, and the saturation amplitude of the mode also changes, due to the non-perturbative energetic particle contribution. The relationship between the calculated energetic particle pressure ratio and fishbone cycle frequency is obtained as ${f_{\textrm{FC}}} = 2.2{(1000{\beta _{\textrm{ep,calc}}} - 0.1)^{5.9 \pm 0.5}}$. Results consistent with the experimental observations have been achieved based on a predator–prey model.

We report on environmentally stable long-cavity ultrashort erbium-doped fiber lasers, which self-start mode-locking at quite low thresholds by using spectrally filtered and phase-biased nonlinear amplifying long-loop mirrors. By employing 100-m polarization-maintaining fiber (PMF) in the nonlinear loop, the fundamental repetition rate reaches 1.84 MHz and no practical limitation is found to further decrease the repetition rate. The filter used in the long loop not only suppresses Kelly sidebands of the solitons, but also eliminates the amplified spontaneous emission which exists widely in low-repetition-rate ultrafast fiber lasers. The bandwidth of the filter is optimized by using a numerical model. The laser emits approximately 3-ps pulses with an energy of 17.4 pJ, which is further boosted to $1.5~\unicode[STIX]{x03BC}\text{J}$ by using a fiber amplifier.

On April 25, 2015, a massive 8.1-magnitude earthquake struck Nepal at 2:11 pm (Beijing time). The 68-member-strong China International Search & Rescue Team (CISAR) left for Nepal at 6 am, April 26, to help with relief work. The CISAR was the first foreign team to rescue a survivor who was trapped beneath the rubble in the Gongabu area after the earthquake. On May 8, the team fulfilled the search-and-rescue mission and returned to Beijing. During the 2 weeks of rescue work, the team treated more than 3700 victims and cleared approximately 430 buildings. In this rescue mission, 10 experienced medical officers (including nine doctors and a nurse) from the General Hospital of Chinese People’s Armed Police Force (PAP) comprised the medical team of CISAR. In this report, we focus on the medical rescues by CISAR and discuss the characteristics of the medical rescue in Nepal. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2018;12:536–538)