Fabrication of fully transparent nanowire transistors for transparent and flexible electronics

The development of optically transparent and mechanically flexible electronic circuitry is an essential step in the effort to develop next-generation display technologies, including 'see-through' and conformable products. Nanowire transistors (NWTs) are of particular interest for future display devices because of their high carrier mobilities compared with bulk or thin-film transistors made from the same materials, the prospect of processing at low temperatures compatible with plastic substrates, as well as their optical transparency and inherent mechanical flexibility. Here we report fully transparent In(2)O(3) and ZnO NWTs fabricated on both glass and flexible plastic substrates, exhibiting high-performance n-type transistor characteristics with approximately 82% optical transparency. These NWTs should be attractive as pixel-switching and driving transistors in active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) displays. The transparency of the entire pixel area should significantly enhance aperture ratio efficiency in active-matrix arrays and thus substantially decrease power consumption.     

Thermal Conductivity of Magnesium Alloys in the Temperature Range from −125 °C to 400 °C

Magnesium alloys have been widely used in recent years as lightweight structural materials in the manufacturing of automobiles, airplanes, and portable computers. Magnesium alloys have extremely low density (as low as 1738 kg · m^?3) and high rigidity, which makes them suitable for such applications. In this study, the thermal conductivity of two different magnesium alloys made by twin-roll casting was investigated using the laser-flash technique and differential scanning calorimetry for thermal diffusivity and specific heat capacity measurements, respectively. The thermal diffusivity of the magnesium alloys, AZ31 and AZ61, was measured over the temperature range from ?125 °C to 400 °C. The alloys AZ31 and AZ61 are composed of magnesium, aluminum, and zinc. The thermal conductivity gradually increased with temperature. The densities of AZ31 and AZ61 were 1754 kg · m^?3 and 1777 kg · m^?3, respectively. The thermal conductivity of AZ31 was about 25 % higher than that of AZ61, and this is attributed to the amount of precipitation.     

Fabrication of thermally expandable core–shell microcapsules using organic and inorganic stabilizers and their application

Thermally expandable core–shell microcapsules (TEM) were fabricated with an organic steric stabilizer and an inorganic Pickering emulsifier. In order to fabricate a TEM, acrylonitrile (AN) and metacrylonitrile (MAN) were used as monomers. Halloysite nanotubes (HNTs) and poly(vinylpyrrolidone) (PVP) were used as the inorganic Pickering emulsifier and the organic stabilizer, respectively. The liquid hydrocarbon content in the core, and the thermal and expansion properties, of TEMs with two different emulsifiers were compared. The mechanical properties of polypropylene (PP) foams containing TEMs prepared with two types of stabilizers were analyzed. The TEMs polymerized with PVP showed a finer expanded cell, while those fabricated with HNTs resulted in a larger expanded cell in the PP matrix. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2016 , 133, 44247.     

Identification of flavonoids and flavonoid rhamnosides from Rhododendron mucronulatum for. albiflorum and their inhibitory activities against aldose reductase

To investigate the therapeutic potential of compounds from natural sources, Rhododendron mucronulatum for. albiflorum flowers (RMAF) and R. mucronulatum flowers (RMF) were tested for inhibition of aldose reductase (AR). The methanol extracts of RMAF and RMF exhibited AR inhibitory activities (IC₅₀ values 1.07 and 1.29 μg/mL, respectively). The stepwise polarity fractions of RMAF were tested for in vitro inhibition of AR from rat lenses. Of these, the ethyl acetate (EtOAc) fraction exhibited AR inhibitory activity (IC₅₀ 0.15 μg/mL). A chromatography of the active EtOAc fraction of RMAF led to the isolation of six flavonoids, which were identified by spectroscopic analysis as kaempferol (1), afzelin (2), quercetin (3), quercitrin (4), myricetin (5) and myricitrin (6). Compounds 1–6 exhibited high AR inhibitory activity, with IC₅₀ values of 0.79, 0.31, 0.48, 0.13, 11.92 and 2.67 μg/mL, respectively. HPLC/UV analysis revealed that the major flavonoids of RMAF and RMF are quercitrin (4) and myricitrin (6). Our results suggest that RMAF containing these six flavonoids could be a useful natural source in the development of a novel AR inhibitory agent against diabetic complications.     

Application of immobilized nanotubular TiO(2) electrode for photocatalytic hydrogen evolution: reduction of hexavalent chromium (Cr(VI)) in water

In this study, immobilized TiO(2) electrode is applied to reduce toxic Cr(VI) to non-toxic Cr(III) in aqueous solution under UV irradiation. To overcome the limitation of powder TiO(2), a novel technique of immobilization based on anodization was applied and investigated under various experimental conditions. The anodization was performed at 20V-5 degrees C for 45min with 0.5% hydrofluoric acid, and then the anodized samples were annealed under oxygen stream in the range 450-850 degrees C. Based on the results of the experiments, the photocatalytic Cr(VI) reduction was favorable in acidic conditions, with approximately 98% of the Cr(VI) being reduced within 2h at pH 3. Among the samples tested under same anodizing condition, the nanotubular TiO(2) annealed at 450 and 550 degrees C showed highest reduction efficiencies of Cr(VI). In addition, the surface characterizations (zeta potential, XRD, and SEM) of these samples proved that the Cr(VI) reduction efficiency was higher under acidic conditions and at a lower annealing temperature. From this research, it was concluded that the anodized TiO(2) has the potential to be a useful technology for environmental remediation as well as photocatalytic hydrogen production from water.     

Colonic Mucosal Immune Activation in Mice with Ovalbumin-Induced Allergic Airway Disease: Association between Allergic Airway Disease and Irritable Bowel Syndrome

Recent studies on the pathophysiology of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) have focused on the role of mast cells (MCs) in intestinal mucosal immunity. A link between allergic airway diseases (AADs) and IBS has been suggested because both diseases have similar pathophysiology. We aimed to investigate whether the induction of AAD in mice could lead to inflammation of the colonic mucosa, similar to IBS. We also evaluated whether this inflammatory response could be suppressed by administering a therapeutic agent. Mice were divided into three groups: control, AAD-induced, and salbutamol-treated. An AAD mouse model was established by intraperitoneal injection and nasal challenge with ovalbumin. Mice with AAD were intranasally administered salbutamol. Analyses of cytokine levels, MC count, and tryptase levels in the intestinal mucosa were performed to compare the changes in inflammatory responses among the three groups. Inflammation was observed in the intestinal mucosa of mice in the AAD group. This inflammation in AAD mice was suppressed after salbutamol treatment. Our study demonstrates that AAD induces an inflammatory response similar to that in IBS, suggesting a possible association between IBS and AADs. In patients with IBS with such allergic components, salbutamol may have the potential to alleviate the inflammatory response.     

An Efficient and Robust Hand Gesture Recognition System of Sign Language Employing Finetuned Inception-V3 and Efficientnet-B0 Network

Hand Gesture Recognition (HGR) is a promising research area with an extensive range of applications, such as surgery, video game techniques, and sign language translation, where sign language is a complicated structured form of hand gestures. The fundamental building blocks of structured expressions in sign language are the arrangement of the fingers, the orientation of the hand, and the hand’s position concerning the body. The importance of HGR has increased due to the increasing number of touchless applications and the rapid growth of the hearing-impaired population. Therefore, real-time HGR is one of the most effective interaction methods between computers and humans. Developing a user-free interface with good recognition performance should be the goal of real-time HGR systems. Nowadays, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) shows great recognition rates for different image-level classification tasks. It is challenging to train deep CNN networks like VGG-16, VGG-19, Inception-v3, and Efficientnet-B0 from scratch because only some significant labeled image datasets are available for static hand gesture images. However, an efficient and robust hand gesture recognition system of sign language employing finetuned Inception-v3 and Efficientnet-Bo network is proposed to identify hand gestures using a comparative small HGR dataset. Experiments show that Inception-v3 achieved 90% accuracy and 0.93% precision, 0.91% recall, and 0.90% f1-score, respectively, while EfficientNet-B0 achieved 99% accuracy and 0.98%, 0.97%, 0.98%, precision, recall, and f1-score respectively.     

TC-VGC: a tumor classification system using variations in genes' correlation

Classification analysis of microarray data is widely used to reveal biological features and to diagnose various diseases, including cancers. Most existing approaches improve the performance of learning models by removing most irrelevant and redundant genes from the data. They select the marker genes which are expressed differently in normal and tumor tissues. These techniques ignore the importance of the complex functional-dependencies between genes. In this paper, we propose a new method for cancer classification which uses distinguished variations of gene–gene correlation in two sample groups. The cancer specific genetic network composed of these gene pairs contains many literature-curated prostate cancer genes, and we were successful in identifying new candidate prostate cancer genes inferred by them. Furthermore, this method achieved a high accuracy with a small number of genes in cancer classification.