Linear-space algorithms that build local alignments from fragments

This paper presents practical algorithms for building an alignment of two long sequences from a collection of alignment fragments, such as all occurrences of identical 5-tuples in each of two DNA sequences. We first combine a time-efficient algorithm developed by Galil and coworkers with a space-saving approach of Hirschberg to obtain a local alignment algorithm that uses0((M+N+F logN) logM) time and0(M+N) space to align sequences of lengthsM andN from a pool of F alignment fragments. Ideas of Huang and Miller are then employed to develop a time- and space-efficient algorithm that computesn best nonintersecting alignments for anyn>1. An example illustrates the utility of these methods.This work was supported in part by Grant RO1 LM05110 from the National Library of Medicine.     

一种应用于5G毫米波通信的双极化有源相控阵模组

针对5G毫米波通信,研制了一种双极化有源相控阵天线模组。厚度为2 mm的多层PCB正面印制阵列天线,在其背面集成多通道波束成形芯片,通过中间层实现天线与芯片的互连以及供电、控制等。测试结果表明,研制的板状4×4双极化相控阵模组在E面和H面均实现了不小于±40度的波束扫描范围（不大于3 dB的电平下降）和低于-18 dB的归一化交叉极化电平,在24～27.5 GHz的频率范围内实现了V极化和H极化分别为42.6～45.7 dBm和43.5～46.1 dBm的等效全向辐射功率（EIRP）。     

Promote Intratumoral Drug Release and Penetration to Counteract Docetaxel-Induced Metastasis by Photosensitizer-Modified Red Blood Cell Membrane-Coated Nanoparticle

The red blood cell membrane (RBCm) provides tight protection, lowers the immunogenicity, and prolongs the circulation time of drugs in vivo when acting as the coating of drug delivery systems. However, the cellular uptake and release of drugs are hindered by RBCm. Docetaxel (DTX) is the first-line medicine for treating triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), but it induces tumor metastasis. To solve these dilemmas, in this study, the photosensitizer 1,1-dioctadecyl-3,3,3,3-tetramethylindotricarbocyanine iodide (DiR)-modified RBCm (DM) is prepared, which is coated onto a hybrid micelle consisting of the prodrugs of DTX and the anti-metastasis agent calcitriol (CTL), obtaining a nanoparticle, named HDC-DM. In a 4T1 tumor-bearing mouse model, after injecting HDC-DM, the intratumoral DTX and CTL concentrations are increased by 1.7 and 2.5 times compared with the free drug groups. After irradiating tumors with near-infrared laser, DiR elicits the photothermal effect, triggering the rupture of RBCm and drug release, promoting drug penetration in tumors, and inducing immunogenic cell death. The tumor growth inhibition rate is 77%, and the formation of lung metastases is reduced by 82%, with good biocompatibility. It is suggested that the combination of phototherapy, chemotherapy, and anti-metastatic therapy using HDC-DM is expected to be a powerful strategy for treating TNBC.     

Sufficient Utilization of Mn2+/Mn3+/Mn4+ Redox in NASICON Phosphate Cathodes towards High-Energy Na-Ions Batteries

Na superionic conductor of Na₃MnTi(PO₄)₃ only containing high earth-abundance elements is regarded as one of the most promising cathodes for the applicable Na-ion batteries due to its desirable cycling stability and high safety. However, the voltage hysteresis caused by Mn²⁺ ions resided in Na⁺ vacancies has led to significant capacity loss associated with Mn reaction centers between 2.5–4.2 V. Herein, the sodium excess strategy based on charge compensation is applied to suppress the undesirable voltage hysteresis, thereby achieving sufficient utilization of the Mn²⁺/Mn³⁺ and Mn³⁺/Mn⁴⁺ redox couples. These findings indicate that the sodium excess Na_3.5MnTi_0.5Ti_0.5(PO₄)₃ cathode with Ti⁴⁺ reduction has a lowest Mn²⁺ occupation on the Na⁺ vacancies in its initial composition, which can improve the kinetics properties, finally contributing to a suppressed voltage hysteresis. Based on these findings, it is further applied the sodium excess route on a Mn-richer phosphate cathode, which enables the suppressed voltage hysteresis and more reversible capacity. Consequently, this developed Na_3.6Mn_1.15Ti_0.85(PO₄)₃ cathode achieved a high energy density over 380 Wh kg⁻¹ (based on active substance mass of cathode) in full-cell configurations, which is not only superior to most of the phosphate cathodes, but also delivers more application potential than the typical oxides cathodes for Na-ion batteries.     

An Artificial Motion and Tactile Receptor Constructed by Hyperelastic Double Physically Cross-Linked Silk Fibroin Ionoelastomer

Ionotronic artificial motion and tactile receptor (i-AMTR) is essential to realize an interactive human-machine interface. However, an i-AMTR that effectively mimics the composition, structure, mechanics, and multi-functionality of human skin, called humanoid i-AMTR, is yet to be developed. To bridge this technological gap, this study proposes a strategy that combines molecular structure design and function integration to construct a humanoid i-AMTR. Herein, a silk fibroin ionoelastomer (SFIE) with double cross-linked molecular structure is designed to mimic the composition and structure of human skin, thereby resolving the conflict of stretchability, softness, and resilience, suffered by many previously reported ionotronics. Functionally, electromechanical sensing and triboelectricity-based tactile perception are integrated into SFIE, to enable simultaneous perception of both motion and tactile inputs. By further leveraging the machine learning and Internet of Things (IoT) techniques, the proposed SFIE-based humanoid i-AMTR precisely senses the movement of human body and accurately sortball objects made of different materials. Notably, the success rate for 610 sorting tests reaches as high as 92.3%. These promising results essentially demonstrate a massive potential of humanoid i-AMTR in the fields of sorting robots, rehabilitation medicine, and augmented reality.     

A large scale parallel fluid-structure interaction computing platform for simulating structural responses to a detonation shock

Due to the intrinsic nature of multi-physics, it is prohibitively complex to design and implement a simulation software platform for study of structural responses to a detonation shock. In this article, a partitioned fluid-structure interaction computing platform is designed for parallel simulating structural responses to a detonation shock. The detonation and wave propagation are modeled in an open-source multi-component solver based on OpenFOAM and blastFoam, and the structural responses are simulated through the finite element library deal.II. To capture the interaction dynamics between the fluid and the structure, both solvers are adapted to preCICE. For improving the parallel performance of the computing platform, the inter-solver data is exchanged by peer-to-peer communications and the intermediate server in conventional multi-physics software is eliminated. Furthermore, the coupled solver with detonation support has been deployed on a computing cluster after considering the distributed data storage and load-balancing between solvers. The 3D numerical result of structural responses to a detonation shock is presented and analyzed. On 256 processor cores, the speedup ratio of the simulations for a detonation shock reach 178.0 with 5.1 million of mesh cells and the parallel efficiency achieve 69.5%. The results demonstrate good potential of massively parallel simulations. Overall, a general-purpose fluid-structure interaction software platform with detonation support is proposed by integrating open source codes. And this work has important practical significance for engineering application in fields of construction blasting, mining, and so forth.     

19.28% Efficiency and Stable Polymer Solar Cells Enabled by Introducing an NIR-Absorbing Guest Acceptor

Here, a near-infrared (NIR)-absorbing small-molecule acceptor (SMA) Y-SeNF with strong intermolecular interaction and crystallinity is developed by combining selenophene-fused core with naphthalene-containing end-group, and then as a custom-tailor guest acceptor is incorporated into the binary PM6:L8-BO host system. Y-SeNF shows a 65 nm red-shifted absorption compared to L8-BO. Thanks to the strong crystallinity and intermolecular interaction of Y-SeNF, the morphology of PM6:L8-BO:Y-SeNF can be precisely regulated by introducing Y-SeNF, achieving improved charge-transporting and suppressed non-radiative energy loss. Consequently, ternary polymer solar cells (PSCs) offer an impressive device efficiency of 19.28% with both high photovoltage (0.873 V) and photocurrent (27.88 mA cm⁻²), which is one of the highest efficiencies in reported single-junction PSCs. Notably, ternary PSC has excellent stability under maximum-power-point tracking for even over 200 h, which is better than its parental binary devices. The study provides a novel strategy to construct NIR-absorbing SMA for efficient and stable PSCs toward practical applications.     

Creating Atomic Ordering in Electrocatalysis

Catalysis always proceeds in a chaotic fashion. Therefore, identifying the working principles of heterogeneous catalysts is a challenging task. Creating atomic order in heterogeneous catalysts simplifies this task and also offers new opportunities for rationally designing active sites to manipulate catalytic performance. The recent rapid advances in heterogeneous electrocatalysis have led to exciting progress in the construction of atomically ordered materials. Here, the latest progress in electrocatalysts with the periodic atomic arrangement, including intermetallic compounds with long-range order and metal atom-array catalysts with short-range order is summarized. The synthesis principles and the intriguing physical and chemical properties of these electrocatalysts are discussed. Furthermore, the compelling prospects of atomically ordered catalysts in the frontier of catalyst research are outlined.     

Cell Development Enhanced Bionic Silk Hydrogel on Remodeling Immune Pathogenesis of Spinal Cord Injury via M2 Polarization of Microglial

Due to the complex spatial-temporal pathophysiology of spinal cord injury (SCI), effective modulation of SCI-specific inflammatory pathogenesis to achieve desirable therapeutic effects on functional recovery still remains challenging. Herein, cell-enhanced photocrosslinked silk fibroin hydrogels with extracellular matrix-mimicking cues of mechanical properties and RGD (Arg-Gly-Asp) signals are gelled in situ to fill the lesion site to modulate injury-induced neuroinflammation and promote neurite regrowth after SCI. The bionic hydrogel system provides biomimetic mechanical cues to promote neuronal differentiation of neural stem/progenitor cells (NPCs) and neurite growth by activating YAP nuclear expression. Importantly, favored by the strong capacity of silk fibroin hydrogels on macrophage/microglia recruitment, NPCs encapsulated hydrogel (NPCs@SFRGD0.1) effectively promotes recruited macrophages/microglia to M2 polarization in the lesion site by releasing S100A4 and thereby remodels the inflammatory microenvironment after SCI. Moreover, NPCs@SFRGD0.1 successfully reduces glial scar formation and accelerates corticospinal tract axon regrowth to improve locomotor recovery. Overall, this work contributes to illustrating the therapeutic mechanism of NPCs development based biomaterial therapies on modulating inflammatory microenvironment and this NPCs enhanced silk fibroin hydrogel provides a promising therapeutic strategy for SCI.     

Solid Solvation Assisted Electrical Doping Conserves High-Performance in 500 nm Active Layer Organic Solar Cells

Organic solar cells (OSCs) process fascinating solution-printing capability to achieve low-cost and large-scale manufacture. However, the rapid power conversion efficiency (PCE) decay with active layer thickness enlargement inhibits the implement of OSCs’ potential advantages. To overcome the bottlenecks of PCE decay in thick active layer OSCs, the electrical doping with componential selectivity in bulk heterojunction (BHJ) film is achieved by introducing a solid solvation additive. Benefiting from the higher exciton splitting efficiency together with the longer drift (L_dr) and diffusion (L_diff) lengths, an OSC with 100 nm BHJ film demonstrates a PCE increment from 16.44% to 18.24% with prolonged dark and illuminated storage stabilities. Applying the solid solvation assisted (SSA) doping method in the OSCs with 500 nm active layer, the PCE significantly increases by 31.9%, from the original value of 11.79% to 15.55%. It further improves to 15.84% in a ternary blend thick-film device, which is the record value to the best of our knowledge. Besides, the SSA doping narrows the PCE gap between the 0.04 and 1 cm² devices. All improvements demonstrate the great potential of SSA doping for OSC commercial manufacture, since it optimizes the photovoltaic performance under all practical conditions of long-term, thick-film, and large-area.