Digital Microfluidics for Manipulation and Analysis of a Single Cell

The basic structural and functional unit of a living organism is a single cell. To understand the variability and to improve the biomedical requirement of a single cell, its analysis has become a key technique in biological and biomedical research. With a physical boundary of microchannels and microstructures, single cells are efficiently captured and analyzed, whereas electric forces sort and position single cells. Various microfluidic techniques have been exploited to manipulate single cells through hydrodynamic and electric forces. Digital microfluidics (DMF), the manipulation of individual droplets holding minute reagents and cells of interest by electric forces, has received more attention recently. Because of ease of fabrication, compactness and prospective automation, DMF has become a powerful approach for biological application. We review recent developments of various microfluidic chips for analysis of a single cell and for efficient genetic screening. In addition, perspectives to develop analysis of single cells based on DMF and emerging functionality with high throughput are discussed.     

绿色建筑的意识形态批判

<正>如今建筑界绿色建筑、低碳城市的概念备受推崇。国家大力发展绿色经济、绿色建筑,建设低碳城市,建筑师们则一窝蜂地学习讨论与此概念相关的问题,就连以前对绿色建筑不感冒的众多开发商也开始申报LEED认证和国家绿色建筑认证。针对"绿色建筑热"一直也有批评的声音,但无论是批评者还是拥护者都认为绿色建筑虽有不足之处,可其观念是正确的,出发点是好的,绿色建筑是大势所趋。我的观点相反,绿色建筑某些细枝末节或许可取,但总体上特别在意识形态上是非常值得怀疑的。我们要把自发地追求节约,利用建筑手段改善通风、采光、保温条件,尊重环境的建筑与特定的绿色     

Macroscopic and Microscopic Structures of Cesium Lead Iodide Perovskite from Atomistic Simulations

A first‐principles‐based effective Hamiltonian is developed and employed to investigate finite‐temperature structural properties of a prototype of perovskite halides, that is CsPbI₃. Such simulations, when using first‐principles‐extracted coefficients, successfully reproduce the existence of an orthorhombic Pnma state and its iodine octahedral tilting angles around room temperature. However, they also yield a direct transformation from Pnma to cubic $Pm\overline{3}m$ upon heating, unlike measurements that reported the occurrence of an intermediate long‐range‐tilted tetragonal P4/mbm phase in‐between the orthorhombic and cubic phases. Such disagreement, which may cast some doubts about the extent to which first‐principle methods can be trusted to mimic hybrid perovskites, can be resolved by “only” changing one short‐range tilting parameter in the whole set of effective Hamiltonian coefficients. In such a case, some reasonable values of this specific parameter result in the predictions that i) the intermediate P4/mbm state originates from fluctuations over many different tilted states; and ii) the cubic $Pm\overline{3}m$ phase is highly locally distorted and develops strong transverse antiphase correlation between first‐nearest neighbor iodine octahedral tiltings, before undergoing a phase transition to P4/mbm under cooling.     

Scanning tunneling spectroscopic study of monolayer 1T-TaS2 and 1T-TaSe2

Nano Research - The isostructural and isoelectronic transition-metal-dichalcogenides 1T-TaS2 and 1T-TaSe2 are layered materials with intricate electronic structures. Combining the molecular beam...     

Recent Advances in Conjugated Polymers for Visible-Light-Driven Water Splitting

With the ambition of solving the challenges of the shortage of fossil fuels and their associated environmental pollution, visible-light-driven splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen using semiconductor photocatalysts has emerged as a promising technology to provide environmentally friendly energy vectors. Among the current library of developed photocatalysts, organic conjugated polymers present unique advantages of sufficient light-absorption efficiency, excellent stability, tunable electronic properties, and economic applicability. As a class of rising photocatalysts, organic conjugated polymers offer high flexibility in tuning the framework of the backbone and porosity to fulfill the requirements for photocatalytic applications. In the past decade, significant progress has been made in visible-light-driven water splitting employing organic conjugated polymers. The recent development of the structural design principles of organic conjugated polymers (including linear, crosslinked, and supramolecular self-assembled polymers) toward efficient photocatalytic hydrogen evolution, oxygen evolution, and overall water splitting is described, thus providing a comprehensive reference for the field. Finally, current challenges and perspectives are also discussed.     

Novel Bi-Doped Amorphous SnOx Nanoshells for Efficient Electrochemical CO2 Reduction into Formate at Low Overpotentials

Engineering novel Sn-based bimetallic materials could provide intriguing catalytic properties to boost the electrochemical CO₂ reduction. Herein, the first synthesis of homogeneous Sn_1−xBi_x alloy nanoparticles (x up to 0.20) with native Bi-doped amorphous SnO_x shells for efficient CO₂ reduction is reported. The Bi-SnO_x nanoshells boost the production of formate with high Faradaic efficiencies (>90%) over a wide potential window (−0.67 to −0.92 V vs RHE) with low overpotentials, outperforming current tin oxide catalysts. The state-of-the-art Bi-SnO_x nanoshells derived from Sn_0.80Bi_0.20 alloy nanoparticles exhibit a great partial current density of 74.6 mA cm⁻² and high Faradaic efficiency of 95.8%. The detailed electrocatalytic analyses and corresponding density functional theory calculations simultaneously reveal that the incorporation of Bi atoms into Sn species facilitates formate production by suppressing the formation of H₂ and CO.