Pressure‐Tunable Ambipolar Conduction and Hysteresis in Thin Palladium Diselenide Field Effect Transistors

Few‐layer palladium diselenide (PdSe₂) field effect transistors are studied under external stimuli such as electrical and optical fields, electron irradiation, and gas pressure. The ambipolar conduction and hysteresis are observed in the transfer curves of the as‐exfoliated and unprotected PdSe₂ material. The ambipolar conduction and its hysteretic behavior in the air and pure nitrogen environments are tuned. The prevailing p‐type transport observed at atmospheric pressure is reversibly turned into a dominant n‐type conduction by reducing the pressure, which can simultaneously suppress the hysteresis. The pressure control can be exploited to symmetrize and stabilize the transfer characteristics of the device as required in high‐performance logic circuits. The transistors are affected by trap states with characteristic times in the order of minutes. The channel conductance, dramatically reduced by the electron irradiation during scanning electron microscope imaging, is restored after an annealing of several minutes at room temperature. The work paves the way toward the exploitation of PdSe₂ in electronic devices by providing an experiment‐based and deep understanding of charge transport in PdSe₂ transistors subjected to electrical stress and other external agents.     

Epigenetic and Genetic Factors Related to Curve Progression in Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis: A Systematic Scoping Review of the Current Literature

Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) is a progressive deformity of the spine. Scoliotic curves progress until skeletal maturity leading, in rare cases, to a severe deformity. While the Cobb angle is a straightforward tool in initial curve magnitude measurement, assessing the risk of curve progression at the time of diagnosis may be more challenging. Epigenetic and genetic markers are potential prognostic tools to predict curve progression. The aim of this study is to review the available literature regarding the epigenetic and genetic factors associated with the risk of AIS curve progression. This review was carried out in accordance with Preferential Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The search was carried out in January 2022. Only peer-reviewed articles were considered for inclusion. Forty studies were included; fifteen genes were reported as having SNPs with significant association with progressive AIS, but none showed sufficient power to sustain clinical applications. In contrast, nine studies reporting epigenetic modifications showed promising results in terms of reliable markers. Prognostic testing for AIS has the potential to significantly modify disease management. Most recent evidence suggests epigenetics as a more promising field for the identification of factors associated with AIS progression, offering a rationale for further investigation in this field.     

Nonlinear model identification and see-through cancelation from recto–verso data

The problem of see-through cancelation in digital images of double-sided documents is addressed. We show that a nonlinear convolutional data model proposed elsewhere for moderate show-through can also be effective on strong back-to-front interferences, provided that the recto and verso pure patterns are estimated jointly. To this end, we propose a restoration algorithm that does not need any classification of the pixels. The see-through PSFs are estimated off-line, and an iterative procedure is then employed for a joint estimation of the pure patterns. This simple and fast algorithm can be used on both grayscale and color images and has proved to be very effective in real-world cases. The experimental results we report in this paper demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the ones based on linear models with no need to tune free parameters and remains computationally inexpensive despite the nonlinear model and the iterative solution adopted. Strategies to overcome some of the residual difficulties are also envisaged.     

呼吸房子——现代沙特房屋

项目地点:沙特阿拉伯利雅得项目类型:建筑(住宅)开工日期:未知该项目获2005年豪瑞可持续建筑大奖赛非洲中东地区提名奖     

Experimental behaviour of reinforced concrete elements repaired with polymer-modified cementicious mortar

This paper presents the results of experimental tests on flexural behaviour of reinforced concrete beams repaired by polymer-modified mortar. Tests were repeated varying repair thickness, which included or did not include the steel reinforcement. Also the position of repair mortar was varied, as it was carried out either in the tension or compression region. Finally, the reinforcement ratios of beam sections were also varied. Results were compared with those from control beams, which were tested in non-damaged, non-repaired conditions. Thick repairs that include the longitudinal reinforcement can restore the load-bearing capacity and ductility of non-damaged control beams, whether they are applied in the tension or in the compression region. Thin repairs in tension, which substitute the concrete cover, but do not include the reinforcement, can even decrease the load bearing capacity and ductility of the beam, whereas thin repairs in compression are more effective than those in tension.     

A tool for design pattern detection and software architecture reconstruction

It is well known that software maintenance and evolution are expensive activities, both in terms of invested time and money. Reverse engineering activities support the obtainment of abstractions and views from a target system that should help the engineers to maintain, evolve and eventually re-engineer it. Two important tasks pursued by reverse engineering are design pattern detection and software architecture reconstruction, whose main objectives are the identification of the design patterns that have been used in the implementation of a system as well as the generation of views placed at different levels of abstractions, which let the practitioners focus on the overall architecture of the system without worrying about the programming details it has been implemented with.In this context we propose an Eclipse plug-in called MARPLE (Metrics and Architecture Reconstruction Plug-in for Eclipse), which supports both the detection of design patterns and software architecture reconstruction activities through the use of basic elements and metrics that are mechanically extracted from the source code. The development of this platform is mainly based on the exploitation of the Eclipse framework and plug-ins as well as of different Java libraries for data access and graph management and visualization. In this paper we focus our attention on the design pattern detection process.     

Empowering Communities Through Design

Francesca Galeazzi is an architectural engineer who leads the sustainability team at Arup Associates in Shanghai. Here she looks back with hindsight from 2050, reflecting on how rapid urbanisation in China, which started in the 1990s, played out over the next half-century. She describes how the initial highly centralised, mass urbanisation programmes gave way to a more local and community-based, participatory approach to decision-making and planning, foreshadowed by some key legislation around land ownership and design for community-based planning models in the early 2010s.     

Reduced Levels of ABCA1 Transporter Are Responsible for the Cholesterol Efflux Impairment in β-Amyloid-Induced Reactive Astrocytes: Potential Rescue from Biomimetic HDLs

The cerebral synthesis of cholesterol is mainly handled by astrocytes, which are also responsible for apoproteins’ synthesis and lipoproteins’ assembly required for the cholesterol transport in the brain parenchyma. In Alzheimer disease (AD), these processes are impaired, likely because of the astrogliosis, a process characterized by morphological and functional changes in astrocytes. Several ATP-binding cassette transporters expressed by brain cells are involved in the formation of nascent discoidal lipoproteins, but the effect of beta-amyloid (Aβ) assemblies on this process is not fully understood. In this study, we investigated how of Aβ_1-42-induced astrogliosis affects the metabolism of cholesterol in vitro. We detected an impairment in the cholesterol efflux of reactive astrocytes attributable to reduced levels of ABCA1 transporters that could explain the decreased lipoproteins’ levels detected in AD patients. To approach this issue, we designed biomimetic HDLs and evaluated their performance as cholesterol acceptors. The results demonstrated the ability of apoA-I nanodiscs to cross the blood–brain barrier in vitro and to promote the cholesterol efflux from astrocytes, making them suitable as a potential supportive treatment for AD to compensate the depletion of cerebral HDLs.