BACKGROUND The mortality rate is high in patients with acute kidney injury (AKI). Hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia alone can increase the morbidity and mortality of patients with AKI. Up to now, no relevant studies have analyzed the relationship between different blood glucose levels and mortality in AKI patients. Therefore, exploring the relationship between baseline blood glucose level and 30-day mortality in patients with AKI can provide early warning information for disease prognosis and provide reference basis for reasonable level of blood glucose control. METHODS This retrospective cohort study was obtained from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III (MIMIC-III) database. Patients had experienced AKI within 48 hours of admission. AKI was diagnosed according to the Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) guidelines. Data on patients' baseline blood glucose level on admission was retrieved, and the outcome indicator was 30-day mortality. A multivariate Cox regression analysis and smoothed curve fitting were used to assess the relationship between the baseline blood glucose level and 30-day mortality. The covariates used for adjustment were those in the patient's baseline data. RESULTS A total of 14,449 AKI patients were screened. The overall 30-day mortality rate was 17.6%. Patients with blood glucose levels of 6.36-7.35 mmol/L on admission had the lowest 30-day mortality risk. The multivariate Cox regression model and smoothed curve fitting revealed a U-shaped relationship between the baseline blood glucose level and 30-day mortality after adjusting all the covariables of the baseline data. The inflection point occurred at 5.52 mmol/L. The effect size was 0.773 [hazards ratio (HR) =0.773; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.614-0.975, P=0.030] on the left side of the inflection point, and 1.077 (HR =1.077; 95% CI: 1.059-1.097, P<0.001) on the right side. CONCLUSIONS The blood glucose of patients with AKI should be controlled at a reasonable level and should not be lower than 5.52 mmol/L, and the optimal control level needs further study. The limitation of this study is that there are some confounding factors in the retrospective study.

The development of electrode materials for non-invasive blood glucose detection has become the focus of glucose sensors because of the close correlation between body fluids and glucose concentration in the blood. However, it is still challenging to build high-performance non-invasive glucose sensors. Here, we constructed the NixCuyO mixed metal oxides and demonstrated their superior glucose-sensing capability. The Ni0.3Cu0.7O sensor exhibits excellent glucose sensing performance with a superior sensitivity of 2.565 mA mM- 1 cm- 2 in a wide range of 0.0005-4 mM, an ultrafast response time (0.70 s), and good long-term stability, superior to most mixed metal oxides-based glucose sensors. The excellent glucose sensing performance of Ni0.3Cu0.7O sensors is derived from the improved conductivity and accelerated interfacial charge transfer induced by the synergistic effect of Cu/Ni bimetallic coupling and oxygen vacancy. Furthermore, the Ni0.3Cu0.7O sensors showed good glucose detection for human urine and sweat, indicating their promising application in the glucose sensing market.

Wireless power transfer (WPT) systems may encounter issues such as device short circuits, open circuits, and parameter drifts during operation. If these faults are not promptly diagnosed and resolved, they can severely impact the system. This paper focuses on the research of fault diagnosis techniques for WPT systems. By using parameters such as current and voltage within the system, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm optimizes the support vector machine (SVM) model parameters, constructing a high-accuracy fault diagnosis model. A LCC-LCC type WPT system was built for simulation and experimental verification. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve accurate fault diagnosis, effectively ensuring the safety of WPT systems.

Airside ground traffic faces increasing congestion pressure with the rapid growth of world air transportation. Airside ground operations, such as gate assignment and taxiway planning, demonstrate excellent results from their own point of view in academia, while the integrated operations are seldom considered. In this paper, we propose an integrated model in a discrete time–space network to simultaneously deal with gate assignment and taxiway planning. An integer programming based on the multi-commodity flow form is formulated to bridge two problems. Practical constraints of the taxiway conflict and gate operation are considered. We also conduct a state analysis among the integrated model, first-come-first-served (FCFS) method, and heuristic approach. The results show that the integrated model can balance the resources between gates and taxiing paths. Sensitivity analyses reveal that the number of flight pairs and connect time impacts gate idle time and aircraft taxi time by directly changing gate assignment.

采用球磨和真空热压烧结结合的工艺制备石墨烯增强铝基(Gr/Al)复合材料,研究不同粒径铝粉混合对复合材料微观组织和力学性能的影响.结果表明,利用球体最密堆积原理设计的多粒径铝粉混合,M1(1μm:10μm按1:1.5混合)和M2(10μm与100μm按1:1.5混合)的致密度均高于单一粒径的试样(S),M2致密度达到96.2％.M1试样抗拉强度和伸长率相较于S试样有所降低,M2试样抗拉强度和伸长率均提高,其中伸长率提升31.8％.多粒径混合可促进分散小粒径铝粉和石墨烯,有效降低孔隙率,在减少原始颗粒界面的同时增加裂纹扩展路径,大尺寸粒径颗粒的加入使得复合材料的塑性大幅提升.

Hypoxia is a negative prognostic indicator of solid tumors, which not only changes the survival state of tumors and increases their invasiveness but also remarkably reduces the sensitivity of tumors to treatments such as radiotherapy, chemotherapy and photodynamic therapy. Thus, developing therapeutic strategies to alleviate tumor hypoxia has recently been considered an extremely valuable target in oncology. In this review, nanotechnological strategies to elevate oxygen levels in tumor therapy in recent years are summarized, including (I) improving the hypoxic tumor microenvironment, (II) oxygen delivery to hypoxic tumors, and (III) oxygen generation in hypoxic tumors. Finally, the challenges and prospects of these nanotechnological strategies for alleviating tumor hypoxia are presented.

To reduce the reliance on large-scale datasets, recent works in 3D segmentation resort to few-shot learning. Current 3D few-shot semantic segmentation methods first pre-train the models on `seen' classes, and then evaluate their generalization performance on `unseen' classes. However, the prior pre-training stage not only introduces excessive time overhead, but also incurs a significant domain gap on `unseen' classes. To tackle these issues, we propose an efficient Training-free Few-shot 3D Segmentation netwrok, TFS3D, and a further training-based variant, TFS3D-T. Without any learnable parameters, TFS3D extracts dense representations by trigonometric positional encodings, and achieves comparable performance to previous training-based methods. Due to the elimination of pre-training, TFS3D can alleviate the domain gap issue and save a substantial amount of time. Building upon TFS3D, TFS3D-T only requires to train a lightweight query-support transferring attention (QUEST), which enhances the interaction between the few-shot query and support data. Experiments demonstrate TFS3D-T improves previous state-of-the-art methods by +6.93% and +17.96% mIoU respectively on S3DIS and ScanNet, while reducing the training time by -90%, indicating superior effectiveness and efficiency.

Nanocatalytic therapy, involving the nanozyme-triggered production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the tumor microenvironment (TME), has demonstrated potential in tumor therapy, but nanozymes still face challenges of activity and specificity that compromise the therapeutic efficacy. Herein, we report a strategy based on a single-atom nanozyme to initiate cascade enzymatic reactions in the TME for tumor-specific treatment. The cobalt-single-atom nanozyme, with Co-N coordination on N-doped porous carbon (Co-SAs@NC), displays catalase-like activity that decomposes cellular endogenous H2 O2 to produce O2 , and subsequent oxidase-like activity that converts O2 into cytotoxic superoxide radicals to efficiently kill tumor cells. By incorporation with doxorubicin, the therapy achieves a significantly enhanced antitumor effect in vivo. Our findings show that cascade TME-specific catalytic therapy combined with chemotherapy is a promising strategy for efficient tumor therapy.

Blood brain barrier (BBB) protects homeostasis and sensitive environment of brain from several toxic substances coming from the systemic circulation. This barrier along with those substances also prevents therapeutic chemicals to reach brain tissues for several brain diseases. BBB consists of a number of cell types and junctions that help maintain its intricate structure and physiology. To open BBB for therapeutic purposes, researchers are keen to explore the use of nanomaterials as therapeutic agents. Nanomaterials have unique physio‐chemical properties such as, increased surface area to mass ratio, superior adsorption capacity, and a wide variety of functionalization possibilities in contrast to bulk materials, making them sought‐after for research pertaining to brain delivery of therapeutic substances. Both organic and inorganic nanomaterials have been researched in this regard with numerous interesting functionalizations, and their toxicity and distribution profiles have been well assessed. Different pathways taken up by nanomaterials to cross BBB like adsorptive‐mediated transcytosis, inhibition of active efflux pumps, receptor‐mediated transport, and cell‐mediated endocytosis have also been investigated. This review summarizes the structural and physiological properties and the modulation techniques of BBB for delivery of adsorbed/functionalized nano delivery platforms and imaging nanomaterials across.

Graphdiyne oxide (GDYO) nanosheets have remarkable electronic, mechanical, and thermal properties, which is hoped to act a better alternative for biomedical applications. Tumor-associated macrophage (TAM) is a promising cell population for nanotechnology application to cancer immunotherapy. In the present study, we found M2-like macrophages can be polarized to kill cancer cells with GDYO treatment via activation of pro-inflammatory pathways and GDYO injected intraperitoneally reduced tumor growth in a melanoma-bearing mouse model. In addition, GDYO activated cytotoxic T cells either directly or indirectly via macrophages, enhancing checkpoint inhibitor response in a breast cancer model. We expect that GDYO has invoked both the innate and adaptive arms of the immune system that are likely to enhance efficacy of cancer immunotherapy.

Inorganic perovskites show excellent advantages over traditional quantum dots (QDs) and have great potential for application in light-emitting devices, display devices, and other fields. In this paper, CsPbBr3/Cs4PbBr6 QDs with different cesium-to-lead ratios are synthesized in one step at room temperature and in a simple environment without protective measures. Among them, the perovskite powder with a photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) of 54% and a series of ink additives are formulated into a perovskite fluorescent ink with high stability and printability. The inks are used not only for printing but also for writing with simple and convenient application conditions in mass production. Finally, the inks are used to combine ZnS:Cu flexible alternative current electroluminescent (ACEL) devices to produce two different structures of light conversion flexible ACEL devices in a full-printing manner. The material loss and cost of the devices are very low. Pattern drawing and printing can be performed selectively. Among them, the P-outside structure ACEL device has a high lumen efficiency of 77.43 lm/W, which shows the application potential of the ink in ACEL devices and promotes the process of perovskite materials from laboratory to industrial applications.

Retraction of 'Cell membrane based biomimetic nanocomposites for targeted therapy of drug resistant EGFR-mutated lung cancer' by Pengying Wu et al., Nanoscale, 2019, 11, 19520-19528, https://doi.org/10.1039/C9NR05791A.

Radioresistance is an important challenge for clinical treatments. The main causes of radioresistance include hypoxia in the tumor microenvironment, the antioxidant system within cancer cells, and the upregulation of DNA repair proteins. Here, a multiple radiosensitization strategy of high-Z-element-based radiation enhancement is designed, attenuating hypoxia and microRNA therapy. The novel 2D graphdiyne (GDY) can firmly anchor and disperse CeO2 nanoparticles to form GDY-CeO2 nanocomposites, which exhibit superior catalase-mimic activity in decomposing H2 O2 to O2 to significantly alleviate tumor hypoxia, promote radiation-induced DNA damage, and ultimately inhibit tumor growth in vivo. The miR181a-2-3p (miR181a) serum levels in patients are predictive of the response to preoperative radiotherapy in locally advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) and facilitate personalized treatment. Moreover, miR181a can act as a radiosensitizer by directly targeting RAD17 and regulating the Chk2 pathway. Subsequently, the GDY-CeO2 nanocomposites with miR181a are conjugated with the iRGD-grafted polyoxyethylene glycol (short for nano-miR181a), which can increase the stability, efficiently deliver miR181a to tumor, and exhibit low toxicity. Notably, nano-miR181a can overcome radioresistance and enhance therapeutic efficacy both in a subcutaneous tumor model and human-patient-derived xenograft models. Overall, this GDY-CeO2 nanozyme and miR181a-based multisensitized radiotherapy strategy provides a promising therapeutic approach for ESCC.

"Reply to Comment on N-acetylcysteine as a treatment for amatoxin poisoning." Clinical Toxicology, 59(7), pp. 681–682

Lead halide perovskite nanocrystals (NCs) have attracted much attention due to their remarkable performances in optoelectronic applications, but their development is greatly limited by the lead toxicity and instability in environmental conditions. In this paper, we reported a simple microwave-assisted (MW-AT) method for the synthesis of non-toxic and stable all-inorganic Cs3Bi2Br9 perovskite NCs in nonpolar solvent. The as-prepared NCs show a highly efficient blue emission at 434 nm and 460 nm. The photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) of Cs3Bi2Br9 NCs is raised from 8.47% to 35.8% because of effective passivation of surface trap-states by BiOBr. In addition, a blue light-emitting diode (LED) are fabricated by coating Cs3Bi2Br9 NCs/silica composite onto a 365 nm GaN LED chip. This work provides a new synthetic path for preparing lead-free perovskite NCs, and demonstrates their promising application in solid-state lighting. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Background: Some studies have reported results from the use of mesenchymal stem cell-derived extracellular vesicles (MSC-EVs) to treat osteoarthritis (OA). Objective: To evaluate the efficacy of MSC-EVs as a treatment for OA. Data sources: Databases were searched using the terms 'mesenchymal stem cells', 'osteoarthritis' and 'extracellular vesicles.' Study eligibility criteria: Studies performed in animal models utilizing MSC-EVs to treat OA that described the macroscopic evaluation or histological evaluation were included. Study appraisal: The quality of the studies was examined using the CAMARADES quality checklist. Results: MSC-EVs were superior to the placebo in the macroscopic evaluation and histological evaluation. MSC-EVs were more effective in the early stage of OA and once a week was better than multiple times a week. Limitations: The included studies were highly heterogeneous. Conclusion: MSC-EVs may improve the results of macroscopic and histological evaluations of OA.

TeO2-AlF3-NaF-BaF2-LaF3 glasses containing both Er3+ and Yb3+ were prepared by conventional quenching melt method. Differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) curve displays good thermal stability with glass transition temperature larger than 426.38 degrees C. Urbach energy was found to be 0.05 eV indicating few defects in prepared glass and its high homogeneity. Based on optical absorption spectra, important spectroscopic parameters are investigated to predict the potential luminescent properties in near-infrared band. Intense Er3+ emission around 1.53 mu m corresponding to the transition of I-4(13/2) -> I-4(15/2) upon 980 nm excitation. Effective bandwidth (Delta lambda(eff)) over 100 nm after introducing 4 mol% amount of ErF3 implies that Er3+/Yb3+ co-doped those glasses possesses excellent broadband luminescent property around 1.53 mu m. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Objectives: The aim of this meta-analysis was to evaluate the efficacy and safety of tanezumab for the treatment of patients with knee or hip osteoarthritis (OA). Methods: PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, and Web of Science were searched from inception to July 2020. Randomized-controlled trials comparing tanezumab with placebo or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs in patients with OA. Two investigators identified studies and independently extracted data, and conventional meta-analyses were conducted with Review Manager 5.3. The outcomes were pain relief, functional improvement, and risk of adverse events (AEs). Results: A total of 8 articles, comprising 9 randomized-controlled trials, were included. Overall, tanezumab was superior to placebo for relieving pain and improving function, as well as in the patient's global assessment. Tanezumab also had significant advantages over nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for relieving pain and improving function, as well as in the patient's global assessment. Significantly more patients discontinued treatment because of AEs after treatment with tanezumab. However, the differences in serious AEs and total joint replacement were not significant. Moreover, tanezumab-treated patients experienced significantly more rapid progression of osteoarthritis. Discussion: Tanezumab can alleviate pain and improve function for patients with OA of the hip or knee. Although tanezumab does not cause serious AEs, rapid progression of OA occurred in a small number of participants, so more clinical trials are needed to explore its safety.

Nanozyme-based catalytic tumor therapy is an emerging therapeutic method with high reactivity in response to tumor microenvironments (TMEs). To overcome the current limitations of deficient catalytic activity of nanozymes, we studied the contributing factors of enzymatic activity based on non-metallic-atom doping and irradiation. Nitrogen doping significantly enhanced the peroxidase activity of Ti-based nanozymes, which was shown experimentally and theoretically. Based on the excellent NIR-adsorption-induced surface plasmon resonance and photothermal effect, the enzymatic activity of TiN nanoparticles (NPs) was further improved under NIR laser irradiation. Hence, an acidic TME-responsive and irradiation-mediated cascade nanocatalyst (TLGp) is presented by using TiN-NP-encapsulated liposomes linked with pH-responsive PEG-modified glucose oxidase (GOx). The integration of pH-responsive GOx-mediated H2 O2 self-supply, nitrogen-doping, and irradiation-enhanced enzymatic activity of TiN NPs and mild-photothermal therapy enables an effective tumor inhibition by TLGp with minimal side effects in vivo.

BACKGROUND:Patients with sepsis have a high mortality rate. Rapid and effective risk stratification indicators for sepsis-related death are urgently needed to explored. Blood urea nitrogen (BUN) level can reflect the protein catabolism in the human body and the degree of renal impairment. So it has particular value for the management of septic patients. In this study, we explored the relationship between BUN level and 30-day mortality in patients with sepsis.METHODS:In this retrospective cohort study, a total of 12,713 patients with sepsis from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III (MIMIC-III) database were included. BUN level at admission was retrieved, and the outcome indicator was the 30-day mortality. Multivariate Cox regression analysis and smoothed curve fitting were used to assess the relationship between BUN and 30-day mortality.RESULTS:A total of 12,713 patients with sepsis were screened. The overall 30-day mortality rate was 20.6%. The multivariate Cox regression model and smoothed curve fitting revealed a nonlinear association between BUN and 30-day mortality. The inflection point occurred at 41.1 mg/dL. The effect size was 1.298 on the left side of the inflection point [hazard ratio (HR) =1.298; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.224-1.376; P<0.001] and 1.045 on the right side of the inflection point (HR =1.045; 95% CI: 1.016-1.075; P=0.002).CONCLUSIONS:There is a nonlinear correlation between BUN and 30-day mortality in patients with sepsis. With 41.1 mg/dL as a cutoff level for BUN, patients have a remarkably different risk of death and should be managed differently.