Search Results (1,784)

Two-dimensional (2D) materials offer opportunities for constructing functional devices; however, integrating them into macroscopic structures requires precise control over nanosheet dispersion, processing parameters, and structural design. This review summarizes research on the fabrication of 3D structures using nanosheet-based inks and composite feedstocks—including graphene and its derivatives, MXenes, transition metal dichalcogenides, hexagonal boron nitride, and black phosphorus. Studies indicate that material performance is determined by the combined effects of feedstock composition, printing conditions, structural design, and post-processing techniques. Direct Ink Writing (DIW) is a particularly suitable fabrication technique for various porous lattices and self-supporting structures where nanosheets form the primary functional network. High-concentration aqueous MXene inks and rheologically tuned graphene oxide-based inks serve as typical feedstocks, provided they exhibit favorable shear-thinning behavior, shape retention, and structural recovery capabilities. Regarding polymer-based composite components, Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) is applicable to thermoplastic feedstocks loaded with 2D materials, whereas Stereolithography (SLA) and Digital Light Processing (DLP) utilize nanosheet-loaded photocurable resins to fabricate composites with intricate features, albeit with applications constrained by light attenuation and curing characteristics. Applications in sensing, energy storage devices, and biomedical scaffolds demonstrate the immense potential of these methods, while printed optoelectronic devices are discussed as a complementary case of device integration. Nevertheless, challenges such as material instability, trade-offs between resolution and scale, post-processing shrinkage, and incomplete biosafety assessments remain significant barriers to practical application, highlighting the need to develop reproducible processing techniques and conduct validation studies focused on real-world use. Full article

Cold stress severely limits the productivity of maize, especially in Northeast China. Hydroxymethylbutenyl diphosphate synthase (HDS) is a key enzyme in the methylerythritol phosphate (MEP) pathway, which is responsible for the generation of precursors for carotenoid biosynthesis, thereby playing a central role in facilitating the cellular response to stress. In the present study, virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS)-mediated ZmHDS1 silencing on the B73 background led to enhanced cold stress sensitivity, as evidenced by growth retardation, leaf shriveling, disrupted Kranz anatomy, elevated reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation, impaired antioxidant enzyme activity, increased membrane lipid peroxidation, and reduced photosynthetic performance. Hormonal profiling revealed that ZmHDS1 silencing decreased the content of indole-3-acetic acid (IAA), gibberellin (GA₄), and abscisic acid (ABA) and disrupted ABA signaling. Furthermore, ZmHDS1 silencing reduced the chlorophyll content, Rubisco activity, and ZmRCA (Rubisco activase) expression and caused a more severe reduction in carotenoid levels and the transcriptional suppression of the entire carotenoid biosynthetic gene network. Collectively, ZmHDS1 acts as a key component of the MEP pathway that contributes to maize cold tolerance by coordinating antioxidant defense, phytohormone homeostasis, photosynthetic maintenance, and carotenoid metabolism. These findings highlight the importance of the MEP pathway as a whole in cold adaptation. Disruption of ZmHDS1 impairs these interconnected protective mechanisms, rendering maize highly susceptible to cold-induced damage. Full article

Nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN) is an active component found in probiotics that may help alleviate Alzheimer’s disease and the effects of aging. The screened NMN-producing strain, Ligilactobacillus salivarius B12-N, contained 6.25 μg of NMN per 10⁹ CFU, as determined by LC–MS analysis of bacterial cell extracts. The results indicate that B12-N showed a slightly greater numerical improvement in chemotactic behavior than purified NMN. However, no significant differences were observed between B12-N and NMN in other AD-related or aging-associated phenotypes examined. Transcriptome analysis revealed that 16 pathways were common to both the NMN group and the B12-N group. Notably, the P450 metabolism pathway, longevity regulation pathway, and autophagy pathway were significantly enriched. These findings indicate partially overlapping phenotypic and transcriptomic responses to B12-N and NMN, suggesting that NMN may contribute to some of the biological effects associated with B12-N. Full article

Remote sensing imagery is characterized by complex backgrounds, substantial scale variation, and numerous small targets, placing greater demands on semantic modeling of high-spatial-resolution features and feature integration across multiple scales. Within the D-FINE hybrid encoder, however, the relatively high-spatial-resolution feature receives limited global semantic interaction, while directly applying dense self-attention would incur substantial computational cost and would apply semantic updates uniformly across all spatial locations. Meanwhile, fixed cross-scale resampling does not explicitly model content-dependent local correspondence between adjacent feature levels. To address these issues, we propose OSPIR-DETR. First, we introduce Object-Selective Proxy Interaction Refinement (OSPIR), which aggregates global context from all spatial features through learnable proxy tokens while restricting semantic readout and residual updates to selected foreground candidate positions, thereby enabling global semantic modeling with selective feature refinement. Second, we propose Adjacent-Scale Gain-Guided Alignment Refinement (ASGAR), which estimates continuous sampling offsets from local correlation responses and modulates the offsets using center-referenced matching gains to improve local feature alignment before cross-scale fusion. Evaluation on the three benchmarks shows average precision (AP) gains of 1.1 points on DOTA-v1.0, 1.2 points on NWPU VHR-10, and 2.5 points on VEDAI over the matched D-FINE-L baseline, indicating consistent performance gains across the three benchmarks. Full article

Although anchor-graph-based multi-view clustering has achieved significant success in handling datasets with arbitrary shapes, current methods still face several challenges. First, many anchor-graph-based methods fail to fully exploit the structural information of the anchor graph. They directly apply regression or decomposition to the anchor graph, overlooking the similarity information between anchor points and data points, which leads to suboptimal clustering results. Second, many anchor-graph-based algorithms only consider sample labels, neglecting the impact of anchor point labels on sample labels. A further difficulty is that an imbalanced anchor distribution may not represent the sample distribution faithfully and can propagate biased assignments to the sample labels. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Probabilistic Anchor Graph Projection for Tensorized Unified Label Learning (PAGP-TULL) method. Specifically, we introduce a label propagation strategy into the regression process of the anchor graph, obtaining probabilistic projections of both anchor point labels and sample labels. Additionally, we stack the soft label matrices of all views into a third-order tensor and impose a tensor Schatten p-norm regularization to fully exploit the high-order complementary information and spatial low-rank structures embedded across different views. Furthermore, we introduce concept regression to reduce the number of variables and thus lower the algorithm’s complexity. We also fully exploit the structural information of the anchor graph, using anchor point labels to guide the learning of sample labels. At the same time, we design a novel balanced regularization term to prevent the occurrence of two trivial solutions for anchor point labels, thereby improving the robustness and performance of the method. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and superiority of the PAGP-TULL method. Full article

Background: Leeches possess significant medicinal value as antithrombotic agents, and elucidating their population genetic background is of great importance for the conservation of medicinal germplasm resources and the development of pharmaceutical applications. Methods: In this study, mitochondrial genes (COI, Cytb, and ND1) were used as molecular markers to systematically investigate the population genetic characteristics of wild Whitmania pigra from 13 regions across China. A total of 137 individuals were sequenced, yielding a concatenated alignment of 3554 bp with 441 variable sites. Haplotype networks and phylogenetic trees were constructed based on the concatenated sequences, alongside BAPS clustering, neutrality tests, and Bayesian Skyline Plot (BSP) analyses. Results: Genetic diversity analyses revealed that the species-level concatenated dataset and most populations exhibited high haplotype diversity (Hd > 0.5) and low nucleotide diversity (Pi < 0.02), with JXJA as a notable exception (concatenated Hd = 0.200). Neutrality tests (Fu’s Fs = −6.002, p = 0.001) supported a scenario of historical bottlenecks followed by rapid demographic expansion, whereas the reduced diversity in JXJA may reflect a local bottleneck or founder effect. Haplotype networks, phylogenetic trees, and BAPS clustering consistently divided the 13 populations into three significantly differentiated groups: northeastern (HLJ), southern, and northern-central. The HLJ population exhibited extremely high genetic differentiation (F_ST = 0.902–0.977), suggesting it may represent a highly differentiated mitochondrial lineage and a candidate Evolutionarily Significant Unit (ESU). The BSP analysis reconstructed four phases of demographic history, broadly corresponding to climatic fluctuations since the Late Pleistocene. Conclusions: Overall, this study reveals high haplotype diversity and low nucleotide diversity in W. pigra, with JXJA representing a distinct local bottleneck case. The populations are strongly structured into three lineages, with the HLJ population representing a highly differentiated mitochondrial lineage and a candidate ESU. Demographic dynamics appear broadly associated with Late Pleistocene climatic fluctuations, though the timing remains uncertain due to the substitution rate. These findings provide a basis for W. pigra conservation, and future studies incorporating nuclear markers are warranted. Full article

Scour around a tripod foundation under a steady current is investigated experimentally. Experiments are conducted on three tripod foundation models and three flow-angle-of-attack conditions. The three tripod foundations differ only in the size of the top braces. The mechanisms of scour are discovered both experimentally by scanning the scour profiles at various stages of scour progression and conducting numerical simulations of flow around the foundations. The scour is found to be a combination of global and local scour, with three local maximum scour depths occurring at each of the three legs. Although the scour below the main column is shallower than the three legs, its contribution is significant to global scour: the scour below the main column of the tripods ranged from 38–72% of the maximum scour depth. Compared with the case of three truncated piles only, the global scour caused by the main column and the braces dramatically increases the volume of eroded sand. Scour below the main column develops more slowly than the three legs because of its greater diameter. The top brace size has a significant effect on scour; although the braces are located well above the sand surface, their effect is greatest at a 30° angle of attack. In addition to horseshoe vortices, other scour mechanisms, i.e., flow amplification and weak vortex shedding, are also identified. Full article

For coarse-diameter electroplated diamond wires, the traditional horizontal sanding process suffers from inhomogeneous circumferential abrasive distribution, a lengthy manufacturing process, and poor production consistency. To address these issues, a pre-plating-free one-step electroplating process based on rotating magnetic field-assisted vertical sanding is proposed. Through the construction of a high-precision multi-process cooperative control system based on a dual-PLC architecture, systematic optimization of the process parameters from pre-treatment and electrodeposition to post-treatment is realized. Combined with the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) and electrodeposition kinetic theories, the regulation mechanism of the rotating magnetic field-induced micro-convection effect on the mass transfer of the plating bath, particle dispersion, and grain refinement is revealed, and the kinetic principle by which the bottom-to-top vertical wire-running mode improves the circumferential deposition uniformity of abrasive grains on coarse-diameter wires is clarified. The experimental results show that the breaking force and the number of torsion cycles of the prepared diamond wire under the optimized process conditions are increased by 14.33% and 175.80%, respectively, and the properties of the head and tail ends of the wire exhibit high consistency. This study provides theoretical support for the industrial production of high-quality, high-consistency coarse-diameter diamond wires. Full article

In this study, the objective was to identify the key regulators of the osteogenic–adipogenic differentiation equilibrium of chicken bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs), with the expectation of developing marker genes that promote skeletal development and inhibit excessive fat deposition. BMSCs were isolated and phenotypically characterized. qRT-PCR showed FHL2 increased during osteogenic differentiation. Transfection with FHL2 overexpression plasmid or siRNAs was done. FHL2 overexpression increased osteogenic marker mRNA (RUNX2, ALP, Osterix, and OCN) levels, reduced lipid deposition-related gene (C/EBPα, C/EBPβ) expression, and increased mineralized area and nodules. FHL2 knockdown had the opposite effect. FHL2 overexpression also reduced apoptosis and proliferation-related transcripts, decreased apoptosis rate, and reduced proliferation-related transcripts and altered cell-cycle distribution. After FHL2 knockdown, RNA sequencing identified 81 differentially expressed genes. Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) enrichment showed changes in various processes and pathways. Enrichment analysis indicated that the differentially expressed genes were involved in apoptosis, cytokine–cytokine receptor interaction, Th17 cell differentiation, JAK-STAT signaling, cAMP signaling, steroid hormone biosynthesis, and retinol metabolism. These findings indicate that FHL2 promotes osteogenic differentiation and suppresses adipogenic differentiation in chicken BMSCs in vitro and may act through multiple downstream pathways. Full article

Aspergillus niger is the main microbial cell factory for industrial citric acid production, but 2–3% of residual sugar typically remains unutilized in the fermentation broth. To reduce carbon loss caused by residual sugars, seven α-glucosidase genes potentially involved in non-fermentable sugar formation were investigated. In this study, seven α-glucosidase gene-disrupted strains were constructed and were designated as An214233, An119858, An52452, An50927, An50055, An49940, and An40261. Disruption of each gene reduced isomaltose accumulation and increased citric acid production; at the same time, some morphological characteristics of the strain also changed. Among them, the isomaltose content in the fermentation broth of An214233, An50927, An50055, and An40261 decreased by more than 30%, indicating that these genes play important roles in isomaltose formation. However, the reduction in isomaltose content was not directly proportional to the increase in citric acid production. An49940 exhibited the greatest increase in citric acid production despite a relatively moderate reduction of 13.62% in isomaltose content. This strain also exhibited favorable overall performance in total and reducing sugar utilization, together with smaller mycelial pellets and thicker hyphae. These results indicate that citric acid production is influenced not only by non-fermentable sugar formation but also by sugar utilization and mycelial morphology, thereby providing a theoretical basis and potential genetic targets for reducing carbon source loss, improving citric acid production, and decreasing residual sugars in industrial fermentation. Full article

This paper proposes a fuzzy gain-scheduled time base generator (FGS-TBG) framework for prescribed fixed-time leader-following consensus of Lipschitz feedforward nonlinear multi-agent systems (FNMASs) with a dynamic leader under distributed output feedback. Existing TBG-based fixed-time consensus methods mostly rely on static leader assumptions and constant tuning parameters, limiting their adaptability to dynamic reference trajectories and causing redundant control energy consumption; meanwhile, most are designed for integrator-type or linear systems, leaving a notable research gap for FNMASs. To address the static-leader limitation, we first develop a smooth TBG-based distributed observer and a distributed output-feedback consensus protocol for FNMASs with a dynamic leader. Our scheme accommodates a user-defined nonzero leader control input and guarantees prescribed fixed-time leader-following tracking consensus independent of the initial conditions. To boost the adaptability of fixed-parameter TBG schemes, we further develop an FGS-TBG strategy for online intelligent tuning of TBG gains. Instead of approximating unknown nonlinear dynamics as in traditional adaptive fuzzy control, the fuzzy system only schedules TBG gains, retaining all inherent theoretical characteristics of TBG while enhancing adaptability and cutting redundant control energy. We establish the fixed-time convergence of the closed-loop system through Lyapunov analysis. Comparative simulations verify that the proposed framework achieves superior adaptability and lower control cost while maintaining the prescribed fixed-time performance. Full article

Toll-like receptors (TLRs) are evolutionarily conserved sensors of pathogen-associated molecular patterns. The chromosomal organization and post-duplication diversification of the TLR repertoire in Lethenteron reissneri remain incompletely characterized. We combined chromosome-level genome screening with phylogenetic, genomic organization, and transcriptional analyses. We identified 21 TLR and TLR-like genes, including expansions of the TLR2, TLR5, TLR7, TLR14, and TLR21 subfamilies, but detected no orthologs of vertebrate TLR1, TLR4, TLR6, TLR9, or TLR10. Two atypical TIR-only genes, designated TLR-like-a and TLR-like-b, formed a distinct phylogenetic group. Chromosomal mapping revealed local paralog clusters alongside members distributed across separate chromosomes. RT-qPCR revealed treatment-associated transcriptional changes in peripheral blood leukocytes after LPS or Poly(I:C) administration, with paralogs differing in response magnitude and timing. Together, these results characterize a distinctive TLR repertoire in L. reissneri and show that duplicated members differ in protein architecture and stimulus-associated transcription, adding comparative evidence on the early evolution of vertebrate innate immunity. Full article

Accurate species-level identification within the genus Peptoniphilus is challenging, yet routine methods, including biochemical identification, MALDI-TOF MS, and 16S rRNA gene sequencing, have not been systematically evaluated. We re-identified seven clinical isolates recovered between 2019 and 2025 from blood, ovarian abscess, diabetic foot, and skin and soft tissue, using VITEK-2 ANC, two MALDI-TOF MS platforms (Autof ms1000 and Bruker Biotyper), 16S rRNA gene sequencing, and whole-genome sequencing (WGS) combined with average nucleotide identity (ANI) analysis. VITEK-2 reported all seven isolates as P. asaccharolyticus; both MALDI-TOF platforms reported all as P. harei with high confidence (Autof ms1000 scores 9.299–9.638; Bruker Biotyper scores 2.008–2.227); and 16S rRNA sequencing could not reliably distinguish between P. vaginalis (98.60–99.23%) and P. harei (98.03–98.31%), as both identity ranges were close to the 98.65% species-level threshold and neither consistently exceeded it. WGS/ANI identified all seven isolates as P. genitalis (ANI 96.44–97.05% against the reference genome). All clinical isolates remained susceptible to β-lactams and vancomycin. Clindamycin resistance was common (6/7), and erythromycin showed a concordant pattern; the fluoroquinolones showed small inhibition zones in 5/7 isolates. However, erythromycin and the fluoroquinolones lacked a method-appropriate breakpoint and could not be formally categorized. The clinical distribution of P. genitalis is not limited by its name; conventional methods underrepresent this recently described species, and WGS/ANI should serve as the confirmatory method when identification conflicts with phenotypic observations. Full article

Reliable UAV detection from ground-based cameras remains difficult under changing illumination, complex backgrounds, and residual displacement between visible and infrared sensors. This paper proposes the Bidirectional Feature Alignment and Transfer-Gated Fusion Network (BATF-Net), a dual-stream detector that preserves separate RGB- and infrared-reference coordinate systems. At the C3, C4, and C5 stages of a two-stream YOLOX-s architecture, an offset estimator shared across transfer directions predicts RGB-to-infrared and infrared-to-RGB displacement fields. Bilinear sampling maps each source features into the corresponding reference coordinates, after which a spatial gate derived from local response magnitude and post-alignment cosine similarity controls residual feature transfer. The network is trained end to end with two detection-head losses and requires neither pixel-level registration labels nor an auxiliary geometric objective. Under the stated validation protocol, the RGB-/infrared-reference ${\mathrm{AP}}_{50:95}$ values are 41.9%/56.9% on MM-UAV and 66.3%/60.6% on Anti-UAV. Compared with the RGB–infrared detector preceding MMA-SORT, these values are higher by 0.8/0.4 and 0.4/0.5 percentage points, respectively. BATF-Net requires 50.0 G FLOPs and runs at 167 frames/s, compared with 54.2 G FLOPs and 125 frames/s for the MMA-SORT detector on the reported platform. These results show that bidirectional alignment can improve paired RGB–infrared UAV detection while preserving sensor-specific outputs and real-time throughput on the evaluated platform. Full article

Granular porous media are widely used in groundwater, filtration, drainage, and packed-treatment systems, where pressure loss is commonly represented by macroscopic correlations or reduced pore-network conductance models. These approaches provide useful descriptions of hydraulic response, but the development of nonlinear behaviour across individual pore connections remains incompletely characterised. This study combines pore-resolved computational fluid dynamics (CFD), a Delaunay-based pore–throat–pore representation, and Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) to examine local pressure–velocity responses in four monodisperse sphere-packing realisations. The CFD-derived throat-centre velocity is used together with throat geometry, particle arrangement, and adjacent pore-body geometry to construct a common response mapping across the sampled flow conditions. The analysis reveals a broad distribution of pair-specific nonlinear transition susceptibilities and progressive, network-dependent activation as the inlet velocity increases. Particle arrangement shows the most persistent association with transition susceptibility, while the broader pore–throat–pore geometry contributes to the representation of local hydraulic response. Comparison with the bed-scale CFD pressure loss provides a descriptive, non-mechanistic quantitative cross-scale comparison: the extent of local activation and the relative quadratic contribution to the bed-scale response follow different packing-level orderings and are not directly proportional. The framework therefore provides a pore-pair perspective on heterogeneous nonlinear flow while remaining limited to the investigated packing realisations and the CFD-sampled response domain. Full article