Photodynamic therapy (PDT) has emerged as an alternative and promising noninvasive treatment for cancer as well as non-cancer diseases, which involves the uptake of photosensitizers (PSs) by cancer cells followed by irradiation. The use of nanomaterials as carriers of PSs is a very promising approach to improve the development of PDT in clinical medicine. In this study, a novel folic acid-conjugated graphene oxide (GO) was strategically designed and prepared as targeting drug delivery system to achieve higher specificity. The second generation photosensitizer (PS) Chlorin e6 (Ce6) was effectively loaded into the system via hydrophobic interactions and π-π stacking. The nanocarriers can significantly increase the accumulation of Ce6 in tumor cells and lead to a remarkable photodynamic efficacy on MGC803 cells upon irradiation. These suggested that folic acid-conjugated GO loaded Ce6 had great potential as effective drug delivery system in targeting PDT.

Ferroelectric capacitive memories have not achieved the commercial success originally hoped for them in large volume because the area of the capacitors ("footprint") is too large to scale them up to gigabit density devices, [ 1 ] and a restoring pulse is required after a destructive readout. The non-destructive readout of the binary information is possible from the bipolar switching between high-and low-conductance of a ferroelectric diode under two opposite polarizations, as fi rst discovered by Blom et al. in PbTiO 3 perovskite thin fi lms [ 2 ] and later reported by Choi et al. in bulk BiFeO 3 single crystals and Pb(Zr,Ti)O 3 fi lms. [3][4][5] Important properties of such memory are the ultrafast operating speed depending on the polarization fl ipping time (1-2 ps in principle) [ 6 ] and the high ratio of resistance in the forward and reverse directions (3000:1). [ 7 ] However, most ferroelectrics are insulating wide bandgap semiconductors at room temperature, which limits the maximum diode current to the order of ≈ 20 mA cm − 2 . [ 2 , 3 ] Therefore, reaching a suffi cient ferroresistive diode current for the stable detection of memory status using the sense amplifi ers in modern memory circuitry with tiny cell size is a major challenge.In such strongly insulating ferroelectrics, suffi cient diode currents can, in fact, only be observed in ultrathin fi lms, where quantum mechanical tunneling current dominates [ 8 ] and is modulated by varying the tunneling barrier height along with the polarization reversal. Although this effect has been reproducibly demonstrated through local electron transport from an atomic force microscope (AFM) tip into ferroelectric thin fi lms, [9][10][11] the local-probe-based data storage is incompatible with current complementary metal-oxide semiconductor integration processes. Meanwhile, with macroscopic capacitor-type upper and lower electrodes capping the ultrathin ferroelectric layer, an overwhelming leakage current through existing defect-mediated leakage paths could swamp the tunneling current, thereby making the switching signal unreadable. In addition, large lattice-mismatch stresses in ultrathin epitaxial fi lms prevent their use as longtime retention memories due to preferred domain orientations. [ 12 ] One solution to these diffi culties has been to more broadly consider resistive switching effects in (non-ferroelectric) metal oxides. [13][14][15][16][17] However, most of these resistive switching effects are based on a certain type of defect (ionic or electronic) mediated phenomenon, suggesting the inherent diffi culty in precise control of the switching behavior. In contrast, ferroresistive switching behavior is based on the intrinsic switching of ferroelectric domains without invoking of charged defect migration and may, therefore, possess a fundamental merit over defectmediated mechanisms for achieving reliable performance requisite for commercial production once reliable fabrication parameters are established. A critical measure of such success using ferroelectric s...

Current-voltage hysteresis and switchable rectifying characteristics have been observed in epitaxial multiferroic BiFeO 3 ͑BFO͒ thin films. The forward direction of the rectifying current can be reversed repeatedly with polarization switching, indicating a switchable diode effect and large ferroelectric resistive switching. With analyzing the potential barriers and their variation with ferroelectric switching at the interfaces between the metallic electrodes and the semiconducting BFO, the switchable diode effect can be explained qualitatively by the polarization-modulated Schottky-like barriers.

Significance International trade affects global air pollution and transport by redistributing emissions related to production of goods and services and by potentially altering the total amount of global emissions. Here we analyze the trade influences by combining an economic-emission analysis on China’s bilateral trade and atmospheric chemical transport modeling. Our focused analysis on US air quality shows that Chinese air pollution related to production for exports contributes, at a maximum on a daily basis, 12–24% of sulfate pollution over the western United States. The US outsourcing of manufacturing to China might have reduced air quality in the western United States with an improvement in the east, due to the combined effects of changes in emissions and atmospheric transport.

Considering that the human brain uses ≈10 synapses to operate, the development of effective artificial synapses is essential to build brain-inspired computing systems. In biological synapses, the voltage-gated ion channels are very important for regulating the action-potential firing. Here, an electrolyte-gated transistor using WO with a unique tunnel structure, which can emulate the ionic modulation process of biological synapses, is proposed. The transistor successfully realizes synaptic functions of both short-term and long-term plasticity. Short-term plasticity is mimicked with the help of electrolyte ion dynamics under low electrical bias, whereas the long-term plasticity is realized using proton insertion in WO under high electrical bias. This is a new working approach to control the transition from short-term memory to long-term memory using different gate voltage amplitude for artificial synapses. Other essential synaptic behaviors, such as paired pulse facilitation, the depression and potentiation of synaptic weight, as well as spike-timing-dependent plasticity are also implemented in this artificial synapse. These results provide a new recipe for designing synaptic electrolyte-gated transistors through the electrostatic and electrochemical effects.

Multi-person pose estimation is fundamental to many computer vision tasks and has made significant progress in recent years. However, few previous methods explored the problem of pose estimation in crowded scenes while it remains challenging and inevitable in many scenarios. Moreover, current benchmarks cannot provide an appropriate evaluation for such cases. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient method to tackle the problem of pose estimation in the crowd and a new dataset to better evaluate algorithms. Our model consists of two key components: joint-candidate single person pose estimation (SPPE) and global maximum joints association. With multipeak prediction for each joint and global association using graph model, our method is robust to inevitable interference in crowded scenes and very efficient in inference. The proposed method surpasses the state-of-the-art methods on CrowdPose dataset by 5.2 mAP and results on MSCOCO dataset demonstrate the generalization ability of our method. Source code and dataset will be made publicly available.

This report describes the development of a compact and versatile, micromachined chip device enabling the efficient coupling of capillary electrophoresis to electrospray mass spectrometry (CE-ESMS). On-chip separation provides a convenient means of achieving rapid sample cleanup and resolution of multicomponent samples (typically 2-5 min) prior to mass spectral analysis. A low dead volume connection facilitating the coupling of microfabricated devices to CE-ESMS was evaluated using two different interfaces. The first configuration used disposable nanoelectrospray emitters directly coupled to the chip device via this low dead volume junction, thereby providing rapid separation of complex protein digests. The performance of this interface was compared with that of more traditional configurations using a sheath flow CE-ESMS arrangement where a fused-silica capillary of varying length enabled further temporal resolution of the multicomponent samples. The sensitivity and analytical characteristics of these interfaces were investigated in both negative and positive ion modes using standard peptide mixtures. The separation performance for synthetic peptides using a chip coated with amine reagent ranged from 26,000 to 58,000 theoretical plates for a sheath flow CE-ESMS interface comprising a 15-cm CE column. Replicate injections of a dilution series of peptide standards provided detection limits of 45-400 nM without the use of on-line preconcentration devices. The reproducibility of migration time ranged from 0.9 to 1.5% RSD whereas RSDs of 5-10% were observed on peak areas. The application of these devices for the analysis of protein digests was further evaluated using on-line tandem mass spectrometry.

A microfluidic device is described in which an electrospray interface to a mass spectrometer is integrated with a capillary electrophoresis channel, an injector and a protein digestion bed on a monolithic substrate. A large channel, 800 µm wide, 150 µm deep and 15 mm long, was created to act as a reactor bed for trypsin immobilized on 40–60 µm diameter beads. Separation was performed in channels etched 10 µm deep, 30 µm wide and about 45 mm long, feeding into a capillary, attached to the chip with a low dead volume coupling, that was 30 mm in length, with a 50 µm i.d. and 180 µm o.d. Sample was pumped through the reactor bed at flow rates between 0.5 and 60 µL/min. The application of this device for rapid digestion, separation and identification of proteins is demonstrated for melittin, cytochrome c and bovine serum albumin (BSA). The rate and efficiency of digestion was related to the flow rate of the substrate solution through the reactor bed. A flow rate of 1 or 0.5 µL/min was found adequate for complete consumption of cytochrome c or BSA, corresponding to a digestion time of 3–6 min at room temperature. Coverage of the amino acid sequence ranged from 92% for cytochrome c to 71% for BSA, with some missed cleavages observed. Melittin was consumed within 5 s. In contrast, a similar extent of digestion of melittin in a cuvet took 10–15 min. The kinetic limitations associated with the rapid digestion of low picomole levels of substrate were minimized using an integrated digestion bed with hydrodynamic flow to provide an increased ratio of trypsin to sample. This chip design thus provides a convenient platform for automated sample processing in proteomics applications. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.