The colloidal assembly of a nanoporous electrochromic 1D Bragg mirror comprising NiO and WO3 nanoparticle multilayers enables the convolution of electrically tunable electronic crystals and photonic crystals into a single device, providing thereby a distinctive means of creating and manipulating color.

We report a facile sol-gel synthesis of colloidally stable Fe(2)O(3) and ZnO nanoparticles in alcoholic solvents, ROH, where R = methyl, ethyl, n-propyl, isopropyl, and tert-butyl. We show that nanoparticles of ZnO (4-42) nm and Fe(2)O(3) (4-38 nm) monotonically increase in size upon increasing the alkyl chain length and branching of the alcohol solvent. These colloidally stable and size-controllable metal oxide nanoparticles enable the formation of high optical quality films and photonic crystal multilayers whose component layer thickness, refractive index, porosity, and surface area are found to scale with the nature of the alcohol. Utility of these colloidally stable nanoparticles is demonstrated by preparation of one-dimensional porous photonic crystals comprising ncZnO/ncWO(3) and ncFe(2)O(3)/ncWO(3) multilayers whose photonic stop band can be tuned by tailoring nanoparticle size. Myriad applications can be envisaged for these nanoparticle films in, for example, heterogeneous catalysis, photocatalysis, electrocatalysis, chemical sensors, and solar cells.

Segmentation of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) from Magnetic ResonanceImages (MRI) is a crucial prerequisite for NPC radiotherapy. However, manually segmenting of NPC is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Additionally, single-modality MRI generally cannot provide enough information for its accurate delineation. Therefore, a multi-modality MRI fusion network (MMFNet), which is a novel framework to fuse information from multi-modality medical images, is proposed to utilize MRI of T1, T2 and contrast-enhanced T1 to complete accurate segmentation of NPC. The backbone of MMFNet is designed as a multi-encoder-based network, consisting of several encoders to capture modality-specific features and one decoder to obtain fused features for NPC segmentation. A fusion block is presented to effectively fuse multi-source features.It contains a 3D Convolutional Block Attention Module (3D-CBAM), recalibrating low-level features captured from modality-specific encoders to highlight both informative features and regions of interest (ROIs), and a residual fusion block (RFBlock), which fuses re-weighted features to keep balance between fused ones and high-level features from decoder. Moreover, in order to make full mining of individual information from multi-modality MRI, a training strategy named self- * transfer is proposed to utilize pre-trained modality-specific encoders to initialize multi-encoder-based network. The proposed method based on multi-modality MRI can effectively segment NPC and its advantages are validated by extensive experiments.

A universal, simple, robust, widely applicable and cost-effective aqueous process is described for a controlled oxidative dissolution process of micrometer-sized metal powders to form high-purity aqueous dispersions of colloidally stable 3-8 nm metal oxide nanoparticles. Their utilization for making single and multilayer optically transparent high-surface-area nanoporous films is demonstrated. This facile synthesis is anticipated to find numerous applications in materials science, engineering, and nanomedicine.

Alpha-synuclein (α-syn), a small soluble protein containing 140 amino acids, is associated with the recycling pool of synaptic vesicles in presynaptic terminals. The misfolding and aggregation of α-syn is closely related to a group of neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s disease (PD), which is one of the most common progressive neurodegenerative diseases. Varieties of the post-translational modifications (PTMs) of α-syn, including phosphorylation, ubiquitination, and glycosylation, have been detected in soluble and aggregated α-syn in vivo. These PTMs can have either positive or negative effects on α-syn aggregation and toxicity, which may play critical roles in PD pathogenesis. Herein, we review the advances in synthetic and semisynthetic chemistry to generate homogeneous α-syn variants with site-specific modifications. Using these modified α-syn, we gain insight into the consequences of PTMs on α-syn aggregation and other biophysical properties, which can help elucidate the role of PTMs in the pathogenesis of PD and develop potential therapies to PD.