This study aimed to synthesize some new sulfone derivatives containing a 1,3,4-oxadiazole moiety and investigate their in vitro antibacterial activities against Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo) and Xanthomonas axonopodis pv. citri (Xac), the pathogens of rice bacterial leaf blight and citrus canker, respectively, by performing turbidimeter tests. Antibacterial bioassay results showed that compound 6d revealed excellent bioactivities against Xoo and Xac, with the 50% effective concentration (EC50) values of 0.17 and 1.98 μg/mL, respectively, compared with thiodiazole copper (121.82 and 77.04 μg/mL, respectively) and bismerthiazol (92.61 and 58.21 μg/mL, respectively). Meanwhile, greenhouse-condition trials indicated that, compared with thiodiazole copper and bismerthiazol, compound 6d more effectively reduced rice bacterial leaf blight.

In recent years, electronic nose (e-nose) systems have become a focus method for diagnosing pulmonary diseases such as lung cancer. However, principles and patterns of sensor responses in traditional e-nose systems are relatively homogeneous. Less study has been focused on type-different sensor arrays. In this paper, we designed a miniature e-nose system using 14 gas sensors of four types and its subsequent analysis of 52 breath samples. To investigate the performance of this system in identifying and distinguishing lung cancer from other respiratory diseases and healthy controls, five feature extraction algorithms and two classifiers were adopted. Lastly, the influence of type-different sensors on the identification ability of e-nose systems was analyzed. Results indicate that when using the LDA fuzzy 5-NN classification method, the sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of discriminating lung cancer patients from healthy controls with e-nose systems are 91.58%, 91.72% and 91.59%, respectively. Our findings also suggest that type-different sensors could significantly increase the diagnostic accuracy of e-nose systems. These results showed e-nose system proposed in this study was potentially practicable in lung cancer screening with a favorable performance. In addition, it is important for type-different sensors to be considered when developing e-nose systems.

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A facile colloidal solution method has been developed for the fast, scalable synthesis of orthorhombic@cubic core-shell nonstoichiometric Cu 5 FeS 4 icosahedral nanoparticles. Such nanoparticles contain high-density twin boundaries in the form of fivefold twins. Spark plasma sintering consolidates the nanoparticles into nanostructured pellets, which retain high-density twin boundaries and a tuned fraction of the secondary phase Fe-deficient cubic Cu 5 FeS 4 . As a result, the thermal and electrical transport properties are synergistically optimized, leading to an enhanced zT of ≈0.62 at 710 K, which is about 51% higher than that of single-phase Cu 5 FeS 4 . This study provides an energy-efficient approach to realize twin engineering in nonstoichiometric Cu 5 FeS 4 nanomaterials for high-performance thermoelectrics.