Thermoelectric technology allows conversion between heat and electricity. Many good thermoelectric materials contain rare or toxic elements, so developing low-cost and high-performance thermoelectric materials is warranted. Here, we report the temperature-dependent interplay of three separate electronic bands in hole-doped tin sulfide (SnS) crystals. This behavior leads to synergistic optimization between effective mass (m*) and carrier mobility (μ) and can be boosted through introducing selenium (Se). This enhanced the power factor from ~30 to ~53 microwatts per centimeter per square kelvin (μW cm−1 K−2 at 300 K), while lowering the thermal conductivity after Se alloying. As a result, we obtained a maximum figure of merit ZT (ZTmax) of ~1.6 at 873 K and an average ZT (ZTave) of ~1.25 at 300 to 873 K in SnS0.91Se0.09 crystals. Our strategy for band manipulation offers a different route for optimizing thermoelectric performance. The high-performance SnS crystals represent an important step toward low-cost, Earth-abundant, and environmentally friendly thermoelectrics.

Interpretable multi-hop reading comprehension (RC) over multiple documents is a challenging problem because it demands reasoning over multiple information sources and explaining the answer prediction by providing supporting evidences. In this paper, we propose an effective and interpretable Select, Answer and Explain (SAE) system to solve the multi-document RC problem. Our system first filters out answer-unrelated documents and thus reduce the amount of distraction information. This is achieved by a document classifier trained with a novel pairwise learning-to-rank loss. The selected answer-related documents are then input to a model to jointly predict the answer and supporting sentences. The model is optimized with a multi-task learning objective on both token level for answer prediction and sentence level for supporting sentences prediction, together with an attention-based interaction between these two tasks. Evaluated on HotpotQA, a challenging multi-hop RC data set, the proposed SAE system achieves top competitive performance in distractor setting compared to other existing systems on the leaderboard.

Some studies on the hyperuricemia (HUA) have focused on intestinal bacteria. To better understand the correlation between gut microbiota and HUA, we established a HUA rat model with high-purine diet, and used 16S rRNA genes sequencing to analyze gut microbiota changes in HUA rats. To analyze the potential role played by gut microbiota in HUA, we altered the gut microbiota of HUA rats with antibiotics, and compared the degree of uric acid elevation between HUA and antibiotic-fed HUA rats (Ab+HUA). Finally, we established a recipient rat model, in which we transplanted fecal microbiota of HUA and normal rats into recipient rats. Three weeks later, we compared the uric acid content of recipient rats. As a result, the diversity and abundance of the gut microbiota had changed in HUA rats. The Ab-fed HUA rats had significantly lower uric acid content compared to the HUA rats, and gut microbiota from HUA rats increased uric acid content of recipient rats. The genera Vallitalea, Christensenella and Insolitispirillum may associate with HUA. Our findings highlight the association between gut microbiota and HUA, and the potential role played by gut microbiota in HUA. We hope that this finding will promote the isolation and culture of HUA-related bacteria and orient HUA-related studies from being correlational to mechanistic. These steps will therefore make it possible for us to treat HUA using gut microbiota as the target.

Hyperuricemia is associated with many metabolic diseases. However, the underlying mechanism remains unknown. The gut microbiota has been demonstrated to play significant roles in the immunity and metabolism of the host. In the present study, we constructed a hyperuricemic mouse model to investigate whether the metabolic disorder caused by hyperuricemia is related to intestinal dysbiosis. A significantly increased intestinal permeability was detected in hyperuricemic mice. The difference in microflora between wild-type and hyperuricemic mice accompanies the translocation of gut microbiota to the extraintestinal tissues. Such a process is followed by an increase in innate immune system activation. We observed increased LPS and TNF-α levels in the hyperuricemic mice, indicating that hyperuricemic mice were in a state of low-grade systemic inflammation. In addition, hyperuricemic mice presented early injury of parenteral tissue and disordered lipid metabolism. These findings suggest that intestinal dysbiosis due to an impaired intestinal barrier may be the key cause of metabolic disorders in hyperuricemic mice. Our findings should aid in paving a new way of preventing and treating hyperuricemia and its complications. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Hyperuricemia is associated with many metabolic diseases. However, the underlying mechanism remains unknown. We constructed a hyperuricemic mouse model to explore the relationship between intestinal dysbiosis and metabolic disorder caused by hyperuricemia.

Low-cost and earth-abundant PbS-based thermoelectrics are expected to be an alternative for PbTe, and have attracted extensive attentions from thermoelectric community. Herein, a maximum ZT (ZT max ) ≈ 1.3 at 923 K in n-type PbS is obtained through synergistically optimizing quality factor with Sn alloying and PbTe phase incorporation. It is found that Sn alloying in PbS can sharpen the conduction band shape to balance the contradictory interrelationship between carrier mobility and effective mass, accordingly, a peak power factor of ∼19.8 μWcm −1 K −2 is achieved. Besides band sharpening, Sn alloying can also narrow the band gap of PbS so as to make the conduction band position between Pb 0.94 Sn 0.06 S and PbTe well aligned, which can benefit high carrier mobility. Therefore, incorporating the PbTe phase into the Pb 0.94 Sn 0.06 S matrix can not only favorably maintain the carrier mobility at ∼150 cm 2 V −1 s −1 but also suppress the lattice thermal conductivity to ∼0.61 Wm −1 K −1 in Pb 0.94 Sn 0.06 S-8%PbTe, which contributes to a largely enhanced quality factor. Consequently, an average ZT (ZT ave ) ≈ 0.72 in 300−923 K is achieved in Pb 0.94 Sn 0.06 S-8%PbTe that outperforms other n-type PbSbased thermoelectric materials.

The electronic structures of FeAs compounds are sensitive to FeAs bonding, which is described unsuccessfully by the local density approximation (LDA). Treating the multiorbital fluctuations from ab inito LDA+Gutzwiller method, we can now predict the correct FeAs bond length and bonding strength, which will explain the observed "soft phonon." The bands are narrowed by a factor of 2 from their LDA widths. The d{3z{2}-r{2}} orbital is pushed up to cross the Fermi level, forming a three-dimensional Fermi surface, which reduces the anisotropy. The interorbital Hund's coupling J rather than U plays a crucial role in obtaining these results.

Multi-hop reading comprehension (RC) across documents poses new challenge over singledocument RC because it requires reasoning over multiple documents to reach the final answer. In this paper, we propose a new model to tackle the multi-hop RC problem. We introduce a heterogeneous graph with different types of nodes and edges, which is named as Heterogeneous Document-Entity (HDE) graph. The advantage of HDE graph is that it contains different granularity levels of information including candidates, documents and entities in specific document contexts. Our proposed model can do reasoning over the HDE graph with nodes representation initialized with co-attention and self-attention based context encoders. We employ Graph Neural Networks (GNN) based message passing algorithms to accumulate evidences on the proposed HDE graph. Evaluated on the blind test set of the Qangaroo WIKIHOP data set, our HDE graph based single model delivers competitive result, and the ensemble model achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Bi 2 Se 3 , as a Te-free alternative of room-temperature state-of-the-art thermoelectric (TE) Bi 2 Te 3 , has attracted little attention due to its poor electrical transport properties and high thermal conductivity. Interestingly, BiSbSe 3 , a product of alloying 50% Sb on Bi sites, shows outstanding electron and phonon transports. BiSbSe 3 possesses orthorhombic structure and exhibits multiple conduction bands, which can be activated when the carrier density is increased as high as ≈3.7 × 10 20 cm −3 through heavily Br doping, resulting in simultaneously enhancing the electrical conductivities and Seebeck coefficients. Meanwhile, an extremely low thermal conductivity (≈0.6-0.4 W m −1 K −1 at 300-800 K) is found in BiSbSe 3 . Both first-principles calculations and elastic properties measurements show the strong anharmonicity and support the ultra-low thermal conductivity of BiSbSe 3 . Finally, a maximum dimensionless figure of merit ZT ∼ 1.4 at 800 K is achieved in BiSb(Se 0.94 Br 0.06 ) 3 , which is comparable to the most n-type Te-free TE materials. The present results indicate that BiSbSe 3 is a new and a robust candidate for TE power generation in medium-temperature range.