In this contribution, large-area organic charge-transfer complex (AgTCNQ and CuTCNQ) nanowires were synthesized by organic vapor-solid-phase reaction at mild experimental conditions. These nanowires were facilitated on the surface of Cu and Ag foils or different kinds of substrates coated with a layer of silver and copper on a large scale. The excellent field emission properties were observed in the as-grown AgTCNQ and CuTCNQ nanowires. They should have great potential in vacuum device applications.

On Monday, May 12, 2008, a devastating mega-earthquake of magnitude 8.0 struck the Wenchuan area, northwestern Sichuan Province, China. The focal mechanism of the earthquake was successive massive rock fracturing 15 km in depth at Yingxiu. Seismic analysis confirms that the major shock occurred on the Beichuan-Yingxiu Fault and that aftershocks rapidly extended in a straight northeast-southeast direction along the Longmenshan Fault zone. Fatalities approaching a total of 15,000 occurred, with a significant number resulting from four types of seismically triggered geohazards-rock avalanches and landslides, landslide-dammed lakes (''earthquake lakes''), and debris flows. China Geological Survey has identified 4,970 potentially risky sites, 1,701 landslides, 1,844 rock avalanches, 515 debris flows, and 1,093 unstable slopes. Rock avalanches and landslides caused many fatalities directly and disrupted the transportation system, extensively disrupting rescue efforts and thereby causing additional fatalities. Landslide-dammed lakes not only flooded human habitats in upstream areas but also posed threats to potentially inundated downstream areas with large populations. Debris flows become the most remarkable geohazards featured by increasing number, high frequency, and low triggering rainfall. Earthquake-triggered geohazards sequentially induced and transformed to additional hazards. For example, debris flows occurred on rock avalanches and landslides, followed by landslide-dammed lakes, and then by additional debris flows and breakouts of the landslide-dammed lakes and downstream flooding. Earthquake-induced geohazards occurred mainly along the fault zone and decreased sharply with distance from the fault. It can be anticipated that post-earthquake geohazards, particularly for debris flows, will continue for 5-10 years and even for as long as 20 years. An integrated strategy of continuing emergency response and economic reconstruction is required. The lesson from Wenchuan Earthquake is that the resulted geohazards may appear in large number in active fault regions. A plan for geohazard prevention in the earthquake-active mountainous areas is needed in advance.

The Wenchuan earthquake, measured at M s 8.0 according to the China Earthquake Administration, occurred at 14:28 on 12 May 2008 in the Sichuan Province of China. It brought overwhelming destruction to eight provinces and cities. Landslides and rock avalanches triggered by the earthquake produced 257 landslide lakes which were distributed along the fault rupture zone and river channels. The authors traveled to the disaster zone immediately after the earthquake to examine some of the features of the debris dams and performed a quick evaluation of the potential for outburst of earthquake-induced landslide lakes for the purpose of disaster relief. The preliminary analysis indicated that the landslide lakes could be classified as those exhibiting extremely high risk, medium risk, and low risk according to field observations and remote sensing, to determine material composition, dam structure, dam height, maximum water storage capacity, and size of the population potentially affected area. The failure risk of 21 debris dams were evaluated as follows: one dam with an extremely high danger risk, seven dams with a high danger, five dams with a medium danger, and eight dams of low danger. More concern was given to the Tangjiashan Lake and different scenarios for the potential sudden failure of its dam were assessed. The risk evaluation result was accepted in full, by the earthquake disaster relief office. A successful emergency dam treatment for risk reduction was planned, based on our assessments, and these measures were quickly carried out. According to this research, the earthquake destabilized the surrounding mountains, resulting in a prolonged geohazard for the area. Landslides and debris flows will continue to develop for at least 5 to 10 years after the Wenchuan earthquake and will produce additional dammed lakes. Recommendations and plans for earthquake-landslide lake mitigation were proposed, based on past successful practices.

No abstract

Microneedle (MN) delivery system has been greatly developed to deliver drugs into the skin painlessly, noninvasively, and safety. In the past several decades, various types of MNs have been developed by the newer producing techniques. Briefly, as for the morphologically, MNs can be classified into solid, coated, dissolved, and hollow MN, based on the transdermal drug delivery methods of “poke and patch,” “coat and poke,” “poke and release,” and “poke and flow,” respectively. Microneedles also have other characteristics based on the materials and structures. In addition, various manufacturing techniques have been well-developed based on the materials. In this review, the materials, structures, morphologies, and fabricating methods of MNs are summarized. A separate part of the review is used to illustrate the application of MNs to deliver vaccine, insulin, lidocaine, aspirin, and other drugs. Finally, the review ends up with a perspective on the challenges in research and development of MNs, envisioning the future development of MNs as the next generation of drug delivery system.

Finding the biomarkers associated with ASD is helpful for understanding the underlying roots of the disorder and can lead to earlier diagnosis and more targeted treatment. A promising approach to identify biomarkers is using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which can be used to analyze graph structured data, i.e. brain networks constructed by fMRI. One way to interpret important features is through looking at how the classification probability changes if the features are occluded or replaced. The major limitation of this approach is that replacing values may change the distribution of the data and lead to serious errors. Therefore, we develop a 2-stage pipeline to eliminate the need to replace features for reliable biomarker interpretation. Specifically, we propose an inductive GNN to embed the graphs containing different properties of task-fMRI for identifying ASD and then discover the brain regions/subgraphs used as evidence for the GNN classifier. We first show GNN can achieve high accuracy in identifying ASD. Next, we calculate the feature importance scores using GNN and compare the interpretation ability with Random Forest. Finally, we run with different atlases and parameters, proving the robustness of the proposed method. The detected biomarkers reveal their association with social behaviors and are consistent with those reported in the literature. We also show the potential of discovering new informative biomarkers. Our pipeline can be generalized to other graph feature importance interpretation problems.

No abstract

A new class of stabilized pentacene derivatives with externally fused five-membered rings are prepared by means of a key palladium-catalyzed cyclopentannulation step. The target compounds are synthesized by chemical manipulation of a partially saturated 6,13-dibromopentacene precursor that can be fully aromatized in a final step through a DDQ-mediated dehydrogenation reaction (DDQ=2,3-dichloro-5,6-dicyano-1,4-benzoquinone). The new 1,2,8,9-tetraaryldicyclopenta[fg,qr]pentacene derivatives have narrow energy gaps of circa 1.2 eV and behave as strong electron acceptors with lowest unoccupied molecular orbital energies between -3.81 and -3.90 eV. Photodegradation studies reveal the new compounds are more photostable than 6,13-bis(triisopropylsilylethynyl)pentacene (TIPS-pentacene).