This study investigated the development of fungal community composition in arable soil during the degradation of straw residue. We explored the short-term responses of the fungal community over 28 days of decomposition in soil using culture-independent polymerase chain reaction in combination with a clone library and denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE). Fungal cellobiohydrolase I (cbhI) genes in the soil were also characterized, and their diversity suggested the existence of a different cellulose decomposer. The DGGE profiles based on fungal internal transcribed spacer analysis showed different successions of fungal populations during residue decomposition. Members of Lecythophora and Sordariales were dominant in the early succession, while Hypocrea and Engyodontium were better adapted in the late succession. The succession of fungal communities might be related to changes of residue quality during decomposition. Collectively, sequences assigned to Ascomycota members were dominant at different stages of the fungal succession during decomposition, revealing that they were key drivers responsible for residue degradation in the arable soil tested.

Dithieno[3,2-b:2′,3′-d]pyrrole (DTP) derivatives are one of the most important organic photovoltaic materials due to better π-conjugation across fused thiophene rings.

The core plays a crucial role in achieving high performance of linear hole transport materials (HTMs) toward the perovskite solar cells (PSCs). Most studies focused on the development of fused heterocycles as cores for HTMs. Nevertheless, nonfused heterocycles deserve to be studied since they can be easily synthesized. In this work, we reported a series of low-cost triphenylamine HTMs (M101-M106) with different nonfused cores. Results concluded that the introduced core has a significant influence on conductivity, hole mobility, energy level, and solubility of linear HTMs. M103 and M104 with nonfused oligothiophene cores are superior to other HTMs in terms of conductivity, hole mobility, and surface morphology. PSCs based on M104 exhibited the highest power conversion efficiency of 16.50% under AM 1.5 sun, which is comparable to that of spiro-OMeTAD (16.67%) under the same conditions. Importantly, the employment of M104 is highly economical in terms of the cost of synthesis as compared to that of spiro-OMeTAD. This work demonstrated that nonfused heterocycles, such as oligothiophene, are promising cores for high performance of linear HTMs toward PSCs.

The flow performance of a high-viscosity fluid in novel static mixers with multitwisted leaves was investigated numerically in the range of Re = 0.1−150. The effects of mixing-segment construction, Reynolds number, and aspect ratio on the chaotic mixing characteristics of different static mixers were evaluated based on the Lagrangian tracking method. The tracer particle distributions, G values, extensional efficiency characteristics, and stretching fields were used to evaluate the dispersion and distribution mixing performances in the new static mixers. Compared with the Kenics static mixer (KSM), the static mixers with three twisted leaves (TKSM) and four twisted leaves (FKSM) achieved chaotic mixing status much earlier and could also maintain this status by successive mixing-element groups. In contrast, there were large unmixed zones in the static mixer with double twisted leaves (DKSM). Stretching rates calculated from pathlines were found to be in good agreement with results reported in the literature. The particle trajectories revealed that the logarithm of the stretching rate increased linearly with the dimensionless axial length. For a given length of static mixer, a decrease in aspect ratio benefited an increasing stretching rate. When the number of multitwisted leaves in the cross section was greater than 2, the range of the probability density curve became larger than that of the KSM. All of the static mixers were found to have small groups of material points experiencing very high stretching. The TKSM and FKSM were found to have higher mixing efficiencies than the KSM, whereas the DKSM exhibited a worse micromixing ability.

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This paper presents a pure hardware implementation of CRYSTALS-KYBER algorithm on Xilinx FPGAs. CRYSTALS-KYBER is one of 26 candidate algorithms in Round 2 of NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standardization process. The proposed design focuses on maximizing resource utilization by reusing most of the functional modules in the encapsulation and decapsulation processes of the algorithm. For instance, the hash module integrates several different hash functions in one module. Efficient parallel and pipelined computations are applied in the NTT module. Through the analysis of simulation and synthesis results, it is found that the proposed work has the advantages of higher frequencies and lower execution times. The scheme operates at 155 MHz and 192 MHz frequencies on Xilinx Artix-7 and Virtex-7 FPGAs, respectively. Compared with the performance of an embedded Cortex-M4 processor, the hardware implementation can achieve a maximum speedup of 129 times for encryption/decryption.