Boron-doped graphene with different boron structures was rationally synthesized to enhance the adsorption of N 2 , thus enabling an efficient metal-free electrocatalyst for electrochemical N 2 reduction in aqueous solution at ambient conditions. At a doping level of 6.2%, boron-doped graphene achieved a NH 3 production rate of 9.8 mg$hr À1 $cm À2 and an excellent faradic efficiency (10.8% at À0.5 V versus reversible hydrogen electrode).

Figure 5. a) Linear sweep voltammetry of the CoNi(OH) x ||NiN x nanotube two-electrode water splitting system. b) Chronoamperometry of water electrolysis using the CoNi(OH) x ||NiN x nanotube system at a voltage of 1.65 V versus RHE.

Off-target binding and cleavage by Cas9 pose major challenges in its application. How the conformational dynamics of Cas9 govern its nuclease activity under on- and off-target conditions remains largely unknown. Here, using intra-molecular single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer measurements, we revealed that Cas9 in apo, sgRNA-bound, and dsDNA/sgRNA-bound forms spontaneously transits among three major conformational states, mainly reflecting significant conformational mobility of the catalytic HNH domain. We also uncovered surprising long-range allosteric communication between the HNH domain and the RNA/DNA heteroduplex at the PAM-distal end to ensure correct positioning of the catalytic site, which demonstrated that a unique proofreading mechanism served as the last checkpoint before DNA cleavage. Several Cas9 residues were likely to mediate the allosteric communication and proofreading step. Modulating interactions between Cas9 and heteroduplex at the PAM-distal end by introducing mutations on these sites provides an alternative route to improve and optimize the CRISPR/Cas9 toolbox.

Oxygen evolution reaction (OER) electrocatalysts are confronted with challenges such as sluggish kinetics, low conductivity, and instability, restricting the development of water splitting. In this study, we report an efficient Co(3+)-rich cobalt selenide (Co0.85Se) nanoparticles coated with carbon shell as OER electrocatalyst, which are derived from zeolitic imidazolate framework (ZIF-67) precursor. It is proposed that the organic ligands in the ZIF-67 can effectively enrich and stabilize the Co(3+) ions in the inorganic-organic frameworks and subsequent carbon-coated nanoparticles. In alkaline media, the catalyst exhibits excellent OER performances, which are attributed to its abundant active sites, high conductivity, and superior kinetics.

Motivation: Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) indexing, which is to assign a set of MeSH main headings to citations, is crucial for many important tasks in biomedical text mining and information retrieval. Large-scale MeSH indexing has two challenging aspects: the citation side and MeSH side. For the citation side, all existing methods, including Medical Text Indexer (MTI) by National Library of Medicine and the state-of-the-art method, MeSHLabeler, deal with text by bag-of-words, which cannot capture semantic and context-dependent information well.Methods: We propose DeepMeSH that incorporates deep semantic information for large-scale MeSH indexing. It addresses the two challenges in both citation and MeSH sides. The citation side challenge is solved by a new deep semantic representation, D2V-TFIDF, which concatenates both sparse and dense semantic representations. The MeSH side challenge is solved by using the ‘learning to rank’ framework of MeSHLabeler, which integrates various types of evidence generated from the new semantic representation.Results: DeepMeSH achieved a Micro F-measure of 0.6323, 2% higher than 0.6218 of MeSHLabeler and 12% higher than 0.5637 of MTI, for BioASQ3 challenge data with 6000 citations.Availability and Implementation: The software is available upon request.Contact: zhusf@fudan.edu.cnSupplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

We theoretically study the superfluid phase of a strongly correlated 173 Yb Fermi gas near its orbital Feshbach resonance, by developing a quantitative pair-fluctuation theory within a two-band model. We examine the density excitation spectrum of the system and determine a stability phase diagram. We find that the 173 Yb Fermi gas is intrinsically metastable and has a peculiar equation of state, due to the small but positive singlet scattering length. The massive Leggett mode, arising from the fluctuation of the relative phase of two order parameters, is severely damped. We discuss the parameter space where an undamped Leggett mode may exist.

Identifying accurate biomarkers of cognitive decline is essential for advancing early diagnosis and prevention therapies in Alzheimer’s Disease. The Alzheimer’s Disease DREAM Challenge was designed as a computational crowdsourced project to benchmark the current state-of-the-art in predicting cognitive outcomes in Alzheimer’s Disease based on high-dimensional, publicly available genetic and structural imaging data. This meta-analysis failed to identify a meaningful predictor developed from either data modality, suggesting that alternate approaches should be considered for to prediction of cognitive performance.

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light represents a fundamental optical freedom that can be exploited to manipulate quantum state of atoms. In particular, it can be used to realize spinorbital-angular-momentum (SOAM) coupling in cold atoms by inducing an atomic Raman transition using two laser beams with differing OAM. Rich quantum phases are predicted to exist in manybody systems with SOAM coupling. Their observations in laboratory, however, are often hampered by the limited control of the system parameters. In this work we report, for the first time, the experimental observation of the ground-state quantum phase diagram of the SOAM coupled Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). The discontinuous variation of the spin polarization as well as the vorticity of the atomic wave function across the phase boundaries provides clear evidence of firstorder phase transitions. Our results open up a new way to the study of phase transitions and exotic quantum phases in quantum gases. arXiv:1806.06263v2 [cond-mat.quant-gas]