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Aerogels derived from nanocellulose have emerged as attractive absorbents for cleaning up oil spills and organic pollutants due to their lightweight, exceptional absorption capacity, and sustainability. However, the majority of the nanocellulose aerogels based on the bottom-up fabrication process still lack sufficient mechanical robustness because of their disordered architecture with randomly assembled cellulose nanofibrils, which is an obstacle to their practical application as oil absorbents. Herein, we report an effective strategy to create anisotropic cellulose-based wood sponges with a special spring-like lamellar structure directly from natural balsa wood. The selective removal of lignin and hemicelluloses via chemical treatment broke the thin cell walls of natural wood, leading to a lamellar structure with wave-like stacked layers upon freeze-drying. A subsequent silylation reaction allowed the growth of polysiloxane coatings on the skeleton surface. The resulting silylated wood sponge exhibited high mechanical compressibility (reversible compression of 60%) and elastic recovery (∼99% height retention after 100 cycles at 40% strain). The wood sponge showed excellent oil/water absorption selectivity with a high oil absorption capacity of 41 g g–1. Moreover, the absorbed oils can be recovered by simple mechanical squeezing, and the porous sponge maintained a high oil-absorption capacity upon multiple squeezing-absorption cycles, displaying excellent recyclability. Taking advantage of the unidirectional liquid transport of the porous sponge, an oil-collecting device was successfully designed to continuously separate contaminants from water. Such an easy, low-cost, and scalable top-down approach holds great potential for developing effective and reusable oil absorbents for oil/water separation.

Under-contribution is a problem for many online communities. Social psychology theories of social loafing and goal-setting can provide mid-level design principles to address this problem. We tested the design principles in two field experiments. In one, members of an online movie recommender community were reminded of the uniqueness of their contributions and the benefits that follow from them. In the second, they were given a range of individual or group goals for contribution. As predicted by theory, individuals contributed when they were reminded of their uniqueness and when they were given specific and challenging goals, but other predictions were not borne out. The paper ends with suggestions and challenges for mining social science theories as well as implications for design.

Genome-wide screening using CRISPR coupled with nuclease Cas9 (CRISPR/Cas9) is a powerful technology for the systematic evaluation of gene function. Statistically principled analysis is needed for the accurate identification of gene hits and associated pathways. Here, we describe how to perform computational analysis of CRISPR screens using the MAGeCKFlute pipeline. MAGeCKFlute combines the MAGeCK and MAGeCK-VISPR algorithms and incorporates additional downstream analysis functionalities. MAGeCKFlute is distinguished from other currently available tools by being a comprehensive pipeline that contains a series of functions for analyzing CRISPR screen data. This protocol explains how to use MAGeCKFlute to perform quality control, normalization, batch effect removal, copy number bias correction, gene hit identification, and downstream functional enrichment analysis for CRISPR screens. We also describe gene identification and data analysis in CRISPR screens involving drug treatment. Completing the entire MAGeCKFlute pipeline requires approximately two hours on a desktop computer running Linux or Mac OS and with R support. The MAGeCKFlute package is available at http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/MAGeCKFlute.html.

Background-The incidence of thyroid cancer is rising steadily because of overdiagnosis and overtreatment conferred by widespread use of sensitive imaging techniques for screening. This overall incidence growth is especially driven by increased diagnosis of indolent and welldifferentiated papillary subtype and early-stage thyroid cancer, whereas the incidence of advancedstage thyroid cancer has increased marginally. Thyroid ultrasound is frequently used to diagnose thyroid cancer. The aim of this study was to use deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) models to improve the diagnostic accuracy of thyroid cancer by analysing sonographic imaging data from clinical ultrasounds.Methods-We did a retrospective, multicohort, diagnostic study using ultrasound images sets from three hospitals in China. We developed and trained the DCNN model on the training set, 131 731 ultrasound images from 17 627 patients with thyroid cancer and 180 668 images from 25 325 controls from the thyroid imaging database at Tianjin Cancer Hospital. Clinical diagnosis of the training set was made by 16 radiologists from Tianjin Cancer Hospital. Images from anatomical sites that were judged as not having cancer were excluded from the training set and only individuals with suspected thyroid cancer underwent pathological examination to confirm diagnosis. The model's diagnostic performance was validated in an internal validation set from Tianjin Cancer Hospital (8606 images from 1118 patients) and two external datasets in China (the

BackgroundThe subtype distribution of lymphoid neoplasms in Southwest China was analyzed according to WHO classifications. This study aims to analyze subtype distribution of lymphomas in southwest China.MethodsLymphoid neoplasms diagnosed within 9 years in a single institution in Southwest China were analyzed according to the WHO classification.ResultsFrom January 2000 to December 2008, a total number of 6,382 patients with lymphoma were established, of which mature B-cell neoplasms accounted for 56%, mature T- and NK-cell neoplasms occupied 26%, and precursor lymphoid neoplasms and Hodgkin lymphomas were 5% and 13%, respectively. Mixed cellularity (76%) was the major subtype of classical Hodgkin lymphoma; and the bimodal age distribution was not observed. The top six subtypes of non-Hodgkin lymphoma were as follows: diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, extranodal NK/T-cell lymphoma, nasal type, extranodal marginal zone lymphoma of mucosa associated lymphoid tissue, follicular lymphoma, precursor lymphoid neoplasms, and chronic lymphocytic leukemia/small lymphocytic lymphoma. Extranodal lymphomas comprised about half of all cases, and most frequently involved Waldeyer's ring, gastrointestinal tract, sinonasal region and skin.ConclusionsThe lymphoid neoplasms of Southwest China displayed some epidemiologic features similar to those reported in literature from western and Asian countries, as well as other regions of China, whereas some subtypes showed distinct features. The high frequency of mature T/NK cell neoplasms and extranodal lymphomas, especially for extranodal NK/T-cell lymphoma, nasal type, is the most outstanding characteristic of this series.

The removal of trace amounts of propyne from propylene is critical for the production of polymer-grade propylene. We herein report the first example of metal-organic frameworks of flexible-robust nature for the efficient separation of propyne/propylene mixtures. The strong binding affinity and suitable pore confinement for propyne account for its high uptake capacity and selectivity, as evidenced by neutron powder diffraction studies and density functional theory calculations. The purity of the obtained propylene is over 99.9998%, as demonstrated by experimental breakthrough curves for a 1/99 propyne/propylene mixture.

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