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Background: The objective of this study was to compare the effectiveness and cosmetic results of tissue adhesive or surgical staples in thyroidectomy through a supraclavicular incision.Methods: This was a prospective, randomized study of consecutive patients undergoing thyroidectomy by a supraclavicular approach. Eligible patients were randomized into two groups: one group had the incision closed with tissue adhesive (the experimental group) and the other with surgical staples (the control group). The main outcomes included operative time, early postoperative pain measured by visual Analog scale, incidence of wound dehiscence and infection, perceived cosmetic outcome, and overall patient satisfaction by using patient satisfaction Assessment form.Results: There were 151 consecutive patients assessed for eligibility, and 132 patients were enrolled over 22 months. The clinical characteristics of the patients in the two groups were similar. main outcomes were assessed in the first 24 h postoperatively, the first month, and the third month postoperatively. Operation time was longer in the experimental group (P = 0.027). mean visual Analog scale scores for pain were lower in the experimental group in the early postoperative period (P < 0.001). No patients developed surgical site infections or wound dehiscence. Lower scores for scar assessment and higher overall satisfaction levels at the first month after surgery were found in the experimental group compared to the control group (P < 0.001). There was no significant difference between the two groups at the third month postoperatively in perceived cosmetic result (P = 0.052) or overall satisfaction (P = 0.059).

In recent years, advances in nonfullerene acceptors, especially fusedring electron acceptors (FREAs), have enabled the power conversion efficiencies of organic solar cells to exceed 16%. FREAs typically consist of a planar fused-ring core connecting two strongly electron-withdrawing end groups, which are usually 1,1-dicyanomethylene-3-indanone and its derivatives. However, 1,1-dicyanomethylene-3-indanone and its derivatives are cyanides, which need to introduce a highly toxic substance, malononitrile, during the synthesis process. Therefore, most of the FREAs investigated currently are not environmentally friendly during the synthesis process. In this work, we answered two questions through systematic studies:(1) what is the role of the toxic cyano (−CN) group in FREAs? (2) Can any other groups replace −CN to construct high-performance environmentally friendly FREAs? Results show that it is the electron-withdrawing ability of −CN that determines the indispensable ability of FREAs to accept electrons. Using other electron-withdrawing groups (−CF 3 , −SO 3 H, and −NO 2 ) to replace the −CN group in the high-performance electron acceptor Y6 shows that the acceptor based on the −NO 2 group exhibits similar electron acceptance, stronger absorption, smaller hole−electron Coulomb attraction, and higher electron mobility than Y6. These results suggest that we can use the −NO 2 group to replace the−CN group for constructing environmentally friendly FREAs with a high performance.

A number of studies revealed that our visual system can extract different types of summary statistics, such as the mean and variance, from sets of items. Although the extraction of such summary statistics has been studied well in isolation, the relationship between these statistics remains unclear. In this study, we explored this issue using an individual differences approach. Observers viewed illustrations of strawberries and lollypops varying in size or orientation and performed four tasks in a within-subject design, namely mean and variance discrimination tasks with size and orientation domains. We found that the performances in the mean and variance discrimination tasks were not correlated with each other and demonstrated that extractions of the mean and variance are mediated by different representation mechanisms. In addition, we tested the relationship between performances in size and orientation domains for each summary statistic (i.e. mean and variance) and examined whether each summary statistic has distinct processes across perceptual domains. The results illustrated that statistical summary representations of size and orientation may share a common mechanism for representing the mean and possibly for representing variance. Introspections for each observer performing the tasks were also examined and discussed.