Self-Sustained Liquid Crystal Elastomer Actuators with Geometric Zero-Elastic-Energy Modes.

Recently, a novel and fascinating actuation mode of liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs), known as geometric zero-elastic-energy modes (ZEEMs), has drawn intensive research interest. Based on this actuation mechanism, LCE actuators exhibit untethered, autonomous movements under external stimulations, demonstrating significant potential for applications in intelligent soft robots, autonomous energy conversion systems, and smart optical tuning components. This perspective provides a timely summary of the current research on LCE actuators based on ZEEMs and highlights their future development trends and prospects, which will be of great interest to broad communities of researchers in fields of LCEs, biomimetic smart materials, soft robotics, and actuators.

4D Printing of Shape-Morphing Liquid Crystal Elastomers.

In nature, biological systems can sense environmental changes and alter their performance parameters in real time to adapt to environmental changes. Inspired by these, scientists have developed a range of novel shape-morphing materials. Shape-morphing materials are a kind of "intelligent" materials that exhibit responses to external stimuli in a predetermined way and then display a preset function.

An efficient multi-path 3D convolutional neural network for false-positive reduction of pulmonary nodule detection.

Purpose: Considering that false-positive and true pulmonary nodules are highly similar in shapes and sizes between lung computed tomography scans, we develop and evaluate a false-positive nodules reduction method applied to the computer-aided diagnosis system.

Methods: To improve the pulmonary nodule diagnosis quality, a 3D convolutional neural networks (CNN) model is constructed to effectively extract spatial information of candidate nodule features through the hierarchical architecture. Furthermore, three paths corresponding to three receptive field sizes are adopted and concatenated in the network model, so that the feature information is fully extracted and fused to actively adapting to the changes in shapes, sizes, and contextual information between pulmonary nodules.

H1521, a novel derivative of 4-hydroxyquinoline-3-carboxamide, suppresses the development of lupus in mice by inducing Th1 cytokine profile in T cells.

Transferring parental splenocytes into unirradiated F1 mice induces a chronic graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), characterized by the production of Th2 cytokines and immunocomplex-mediated glomerulonephritis resembling systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). The effects of H1521, a new derivative of 4-hydroxyquinoline-3-carboxamide, were investigated in chronic GVHD lupus model. H1521 was administered to chronic GVHD mice for 10 weeks.