Surface Chemistry of WC Powder Electrocatalysts Probed In Situ with NAP-XPS.

Tungsten carbide (WC) is a renowned compound catalyst material for electrochemical water splitting, and its high electrocatalytic activity toward the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) has been repeatedly reported. However, its susceptibility to oxidation raises the fundamental question of the underlying reason for its high activity, especially since passivation and thus potential deactivation can occur not only in air but also during reaction. Hence, the investigation of the surface chemistry under true operating conditions is crucial for a fundamental understanding of the electrocatalytic process.

Amplified multipartite entanglement witnessed in a quantum critical metal.

Strong correlations in matter promote a landscape of quantum phases and associated quantum critical points. For metallic systems, there is increasing recognition that the quantum criticality goes beyond the Landau framework and, thus, further means are needed to characterize the quantum critical fluid. Here we do so by studying an entanglement quantity, the quantum Fisher information, in a strange metal system, focusing on the exemplary case of an Anderson/Kondo lattice model near its Kondo destruction quantum critical point.

Increasing hourly heavy rainfall in Austria reflected in flood changes.

Climate change is expected to increase heavy rainfall with concomitant increases in flooding. Causes of increased heavy rainfall include the higher water-holding capacity of a warmer atmosphere and changes in atmospheric circulation patterns, which may translate into future heavy rainfall increases in most of Europe. However, gathering evidence on the time evolution of past changes has been hampered by data limitations and measurement uncertainties, in particular for short rainfall durations, such as 1 h.

Pixel level deep reinforcement learning for accurate and robust medical image segmentation.

Existing deep learning methods have achieved significant success in medical image segmentation. However, this success largely relies on stacking advanced modules and architectures, which has created a path dependency. This path dependency is unsustainable, as it leads to increasingly larger model parameters and higher deployment costs.

Chemical investigation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon sources in an urban area with complex air quality challenges.

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are hazardous air pollutants with well-documented carcinogenic, mutagenic, and toxic effects. This study investigates the chemical composition and sources of PAHs in Kraków, a city characterized by diverse air quality challenges. PM10 and PM2.

Regional lung ventilation during supraglottic and subglottic jet ventilation: A randomized cross-over trial.

Objective: Test the hypothesis that the center of ventilation, a measure of ventro-dorsal atelectasis, is posterior during supraglottic ventilation indicating better dependent-lung ventilation. Secondarily, we tested the hypothesis that supraglottic ventilation improves oxygenation and carbon dioxide elimination.

Background: Supraglottic and subglottic jet ventilation are both used during laryngotracheal surgery.

Demonstration of a Chemical Recycling Concept for Polybutylene Succinate Containing Waste Substrates via Coupled Enzymatic/Electrochemical Processes.

Chemical recycling of polymer waste is a promising strategy to reduce the dependency of chemical industry on fossil resources and reduce the increasing quantities of plastic waste. A common challenge in chemical recycling processes is the costly downstream separation of reaction products. For polybutylene succinate (PBS) no effective recycling concept has been implemented so far.

Personalized auricular vagus nerve stimulation: beat-to-beat deceleration dominates in systole-gated stimulation during inspiration - a pilot study.

Neuromodulation comes into focus as a non-pharmacological therapy with the vagus nerve as modulation target. The auricular vagus nerve stimulation (aVNS) has emerged to treat chronic diseases while re-establishing the sympathovagal balance and activating parasympathetic anti-inflammatory pathways. aVNS leads still to over and under-stimulation and is limited in therapeutic efficiency.

New highly efficient phosphorescent manganese halides as green and blue emitters.

Three new manganese compounds on 5-(pyridin-2-yl)-3-phenyl-1,2,4-triazole (L) basis (HL)[MnBr]·HO (1), (HL)[MnCl] (2) and [MnLCl]·HO (3) have been synthesized and characterized in terms of their structure, photoluminescence (PL), and electroluminescence (EL) properties. Compounds 1 and 2 exhibit bright green luminescence ( ≈ 550 nm) with high quantum yields of 75.1 and 71.

Computational frameworks transform antagonism to synergy in optimizing combination therapies.

While drug combinations are increasingly important in disease treatment, predicting their therapeutic interactions remains challenging. This review systematically analyzes computational methods for predicting drug combination effects through multi-omics data integration. We comprehensively assess key algorithms including DrugComboRanker and AuDNNsynergy, and evaluate integration approaches encompassing kernel regression and graph networks.

Exploring the influence of urban art interventions on attraction and wellbeing: an empirical field experiment.

While cities are attractive places, brimming with opportunities and possibilities for their inhabitants, they have also been found to have negative consequences, especially on physical and mental health. In a world of ever-growing urban populations, it is important to understand how to make cities healthier and more pleasant places to live. In the present study, we investigated the impact of art as an urban intervention and compared it to the well-known effects of greenery (i.

One-dimensional mapping of femtosecond laser filaments using coherent microwave scattering.

This paper reports on the use of coherent microwave scattering (CMS) for spatially resolved electron number density measurements of elongated plasma structures induced at mid-IR femtosecond filamentation in air. The presented studies comprise one-dimensional mapping of laser filaments induced via 3.9 µm, 127.

Development of Advanced Positioning Techniques of UWB/Wi-Fi RTT Ranging for Personal Mobility Applications.

"Smart" devices, such as contemporary smartphones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistance), play a significant role in our daily live, be it for navigation or location-based services (LBSs). In this paper, the use of Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) and Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) based on RTT (Round-Trip Time) measurements is investigated for pedestrian user localization. For this purpose, several scenarios are designed either using real observation or simulated data.

Impact of long-term mass-rearing on the genetic structure of tsetse fly Glossina palpalis gambiensis colonies.

Tsetse flies are the sole cyclic vectors of African trypanosomes, which cause human and animal African trypanosomiases in Africa. Tsetse fly control remains a promising option for disease management. The sterile insect technique (SIT) stands as an environmentally friendly tool to control tsetse populations.

The costs of competition in distributing scarce research funds.

Research funding systems fundamentally influence how science operates. This paper aims to analyze the allocation of competitive research funding from different perspectives: How reliable are decision processes for funding? What are the economic costs of competitive funding? How does competition for funds affect doing risky research? How do competitive funding environments affect scientists themselves, and which ethical issues must be considered? We attempt to identify gaps in our knowledge of research funding systems; we propose recommendations for policymakers and funding agencies, including empirical experiments of decision processes and the collection of data on these processes. With our recommendations, we hope to contribute to developing improved ways of organizing research funding.

Modeling early phenotypes of Parkinson's disease by age-induced midbrain-striatum assembloids.

Parkinson's disease, an aging-associated neurodegenerative disorder, is characterised by nigrostriatal pathway dysfunction caused by the gradual loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta of the midbrain. Human in vitro models are enabling the study of the dopaminergic neurons' loss, but not the dysregulation within the dopaminergic network in the nigrostriatal pathway. Additionally, these models do not incorporate aging characteristics which potentially contribute to the development of Parkinson's disease.

Concurrent validity of novel smartphone-based apps monitoring barbell velocity in powerlifting exercises.

The aim of this study was to determine the validity of three smartphone applications measuring barbell movement velocity in resistance training and comparing them to a commercially available linear transducer. Twenty competitive powerlifters (14 male and 6 female) completed a progressive loading protocol in the squat, bench press and deadlift (sumo or conventional) until reaching 90% of the highest load they had achieved in a recent competition. Mean velocity was concurrently recorded with three smartphone applications: Qwik VBT (QW), Metric VBT (MT), MyLift (ML), and one linear transducer: RepOne (RO).

Unraveling a Molecular Adhesion Mechanism at Complex Polymer-Metal Interfaces.

Controlling polymer-metal adhesion is critical in ensuring that materials can be cleanly separated during production processes without residue, which is crucial for various industrial applications. Accurately characterizing adhesion on industrial-grade surfaces is complex due to factors like surface roughness and actual contact area between surfaces and the polymer. In this study, we quantified the adhesive behavior of stainless-steel samples with varying surface treatments against a polymer using the surface forces apparatus (SFA) in reflection geometry, as well as X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS).

RIRGAN: An end-to-end lightweight multi-task learning method for brain MRI super-resolution and denoising.

A common problem in the field of deep-learning-based low-level vision medical images is that most of the research is based on single task learning (STL), which is dedicated to solving one of the situations of low resolution or high noise. Our motivation is to design a model that can perform both SR and DN tasks simultaneously, in order to cope with the actual situation of low resolution and high noise in low-level vision medical images. By improving the existing single image super-resolution (SISR) network and introducing the idea of multi-task learning (MTL), we propose an end-to-end lightweight MTL generative adversarial network (GAN) based network using residual-in-residual-blocks (RIR-Blocks) for feature extraction, RIRGAN, which can concurrently accomplish super-resolution (SR) and denoising (DN) tasks.

Time Delays as Attosecond Probe of Interelectronic Coherence and Entanglement.

Attosecond chronoscopy enables the exploration of correlated electron dynamics in real time. One key observable of attosecond physics is the determination of "time zero" of photoionization, the time delay with which the wave packet of the ionized electron departs from the ionic core. This observable has become accessible by experimental advances in attosecond streaking and reconstruction of attosecond beating by interference of two-photon transitions (RABBIT) techniques.

Thiol-Acrylate polyHIPEs via Facile Layer-by-Layer Photopolymerization.

A highly reactive thiol-ene high internal phase emulsion based on the monomers 1,6-hexanediol diacrylate and tris 2-(3-mercaptopropionyloxy)ethyl isocyanurate was developed for the purpose of light-driven additive manufacturing, resulting in highly porous customizable poly(high internal phase emulsion) materials. The formulation was specifically designed to facilitate short irradiation times and low amounts of photoinitiator. Furthermore, the developed emulsion does not rely on employing harmful solvents to make scale-up and industrial applications feasible.

L-Cysteine-Catalysed Hydration of Activated Alkynes.

Hydration reactions consist of the introduction of a molecule of water into a chemical compound and are particularly useful to transform alkynes into carbonyls, which are strategic intermediates in the synthesis of a plethora of compounds. Herein we demonstrate that L-cysteine can catalyse the hydration of activated alkynes in a very effective and fully regioselective manner to access important building blocks in synthetic chemistry such as β-ketosulfones, amides and esters, in aqueous media. The mild reaction conditions facilitated the integration with enzyme catalysis to access chiral β-hydroxy sulfones from the corresponding alkynes in a one-pot cascade process in good yields and excellent enantiomeric ratios.

Anomalous Hall Effect and Quantum Criticality in Geometrically Frustrated Heavy Fermion Metals.

Studies on the heavy-fermion pyrochlore iridate (Pr_{2}Ir_{2}O_{7}) point to the role of time-reversal-symmetry breaking in geometrically frustrated Kondo lattices. Here, we address the effect of Kondo coupling and chiral spin liquids in a J_{1}-J_{2} model on a square lattice and a model on a kagome lattice via a large-N method, based on a fermionic representation of the spin operators, and consider a new mechanism for anomalous Hall effect for the chiral phases. We calculate the anomalous Hall response for the chiral states of both the Kondo destroyed and Kondo screened phases.