Immune checkpoint inhibitor(ICI)therapy has sig-nificantly revolutionized cancer treatment across vari-ous malignancies,offering distinct and enduring clin-ical advantages[1].Gastric cancer(GC)represents a widespread ...Immune checkpoint inhibitor(ICI)therapy has sig-nificantly revolutionized cancer treatment across vari-ous malignancies,offering distinct and enduring clin-ical advantages[1].Gastric cancer(GC)represents a widespread and life-threatening malignancy with substan-tial global health implications[2].However,ICI therapy has not produced satisfactory therapeutic responses in GC patients.展开更多
The study on the fingering phenomenon has been playing an important role in understanding the mechanism of the fluid flow through the porous media.In this paper,a numerical method consisting of the Crank-Nicolson sche...The study on the fingering phenomenon has been playing an important role in understanding the mechanism of the fluid flow through the porous media.In this paper,a numerical method consisting of the Crank-Nicolson scheme for the temporal discretization and the finite element method for the spatial discretization is proposed for the relaxation non-equilibrium Richards equation in simulating the fingering phenomenon.Towards the efficiency and accuracy of the numerical simulations,a predictor-corrector process is used for resolving the nonlinearity of the equation,and an h-adaptive mesh method is introduced for accurately resolving the solution around the wetting front region,in which a heuristic a posteriori error indicator is designed for the purpose.In numerical simulations,a traveling wave solution of the governing equation is derived for checking the numerical convergence of the proposed method.The effectiveness of the h-adaptive method is also successfully demonstrated by numerical experiments.Finally the mechanism on generating fingers is discussed by numerically studying several examples.展开更多
The d-band centers of catalysts have exhibited excellent performance in various reactions.Among them,the enhanced catalytic reaction is considered a crucial way to power dynamics and reduce the“shuttle”effect in pol...The d-band centers of catalysts have exhibited excellent performance in various reactions.Among them,the enhanced catalytic reaction is considered a crucial way to power dynamics and reduce the“shuttle”effect in polysulfide conversions of lithium-sulfur batteries.Here,we report two-dimensional-shaped tungsten borides(WB)nanosheets with d-band centers,where the d orbits of W atoms on the(001)facets show greatly promoting the electrocatalytic sulfur reduction reaction.As-prepared WB-based Li-S cells exhibit excellent electrochemical performance for Li-ion storage.Especially,it delivers superior capacities of 7.7 mAh/cm^(2) under the 8.0 mg/cm^(2) sulfur loading,which is far superior to most other electrode catalysts.This study provides insights into the d-band centers as a promising catalyst of twodimensional boride materials.展开更多
Leveraging seawater toilet flushing system in Hong Kong,China,a Seawater-based Urine Phosphorus Recovery(SUPR)process that integrates ureolysis and phosphorus(P)recovery was proposed in our earlier work.In this study,...Leveraging seawater toilet flushing system in Hong Kong,China,a Seawater-based Urine Phosphorus Recovery(SUPR)process that integrates ureolysis and phosphorus(P)recovery was proposed in our earlier work.In this study,a thermodynamic model was applied to evaluate the effects of ureolysis and the seawater-to-urine mixing ratio(S/U ratio)on P precipitation in the SUPR system.The results suggested that effective P recovery was thermodynamically feasible across a wide range of S/U ratios,with elevated pH levels resulting from ureolysis being critical for P precipitation.Furthermore,a SUPR reactor was developed to validate this process.When the hydraulic retention time(HRT)exceeded 3 h and the S/U ratio was lower than 3:1,more than 98%of P could be recovered without urine storage,chemical dosage,or external mixing.Further decrease in the HRT and increase in S/U ratio caused flushing out of fine precipitates,resulting in a relatively low P recovery efficiency.However,this could be advantageous when downstream urine nitrification is implemented,as dilution of urine can alleviate the inhibitory effects of free ammonia and free nitrous acid,as well as overcome the P limitation problem,thus facilitating urine nitrification.Consequently,there is a trade-off between optimizing P recovery and nitrification efficiencies.展开更多
The swelling process of bentonite is vital for judging the time required for completing the swelling,estimating the engineering safety,and organizing the construction plan.Many factors affect the swelling process,and ...The swelling process of bentonite is vital for judging the time required for completing the swelling,estimating the engineering safety,and organizing the construction plan.Many factors affect the swelling process,and the underlying mechanisms still require to be clearly explained.In this paper,the swelling process of commercial bentonite in different molar concentrations of salt solution was studied by the one-dimensional free swelling test and constant volume swelling pressure test.The curves of swelling over time were fitted using a hyperbolic model,and two parameters were extracted to reflect the swelling rate and the final swelling strain or swelling pressure quantitatively,respectively.The test results show that the final swelling strain or swelling pressure is determined by the swelling ability of the bentonite,while the swelling rate is influenced by the coupled effect of the swelling ability and permeability of soil.The mechanisms of different factors affecting the swelling process of bentonite are summarized as the effects on the permeability and swelling ability of the soil by considering the change process of pore structure during swelling.The proposed mechanism explanation can also reasonably explain the effect of initial water content in the existing literature.The influencing mechanism of the swelling process revealed in this paper from the perspective of pore structure provides a reasonable theoretical basis for analyzing the swelling process of bentonite.展开更多
Natural hydrogels have emerged as a pivotal innovation in wound care,offering a unique combination of high absorbency,biocompatibility,and versatility.However,due to the complexity of wound healing,the physiological s...Natural hydrogels have emerged as a pivotal innovation in wound care,offering a unique combination of high absorbency,biocompatibility,and versatility.However,due to the complexity of wound healing,the physiological state of the wound varies dynamically,and the mechanism of natural hydrogels that boost wound healing is still unclear.In this review,we firstly provide a comprehensive introduction to the bio-logical process of wound healing,emphasizing the critical stages and factors affecting healing.This work concludes the composition and properties of natural hydrogels,including collagen,gelatin,hyaluronic acid,chitosan,alginates,cellulose,and fibroin,highlighting their biocompatibility and biodegradability.The focus shifts to the various crosslinking strategies employed to enhance the structural integrity and functionality of natural hydrogels.This review further investigates the biological effects of natural hydro-gels in wound healing,detailing their antibacterial,antioxidant,anti-inflammatory,adhesive,and hemo-static functions.Furthermore,we propose the challenges and future perspectives of natural hydrogels in practical applications.This review offers a comprehensive overview of the current state and poten-tial future advancements in natural hydrogel dressings for wound care,highlighting their critical role in addressing complex and hard-to-heal wounds.展开更多
The efficacy of transarterial chemoembolization(TACE)has been limited by insufficient embolization and a high incidence of tumor recurrence.Herein,we iden-tified that aberrant metabolic reprogramming and immunosuppres...The efficacy of transarterial chemoembolization(TACE)has been limited by insufficient embolization and a high incidence of tumor recurrence.Herein,we iden-tified that aberrant metabolic reprogramming and immunosuppression contribute to TACE refractoriness and Rhein,as a potential glycolytic metabolism inhibitor and immunoactivation inducer,was optimized to sensitize tumors to TACE therapy.To achieve efficient embolization,we developed an oil-in-water lipiodol embolic emulsion by stabilizing the self-assembled Rhein nanogel.The assembled Rhein exhibited a nanofiber network,and its integration enhanced the mechanical stability and viscoelasticity of the lipiodol embolic agent.With the synergistic advantages of solid and liquid embolic agents,this carrier-free Pickering emulsion exhibits effi-cient embolization and sustained drug release in models of unilateral renal artery embolization,rabbit ear tumor embolization,rabbit orthotopic liver cancer,and rat orthotopic liver cancer.Compared to conventional three-way catheter mixing meth-ods,multimodal imaging corroborates a marked enhancement in local drug retention and tumor suppression.Importantly,the incorporation of Rhein-mediated syner-gistic immunoembolization in this strategy achieved efficient embolization while robustly activating anti-tumor immune responses,including inducing immunogenic cell death,dendritic cell activation,and major histocompatibility complex class I pre-sentation to CD8^(+)T cells for tumor killing.Together,thesefindings reveal a novel strategy for the application of self-assembled Rhein nanofiber-stabilized lipiodol emulsion to control metabolic signaling and immunoactivation in TACE.展开更多
The implicit numerical methods have the advantages on preserving the physical properties of the quantum system when solving the time-dependent Kohn-Sham equation.However,the efficiency issue prevents the practical app...The implicit numerical methods have the advantages on preserving the physical properties of the quantum system when solving the time-dependent Kohn-Sham equation.However,the efficiency issue prevents the practical applications of those implicit methods.In this paper,an implicit solver based on a class of Runge-Kutta methods and the finite element method is proposed for the time-dependent Kohn-Sham equation.The efficiency issue is partially resolved by three approaches,i.e.,an h-adaptive mesh method is proposed to effectively restrain the size of the discretized problem,a complex-valued algebraic multigrid solver is developed for efficiently solving the derived linear system from the implicit discretization,as well as the OpenMP based parallelization of the algorithm.The numerical convergence,the ability on preserving the physical properties,and the efficiency of the proposed numerical method are demonstrated by a number of numerical experiments.展开更多
In this paper,based on the imaginary time gradient flow model in the density functional theory,a scalar auxiliary variable(SAV)method is developed for the ground state calculation of a given electronic structure syste...In this paper,based on the imaginary time gradient flow model in the density functional theory,a scalar auxiliary variable(SAV)method is developed for the ground state calculation of a given electronic structure system.To handle the orthonormality constraint on those wave functions,two kinds of penalty terms are introduced in designing the modified energy functional in SAV,i.e.,one for the norm preserving of each wave function,another for the orthogonality between each pair of different wave functions.A numerical method consisting of a designed scheme and a linear finite element method is used for the discretization.Theoretically,the desired unconditional decay of modified energy can be obtained from our method,while computationally,both the original energy and modified energy decay behaviors can be observed successfully from a number of numerical experiments.More importantly,numerical results show that the orthonormality among those wave functions can be automatically preserved,without explicitly preserving orthogonalization operations.This implies the potential of our method in large-scale simulations in density functional theory.展开更多
In[Dai et al.,Multi.Model.Simul.18(4)(2020)],a structure-preserving gradient flow method was proposed for the ground state calculation in Kohn-Sham density functional theory,based on which a linearized method was deve...In[Dai et al.,Multi.Model.Simul.18(4)(2020)],a structure-preserving gradient flow method was proposed for the ground state calculation in Kohn-Sham density functional theory,based on which a linearized method was developed in[Hu et al.,EAJAM.13(2)(2023)]for further improving the numerical efficiency.In this paper,a complete convergence analysis is delivered for such a linearized method for the all-electron Kohn-Sham model.Temporally,the convergence,the asymptotic stability,as well as the structure-preserving property of the linearized numerical scheme in the method is discussed following previous works,while spatially,the convergence of the h-adaptive mesh method is demonstrated following[Chen et al.,Multi.Model.Simul.12(2014)],with a key study on the boundedness of the Kohn-Sham potential for the all-electron Kohn-Sham model.Numerical examples confirm the theoretical results very well.展开更多
基金Macao Science and Technology Development Fund,Grant/Award Number:0009/2022/AKP。
文摘Immune checkpoint inhibitor(ICI)therapy has sig-nificantly revolutionized cancer treatment across vari-ous malignancies,offering distinct and enduring clin-ical advantages[1].Gastric cancer(GC)represents a widespread and life-threatening malignancy with substan-tial global health implications[2].However,ICI therapy has not produced satisfactory therapeutic responses in GC patients.
基金supported by FDCT of Macao SAR(FDCT 029/2016/A1),MYRG of University of Macao(MYRG2017-00189-FST,MYRG2019-00154-FST)National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant Nos.11922120,11871489,and 11401608)Department of Science and Technology of Guangdong Province.
文摘The study on the fingering phenomenon has been playing an important role in understanding the mechanism of the fluid flow through the porous media.In this paper,a numerical method consisting of the Crank-Nicolson scheme for the temporal discretization and the finite element method for the spatial discretization is proposed for the relaxation non-equilibrium Richards equation in simulating the fingering phenomenon.Towards the efficiency and accuracy of the numerical simulations,a predictor-corrector process is used for resolving the nonlinearity of the equation,and an h-adaptive mesh method is introduced for accurately resolving the solution around the wetting front region,in which a heuristic a posteriori error indicator is designed for the purpose.In numerical simulations,a traveling wave solution of the governing equation is derived for checking the numerical convergence of the proposed method.The effectiveness of the h-adaptive method is also successfully demonstrated by numerical experiments.Finally the mechanism on generating fingers is discussed by numerically studying several examples.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Nos.61904080,22205101)the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province(No.BK20190670)+5 种基金the Natural Science Foundation of Colleges and Universities in Jiangsu Province(No.19KJB530008)the Macao Young Scholars Program(No.AM2020005)the High-Performance Computing Cluster(HPCC)of Information and Communication Technology Office(ICTO)at University of Macao,Science and Technology Development Fund,Macao SAR(Nos.0191/2017/A3,0041/2019/A1,0046/2019/AFJ,0021/2019/AIR)University of Macao(Nos.MYRG2017-00216-FST and MYRG2018-00192-IAPME),FDCT Funding Scheme for Postdoctoral Researchers(No.0026/APD/2021)the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions(PAPD)the UEA funding,and Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation(No.2022A1515110994).
文摘The d-band centers of catalysts have exhibited excellent performance in various reactions.Among them,the enhanced catalytic reaction is considered a crucial way to power dynamics and reduce the“shuttle”effect in polysulfide conversions of lithium-sulfur batteries.Here,we report two-dimensional-shaped tungsten borides(WB)nanosheets with d-band centers,where the d orbits of W atoms on the(001)facets show greatly promoting the electrocatalytic sulfur reduction reaction.As-prepared WB-based Li-S cells exhibit excellent electrochemical performance for Li-ion storage.Especially,it delivers superior capacities of 7.7 mAh/cm^(2) under the 8.0 mg/cm^(2) sulfur loading,which is far superior to most other electrode catalysts.This study provides insights into the d-band centers as a promising catalyst of twodimensional boride materials.
基金supported by the Excellent Young Scientists Fund of National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.52222008)the Science and Technology Development Fund,Macao SAR,China(No.0026/2022/A1)+2 种基金the Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Committee(No.EF2023-00072-FST)the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region,China(No.T21-604/19-R)the Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Commission,China(No.ITC-CNERC14EG03).
文摘Leveraging seawater toilet flushing system in Hong Kong,China,a Seawater-based Urine Phosphorus Recovery(SUPR)process that integrates ureolysis and phosphorus(P)recovery was proposed in our earlier work.In this study,a thermodynamic model was applied to evaluate the effects of ureolysis and the seawater-to-urine mixing ratio(S/U ratio)on P precipitation in the SUPR system.The results suggested that effective P recovery was thermodynamically feasible across a wide range of S/U ratios,with elevated pH levels resulting from ureolysis being critical for P precipitation.Furthermore,a SUPR reactor was developed to validate this process.When the hydraulic retention time(HRT)exceeded 3 h and the S/U ratio was lower than 3:1,more than 98%of P could be recovered without urine storage,chemical dosage,or external mixing.Further decrease in the HRT and increase in S/U ratio caused flushing out of fine precipitates,resulting in a relatively low P recovery efficiency.However,this could be advantageous when downstream urine nitrification is implemented,as dilution of urine can alleviate the inhibitory effects of free ammonia and free nitrous acid,as well as overcome the P limitation problem,thus facilitating urine nitrification.Consequently,there is a trade-off between optimizing P recovery and nitrification efficiencies.
文摘The swelling process of bentonite is vital for judging the time required for completing the swelling,estimating the engineering safety,and organizing the construction plan.Many factors affect the swelling process,and the underlying mechanisms still require to be clearly explained.In this paper,the swelling process of commercial bentonite in different molar concentrations of salt solution was studied by the one-dimensional free swelling test and constant volume swelling pressure test.The curves of swelling over time were fitted using a hyperbolic model,and two parameters were extracted to reflect the swelling rate and the final swelling strain or swelling pressure quantitatively,respectively.The test results show that the final swelling strain or swelling pressure is determined by the swelling ability of the bentonite,while the swelling rate is influenced by the coupled effect of the swelling ability and permeability of soil.The mechanisms of different factors affecting the swelling process of bentonite are summarized as the effects on the permeability and swelling ability of the soil by considering the change process of pore structure during swelling.The proposed mechanism explanation can also reasonably explain the effect of initial water content in the existing literature.The influencing mechanism of the swelling process revealed in this paper from the perspective of pore structure provides a reasonable theoretical basis for analyzing the swelling process of bentonite.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Nos.52203146,81925019,U1705281,and U22A20333)the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities(No.20720200019)the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University,China(No.NCET-13-0502)。
文摘Natural hydrogels have emerged as a pivotal innovation in wound care,offering a unique combination of high absorbency,biocompatibility,and versatility.However,due to the complexity of wound healing,the physiological state of the wound varies dynamically,and the mechanism of natural hydrogels that boost wound healing is still unclear.In this review,we firstly provide a comprehensive introduction to the bio-logical process of wound healing,emphasizing the critical stages and factors affecting healing.This work concludes the composition and properties of natural hydrogels,including collagen,gelatin,hyaluronic acid,chitosan,alginates,cellulose,and fibroin,highlighting their biocompatibility and biodegradability.The focus shifts to the various crosslinking strategies employed to enhance the structural integrity and functionality of natural hydrogels.This review further investigates the biological effects of natural hydro-gels in wound healing,detailing their antibacterial,antioxidant,anti-inflammatory,adhesive,and hemo-static functions.Furthermore,we propose the challenges and future perspectives of natural hydrogels in practical applications.This review offers a comprehensive overview of the current state and poten-tial future advancements in natural hydrogel dressings for wound care,highlighting their critical role in addressing complex and hard-to-heal wounds.
基金Major State Basic Research Development Program of China,Grant/Award Number:2023YFB3810000National Natural Science Foundation of China,Grant/Award Numbers:U22A20333,81925019,U1705281,82202330+2 种基金Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities,Grant/Award Numbers:20720190088,20720200019Science Foundation of Fujian Province,Grant/Award Number:2020Y4003Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University,China,Grant/Award Number:NCET-13-0502。
文摘The efficacy of transarterial chemoembolization(TACE)has been limited by insufficient embolization and a high incidence of tumor recurrence.Herein,we iden-tified that aberrant metabolic reprogramming and immunosuppression contribute to TACE refractoriness and Rhein,as a potential glycolytic metabolism inhibitor and immunoactivation inducer,was optimized to sensitize tumors to TACE therapy.To achieve efficient embolization,we developed an oil-in-water lipiodol embolic emulsion by stabilizing the self-assembled Rhein nanogel.The assembled Rhein exhibited a nanofiber network,and its integration enhanced the mechanical stability and viscoelasticity of the lipiodol embolic agent.With the synergistic advantages of solid and liquid embolic agents,this carrier-free Pickering emulsion exhibits effi-cient embolization and sustained drug release in models of unilateral renal artery embolization,rabbit ear tumor embolization,rabbit orthotopic liver cancer,and rat orthotopic liver cancer.Compared to conventional three-way catheter mixing meth-ods,multimodal imaging corroborates a marked enhancement in local drug retention and tumor suppression.Importantly,the incorporation of Rhein-mediated syner-gistic immunoembolization in this strategy achieved efficient embolization while robustly activating anti-tumor immune responses,including inducing immunogenic cell death,dendritic cell activation,and major histocompatibility complex class I pre-sentation to CD8^(+)T cells for tumor killing.Together,thesefindings reveal a novel strategy for the application of self-assembled Rhein nanofiber-stabilized lipiodol emulsion to control metabolic signaling and immunoactivation in TACE.
基金The work of the third author was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant No.11601229)the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China(Grant No.BK20160784)+2 种基金The work of the last author was partially supported by FDCT of Macao SAR(029/2016/A1)National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant Nos.11922120,11871489,11401608)Multi-Year research grant(2019-00154-FST,2017-00189-FST)of University of Macao。
文摘The implicit numerical methods have the advantages on preserving the physical properties of the quantum system when solving the time-dependent Kohn-Sham equation.However,the efficiency issue prevents the practical applications of those implicit methods.In this paper,an implicit solver based on a class of Runge-Kutta methods and the finite element method is proposed for the time-dependent Kohn-Sham equation.The efficiency issue is partially resolved by three approaches,i.e.,an h-adaptive mesh method is proposed to effectively restrain the size of the discretized problem,a complex-valued algebraic multigrid solver is developed for efficiently solving the derived linear system from the implicit discretization,as well as the OpenMP based parallelization of the algorithm.The numerical convergence,the ability on preserving the physical properties,and the efficiency of the proposed numerical method are demonstrated by a number of numerical experiments.
基金The first author would like to thank the support from the UM-Funded PhD Assistantship from University of MacaoThe second author was partially supported by Macao Young Scholar Program(AM201919)+5 种基金excellent youth project of Hunan Education Department(19B543)Hunan National Applied Mathematics Center of Hunan Provincial Science and Technology Department(2020ZYT003)The third author would like to thank financial support from National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant Nos.11922120,11871489)FDCT of Macao SAR(Grant No.0082/2020/A2)University of Macao(Grant No.MYRG2020-00265-FST)Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Joint Laboratory for Data-Driven Fluid Mechanics and Engineering Applications(Grant No.2020B1212030001).
文摘In this paper,based on the imaginary time gradient flow model in the density functional theory,a scalar auxiliary variable(SAV)method is developed for the ground state calculation of a given electronic structure system.To handle the orthonormality constraint on those wave functions,two kinds of penalty terms are introduced in designing the modified energy functional in SAV,i.e.,one for the norm preserving of each wave function,another for the orthogonality between each pair of different wave functions.A numerical method consisting of a designed scheme and a linear finite element method is used for the discretization.Theoretically,the desired unconditional decay of modified energy can be obtained from our method,while computationally,both the original energy and modified energy decay behaviors can be observed successfully from a number of numerical experiments.More importantly,numerical results show that the orthonormality among those wave functions can be automatically preserved,without explicitly preserving orthogonalization operations.This implies the potential of our method in large-scale simulations in density functional theory.
基金partially funded by the Hunan National Applied Mathematics Center of Hunan Provincial Science and Technology Department(Grant No.2020ZYT003)by the RSF-NSFC Cooperation project(Grant No.12261131501)+4 种基金by the Excellent youth project of the Hunan Education Department(Grant No.19B543)partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant Nos.11922120 and 11871489)by the FDCT of Macao SAR(Grant No.0082/2020/A2)by the MYRG of the University of Macao(Grant No.MYRG2020-00265-FST)by the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Joint Laboratory for Data-Driven Fluid Mechanics and Engineering Applications(Grant No.2020B1212030001).
文摘In[Dai et al.,Multi.Model.Simul.18(4)(2020)],a structure-preserving gradient flow method was proposed for the ground state calculation in Kohn-Sham density functional theory,based on which a linearized method was developed in[Hu et al.,EAJAM.13(2)(2023)]for further improving the numerical efficiency.In this paper,a complete convergence analysis is delivered for such a linearized method for the all-electron Kohn-Sham model.Temporally,the convergence,the asymptotic stability,as well as the structure-preserving property of the linearized numerical scheme in the method is discussed following previous works,while spatially,the convergence of the h-adaptive mesh method is demonstrated following[Chen et al.,Multi.Model.Simul.12(2014)],with a key study on the boundedness of the Kohn-Sham potential for the all-electron Kohn-Sham model.Numerical examples confirm the theoretical results very well.
