10/07/2024


The micro-riblets prohibited the settlement of macrofoulers. Over 77 days of static immersion in the sea during summer, the metallic surface showed significantly less biofouling compared to a surface painted with an anticorrosive coating.The field of plasmonics explores the interaction between light and metallic micro/nanostructures and films. The collective oscillation of free electrons on metallic surfaces enables subwavelength optical confinement and enhanced light-matter interactions. In optoelectronics, perovskite materials are particularly attractive due to their excellent absorption, emission, and carrier transport properties, which lead to the improved performance of solar cells, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), lasers, photodetectors, and sensors. When perovskite materials are coupled with plasmonic structures, the device performance significantly improves owing to strong near-field and far-field optical enhancements, as well as the plasmoelectric effect. Here, we review recent theoretical and experimental works on plasmonic perovskite solar cells, light emitters, and sensors. The underlying physical mechanisms, design routes, device performances, and optimization strategies are summarized. This review also lays out challenges and future directions for the plasmonic perovskite research field toward next-generation optoelectronic technologies.Since the WHO declared the COVID-19 pandemic on March 11, 2020, the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has profoundly impacted public health and the economy worldwide. But there are not the only ones to be hit. The COVID-19 pandemic has also substantially altered mental health, with anxiety symptoms being one of the most frequently reported problems. Especially, the number of people reporting anxiety symptoms increased significantly during the first lockdown-phase compared to similar data collected before the pandemic. Yet, most of these studies relied on a unitary approach to anxiety, wherein its different constitutive features (i.e., symptoms) were tallied into one sum-score, thus ignoring any possibility of interactions between them. Therefore, in this study, we seek to map the associations between the core features of anxiety during the first weeks of the first Belgian COVID-19 lockdown-phase (n = 2,829). To do so, we implemented, in a preregistered fashion, two distinct computational network approaches a Gaussian graphical model and a Bayesian network modelling approach to estimate a directed acyclic graph. Despite their varying assumptions, constraints, and computational methods to determine nodes (i.e., the variables) and edges (i.e., the relations between them), both approaches pointed to excessive worrying as a node playing an especially influential role in the network system of the anxiety features. Altogether, our findings offer novel data-driven clues for the ongoing field's larger quest to examine, and eventually alleviate, the mental health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is highly contagious. More than 247 million cases have been confirmed by the end of October 2021. Seeking help earlier may slow the spread of COVID-19 because it may help in early detection of infected cases, and it facilitate tracing those who were with close contact with infected cases. The purpose of this study is to identify participants' intentions toward COVID-19 seeking help and the factors affecting their decision. This is a cross-sectional study. An online survey using Google Forms was used for data collection. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was used to explain intentions to seek help for COVID-19. The concepts included in the Theory of Planned Behavior and COVID-19 knowledge were used as predictors. The sample included 780 participants, with an average age of 28.60±9.86 years old. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/ly3537982.html Most of the sample were female (67.4%) and having a bachelor's degree (72.7%). Participants showed high level of knowledge regarding COVID-19, 73% of the sample had a total knowledge score equal to or higher than 85%. Also, participants had high positive attitudes and high intentions to seek help for COVID-19. The four predictors Attitudes towards COVID-19, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, and COVID-19 knowledge significantly explained intentions to seek help. Participants had high intentions to seek help for COVID-19, which was related to having positive attitudes toward seeking help, high social approval, high perceived controllability, and high COVID-19 knowledge levels. Regular awareness campaigns during early stages of pandemics should be performed to improve attitudes and knowledge level, which may improve prevention measures, and promote help seeking behaviors. Consequently, this may facilitate early detection of cases, and slow the spread of pandemics.Running-prostheses have enabled exceptional athletes with bilateral leg amputations to surpass Olympic 400 m athletics qualifying standards. Due to the world-class performances and relatively fast race finishes of these athletes, many people assume that running-prostheses provide users an unfair advantage over biologically legged competitors during long sprint races. These assumptions have led athletics governing bodies to prohibit the use of running-prostheses in sanctioned non-amputee (NA) competitions, such as at the Olympics. However, here we show that no athlete with bilateral leg amputations using running-prostheses, including the fastest such athlete, exhibits a single 400 m running performance metric that is better than those achieved by NA athletes. Specifically, the best experimentally measured maximum running velocity and sprint endurance profile of athletes with prosthetic legs are similar to, but not better than those of NA athletes. Further, the best experimentally measured initial race acceleration (from 0 to 20 m), maximum velocity around curves, and velocity at aerobic capacity of athletes with prosthetic legs were 40%, 1-3% and 19% slower compared to NA athletes, respectively. Therefore, based on these 400 m performance metrics, use of prosthetic legs during 400 m running races is not unequivocally advantageous compared to the use of biological legs.Nanostructured ZnO has been widely investigated as a gas sensing material. Antimony is an important dopant for ZnO that catalyses its surface reactivity and thus strengthens its gas sensing capability. However, there are not enough studies on the gas sensing of antimony-doped ZnO single wires. We fabricated and characterized ZnO/ZnOSb core-shell micro-wires and demonstrated that individual wires are sensitive to oxygen gas flow. Temperature and light illumination strongly affect the oxygen gas sensitivity and stability of these individual wires. It was found that these micro- and nano-wire oxygen sensors at 200°C give the highest response to oxygen, yet a vanishingly small effect of light and temperature variations. The underlying physics and the interplay between these effects are discussed in terms of surface-adsorbed oxygen, oxygen vacancies and hydrogen doping.The history of molecular oxygen (O2) in Earth's atmosphere is still debated; however, geological evidence supports at least two major episodes where O2 increased by an order of magnitude or more the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) and the Neoproterozoic Oxidation Event. O2 concentrations have likely fluctuated (between 10-3 and 1.5 times the present atmospheric level) since the GOE ∼2.4 Gyr ago, resulting in a time-varying ozone (O3) layer. Using a three-dimensional chemistry-climate model, we simulate changes in O3 in Earth's atmosphere since the GOE and consider the implications for surface habitability, and glaciation during the Mesoproterozoic. We find lower O3 columns (reduced by up to 4.68 times for a given O2 level) compared to previous work; hence, higher fluxes of biologically harmful UV radiation would have reached the surface. Reduced O3 leads to enhanced tropospheric production of the hydroxyl radical (OH) which then substantially reduces the lifetime of methane (CH4). We show that a CH4 supported greenhouse effect during the Mesoproterozoic is highly unlikely. The reduced O3 columns we simulate have important implications for astrobiological and terrestrial habitability, demonstrating the relevance of three-dimensional chemistry-climate simulations when assessing paleoclimates and the habitability of faraway worlds.Scientists conducting affective research often use visual, emotional images, to examine the mechanisms of defensive responses to threatening and dangerous events and objects. Many studies use the rich emotional images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) to facilitate affective research. While IAPS images can be classified into emotional categories such as fear or disgust, the number of images per discrete emotional category is limited. We developed the Open Biological Negative Image Set (OBNIS) consisting of 200 colour and greyscale creature images categorized as disgusting, fearful or neither. Participants in Experiment 1 (N = 210) evaluated the images' valence and arousal and classified them as disgusting, fearful or neither. In Experiment 2, other participants (N = 423) rated the disgust and fear levels of the images. As a result, the OBNIS provides valence, arousal, disgust and fear ratings and 'disgusting,' 'fearful' and 'neither' emotional categories for each image. These images are available to download on the Internet (https//osf.io/pfrx4/?view_only=911b1be722074ad4aab87791cb8a72f5).The evolution of SARS-CoV-2 virulence, or lethality, threatens to exacerbate the burden of COVID-19 on society. How might COVID-19 vaccines alter selection for increased SARS-CoV-2 virulence? Framing current evidence surrounding SARS-CoV-2 biology and COVID-19 vaccines in the context of evolutionary theory indicates that prospects for virulence evolution remain uncertain. However, differential effects of vaccinal immunity on transmission and disease severity between respiratory compartments could select for increased virulence. To bound expectations for this outcome, we analyse an evo-epidemiological model. Synthesizing model predictions with vaccine efficacy data, we conclude that while vaccine-driven virulence remains a theoretical possibility, the risk is low if vaccines provide sustained robust protection against infection. Furthermore, we found that any increases in transmission concomitant with increases in virulence would be unlikely to threaten prospects for herd immunity in a highly immunized population. Given that virulence evolution would nevertheless impact unvaccinated individuals and populations with low vaccination rates, it is important to achieve high vaccination rates worldwide and ensure that vaccinal immunity provides robust protection against both infection and disease, potentially through the use of booster doses.We report data from an online experiment which allows us to study how generosity changed over a 6-day period during the initial explosive growth of the COVID-19 pandemic in Andalusia, Spain, while the country was under a strict lockdown. Participants (n = 969) could donate a fraction of a €100 prize to an unknown charity. Our data are particularly rich in the age distribution and we complement them with daily public information about COVID-19-related deaths, infections and hospital admissions. We find correlational evidence that donations decreased in the period under study, particularly among older individuals. Our analysis of the mechanisms behind the detected decrease in generosity suggests that expectations about others' behaviour, perceived mortality risk and (alarming) information play a key-but independent-role for behavioural adaptation. These results indicate that social behaviour is quickly adjusted in response to the pandemic environment, possibly reflecting some form of selective prosociality.