EcoLens: visual analysis of ecological regions in urban contexts using traffic data

Journal of Visualization - The increasing availability of spatiotemporal data provides unprecedented opportunities for understanding the structure of an urban area in terms of people’s...     

Gap theorems for Lagrangian submanifolds in complex space forms

Geometriae Dedicata - Inspired by a recent work of Grove and Petersen (Alexandrov spaces with maximal radius, 2018), where the authors studied positively curved Alexandrov spaces with largest...     

A Nonclinical Spectroscopic Approach for Diagnosing Covid-19: A Concise Perspective

Journal of Applied Spectroscopy - With the COVID-19 outbreak, many challenges are posed before the scientific world to curb this pandemic. The diagnostic testing, treatment, and vaccine development...     

Virtual Field Characterization for Ratcheting Effect Under Cyclic Loading

Experimental Mechanics - Ratcheting is an important mechanical behavior of metals and alloys, which is caused by the repeated accumulations of tensile and compressive strain in circle load....     

Secondary Metabolites of Litchi chinensis

Chemistry of Natural Compounds -     

High-efficient surface tailoring via reverse atom transfer radical polymerization and reversible addition-fragmentation chain-transfer polymerization in an aqueous system initiated by a monocenter redox pair

The commonly used multi-center initiation methods always lead to the formation of quantities of homopolymer in the surface tailoring based on reverse atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) and reversible addition-fragmentation chain-transfer (RAFT) polymerization. In this study, a monocenter redox pair constructed of silica bearing tert-butyl hydroperoxide groups and ascorbic acid (SiO₂-TBHP/AsAc) was applied to substitute the commonly used initiation method of R-supported RAFT grafting polymerization. All the propagating radicals were restricted on the surface of solid particles during the whole procedure theoretically, resulting in a higher grafting efficiency of 95.1% combined with the “controllable” feature at 10 h. This redox pair was also used to initiate the reverse ATRP in miniemulsion successfully with a grafting efficiency of 86.3% at 10 h. The grafting efficiency obtained under this monocenter initiation method was significantly higher than that of the frequently reported surface modification by reverse ATRP and RAFT polymerization. In addition, the high-efficient surface tailoring was traced and confirmed by nuclear magnetic resonance, Fourier transform infrared, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, transmission electron microscopy, and other analysis tests. The advantage of this monocenter redox pair will open a new avenue for the potential “high-efficient” surface tailoring of various materials.     

Restricted testing conditions for the multilinear maximal operator

Restricted testing conditions were considered recently. For the maximal operator, Hytönen, Li and Sawyer [8] first obtained parental testing condition. Later, they [9] showed that it suffices to restrict testing to doubling cubes. Chen and Lacey [3] gave a similar restricted testing condition. In our paper, we discuss a version of the latter in the multilinear setting.

     

A decision support method for designing vegetation layers with minimised irrigation need

Annals of Operations Research - Selecting a vegetation layer design goes along with determining its future irrigation need. Therefore, it is essential to take a design decision that is minimising...     

One-pot,one-step,and selective terpolymerization of ethylene oxide,propylene oxide,and COS to copoly(thioether)s with tunable thermal properties

Facile construction of sulfur-rich polymers using readily available raw chemicals is an area aggressively pursued but challenging. Herein we use common feedstocks of ethylene oxide (EO), propylene oxide (PO), and carbonyl sulfide (COS) to synthesize copoly(thioether)s which are traditionally produced from unpleasant and difficult to store episulfides. In this protocol, the EO/COS coupling selectively generates a pure poly(ethylene sulfide) (PES) with melting temperature (T_m) values up to 172°C and high yields up to 98%. The EO/PO/COS terpolymerization leads to the incorporation of soft poly(propylene sulfide) (PPS) and hard PES segments together, affording a random PES-co-PPS copoly(thioether) with the complete consumption of EO and PO. Additionally, by simply varying the EO/PO feeding ratio, the obtained copoly(thioether)s possess tunable thermal properties, T_m values in the range of 76–144°C, and excellent solubility. These copolymerizations are conducted in one-pot/one-step at industrially favored reaction temperatures of 100–120°C using catalysts of common organic bases, suggesting a facile and practical manner. Especially, the copoly(thioether) exhibits high refractive indices up to 1.68 owing to its high sulfur content, suggesting a broad application prospect in optical materials.