Bioinspired Geometry‐Switchable Janus Nanofibers for Eye‐Readable H2 Sensors

Nanoscale architectures found in nature have unique functionalities and their discovery has led to significant advancements in various fields including optics, wetting, and adhesion. The sensilla of arthropods, comprised of unique hierarchical structures, are a representative example which inspired the development of various bioinspired systems, owing to their hypersensitive and ultrafast responsivity to mechanical and chemical stimuli. This report presents a geometry‐switchable and highly H₂‐reactive Janus nanofiber (H‐NF) array inspired by the structural features of the arthropod sensilla. The H‐NF array (400 nm diameter, 4 µm height, 1.2 µm spacing distance, and hexagonal array) exhibits reversible structural deformation when exposed to a flammable concentration of hydrogen gas (4 vol% H₂ in N₂) with fast response times (5.1 s). The structural change can be detected with the bare eye, which is a result of change in the optical transmittance due to the structural deformation of the H‐NF array. Based on these results, an eye‐readable H₂‐sensor that requires no additional electrical apparatus is demonstrated, including wetting‐controllable H₂‐selective smart surfaces and H₂‐responsive fasteners.     

Energy Saving Electrochromic Polymer Windows with a Highly Transparent Charge‐Balancing Layer

Highly transparent TiO₂ nanoparticles are explored as a non‐electrochromic (non‐EC) charge‐balancing layer for a high color contrast, bistable electrochromic window (ECW). The TiO₂ nanoparticle (TNP) layer increases the potential at the EC polymer electrode, thereby lowering the working voltage of the ECW. This leads to lower the power consumption of ECWs without loss in the high color contrast (ΔT > 72%) and to remarkably improve the cyclability (ΔT change <1% over 3000 cycles), mainly due to the low overvoltage (<0.1 V) on the electrochromic polymer layer. Furthermore, the ECWs including the non‐EC TNP layer show long‐term bistability (>2.7 h, 40% increase) and UV stability (ΔT change <1%) to provide a low‐power automatic ECW. This finding shows that the charge balanced ECP window has the potential to be used for an energy saving ECW with low‐power consumption and will be widely applied in various ECWs as well as electrochemical devices with multiple functions.     

Ceria Nanoparticle Systems for Selective Scavenging of Mitochondrial,Intracellular, and Extracellular Reactive Oxygen Species in Parkinson's Disease

Oxidative stress induced by reactive oxygen species (ROS) is one of the critical factors that involves in the pathogenesis and progression of many diseases. However, lack of proper techniques to scavenge ROS depending on their cellular localization limits a thorough understanding of the pathological effects of ROS. Here, we demonstrate the selective scavenging of mitochondrial, intracellular, and extracellular ROS using three different types of ceria nanoparticles (NPs), and its application to treat Parkinson's disease (PD). Our data show that scavenging intracellular or mitochondrial ROS inhibits the microglial activation and lipid peroxidation, while protecting the tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) in the striata of PD model mice. These results indicate the essential roles of intracellular and mitochondrial ROS in the progression of PD. We anticipate that our ceria NP systems will serve as a useful tool for elucidating the functions of various ROS in diseases.     

Visible‐Light‐Responsive Photoanodes for Highly Active,Stable Water Oxidation

Solar energy is a natural and effectively permanent resource and so the conversion of solar radiation into chemical or electrical energy is an attractive, although challenging, prospect. Photo‐electrochemical (PEC) water splitting is a key aspect of producing hydrogen from solar power. However, practical water oxidation over photoanodes (in combination with water reduction at a photocathode) in PEC cells is currently difficult to achieve because of the large overpotentials in the reaction kinetics and the inefficient photoactivity of the semiconductors. The development of semiconductors that allow high solar‐to‐hydrogen conversion efficiencies and the utilization of these materials in photoanodes will be a necessary aspect of achieving efficient, stable water oxidation. This Review discusses advances in water oxidation activity over photoanodes of n‐type visible‐light‐responsive (oxy)nitrides and oxides.     

Electronic Band Structure Study of the Transport Properties of the Intermetallic Compounds ZrRuP and ZrRuSi

Electrical properties of the intermetallic superconductors h-ZrRuP, o-ZrRuP, and h-ZrRuSi were examined by calculating their electronic structures on the basis of the extended Hückel tight-binding method. To a first approximation, the electronic structure of ZrRuP is well described in terms of the oxidation state Zr(4+)(RuP)(4)(-). This picture provides simple explanations for why both h-ZrRuP and o-ZrRuP have low N(E(f)) values and why h-ZrRuP has a nearly half-filled one-dimensional (1D) band dispersive along the c direction. A charge density wave instability associated with such a 1D band probably causes a c-axis doubling structural distortion in h-HfRuAs and h-TiRuAs. We discussed probable reasons for why the intermetallic phases with the c-axis doubling distortion are not superconductors and why h-ZrRuP has a higher T(c) than does o-ZrRuP.     

Fast Multibit Decision Polar Decoder for Successive-Cancellation List Decoding

Successive-cancellation list (SCL) decoding for polar codes has the disadvantage of high latency owing to serial operations. To improve the latency, several algorithms with additional circuits have been proposed, but the area becomes larger. This paper proposes a fast multibit decision method having-high area efficiency based on the SCL decoding algorithm. First, multiple bits can be determined to reduce clock cycles using new nodes represented by the information bits and frozen bits. We propose the new nodes called the combined nodes and the other node in this paper. The combined nodes that combine redundant operations of the fast-simplified SC (fast-SSC) algorithm can increase area efficiency. The other node with bit patterns other than the node types of the fast-SSC algorithm performs an 8-bit multibit decision to reduce the number of decoding cycles. Latency is further reduced by applying a sphere decoding method to the other node. In addition, a sorter is proposed to reduce the critical path delay. As a large number of path metrics causes sorter delays, the proposed sorter can achieve high throughput with the small area. The proposed (1024, 512) SCL decoder showed negligible performance degradation in the simulation using Matlab and was synthesized using 65 nm CMOS technology. The proposed decoder achieves about 1.3Gbps with the small area. As a result, the area-throughput efficiency is at least 1.4 times higher than the state-of-the-art works over 1 Gbps.

     

A Study on Financing Security for Smartphones Using Text Mining

With the emergence of smartphones, our lives have considerably changed. A smartphone has not only conventional calling, text-messaging, and photo-taking functions, but also performs many other functions by executing apps. In particular, more financial transactions using smartphone have recently become possible. With the global rapid rise in smartphone users and an ever-growing time and frequency of smartphone use, smartphones have become a target of malicious attacks. As a result, the damage caused by personal information leakage, phishing, and pharming has occurred more frequently. In this respect, however, very few studies have previously used crawling and text mining techniques, which have been actively studied quite recently; furthermore, network analysis has rarely been conducted. In this context, the present study collected the data from 2014 to the first half of 2016 on the trends of safe financing via smartphone with the crawling technique and analyzed the collected data with the text mining Technique. Our results suggest that there was a difference in the use of important keywords related to smartphone financial security, on the year-on-year basis. This suggests that an increasing number of financial services provided using smartphones should be accompanied by the elaboration of safe smartphone financial security services. In addition, for the sake smartphone financial security, not only manufacturers, but also banks, i.e. service providers, and users must pay specific attention to security issues.     

Correction to: Performance Analysis on Channel Estimation with Antenna Diversity of OFDM Reception in Multi-path Fast Fading Channel

Wireless Personal Communications - There was incorrect information in the acknowledgement in the original publication. The correct information is shown below.     

Hybrid functional microfibers for textile electronics and biosensors

Fibers are low-cost substrates that are abundantly used in our daily lives.This review highlights recent advances in the fabrication and application of multifunctional fibers to achieve fibers with unique functions for specific applications ranging from textile electronics to biomedical applications.By incorporating various nanomaterials such as carbon nanomaterials,metallic nanomaterials,and hydrogel-based biomaterials,the functions of fibers can be precisely engineered.This review also highlights the performance of the functional fibers and electronic materials incorporated with textiles and demonstrates their practical application in pressure/tensile sensors,chemical/biosensors,and drug delivery.Textile technologies in which fibers containing biological factors and cells are formed and assembled into constructions with biomimetic properties have attracted substantial attention in the field of tissue engineering.We also discuss the current limitations of functional textile-based devices and their prospects for use in various future applications.     

Distributed quality of service routing protocol for multimedia traffic in WiMedia networks

Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology has emerged as a solution for the wireless interface between medical sensors and personal servers in future telemedicine systems. The WiMedia Alliance has specified a distributed medium access control protocol based on UWB for high-rate WPANs. In the cases of some applications, data traffic between the source device and destination device is transmitted via one or more intermediate links before it reaches the destination device. However, when all data frames do not transmit in the current DRP reservation block, a relay device cannot transmit the received data frame from the source device in the current DRP policy, until the next DRP duration reserved for forwarding to the destination device begins. This policy increases end-to-end latency between the source device and destination device significantly. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel reservation-based routing protocol to minimize the end-to-end delay between source and destination. The proposed routing protocol utilizes the number of medium access slots and hop-count to decide the optimal route between the source device and destination device. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol can enhance the throughput and delay performance and improve energy efficiency by minimizing the packet drop and collision.