In Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and type 2 diabetes, harmful protein aggregates and deposits, known as amyloid plaques, develop. There is also much evidence that these three diseases are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. A research team led by the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now shown that synthetic mini-proteins (macrocyclic peptides) developed by the researchers inhibit both amyloid formation in Parkinson's and harmful protein interactions between the three diseases in experimental models. They could serve as the basis for future drugs to treat these diseases.

An Osaka Metropolitan University-led team of researchers identified raccoons as the probable reservoir of the cytolethal distending toxin (cdt) gene-positive Providencia strains in Japan.

 

Enhanced Durability of Fire-Safe Aqueous Zinc-Ion Batteries via Electron Sponge Technology

- Dendrite suppression in aqueous zinc-ion batteries via anodic electron sponge for fast electron uptake

- Complete dendrite suppression achieves threefold durability and sustains over 2,500 charge-discharge cycles - Published in the January Issue of Nature Communications (IF 14.7), a leading international journal

Researchers Dr. Jung Hoon Yang and Dr. Chan-Woo Lee of the Energy Storage Research Department at the Korea Institute of Energy Research (President: Chang-Keun Yi, hereinafter referred to as ‘KIER’) have developed a novel copper oxide-based electrode material and successfully applied it to aqueous zinc-ion batteries, achieving a threefold improvement in durability.

Medical image segmentation plays a crucial role in facilitating clinical diagnosis and treatment, yet it poses numerous challenges due to variations in object appearances and sizes with indistinct boundaries. This paper introduces the MHSAttResDU-Net architecture, a novel approach to automatic medical image segmentation. Drawing inspiration from the double U-Net, multi-head self-attention (MHSA) model, and residual connections, the proposed model is trained on images pre-processed by the innovative ranking-based color constancy approach (RCC). The MHSAttResDU-Net includes the integration of RCC to control model complexity and enhance generalization across diverse lighting conditions. Additionally, the incorporation of the sparse salient region pooling (SSRP) unit in the encoder-decoder blocks reduces the dimension of feature maps, capturing essential local and global channel descriptors without introducing learnable parameters. MHSA gates are strategically employed in both down-sampling and up-sampling paths, allowing the recollection of additional relevant dimensional data. This effectively addresses dissimilar feature representations, minimizing unfocused noise and artifacts while reducing computational costs. Furthermore, Leaky ReLU-based residual connections between the encoder and decoder enhance the model’s capability to recognize complex shapes and structures, ensuring improved gradient flow and faster convergence. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the MHSAttResDU-Net architecture across diverse datasets, including COVID-19, ISIC 2018, CVC-ClinicDB, and the 2018 Data Science Bowl. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance metrics, including an accuracy of 99%, representing a promising advancement in automated medical image analysis with potential implications for improving patient care and diagnostic accuracy.

Researchers in Shanghai have developed a high-efficiency cryomodule with high quality factors, promising enhanced performance and accessibility for particle accelerator applications in healthcare, industry, and scientific research.

A research team comprising members from the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), Tohoku University, and the Photon Science Innovation Center (PhoSIC) has successfully identified the optimal composition of a Co-Mn-Si Heusler alloy exhibiting the highest spin polarization—a key property of half-metallic materials—in just one day of experiments. This achievement was made possible by fabricating a composition-spread thin film on a single substrate and conducting photoelectron measurements at a 3 GeV high-brilliance synchrotron radiation facility, NanoTerasu. This highly efficient optimization approach is expected to accelerate the development of high-performance spintronic materials.

Solid-state batteries have attracted significant attention due to their high safety and high energy density. However, the continuous lithium (Li) consumption will lead to decrease of the energy density and lifespan of the battery. Efforts have been devoted to exploring new strategies to increase the content of the active Li-ions, among which application of sacrificial additives is one of the most effective ways to compensate for the lost lithium. To spur more research into a stable and high-efficiency additive, researchers in China assessed the current advances of research and proposed Li_xC₆O₆ (x=2 and 4) as high-efficiency Li-compensation additives in cathode.