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Electrochemo-Mechanical Degradation and Failure of Active Particles in High Energy Density Batteries: A Review
No full textThis is the peer reviewed version of the following article: D. Li, C. Shen, Y. Zheng, J. Xu, Electrochemo-Mechanical Degradation and Failure of Active Particles in High Energy Density Batteries: A Review. Small 2025, 21, 2407740. https://doi.org/10.1002/smll.202407740, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/smll.202407740. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. This article may not be enhanced, enriched or otherwise transformed into a derivative work, without express permission from Wiley or by statutory rights under applicable legislation. Copyright notices must not be removed, obscured or modified. The article must be linked to Wiley’s version of record on Wiley Online Library and any embedding, framing or otherwise making available the article or pages thereof by third parties from platforms, services and websites other than Wiley Online Library must be prohibited.
© 2025 Wiley-VCH GmbH.
This article will be embargoed until 01/07/2026.Failure of the active particles is inherently electrochemo-mechanics dominated. This review comprehensively examines the electrochemo-mechanical degradation and failure mechanisms of active particles in high-energy density lithium-ion batteries. The study delves into the growth of passivating layers, such as the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI), and their impact on battery performance. It highlights the role of elevated temperatures in accelerating degradation reactions, such as the dissolution of transition metals and the formation of new SEI layers, leading to capacity fade and increased internal resistance. The review also discusses the mechanical degradation of electrode materials, including the fracture of active particles and the impact of stress on electrode performance. Advanced characterization techniques, such as cryogenic scanning transmission electron microscopy and 3D tomography, are explored to provide insights into the structural and chemical evolution of battery materials. By addressing the interplay between chemical, mechanical, and thermal factors, this review aims to provide guidelines for the chemistry development, material selection, structural design as well as recycling of next-generation batteries with high safety, durability, and high energy density.D.L. was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 12102264)
Understanding the role of a sperm-oocyte protein complex (SPE-11-OOPS-1) in C. elegans egg activation
No full textJaramillo-Lambert, AimeeThe cornerstone of sexual reproduction is fertilization, in which a sperm and an oocyte fuse to form a zygote. Although both the sperm and oocyte are products of meiosis and contain a haploid genome, they are highly differentiated and specialized to fulfill their unique roles. Comparing the two gametes, the oocyte is much larger and contains most of the stockpiled materials required for the early embryonic development of the zygote. Conversely, the male gamete is streamlined for the singular purpose of locating and fertilizing the oocyte therefore it is consequently small and compact. The traditional view of the sperm’s contribution towards embryogenesis is limited to the haploid genome and a pair of centrioles. However, work in several model organisms has shown that the sperm also contributes other factors that are required for proper embryogenesis. Mutants lacking these factors are known as paternal-effect embryonic lethal (PEL). In C. elegans, the only known strictly PEL gene is spe-11. Oocytes fertilized by sperm lacking SPE-11 show severe defects during the early stages of embryogenesis resulting in embryonic lethality, whereas spe-11 mutant oocytes fertilized by wild-type sperm are completely viable. Recently, we identified OOPS-1, an oocyte partner of SPE-11. OOPS-1 is a protein expressed throughout the maternal germ line, and it is a maternal-effect embryonic lethal gene. ☐ In this dissertation, I explore the connection between SPE-11 and OOPS-1. I found that they are essential proteins, as mutants of both spe-11 and oops-1 produce non-viable progeny that fail at an early stage of development. Mutants of spe-11 and oops-1 display identical defects across a number of egg activation phenotypes, including eggshell formation and meiotic arrest. From this, I explore the function of the SPE-11 and OOPS-1 complex, and their role in C. elegans egg activation, eggshell formation and the oocyte-to-embryo transition. Alongside this, I also briefly explored another SPE-11 associated protein, SPSP-1 and investigated the role of EGG-1 and EGG-2, a pair of oocyte plasma membrane proteins in which their function remains unclear due to prior technical limitations. Apart from the main focus of my graduate research with the SPE-11-OOPS-1 complex, I will also be presenting my work on understanding the role of TDPT-1, a C. elegans homolog of human tyrosyl DNA phosphodiesterase 2, and its role in suppressing the topoisomerase II mutant-mediated segregation defects.University of Delaware, Department of Biological SciencesPh.D
Inhibition of lipolysis in visceral adipose tissue from obese mice and humans prevents impairment of endothelial Kir2.1 channels
No full textThis article was originally published in Channesl. The version of record is available at https://doi.org/10.1080/19336950.2025.2564651
© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.Accumulation of abdominal visceral adipose tissue (VAT) is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Obesity-induced endothelial dysfunction is a precursor to severe disease, and we and others have shown that arteries embedded in VAT, but not subcutaneous adipose tissue, exhibit robust endothelial dysfunction. Using a mouse model of diet-induced obesity, we recently linked VAT from obese mice to the impairment of endothelial Kir2.1, a critical regulator of endothelial function. However, the mechanism by which VAT impairs Kir2.1 is unclear. As Kir2.1 impairment is dependent on endothelial CD36, we hypothesized that lipolytic VAT induces Kir2.1 impairment through fatty acids (FA). To test this, we first treated endothelial cells with palmitic acid (PA) to determine whether the addition of exogenous FAs recapitulated our original finding of Kir2.1 dysfunction when challenged with VAT. PA inhibited Kir2.1 assessed via whole-cell patch-clamp electrophysiology, an effect that was dependent on endothelialCD36. To determine whether inhibiting VAT lipolysis prevents Kir2.1 dysfunction in the presence of VAT in obese mice and humans, VAT was pretreated with small molecule inhibitors of adipose triglyceride lipase prior to incubating endothelial cells with adipose tissue. This approach also prevented VAT-induced impairment of endothelial Kir2.1suggesting that VAT-derived FAs may play a role. Furthermore, inhibition of lipolysis in the VAT of obese mice and humans significantly reduced endothelial FA uptake, similar to that observed when CD36 was downregulated. These findings advance our under-standing of the relationship between VAT and endothelial Kir2.1 impairment and place VAT-derived FAs as potential paracrine mediators.The research reported in this publication was supported by the Institutional Development Award (IDeA) of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award number 2P20GM113125 and a University of Delaware Research Foundation seed grant
Farmer adoption of nitrogen modeling tools: perceived barriers and important factors
No full textDavidson, KellyAgricultural nitrogen runoff contributes around 45% of nitrogen entering the Chesapeake Bay, significantly affecting its water quality. Despite various efforts, the 2025 water quality goal for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed has not yet been achieved. In-season nitrogen modeling tools (NMTs) help farmers optimize nitrogen application, improve Nitrogen Use Efficiency, and reduce environmental nitrogen loss. However, the adoption of NMTs among U.S. farmers is low. While existing studies have explored factors influencing best management practices, nutrient management practices, and agricultural technology adoption, little is known about factors that influence farmers’ adoption decisions specifically on the use of NMT. This study examines the role of perceived important factors (e.g., economics, time, and environment) and perceived barriers (e.g., resources and information) in current and future NMT adoption decisions. A mail survey was conducted among 204 grain farmers in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. To bring more clarification on quantitative results, a semi-structured interview was conducted among 20 farmers. Survey data were analyzed using exploratory factor analysis and ordered logistic regression models, and interview data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Survey results showed that the importance farmers placed on time investments was positively correlated with current adoption and the likelihood of future adoption. Additionally, the influence of environmental awareness and compliance importance, time investment importance, belief barriers, and equipment and technology barriers on farmer adoption decisions for NMT varied by farm size. Farmers with larger cropland area were more likely to adopt NMT both currently and in the future. Farmers’ enrollment in the Conservation Reserve Program, Conservation Stewardship Program, and State Agriculture Cost-Share Program was found to influence their adoption decisions. Through qualitative analysis, we found that farmers considered NMT as a time and accuracy-efficient tool once they were initially set up, and they were willing to invest additional time if the tools proved profitable. These findings inform organizations such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Mid-Atlantic 4R Alliance, which promote nutrient management and NMT adoption, to emphasize the time-saving and cost-saving benefits of NMT and design programs that address adoption barriers based on farm size.University of Delaware, Department of Applied Economics and StatisticsM.S
Discrimination
No full text© 2026 The Author(s)
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this chapter or parts of it.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
This book chapter was originally published in IPSA Companion to Political Science . The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-06918-4_137-
Color-Coded Compressive Spectral Imager Based on Focus Transformer Network
No full textThis article was originally published in Sensors. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/s25072006.
© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Compressive spectral imaging (CSI) methods aim to reconstruct a three-dimensional hyperspectral image (HSI) from a single or a few two-dimensional compressive measurements. Conventional CSIs use separate optical elements to independently modulate the light field in the spatial and spectral domains, thus increasing the system complexity. In addition, real applications of CSIs require advanced reconstruction algorithms. This paper proposes a low-cost color-coded compressive snapshot spectral imaging method to reduce the system complexity and improve the HSI reconstruction performance. The combination of a color-coded aperture and an RGB detector is exploited to achieve higher degrees of freedom in the spatio-spectral modulations, which also renders a low-cost miniaturization scheme to implement the system. In addition, a deep learning method named Focus-based Mask-guided Spectral-wise Transformer (F-MST) network is developed to further improve the reconstruction efficiency and accuracy of HSIs. The simulations and real experiments demonstrate that the proposed F-MST algorithm achieves superior image quality over commonly used iterative reconstruction algorithms and deep learning algorithms.The authors Jinshan Li and Xu Ma are supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U2241275)
Innovations in preclinical MR elastography and applications in rat models of neurological disorders
No full textJohnson, CurtisMagnetic resonance elastography (MRE) is a quantitative MRI technique used to estimate the mechanical properties of tissue. While still relatively new, MRE has become the gold standard for diagnosing liver fibrosis and has shown great promise as a noninvasive, quantitative, evaluation technique in a multitude of physiological settings. This is due to MRE’s unique sensitivity to small variations in mechanical properties and its ability to reflect microstructural integrity. Mechanical properties are impacted by variations in microstructural composition and organization including cell density, myelination, vasculature, fiber alignment, and extracellular matrix (ECM) integrity. Thus, mechanical properties indirectly measure tissue health. Using brain MRE, we can detect tumors, assess cognitive health and memory performance, differentiate between brain structures, and monitor neurodegeneration and the natural aging process. Despite the numerous applications, there is much we do not fully understand about the microstructural contributions to the property changes we observe. Treatment development and benchmarking are also difficult in clinical settings. Human MRE studies are restricted by the availability of subjects, large variability between subjects, and ethical considerations. Thus, there is a need for advancements in preclinical MRE research to fill these knowledge gaps. ☐ MRE in preclinical models (preclinical MRE) is an emerging field motivated by the need to improve our understanding of the microstructure and its effects on the mechanical property measurements we find in humans. Through rodent models, we can monitor disease progression and correlate findings with histology. Animal models are also necessary for treatment development and allow for faster, more controlled longitudinal studies. To facilitate translatability, we must use the same MRE process in animals with comparable quality and resolution to humans. The field of rodent MRE is expanding, and several studies describe similar findings to humans and have verified their results with histology. However, mechanical property ranges and trends vary due to differences in data acquisition, scanner strength, inversion algorithm, and age of the rodents. Rat models are advantageous over mice in that mechanical properties from smaller structures may be recovered at similarly high field strengths and resolutions. Rat models are also more translatable to human neuroscience, yet the vast majority of preclinical brain MRE work has been done on mice. This thesis presents a series of experiments aimed at improving the capabilities, translatability, and applications of preclinical MRE with an emphasis on rat models of neurological disorders. ☐ The first aim focuses on the development of novel protocols for benchmarking MRE experiments and performing rat brain MRE with translatable quality and resolution to human MRE. This foundational work is then leveraged to establish the in vivo rat brain MRE protocol. In Aim 2, we develop a viscoelastic MRE phantom with tunable damping ratio independent of shear stiffness. This linear polyacrylamide (LPAA) phantom is used to improve benchmarking capabilities and to assess the sensitivity of our preclinical MRE protocol to small variations in mechanical properties. In the third aim, we apply the established preclinical MRE protocol to assess brain mechanical property alterations and recovery in a rat model of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD). This work evaluates whether MRE can reflect microstructural changes due to alcohol exposure and response to therapeutic intervention. In Aim four, we adopt a multimodal MRE and sodium MRI approach to assess the feasibility and sensitivity of detecting variations in brain mechanical properties and sodium concentration in a rat model of acute inflammation. ☐ Collectively, this work contributes improvements to the quality and translatability of preclinical MRE, combined with novel benchmarking tools and applications of MRE in rat models of neurological disorders. Future research in this field should strive to further our knowledge of microstructural components and their relationships to the mechanical properties we measure, and to explore multimodal imaging approaches to comprehensively assess tissue health.University of Delaware, Department of Biomedical EngineeringPh.D
Generative Diffusion Models for Compressed Sensing of Satellite LiDAR Data: Evaluating Image Quality Metrics in Forest Landscape Reconstruction
No full textThis article was originally published in Remote Sensing. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs17071215.
© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Spaceborne LiDAR systems are crucial for Earth observation but face hardware constraints, thus limiting resolution and data processing. We propose integrating compressed sensing and diffusion generative models to reconstruct high-resolution satellite LiDAR data within the Hyperheight Data Cube (HHDC) framework. Using a randomized illumination pattern in the imaging model, we achieve efficient sampling and compression, reducing the onboard computational load and optimizing data transmission. Diffusion models then reconstruct detailed HHDCs from sparse samples on Earth. To ensure reliability despite lossy compression, we analyze distortion metrics for derived products like Digital Terrain and Canopy Height Models and evaluate the 3D reconstruction accuracy in waveform space. We identify image quality assessment metrics—ADD_GSIM, DSS, HaarPSI, PSIM, SSIM4, CVSSI, MCSD, and MDSI—that strongly correlate with subjective quality in reconstructed forest landscapes. This work advances high-resolution Earth observation by combining efficient data handling with insights into LiDAR imaging fidelity.This research was funded in part by US National Science Foundation NSF under Grant No. 2404740, Science & Technology Center in Ukraine (STCU) Agreement No. 7116, and National Science Centre, Poland (NCN), Grant no. 2023/05/Y/ST6/00197, within the joint IMPRESS-U project entitled “EAGER IMPRESS-U: Exploratory Research on Generative Compression for Compressive Lidar”
Molecular mechanism of initiation of human papillomavirus (HPV) DNA replication
No full textBiswas-Fiss, Esther E.Human papillomaviruses (HPVs) are small double-stranded DNA viruses responsible for a significant burden of disease, including cervical, oropharyngeal and other anogenital cancers. The initiation of HPV DNA replication depends on the cooperative function of the viral E1 helicase and the E2 initiation protein. E1 assembles as a hexameric helicase that unwinds the viral genome, while E2 facilitates E1 recruitment to the replication origin and modulates its enzymatic functions. In this study, full-length HPV16 E1 helicase was successfully expressed and purified to homogeneity. Biochemical analyses confirmed that the purified protein forms oligomeric complexes consistent with its helicase function and exhibits ATPase activity that is significantly stimulated in the presence of single-stranded DNA. Helicase assays demonstrated DNA unwinding activity dependent on ATP hydrolysis. ☐ Electrophoretic mobility shift assays revealed that stable E1–E2–DNA complexes require the presence of E2, while the putative E1 binding site within the viral origin is dispensable, for this complex assembly. E2 protein facilitated the E1 recruitment, indicating that E2 plays a primary role in complex assembly. Furthermore, E2 was observed to inhibit both the ATPase and helicase activities of E1, suggesting a regulatory mechanism that controls the origin unwinding. ☐ Quantitative characterization of the E1–E2 interaction was performed using bio-layer interferometry. The binding studies demonstrated that E1 and E2 form a high-affinity complex with nanomolar dissociation constants. The presence of ATP or ADP promoted dissociation of the complex, whereas single-stranded DNA had minimal impact on nucleotide-induced dissociation. Additional experiments showed that critical glutamic acid residues in E2 (E20 and E39) severely impaired E1 binding, confirming their importance in maintaining complex stability. ☐ These findings provide new insights into the mechanistic basis of HPV DNA replication initiation. The work establishes that E2 is both an essential factor for recruiting E1 to the origin and a negative regulator of its enzymatic activities. Moreover, the results highlight the dynamic modulation of E1–E2 interactions by nucleotide cofactors. Together, this study advances the understanding of papillomavirus replication and offers a foundation for future efforts aimed at targeting viral replication processes therapeutically.University of Delaware, Department of Medical and Molecular SciencesPh.D