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This paper studies the sustainability of plastrons on superhydrophobic (SHPo) surfaces made of longitudinal micro-trenches covered by nano-grass with the main interest on hydrodynamic friction drag reduction in high-speed flows of open water, which represent the operating conditions of common watercraft. After revising the shear-driven drainage model to address the air diffusion for SHPo surfaces, the existing theories are combined to reveal the trends of how the immersion depth, air saturation level and shear stress affect the maximum attainable plastron length. Deviations from the theories by the dynamic effect at the two ends of the trench, the interfacial contaminations and turbulent fluctuation are also discussed. A combinatorial series of well-defined SHPo trench surfaces (4 cm × 7 cm in size with varying trench widths, depths, lengths and roughnesses) is microfabricated and attached underneath a 4 m long motorboat on seawater in turbulent flows up to 7.2 m s −1 (shear rate ∼83 000 s −1 and friction Reynolds number ∼5500). Because the plastron can provide a substantial slip only while its air–water interfaces are pinned (or only slightly depinned) at the trench top, two underwater cameras are employed to differentiate the pinned (and slightly depinned) interfaces from the depinned (and no) interfaces. In additionmore »to achieving pinned plastrons on 6 cm long trenches aligned to high-speed flows in open water, the experimental results corroborate the theoretical estimations, supporting the design of SHPo surfaces for field applications.« less

Modern data-driven research has the power to promote novel biomedical discoveries through secondary analyses of raw data. Therefore, it is important to ensure data-driven research with great reproducibility and robustness for promoting a precise and accurate secondary analysis of the immunogenomics data. In scientific research, rigorous conduct in designing and conducting experiments is needed, specifically in scientific writing and reporting results. It is also crucial to make raw data available, discoverable, and well described or annotated in order to promote future re-analysis of the data. In order to assess the data availability of published T cell receptor (TCR) repertoire data, we examined 11,918 TCR-Seq samples corresponding to 134 TCR-Seq studies ranging from 2006 to 2022. Among the 134 studies, only 38.1% had publicly available raw TCR-Seq data shared in public repositories. We also found a statistically significant association between the presence of data availability statements and the increase in raw data availability ( p = 0.014). Yet, 46.8% of studies with data availability statements failed to share the raw TCR-Seq data. There is a pressing need for the biomedical community to increase awareness of the importance of promoting raw data availability in scientific research and take immediate action to improvemore »its raw data availability enabling cost-effective secondary analysis of existing immunogenomics data by the larger scientific community.« less

Optical transmission and scattering spectroscopic microscopy at the visible and adjacent wavelengths denote one of the most informative and inclusive characterization methods in material research. Unfortunately, restricted by the diffraction limit of light, it cannot resolve the nanoscale variation in light absorption and scattering, diagnostics of the local inhomogeneity in material structure and properties. Moreover, a large quantity of nanomaterials has anisotropic optical properties that are appealing yet hard to characterize through conventional optical methods. There is an increasing demand to extend the optical hyperspectral imaging into the nanometer length scale. In this work, we report a super-resolution hyperspectral imaging technique that uses a nanoscale white light source generated by superfocusing the light from a tungsten-halogen lamp to simultaneously obtain optical transmission and scattering spectroscopic images. A 6-nm spatial resolution in the visible to near-infrared wavelength regime (415–980 nm) is demonstrated on an individual single-walled carbon nanotube (SW-CNT). Both the longitudinal and transverse optical electronic transitions are measured, and the SW-CNT chiral indices can be identified. The band structure modulation in a SW-CNT through strain engineering is mapped.

Abstract Silver nanowires (AgNWs) hold great promise for applications in wearable electronics, flexible solar cells, chemical and biological sensors, photonic/plasmonic circuits, and scanning probe microscopy (SPM) due to their unique plasmonic, mechanical, and electronic properties. However, the lifetime, reliability, and operating conditions of AgNW-based devices are significantly restricted by their poor chemical stability, limiting their commercial potentials. Therefore, it is crucial to create a reliable oxidation barrier on AgNWs that provides long-term chemical stability to various optical, electrical, and mechanical devices while maintaining their high performance. Here we report a room-temperature solution-phase approach to grow an ultra-thin, epitaxial gold coating on AgNWs to effectively shield the Ag surface from environmental oxidation. The Ag@Au core-shell nanowires (Ag@Au NWs) remain stable in air for over six months, under elevated temperature and humidity (80 °C and 100% humidity) for twelve weeks, in physiological buffer solutions for three weeks, and can survive overnight treatment of an oxidative solution (2% H 2 O 2 ). The Ag@Au core-shell NWs demonstrated comparable performance as pristine AgNWs in various electronic, optical, and mechanical devices, such as transparent mesh electrodes, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) substrates, plasmonic waveguides, plasmonic nanofocusing probes, and high-aspect-ratio, high-resolution atomic force microscopy (AFM) probes.more »These Au@Ag core-shell NWs offer a universal solution towards chemically-stable AgNW-based devices without compromising material property or device performance.« less

As far as plastron is sustained, superhydrophobic (SHPo) surfaces are expected to reduce skin-friction drag in any flow conditions including large-scale turbulent boundary-layer flows of marine vessels. However, despite many successful drag reductions reported using laboratory facilities, the plastron on SHPo surfaces was persistently lost in high-Reynolds-number flows on open water, and no reduction has been reported until a recent study using certain microtrench SHPo surfaces underneath a boat (Xu et al., Phys. Rev. Appl. , vol. 13, no. 3, 2020, 034056). Since scientific studies with controlled flows are difficult with a boat on ocean water, in this paper we test similar SHPo surfaces in a high-speed towing tank, which provides well-controlled open-water flows, by developing a novel $0.7\ \textrm {m} \times 1.4\ \textrm {m}$ towing plate, which subjects a $4\ \textrm {cm} \times 7\ \textrm {cm}$ sample to the high-Reynolds-number flows of the plate. In addition to the 7 cm long microtrenches, trenches divided into two in length are also tested and reveal an improvement. The skin-friction drag ratio relative to a smooth surface is found to be decreasing with increasing Reynolds number, down to 73 % (i.e. 27 % drag reduction) at $Re_x\sim 8\times 10^6$ , before starting to increasemore »at higher speeds. For a given gas fraction, the trench width non-dimensionalized to the viscous length scale is found to govern the drag reduction, in agreement with previous numerical results.« less