TY - JOUR AB - Direct ethanol fuel cells (DEFCs) show a huge potential to power future electric vehicles and portable electronics, but their deployment is currently limited by the unavailability of proper electrocatalysis for the ethanol oxidation reaction (EOR). In this work, we engineer a new electrocatalyst by incorporating phosphorous into a palladium-tin alloy and demonstrate a significant performance improvement toward EOR. We first detail a synthetic method to produce Pd2Sn:P nanocrystals that incorporate 35% of phosphorus. These nanoparticles are supported on carbon black and tested for EOR. Pd2Sn:P/C catalysts exhibit mass current densities up to 5.03 A mgPd−1, well above those of Pd2Sn/C, PdP2/C and Pd/C reference catalysts. Furthermore, a twofold lower Tafel slope and a much longer durability are revealed for the Pd2Sn:P/C catalyst compared with Pd/C. The performance improvement is rationalized with the aid of density functional theory (DFT) calculations considering different phosphorous chemical environments. Depending on its oxidation state, surface phosphorus introduces sites with low energy OH− adsorption and/or strongly influences the electronic structure of palladium and tin to facilitate the oxidation of the acetyl to acetic acid, which is considered the EOR rate limiting step. DFT calculations also points out that the durability improvement of Pd2Sn:P/C catalyst is associated to the promotion of OH adsorption that accelerates the oxidation of intermediate poisoning COads, reactivating the catalyst surface. AU - Yu, Xiaoting AU - Liu, Junfeng AU - Li, Junshan AU - Luo, Zhishan AU - Zuo, Yong AU - Xing, Congcong AU - Llorca, Jordi AU - Nasiou, Déspina AU - Arbiol, Jordi AU - Pan, Kai AU - Kleinhanns, Tobias AU - Xie, Ying AU - Cabot, Andreu ID - 8189 IS - 11 JF - Nano Energy SN - 2211-2855 TI - Phosphorous incorporation in Pd2Sn alloys for electrocatalytic ethanol oxidation VL - 77 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Understanding to what extent stem cell potential is a cell-intrinsic property or an emergent behavior coming from global tissue dynamics and geometry is a key outstanding question of systems and stem cell biology. Here, we propose a theory of stem cell dynamics as a stochastic competition for access to a spatially localized niche, giving rise to a stochastic conveyor-belt model. Cell divisions produce a steady cellular stream which advects cells away from the niche, while random rearrangements enable cells away from the niche to be favorably repositioned. Importantly, even when assuming that all cells in a tissue are molecularly equivalent, we predict a common (“universal”) functional dependence of the long-term clonal survival probability on distance from the niche, as well as the emergence of a well-defined number of functional stem cells, dependent only on the rate of random movements vs. mitosis-driven advection. We test the predictions of this theory on datasets of pubertal mammary gland tips and embryonic kidney tips, as well as homeostatic intestinal crypts. Importantly, we find good agreement for the predicted functional dependency of the competition as a function of position, and thus functional stem cell number in each organ. This argues for a key role of positional fluctuations in dictating stem cell number and dynamics, and we discuss the applicability of this theory to other settings. AU - Corominas-Murtra, Bernat AU - Scheele, Colinda L.G.J. AU - Kishi, Kasumi AU - Ellenbroek, Saskia I.J. AU - Simons, Benjamin D. AU - Van Rheenen, Jacco AU - Hannezo, Edouard B ID - 8220 IS - 29 JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America TI - Stem cell lineage survival as a noisy competition for niche access VL - 117 ER - TY - JOUR AB - We investigate a mechanism to transiently stabilize topological phenomena in long-lived quasi-steady states of isolated quantum many-body systems driven at low frequencies. We obtain an analytical bound for the lifetime of the quasi-steady states which is exponentially large in the inverse driving frequency. Within this lifetime, the quasi-steady state is characterized by maximum entropy subject to the constraint of fixed number of particles in the system's Floquet-Bloch bands. In such a state, all the non-universal properties of these bands are washed out, hence only the topological properties persist. AU - Gulden, Tobias AU - Berg, Erez AU - Rudner, Mark Spencer AU - Lindner, Netanel ID - 8199 JF - SciPost Physics SN - 2542-4653 TI - Exponentially long lifetime of universal quasi-steady states in topological Floquet pumps VL - 9 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Dentate gyrus granule cells (GCs) connect the entorhinal cortex to the hippocampal CA3 region, but how they process spatial information remains enigmatic. To examine the role of GCs in spatial coding, we measured excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs) and action potentials (APs) in head-fixed mice running on a linear belt. Intracellular recording from morphologically identified GCs revealed that most cells were active, but activity level varied over a wide range. Whereas only ∼5% of GCs showed spatially tuned spiking, ∼50% received spatially tuned input. Thus, the GC population broadly encodes spatial information, but only a subset relays this information to the CA3 network. Fourier analysis indicated that GCs received conjunctive place-grid-like synaptic input, suggesting code conversion in single neurons. GC firing was correlated with dendritic complexity and intrinsic excitability, but not extrinsic excitatory input or dendritic cable properties. Thus, functional maturation may control input-output transformation and spatial code conversion. AU - Zhang, Xiaomin AU - Schlögl, Alois AU - Jonas, Peter M ID - 8261 IS - 6 JF - Neuron SN - 0896-6273 TI - Selective routing of spatial information flow from input to output in hippocampal granule cells VL - 107 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Modern scientific instruments produce vast amounts of data, which can overwhelm the processing ability of computer systems. Lossy compression of data is an intriguing solution, but comes with its own drawbacks, such as potential signal loss, and the need for careful optimization of the compression ratio. In this work, we focus on a setting where this problem is especially acute: compressive sensing frameworks for interferometry and medical imaging. We ask the following question: can the precision of the data representation be lowered for all inputs, with recovery guarantees and practical performance Our first contribution is a theoretical analysis of the normalized Iterative Hard Thresholding (IHT) algorithm when all input data, meaning both the measurement matrix and the observation vector are quantized aggressively. We present a variant of low precision normalized IHT that, under mild conditions, can still provide recovery guarantees. The second contribution is the application of our quantization framework to radio astronomy and magnetic resonance imaging. We show that lowering the precision of the data can significantly accelerate image recovery. We evaluate our approach on telescope data and samples of brain images using CPU and FPGA implementations achieving up to a 9x speedup with negligible loss of recovery quality. AU - Gurel, Nezihe Merve AU - Kara, Kaan AU - Stojanov, Alen AU - Smith, Tyler AU - Lemmin, Thomas AU - Alistarh, Dan-Adrian AU - Puschel, Markus AU - Zhang, Ce ID - 8268 JF - IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing SN - 1053587X TI - Compressive sensing using iterative hard thresholding with low precision data representation: Theory and applications VL - 68 ER -