Incorporation of pseudocapacitive materials into porous carbon is a promising strategy to boost electrochemical performance. Herein, composite of biomass-derived porous carbon and MnO2 (a typical pseudocapacitive material) was facilely fabricated through an in-situ synthesis approach with sorghum seeds derived porous carbon (SSC) as the skeleton for MnO2 deposition. The as-prepared composite ( MnO2@SSC) exhibits hierarchical porous structure with abundant interlaced MnO2 nanowires wrapping on the surface. While the porous structure is beneficial to the active sites exposure and electrolyte ions transport, the interlaced three-dimensional (3D) network of MnO2 nanowires significantly boosts the tolerance toward volume shrinkage/expansion during the cyclic process. Consequently, the MnO2@ SSC-based electrode delivered quite promising supercapacitive performance including superior specific capacitance of 482.7 F/g at 0.5 A/g, outstanding long-term cycling stability (95.8% specific capacitance retention after 20,000 cycles) and high energy density of 13.7 Wh/kg at power density of 298.1 W/kg. Furthermore, all-solid-state flexible supercapacitor based on MnO2@ SSC can be facilely bent to various angles (0° to 150°) without significant degradation in the capacitive performance. This study provides a facile, cost-effective, and sustainable approach for the fabrication of high-performance electrode materials.

The structure and composition of coal tar pitch are critical in the production of superior needle coke. We used high-temperature refined coal tar pitch (HRCTP) to modify medium–low-temperature refined coal tar pitch (MLRCTP) for needle coke preparation. Various characterization techniques were applied to evaluate the effects of the HRCTP addition on the MLRCTP's structure and composition, and to investigate the microstructural and crystallographic differences in needle coke from different feedstocks. We identified the optimal HRCTP addition level and assessed how carbonization reaction conditions influenced needle coke quality. The findings indicated that HRCTP addition increased the aromatic hydrocarbons content while reducing the heterocyclic compounds and excess alkanes, leading to enhanced structure and composition, which supported the structured development of carbon-based structures during the thermal polycondensation process. Notably, higher HRCTP amounts did not equate to better outcomes. With a 25% HRCTP additive level, the needle coke’s microstructure showed a highly ordered fibrous texture with optimal orientation, the greatest degree of graphitization, and a mature graphite crystal content of 24.84%. Further optimization of the carbonization process demonstrated that very high temperatures might cause the formation of numerous mosaic structures due to disordered radical cross-linking. Properly reducing pressure at high temperatures could promote adequate directional airflow and apply shear force during orderly stacking of the mesophase, thus enhancing the carbon lamellae’s streamline and orientation. Following the carbonization process optimization, the mature graphite crystal content in the needle coke increased from 24.84% to 39.87%.

Introduction How to evaluate quality of advertising? Previous behavioral studies have mainly focused on subjective reports of survey and interview containing social and cognitive bias, or objective data of sell changes suffering huge temporal and monetary cost. Recently, increasing researchers have proposed that techniques of neuro-imaging could provide an objective and effective way to examine cognitive neural mechanisms underlying consumer behavior (referred to as consumer neuroscience) (Karmarkar & Yoon, 2016), and several studies have measured consumer's brain responses to advertising and movie trailer in both single- and two-brain frames (Barnett & Cerf, 2017; Venkatraman et al., 2015). However, still little is known about cognitive neural mechanisms underlying comprehension of advertising. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a non-invasive technique of brain-imaging measuring changes in the hemodynamic properties of human brain. Compared with fMRI and EEG, fNIRS is portable, has few physical constraints on participants with reasonable spatial and temporal resolution, and is tolerant to electromagnetic noise and motion artifact. Therefore, fNIRS is a suitable tool for research of human behavior in daily-life contexts (Liu et al., in press), which is a trends in neuroimaging (Hasson & Honey, 2012) and consumer neuroscience as weill. Methods To examine the neural responses to different quality of advertisings, in the present study we measured 14 undergraduate students' frontal activations while watching 20 advertisings in Study 1 and listening 30 music demos in Study 2 using a portable fNIRS device, and analyzed interpersonal neural network across all participants based on graph theory. Figure 1 shows positions of the fNIRS channels. Positions of the fNIRS channels were measured by a 3D magnetic digitizer. In a pilot study, another group of participants were recruited to score 30 advertisings from three dimensions: degree of liking, degree of willing to pay (WTP), and degree of understanding, and finally top-10 and bottom-10 scored adverting were remained for the final experiment in Study 1. Concerning the music demos used in Study 2, we selected the top-15 and bottow-15 ranking music in the ‘Billboard 2014 hot 100’. During the experiment, participants were asked to score their degree of liking and WTP to the advertising or the music immediately after each stimulus was displayed. After the experiment, they were also instructed to score and report their understanding on each advertising or music. Results and Discussion In Study 1, the intra-brain activations revealed higher medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) activation when participants watched low-scored advertisings than watched high-scored ones (Fig. 2), and the mPFC activations showed a positive relationship with participants’ understanding on the meaning of the advertisings. This result only suggests that low-scored advertisings were relatively hard for participants to understand the intentions of the adverting, requiring more cognitive resources of mentalizing (Lieberman, 2007). Importantly, when we considered all participants' brains as a network, and then calculated the interpersonal neural connectivity (INS) across the network (defined as the number of participant pairs who showed significant positive inter-brain neural synchronization across them indicating shared understanding) (Hasson et al., 2012), only the network connectivity in the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) had significantly positive relationships with participants' scores of attitude towards the advertisings (defined as mean of the scores of liking and WTP) (Fig. 3). Study 2 confirmed the result showing significantly positive relationship between the network connectivity across all participants' brains and their scores of attitude towards the song demos. More importantly, the network connectivity in the right IFG of the small group of participants also significantly predicted the public's attitude towards the songs assessed by the rating scores on Douban website (Fig. 4). Conclusion The right IFG is a core area of mirror neuron system and is closely associated with empathy (Lamm et al., 2007). Thus, the present results suggest that high-scored advertisings may activate consumer's empathic response to simulate and experience their contents and intentions. And the network connectivity across consumers' brains in the right IFG may be a critical index evaluating quality of experiential advertisings. Practically, advertising should invite consumers to experience their products, and then could convey information and emotion more effectively.

Four shear-deficient reinforced concrete (RC) beam specimens with different shear span ratios were tested using a well-instrumented drop-weight impact machine to gain a better understanding of the effect of shear span ratio on impact behavior of RC beams strengthened with carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP). The results demonstrated that the shear span ratio could change the failure modes for strengthened specimens and also affect the impact resistance.

This study is focused on three-dimensional nonlinear finite element analysis of reinforced concrete (RC) beams strengthened with carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) strips under impact loading. The validity of the model was assessed through the comparison with experimental results obtained from drop-weight impact tests of the authors. The well agreement proves the feasibility of the proposed numerical analysis method.