As a representative natural polymer with abundant functionalities, humic acid was creatively explored as an anode material for lithium ion batteries and sodium ion batteries with high storage capacities, and satisfactory cycling stabilities. Most impressively, this work provides a promising and effective strategy for developing organic energy storage devices from natural sources.

A novel, ultrafast, mild and scalable amide bond formation strategy in methanol using simple thioacids and amines is described. The mechanism suggests that the coupling reactions are initially mediated by CuSO(4)·5H(2)O and subsequently catalyzed by in situ generated copper sulfide. The pure peptides were isolated in satisfactory yields in less than 5 minutes.

Since the advent of evolution strategies many attempts have been done to improve the mutation operator [7]. The first enhancement could be seen in the introduction of a flexible step size. As a logical consequence later n step sizes, one per variable, were used. Highest flexibility is achieved with the correlated mutation but also quadratic growth of the number of strategy parameters [8]. A new...

In order to reduce the risk of complete failure, research managers often adopt a parallel strategy by simultaneously funding several R&D activities and several research teams within each activity. The parallel strategy requires the allocation of an available budget to a number of R&D activities, the determination of the number of research teams within each activity and the amount of funding the...

The Besley-Coate model of representative democracy has the problem of multiple equilibria (Besley-Coate, 1997). We show that requiring the Besley-Coate political equilibria to be iteratively undominated at the voting stage re nes the set of (pure strategy) political equilibrium outcomes only for those cases where at least four candidates stand for election. This note complements the results of ...

with rapid changes in the business environment, organizations are increasingly looking at human resources as a unique asset that can provide sustained competitive advantage. as much as, people are viewed among the most important resources to firms, hr strategy would be central to achieve competitive advantages .firms should view hr strategy as an important tool for integrating competencies insi...

Background: The key challenge is how to encourage and retain health professionals in their work location. There is a list of policy options for this purpose but applying an appropriate and effective set of strategies requires a country level research. Our study aimed to identify retention strategies for neurosurgeons and examine both the importance and feasibility of the identified strategies u...