0125), and significant relationships for hearing aid benefit were absent with only few exceptions. Hearing aid benefit defined by global APHAB using NU-6 and SPIN scores showed significant but weak positive correlations (r = 0.37, p less then 0.001; r = 0.28, p = 0.005, respectively) and ease of communication APHAB subscale scores (r = 0.32, p less then 0.001; r = 0.33, p = 0.001, respectively). CONCLUSION Hearing aid benefit assessed with audiologic measures were poor predictors of patient-reported benefit. Thus, patient-reported outcomes may provide a unique assessment of patient-perceived benefit from hearing aids, which can be used to direct hearing aid programming, training, or recommendations of alternative hearing services. © 2020 S. Karger AG, Basel.In this study, a transparent particle-free reactive silver ink was used to fabricate conductive patterns on flexible substrate. Thermal annealing and plasma irradiation at low temperature were utilized to improve the conductivity of as-printed patterns. The effects of sintering process parameters on the microstructure and resistivity of patterns were investigated. Under the optimized process conditions, the resistivity of pattern reached 1.2 ×10 -7 Ω · m by thermal sintering, while it was 8 ×10 -8 Ω · m after plasma sintering. Combined with these two sintering techniques, the resistivity was reduced to 6 × 10 -8 Ω · m, close to that of bulk silver. This work provides an alternative solution for fabricating of highly conductive feature patterns on common flexible substrates. © 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd.The poor conductivity of sulfur and the “shuttle effect” of polysulfide intermediates have hindered the development of next generation lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries with high energy and low consumption. Herein, novel Co9S8-S composite nanotubes are developed to efficiently alleviate above-mentioned problems. Copanlisib Experiments and theoretical calculations show that Co9S8 has strong adsorption on soluble polysulfides. This can not only restrain polysulfides diffusion and ensure their utilization, but also enhance the intimate contact between the active materials and the conductive substrates to promote the kinetics of conversion reaction. The three-dimensional (3D) conductive network with high surface area formed by interlinking Co9S8 nanotubes further improves the electronic conductivity of the composite cathode. As a result, the Co9S8-S cathode shows a high capacity of 1153 mAh g-1. After 500 cycles, it shows a high capacity of 462 mAh g-1 (2 C) with a negligible capacity decay of ~0.04% per cycle. © 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd.Hierarchical actuators are comprised of multiple individual actuator elements arranged into a system, resulting in improved and expanded performance. Natural muscle tissue is a complex and multi-level example of hierarchical actuation, with its hierarchy spanning from the micrometer to the centimeter scale. In addition to a hierarchical configuration, muscle tissue exists in varying geometric arrangements. Pennate muscle tissue, denoted by its characteristic fibers extending obliquely away from the muscle tissue line of action, leverages geometric complexity to transform the relationship between fiber inputs and muscle tissue outputs. In this paper, a bioinspired hierarchical pennate actuator is detailed. This work expands on previous pennate actuator studies by deriving constitutive force, contraction, and stiffness models for a general pennate actuator, where the constituent fibers can be constructed from any linear actuator. These models are experimentally validated by studying a pennate actuator with McKibben artificial muscles constituting the actuator fibers. McKibben artificial muscles are used because they have a high force-to-weight ratio and are inexpensive to construct, making them an attractive candidate for hierarchical actuators and mobile robotics. Using the derived constitutive models, general pennate actuator performance is better understood by analyzing the transmission ratio, blocked force, and free contraction. Loaded contractions and stiffness during isotonic and isobaric contractions are also explored. The results allow for informed design decisions and an understanding of the associated tradeoffs when recreating the remarkable properties of pennate musculature. Future work will leverage the results of this paper to create an adaptive pennate actuator that is capable of changing configuration in response to force, contraction, and stiffness demands. © 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd.Controlling sub-microsecond desorption of water and other impurities from electrode surfaces at high heating rates is crucial for pulsed power applications. Despite the short time scales involved, quasi-equilibrium ideas based on transition state theory (TST) and Arrhenius temperature dependence have been widely applied to fit desorption barriers. In this work, we apply molecular dynamics (MD) simulations in conjunction with equilibrium potential-of-mean-force (PMF) techniques to directly compute the free energy barrier (Delta G*) associated with desorption of intact water molecules from Fe(2)O(3) and Cr(2)O(3) (0001) surfaces. The desorption free energy profiles are diffuse, without maxima, and have substantial dependences on temperature and surface water coverage. Incorporating the predicted Delta G* into an analytical form gives rate equations that are in reasonable agreement with non-equilibrium molecular dynamics desorption simulations. We also show that different Delta G* analytical functional forms which give similar predictions at a particular heating rate can yield desorption times that differ by up to a factor of four or more when the ramp rate is extrapolated by 8 orders of magnitude. This highlights the importance of constructing a physically-motivated Delta G* functional form to predict fast desorption kinetics. © 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd.Single-layer FeSe films grown on SrTiO3, with the highest superconducting transition temperature (TC) among all the iron-based superconductors, serves as an ideal platform for studying the microscopic mechanisms of high-TCsuperconductivity. The significant role of interfacial coupling has been widely recognized, while the precise nature of theTCenhancement remains open. In this review, we focus on the investigations of the interfacial coupling in FeSe/SrTiO3from the perspective of electron-phonon coupling (EPC). The main content will include an overview of the experimental measurements associated with different theoretical models and arguments about the EPC. Especially, besides the discussions of EPC based on the measurements of electronic states, we will emphasize the analyses based on phonon measurements. A uniform picture about the nature of the EPC and its relation to theTCenhancement in FeSe/SrTiO3has still not achieved, which should be the key for further studies aiming to the in-depth understanding of high-TCsuperconductivity and the discovery of new superconductors with even enhancedTC.