The silicon nanostructure is a promising candidate for an anode of Li-ion batteries due to its high theoretical capacity. In this work, we have demonstrated the scalable synthesis of Si nanosheets from natural sand by magnesiothermic reduction, and suggested a new formation mechanism for Si nanosheets. In the suggested mechanism, an Mg₂Si intermediate phase was formed at an early stage of the reduction process, which leads to the two-dimensional Si nanostructure. The synthesized Si nanosheets have a leaf-like sheet morphology ranging from several ten to several hundred nanometers, and show comparable electrochemical properties to the commercial Si nanopowder as an anode for lithium ion batteries. For the improved electrochemical performance, Si nanosheets are encapsulated with reduced graphene oxide (RGO), and the RGO-encapsulated Si nanosheet electrode exhibits high-reversible capacity and excellent rate capability.

This paper describes a new hair rendering technique for Anime characters. The overall goal is to improve current cel shaders by introducing a new hair model and hair shader. The hair renderer is based on a painterly rendering algorithm which uses a large amount of particles. The hair model is rendered twice: first for generating the silhouettes and second for shading the hair strands. In addition we also describe a modified technique for specular highlighting. Most of the rendering steps (except the specular highlighting) are performed on the GPU and take advantage of recent graphics hardware. However, since the number of particles determines the quality of the hair shader, a large number of particles is used which reduces the performance accordingly.

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