Hoffmannvoigt6716

Based on the coordination of the smectic assembly and PEO aggregation, the charge transport in the liquid crystal gel electrolyte was greatly improved despite a higher viscosity. Conversely, the photovoltaic efficiency of the DSSC prepared from the liquid crystal gel electrolyte was about two times enhanced, with a champion efficiency of 7.2%, compared with that from the smectic electrolyte without PEO. The liquid crystal gel-based DSSC showed superior stable performance within a wide temperature range from 30 to 70 °C, and stored after 5000 h. Our work here provides a novel and convenient approach to break the trade-off for high-performance electrolytes towards efficient and stable energy devices.Paper based thermoresistive sensors are fabricated by rubbing WS2 powder against a piece of standard copier paper, like the way a pencil is used to write on paper. The abrasion between the layered material and the rough paper surface erodes the material, breaking the weak van der Waals interlayer bonds, yielding a film of interconnected platelets. The resistance of WS2 presents a strong temperature dependence, as expected for a semiconductor material in which charge transport is due to thermally activated carriers. This strong temperature dependence makes the paper supported WS2 devices extremely sensitive to small changes in temperature. This exquisite thermal sensitivity, and their fast response times to sudden temperature changes, is exploited thereby demonstrating the usability of a WS2-on-paper thermal sensor in a respiration monitoring device.Flexible energy storage devices with ultrahigh areal capacity and excellent cycling stability are highly desired for portable and wearable electronics. Bimetal hydroxides with low crystallinity are preferred as electrode materials due to their advantageous features of high electrochemical performance, rapid ion diffusion and high structure stability enabled by lattice disorder. Herein, holey NiMn-hydroxide (NiMn-OH) nanosheets with abundant lattice disorder induced by Jahn-Teller distortion are grown vertically on carbon cloth and their loading level reaches as high as 3.27 mg cm-2. The obtained NiMn-OH nanosheets demonstrate a superior capacity of 881 μAh cm-2 at 3 mA cm-2 and outstanding rate capability (66.4% capacity retained at 30 mA cm-2). The flexible all-solid hybrid device (NiMn-OH//Fe2O3) delivers a high energy density of 573.8 μW h cm-2 at a power density of 2.4 mW cm-2 and more importantly exhibits good cycling stability with 90.1% retained after 10 000 cycles and mechanical robustness. This proof-of-principle investigation is opening up a viable way to develop high performance electrodes for flexible energy storage devices.Non-photochemical degradation of perfluorinated photochromic diarylethenes (DAE) under Knoevenagel, Sonogashira or Wittig conditions was discovered. This base promoted formation of strongly colored non-photochromic byproducts has an impact in the field of molecular electronics due to the basic conditions often employed during deacylation and desilylation of the protected thiol anchoring groups of functionalized DAE. The products were identified as seven-membered ring systems of the bicyclo[5.3.0]deca-1,7-diene type. Their formation was rationalized by a tentative two-step reaction mechanism.Earth-abundant transition-metal selenides (TMSs) have aroused great interest towards their application in sodium-ion batteries (SIBs). Herein, we present Fe-based Prussian blue analogs (PBA) modified by graphene oxide as precursors to synthesize FeSe2 nanoparticles within a nitrogen-doped carbon (NC) matrix and graphene layer (FeSe2/NC@G). The bifunctional carbon wrapped FeSe2/NC@G shows excellent sodium-storage performance with a large reversible capacity of 331 mA h g-1 at 5.0 A g-1 and a high cyclability of 323 mA h g-1 at the current density of 2.0 A g-1 after 1000 cycles (82% capacity retention). Furthermore, Raltitrexed in vivo are also fabricated and exhibit superior capacities and stabilities. The remarkable electrochemical properties result from the formation of an Fe-O-C chemical bond in the composite with enhanced electronic/ionic diffusion kinetics and structural integrity. #link# This study paves the way for the successful synthesis of novel nanostructural TMSs which can be utilized in energy storage system application.Identifying the intrinsic electrocatalytic activity of an individual nanoparticle is challenging as traditional ensemble measurements only provide average activity over a large number of nanoparticles and may be greatly affected by the ensemble properties, irrelevant to the nanoparticle itself. Here, single-particle collision electrochemistry is used to investigate the electrocatalytic activity of a single IrOx nanoparticle towards the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). The collision frequency is linearly proportional to the nanoparticle concentration. The mean peak current and transferred charge, extracted from current spikes of the collision, present a similar potential dependence relevant to IrOx intrinsic activity. The turnover frequency (TOF) is determined as 1.55 × 102 O2 s-1, which is orders of magnitude larger than TOFs of the reported ensemble systems. In addition, the deactivation of a single IrOx nanoparticle is also explored based on a half-width analysis of current spikes. This versatilely applicable method provides new insights into the intrinsic performance of a single nanoparticle, which is essential to reveal the structure-activity relations of nanoscale materials for the rational design of advanced catalysts.Inspired by the slight acidic microenvironment, a variety of pH-responsive nanomaterials are designed for highly effective antibacterial therapy by improving the ability of drug penetration and retention to enhance the therapeutic efficacy of phototherapy or control surface adhesion. This review summarizes the common pH-responsive modes and highlights the recent and potential applications of pH-responsive nanomaterials in anti-infective therapy. link2 Finally, the challenges and prospects of pH-responsive nanomaterials in clinical transformation are discussed.Heat-induced aggregation and gelation in lentil protein isolate (LPI) were studied over pH levels (pH 2-9), protein concentration (1-13%, w/w), and heating time (0.5-16 h). The LPI gels were formed from both fibrillar and particulate aggregates at pH 2 and 7, respectively. The gels formed from fibrillar aggregates at pH 2 were translucent and showed homogeneous and highly interconnected networks. While lentil protein showed weak gelling capacity, the gels prepared from LPI aggregates possessed good mechanical properties, and the optimized gel demonstrated a compressive strength of 2.37 kPa and a water holding capacity of 80.62%. The gelling mechanism study suggests that the high aspect ratio allowed fibrillar aggregates to build a higher level of structures with positive characteristics along with other attractive interactions including hydrophobic interactions and disulfide bonds to build strong gels. Therefore, this research has developed a new strategy to prepare improved lentil protein gels for food texturization from LPI fibrillar aggregates.Bioluminescence is a powerful imaging modality for monitoring biological phenomena both in vitro and in vivo. Bioluminescence imagin (BLI) is becoming a seamless imaging technology covering the range from cells to organs of small animals. Long-term imaging at the single cell level would lead to a true understanding of the dynamics of life phenomena. This work presents a long-term single cell bioluminescence imaging technology accomplished with C-3 position protected furimazines (FMZs), a CTZ analogues, which generate intense blue emission when paired with a highly stable engineered luciferase, Nanoluc. Four types of FMZs protected at the C-3 position have been synthesized. The type and steric bulkiness of the protection group strongly contributed to storage stability and the kinetics of the bioluminescence reactions of the analogues in human living cells. In particular, two developed FMZ analogues resulted in significantly longer bioluminescence emission with higher S/N ratio than FMZ at single cell level. Long-term bioluminescence single cell imaging technology with the developed FMZ analogues will lead to seamless imaging in the range from cells to organs of small animals.The syntheses of two platinum(ii) dithiocarbamate complexes (1 and 2) that show quinoplatin- and phenanthriplatin-type axial protection of the Pt-plane are described. The Pt-plane of complex 2 is axially more protected than that of complex 1. Furthermore, both complexes adopt two different stereochemical conformations in the solid state (based on single-crystal X-ray structures) owing to the structurally flexible piperazine backbone; i.e., C-e,e-Anti (1) and C-e,a-Syn (2), where "C" stands for the chair configuration, "e" and "a" stand for the equatorial and axial positions and "Anti" (opposite side) and "Syn" (same side) represent the relative orientations in space of the terminal substituents on the piperazine ring. In complex 2, the C-e,a-Syn conformation may provide additional steric hindrance to the Pt-plane. Despite the lower lipophilicity of 2 as compared to that of 1, the in vitro anticancer action against selected cancer cell lines is better for the former revealing the superior role of the axial protection over lipophilicity in modulating anticancer activity. The activity against the cancer promoting protein NF-κB signifies that the mode of cancer cell death may be the result of hindering the activity of NF-κB in the initiation of apoptosis. The apoptotic mode of cell death has been established earlier in a study using Annexin V-FITC. link3 Finally, DNA binding studies revealed that the complex-DNA adduct formation is spontaneous and the mode of interaction is non-intercalative (electrostatic/covalent).Rechargeable magnesium batteries (RMBs) have been regarded as one of the most promising competitors for energy storage systems owing to their high volumetric density (3800 W h cm-3), earth abundance and safe metallic Mg anode. However, up till now, only a few cathode materials and suitable electrolytes could be used for RMBs, which has hindered the applications for rechargeable magnesium batteries. In this study, erythrocyte-like CuS nanosheet assemblies were prepared via a hydrothermal process and applied to RMBs with Mg2+ and Mg2+/Li+ complex electrolytes. Erythrocyte-like CuS|Mg2+, Li+|Mg secondary batteries provide a stabilized capacity of 250 mA h g-1 without the activation process and excellent cycling stability over 500 cycles, which is superior to that in pure Mg2+ electrolytes. Further, the reaction mechanism and kinetic analysis revealed that the addition of lithium salts could not only enhance the electrochemical performance but also effectively avoid the activation process. Considering the outstanding electrochemical performance of CuS in the Mg2+/Li+ complex electrolyte, our study provides a new strategy for designing electrode structures and electrolyte composition for rechargeable magnesium batteries.Flat sheets encoded with patterns of contraction/elongation morph into curved surfaces. If the surfaces bear Gauss curvature, the resulting actuation can be strong and powerful. We deploy the Gauss-Bonnet theorem to deduce the Gauss curvature encoded in a pattern of uniform-magnitude contraction/elongation with spatially varying direction, as is commonly implemented in patterned liquid crystal elastomers. This approach reveals two fundamentally distinct contributions a structural curvature which depends on the precise form of the pattern, and a topological curvature generated by defects in the contractile direction. These curvatures grow as different functions of the contraction/elongation magnitude, explaining the apparent contradiction between previous calculations for simple +1 defects, and smooth defect-free patterns. We verify these structural and topological contributions by conducting numerical shell calculations on sheets encoded with simple higher-order contractile defects to reveal their activated morphology.