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Brix Gaines posted an update 2 days, 8 hours ago
This result provides a new approach for non-invasive blood glucose monitoring based on QCM.Hydrogels have recently garnered tremendous interest due to their potential application in soft electronics, human-machine interfaces, sensors, actuators, and flexible energy storage. Benefiting from their impressive combination of hydrophilicity, metallic conductivity, high aspect ratio morphology, and widely tuneable properties, when two-dimensional (2D) transition metal carbides/nitrides (MXenes) are incorporated into hydrogel systems, they offer exciting and versatile platforms for the design of MXene-based soft materials with tunable application-specific properties. The intriguing and, in some cases, unique properties of MXene hydrogels are governed by complex gel structures and gelation mechanisms, which require in-depth investigation and engineering at the nanoscale. On the other hand, the formulation of MXenes into hydrogels can significantly increase the stability of MXenes, which is often the limiting factor for many MXene-based applications. Moreover, through simple treatments, derivatives of MXene hydrogels, such as aerogels, can be obtained, further expanding their versatility. This tutorial review intends to show the enormous potential of MXene hydrogels in expanding the application range of both hydrogels and MXenes, as well as increasing the performance of MXene-based devices. We elucidate the existing structures of various MXene-containing hydrogel systems along with their gelation mechanisms and the interconnecting driving forces. We then discuss their distinctive properties stemming from the integration of MXenes into hydrogels, which have revealed an enhanced performance, compared to either MXenes or hydrogels alone, in many applications (energy storage/harvesting, biomedicine, catalysis, electromagnetic interference shielding, and sensing).Oxygen migration and spectroscopic properties of coronene (C24) epoxides and persulfurated coronene (PSC) oxides have been investigated by using density functional theory (DFT) and time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT). The rim-oxide is predicted to be more energetically favorable than the oxygen-centered configuration, and the application of an external electric field can accelerate the epoxy migration from the middle to the edge of the molecule. The predicted electronic absorptions and emissions of the C24 epoxides strongly depend on the location of oxygen. In particular, the stable edge-epoxide C24d3 has the largest radiative decay rate (kr) and the smallest non-radiative decay rate (knr), suggesting relatively strong fluorescence emission. On the contrary, absorptions and emissions of the PSC oxides are less changed, compared to those of the pristine PSC. On-the-fly trajectory surface hopping dynamics simulations reveal that the nonadiabatic S1 → S0 decay of the C24 epoxides is triggered by C-O bond stretching, and thus the radiative and nonradiative features depend on the C-O bond strength. The present results indicate that the oxygen diffusion on the basal plane of graphene oxides is easily tuned by the external electric field and their optoelectronic properties show a notable oxygen-site dependence.Si K-edge X-ray absorption spectra (XAS) have been measured experimentally and calculated using time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) to investigate electronic structure in aryl silanes, PhnSiH4-n (n = 0-4). Adding aryl groups to SiH4 splits the Si-H σ-antibonding orbitals into new orbitals with Si-Ph π-bonding (πb) and π-antibonding (π*) character. Greater aryl substitution is reflected by increasingly intense Si 1s → πb and Si 1s → π* transitions, and weaker transitions into the Si-H and Si-C σ* orbitals. These observations are consistent with known trends in the hydride donor ability of aryl silanes, which is driven in part by the composition of the LUMOs and the accessibility of pathways for electron delocalization through aromatic conjugation. Methodology developed for liquid-phase Si K-edge XAS measurements on PhSiH3 and Ph2SiH2 will enable dynamic studies of chemical transformations involving silicon-containing catalysts, intermediates, and substrates.An efficient approach to synthesize heteroaromatic 2-amines from one-pot desulfurization/dehydrogenative cyclization of aryl isothiocyanates with ortho-substituted amines in water was developed. This approach tolerated a wide range of functional groups on the aromatic ring, providing a practical and environment-friendly process to synthesize heteroaromatic 2-amines in moderate to excellent yields. A plausible mechanism was proposed and the role of TBAB and Cu2O in the present strategy was suggested with the help of ESI mass spectrometry.G-quadruplex DNAs (G4s) have been reported to exhibit the DNAzyme activities by binding with some metal complexes and functional organic ligands. However, there is a challenge to develop metalloenzyme-mimic G4-based innate DNAzymes using the complexed metal ions directly serving as the active centers. This will diversify DNAzymes for developing novel devices since G4 structures are more polymorphic than the other DNA foldings. In this work, we found that the lanthanide trivalent cerium ion of Ce3+ can bind to the human telomere G4 (htG4) according to a 1 2 binding mode favorable for creating metalloenzymes-mimic G4 DNAzymes. This Ce3+-G4 entity exhibits a peroxidase activity towards the oxidation of the substrate of 3,3,5,5-tetramethylbenzidine (TMB) by hydrogen peroxide. The 5′ G4 tetrads with the orderly arranged carbonyl oxygen atoms are believed to be the coordination sites for Ce3+ and favor the conversion between Ce3+ and Ce4+. Our work provides an alternative feasibility in developing the G4-based innate DNAzymes for variant applications.Ostwald ripening (OR), one of the major processes of nanoparticle sintering, is critical for the rational design of functional nanomaterials. However, the atomistic mechanism of OR has not been fully understood, because the characterization of interparticle transport of atoms in real-time is challenging by either experiments or theoretical simulations. Thus, current understandings are based on ad hoc assumptions about the OR mechanism, which have never been confirmed yet at the atomic scale. Herein, we realized all-atom kinetic Monte Carlo simulation of sintering of TiO2 supported Au nanoparticles (NPs) through the OR mechanism at millisecond timescales. We demonstrated that the “semi-spherical” assumption should be removed. Paeoniflorin manufacturer The OR process was a stagewise process determined by different rate-determining steps, which is in contrast to the single-stage presumption. Au dimers, rather than monomers as generally assumed, were exchanged among different NPs. Besides, we proposed a new kinetic model for describing the determining rate of OR without presumptions.