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Food adulteration presents a significant challenge due to the evasion of legal oversight and the difficulty of identification. Addressing this issue, there is an urgent need for on-site, rapid, visually based small-scale equipment, along with large-scale screening technology, to enable prompt results without providing opportunities for dishonest traders to react. Colorimetric reactions offer advantages in terms of speed, visualization, and miniaturization. However, there is a scarcity of suitable colorimetric reactions for food adulteration detection, and interference from colored food impurities and easily comparable color results affects accuracy. To overcome limitations, this study introduces a novel approach utilizing polydopamine magnetic nanoparticles to enrich DNA in food samples, effectively eliminating interfering components. By employing gold nanoparticles to generate magnetic-gold nanoparticles, a single magnetic bead achieves simultaneous enrichment, impurity removal, and detection. The use of paper-based biosensors and visualization equipment allows for the visualization and digital analysis of results, achieving a low detection limit of 4.59 nmol mL -1 . The method also exhibits high accuracy and repeatability, with a RSD ranging from 1.6 % to 4.0 %. This innovative colorimetric method addresses the need for rapid, miniaturized, and large-scale detection, thus providing a solution for food adulteration challenges., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The author declare that there are no conflicts of interest associated with this manuscript. This research was conducted with utmost integrity and impartiality, adhering to the highest ethical standards. We have no financial or personal relationships that could inappropriately influence the content or interpretation of this work., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

In this work, a sustainable 3D carbon aerogel (AO-WPC) is prepared from waste paper (WP), and used for efficient antibiotics removal from water. The AO-WPC aerogel shows good mechanical property and can recover after 100th of 30 % compression strain. The specific surface area of AO-WPC aerogel is up to 654.58 m 2 /g. More importantly, this aerogel reveals proper pore size distribution, including micro sized macropores between carbon fibers and intrinsic nano scale mesopores (11.86 nm), which is conducive to remove antibiotics from water. Taking tetracycline (Tc) as an example, the maximum adsorption capacity and adsorption rate of AO-WPC for Tc are as high as 384.6 mg/g and 0.510 g/(mg‧min), respectively, which exhibits significant advantages over most of the recent absorbents, and the adsorption toward Tc reveals good resistance to various environmental factors, including pH, various ions, and dissolved organic matter (DOM). Moreover, good thermal stability enables the AO-WPC aerogel to be regenerated through simple burning, and the adsorption capacity of Tc only decreases by 10.4 % after 10 cycles. Mechanism research shows that hydrogen bonding and π-π electron-donor-acceptor (EDA) interaction play the important role in the adsorption. The excellent mechanical property and adsorption performance imply good practical prospect of the AO-WPC aerogel., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest We declare no conflict of interest. This manuscript has not been published or presented elsewhere in part or in entirety, and is not under consideration by another journal. There are no conflicts of interest to declare. All authors have contributed to, read, and approved this submitted manuscript in its current form., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The contamination of paper products by various chemicals has been reported on a global level, but to date, no published research has investigated pharmaceutical contamination of paper-based products. In this study, pharmaceutical analysis was conducted on 42 samples collected from various points of the recycled paper value chain in Cape Town, South Africa, which included the various grades that may be included in the manufacturing of recycled paperboard. The analysis was achieved by ultrasonic-assisted extraction of paper samples before detection by UHPLC-Q Orbitrap. Quantification limits ranged from 1.15 pg/g for ketoprofen to 46.07 pg/g for methocarbamol. Pharmaceuticals identified in newspaper samples were dexamethasone, ketoprofen, and 17β-estradiol. The latter was also detected in paper shopping bags (up to 697.49 ng/g), infant bathtub packaging (280.62 ng/g), battery packaging (137.43 ng/g), and an egg carton (170.47 ng/g). Carbamazepine was also prominent with its concentration reaching 13.02 ng/g in a vegetable box. Suspect screening tentatively identified 14 additional pharmaceuticals in paper samples, with minocycline, prazepam, and anabolic steroids appearing more prominently. This pioneering study indicated that unintentional pharmaceutical exposure had expanded beyond environmental media to consumer products., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Nondumiso Mofokeng reports funding was provided by Mpact Operations Pty (Ltd). All other authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Cu2+ contamination and food spoilage raise food and drinking water safety issues, posing a serious threat to human health. Besides, Cu2+ and H 2 S levels indicate excess Cu2+-caused diseases and protein-containing food spoilage. Herein, a coumarin-containing bifunctional paper-based fluorescent platform integrated with a straightforward smartphone color recognition app is developed by an all-in-one strategy. The proposed fluorescent materials can simultaneously detect Cu2+ and H 2 S for on-demand food and drinking water safety monitoring at home. Specifically, a coumarin-derived fluorescence sensor (referred to as CMIA) with a low detection limit (0.430 μM) and high-selectivity/-sensitivity for Cu2+ is synthesized through a simple one-step route and then loaded onto commercially used cellulose fiber filter paper to engineer a biomass-based fluorescent material (CMIA-FP). The CMIA-FP offers user-friendly, high-precision, fast-responsive, and real-time visual monitoring of Cu2+. Moreover, CMIA forms a chemically stable complex with Cu2+, loaded onto filter paper to prepare another biomass-based fluorescent platform (CMIA-CU-FP) for visual real-time monitoring of H 2 S. Based on the exquisite composition design, the proposed dual-function paper-based fluorescent materials equipped with a smartphone color recognition program concurrently realize fast, accurate, and easy real-time monitoring of Cu2+ in drinking water and H 2 S in chicken breast-/shrimp-spoilage, demonstrating an effective detection strategy for the Cu2+ and H 2 S monitoring and presenting the new type of biomass-based platforms for concentrated reflection of drinking water and food safety. [Display omitted] • On-demand platform enabling simultaneously home-detecting Cu2+/H 2 S was proposed. • The platform realizes user-friendly, low-cost, fast-response detecting of Cu2+/H 2 S. • The platform achieves real-time monitoring of drinking-water and meat-storage safety. • The study provides effective tactics for the integrated Cu2+ and H 2 S home-detecting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]