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It is still an enormous challenge to regulate microstructure of pure carbonaceous electromagnetic (EM) wave absorbents in order to gain superior wideband microwave absorption (MA) with environmentally adaptive ability. Herein, the novel pure cellulose-derived graphite carbon materials (CGC) with abundant defects were fabricated via the self-assembly strategy combined with simple carbonization for the first time. The EM and MA performance of as-prepared CGC with different carbonization temperatures were studied in detail. The minimum reflection loss of CGC was up to −46.2 dB (over 99.99% MA) at only 1.42 mm, and the maximum effective absorption bandwidth (EABmax, RL

Parkinson’s disease resultant in the degeneration of Dopaminergic neurons and accumulation of α-synuclein in the substantia nigra pars compacta. The synthetic therapeutics for Parkinson’s disease have moderate symptomatic benefits but cannot prevent or delay disease progression. In this study, nicotine was employed by using transgenic Caenorhabditis elegans Parkinson’s disease models to minimize the Parkinson’s disease symptoms. The results showed that the nicotine at 100, 150, and 200 μM doses reduced degeneration of Dopaminergic neurons caused by 6-hydroxydopamine (14, 33, and 40%), lowered the aggregative toxicity of α-synuclein by 53, 56, and 78%, respectively. The reduction in food-sensing behavioral disabilities of BZ555 was observed to be 18, 49, and 86%, respectively, with nicotine concentrations of 100 μM, 150 μM, and 200 μM. Additionally, nicotine was found to enhance Daf-16 nuclear translocation by 14, 31, and 49%, and dose-dependently increased SOD-3 expression by 10, 19, and 23%. In summary, the nicotine might a promising therapy option for Parkinson’s disease.

Abstract Bentonite is a key material for engineering barriers to prevent groundwater and nuclide migration in the multi-barrier system of high-level radioactive waste (HLW) geological disposal. However, its barrier property will be degraded under the action of iron corrosion products of steel disposal containers. In this paper, the effects of iron corrosion products on the degradation of bentonite structure and properties were investigated in the simulated environments for HLW geological disposal. The results showed that Fe2+/Fe3+ dissolved from iron powder could enter montmorillonite (Mt) interlayer and substituted part of Na+, which caused the decrease of the volume and interlayer spacing of Mt, and the structural integrity of Mt was destroyed. Macroscopically, the water absorption and swelling property of bentonite were significantly decreased. The degradation mechanism of Mt structure was mainly that Fe2+/Fe3+ generated by iron corrosion entered the interlayer domain of Mt to compensate for the interlayer charge deficit.

This work developed a simple and mild strategy for controllable synthesis of highly and homogeneously distributed TiO2 nanoparticles on a cellulose template via tuning the cellulose crystallinity. As the crystallinity of cellulose increases, the restriction from crystallinity on nanoparticles increases, leading to homogeneous distribution, a decrease in size, and structural changes of TiO2 from crystalline to amorphous. The carboxyl groups grafted on the periodically arranged hydroxyl groups of crystalline cellulose, which act as anchor sites for metal oxide precursor, restrict the distribution, growth and crystallization of TiO2 nanoparticles. The amorphous TiO2 nanoparticles on the cellulose with the highest degree of crystallinity (72.40 %) give the highest adsorption capacity toward tetracycline hydrochloride (152.89 mg/g), which is the state of art among the supported TiO2. The high adsorption capacity is proposed to be the oxygen defects caused by the Ti3+ species, originating from the amorphous TiO2 nanoparticles.

The development of affordable and compact noninvasive point-of-care (POC) dopamine biosensors for the next generation is currently a major and challenging problem. In this context, a highly sensitive, selective, and low-cost sensing probe is developed by a simple one-step laser-scribing process of plastic waste. A flexible POC device is developed as a prototype and shows a highly specific response to dopamine in the real sample (urine) as low as 100 pmol/L in a broad linear range of 10−10–10−4 mol/L. The 3D topological feature, carrier kinetics, and surface chemistry are found to improve with the formation of high-density metal-embedded graphene-foam composite driven by laser irradiation on the plastic-waste surface. The development of various kinds of flexible and tunable biosensors by plastic waste is now possible thanks to the success of this simple, but effective, laser-scribing technique, which is capable of modifying the matrix’s electronic and chemical composition.