Energy shortages and greenhouse effects are two unavoidable problems that need to be solved. Photocatalytically converting CO2 into a series of valuable chemicals is considered to be an effective ...means of solving the above dilemmas. Among these photocatalysts, the utilization of black phosphorus for CO2 photocatalytic reduction deserves a lightspot not only for its excellent catalytic activity through different reaction routes, but also on account of the great preponderance of this relatively cheap catalyst. Herein, this review offers a summary of the recent advances in synthesis, structure, properties, and application for CO2 photocatalytic reduction. In detail, the review starts from the basic principle of CO2 photocatalytic reduction. In the following section, the synthesis, structure, and properties, as well as CO2 photocatalytic reduction process of black phosphorus‐based photocatalyst are discussed. In addition, some possible influencing factors and reaction mechanism are also summarized. Finally, a summary and the possible future perspectives of black phosphorus‐based photocatalyst for CO2 reduction are established.
Black phosphorus has been a hotspot in the field of photocatalytic CO2 reduction due to its distinctive potential advantages. This review summarizes recent synthesis methods and photocatalytic CO2 reduction applications of black phosphorus, the possible appearing challenges, and some future perspectives of these materials are also discussed. The aim is to provide certain reference to design black phosphorus‐based catalysts.
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•Recent development of g-C3N4-based materials for environmental remediation were comprehensively summarized.•The different synthesis approaches of g-C3N4 and g-C3N4-based materials ...were reviewed.•A variety of pollutant removal methods based on g-C3N4 materials were systematically summarized.•Future insights to give overview on g-C3N4-based materials for remediation of environmental pollutants.
Environmental contaminants have become one kind of the most rigorous environmental issues, and the removal of various environmental contaminant (dyes, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, phenols, metal ions, VOCs, etc.) is of particular concern because they are poisonous and recalcitrant in the environment. In recent years, graphitic carbon nitride obtained more and more attention due to its abundance of raw material, chemical stability, metal-free nature, environmental friendliness, as well as adjustable structure. Hence, this design and application of high efficiency g-C3N4-based functional materials for remediation of representative environmental pollutants is a promising area of research. In view of this, the critical review summarizes the recent advances in the design and preparation of novel g-C3N4-based composites via various methods and the removal efficiencies and related mechanisms via different techniques (adsorption, photocatalysis, electrocatalysis, photoelectrocatalysis, and membrane separation) are also summarized. Furthermore, some perspectives and research direction are briefly discussed. All in all, the g-C3N4-based composites have great advantages environmental remediation in the future.
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•Recent development of hollow photocatalysts for energy production were summarized.•The synthesis methods for hollow photocatalysts are reviewed.•The possible future research ...directions have made some corresponding outlooks.
Hollow nanostructured functional photocatalysts have exhibited great promise for various clean energy production. A great deal of foison has been expended to the design and fabrication of hollow nanostructured photocatalysts with varying compositional and geometric features in the past few years. However, the relevance between their special structure and clean energy production performance has not been adequately reviewed in the literature. Here, some typical examples of designing and fabricating hollow nanostructured photocatalysts to solve the problems of various clean energy production, such as H2 evolution, CO2 reduction, N2 fixation, H2O2 production and fine chemical synthesis are highlighted. The relevant influencing factors between structures engineering and performance are discussed deeply, which makes for better design the hollow nanostructured photocatalysts to meet the needs of particular applications and synchronously enrich the variety of the hollow nanostructured materials. Finally, the possible directions of hollow nanostructured photocatalysts design to deal with the energy crisis and further enhance the performance of clean energy production are also discussed.
Soaring cases of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) are pummeling the global health system. Overwhelmed health facilities have endeavored to mitigate the pandemic, but mortality of COVID-19 continues to ...increase. Here, we present a mortality risk prediction model for COVID-19 (MRPMC) that uses patients' clinical data on admission to stratify patients by mortality risk, which enables prediction of physiological deterioration and death up to 20 days in advance. This ensemble model is built using four machine learning methods including Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, Gradient Boosted Decision Tree, and Neural Network. We validate MRPMC in an internal validation cohort and two external validation cohorts, where it achieves an AUC of 0.9621 (95% CI: 0.9464-0.9778), 0.9760 (0.9613-0.9906), and 0.9246 (0.8763-0.9729), respectively. This model enables expeditious and accurate mortality risk stratification of patients with COVID-19, and potentially facilitates more responsive health systems that are conducive to high risk COVID-19 patients.
Heat is an abundant but often wasted source of energy. Thus, harvesting just a portion of this tremendous amount of energy holds significant promise for a more sustainable society. While traditional ...solid-state inorganic semiconductors have dominated the research stage on thermal-to-electrical energy conversion, carbon-based semiconductors have recently attracted a great deal of attention as potential thermoelectric materials for low-temperature energy harvesting, primarily driven by the high abundance of their atomic elements, ease of processing/manufacturing, and intrinsically low thermal conductivity. This quest for new materials has resulted in the discovery of several new kinds of thermoelectric materials and concepts capable of converting a heat flux into an electrical current by means of various types of particles transporting the electric charge: (i) electrons, (ii) ions, and (iii) redox molecules. This has contributed to expanding the applications envisaged for thermoelectric materials far beyond simple conversion of heat into electricity. This is the motivation behind this review. This work is divided in three sections. In the first section, we present the basic principle of the thermoelectric effects when the particles transporting the electric charge are electrons, ions, and redox molecules and describe the conceptual differences between the three thermodiffusion phenomena. In the second section, we review the efforts made on developing devices exploiting these three effects and give a thorough understanding of what limits their performance. In the third section, we review the state-of-the-art thermoelectric materials investigated so far and provide a comprehensive understanding of what limits charge and energy transport in each of these classes of materials.
The evolution of the society is characterized by an increasing flow of information from things to the internet. Sensors have become the cornerstone of the internet‐of‐everything as they track various ...parameters in the society and send them to the cloud for analysis, forecast, or learning. With the many parameters to sense, sensors are becoming complex and difficult to manufacture. To reduce the complexity of manufacturing, one can instead create advanced functional materials that react to multiple stimuli. To this end, conducting polymer aerogels are promising materials as they combine elasticity and sensitivity to pressure and temperature. However, the challenge is to read independently pressure and temperature output signals without cross‐talk. Here, a strategy to fully decouple temperature and pressure reading in a dual‐parameter sensor based on thermoelectric polymer aerogels is demonstrated. It is found that aerogels made of poly(3,4‐ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) can display properties of semiconductors lying at the transition between insulator and semimetal upon exposure to high boiling point polar solvents, such as dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO). Importantly, because of the temperature‐independent charge transport observed for DMSO‐treated PEDOT‐based aerogel, a decoupled pressure and temperature sensing can be achieved without cross‐talk in the dual‐parameter sensor devices.
A dual‐parameter sensor based on thermoelectric polymer aerogel with fully decoupled temperature and pressure sensing capability is successfully developed and characterized. This is achieved by finely tuning the transport properties of the conducting aerogels with exposure to the vapor of high boiling point polar solvents, such as dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO). Pressure sensitivity is also improved by DMSO treatment.
In this work, we prepared a novel binary heterojunction comprising ZnAl–LDHs and F-modified g-C
3
N
4
(FCN) with a notable 2D/2D configuration via a facile hydrothermal method. The ...visible-light-driven FCN/ZnAl–LDHs (FCN/LDHs) binary heterojunctions exhibited superior increased photocatalytic performance towards the removal of tetracycline (TC, antibiotics) contaminant, which is far better than that observed for pristine FCN and LDHs. Moreover, the addition of F atoms strikingly narrowed the bandgap energy and increased the separation rate of the photogenerated charge carrier of pristine g-C
3
N
4
, further enhancing the degradation efficiency of TC under different environmental conditions. Particularly, the FCN/LDHs binary heterojunctions with the optimized doping contents (30 mg) of FCN exhibited the best photodegradation activity among all the synthesized samples. And it also showed significant stability and reusability according to recycling experiments due to the intimate interfacial contact between FCN and LDHs promoted via their precise 2D/2D arrangement. Results of trapping experiments and band energy analysis obviously illustrate that superoxide radical and hole are the auxiliary active species increasing TC photodegradation, and further, the plausible photocatalytic mechanism for TC degradation over FCN/LDHs are proposed.
•Preparation and characterization of ox-MWCNT-PER was performed.•Aqueous removal of AYR and ARS by ox-MWCNT-PER was investigated.•The adsorption properties of ox-MWCNT-PER for AYR and ARS were ...evaluated.
A contrastive work on the removal of two organic dyes, alizarin yellow R (AYR) and alizarin red S (ARS), was carried out by utilizing pentaerythritol modified multi-walled carbon nanotubes (ox-MWCNT-PER) as a highly efficient adsorbent. Various characterization methods such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) analysis and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), were applied for revealing the physical and chemical properties of the as-prepared material. In addition, the adsorption kinetics, isotherms and thermodynamic parameters were also discussed. The results showed that the time required to achieve the adsorption equilibrium for both dyes was about 30min, and the increase in temperature was not favorable to the adsorption process. It was worth noting that the adsorption capacity of ox-MWCNT-PER towards ARS dye was more significant than that towards AYR dye. And the maximum adsorption capacities for ARS and AYR were 257.73mgg−1 and 45.39mgg−1, respectively. The possible adsorption mechanism was also proposed, and the synergistic effects of the hydrogen bonding and the π–π electron stacking interactions between the adsorbents and adsorbates both contributed to the adsorption. It could be proposed that the ox-MWCNT-PER nanocomposite might have some positive effects in removing organic dyes from water treatment in the future.
In this study, platinum nanochains (PtNCs), multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and graphene nanoparticles (GNPs) were assembled together to form a novel nanocomposite by a facile ...ultrasonic-assisted blending process. The PtNCs-MWCNTs-GNPs nanocomposite was characterized by high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The nanocomposite was used for the modification of glass carbon electrode (GCE) and simultaneous determination of dopamine (DA) and ascorbic acid (AA) by differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) and cycle voltammetry (CV). Under the optimum conditions, the calibration curves obtained are linear for the currents versus DA and AA concentrations over the range 2.00–50.0 μM and 100–1200 μM, respectively. And the detection limits for DA and AA are 0.500 μM and 10.0 μM, respectively. The detection and quantitative analysis of DA and AA in human serum and vitamin C tablets on PtNCs-MWCNTs-GNPs/GCE gave the recoveries of 104–110% and 101–108% with relative standard deviations (RSD) of 4.36–7.48% and 0.620–2.90%, respectively. The proposed PtNCs-MWCNTs-GNPs composite could provide a new platform for the routine analysis of DA and AA in terms of its good anti-interference ability, excellent reproducibility and repeatability, and feasibility of use.
•Fabrication and characterization of a novel PtNCs-GNPs-MWCNTs nanocomposite were performed.•The simultaneous determination of DA and AA at PtNCs-GNPs-MWCNTs/GCE was performed.•The anti-interference ability, repeatability and reproducibility of PtNCs-GNPs-MWCNTs/GCE were investigated.•The performances of PtNCs-GNPs-MWCNTs/GCE for DA and AA in actual samples were evaluated.
Mutations in
are considered to be the main drivers of acquired resistance to epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) blockade in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC). However, the ...potential role of other genes downstream of the EGFR signaling pathway in conferring acquired resistance has not been extensively investigated.
Using circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) from patients with mCRC and with acquired cetuximab resistance, we developed a targeted amplicon ultra-deep sequencing method to screen for low-abundance somatic mutations in a panel of genes that encode components of the EGFR signaling pathway. Mutations with significantly increased variant frequencies upon disease progression were selected by using quartile analysis. The functional consequences of the identified mutations were validated in cultured cells.
We analyzed 32 patients with acquired cetuximab resistance in a development cohort. Of them, seven (22%) carried five novel
mutations, whereas eight (25%) carried previously reported
mutations. Functional studies showed that novel
mutations (all in exon 19; p.K944N, p.F930S, p.V955G, p.V955I, and p.K966E) promote cell viability in the presence of cetuximab. Only one novel
mutation (p.K944N) was verified in one of the 27 patients with acquired resistance in a validation cohort, simultaneous
and
hotspot mutations were detected in two patients. Among the above 59 acquired resistance patients, those with
or
mutations detected in ctDNA showed a pronounced decrease in progression-free survival than patients with no mutation.
The
mutations may potentially contribute to acquired cetuximab resistance in patients with mCRC.
.
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