Small Science最新文献

Silicon-anode lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) suffer from limited cycle life and poor calendar life, constraining their large-scale commercialization. Integrating additives into electrolytes is a simple and cost-effective strategy to improve these aspects. The effects of lithium-free boron-based additives on cycling and calendar performance of high-loading Si-anode LIBs remain largely unexplored. In this work, the influence of five Li-free borate additives, each with distinct molecular structures and elemental compositions, is systematically investigated. All additives enhance cycle life to varying extents. Notably, the addition of 1 v/v% tri(2,2,2-trifluoroethyl) borate to the baseline electrolyte nearly doubles the cycle life at 50% state of health. This enhancement is attributed to three key factors. Specifically, borate additives 1) improve electrochemical activity, 2) act as anion receptors that interact with [PF₆]^- anions and carbonate solvents to reduce electrolyte decomposition, and 3) promote the formation of a stable and polymeric solid electrolyte interphase layer. Furthermore, these additives exhibited negligible impact in mitigating leakage current during a 180 h voltage-hold calendar-aging test, indicating their limited effect in calendar life. These findings provide insight into the role of Li-free borate additives in improving cycle life while addressing the knowledge gap regarding their influence on calendar aging.

Implantable vascular devices are becoming increasingly essential in clinical practice, particularly in the management of chronic cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), such as heart failure. These devices enable continuous hemodynamic monitoring, support early interventions, and promote personalized, cost-effective care by providing real-time data that enhance patient outcomes. However, their development and clinical application face significant regulatory and biological challenges. Regulatory frameworks, such as the European Union's Medical Device Regulation, ensure safety, efficacy, and high-quality standards throughout a device's lifecycle. Despite these regulations, intravascular devices interact with vascular tissues and blood, triggering biological responses, such as inflammation and thrombosis, which may impair device functionality, reduce long-term durability, and cause severe adverse events. The bioactive surface of implanted devices initiates inflammatory responses and coagulation, leading to complications like fibrotic encapsulation and vascular injury. After device implantation, endothelial injury promotes platelet activation, thrombus formation, and leukocyte infiltration, compromising both device integration and vascular function. Therefore, the material and structural design of these devices play a crucial role in mitigating thrombotic and inflammatory reactions. This review explores the potential benefits and challenges of vascular implantable devices in the management of chronic CVDs, highlighting regulatory aspects, biological responses, and future clinical perspectives.

The development of miniaturized, remotely addressable sensing devices is crucial in a variety of fields, including healthcare, environmental monitoring, and security. This study introduces an optrode sensor comprising a multimaterial fiber composed of a phosphate glass cladding and a continuous Zn wire core, interfaced with a photoactive ZnO coating on its tip, deposited by anodization. It is shown that this optrode can promote photoelectrochemical reactions under illumination with UV light when immersed in an aqueous electrolyte. Proof-of-principle experiments demonstrate that these optrodes produce a glucose-responsive photocurrent, opening the way to biomedical applications. This optical sensor shows promise, as it would ultimately allow the decoupling of input stimuli, i.e., potential and light excitation, over a long distance. Due to its advantages in terms of integration, detection speed, and ease of use, these ZnO/Zn/phosphate optrodes hold significant potential for remote analysis and implantable sensors.

Antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) that is easily adaptable for point-of-care (POC) use is essential for addressing the growing threat of antibiotic resistance. Here, the solid medium droplet microarray (SM-DMA), a simple yet versatile testing platform consisting of a single microscope slide patterned with an array of 80 agar droplets (6-8  μL each), containing customizable combinations of clinically relevant antibiotics, is introduced. The test allows for easy manual sample application and features a colorimetric self-check readout. Using E. coli (DSM498) as a model organism, accurate determination of minimum inhibitory concentrations for clinically relevant antibiotics (cefotaxime, ciprofloxacin, and ampicillin), producing results consistent with EUCAST clinical breakpoints, is demonstrated. Furthermore, SM-DMA facilitates combinatorial antibiotic testing, represented by intuitive viability heatmaps. The platform is more time efficient (≈16-18 h total) compared to the conventional agar plate-based methods. Owing to the robustness, ease of use, and independence from specialized equipment, the SM-DMA can be adapted for POC applications by nontrained personnel or even by patients themselves.

Chronic inflammatory diseases of bone and soft tissue pose significant clinical challenges due to their complex pathogenesis and the limitations of conventional therapies, which often fail to address immune microenvironment dysregulation. This review explores the pivotal roles of key immune cells (including mast cells, macrophages, neutrophils, T cells, B cells, and dendritic cells) in driving inflammatory progression and tissue damage through dynamic cellular interactions and cytokine networks. It systematically analyzes the molecular and structural foundations of immunomodulatory biomaterials, such as nanoparticles, hydrogels, and scaffolds, which offer precise spatiotemporal control over immune cell phenotypes and inflammatory mediators. By integrating advances in immunology and materials science, this review highlights how surface functionalization, controlled drug release, and composite material strategies synergistically restore immune homeostasis and promote tissue regeneration. Studies across common chronic inflammatory diseases (e.g., osteoporosis, osteomyelitis, osteoarthritis, diabetic wounds, spinal cord injury, and intervertebral disc degeneration) demonstrate the therapeutic potential of biomaterial-mediated immunomodulation, such as nanoparticle-driven macrophage polarization, cytokine-loaded hydrogel-mediated immune cell balance, and scaffold-guided immune cell recruitment. Challenges in clinical translation, including material biocompatibility and multicomponent synergy, are critically addressed. This review underscores the transformative potential of immunomodulatory biomaterials as next-generation precision therapies to overcome therapeutic bottlenecks in chronic inflammatory diseases.

Graphene, a pioneering 2D carbon nanomaterial, has attracted significant attention owing to its exceptional structural, mechanical, thermal, and electrical performances. These intrinsic properties position it as a promising material platform for nanoelectromechanical systems, flexible electronics, and biomedical devices. Despite numerous existing reviews on graphene, a comprehensive assessment across graphene variants remains limited. Addressing this critical gap, this review provides an in-depth overview of the structural configurations, physical properties, and application domains of key graphene forms-including monolayer, bilayer, few-layer, and multilayer graphene, as well as functionalized derivatives. The review systematically discusses fabrication and synthesis strategies. Furthermore, it delves into state-of-the-art methodologies for mechanical characterization, highlighting experimental and computational techniques, including in situ scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy, nanoindentation, tensile testing, Raman spectroscopy, and multiscale simulations based on molecular dynamics, density functional theory, coarse-grained modeling, and continuum mechanics. A comparative analysis of experimentally measured and computationally predicted mechanical properties is presented, elucidating existing discrepancies among methods. Collectively, this review aims to serve as a comprehensive reference for researchers at the intersection of nanomaterials, mechanics, and multifunctional material systems, offering a critical foundation for future research and the application of graphene nanostructures in next-generation technologies.

Edge contacts offer significant potential for scaling down 2D transistors due to their minimal contact resistance and reduced contact length. However, their intricate fabrication complicates reproducible large-scale production and evaluation of electrical properties, particularly for p-type channels. Here, the wafer-scale production of p-type nanosheet transistors with pure edge contacts by leveraging the alloying-mediated phase engineering of 2D MoTe₂ is demonstrated. The relative 1T'-phase stability of W _x Mo_1-x Te₂ facilitates the one-pot growth of lateral polymorphic junctions by combining the 2H-single-crystalline MoTe₂ channels with W _x Mo_1-x Te₂ edge contacts. These edge-contact transistors exhibit improved carrier transfer, which is attributed to the impurity-free contact interface and suppressed metal-induced gap states. Consequently, their electrical performance is both exceptional and reproducible, compared with that of transistors fabricated using two-step metallization. Furthermore, irrespective of contact length scaling (8-15 nm), the contact resistivity remains consistently low (≈5.9 × 10^-7 Ω cm²) owing to edge-confined transport, providing a promising ultra-scaled contact scheme for Ångström-node 2D integrated circuits.

Proteinoid-quantum dot (QD) conjugates are a new class of bioquantum hybrid materials combining biological self-assembly with semiconductor nanocrystal electronic properties. This study describes the synthesis and analysis of $\text{Glu}-\text{Phe}-\text{Asp}-\text{Cys}$ proteinoid-QD networks using sulfosuccinimidyl 4-(N-maleimidomethyl)cyclohexane-1-carboxylate (sulfo-SMCC) cross-linking chemistry, achieving 80-90% conjugation efficiency. Scanning electron microscopy reveals a morphological transformation from spherical precursors to toroidal nanostructures with outer diameters of $145.2\pm 18.7\hspace{0.17em}\text{nm}$ and central cavities of $102.3\pm 15.2\hspace{0.17em}\text{nm}$ . The hybrid networks exhibit spontaneous electrochemical oscillations ( $0.03$ to $0.11\hspace{0.17em}\text{Hz}$ , $297$ - $485\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}\text{mV}$ ) reproducible across trials. QD incorporation enhances signal amplitude 41-fold ( $1999\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}\text{mV}$ vs. $48.8\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}\text{mV}$ ) via surface plasmon coupling. Optimal charge transfer resistance for biosensing is ≈ $5250\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}\Omega$ . Electron transfer kinetics follow first-order decay ( $\alpha =0.0032\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}{\text{Hz}}^{-1}$ ). The networks respond to structured binary input over 5 days, displaying frequency synchronization at $f=0.022217\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}\text{Hz}$ . Magnitude-squared coherence values are $0.90$ for pure proteinoids and $0.85$ for conjugates. The system exhibits adaptive response-like behavior through structural transformations, enabling applications in neuromorphic computing, adaptive biosensors, and information processing architectures.

The environmental instability of n-type semiconducting polymers remains a limitation for organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs), as oxygen diffusion and oxidation reduces device performance. Herein, a simple stabilization strategy using poly(2-vinylpyridine) (P2VP), a synthetically accessible, hygroscopic, insulating polymer, is shown. Building on earlier work showing short-term stabilization with this insulating additive, the molecular weight of P2VP is systematically varied and it is demonstrated that higher molecular weight chains form larger domains that reduce oxygen access to the crystalline regions of the benchmark n-type polymer P(NDI2OD-T2). Structural characterization reveals that P2VP domains absorb atmospheric moisture, which both decreases the free volume available for oxygen penetration and partitions oxygen away from semiconductor crystallites. As such, devices containing P2VP exhibit enhanced stability over seven days and can be regenerated by mild heating, whereas neat P(NDI2OD-T2) devices remain degraded. These findings provide mechanistic insight into how insulating polymer blends mediate oxygen-water interactions and highlight polymer blending as a scalable strategy for improving the operational stability of n-type OTFTs.

Protein secretion plays a crucial role in cell-to-cell communication, tissue homeostasis, and disease progression. Mapping secretomes from paired cells provides valuable insights into their interactions; however, existing approaches yield only semi-quantitative, endpoint data, lacking real-time and quantitative resolution. Herein, real-time spatiotemporal imaging of extracellular secretions from individual cells using a high-throughput integrative biosensing nanoplasmonic array (iBNA) within microfluidics is presented. The self-assembled iBNA, composed of precisely arranged gold nanostructures functionalized with aptamer receptors, enhances plasmonic resonance and significantly improves the spatiotemporal resolution and specificity of interleukin-6 (IL-6) imaging, surpassing conventional techniques. The iBNA's molecular recognition mechanism exploits biomolecular surface binding-induced localized plasmonic resonance shifts, correlating with cytokine concentration and enabling optoelectronic detection of transmitted light. Using iBNA, spatiotemporal resolution images of polarized cytokine-mediated cell-to-cell communication between Jurkat T cells and CD4+ T cells, which are essential to immune responses, are achieved. This transformative platform provides unprecedented insights into the spatiotemporal dynamics of protein secretion, offering significant potential for immunological research, cellular biology, and diagnostic applications in infectious diseases.