Monitoring of human bodily motion requires wearable sensors that can detect position, velocity and acceleration. They should be cheap, lightweight, mechanically compliant and display reasonable sensitivity at high strains and strain rates. No reported material has simultaneously demonstrated all the above requirements. Here we describe a simple method to infuse liquid-exfoliated graphene into natural rubber to create conducting composites. These materials are excellent strain sensors displaying 10(4)-fold increases in resistance and working at strains exceeding 800%. The sensitivity is reasonably high, with gauge factors of up to 35 observed. More importantly, these sensors can effectively track dynamic strain, working well at vibration frequencies of at least 160 Hz. At 60 Hz, we could monitor strains of at least 6% at strain rates exceeding 6000%/s. We have used these composites as bodily motion sensors, effectively monitoring joint and muscle motion as well and breathing and pulse.

Carbon nanotubes and materials based on carbon nanotubes have many perceived applications in the field of biomedicine. Several highly promising examples have been highlighted in the literature, ranging from their use as growth substrates or tissue scaffolds to acting as intracellular transporters for various therapeutic and diagnostic agents. In addition, carbon nanotubes have a strong optical absorption in the near-infrared region (in which tissue is transparent), which enables their use for biological imaging applications and photothermal ablation of tumors. Although these advances are potentially game-changing, excitement must be tempered somewhat as several bottlenecks exist. Carbon nanotube-based technologies ultimately have to compete with and out-perform existing technologies in terms of performance and price. Moreover, issues have been highlighted relating to toxicity, which presents an obstacle for the transition from preclinical to clinical use. Although many studies have suggested that well-functionalized carbon nanotubes appear to be safe to the treated animals, mainly rodents, long-term toxicity issues remains to be elucidated. In this report, we systematically highlight some of the most promising biomedical application areas of carbon nanotubes and review the interaction of carbon nanotubes with cultured cells and living organisms with a particular focus on in vivo biodistribution and potential adverse health effects. To conclude, future challenges and prospects of carbon nanotubes for biomedical applications will be addressed.

Two-dimensional titanium carbide (Ti 3 C 2 T x ), or MXene, is a new nanomaterial that has attracted increasing interest due to its metallic conductivity, good solution processability, and excellent energy storage performance. However, Ti 3 C 2 T x MXene flakes suffer from degradation through oxidation due to prolonged exposure to oxygenated water. Preventing the occurrence of oxidation i.e. the formation of TiO 2 particles, was found to be the crucial to maintain MXene quality. In present work, we found that freezing aqueous MXene dispersions at low-temperature can

We report on the first use of carbon-nanotube based films to produce crystals of proteins. The crystals nucleate on the surface of the film. The difficulty of crystallising proteins is a major bottleneck in the determination of the structure and function of biological molecules. The crystallisation of two model proteins and two medically relevant proteins was studied. Quantitative data on the crystallisation times of the model protein lysozyme are also presented. Two types of the nanotube film, one made with the surfactant Triton X-100 (TX-100) and one with gelatin, were tested. Both induce nucleation of the crystal phase at supersaturations at which the protein solution would otherwise remain clear, however the gelatin-based film induced nucleation down to much lower supersaturations for the two model proteins with which it was used. It appears that the interactions of gelatin with the protein molecules are particularly favourable to nucleation. Crystals of the C1 domain of the human cardiac myosin-binding protein-C that diffracted to a resolution of 1.6Å, were obtained on the TX-100 film. This is far superior to the best crystals obtained using standard techniques, which only diffracted to 3.0 Å. Thus, both our nanotube-based films are very promising candidates for future work on crystallising difficult-tocrystallise target proteins.3