At room temperature, glasses are known to be brittle and fracture upon deformation. Zheng et al. show that, by exposing amorphous silica nanostructures to a low-intensity electron beam, it is possible to achieve dramatic shape changes, including a superplastic elongation of 200% for nanowires.

water. [1] Furthermore, looking into the future, increasing amounts of fresh water will be required to account for population growth, greenhouse gas induced climate change, contamination of freshwater resources, industrial expansion, and agricultural activities. It has been reported that the only methods capable of meeting the increasing demands for freshwater supply are desalination and water reuse. [2] Of these, seawater and brackish water desalination offers a seemingly unlimited and high-quality water supply since 71% of the planet's surface is covered by ocean. Presently, two of the most successful commercialized technologies for water desalination are the multistage flash (MSF) distillation and reverse osmosis (RO) processes. [3] The MSF process is being gradually replaced by the RO process since it produces large quantities of fresh water while consuming less electric energy and having a smaller CO 2 footprint. [4] In the past two decades, numerous large-scale seawater desalination plants based on the RO processes have been built worldwide to harvest available water resources, and the global water production by desalination is projected to exceed 38 billion m 3 per year in 2016. [5] Compared to conventional drinking water treatment processes (coagulation, sedimentation, filtration, and disinfection), seawater desalination consumes a greater amount of electric energy, and thus emits a larger quantity of greenhouse gases. [4] Moreover, a large number of marine organisms, especially juvenile-stage fish, are killed during the seawater intake process. [6] In addition, electric power and centralized water desalination maybe unavailable for the RO process in some remote and rural areas.To overcome these two disadvantages of the RO process, a new concept, named "Air-Water Interface Solar Heating" (AWISH), has been employed for seawater desalination by modifying the old "Solar Distillation Seawater Desalination" (SDSD) process. [7,8] In this conceptually new process, black materials that are capable of efficiently absorbing the solar irradiance and converting it to heat energy are coated on meshes, gauzes or other floating supports. To date, black materials that have been investigated to function as solar-thermal absorbers in AWISH desalination apparatuses include Fe 3 O 4 /C, [8] carbon nanoparticles, [9] black gold, [10] polypyrrole, [7] aluminum nanoparticles, [11] hollow TiO x (x < 2) nanoparticles with tunable colors from white to gray to bluegray to black are synthesized by magnesium (Mg) reduction of white P25 TiO 2 nanocrystals followed by removal of excess Mg with aqueous HCl and distilled water. Increasing amounts of Mg smoothly decrease the oxygen content in TiO x which is responsible for the gradual increase in light absorption and concomitant darkening of its color from white to black with decreasing values of x. The as-synthesized TiO x nanoparticles are spin-coated onto the surface of a stainless steel mesh followed by surface superhydrophobization in order to test their performance as a solar water...

Core–shell structured Fe3O4/SiO2/TiO2 nanocomposites with enhanced photocatalytic activity that are capable of fast magnetic separation have been successfully synthesized by combining two steps of a sol–gel process with calcination. The as‐obtained core–shell structure is composed of a central magnetite core with a strong response to external fields, an interlayer of SiO2, and an outer layer of TiO2 nanocrystals with a tunable average size. The convenient control over the size and crystallinity of the TiO2 nanocatalysts makes it possible to achieve higher photocatalytic efficiency than that of commercial photocatalyst Degussa P25. The photocatalytic activity increases as the thickness of the TiO2 nanocrystal shell decreases. The presence of SiO2 interlayer helps to enhance the photocatalytic efficiency of the TiO2 nanocrystal shell as well as the chemical and thermal stability of Fe3O4 core. In addition, the TiO2 nanocrystals strongly adhere to the magnetic supports through covalent bonds. We demonstrate that this photocatalyst can be easily recycled by applying an external magnetic field while maintaining their photocatalytic activity during at least eighteen cycles of use.

Existing methods for RNA diagnostics, such as reverse transcription PCR (RT-PCR), mainly rely on nucleic acid amplification (NAA) and RT processes, which are known to introduce substantial issues, including amplification bias, cross-contamination, and sample loss. To address these problems, we introduce a confinement effect-inspired Cas13a assay for single-molecule RNA diagnostics, eliminating the need for NAA and RT. This assay involves confining the RNAtriggered Cas13a catalysis system in cell-like-sized reactors to enhance local concentrations of target and reporter simultaneously, via droplet microfluidics. It achieves >10 000-fold enhancement in sensitivity when compared to the bulk Cas13a assay and enables absolute digital single-molecule RNA quantitation. We experimentally demonstrate its broad applicability for precisely counting microRNAs, 16S rRNAs, and SARS-CoV-2 RNA from synthetic sequences to clinical samples with excellent accuracy. Notably, this direct RNA diagnostic technology enables detecting a wide range of RNA molecules at the single-molecule level. Moreover, its simplicity, universality, and excellent quantification capability might render it to be a dominant rival to RT-qPCR.