Conventional superhydrophobic surfaces have always depended on expensive, sophisticated, and fragile roughness structures. Therefore, poor robustness has turned into the bottleneck for large-scale industrial applications of the superhydrophobic surfaces. To handle this problem, a superhydrophobic surface with firm robustness urgently needs to be developed. In this work, we created a versatile strategy to fabricate robust, self-cleaning, and superhydrophobic surfaces for both soft and hard substrates. We created an ethanol based suspension of perfluorooctyltriethoxysilane-mdodified calcium carbonate nanoparticles which can be sprayed onto both hard and soft substrates to form superhydrophobic surfaces. For all kinds of substrates, spray adhesive was directly coated onto abluent substrate surfaces to promote the robustness. These superhydrophobic surfaces showed remarkable robustness against knife scratch and sandpaper abrasion, while retaining its superhydrophobicity even after 30 abrasion cycles with sandpaper. What is more, the superhydrophobic surfaces have shown promising potential applications in self-cleaning and oil-water separation. The surfaces retained their self-cleaning property even immersed in oil. In addition to oil-water separation, the water contents in oil after separation of various mixtures were all below 150 ppm, and for toluene even as low as 55 ppm. Furthermore, the as-prepared device for oil-water separation could be cycled 6 times and still retained excellent oil-water separation efficiency.

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Chemicals with androgenic or estrogenic activity induce the sex reversal and/or intersex condition in various teleost fish species. Previously, we reported that exposure to 17α‐methyltestosterone, bisphenol A, or 4‐nonylphenol induces changes in expression of the gonadal soma‐derived factor (gsdf) gene accompanied by disruption of gonadal differentiation in Japanese medaka (Oryzias latipes). These findings suggest that gsdf expression might be a useful biomarker for predicting the potential effect of chemicals on gonadal differentiation. We examined the gsdf expression in Japanese medaka exposed to chemicals with estrogenic or androgenic activity. Exposure to the androgenic steroid 17β‐trenbolone at 0.5–22.1 μg/L induced the development of ovotestis (presence of ovarian tissue with testicular tissue) and female‐to‐male sex reversal in XX embryos, and exposure at 6.32 and 22.1 μg/L significantly increased gsdf expression in XX embryos compared with controls at developmental stage 38 (1 day before hatching). In the present study, no statistically significant difference in gsdf mRNA expression was observed after exposure to 17β‐estradiol, 17α‐ethinylestradiol, and 4‐t‐octylphenol, which have estrogenic activity. In addition, antiandrogenic chemicals or chemicals without endocrine‐disrupting activity did not induce changes in gsdf expression in XX or XY embryos. Thus, an increase in gsdf expression after androgen exposure was observed in XX embryos. Together, these findings indicate that gsdf expression might be useful for predicting the adverse effect of chemicals on gonadal differentiation. Environ Toxicol Chem 2022;41:1875–1884. © 2022 SETAC

The lethal effects of chemicals is a serious concern to the protection of ecosystems, and the OECD TG 212 was established to estimate the lethal and sublethal effects on embryo and sac-fry stages of fish. It is still unclear, however, whether this test can effectively estimate the impacts of chemicals using marine fish. Therefore, this study aimed to use a recognized testing method on the marine fish Oryzias javanicus, and to assess differences in response to organotin compounds between a freshwater congener (Oryzias latipes) and O. javanicus. The lowest observed effect concentration (LOEC) of triphenyltin for lethal effect was the same in both species. The LOEC of tributyltin for lethal and sublethal effects were the same in both species. Our results provide the first evidence that O. javanicus and O. latipes are similarly affected by organotin compounds, suggesting that O. javanicus is a good model marine fish for the ecotoxicological assessment of chemicals.