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The various forms of carbon nanostructures are providing extraordinary new opportunities that can revolutionize the way gas sensors, electrochemical sensors and biosensors are engineered. The great potential of carbon nanostructures as a sensing platform is exciting due to their unique electrical and chemical properties, highly scalable, biocompatible and particularly interesting due to the almost infinite possibility of functionalization with a wide variety of inorganic nanostructured materials and biomolecules. This opens a whole new pallet of specificity into sensors that can be extremely sensitive, durable and that can be incorporated into the ongoing new generation of wearable technology. Within this context, carbon-based nanostructures are amongst the most promising structures to be incorporated in a multi-functional platform for sensing. The present review discusses the various 1D, 2D and 3D carbon nanostructure forms incorporated into different sensor types as well as the novel functionalization approaches that allow such multi-functionality.

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Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) demonstrate unique properties of both electrical and thermal conductivity, but at the moment of producing a network composed of multiple nanotubes, these values sharply decrease. It is associated with the presence of defects in the nanotube network structure, as well as with the dissipation phenomena at the junctions between SWCNTs. One of the methods to alleviate this problem is doping. In our study, we obtained a film made of high-quality SWCNTs doped with three types of iodonium salts: Barluenga's reagent (bispyridineiodonium tetrafluoroborate, IPy 2 BF 4), pyridine iodine monochloride (IPyCl) and diphenyliodonium chloride (DPIC). We recorded a significant improvement in electrical properties after doping with IPy 2 BF 4 and IPyCl, by as much as 224% and 322%, respectively. What is more, we noted improvement in thermal conductivity, which amounted to over 50% when the material was doped with IPyCl. Our research indicates that permanent doping of CNT-based ensembles is possible with iodonium salts. The process significantly improves electrical conductivity, and the compounds themselves are more convenient to work with rather than when other halogen-based dopants are used commonly for this purpose.

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and energy transfer to a structure from an underwater blast. Hitherto, the majority of an-13 alytical models assume a rigid (non-deformable) and free-standing (unsupported) structure 14 where resistance to its translational motion -apart from that offered by its inertial mass 15-comes from 'ad-hoc' backing spring(s) introduced to simulate compression of the fluid 16 medium and/or the resistance to transverse deformation encountered by a real structure. 17These limitations/assumptions are relaxed in this paper by adopting a physically realistic

In recent years, many investigations on the development of innovative dressing materials with potential applications, e.g., for cytostatics delivery, have been performed. One of the most promising carriers is albumin, which tends to accumulate near cancer cells. Here, chitosan-based hydrogels containing albumin spheres and Aloe vera juice, designed for the treatment of skin cancers or burn wounds resulting from radiotherapy, were developed. The presence of albumin in hydrogel matrices was confirmed via Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) and Raman spectroscopy. Albumin spheres were clearly visible in microscopic images. It was proved that the introduction of albumin into hydrogels resulted in their increased resistance to the tensile load, i.e., approximately 30% more force was needed to break such materials. Modified hydrogels showed approximately 10% more swelling ability. All hydrogels were characterized by hydrophilicity (contact angles were <90°) which may support the regeneration of epithelial cells and non-cytotoxicity towards murine fibroblasts L929 and released Aloe vera juice more effectively in an acidic environment than in a neutral one wherein spheres introduced into the hydrogel matrix extended the release time. Thus, the developed materials, due to their chemical composition and physicochemical properties, constitute promising materials with great application potential for biomedical purposes.

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