Fumigants and residual insecticides are commonly used to combat stored grain pests. In recent years, consumer awareness of the health hazard from residual toxicity and the growing problem of insect resistance to these conventional insecticides have led the researchers to look for alternative strategies for stored grains protection. For example, diatomaceous earth (DE) can be effective against stored grain insects. In this study, DE was used to design amorphous nano sized hydrophilic, hydrophobic, and lipophilic silica in 15-30 nm size range. Nanocides are expected to reduce the volume of application and kinetics of development of resistance in pests. We hypothesized that surface-functionalized silica nanoparticle (SNP) might be a viable alternative to conventional pesticides. Entomotoxicity of SNP was tested against rice weevil Sitophilus oryzae and its efficacy was compared with bulk-sized silica (individual particles larger than 1 lm). Amorphous SNP was found to be highly effective against this insect pest causing more than 90% mortality, indicating the effectiveness of SNP to control insect pests.

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Solution processed zinc tin oxide (ZTO) thin film transistors (TFTs) were fabricated by varying the Zn/Sn composition. The addition of Sn to the zinc oxide (ZnO) films resulted in improved electrical characteristics, with devices of Zn0.7Sn0.3O composition showing the highest mobility of 7.7 cm(2)/(V s). An improvement in subthreshold swings was also observed, indicative of a reduction of the interfacial trap densities. Mobility studies at low temperature have been carried out, which indicated that the activation energy was reduced with Sn incorporation. Kelvin probe force microscopy was performed on the films to evaluate work function and correlated to the metal-semiconductor barrier indicating Zn0.7Sn0.3O films had the smallest barrier for charge injection. Organic-inorganic hybrid complementary inverters with a maximum gain of 10 were fabricated by integrating ZTO TFTs with poly-3-hexylthiophene (P3HT) transistors.

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Multi‐Core–shell TiO2NPs@ZIF‐8 composites were synthesized by in situ encapsulation of different amounts of TiO2NPs (150, 300 and 500 μL suspension of TiO2NPs in methanol) in ZIF‐8 at room temperature. Encapsulation of TiO2NPs in ZIF‐8 was confirmed by transmission electron microscopy and X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy. ZIF‐8 and its core–shell composites have similar crystal structure and morphology as confirmed by powder X‐ray diffraction analysis and scanning electron microscopy. The detailed photocatalytic degradation and adsorption studies of methylene blue and rhodamine‐B were investigated by considering various factors, viz. amount of loading of TiO2NPs in ZIF‐8, amount of photocatalyst, pH and initial concentration of the dye. At higher pH (11.5−12.6), TiO2NPs@ZIF‐8 composite exhibited higher (≈ 8 times) photocatalytic activity as compared to TiO2NPs and the optimum amount of TiO2NPs@ZIF‐8 composite was 10 mg for the maximum photodegradation of 3.19 mg L−1 (93 %) and 2.4 mg L−1 (57 %) of methylene blue and rhodamine‐B, respectively.