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The widespread usage of miniaturized electronic gadgets today faces stiff reliability obstacles from factors like stray electromagnetic signals. The challenge is to design lightweight shielding materials that combine small volume...

A comprehensive review of research trends and prospects for interpenetrating polymer networks (IPNs) for desalination and water remediation is presented in this article.

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Nature‐driven designs for water crisis have shown much interest in energy‐efficient water treatment. This review discusses four different bioinspired systems, aquaporin membranes, mussel‐inspired amine‐based membranes, supramolecular architectures, and cactus/mangrove desalination. The authors have also delineated their contributions and mechanisms toward forming water pathways for effective desalination. The discussion is mainly channelized toward constructing generic approaches based on membranes with diverse shapes and dimensions, including hierarchically structured membranes. The separation properties of these bioinspired systems stem from their chemical and physical structures imparting selectivity in the separation of ions, pollutants, etc. Further, this review covers the practical methodologies for next‐generation energy‐efficient membranes and outlines the perspectives regarding the upcoming developments in water technology.

In the era of fifth-generation networks and the Internet of Things new class of lightweight, ultrathin, and multifunctional electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding materials have become inevitable prerequisites for the protection...

and aquifers has compelled researchers to re-design approaches for the treatment of these sources as well as consider newer alternatives to meet the current demands. [3,4] In this regard, desalination has shown immense potential to cater to the worldwide water crisis. [5][6][7] Among current desalination strategies, forward osmosis (FO) offers a more significant advantage with low energy consumption, operation costs, lower driving pressures, efficient rejection characteristics, and reduced fouling of membranes among the current pressure-driven processes. [6,[8][9][10] While polyamide thin film nanocomposites (TFC) are the traditional membranes used in forward osmosis applications, recently, researchers have started to explore 2D materials-based membranes for forward osmosis desalination applications. [7,11] Traditional thin film nanocomposite is substrate dependent, the polyamide thin film layer (≈10-400 nm in thickness) is bound to a porous ultrafiltration membrane substrate and nonwoven fabric support and has permeability-selectivity trade-off to maintain the desired performance. [12,13] Also, these membranes require high pumping and frequent replacements, which adds up costs and is vulnerable to fouling and chlorine attack. [14,15] Free-standing 2D assemblies are 2D nanoparticle systems are vacuum filtered, self-assembled, or cast and stripped from the substrate and offer unique characteristics like the minimal effect of the substrate, facile transferability, flexibility, and high permeability. [16] The free-standing membranes with sub-nanometer exclusion characteristics (interlayer spacing between sheets acting as sieves for the size-based exclusion of ions) are, generally, graphene-based derivatives or transition metal dichalcogenides like MoS 2 . [11,[17][18][19] The critical distinguishing traits garnering the interest of the researchers is its excellent salt rejection, chlorine tolerance, and good water flux compared to thin film composites. [7] Among the previously mentioned 2D materials, hexagonal BN (h-BN) has shown to be a potential contender with the lowest interplanar spacing of 3.34 Å and has structured carbon lattices based crystalline arrangements analogous to graphite. [20,21] Due to its hexagonal arrangement with few layers, it is also called white graphene or non-carbon graphene. [22] Herein, a facile "matrix-free" thin film membrane strategy is reported that exploits polymer brushes grafted hydroxyl-functionalized hexagonal boron nitride nanosheets (h-BNOH) toward forward osmosis desalination and dye rejection application. The functionalized nanosheets are characterized using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), UV-visible spectrophotometry, and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). Covalently functionalized nanosheets of poly methyl methacrylate (PMMA) termed as boron nitride grafted PMMA (BN-g-PMMA) obtained via RAFT polymerization are deployed toward "matrix-free" nan...

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