Energy shortage, environmental crisis, and developing customer demands have driven people to find facile, low-cost, environmentally friendly, and nontoxic routes to produce novel functional materials that can be commercialized in the near future. Amongst various techniques, the hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) process of biomass (either of isolated carbohydrates or crude plants) is a promising candidate for the synthesis of novel carbon-based materials with a wide variety of potential applications. In this Review, we will discuss various synthetic routes towards such novel carbon-based materials or composites via the HTC process of biomass. Furthermore, factors that influence the carbonization process will be analyzed and the special chemical/physical properties of the final products will be discussed. Despite the lack of a clear mechanism, these novel carbonaceous materials have already shown promising applications in many fields such as carbon fixation, water purification, fuel cell catalysis, energy storage, CO(2) sequestration, bioimaging, drug delivery, and gas sensors. Some of the most promising examples will also be discussed here, demonstrating that the HTC process can rationally design a rich family of carbonaceous and hybrid functional carbon materials with important applications in a sustainable fashion.

The anode oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is knownt ol argely limit the efficiency of electrolyzerso wing to its sluggish kinetics.W hile crystalline metal oxides are promising as OER catalysts,t heir amorphous phases also show high activities.E fforts to produce amorphous metal oxides have progressed slowly, and how an amorphous structure benefits the catalytic performances remains elusive. Now the first scalable synthesis of amorphous NiFeMo oxide (up to 515 gi no ne batch) is presented with homogeneous elemental distribution via afacile supersaturated co-precipitation method. In contrast to its crystalline counterpart, amorphous NiFeMo oxide undergoes af aster surface self-reconstruction process during OER, forming am etal oxy(hydroxide) active layer with rich oxygen vacancies,leading to superior OER activity (280 mV overpotential at 10 mA cm À2 in 0.1m KOH). This opens up the potential of fast, facile,a nd scaleup production of amorphous metal oxides for high-performance OER catalysts.

A stretchable and multiple-force-sensitive electronic fabric based on stretchable coaxial sensor electrodes is fabricated for artificial-skin application. This electronic fabric, with only one kind of sensor unit, can simultaneously map and quantify the mechanical stresses induced by normal pressure, lateral strain, and flexion.

Biomedical applications of nontoxic amorphous calcium carbonate (ACC) nanoparticles have mainly been restricted because of their aqueous instability. To improve their stability in physiological environments while retaining their pH-responsiveness, a novel nanoreactor of ACC-doxorubicin (DOX)@silica was developed for drug delivery for use in cancer therapy. As a result of its rationally engineered structure, this nanoreactor maintains a low drug leakage in physiological and lysosomal/endosomal environments, and responds specifically to pH 6.5 to release the drug. This unique ACC-DOX@silica nanoreactor releases DOX precisely in the weakly acidic microenvironment of cancer cells and results in efficient cell death, thus showing its great potential as a desirable chemotherapeutic nanosystem for cancer therapy.

We report an environmentally benign process for the synthesis of nearly monodisperse silver nanoparticles in large quantities via a microwave-assisted “green” chemistry method in an aqueous system, using basic amino acids, such as l-lysine or l-arginine, as reducing agents and soluble starch as a protecting agent. The presence of amino acids with basicity such as l-lysine or l-arginine, having two amino groups in each molecule, is indispensable for the synthesis of uniform silver nanoparticles. The current synthetic process can be readily applied to large-scale production, for example, a reaction yielding 0.1 g of nearly monodisperse silver nanoparticles can be performed in a 80 mL microwave sealed vessel. This combination of solvent, renewable reactants, and microwave irradiation seem to make it clear that green chemical synthesis of metal nanoparticles with well-controlled shapes, sizes, and structures has practical potential. Self-assembly of starch-capped silver nanoparticles results in multilayered mirrorlike films forming on the glass slide surface. The surface plasmon transmission of the films has blue-shifted with decreasing silver atom concentrations of the films. The silver films offer great surface enhancement for 4-mercaptobenzoic acid (4-MBA) molecules, and the surface enhancement factor can be efficiently changed by the silver atom concentrations of the films.

Inspired by smart biological tissues, artificial muscle-like actuators offer fascinating prospects due to their distinctive shape transformation and self-healing function under external stimuli. However, further practical application is hindered by the lack of simple and general routes to fabricate ingenious soft materials with anisotropic responsiveness. Here, we describe a general in situ polymerization strategy for the fabrication of anisotropic hydrogels composed of highly-ordered lamellar network crosslinked by the metal nanostructure assemblies, accompanied with remarkably anisotropic performances on mechanical, optical, de-swelling and swelling behaviors. Owing to the dynamic thiolate-metal coordination as healing motifs, the composites exhibit rapid and efficient multi-responsive self-healing performance under NIR irradiation and low pH condition. Dependent on well-defined anisotropic structures, the hydrogel presents controllable solvent-responsive mechanical actuating performance. Impressively, the integrated device through a healing-induced assembly way can deliver more complicated, elaborate forms of actuation, demonstrating its great potentials as superior soft actuators like smart robots.

The rapid development of treatment resistance in tumors poses a technological bottleneck in clinical oncology. Ferroptosis is a form of regulated cell death with clinical translational potential, but the efficacy of ferroptosis-inducing agents is susceptible to many endogenous factors when administered alone, for which some cooperating mechanisms are urgently required. Here, we report an amorphous calcium carbonate (ACC)–based nanoassembly for tumor-targeted ferroptosis therapy, in which the totally degradable ACC substrate could synergize with the therapeutic interaction between doxorubicin (DOX) and Fe2+. The nanoplatform was simultaneously modified by dendrimers with metalloproteinase-2 (MMP-2)–sheddable PEG or targeting ligands, which offers the functional balance between circulation longevity and tumor-specific uptake. The therapeutic cargo could be released intracellularly in a self-regulated manner through acidity-triggered degradation of ACC, where DOX could amplify the ferroptosis effects of Fe2+ by producing H2O2. This nanoformulation has demonstrated potent ferroptosis efficacy and may offer clinical promise.

Water purification by solar distillation is considered a promising technology for producing clean water from undrinkable water resources. A solar steam generator is a central part of a solar distillation process to separate water and contaminants. Here, we report an efficient and sustainable hierarchical solar steam generator (HSSG) with reduced vaporization enthalpy based on bacterial cellulose (BC) nanocomposites. The nanomaterials are assembled with BC nanofibers produced by bacteria in situ to form nanocomposites. Using this method, we construct functional BC nanocomposites inside and on the natural porous structure of wood. Our HSSG integrates solar-to-vapor efficiency improvement and vaporization enthalpy reduction by integrating the hierarchical multifunctional BC nanocomposites with the natural porous structure of wood. Because of the biomimetic design, hierarchical structure and reduced vaporization enthalpy of HSSG, a high evaporation rate of 2.9 kg m–2 h–1 and solar-to-vapor efficiency of 80% is achieved.