Going straight: A luminescent composite of poly(p‐phenylenevinylene) (PPV) and amylose was synthesized by direct polymerization of the precursor monomer in aqueous media in the presence of amylose. The PPV–amylose composite consists of a rigid‐rod PPV segment threaded into a flexible amylose tube and self‐assembles into liquid‐crystalline phases.

In this study, the effect of the grain boundary density on the transport properties of the Re-substituted higher manganese silicide Mn30.4Re6Si63.6 has been investigated. The efficiency of electrical energy conversion from waste heat, mainly in thermoelectric generators, depends on how the thermal conduction is reduced, while the charge-carrier electrons/holes contribute to possess a large magnitude of both the electrical conductivity σ and Seebeck coefficient S. In this work, we tried to obtain such a condition with a novel approach of merging the energy-filtering effect at the grain boundaries to improve the power factor (PF) = S 2σ. The nanostructuring and heavy-element substitution were also employed to greatly scatter the phonon conduction. As a result, enhancement of the PF was observed in the diffused nanostructure of annealed ribbon samples, and the enhancement was correlated with the formation of Schottky barriers at the grain boundary interface. Together with a reduction of the thermal conductivity to very low magnitude 1.27 W m–1 K–1, we obtained a maximum ZT = 1.15 at 873 K for the annealed ribbon samples.

We investigate the effect of a self-assembled monolayer (SAM) as a hole injection layer on the electroluminescence (EL) properties of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). We modify the surface of an indium-tin-oxide (ITO) substrate using (heptadecafluoro-1,1,2,2-tetrahydrodecyl)triethoxysilane (F-SAM) and n-decyltriethoxysilane (CH 3 -SAM). The current of the OLED with F-SAM is higher that those of the OLEDs with or without CH 3 -SAM at the same voltage and the same as that of an OLED with copper phthalocyanine (CuPc). In addition, the half-lifetime of the OLED with F-SAM is 2500 times greater than that of the OLED without the hole injection layer and about twice that of the OLED with CuPc. We discuss the conduction mechanism of the OLED in terms of the barrier height of the hole injection and the voltage distribution of the organic layers.

Internal standard based absolute quantitation of glycolytic intermediates was performed to characterize the thermodynamic states of Saccharomyces cerevisiae metabolism. A mixture of (13)C-labeled glycolytic intermediates was prepared via extraction from S. cerevisiae cells cultivated using a synthetic medium containing [U-(13)C] glucose as the sole carbon source. The (13)C-labeled metabolite mixture was used as an internal standard for the analysis of S. cerevisiae cultivated in a medium containing natural glucose. The methodology was employed for the absolute quantitation of glycolytic intermediates of BY4742, pfk1Δ, and zwf1Δ strains of S. cerevisiae. Fructose-1,6-bisphosphate was the most abundant intermediate in the BY4742 strains in the log phase of growth. Estimation of the Gibbs free energy change (ΔG) from the absolute concentration revealed that several reactions, such as those catalyzed by ribose-5-phosphate keto-isomerase and phosphoglucose isomerase, were commonly at near-equilibrium in all three strains. A significant shift in thermodynamic state was also observed for the transketolase-transaldolase reaction, for which ΔG was -6.6 ± 0.5 kJ mol(-1) in the BY4742 strain and 5.4 ± 0.3 kJ mol(-1) in the zwf1Δ strain.

A heterostructured copper sulfide–zinc sulfide nanocomposite is explored as a new class of low temperature and sustainable thermoelectric materials. The nanoparticles are created through a wet chemical synthetic technique and display a remarkable Janus structure. These nanoparticles are processed as building blocks by molecular linking with short alkyl chain ligands to enhance their electrical conductivity. The nanomaterials are pressed into a pellet and subjected to subsequent thermal annealing to remove volatiles and enhance particle contacts through sintering. The resulting nanocomposite materials were characterized to assess the thermoelectric characteristics, revealing P-type conductivity.