Inspired by the mussel byssus adhesiveness, a highly hydrated polymeric structure is designed to combine, for the first time, a set of interesting features for load-bearing purposes. These characteristics include: i) a compressive strength and stiffness in the MPa range, ii) toughness and the ability to recover it upon successive cyclic loading, iii) the ability to quickly self-heal upon rupture, iv) the possibility of administration through minimally invasive techniques, such as by injection, v) the swelling ratio being adjusted to space-filling applications, and vi) cytocompatibility. Owing to these characteristics and the mild conditions employed, the encapsulation of very unstable and sensitive cargoes is possible, highlighting their potential to researchers in the biomedical field for the repair of load-bearing soft tissues, or to be used as an encapsulation platform for a variety of biological applications such as disease models for drug screening and therapies in a more realistic mechanical environment. Moreover, given the simplicity of this methodology and the enhanced mechanical performance, this strategy can be expanded to applications in other fields, such as agriculture and electronics. As such, it is anticipated that the proposed strategy will constitute a new, versatile, and cost-effective tool to produce engineered polymeric structures for both science and technology.

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Titanium dioxide (TiO 2) absorbs only a small fraction of incoming sunlight in the visible region thus limiting its photocatalytic efficiency and concomitant photocatalytic ability. The large-scale application of TiO 2 nanoparticles has been limited due to the need of using an ultraviolet excitation source to achieve high photocatalytic activity. The inclusion of foreign chemical elements in the TiO 2 lattice can tune its band gap resulting in an absorption edge red-shifted to lower energies enhancing the photocatalytic performance in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum. In this research work, TiO 2 nanoparticles were doped with iron powder in a planetary ball-milling system using stainless steel balls. The correlation between milling rotation speeds with structural and morphologic characteristics, optical and magnetic properties, and photocatalytic abilities of bare and Fedoped TiO 2 powders was studied and discussed.