Focused metabolic profiling is a powerful tool for the determination of biomarkers. Here, a more global proton nuclear magnetic resonance ((1)H NMR)-based metabolomic approach coupled with a relative simple ultra high performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC)-based focused metabolomic approach was developed and compared to characterize the systemic metabolic disturbances underlying esophageal cancer (EC) and identify possible early biomarkers for clinical prognosis. Serum metabolic profiling of patients with EC (n=25) and healthy controls (n=25) was performed by using both (1)H NMR and UHPLC, and metabolite identification was achieved by multivariate statistical analysis. Using orthogonal projection to least squares discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA), we could distinguish EC patients from healthy controls. The predictive power of the model derived from the UHPLC-based focused metabolomics performed better in both sensitivity and specificity than the results from the NMR-based metabolomics, suggesting that the focused metabolomic technique may be of advantage in the future for the determination of biomarkers. Moreover, focused metabolic profiling is highly simple, accurate and specific, and should prove equally valuable in metabolomic research applications. A total of nineteen significantly altered metabolites were identified as the potential disease associated biomarkers. Significant changes in lipid metabolism, amino acid metabolism, glycolysis, ketogenesis, tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle and energy metabolism were observed in EC patients compared with the healthy controls. These results demonstrated that metabolic profiling of serum could be useful as a screening tool for early EC diagnosis and prognosis, and might enhance our understanding of the mechanisms involved in the tumor progression.

Nanocrystallization is a well-known strategy to dramatically tune the properties of materials; however, the grain-size effect of graphene at the nanometer scale remains unknown experimentally because of the lack of nanocrystalline samples. Here we report an ultrafast growth of graphene films within a few seconds by quenching a hot metal foil in liquid carbon source. Using Pt foil and ethanol as examples, four kinds of nanocrystalline graphene films with average grain size of ~3.6, 5.8, 8.0, and 10.3 nm are synthesized. It is found that the effect of grain boundary becomes more pronounced at the nanometer scale. In comparison with pristine graphene, the 3.6 nm-grained film retains high strength (101 GPa) and Young’s modulus (576 GPa), whereas the electrical conductivity is declined by over 100 times, showing semiconducting behavior with a bandgap of ~50 meV. This liquid-phase precursor quenching method opens possibilities for ultrafast synthesis of typical graphene materials and other two-dimensional nanocrystalline materials.

A thermosetting resin system for resin-transfer molding based on novolak and bismaleimide (BMI) was developed. The novolak resin was allylated and BMI was used as the curing agent, and allyl phenyl ether, as the diluent. The viscosity-temperature curve and the viscosity-time curve were used to characterize the processing property of the resin system. The resin system had a long pot life at the injection temperature. Based on the DSC data, a regime for the curing and postcuring cycles was established. The cured resin showed outstanding heat resistance and good flexural properties. Composites based on the resin system and woven glass fabric were fabricated using RTM technology. The composites showed very good flexural properties at room temperature and high retention rates at 200 and 300°C.

Solar-driven water evaporation is considered to be an appealing way to solve water scarcity issues globally. Various natural creatures possess unique structural features and exhibit an excellent pumping ability in arid environments. Motivated by sunflower stalk pith, here, the biomass porous foam modified with zwitterionic hydrogel coating for solar desalination devices is introduced. It is demonstrated that the multi-curvature and gradient honeycomb architecture offers a remarkable solar desalination system, which combines critical aspects of solar evaporation including high light absorption, localizing converted heat, rapid water transport, water activation, and multi-channel release of steam via its ubiquitous structure, and substantially outperforms other natural biomass materials. The device exhibits long-term stability in actual seawater, as well as high performance for soybean oil emulsion and oily brines (crude oil, salts). Furthermore, the long-term use of excellent storability to prevent putrefying is shown, which is attributed to the outstanding antifouling property of zwitterionic hydrogel. It is envisioned that the nature material with the advantage of being inexpensive, environmentally friendly, and portable, may be a new candidate for water purification and desalination.

High performance nanocomposites require well dispersion and high alignment of the nanometer-sized components, at a high mass or volume fraction as well. However, the road towards such composite structure is severely hindered due to the easy aggregation of these nanometer-sized components. Here we demonstrate a big step to approach the ideal composite structure for carbon nanotube (CNT) where all the CNTs were highly packed, aligned, and unaggregated, with the impregnated polymers acting as interfacial adhesions and mortars to build up the composite structure. The strategy was based on a bio-inspired aggregation control to limit the CNT aggregation to be sub 20–50 nm, a dimension determined by the CNT growth. After being stretched with full structural relaxation in a multi-step way, the CNT/polymer (bismaleimide) composite yielded super-high tensile strengths up to 6.27–6.94 GPa, more than 100% higher than those of carbon fiber/epoxy composites, and toughnesses up to 117–192 MPa. We anticipate that the present study can be generalized for developing multifunctional and smart nanocomposites where all the surfaces of nanometer-sized components can take part in shear transfer of mechanical, thermal, and electrical signals.

Graphite film has many remarkable properties and intriguing applications from energy storage, electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding, and thermal management to ultraviolet lithography. However, the existing synthesis methods require an extremely high processing temperature of ∼3000 °C and/or long processing time of typically hours. Here, we report an ultrafast synthesis of tens of nanometer-thick high-quality graphite films within a few seconds by quenching a hot Ni foil in ethanol. The vertical growth rate can reach over 64 nm s −1 , which is more than 2 orders of magnitude higher than those of the existing methods. Moreover, the films show excellent electrical conductivity (∼2.6 × 10 5 S/m) and mechanical strength (∼110 MPa) comparable to or even better than those synthesized by chemical vapor deposition. As an example, we demonstrate the potential of these graphite films for effective EMI shielding, which show a record absolute shielding effectiveness of 481,000 dB cm 2 g −1 , outperforming all the reported synthetic materials.

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