Recently, smart polymer vesicles have attracted increasing interest due to their endless potential applications such as tunable delivery vehicles for the treatment of degenerative diseases. However, the evolution of stimuli-responsive vesicles from bench to bedside still seems far away for the limitations of current stimuli forms such as temperature, light, redox, etc. Since ultrasound combined with chemotherapy has been widely used in tumor treatment and the pH in tumor tissues is relatively low, we designed herein a novel polymer vesicle that respond to both physical (ultrasound) and chemical (pH) stimuli based on a PEO-b-P(DEA-stat-TMA) block copolymer, where PEO is short for poly(ethylene oxide), DEA for 2-(diethylamino)ethyl methacrylate and TMA for (2-tetrahydrofuranyloxy)ethyl methacrylate. These dually responsive vesicles show noncytotoxicity below 250 μg/mL and can encapsulate anticancer drugs, exhibiting retarded release profile and controllable release rate when subjected to ultrasound radiation or varying pH in tris buffer at 37°C.

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Nematic order is the breaking of rotational symmetry in the presence of translational invariance. While originally defined in the context of liquid crystals, the concept of nematic order has arisen in crystalline matter with discrete rotational symmetry, most prominently in the tetragonal Fe-based superconductors where the parent state is four-fold symmetric. In this case the nematic director takes on only two directions, and the order parameter in such "Ising-nematic" systems is a simple scalar. Here, using a novel spatially-resolved optical polarimetry technique, we show that a qualitatively distinct nematic state arises in the triangular lattice antiferromagnet Fe1/3NbS2. The crucial difference is that the nematic order on the triangular lattice is a ℤ " , or three-state Potts-nematic order parameter. As a consequence, the anisotropy axes of response functions such as the resistivity tensor can be continuously re-oriented by external perturbations.This discovery provides insight into realizing devices that exploit analogies with nematic liquid crystals.