Due to their high electron affinities, chemical and thermal stabilities, π-conjugated molecules with imide/amide frameworks have received considerable attentions as promising candidates for high-performance optoelectronic materials, particularly for organic semiconductors with high carrier mobilities. The purpose of this Research News is to give an overview of recent advances in development of high performance imide/amide based organic semiconductors for field-effect transistors. It covers naphthalene diimide-, perylene diimide- and amide-based conjugated molecules and polymers for organic semiconductors.

We report herein the development of a highly robust, quantitative, sensitive, and naked eye colorimetric detection method for different isomers of aromatic compounds using β-CD-modified silver nanoparticle (AgNPs) probes. This assay relies on the distance-dependent optical properties of Ag nanoparticles and the different inclusion binding strength of the aromatic guests to β-CD host. In the presence of different isomers of aromatic compounds, AgNPs could be rapidly induced to aggregate, thereby resulting in apricot-to-red color change. The variety and concentration of different isomers of aromatic compounds could be determined by monitoring with the naked eye or a UV-vis spectrometer. The present detection limit for different isomers of aromatic compounds is 5 × 10(-5) M. We believe that the surface architectures of AgNPs after the introduction of the CD-based host-guest recognition would be applicable for a range of chemical and bioanalytical molecular sensing systems in aqueous media.

People’s satisfaction towards the experience in forests is one of most important feedbacks that forest park managers need to meet positive visitors’ experiences. Although the drawbacks of questionnaire methodology are obvious for data collection from self-reported scores at the landscape scale, few alternative methods have been proposed. In this study, nine urban forest parks along the urbanization gradients in three capital cities of Northeast China were targeted to investigate their visitors’ selfies from social networking services (SNS) by assessing facial expressions. A total of 935 photos with location records were obtained from the SNS platform of Sina Micro-Blog in a social hot-event of ‘Golden Week Holidays of National Day of China’ of 2017. Images were recognized by FireFace software to assess scores of neutral, happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, disgusted, and contempt expressions. Data were ranked in descending order and analyzed by Friedman’s test, correlation analysis, and Poisson regression. Visitors in downtown-forests showed fewer negative expressions at the most northern city than at the southern most one. The negative expressions tended to be alleviated with the increasing distance of forest parks from downtown. However, when the distance reached over 10 km no geographical effect was found. Female visitors showed positive emotional expressions to urban forests while male visitors showed no response. In conclusion, using data from SNS, this study found an experience in forest park less than 10 km from the downtown of a northern city resulted in female visitors showing the most positive expressions.