It has been a major challenge to treat osteoporotic bone defects with irregular shapes. Although bioactive glass offers an attractive material for bone regeneration, its inherent brittleness has greatly limited its scope of application. Herein, we report the fabrication of bioactive glass (SiO2–CaO) nanofibers with excellent flexibility to even allow for 180° bending. The bioactive glass nanofibers could be further assembled into 3D fibrous scaffolds with chitosan serving as the linkers. The scaffolds constructed from an assembly of 85SiO2–15CaO nanofibers and chitosan (85SiO2–15CaO NF/CS) possessed significantly better mechanical properties when benchmarked against both 75SiO2–25CaO nanofiber- and chitosan-based scaffolds. Moreover, the 85SiO2–15CaO NF/CS scaffolds exhibited an elastic behavior, with full recovery from 80% compression and good fatigue resistance over 1000 cycles of compression under water. Upon implantation, the elastic fibrous scaffolds were able to deform and fit irregularly shaped bone defects, followed by a self-deploying behavior to achieve a perfect match with the cavities. When applied to the repair of an osteoporotic calvarial defect in a rat model, the 85SiO2–15CaO NF/CS scaffolds showed substantial promotion of bone regrowth and vascularization. This new class of 3D fibrous scaffold provides a promising advancement in engineering smart materials for complex bone repair.

Tin diselenide (SnSe2) nanosheets as novel 2D layered materials have excellent optical properties with many promising application prospects, such as photoelectric detectors, nonlinear optics, infrared photoelectric devices, and ultrafast photonics. Among them, ultrafast photonics has attracted much attention due to its enormous advantages; for instance, extremely fast pulse, strong peak power, and narrow bandwidth. In this work, SnSe2 nanosheets are fabricated by using solvothermal treatment, and the characteristics of SnSe2 are systemically investigated. In addition, the solution of SnSe2 nanosheets is successfully prepared as a fiber‐based saturable absorber by utilizing the evanescent field effect, which can bear a high pump power. 31st‐order subpicosecond harmonic mode locking is generated in an Er‐doped fiber laser, corresponding to the maximum repetition rate of 257.3 MHz and pulse duration of 887 fs. The results show that SnSe2 can be used as an excellent nonlinear photonic device in many fields, such as frequency comb, lasers, photodetectors, etc.

Flexible membranes with excellent waterproofness and breathability have been strongly desired in wound dressing applications with the aim of providing both protection and comfort. Despite the advances in protective clothing using waterproof breathable materials, the construction of waterproof breathable membranes suited for wound dressing still faces huge challenges to eliminate the toxic solvent residue-related harm to health and improve the waterproof, breathable, and stretchable performance. In the current work, we developed a facile and versatile approach based on one-step electrospinning and an ethanol solvent system for producing skinlike waterproof and breathable polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) embedded polyvinyl butyral (PVB) fibrous membranes. Benefiting from the addition of hydrophobic agent PDMS, a reduced maximum pore size and enhanced surface hydrophobicity were achieved, contributing to a maximum hydrostatic pressure of 54.32 kPa, which was about 4.0 times that of the PVB fibrous membrane. In addition, the obtained PVB/PDMS fibrous membranes exhibited a remarkable water vapor transmission rate of 8.98 kg m −2 day −1 , and enhanced mechanical strength of 4.95 MPa. The developed fibrous membranes provided human skinlike functions, including blocking liquid water penetration inside, permitting water vapor transmission outside, and allowing for sufficient stretching at joint positions. Taken together, this work could contribute to a better design of health-friendly, waterproof, breathable, and stretchable wound dressing materials.

A supercontinuum source based on a figure-eight Er-doped fiber ring cavity has been experimentally demonstrated with low repetition rate. The proposed configuration of the experiment is a figure-eight fiber laser grounded in Nonlinear Optical Loop Mirror (NOLM) technique. A broad spectrum of approximately 410 nm spanning the range 1315-1725 nm at the level of 30 dB can be obtained at a given average power of 2.6 mW and without any amplifier. Such wide spectrum can be directly achieved in the fiber resonator, which makes the structure compact and robust. By changing the pump power, the temporal pulse width can be adjusted accordingly. The pulse width is about 4 ns at the pump power of around 240 mW. The broadband spectrum was generated directly from the fiber resonator, which can be easily applied in numerous areas, such as the optical frequency metrology, optical spectroscopy, optical coherence tomography, optical communications, and medical sciences.

Single domain YBCO bulk superconductors have been fabricated with different vertical temperature gradients (VTG) by a modified top-seeded infiltration and growth (TSIG) process with a new solid phase (Y 2 O 3 +BaCuO 2 ) and a new liquid phase (Y 2 O 3 +6CuO +10BaCuO 2 ). It is found that the angle α (between the upper surface and interface of a-and c-growth sectors) is very sensitive to the VTG, which means that the growth rate in caxis direction (R c ) can be changed by the VTG, according to tan α = R c /R a ; R a is the growth rate in the a-axis direction. It is also found that the 4-fold growth sectors did not cover the whole surface of the sample grown with a positive VTG, and the volume fraction of the single c-axis growth sector (V fc ) is 37.5% of the sample grown with a zero VTG, but it is reduced to 25% by a positive VTG, and enlarged to 53.6% by a negative VTG. The results of levitation force and trapped field of the samples show that a negative (or positive) VTG can improve (or reduce) levitation force and trapped field of the sample compared with that of the sample grown under a zero VTG. The results provide a very important way to fabricate large-size YBCO bulks with higher V fc and better physical properties.