Advances in research on the effectiveness and mechanism of Traditional Chinese Medicine formulas for colitis-associated colorectal cancer.

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) can progress into colitis-associated colorectal cancer (CAC) through the inflammation-cancer sequence. Although the mechanism of carcinogenesis in IBD has not been fully elucidated, the existing research indicates that CAC may represent a fundamentally different pathogenesis pattern of colorectal cancer. At present, there is no proven safe and effective medication to prevent IBD cancer. In recent years, Chinese medicine extracts and Chinese medicine monomers have been the subject of numerous articles about the prevention and treatment of CAC, but their clinical application is still relatively limited. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) formulas are widely applied in clinical practice. TCM formulas have demonstrated great potential in the prevention and treatment of CAC in recent years, although there is still a lack of review. Our work aimed to summarize the effects and potential mechanisms of TCM formulas for the prevention and treatment of CAC, point out the issues and limitations of the current research, and provide recommendations for the advancement of CAC research in the future. We discovered that TCM formulas regulated many malignant biological processes, such as inflammation-mediated oxidative stress, apoptosis, tumor microenvironment, and intestinal microecology imbalance in CAC, through a review of the articles published in databases such as PubMed, SCOPUS, Web of Science, Embase, and CNKI. Several major signal transduction pathways, including NF-κB, STAT3, Wnt/ß-catenin, HIF-1α, and Nrf2, were engaged. TCM formula may be a promising treatment candidate to control the colitis-cancer transformation, however further high-quality research is required.

Hierarchical Reduced Graphene Oxide Ridges for Stretchable, Wearable, and Washable Strain Sensors.

Recently, flexible and wearable devices are increasingly in demand and graphene has been widely used due to its exceptional chemical, mechanical and electrical properties. Building complex buckling patterns of graphene is an essential strategy to increase its flexible and stretchable properties. Herein, a facile dimensionally controlled four-dimensional (4D) shrinking method was proposed to generate hierarchical reduced graphene oxide (rGO) buckling patterns on curved substrates mimicking different parts of the uniforms. The reduced graphene oxide ridges (rGORs) generated on the spherical substrate seem isotropic, while those generated on the cylindrical substrate are obviously more hierarchical or oriented, especially when the cylindrical substrate are shrinking via two steps. The oriented rGORs are superhydrophobic and strain sensitive but obviously anisotropic along the axial and circumferential directions. The sensitivity of rGORs along the axial direction is much higher than those along the circumferential direction. In addition, the intrinsic solvent barrier property of graphene enables the crack-free rGORs an excellent chemical protective performance, withstanding DCM immersion for more than 2.5 h. The flexible rGORs-based strain sensors can be used to detect both large and subtle human motions and activities by achieving high sensitivity (maximum gauge factor up to 48), high unidirectional stretchability (300-530%), and ultrahigh areal stretchability (up to 2690%). Excellent durability was also demonstrated for human motion monitoring with resistance to hand rubbing, ultrasonic cleaning, machine washing, and chemical immersion.

Facile Wearable Vapor/Liquid Amphibious Methanol Sensor.

Detection of methanol is a significant segment for body health and work safety in the production of chemical industry. However, there hardly exists highly selective methanol detection system with green environment for vapor or liquid adaptability, as well as large linear relationship. A facile wearable vapor/liquid amphibious electrochemical sensor for monitoring methanol has been carried out for the first time in this Article. This wearable methanol sensor was fabricated by using a simple screen-printing technology for accomplishing a microdevice platform, showing good linear relationship, high selectivity (multiple volatile chemical compounds), reliable repeatability, good stability, and excellent stretching and bending performance (nitrile glove-based sensor) without pretreatment or adding any polymers into inks. Owing to its good environmental adaptability of vapor or liquid and various sensing behaviors (high sensitivity and wide linear range) by being modified with different content of platinum catalyst, this methanol sensor would have tremendous potential application for environmental monitoring on smart wearable devices when employed based on various platforms (such as PET, cotton, and nitrile gloves).

Cellular toxicity of silicon carbide nanomaterials as a function of morphology.

Silicon carbide has been shown to be biocompatible and is used as a coating material for implanted medical devices to prevent biofilms. Silicon carbide nanomaterials are also promising in cell tracking due to their stable and strong luminescence, but more comprehensive studies of this material on the nanoscale are needed. Here, we studied the toxicity of silicon carbide nanomaterials on human mesenchymal stem cells in terms of metabolism, viability, adhesion, proliferation, migration, oxidative stress, and differentiation ability. We compared two different shapes and found that silicon carbide nanowires are toxic to human mesenchymal stem cells but not to cancer cell lines at the concentration of 0.1 mg/mL. Control silicon carbide nanoparticles were biocompatible to human mesenchymal stem cells at 0.1 mg/mL. We studied the potential mechanistic effect of silicon carbide nanowires on human mesenchymal stem cells' phenotype, cytokine secretion, and gene expression. These findings suggest that the toxic effect of silicon carbide nanomaterials to human mesenchymal stem cells are dependent on morphology.

Synthesis of hierarchical hollow sodium titanate microspheres and their application for selective removal of organic dyes.

Titanate-based materials are attractive inorganic adsorbents for wastewater treatment. In this study, hierarchical hollow sodium titanate microspheres (HHSTMs) were successfully synthesized via a template-assisted method. Silica microspheres were selected as hard templates, with a uniformly smooth TiO2 shell first grown onto the surface of the SiO2 cores. Then, through an alkaline hydrothermal process, the silica core was removed and the TiO2 shell gradually converted into a sodium titanate shell with a preserved morphology. The as-synthesized HHSTMs are constructed from twined nanobelts, with a high surface area of 308 m2 g-1. A typical organic dye, methylene blue, was employed to investigate the adsorption properties of the HHSTMs. The adsorption process matched well with the Langmuir isothermal model, with the maximum adsorption capacity of methylene blue reaching 443 mg g-1. Moreover, the resulting HHSTMs can be used to selectively capture of methylene blue from a cationic-anionic dye binary system due to their negatively charged surface. All adsorption processes were very fast and could complete in ten minutes.

Gyrification-Inspired Highly Convoluted Graphene Oxide Patterns for Ultralarge Deforming Actuators.

Gyrification in the human brain is driven by the compressive stress induced by the tangential expansion of the cortical layer, while similar topographies can also be induced by the tangential shrinkage of the spherical substrate. Herein we introduce a simple three-dimensional (3D) shrinking method to generate the cortex-like patterns using two-dimensional (2D) graphene oxide (GO) as the building blocks. By rotation-dip-coating a GO film on an air-charged latex balloon and then releasing the air slowly, a highly folded hydrophobic GO surface can be induced. Wrinkling-to-folding transition was observed and the folding state can be easily regulated by varying the prestrain of the substrate and the thickness of the GO film. Driven by the residue stresses stored in the system, sheet-to-tube actuating occurs rapidly once the bilayer system is cut into slices. In response to some organic solvents, however, the square bilayer actuator exhibits excellent reversible, bidirectional, large-deformational curling properties on wetting and drying. An ultralarge curvature of 2.75 mm-1 was observed within 18 s from the original negative bending to the final positive bending in response to tetrahydrofuran (THF). In addition to a mechanical hand, a swimming worm, a smart package, a bionic mimosa, and two bionic flowers, a crude oil collector has been designed and demonstrated, aided by the superhydrophobic and superoleophilic modified GO surface and the solvent-responsive bilayer system.

Hybrids of Reduced Graphene Oxide and Hexagonal Boron Nitride: Lightweight Absorbers with Tunable and Highly Efficient Microwave Attenuation Properties.

Sandwichlike hybrids of reduced graphene oxide (rGO) and hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) were prepared via heat treatment of the self-assemblies of graphene oxide (GO) and ammonia borane (AB). TG-DSC-QMS analysis indicate a mutually promoted redox reaction between GO and AB; 900 °C is a proper temperature to transfer the hybrids into inorganic sandwiches. XRD, XPS, and Raman spectra reveal the existence of h-BN embedded into the rGO frameworks. High-resolution SEM and TEM indicate the layer-by-layer structure of the hybrids. The content of h-BN can be increased with increase of the mass ratio of AB and the highest heat treatment temperature. The complex permittivity and the microwave absorption are tunable with the variation of the content of h-BN. When the mass ratio of GO/AB is 1:1, the microwave absorption of the hybrid treated at 900 °C is preferable in the range of 6-18 GHz. A minimum reflection loss, -40.5 dB, was observed at 15.3 GHz for the wax composite filled with 25 wt % hybrids at the thickness of 1.6 mm. The qualified frequency bandwidth reaches 5 GHz at this thickness with a low surface density close to 1.68 kg/m2. The layer-by-layer structure of the hybrid makes great contributions to the increased approaches and possibilities of electron migrating and hopping, which has both highly efficient dielectric loss and excellent impedance matching for microwave consumption.

Room-temperature humidity-sensing performance of SiC nanopaper.

Centimeters-long SiC nanowire could be a strong "bridge" between microworld and macroworld due to its unique morphology, excellent chemical stability, and intriguing physical properties. Here we present a novel "paperlike" material-free-standing SiC nanopaper fabricated by acetone-assisted compression of centimeters-long SiC nanowires. The resistance of this new paperlike material linearly increases with increasing environmental relative humidity in a very short time. We suggest that adsorption of water molecules on SiC nanopaper surface led to fast electron transfer between SiC nanopaper and water layer, which indicates that SiC nanopaper could be applied to high-performance humidity sensor in harsh environment.