Aggregation-Induced Emission in Electrochemiluminescence: Advances and Perspectives

The discovery of aggregation-induced electrochemiluminescence (AIECL) in 2017 opened new research paths in the quest for novel, more efficient emitters and platforms for biological and environmental sensing applications. The great abundance of fluorophores presenting aggregation-induced emission in aqueous media renders AIECL a potentially powerful tool for future diagnostics. In the short time following this discovery, many scientists have found the phenomenon interesting, with research findings contributing to advances in the comprehension of the processes involved and in attempts to design new sensing platforms. Herein, we explore these advances and reflect on the future directions to take for the development of sensing devices based on AIECL

Tracheal extramedullary plasmacytoma: a rare cause of chronic cough.

Operative Rigid Bronchoscopy treatmen

Punctured Two-Dimensional Sheets for Harvesting Blue Energy

The challenges of global climate change and the world’s growing demand for energy have brought the need for new renewable energy sources to the top of the international community’s agenda. We have known for many centuries that energy is released upon mixing seawater and freshwater, yet it was just a few decades ago that it became clear how this energy can be converted into electricity instead of heat. As a result, the blue energy rush has raised and set new strategies in different science and technology sectors, leading to the construction of a new generation of plants and other technological investments. Among many approaches, pressure-retarded osmosis has emerged as a promising method to collect the largest amount of produced blue energy. In this Perspective, we highlight the advances in the development of ultrathin membranes based on two-dimensional materials. We discuss the most relevant synthetic methods devised to generate atomically thin membranes for pressure-retarded osmosis and retarded electrodialysis applications, and we provide some critical views on the greatest challenges in this thrilling research area

Solvent‐Driven Supramolecular Wrapping of Self‐Assembled Structures

Self‐assembly relies on the ability of smaller and discrete entities to spontaneously arrange into more organized systems by means of the structure‐encoded information. Herein, we show that the design of the media can play a role even more important than the chemical design. The media not only determines the self‐assembly pathway at a single‐component level, but in a very narrow solvent composition, a supramolecular homo‐aggregate can be non‐covalently wrapped by a second component that possesses a different crystal lattice. Such a process has been followed in real time by confocal microscopy thanks to the different emission colors of the aggregates formed by two isolated PtII complexes. This coating is reversible and controlled by the media composition. Single‐crystal X‐ray diffraction and molecular simulations based on coarse‐grained (CG) models allowed the understanding of the properties displayed by the different aggregates. Such findings could result in a new method to construct hierarchical supramolecular structures

Solvent-driven chirality for luminescent self- assembled structures: experiments and theory

We describe, for a single platinum complex bearing a dipeptide moiety, a solvent-driven interconversion from twisted to straight micrometric assembled structures with different chirality. The photophysical and morphological properties of the aggregates have been investigated as well as the role of the media and concentration. A real-time visualization of the solvent-driven interconversion processes has been achieved by confocal microscopy. Finally, atomistic and coarse-grained simulations, providing results consistent with the experimental observations, allow to obtain a molecular-level insight into the interesting solvent-responsive behavior of this system

Direct Patterning of Organic Functional Polymers through Conventional Photolithography and Noninvasive Cross-Link Agents

A new technique for direct patterning of functional organic polymers using commercial photolithography setups with a minimal loss of the materials' performances is reported. This result is achieved through novel cross-link agents made by boron- and fluorine-containing heterocycles that can react between themselves upon UV- and white-light exposure

Chemical sensing with 2D materials

During the last decade, two-dimensional materials (2DMs) have attracted great attention due to their unique chemical and physical properties, which make them appealing platforms for diverse applications in opto-electronic devices, energy generation and storage, and sensing. Among their various extraordinary properties, 2DMs possess high surface area-to-volume ratios and ultra-high surface sensitivity to the environment, which are key characteristics for applications in chemical sensing. Furthermore, 2DMs’ superior electrical and optical properties, combined with their excellent mechanical characteristics such as robustness and flexibility, make these materials ideal components for the fabrication of a new generation of high-performance chemical sensors. Depending on the specific device, 2DMs can be tailored to interact with various chemical species at the non-covalent level, making them powerful platforms for fabricating devices exhibiting a high sensitivity towards detection of various analytes including gases, ions and small biomolecules. Here, we will review the most enlightening recent advances in the field of chemical sensors based on atomically-thin 2DMs and we will discuss the opportunities and the challenges towards the realization of novel hybrid materials and sensing devices

3D vs. 2D MRI radiomics in skeletal Ewing sarcoma: Feature reproducibility and preliminary machine learning analysis on neoadjuvant chemotherapy response prediction

ObjectiveThe extent of response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy predicts survival in Ewing sarcoma. This study focuses on MRI radiomics of skeletal Ewing sarcoma and aims to investigate feature reproducibility and machine learning prediction of response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Materials and methodsThis retrospective study included thirty patients with biopsy-proven skeletal Ewing sarcoma, who were treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy before surgery at two tertiary sarcoma centres. 7 patients were poor responders and 23 were good responders based on pathological assessment of the surgical specimen. On pre-treatment T1-weighted and T2-weighted MRI, 2D and 3D tumour segmentations were manually performed. Features were extracted from original and wavelet-transformed images. Feature reproducibility was assessed through small geometrical transformations of the regions of interest mimicking multiple manual delineations, and intraclass correlation coefficient >0.75 defined feature reproducibility. Feature selection also consisted of collinearity and significance analysis. After class balancing in the training cohort, three machine learning classifiers were trained and tested on unseen data using hold-out cross-validation. Results1303 (77%) 3D and 620 (65%) 2D radiomic features were reproducible. 4 3D and 4 2D features passed feature selection. Logistic regression built upon 3D features achieved the best performance with 85% accuracy (AUC=0.9) in predicting response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy. ConclusionCompared to 2D approach, 3D MRI radiomics of Ewing sarcoma had superior reproducibility and higher accuracy in predicting response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy, particularly when using logistic regression classifier

Graphene Oxide Hybrid with Sulfur–Nitrogen Polymer for High-Performance Pseudocapacitors

Toward the introduction of fast faradaic pseudocapacitive behavior and the increase of the specific capacitance of carbon-based electrodes, we covalently functionalized graphene oxide with a redox active thiourea-formaldehyde polymer, yielding a multifunctional hybrid system. The multiscale physical and chemical characterization of the novel 3-dimensional hybrid revealed high material porosity with high specific surface area (402 m2 g–1) and homogeneous element distribution. The presence of multiple functional groups comprising sulfur, nitrogen, and oxygen provide additional contribution of Faradaic redox reaction in supercapacity performance, leading to a high effective electrochemical pseudocapacitance. Significantly, our graphene-based 3-dimensional thiourea-formaldehyde hybrid exhibited specific capacitance as high as 400 F g–1, areal capacitance of 160 mF cm–2, and an energy density of 11.1 mWh cm–3 at scan rate of 1 mV s–1 with great capacitance retention (100%) after 5000 cycles at scan rate of 100 mV s–1