Oxidative Etching of Hexagonal Boron Nitride Toward Nanosheets with Defined Edges and Holes

Lateral surface etching of two-dimensional (2D) nanosheets results in holey 2D nanosheets that have abundant edge atoms. Recent reports on holey graphene showed that holey 2D nanosheets can outperform their intact counterparts in many potential applications such as energy storage, catalysis, sensing, transistors, and molecular transport/separation. From both fundamental and application perspectives, it is desirable to obtain holey 2D nanosheets with defined hole morphology and hole edge structures. This remains a great challenge for graphene and is little explored for other 2D nanomaterials. Here, a facile, controllable, and scalable method is reported to carve geometrically defined pit/hole shapes and edges on hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) basal plane surfaces via oxidative etching in air using silver nanoparticles as catalysts. The etched h-BN was further purified and exfoliated into nanosheets that inherited the hole/edge structural motifs and, under certain conditions, possess altered optical bandgap properties likely induced by the enriched zigzag edge atoms. This method opens up an exciting approach to further explore the physical and chemical properties of hole-and edge-enriched boron nitride and other 2D nanosheets, paving the way toward applications that can take advantage of their unique structures and performance characteristics

Holey graphene: a unique structural derivative of graphene

Holey graphene (hG), also called graphene nanomesh, is a structural derivative of graphene. hG is formed by removing a large number of atoms from the graphitic plane to produce holes distributed on and through the atomic thickness of the graphene sheets. These holes, sometimes with abundant functional groups around their edges, impart properties that are uncommon to intact graphene but advantageous toward various applications. In this review, strategies to prepare hG and the related applications that take advantage of the unique structural motif of these materials are discussed. Prospects are then given for this emerging class of graphene derivatives

Toward Edge-Defined Holey Boron Nitride Nanosheets

"Holey" two-dimensional (2D) nanosheets with well-defined holy morphology and edge chemistry are highly desirable for applications such as energy storage, catalysis, sensing, transistors, and molecular transport/separation. For example, holey grapheme is currently under extensive investigation for energy storage applications because of the improvement in ion transport due to through the thickness pathways provided by the holes. Without the holes, the 2D materials have significant limitations for such applications in which efficient ion transport is important. As part of an effort to apply this approach to other 2D nanomaterials, a method to etch geometrically defined pits or holes on the basal plane surface of hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) nanosheets has been developed. The etching, conducted via heating in ambient air using metal nanoparticles as catalysts, was facile, controllable, and scalable. Starting h-BN layered crystals were etched and subsequently exfoliated into boron nitride nanosheets (BNNSs). The as-etched and exfoliated h-BN nanosheets possessed defined pit and hole shapes that were comprised of regulated nanostructures at the edges. The current finding are the first step toward the bulk preparation of holey BNNSs with defined holes and edges

Evolution of Moire Profiles from van der Waals Superstructures of Boron Nitride Nanosheets

Two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) superstructures, or vdW solids, are formed by the precise restacking of 2D nanosheet lattices, which can lead to unique physical and electronic properties that are not available in the parent nanosheets. Moire patterns formed by the crystalline mismatch between adjacent nanosheets are the most direct features for vdW superstructures under microscopic imaging. In this article, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) observation of hexagonal Moire patterns with unusually large micrometer-sized lateral areas (up to similar to 1 mu m(2)) and periodicities (up to similar to 50 nm) from restacking of liquid exfoliated hexagonal boron nitride nanosheets (BNNSs) is reported. This observation was attributed to the long range crystallinity and the contaminant-free surfaces of these chemically inert nanosheets. Parallel-line-like Moire fringes with similarly large periodicities were also observed. The simulations and experiments unambiguously revealed that the hexagonal patterns and the parallel fringes originated from the same rotationally mismatched vdW stacking of BNNSs and can be inter-converted by simply tilting the TEM specimen following designated directions. This finding may pave the way for further structural decoding of other 2D vdW superstructure systems with more complex Moire images

Chemical Sharpening, Shortening, and Unzipping of Boron Nitride Nanotubes

Boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs), the one-dimensional member of the boron nitride nanostructure family, are generally accepted to be highly inert to oxidative treatments and can only be covalently modifi ed by highly reactive species. Conversely, it is discovered that the BNNTs can be chemically dispersed and their morphology modifi ed by a relatively mild method: simply sonicating the nanotubes in aqueous ammonia solution. The dispersed nanotubes are significantly corroded, with end-caps removed, tips sharpened, and walls thinned. The sonication treatment in aqueous ammonia solution also removes amorphous BN impurities and shortened BNNTs, resembling various oxidative treatments of carbon nanotubes. Importantly, the majority of BNNTs are at least partially longitudinally cut, or "unzipped". Entangled and freestanding BN nanoribbons (BNNRs), resulting from the unzipping, are found to be approximately 5-20 nm in width and up to a few hundred nanometers in length. This is the fi rst chemical method to obtain BNNRs from BNNT unzipping. This method is not derived from known carbon nanotube unzipping strategies, but is unique to BNNTs because the use of aqueous ammonia solutions specifi cally targets the B-N bond network. This study may pave the way for convenient processing of BNNTs, previously thought to be highly inert, toward controlling their dispersion, purity, lengths, and electronic properties

Microarray studies on effects of Pneumocystis carinii infection on global gene expression in alveolar macrophages

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p><it>Pneumocystis </it>pneumonia is a common opportunistic disease in AIDS patients. The alveolar macrophage is an important effector cell in the clearance of <it>Pneumocystis </it>organisms by phagocytosis. However, both the number and phagocytic activity of alveolar macrophages are decreased in <it>Pneumocystis </it>infected hosts. To understand how <it>Pneumocystis </it>inactivates alveolar macrophages, Affymetrix GeneChip^®RG-U34A DNA microarrays were used to study the difference in global gene expression in alveolar macrophages from uninfected and <it>Pneumocystis carinii</it>-infected Sprague-Dawley rats.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Analyses of genes that were affected by <it>Pneumocystis </it>infection showed that many functions in the cells were affected. Antigen presentation, cell-mediated immune response, humoral immune response, and inflammatory response were most severely affected, followed by cellular movement, immune cell trafficking, immunological disease, cell-to-cell signaling and interaction, cell death, organ injury and abnormality, cell signaling, infectious disease, small molecular biochemistry, antimicrobial response, and free radical scavenging. Since rats must be immunosuppressed in order to develop <it>Pneumocystis </it>infection, alveolar macrophages from four rats of the same sex and age that were treated with dexamethasone for the entire eight weeks of the study period were also examined. With a filter of false-discovery rate less than 0.1 and fold change greater than 1.5, 200 genes were found to be up-regulated, and 144 genes were down-regulated by dexamethasone treatment. During <it>Pneumocystis </it>pneumonia, 115 genes were found to be up- and 137 were down-regulated with the same filtering criteria. The top ten genes up-regulated by <it>Pneumocystis </it>infection were Cxcl10, Spp1, S100A9, Rsad2, S100A8, Nos2, RT1-Bb, Lcn2, RT1-Db1, and Srgn with fold changes ranging between 12.33 and 5.34; and the top ten down-regulated ones were Lgals1, Psat1, Tbc1d23, Gsta1, Car5b, Xrcc5, Pdlim1, Alcam, Cidea, and Pkib with fold changes ranging between -4.24 and -2.25.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>In order to survive in the host, <it>Pneumocystis </it>organisms change the expression profile of alveolar macrophages. Results of this study revealed that <it>Pneumocystis </it>infection affects many cellular functions leading to reduced number and activity of alveolar macrophages during <it>Pneumocystis </it>pneumonia.</p

A nonlinear triboelectric nanogenerator with a broadened bandwidth for effective harvesting of vibration energy

A narrow resonance bandwidth of an energy harvesters limits its response to the wide frequency spectrum in ambient environments. This work proposes an addition of a nonlinear restoring force applied to a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) to tune and broaden the resonance bandwidth. This restoring force is applied by permanent magnets at both sides of the slider and two external magnets. The noncontact strategy is adopted between the slider and the grating electrodes to avoid the wear of electrodes and energy loss caused by friction. The results show that compared with the linear system, the nonlinear noncontact TENG (NN-TENG) can increase the peak current from 6.3 μA to 7.89 μA, with an increment of about 25%, increase the peak power from 650 μW to 977 μW, increasing by about 50%, and increase the bandwidth from 0.5 Hz to 7.75 Hz, increasing by about1400%. This work may enable a new strategy to boost the bandwidth and output power of TENG through nonlinear oscillators

Deep high-temperature hydrothermal circulation in a detachment faulting system on the ultra-slow spreading ridge

© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Tao, C., Seyfried, W. E., Jr., Lowell, R. P., Liu, Y., Liang, J., Guo, Z., Ding, K., Zhang, H., Liu, J., Qiu, L., Egorov, I., Liao, S., Zhao, M., Zhou, J., Deng, X., Li, H., Wang, H., Cai, W., Zhang, G., Zhou, H., Lin, J., & Li, W. Deep high-temperature hydrothermal circulation in a detachment faulting system on the ultra-slow spreading ridge. Nature Communications, 11(1), (2020): 1300, doi:10.1038/s41467-020-15062-w.Coupled magmatic and tectonic activity plays an important role in high-temperature hydrothermal circulation at mid-ocean ridges. The circulation patterns for such systems have been elucidated by microearthquakes and geochemical data over a broad spectrum of spreading rates, but such data have not been generally available for ultra-slow spreading ridges. Here we report new geophysical and fluid geochemical data for high-temperature active hydrothermal venting at Dragon Horn area (49.7°E) on the Southwest Indian Ridge. Twin detachment faults penetrating to the depth of 13 ± 2 km below the seafloor were identified based on the microearthquakes. The geochemical composition of the hydrothermal fluids suggests a long reaction path involving both mafic and ultramafic lithologies. Combined with numerical simulations, our results demonstrate that these hydrothermal fluids could circulate ~ 6 km deeper than the Moho boundary and to much greater depths than those at Trans-Atlantic Geotraverse and Logachev-1 hydrothermal fields on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.This work was supported by National Key R&D Program of China under contract no. 2018YFC0309901, 2017YFC0306603, 2017YFC0306803, and 2017YFC0306203, COMRA Major Project under contract No. DY135-S1-01-01 and No. DY135-S1-01-06

AI is a viable alternative to high throughput screening: a 318-target study

: High throughput screening (HTS) is routinely used to identify bioactive small molecules. This requires physical compounds, which limits coverage of accessible chemical space. Computational approaches combined with vast on-demand chemical libraries can access far greater chemical space, provided that the predictive accuracy is sufficient to identify useful molecules. Through the largest and most diverse virtual HTS campaign reported to date, comprising 318 individual projects, we demonstrate that our AtomNet® convolutional neural network successfully finds novel hits across every major therapeutic area and protein class. We address historical limitations of computational screening by demonstrating success for target proteins without known binders, high-quality X-ray crystal structures, or manual cherry-picking of compounds. We show that the molecules selected by the AtomNet® model are novel drug-like scaffolds rather than minor modifications to known bioactive compounds. Our empirical results suggest that computational methods can substantially replace HTS as the first step of small-molecule drug discovery

High Quality TaS₂ Nanosheet SPR Biosensors Improved Sensitivity and the Experimental Demonstration for the Detection of Hg²⁺

TaS2 as transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) two-dimensional (2D) material has sufficient unstructured bonds and large inter-layer spacing, which highly supports transporting and absorbing mercury ions. The structural characterizations and simulation data show that an SPR sensor with high sensitivity can be obtained with a TaS2 material-modified sensitive layer. In this paper, the role of TaS2 nanoparticles in an SPR sensor was explored by simulation and experiment, and the TaS2 layer in an SPR sensor was characterized by SEM, elemental mapping, XPS, and other methods. The application range of structured TaS2 nanoparticles is explored, these TaS2 based sensors were applied to detect Hg2+ ions at a detection limit approaching 1 pM, and an innovative idea for designing highly sensitive detection techniques is provided