Nurturing net generation graduates with global skills

The total enrolments in more than 20,000 universities and tertiary education providers around the world are in the range of 200 million students. One in five students are enrolled in technology related disciplines. Various surveys reiterate that only a fraction of graduates are suitable for careers in the world of hyper-connected economies and competitive businesses with supply chains spanning the world. Universities irrespective of where they are functioning are facing new challenges, opportunities and expectations. They are being assessed, benchmarked and compared frequently by third parties with considerable impact on reputation, student enrolments, and resources. Tertiary institutions are on the cusp of enrolling a Net generation of students, who have diverse learning aspirations and needs compared the earlier generations. The emerging scenario requires the tertiary education to be reimagined in terms of the way a) the students are developed to possess global skills and values, b) faculty members are prepared to inspire students, c) curriculum and pedagogy are tailored to the needs of 21st Century workplaces and jobs, d) scientific research and innovation are carried out, and e) entrepreneurship is facilitated at the universities. This manuscript is based on authors’ own experiences during the rise of world-class universities in Singapore, and close interactions with several tertiary institutions around the world. The reimagined higher education will enable future graduates to build liveable and resilient societie

Intelligent hydrogels and their biomedical applications

Intelligent biomaterials can modify their properties in response to physical, chemical, and biological stimuli. These smart characteristics drive the innovation of biomaterials in therapy and diagnostics for detecting diseases and providing treatment at early stages. Mainly, hydrogels have gained significant interest in developing smart materials due to their excellent biocompatibility and ability to interact with body fluids that host condition-specific stimuli. Temperature, pressure, pH, light, ROS, cell metabolites, and other physicochemical factors specific to specific disease conditions were studied as major stimuli for designing intelligent biomaterials. The stimuli-responsive characteristic mainly depends on the sensitivity of the biomaterial to the stimuli factor and the tunable macromolecular structure of the materials. The method of biomaterial fabrication is critical in determining the physical and chemical properties of the biomaterial. Surface functionalisation, material blending, and crosslinking are commonly used to synthesise intelligent hydrogels to change the macromolecular structure. The impact and mechanism of these fabrication methods on the macromolecular structure and stimuli responsiveness of intelligent materials remain unidentified. This review focuses on strategies for transforming conventional hydrogels into intelligent hydrogels, their concerning mechanisms of stimuli-responsiveness and their biomedical applications.Peer reviewe

Electrospinning and emerging healthcare and medicine possibilities

Electrospinning forms fibers from either an electrically charged polymer solution or polymer melt. Over the past decades, it has become a simple and versatile method for nanofiber production. Hence, it has been explored in many different applications. Commonly used electrospinning assembles fibers from polymer solutions in various solvents, known as solution electrospinning, while melt and near-field electrospinning techniques enhance the versatility of electrospinning. Adaption of additive manufacturing strategy to electrospinning permits precise fiber deposition and predefining pattern construction. This manuscript critically presents the potential of electrospun nanofibers in healthcare applications. Research community drew impetus from the similarity of electrospun nanofibers to the morphology and mechanical properties of fibrous extracellular matrices (ECM) of natural human tissues. Electrospun nanofibrous scaffolds act as ECM analogs for specific tissue cells, stem cells, and tumor cells to realize tissue regeneration, stem cell differentiation, and in vitro tumor model construction. The large surface-to-volume ratio of electrospun nanofibers offers a considerable number of bioactive agents binding sites, which makes it a promising candidate for a number of biomedical applications. The applications of electrospinning in regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, controlled drug delivery, biosensors, and cancer diagnosis are elaborated. Electrospun nanofiber incorporations in medical device coating, in vitro 3D cancer model, and filtration membrane are also discussed

Addressing sustainability gaps

Widespread industrialization, rapid urbanization, and massive transport through land, waters, and air have led to catastrophes such as climate change, water pollution, resource limitation, and pandemics causing severe economic consequences, massive influences on the natural environment and pose a great threat to the life sustainability. Sustainability topic has a long history, and many policies and initiatives are in effect for a sustainable planet Earth, still gaps of varying degrees exist in almost all sectors. This article addresses the essentiality of minimising the sustainability gaps exist in diverse realms of life and citing few examples. Creating a cyclic path for production–consumption process in the economic sector through promoting circular economy, learning from the natural processes through appropriate biomimicking, and knowledge-integration from diverse disciplines and emphasizing sustainability in the educational sector are shown to lower the sustainability gaps

Principles of materials circular economy

Material sourcing, processing, usage, and end-use management play a substantial role in present-day life; however, the sustainability concerns call for adaptation of “materials circular economy” to provide the materials’ share of the solutions to the existential threats. This Matter of Opinion puts together ten principles of materials circular economy as a guide for the materials community at large, including researchers, engineers, designers, manufacturers, businesses, and policy makers, to review and update. We hope that these ten principles and associated future editions will be helpful to eliminate the materials-related existential threats

The largest emission sector direly needs more research funds to clean-up

Biomass growing and harvesting; mineral and fossil resource extraction; and processing of materials, fuels and food accounted for more than 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2022 and more than 60% if land-use change impacts are considered” reports the international resource panel in their 2024 global resource outlook (United Nations Environmental Program 2024). In a nutshell, material sourcing and processing for all walks of life contributed 55% of the global emission. An inadvertent surge in material usage by 60% than the 2022 levels is predicted (United Nations Environmental Program 2024); if the current habits of sourcing and processing prevail, the future of a liveable planet Earth is uncertain. The report also notes that “the scientific community has never been more aligned before or more resolute on the need for urgent global transformation towards the sustainable use of resources” (United Nations Environmental Program 2024); however, practical changes are yet to be seen. Obviously, switching into a circular economy and circular use of materials are unanimously opined as the way forward for a sustainable planet. Circular economy, by definition, is an intentionally designed economic system wherein life means are made cyclic, similar to natural life cycle, such that resources are not wasted or accumulated in air, soil, or water but avoid adverse health effects on humans as well as other living beings (An Introduction to Circular Economy 2021). Circular materials, on the other hand, are “renewable materials” or “sustainable materials” or “low-carbon materials” that foster a healthy living environment and a circular economy via the elimination or reduction of associated greenhouse gas emissions and resource depletion and wastage (Ramakrishna and Jose 2022). Circular materials are purposely designed with lower environmental footprint and social costs and higher circularity potential while satisfying the cost as well as functional requirements. The primary purpose of the Springer Nature journal Materials Circular Economy is to promote and direct circular materials research for sustainability

Rheological, Surface Tension and Conductivity Insights on the Electrospinnability of Poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid)-hyaluronic Acid Solutions and Their Correlations with the Nanofiber Morphological Characteristics

In this study, solutions were prepared with fixed concentrations of hyaluronic acid (HA) but varied concentrations of poly (lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) to emphasize the effects of PLGA concentration and HA addition on solution properties and to further evaluate their electrospinning performance. The dependence of specific viscosity on PLGA concentration was studied to determine the concentration regimes and evaluate the critical concentration (Ce) for successful fiber generation. The Ce of PLGA solutions is 12.07% compared to 10.09% for PLGA-HA solutions. Blending with HA results in a lower concentration dependence and better consistency to the theoretical scaling mechanisms due to the additional topological constrains, which thus result in more chain entanglements. Solutions in semi-dilute entangled regimes show the crossover of complex moduli, verifying the stable and reliable entanglement network. Higher concentrations and HA addition both led to lower crossover frequencies and, thus, a longer relaxation time. The effects of a higher PLGA concentration and HA addition on the surface tension were not evident. However, the HA addition significantly improved the solution conductivity up to three times in the pure PLGA solutions due to its polyelectrolyte nature. Defect-free and uniform nanofibers were generated from 35% to 40% of the PLGA-HA solutions, yet fibers with bead-on-string structures were produced from all studied pure PLGA solutions. Such solution characteristics and parametric correlations can provide predictive insights on tailoring the morphological characteristics of nanofibers for specific applications

Facile construction of nanofibrous ZnO photoelectrode for dye-sensitized solar cell applications

A facile method to prepare nanofibrous ZnO photoelectrodes with tunable thicknesses by electrospinning is reported. A “self-relaxation layer” is formed spontaneously between ZnO nanofibers and fluorine-doped SnO2 FTO substrate, which facilitates the release of interfacial tensile stress during calcination, resulting in good adhesion of ZnO film to FTO substrate. Dye-sensitized solar cells DSSCs based on the nanofibrous ZnO photoelectrodes are fabricated and an energy conversion efficiency of 3.02% is achieved under irradiation of AM 1.5 simulated sunlight with a power density of 100 mW cm−2, which shows good promise of electrospun nanofibrous ZnO as the photoelectrode in DSSCs

Sustainability in Numbers by Data Analytics

For a successful delivery of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) and to track the progress of UNSDGs as well as identify the gaps and the areas requiring more attention, periodic analyses on the “research on sustainability” by various countries and their contribution to the topic are inevitable. This paper tracks the trends in sustainability research including the geographical distribution on sustainability research, their level of multi-disciplinarity and the cross-border collaboration, their distribution of funding with respect to the UNSDGs, and the lifecycle analyses. Cumulative publications and patents on sustainability could be fitted to an exponential function, thereby highlighting the importance of the research on sustainability in the recent past. Besides, this analytics quantifies cross-border collaborations and knowledge integration to solve critical issues as well as traditional and emerging sources to undertake sustainability research. As an important aspect of resource sustainability and circular economy, trends in publication and funding on lifecycle assessment have also been investigated. The analytics present here identify that major sustainability research volume is from the social sciences as well as business and economics sectors, whereas contributions from the engineering disciplines to develop technologies for sustainability practices are relatively lower. Similarly, funding distribution is also not evenly distributed under various SDGs; the larger share of funding has been on energy security and climate change research. Thus, this study identifies many gaps to be filled for the UNSDGs to be successful