Themed collection Recent Review Articles

This minireview discusses the advantages and challenges in constructing bioinspired double-network hydrogels mimicking the structure and/or properties of biological tissue.

Beyond the usual surface-to-surface Planck's law of thermal radiation, nanoscale radiative heat transfer is experiencing a revolution.

In this Minireview, we discuss several appealing approaches that have been developed in the last few years for the fabrication of MOF thin films, highlighting their assets and the challenges still faced.

This review summarizes the advances in solar cells based on PbX CQD inks, including both lab-scale and large-area photovoltaic devices.

A review covering catalytic method development to enable efficient chemical recycling and upcycling of the most abundant commercial polymers.

This review revisits the state of the art of research efforts on the design of mechanical materials using machine learning.

This review summarizes the crystalline features, electrochemical characteristics, ions intercalation charge storage mechanisms, and recent advances in niobium pentoxide related materials for high-rate electrochemical energy storage.

Ytterbium-doped lead halide perovskite (Yb³⁺:CsPbX₃ with x = Cl or Cl/Br) nanocrystals and thin films have shown surprisingly efficient downconversion by quantum cutting with PLQYs up to 193%.

The integration of various materials and technologies enables the intelligent SDLG biosensor to detect the different types of targets with high sensitivity and generate diversified output signals.

This review article summarizes the state-of-the-art techniques for the characterization and monitoring of flow battery electrolytes highlighting in particular the importance of the electrolyte state-of-charge and state-of-health assessment.

Thermoelectric materials, which enable direct energy conversion between waste heat and electricity, are witnessing exciting developments due to innovative breakthroughs both in materials and the synergistic optimization of structures and properties.

Recent developments and major advances in field-assisted additive manufacturing technologies from aspects of materials, methodologies, and applications.

We review the electrochemical theory, material design, and device fabrication for nitroxide radical polymers in emerging plastic energy storage and organic electronics.

This review summarizes the recent progress in self-assembled oxide-metal nanocomposites, their design criteria using the in-plane strain compensation model, functionalities, and the coupling between electrical, magnetic and optical properties

A rich variety of unconventional computing paradigms has been raised with the rapid development of nanoscale devices. Magnetic skyrmions, spin swirling quasiparticles, have been endowed with great expectations for unconventional computing.

All major classes of porous crystalline frameworks including zeolites, metal–organic frameworks, covalent organic frameworks and hydrogen-bonded organic frameworks exhibit structural flexibilities.

This review revisits staining protocols for electron microscopy focussing on the visualization of active sites, i.e. enzymes, metabolites or proteins, in cells and tissues, which were never established as standard protocols in electron microscopy.

Sorption, size-selective & catalytic film or particle-bed filters dramatically enhance gas sensor selectivity. We critically review 300+ articles and tutorially give guidelines for systematic filter design in air quality, health & food applications.

This review encompasses the underlying working principles behind the most critical approaches to solve challenging issues in Mg–S batteries.

This review aims to comprehensively summarize the significant developments in design strategies, processing approaches, and application-oriented techniques of 2D nanomaterials for water purification and monitoring.

This review provides an account of the state-of-the-art light-driven bimorph soft actuators from their fundamentals to emerging applications, as well as new perspectives on the future scope, opportunities, and challenges.

Gold-based nanomaterials can be used in various electrocatalytic reactions. The rational tuning of their composition, architecture, and particle size can achieve enhanced electrocatalytic activity.

This review presents the recent progress of printed flexible heaters for portable and wearable thermal management.

This review focuses on the recent progress in polydopamine antibacterial materials, including their structural and functional features, preparation strategies, antibacterial mechanisms, and their biomedical applications.

Porous bioactive glass micro- and nanospheres are attractive biomaterials for biomedical applications: bone regeneration, wound healing, drug delivery and theranostics.

Dioxaborine-based materials, including molecules and nanoparticles, possess various interesting photophysical properties allowing advanced bioimaging from cells to in vivo.

Solution-processed artificial synapses are expected to develop the synaptic electronics towards flexible and highly integrated three-dimensional neural networks to break through the von Neumann computing architecture in the post-Moore era.

The gaps and catching up strategies between nanozymes and enzymes in terms of their activity, specificity, physiological reaction conditions and biologically relevant reactions are critically reviewed.

Lithium storage properties of organosulfur electrodes including organodisulfide, thioethers, organosulfide polymers and sulfurized polyacrylonitrile have been comprehensively reviewed.

In the past 30 years, researchers have worked towards reducing the size of ordinary three-dimensional (3D) materials into 1D or 2D materials in order to obtain new properties and applications of these low-dimensional systems.

Advances in materials and mechanics designs have led to the development of flexible electronics, which have important applications to human healthcare due to their good biocompatibility and conformal integration with biological tissue.

Owing to their natural thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) characteristics, the development of exciplex emitters for organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) has witnessed booming progress in recent years.

SERS on metal–semiconductor heterostructures including their building blocks, enhancement mechanisms and applications was reviewed. The synergistic contribution of plasmons and charge transfer is highlighted.

The bio-inspired general synthesis strategies of anti-freezing hydrogels and their potential application fields.

Impactful research in nanomedicine depends upon the adequate use of cellular and animal models. Here we systematically review and evaluate the in vitro and in vivo models which have enabled the development of anti-amyloidosis nanomedicines.

By varying biophysical properties of drug-loaded liposomes such as size, head-group chemistry and polarity, fluidity, rigidity, and PEGylation, their effects on both passive and active targeting are reviewed with cancer therapy as the main example.

We review the physics, design, and optimization of four steep-slope transistors and demonstrate their potential and drawbacks.

This review summarizes the recent progress in a novel route to both synthesize and process complex and multi-component materials as thin films, based on interfaces between immiscible liquids, highlighting different materials and applications.

This comprehensive and critical review covers the recent important progress of the fabrication of nanopores in two-dimensional materials.

We present a review of the recent advances in environment-friendly photodetectors based on lead-free metal halide perovskites and perovskite derivatives.

The present work provides a comprehensive array of design parameters for the fabrication of the principal morphologies of nanoceria.

This review summarizes the recent advances of functional separators towards the suppression of lithium dendrites in lithium metal batteries.

In this review, types and mechanisms of dual emission, as well as recent new insights for the design and applications of efficient novel dual emissive organic materials are presented.

This review focuses on the recent advances in polyphenol-based scaffolds including their structural and functional features, fabrication strategies, and various applications in tissue engineering.

This article reviews the recent progress of the bio-inspired wettability patterns and their biomedical applications.

This review answers how to manipulate the surface/interface chemistry of liquid metal micro/nanomaterials for improved applications.

Design, constructions, drug loading strategies and the latest applications of chemotherapeutic drug–DNA hybrid nanostructures.

Radiation therapy (RT), including external beam radiotherapy (EBRT) and internal radioisotope therapy (RIT), has been an indispensable strategy for cancer therapy in clinical practice in recent years.