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In this paper, a facile and efficient approach to robust and durable superhydrophobic cotton fabric was presented via in situ CuO deposition and stearic acid (STA) coating. The combined effects of both rough structure and low surface energy endowed cotton fabric (Cot) with superhydrophobicity, water repellency, and self-cleaning property. Moreover, the as-prepared fabric (Cot–CuO–STA) could keep its robust superhydrophobicity under harsh environmental conditions of acidic, alkaline and salt solutions, high temperature, mechanical abrasion and washing. Importantly, the obtained Cot–CuO–STA with WCA of 156.5° had great potential in oil/water separation with high separation efficiency of up to 98.7% for various oils (dichloromethane, trichloromethane, soybean oil, and n-heptane). Further, fascinating permeate flux (more than 1800 L.m−2.h−1) and remarkable recyclability made Cot–CuO–STA a promising application in oil-contaminated water treatment and marine spilt oil cleanup.Graphic abstractRobust and durable superhydrophobic cotton fabric was fabricated for oil/water separation via a facile and efficient route. The resultant fabric exhibited remarkable separation efficiency for different kinds of oils, fascinating permeate flux, and excellent recyclability.

Polyethyleneimine-functionalized cellulose beads (PCB-PEI) with hierarchical multi-porous structures were fabricated via a novel strategy combining intermolecular pre-crosslinking with glutaraldehyde chemical crosslinking to improve the specific surface area and mechanical performances of PCB-PEI. The resultant PCB-PEI possessed unique hierarchical architecture consisting of surface interpenetrating porous networks, resulting in large specific surface area of 100.61 m2/g and high porosity of 94.27%. In particular, the robust double cross-linking networks endowed PCB-PEI with outstanding stiffness, toughness, and elasticity. The compressive strength was up to 202 kPa, and retained at 94.5 kPa with 84.1% of shape recovery after 10 loading–unloading cycles at 50% compressive strain. Benefiting from its hierarchical multi-porous structure, abundant functional sites, and excellent mechanical properties, PCB-PEI displayed excellent dye adsorption and reusability. The maximum adsorption capacities for methyl blue (MB) and rose bengal (RB) reached 1550.55 and 467.95 mg/g. After 8 cycles, the adsorption capacities of PCB-PEI for MB and RB still maintained more than 97% and 86%, respectively. Predominant electrostatic attraction and hydrogen bond interactions during adsorption process were proposed to improve the adsorption of dyes. Thus, PCB-PEI is a potential, sustainable adsorbent for highly efficient removal of dyes from wastewater.Graphic abstract

In this work, a novel and high-efficiency scavenger based on amino-functionalized cellulose was designed for sodium cholate sorption in vitro. To estimate the adsorption performance of the amino-functionalized cellulose for sodium cholate, various factors including sodium cholate concentration, contact time and electrolyte were investigated. The results suggested that amino-functionalization for cellulose regarding to hyperbranched polyethylenimine not only induce positive charge surface of cellulose but also provide abundant and special binding sites for sodium cholate sorption. The amino-functionalized cellulose displayed an excellent performance to sodium cholate sorption with a maximum adsorption capacity of 569.7 mg/g, higher than cholestyramine, a synthetic lipid-lowering drug in clinic. And the adsorption behavior was well fitted into the Langmuir isotherm model and pseudo-second-order kinetic model, suggesting a homogeneous monolayer chemisorption. Furthermore, the amino-functionalized cellulose presented the features of excellent anti-interferences, cytocompatibility and facile preparation process. All these results support amino-functionalized cellulose as a promising prospect for cholesterol elimination.

Green bio-flocculants from renewable biomass resources have received the widespread attention for wastewater treatment, which are promising alternatives to petroleum-based synthetic flocculants. In this paper, sustainable cationic cellulose bio-flocculants with various amino group contents were successfully prepared by a feasible chemical crosslinking with polyethyleneimine (PEI). The flocculation performances of diverse PEI-grafting cellulose (CE-PEI) were evaluated to purify turbid Kaolin suspension. Further, the flocculation kinetics and flocculation mechanism were investigated. Benefiting from the high surface positive charges and supramolecular structure, CE-PEI bio-flocculants with amino group contents of 17.5 mmol/g displayed the best turbidity removal efficiency. The residual turbidity of Kaolin suspension decreased from the initial 480–8.6 NTU, a 98.2% reduction with CE-PEI dosage of 0.15 mg/mL, sedimentation time of 30 min at pH 7.0. Flocculation kinetic results indicated that interaction of aggregation and collision between CE-PEI bio-flocculants and Kaolin particles was sufficient for the flocculation process at the optimal CE-PEI dosage. Moreover, charge neutralization was the dominant mechanism for the flocculation of CE-PEI on Kaolin. Thus, this work not only exploits a promising application of cellulose as a bio-flocculant, but also provides a feasible approach to efficiently purify high turbidity wastewater.Graphic abstract

Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common degenerative joint disease worldwide, with the main pathological manifestation of articular cartilage degeneration. It have been investigated that pharmacological activation of transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) significantly alleviated cartilage degeneration by abolishing chondrocyte ferroptosis. In this work, in view of the thermal activated feature of TRPV1, Citrate‐stabilized gold nanorods (Cit‐AuNRs) is conjugated to TRPV1 monoclonal antibody (Cit‐AuNRs@Anti‐TRPV1) as a photothermal switch for TRPV1 activation in chondrocytes under near infrared (NIR) irradiation. The conjugation of TRPV1 monoclonal antibody barely affect the morphology and physicochemical properties of Cit‐AuNRs. Under NIR irradiation, Cit‐AuNRs@Anti‐TRPV1 exhibited good biocompatibility and flexible photothermal responsiveness. Intra‐articular injection of Cit‐AuNRs@Anti‐TRPV1 followed by NIR irradiation significantly activated TRPV1 and attenuated cartilage degradation by suppressing chondrocytes ferroptosis. The osteophyte formation and subchondral bone sclerosis are remarkably alleviated by NIR‐inspired Cit‐AuNRs@Anti‐TRPV1. Furthermore, the activation of TRPV1 by Cit‐AuNRs@Anti‐TRPV1 evidently improved physical activities and alleviated pain of destabilization of the medial meniscus (DMM)‐induced OA mice. The study reveals Cit‐AuNRs@Anti‐TRPV1 under NIR irradiation protects chondrocytes from ferroptosis and attenuates OA progression, providing a potential therapeutic strategy for the treatment of OA. Li et al develop a Cit‐AuNRs@Anti‐TRPV1 switch for photothermal activation of TRPV1 signaling for the treatment of osteoarthritis. Cit‐AuNRs@Anti‐TRPV1 has good photothermal responsiveness, and it can rapidly warm up under near‐infrared (NIR) irradiation. By controlling the NIR power and action time, it can realize effective, controllable and targeted activation of TRPV1, thereby suppressing the ferroptosis of chondrocytes to attenuate OA.

Cellulose-based hierarchical porous beads exhibit significant application potential in adsorption and separation systems due to their degradation and biocompatibility. However, the current fabrications of cellulose beads show poor mechanical properties and a difficult-to-regulate hierarchical porous structure, reducing their lifespan of use and limiting their application in fine separation. Here, we reported the facile creep–drop method to prepare cellulose beads that enabled systemic regulation of the macro-size, micropore structures, and mechanical properties by optimizing injection nozzle diameter, the composition of the coagulation bath, the temperature of the coagulation bath, and cellulose concentration. Notably, during the molding process, the H2SO4-Na2SO4 composite solidification bath endowed cellulose beads with a dense shell layer and a loose core layer, which achieved the integration of mechanical properties and high porosity. The cellulose beads exhibited high porosity (93.38–96.18%) and high sphericity (86.78–94.44%) by modulating the shell thickness of the cellulose beads. In particular, the cellulose beads exhibited excellent mechanical properties with a high compressive strength of 544.24 kPa at a 5% cellulose concentration. It is expected that these cellulose beads with tunable microstructures can realize their potential for applications in the fields of wastewater treatment, chemical engineering, bioengineering, medicine, and pharmaceuticals.

Background Reactive oxygen species (ROS) is considered as ubiquitous and highly active chemicals that influence tendon integrity and orchestrate tendon repair. With significant recent advances in nanomaterials, cerium oxide nanoparticles (CeO 2 NPs) exhibit superoxide dismutase- and catalase-like activities. Herein, we introduced a therapeutic approach of CeO 2 NPs for Achilles tendinopathy (AT) healing. Methods CeO 2 NPs were synthesized to examine their effect as ROS scavengers on AT healing in vitro and in vivo. The mRNA levels of inflammatory factors were evaluated in AT after CeO 2 NPs treatment in vitro. The mechanisms underlying CeO 2 NPs-mediated stimulation of NRF2 translocation and ERK signaling were verified through immunofluorescence and Western blot analysis. The efficacy of CeO 2 NPs was tested in an AT rat model in comparison with the control. Results CeO 2 NPs not only significantly scavenged multiple ROS and suppressed ROS-induced inflammatory reactions but also protected cell proliferation under oxidative stress induced by tert-butyl hydroperoxide (TBHP). Moreover, CeO 2 NPs could promote NRF2 nuclear translocation for anti-oxidation and anti-inflammation through the ERK signaling pathway. In a rat model of collagenase-induced tendon injuries, CeO 2 NPs showed significant therapeutic efficacy by ameliorating tendon damage. Conclusion The present study provides valuable insights into the molecular mechanism of CeO 2 NPs to ameliorate ROS in tenocytes via the ERK/NRF2 signaling pathway, which underscores the potential of CeO 2 NPs for application in the treatment of enthesopathy healing.

Ghost imaging needs massive measurements to obtain an image with good visibility and the imaging speed is usually very low. In order to realize real-time high-resolution ghost imaging of a target which is located in a scenario with a large field of view (FOV), we propose a high-speed multi-resolution progressive computational ghost imaging approach. The target area is firstly locked by a low-resolution image with a small number of measurements, then high-resolution imaging of the target can be obtained by only modulating the light fields corresponding to the target area. The experiments verify the feasibility of the approach. The influence of detection signal-to-noise ratio on the quality of multi-resolution progressive computational ghost imaging is also investigated experimentally. This approach may be applied to some practical application scenarios such as ground-to-air or air-to-air imaging with a large FOV.

Our previous studies have shown that infection with the gp120 V3 loop can cause human immunodeficiency virus-1 associated neurocognitive disorders. Curcumin has been shown to improve these effects to some degree, but the precise mechanisms remain unknown. The present study analyzed the neuroprotective effect and mechanism of curcumin in relation to hippocampal neurons. Results showed that 1 nmol/L gp120 V3 loop suppressed the growth of synapses. After administration of 1 !umol/L curcumin, synaptic growth improved. Curcumin is neuroprotective against gp120 V3 loop-induced neuronal damage by inhibiting the activation of L-type calcium currents, relieving intracellular Ca^2＋ overload, promoting Bcl-2 expression, and inhibiting Bax activation. The effect of curcumin was identical to nimodipine, suggesting that curcumin has the same neuroprotective effects against gp120 V3 loop-induced neuronal damage.

To address the issue of cold chain interruptions during the ship transshipment of fresh fruits and vegetables, this study suggests using a phase change material (PCM)-based insulation cover to temporarily preserve fruits and vegetables. A simulation-based study was conducted to analyze the airflow characteristics in the inner space of the PCM-based insulation cover. At the same time, a comparative evaluation was conducted to determine the temperature uniformity of the insulation cover under different structures. Based on the results, recommendations for structural design were put forward to optimize the overall structure of the insulation cover. The findings indicate that using a configuration with top and side-mounted phase change panels can reduce the vertical temperature difference inside the insulation cover to approximately 2°C, thereby effectively ensuring the thermal uniformity inside the PCM-based insulation cover.