Residual tumors after surgery lead to a high risk of recurrence, and effective strategies clearing the residual tumors urgently need to be developed. Locally administering antitumor agents after surgery has been proved effective to clear residual tumor cells, but achieving long-lasting efficacy and repeatable treatment are still challenges for these agents. In this study, we orderly arranged propyl gallate (PG)-grafting MXene onto calcium-alginate hydrogel (CA) layer to develop a photothermal-responsive biopaster for the tumor post-surgery recurrence prevention. The order arrangement of PG-grafting MXene nanosheets with the prolonged degradation time (compared to the non-PG-grafting ones) could retain the photothermal responsiveness for 14 days. Therefore, this biopaster provided long-term photothermal therapeutic capability to kill the residual tumors and effectively prevented the tumor recurrence (after surgery). This work provides references for designing NIR-responsive 2D nanomaterials with enhanced NIR-responsiveness and long-term antitumor efficacy.

The energy conversion process caused by relative motion of droplets and nanofilms has aroused widespread attention. However, the mechanism is still unclear, especially regarding the modification of the nanomaterial itself. In this study, we found that by annealing TiO2 in a H-2 atmosphere at different temperatures, the Magneli phase titanium suboxide can be prepared with a lot of oxygen vacancies. Oxygen vacancies not only form negative charge centers inside the film, which enhance the attraction of Na+, but also increase the carrier concentration. By increasing the oxygen vacancy concentration, the measured V-OC value was increased by similar to 5 times and ISC by similar to 30 times. Furthermore, a universal film preparation process was developed for the large-scale production of flexible energy conversion units based on the simple sol-gel method. Experimental results show that the prepared energy conversion unit has excellent performance of collecting rainwater energy and show a stable and continuous V-OC output of similar to 600 mV, combined with the surface hydrophobic treatment technology.

Simple, efficient and accurate controllable systems for materials are becoming more essential, in response to the explosively growing demands in the fields of chemistry and material science. Herein, tailored hydrogels are explored depending on synergistic regulation of pH-responsive chemical networks with an "on/off" function and physical networks with dynamic self-optimized arrangement. Thiol-disulfide exchange reaction endows hydrogels with controlled architectures while hydrogen bond-strengthened 2-ureido-4[1H]-pyrimidinone (UPy) moieties contributes a significant increase in mechanical strengths. The integration of that dual cross-linking (DC) network ensures the hydrogels with customized structure and enhanced mechanical property. Such controllably strategy is universally applicable and will open a new avenue to flexibly fabricate desired hybrid hydrogels with distinctive features and functions for their potential applications.