Divergent dynamics of inflammatory mediators and multiplex PCRs during airway infection in cystic fibrosis patients and healthy controls: Serial upper airway sampling by nasal lavage.

Background: In cystic fibrosis (CF), acute respiratory exacerbations critically enhance pulmonary destruction. Since these mainly occur outside regular appointments, they remain unexplored. We previously elaborated a protocol for home-based upper airway (UAW) sampling obtaining nasal-lavage fluid (NLF), which, in contrast to sputum, does not require immediate processing.

Large Shift in Hybrid Bragg Stacks through Interfacial Slowdown.

Studies of glass transition under confinement frequently employ supported polymer thin films, which are known to exhibit different transition temperature close to and far from the interface. Various techniques can selectively probe interfaces, however, often at the expense of sample designs very specific to a single experiment. Here, we show how to translate results on confined thin film to a "nacre-mimetic" clay/polymer Bragg stack, where periodicity allows to limit and tune the number of polymer layers to either one or two.

Anisotropic Thermal Transport in Spray-Coated Single-Phase Two-Dimensional Materials: Synthetic Clay Versus Graphene Oxide.

Directional control on material properties such as mechanical moduli or thermal conductivity are of paramount importance for the development of nanostructured next-generation devices. Two-dimensional materials are particularly interesting in this context owing to their inherent structural anisotropy. Here, we compare graphene oxide (GO) and synthetic clay sodium fluorohectorite (Hec) with respect to their thermal transport properties.

Tunable Thermoelastic Anisotropy in Hybrid Bragg Stacks with Extreme Polymer Confinement.

Controlling thermomechanical anisotropy is important for emerging heat management applications such as thermal interface and electronic packaging materials. Whereas many studies report on thermal transport in anisotropic nanocomposite materials, a fundamental understanding of the interplay between mechanical and thermal properties is missing, due to the lack of measurements of direction-dependent mechanical properties. In this work, exceptionally coherent and transparent hybrid Bragg stacks made of strictly alternating mica-type nanosheets (synthetic hectorite) and polymer layers (polyvinylpyrrolidone) were fabricated at large scale.