A biomimetic gradient porous cage with a micro-structure for enhancing mechanical properties and accelerating osseointegration in spinal fusion.

Objectives: Spinal fusion is a widely employed treatment of patients with degenerative disc disease, in which a cage is used to replace the disc for spinal fusion. But it often fails for insufficient mechanical strength and poor osseointegration. Here, we designed a polyether-ether-ketone (PEEK)/tantalum (Ta) composite cage with a biomimetic gradient porous micro-structure, simultaneously enhancing mechanical properties and accelerating osseointegration in spinal fusion.

Stable high-capacity and high-rate silicon-based lithium battery anodes upon two-dimensional covalent encapsulation.

Silicon is a promising anode material for lithium-ion and post lithium-ion batteries but suffers from a large volume change upon lithiation and delithiation. The resulting instabilities of bulk and interfacial structures severely hamper performance and obstruct practical use. Stability improvements have been achieved, although at the expense of rate capability.

Silicene Flowers: A Dual Stabilized Silicon Building Block for High-Performance Lithium Battery Anodes.

Nanostructuring is a transformative way to improve the structure stability of high capacity silicon for lithium batteries. Yet, the interface instability issue remains and even propagates in the existing nanostructured silicon building blocks. Here we demonstrate an intrinsically dual stabilized silicon building block, namely silicene flowers, to simultaneously address the structure and interface stability issues.

A Facile Reduction Method for Roll-to-Roll Production of High Performance Graphene-Based Transparent Conductive Films.

A facile roll-to-roll method is developed for fabricating reduced graphene oxide (rGO)-based flexible transparent conductive films. A Sn /ethanol reduction system and a rationally designed fast coating-drying-washing technique are proven to be highly efficient for low-cost continuous production of large-area rGO films and patterned rGO films, extremely beneficial toward the manufacture of flexible photoelectronic devices.