This study presents a smart, soft contact lens that provides real-time sensing for the wireless immunosensing of cortisol.

A controllable and reversible transition of volatile and non-volatile resistive switching is presented in Ag/indium-gallium-zinc oxide (IGZO)/manganese oxide (MnO)/Pt bilayer resistive memory devices. The coexistence of volatile and non-volatile switching characteristics was demonstrated by controlling the current compliance during the SET process. With lower current compliance (<50 μA), the formation of an unstable conducting filament presented typical diode-like non-volatile switching. A reversible transition from volatile to non-volatile switching could be obtained by applying a higher current compliance (≥50 μA). Moreover, highly uniform multistate memory characteristics were achieved by modulating the current compliance in the non-volatile switching region. The coexistence of volatile and multistate non-volatile resistive switching behaviors with a reversible transition demonstrates the capability of developing a selector element for crossbar arrays and the application for next generation multistate high-density storage with the same Ag/IGZO/MnO/Pt device.

Recently, various waste microplastics sensors have been introduced in response to environmental and biological hazards posed by waste microplastics. In particular, the detrimental effects of nano-sized plastics or nanoplastics have been reported to be severe. Moreover, there have been many difficulties for sensing microplastics due to the limited methodologies for selectively recognizing nanoplastics. In this study, a customized gold nanoparticles (Au NPs) based localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) system having bio-mimicked peptide probes toward the nanoplastics was demonstrated. The specific determination through the oligo-peptide recognition was accomplished by chemical conjugation both on the LSPR chip’s 40~50 nm Au NPs and sandwiched 5 nm Au NPs, respectively. The peptide probe could selectively bind to polystyrene (PS) nanoplastics in the forms of fragmented debris by cryo-grinding. A simple UV-Vis spectrophotometer was used to identify the LSPR sensing by primarily measuring the absorbance change and shift of absorption peak. The sandwich-binding could increase the LSPR detection sensitivity up to 60% due to consecutive plasmonic effects. In addition, microwave-boiled DI water inside of a styrofoam container was tested for putative PS nanoplastics resource as a real accessible sample. The LSPR system could be a novel protocol overcoming the limitations from conventional nanoplastic detection.

We demonstrate strong, analog, reversible, and nonvolatile memcapacitance in a Si-based MOS (metal-oxide-semiconductor) memcapacitor with an ITO (In-Sn-O)/HfO_x/Si structure. Both accumulation and depletion capacitances change sequentially and reversibly upon repeating voltage application with respect to voltage polarity. This memcapacitance is thought to be induced by oxygen ions' migration between ITO and HfO_x layers, which changes the HfOx permittivity and the depletion states in Si and ITO. The Si-based memcapacitor has potential to be applied to the gate stack of the MOS field-effect-transistor for nonvolatile memory and synaptic transistors through modulating drain current determined by the capacitance change of the MOS gate stack.