This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in\ud Macromolocules, copyright © American Chemical Society after peer review and technical editing by the publisher.\ud To access the final edited and published work see: http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ma200667

Over the last 10 years great research interest has been directed toward nanofibrous architectures produced by electrospinning bioactive plant extracts. The resulting structures possess antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, and anti-oxidant activity, which are attractive for biomedical applications and food industry. This review describes the diverse approaches that have been developed to produce electrospun nanofibres that are able to deliver naturally-derived chemical compounds in a controlled way and to prevent their degradation. The efficacy of those composite nanofibres as wound dressings, scaffolds for tissue engineering, and active food packaging systems will be discussed.

This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene with a reduced number of entanglements can be stretched in the solid state both uni- or biaxially to produce highly oriented tapes and films. The chain orientation, in combination with the reduced number of chain ends, is responsible for the high tensile modulus and tensile strength of the drawn materials, and, as we report here, also for the high thermal conductivity achieved through lattice movements. A property such as thermal conductivity in an electrical insulator makes UHMWPE tapes and films of great applicative interest. In-plane laser-flash thermal analysis has been applied to measure the thermal diffusivity of samples of different molecular weights stretched both uni- and biaxially, and a strong correlation has been found between the drawing ratio and the resulting in-plane thermal conductivity. Values of at least 40 W/m K have been achieved for UHMWPE having Mw comprised between 2 and 10 million, while higher values of 65 W/m K are observed for the higher Mw samples having relatively lesser number of chain ends. Surprisingly the biaxially stretched samples also show in-plane conductivity, with the highest value reaching 18 W/m K, comparable to stainless steel