The microclimate surrounding a plant has major effect on its health and photosynthesis process, where certain plants struggle in suboptimal environmental conditions and unbalanced levels of humidity and temperature. The ability to remotely track and correlate the effect of local environmental conditions on the healthy growth of plants can have great impact for increasing survival rate of plants and augmenting agriculture output. This necessitates the widespread distribution of lightweight sensory devices on the surface of each plant. Using flexible and biocompatible materials coupled with a smart compact design for a low power and lightweight system, we develop widely deployed, autonomous, and compliant wearables for plants. The demonstrated wearables integrate temperature, humidity and strain sensors, and can be intimately deployed on the soft surface of any plant to remotely and continuously evaluate optimal growth settings. This is enabled through simultaneous detection of environmental conditions while quantitatively tracking the growth rate (viz. elongation). Finally, we establish a nature-inspired origami-assembled 3D-printed “PlantCopter”, used as a launching platform for our plant wearable to enable widespread microclimate monitoring in large fields.

To augment the quality of our life, fully compliant personalized advanced health-care electronic system is pivotal. One of the major requirements to implement such systems is a physically flexible high-performance biocompatible energy storage (battery). However, the status-quo options do not match all of these attributes simultaneously and we also lack in an effective integration strategy to integrate them in complex architecture such as orthodontic domain in human body. Here we show, a physically complaint lithium-ion micro-battery (236 μg) with an unprecedented volumetric energy (the ratio of energy to device geometrical size) of 200 mWh/cm³ after 120 cycles of continuous operation. Our results of 90% viability test confirmed the battery’s biocompatibility. We also show seamless integration of the developed battery in an optoelectronic system embedded in a three-dimensional printed smart dental brace. We foresee the resultant orthodontic system as a personalized advanced health-care application, which could serve in faster bone regeneration and enhanced enamel health-care protection and subsequently reducing the overall health-care cost.

In the recent past, with the advent of transient electronics for mostly implantable and secured electronic applications, the whole field effect transistor structure has been dissolved in a variety of chemicals. Here, we show simple water soluble nano-scale (sub-10 nm) germanium oxide (GeO₂) as the dissolvable component to remove the functional structures of metal oxide semiconductor devices and then reuse the expensive germanium substrate again for functional device fabrication. This way, in addition to transiency, we also show an environmentally friendly manufacturing process for a complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Every year, trillions of complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) electronics are manufactured and billions are disposed, which extend the harmful impact to our environment. Therefore, this is a key study to show a pragmatic approach for water soluble high performance electronics for environmentally friendly manufacturing and bioresorbable electronic applications.

Nanocellulose shows potential as an effective natural adsorbent for removing harmful contaminants from wastewater. This paper describes the development of innovative nanocellulose thin films made of cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs), polyacrylic acid (PAA), and active carbon (AC) as adsorbent materials for absorbing azo dyes from wastewater. The CNCs were recovered from sugarcane bagasse using alkali treatment and acid hydrolysis. The composition and processing parameters of the thin films were optimized, and their adsorption capacity was determined using thermodynamic isotherms and adsorption kinetics. Adsorption characteristics such as the methylene blue (MB) dye concentration, contact time, temperature, and pH were investigated to determine how they affected adsorption. The results show that the adsorption process follows pseudo-second-order kinetics. At an adsorbent mass of 50 mg, dye concentration of 50 ppm in 50 mL, and contact period of 120 min at 25 °C, the thin film comprising 64 wt% CNC, 16 wt% PAA, and 20 wt% AC showed high dye removal efficiency (86.3%) and adsorption capacity (43.15 mg/g). The MB removal efficiency increased to 95.56% and the adsorption capacity to 47.78 mg/g when the medium’s pH was gradually increased from neutral to alkaline. The nontoxicity, low production cost, water stability, easy recovery, and high adsorption capacity of these membranes make them suitable for water treatment systems.