Dear Readers,

I found an interesting news article about making exercise mats out of hydrogel materials. I couldn’t help but click into it since it’s so odd.

Further down, there is a research paper that deals with money. How can hydrogel materials be implemented for anti-counterfeiting purposes? Find out more in the paper below.

In The News

Research Updates

Fabrication of Low-Temperature Fast Gelation β-Cyclodextrin-Based Hydrogel-Loaded Medicine for Wound Dressings (Link)

• The authors fabricated a novel hydrogel based on β-cyclodextrin (β-CD), a carbohydrate polymer that can act as a drug carrier due to its cavity-like structure. It is modified with acryloyl chloride, N-isopropylacrylamide (NIPAM), and acrylic acid (AA) to obtain PNIPAM-co-β-CD-AC, which has thermosensitive and pH-sensitive properties.

• This hydrogel transforms from a liquid to a gel state at 19 °C, which is lower than the body temperature and suitable for wound dressing applications. The hydrogel can also release drugs in a controlled manner depending on the temperature and pH of the environment.

• Their prepared hydrogel also has good biocompatibility, mechanical strength, antioxidant activity, and porous structure. It can adhere to irregular wounds and prevent secondary damage.

• The authors highlight the potential of the hydrogel as a wound dressing material, especially for exposed wounds in winter.

Multifunctional Organohydrogels for pH-Responsive Fluorescent and Electrostimulus Writing (Link)

• The authors developed a new dual network fluorescent organohydrogel that can be used for information storage and encryption.

• The organohydrogel is made by copolymerizing a fluorescent monomer 7-methylacryloxy4-methylcoumarin (MAOMC) with acrylamide (AM) and sodium carboxymethyl cellulose (CMCNa).

• This hydrogel can change its fluorescence intensity under different pH conditions due to the reversible transformation of the coumarin side groups from keto to enol configuration.

• It can also be patterned by ion printing or electro-touch writing, and the stored information can be revealed under UV light irradiation.

• There are more robust properties like good mechanical and antifreezing properties, making it suitable for low-temperature anticounterfeiting applications.

SEMPro: A Data-Driven Pipeline To Learn Structure–Property Insights from Scanning Electron Microscopy Images (Link)

• SEMPro uses web-scraping and deep learning to learn the relationship between hydrogel microstructure and elastic modulus from scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images.

• It contains a web-scraping tool that extracts SEM images and modulus data from online research papers using natural language processing (NLP) and image classification techniques.

• The authors used the scraping tool to build a dataset of 830 labeled SEM images of 553 unique hydrogels.

• Based on ResNeXt50, the model uses label distribution smoothing (LDS) to address the imbalance of modulus data and shows better performance than trivial models.

• The results show that the baseplate model can extract general features relevant to hydrogel SEMs and highlight nontrivial regions of influence on the modulus prediction.

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