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Each year approximately 1.3 billion tons of food is either wasted or lost. One of the most wasted foods in the world is bread. The ability to reuse wasted food in another area of need, such as water scarcity, would provide a tremendous sustainable outcome. To address water scarcity, many areas of the world are now implementing desalination. One desalination technology that could benefit from food waste reuse is capacitive deionization (CDI). CDI has emerged as a powerful desalination technology that essentially only requires a pair of electrodes and a low-voltage power supply. Developing freestanding carbon electrodes from food waste could lower the overall cost of CDI systems and the environmental and economic impact from food waste. We created freestanding CDI electrodes from bread. The electrodes possessed a hierarchical pore structure that enabled both high salt adsorption capacity and one of the highest reported values for hydraulic permeability to date in a flow-through CDI system. We also developed a sustainable technique for electrode fabrication that does not require the use of common laboratory equipment and could be deployed in decentralized locations and developing countries with low-financial resources. 

The brain is arguably the most powerful computation system known. It is extremely efficient in processing large amounts of information and can discern signals from noise, adapt, and filter faulty information all while running on only 20 watts of power. The human brain's processing efficiency, progressive learning, and plasticity are unmatched by any computer system. Recent advances in stem cell technology have elevated the field of cell culture to higher levels of complexity, such as the development of three-dimensional (3D) brain organoids that recapitulate human brain functionality better than traditional monolayer cell systems. Organoid Intelligence (OI) aims to harness the innate biological capabilities of brain organoids for biocomputing and synthetic intelligence by interfacing them with computer technology. With the latest strides in stem cell technology, bioengineering, and machine learning, we can explore the ability of brain organoids to compute, and store given information (input), execute a task (output), and study how this affects the structural and functional connections in the organoids themselves. Furthermore, understanding how learning generates and changes patterns of connectivity in organoids can shed light on the early stages of cognition in the human brain. Investigating and understanding these concepts is an enormous, multidisciplinary endeavor that necessitates the engagement of both the scientific community and the public. Thus, on Feb 22–24 of 2022, the Johns Hopkins University held the first Organoid Intelligence Workshop to form an OI Community and to lay out the groundwork for the establishment of OI as a new scientific discipline. The potential of OI to revolutionize computing, neurological research, and drug development was discussed, along with a vision and roadmap for its development over the coming decade.

 

Thermal interfaces are vital for effective thermal management in modern electronics, especially in the emerging fields of flexible electronics and soft robotics that impose requirements for interface materials to be soft and flexible in addition to having high thermal performance. Here, a novel sandwich‐structured thermal interface material (TIM) is developed that simultaneously possesses record‐low thermal resistance and high flexibility. Frequency‐domain thermoreflectance (FDTR) is employed to investigate the overall thermal performance of the sandwich structure. As the core of this sandwich, a vertically aligned copper nanowire (CuNW) array preserves its high intrinsic thermal conductivity, which is further enhanced by 60% via a thick 3D graphene (3DG) coating. The thin copper layers on the top and bottom play the critical roles in protecting the nanowires during device assembly. Through the bottom‐up fabrication process, excellent contacts between the graphene‐coated CuNWs and the top/bottom layer are realized, leading to minimal interfacial resistance. In total, the thermal resistance of the sandwich is determined as low as ~0.23 mm² K W⁻¹. This work investigates a new generation of flexible thermal interface materials with an ultralow thermal resistance, which therefore renders the great promise for advanced thermal management in a wide variety of electronics.

 

The cell‐chip coupling is in general regulated by the interplay between cells and the material surface at the interface. Electroactive planar materials have shown limited crosstalk with cells, whereas pseudo 3D patterned materials promote a more intimate contact with the biological system. Here, unprecedented physical properties of a carbon‐based material, i.e., graphene, to engineer out‐of‐plane morphologies are exploited: 1) 3D single‐ to few‐layer fuzzy graphene morphology (3DFG), 2) 3DFG on a collapsed Si nanowire mesh template, and 3) 3DFG on a noncollapsed Si nanowire mesh template. These materials are synthesized and interfaced with cardiomyocyte‐like cells focusing on the characterization of the cytoskeletal arrangement as well as membrane wrapping processes yet regulated by endocytic proteins. Finally, some major conditions to promote tight coupling to the device and eventually spontaneous intracellular penetration are found.