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Millions of tons of plastics enter the oceans yearly, and they can be fragmented by ultraviolet and mechanical means into nanoplastics. Here, we report the direct observation of nanoplastics in global ocean water leveraging a unique shrinking surface bubble deposition (SSBD) technique. SSBD involves optically heating plasmonic nanoparticles to form a surface bubble and leveraging the Marangoni flow to concentrate suspended nanoplastics onto the surface, allowing direct visualization using electron microscopy. With the plasmonic nanoparticles co-deposited in SSBD, the surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy effect is enabled for direct chemical identification of trace amounts of nanoplastics. In the water samples from two oceans, we observed nanoplastics made of nylon, polystyrene, and polyethylene terephthalate—all common in daily consumables. The plastic particles have diverse morphologies, such as nanofibers, nanoflakes, and ball-stick nanostructures. These nanoplastics may profoundly affect marine organisms, and our results can provide critical information for appropriately designing their toxicity studies. 

Abstract The poor reversibility of Zn metal anodes arising from water‐induced parasitic reactions poses a significant challenge to the practical applications of aqueous zinc‐ion batteries (AZIBs). Herein, a novel quasi‐solid‐state “water‐in‐swelling‐clay” electrolyte (WiSCE) containing zinc sulfate and swelling clay, bentonite (BT), is designed to enable highly reversible Zn metal anodes. AZIB full cells based on the WiSCE exhibit excellent cyclic stability at various current densities, long shelf life, low self‐discharge rate, and outstanding high‐temperature adaptability. Particularly, the capacity of WiSCE‐based AZIB full cells retains 90.47% after 200 cycles at 0.1 A g⁻¹, 96.64% after 2000 cycles at 1 A g⁻¹, and 88.29% after 5000 cycles at 3 A g⁻¹. Detailed density functional theory calculations show that strong hydrogen bonds are formed between BT and water molecules in the WiSCE. Thus, water molecules are strongly confined by BT, particularly within the interlayers, which significantly inhibits water‐induced parasitic reactions and greatly improves cyclic stability. Compared to the state‐of‐the‐art “water‐in‐salt” electrolytes, the WiSCE can provide a significantly higher capacity at the full‐cell level with a substantially reduced cost, which is promising for the design of next‐generation high‐performance AZIBs. This work provides a new direction for developing cost‐competitive AZIBs as alternatives to grid‐scale energy storage. 

Abstract Functionalized nanoparticles (NPs) are the foundation of diverse applications. Especially, in many biosensing applications, concentrating suspended NPs onto a surface without deteriorating their biofunction is usually an inevitable step to improve detection limit, which remains to be a great challenge. In this work, biocompatible deposition of functionalized NPs to optically transparent surfaces is demonstrated using shrinking bubbles. Leveraging the shrinking phase of bubble mitigates the biomolecule degradation problems encountered in traditional photothermal deposition techniques. The deposited NPs are closely packed, and the functional molecules are able to survive the process as verified by their strong fluorescence signals. Using high‐speed videography, it is revealed that the contracting contact line of the shrinking bubble forces the NPs captured by the contact line to a highly concentrated island. Such shrinking surface bubble deposition (SSBD) is low temperature in nature as no heat is added during the process. Using a hairpin DNA‐functionalized gold NP suspension as a model system, SSBD is shown to enable much stronger fluorescence signal compared to the optical‐pressure deposition and the conventional thermal bubble contact line deposition. The demonstrated SSBD technique capable of directly depositing functionalized NPs may significantly simplify biosensor fabrication and thus benefit a wide range of relevant applications.