Both academia and industries have put great efforts into developing non-destructive technologies for the fabrication of polymeric nanoporous materials. Such non-destructive technologies developed with supercritical CO2 (scCO2) and CO2-expanded liquids (CXLs) have been attracting more and more attention because they have been demonstrated to be green and effective media for porous polymer preparation and processing. In this tutorial review, we present several such new technologies with scCO2 and CXLs, which have the capacity to prepare polymeric nanoporous materials with unique morphologies. The fabricated nanoporous polymers have significantly improved the performance of polymeric monoliths and films, and have found wide applications as templates, antireflection coatings, low-k materials, tissue engineering scaffolds and filtration membranes. This tutorial review also introduces the associated characterization methods, including the imaging, scattering and physisorption techniques.

Porous composites based on basic aluminum sulfate and graphene hydrogel (BAS@GHG) were prepared via homogeneous precipitation of BAS in GHG, and used as adsorbents for fluoride removal from water.The BAS@GHG composites have a porous structure with a chemically converted graphene three dimensional network coated by a thin layer of amorphous BAS. These composites showed high adsorption capacities of up to 33.4 mg g À1 at equilibrium fluoride concentrations of 10.7 mg L À1 and temperatures of 298 K, higher than those of previously reported graphene and aluminum-based adsorbents. The adsorption kinetics and isotherm were analyzed by fitting experimental data with pseudo-first-order kinetics, the Weber-Morris model and Langmuir equations. The effects of temperature, pH value, and co-existing anions on the adsorption of fluoride were also investigated.

Polymeric films with nanoscale networks were prepared by selectively swelling an amphiphilic diblock copolymer, polystyrene-block-poly(4-vinylpyridine) (PS-b-P4VP), with the CO(2)-expanded liquid (CXL), CO(2)-methanol. The phase behavior of the CO(2)-methanol system was investigated by both theoretical calculation and experiments, revealing that methanol can be expanded by CO(2), forming homogeneous CXL under the experimental conditions. When treated with the CO(2)-methanol system, the spin cast compact PS-b-P4VP film was transformed into a network with interconnected pores, in a pressure range of 12-20 MPa and a temperature range of 45-60 °C. The formation mechanism of the network, involving plasticization of PS and selective swelling of P4VP, was proposed. Because the diblock copolymer diffusion process is controlled by the activated hopping of individual block copolymer chains with the thermodynamic barrier for moving PVP segments from one to another, the formation of the network structures is achieved in a short time scale and shows "thermodynamically restricted" character. Furthermore, the resulting polymer networks were employed as templates, for the preparation of polypyrrole networks, by an electrochemical polymerization process. The prepared porous polypyrrole film was used to fabricate a chemoresistor-type gas sensor which showed high sensitivity towards ammonia.

Ferroptosis is a newly discovered type of programmed cell death, which is closely related to the imbalance of iron metabolism and oxidative stress. Ferroptosis has become an important research topic in the fields of cardiomyopathy, tumors, neuronal injury disorders, and ischemia perfusion disorders. As an important part of non-coding RNA, microRNAs regulate various metabolic pathways in the human body at the post-transcriptional level and play a crucial role in the occurrence and development of many diseases. The present review introduces the mechanisms of ferroptosis and describes the relevant pathways by which microRNAs affect cardiomyopathy, tumors, neuronal injury disorders and ischemia perfusion disorders through regulating ferroptosis. In addition, it provides important insights into ferroptosis-related microRNAs, aiming to uncover new methods for treatment of the above diseases, and discusses new ideas for the implementation of possible microRNA-based ferroptosis-targeted therapies in the future.

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