Silk fibroin (SF) is a structural protein derived from natural silkworm silks. Materials fabricated based on SF usually inherit extraordinary physical and biological properties, including high mechanical strength, toughness, optical transparency, tailorable biodegradability, and biocompatibility. Therefore, SF has attracted interest in the development of sustainable biodevices, especially for emergent bio-electronic technologies. To expand the function of current silk devices, the SF characteristic sequence has been used to synthesize recombinant silk proteins that benefit from SF and other functional peptides, such as stimuli-responsive elastin peptides. In addition to genetic engineering methods, innovated chemistry modification approaches and improved material processing techniques have also been developed for fabricating advanced silk materials with tailored chemical features and nanostructures. Herein, this review summarizes various methods to synthesize functional silk-based materials from different perspectives. This review also highlights the recent advances in the applications of natural and recombinant silks in tissue regeneration, soft robotics, and biosensors, using B. mori SF and silk-elastin-like proteins (SELPs) as examples.

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COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) is a serious lung disease that causes difficulty in breathing. COPD patients require lung function examinations and perform breathing exercises on a regular basis in order to manage and be more aware of their health status. In this paper, we designed and developed a mobile-phone based system for lung function diagnosis, called mCOPD. Besides enabling accurate COPD examinations at home, the mCOPD system also offers a video-game based guidance system for breathing exercises. We evaluated mCOPD in controlled and uncontrolled environments with 40 subjects. The experimental results show that our system is a promising tool for remote medical treatment of COPD.

In the new era of China, the communication modality has undergone great changes. Therefore, the dissemination of Marxism in colleges and universities must adapt to the requirements of the new period. In fact, the channels of ideological and political education have shifted to some extent from the traditional dissemination of teachers' lectures and textbooks to the modern one of media convergence such as fast news and short videos.