Recently, iron oxide nanoparticles (NPs) have attracted much consideration due to their unique properties, such as superparamagnetism, surface-to-volume ratio, greater surface area, and easy separation methodology. Various physical, chemical, and biological methods have been adopted to synthesize magnetic NPs with suitable surface chemistry. This review summarizes the methods for the preparation of iron oxide NPs, size and morphology control, and magnetic properties with recent bioengineering, commercial, and industrial applications. Iron oxides exhibit great potential in the fields of life sciences such as biomedicine, agriculture, and environment. Nontoxic conduct and biocompatible applications of magnetic NPs can be enriched further by special surface coating with organic or inorganic molecules, including surfactants, drugs, proteins, starches, enzymes, antibodies, nucleotides, nonionic detergents, and polyelectrolytes. Magnetic NPs can also be directed to an organ, tissue, or tumor using an external magnetic field for hyperthermic treatment of patients. Keeping in mind the current interest in iron NPs, this review is designed to report recent information from synthesis to characterization, and applications of iron NPs.

The presence of heavy metals in the industrial effluents has recently been a challenging issue for human health. Efficient removal of heavy metal ions from environment is one of the most important issues from biological and environmental point of view, and many studies have been devoted to investigate the environmental behavior of nanoscale zerovalent iron (NZVI) for the removal of toxic heavy metal ions, present both in the surface and underground wastewater. The aim of this review is to show the excellent removal capacity and environmental remediation of NZVI-based materials for various heavy metal ions. A new look on NZVI-based materials (e.g., modified or matrix-supported NZVI materials) and possible interaction mechanism (e.g., adsorption, reduction and oxidation) and the latest environmental application. The effects of various environmental conditions (e.g., pH, temperature, coexisting oxy-anions and cations) and potential problems for the removal of heavy metal ions on NZVI-based materials with the DFT theoretical calculations and EXAFS technology are discussed. Research shows that NZVI-based materials have satisfactory removal capacities for heavy metal ions and play an important role in the environmental pollution cleanup. Possible improvement of NZVI-based materials and potential areas for future applications in environment remediation are also proposed.

The Internet of Things (IoT)-centric concepts like augmented reality, high-resolution video streaming, self-driven cars, smart environment, e-health care, etc. have a ubiquitous presence now. These applications require higher data-rates, large bandwidth, increased capacity, low latency and high throughput. In light of these emerging concepts, IoT has revolutionized the world by providing seamless connectivity between heterogeneous networks (HetNets). The eventual aim of IoT is to introduce the plug and play technology providing the end-user, ease of operation, remotely access control and configurability. This paper presents the IoT technology from a bird's eye view covering its statistical/architectural trends, use cases, challenges and future prospects. The paper also presents a detailed and extensive overview of the emerging 5G-IoT scenario. Fifth Generation (5G) cellular networks provide key enabling technologies for ubiquitous deployment of the IoT technology. These include carrier aggregation, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), massive-MIMO (M-MIMO), coordinated multipoint processing (CoMP), device-to-device (D2D) communications, centralized radio access network (CRAN), software-defined wireless sensor networking (SD-WSN), network function virtualization (NFV) and cognitive radios (CRs). This paper presents an exhaustive review for these key enabling technologies and also discusses the new emerging use cases of 5G-IoT driven by the advances in artificial intelligence, machine and deep learning, ongoing 5G initiatives, quality of service (QoS) requirements in 5G and its standardization issues. Finally, the paper discusses challenges in the implementation of 5G-IoT due to high data-rates requiring both cloud-based platforms and IoT devices based edge computing.

Solution-processed organic photovoltaics (OPV) offer the attractive prospect of low-cost, light-weight and environmentally benign solar energy production. The highest efficiency OPV at present use low-bandgap donor polymers, many of which suffer from problems with stability and synthetic scalability. They also rely on fullerene-based acceptors, which themselves have issues with cost, stability and limited spectral absorption. Here we present a new non-fullerene acceptor that has been specifically designed to give improved performance alongside the wide bandgap donor poly(3-hexylthiophene), a polymer with significantly better prospects for commercial OPV due to its relative scalability and stability. Thanks to the well-matched optoelectronic and morphological properties of these materials, efficiencies of 6.4% are achieved which is the highest reported for fullerene-free P3HT devices. In addition, dramatically improved air stability is demonstrated relative to other high-efficiency OPV, showing the excellent potential of this new material combination for future technological applications.

Nanotechnology, contrary to its name, has massively revolutionized industries around the world. This paper predominantly deals with data regarding the applications of nanotechnology in the modernization of several industries. A comprehensive research strategy is adopted to incorporate the latest data driven from major science platforms. Resultantly, a broad-spectrum overview is presented which comprises the diverse applications of nanotechnology in modern industries. This study reveals that nanotechnology is not limited to research labs or small-scale manufacturing units of nanomedicine, but instead has taken a major share in different industries. Companies around the world are now trying to make their innovations more efficient in terms of structuring, working, and designing outlook and productivity by taking advantage of nanotechnology. From small-scale manufacturing and processing units such as those in agriculture, food, and medicine industries to larger-scale production units such as those operating in industries of automobiles, civil engineering, and environmental management, nanotechnology has manifested the modernization of almost every industrial domain on a global scale. With pronounced cooperation among researchers, industrialists, scientists, technologists, environmentalists, and educationists, the more sustainable development of nano-based industries can be predicted in the future.

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, have come in a great diversity of several applications such as military, construction, image and video mapping, medical, search and rescue, parcel delivery, hidden area exploration, oil rigs and power line monitoring, precision farming, wireless communication and aerial surveillance. The drone industry has been getting significant attention as a model of manufacturing, service and delivery convergence, introducing synergy with the coexistence of different emerging domains. UAVs offer implicit peculiarities such as increased airborne time and payload capabilities, swift mobility, and access to remote and disaster areas. Despite these potential features, including extensive variety of usage, high maneuverability, and cost-efficiency, drones are still limited in terms of battery endurance, flight autonomy and constrained flight time to perform persistent missions. Other critical concerns are battery endurance and the weight of drones, which must be kept low. Intuitively it is not suggested to load them with heavy batteries. This study highlights the importance of drones, goals and functionality problems. In this review, a comprehensive study on UAVs, swarms, types, classification, charging, and standardization is presented. In particular, UAV applications, challenges, and security issues are explored in the light of recent research studies and development. Finally, this review identifies the research gap and presents future research directions regarding UAVs.

Over the past three decades, significant developments have been made in hyperspectral imaging due to which it has emerged as an effective tool in numerous civil, environmental, and military applications. Modern sensor technologies are capable of covering large surfaces of earth with exceptional spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions. Due to these features, hyperspectral imaging has been effectively used in numerous remote sensing applications requiring estimation of physical parameters of many complex surfaces and identification of visually similar materials having fine spectral signatures. In the recent years, ground based hyperspectral imaging has gained immense interest in the research on electronic imaging for food inspection, forensic science, medical surgery and diagnosis, and military applications. This review focuses on the fundamentals of hyperspectral image analysis and its modern applications such as food quality and safety assessment, medical diagnosis and image guided surgery, forensic document examination, defense and homeland security, remote sensing applications such as precision agriculture and water resource management and material identification and mapping of artworks. Moreover, recent research on the use of hyperspectral imaging for examination of forgery detection in questioned documents, aided by deep learning, is also presented. This review can be a useful baseline for future research in hyperspectral image analysis.