Huang Zhou

Universal and unlimited access to clean water resources represents one of the global priorities. Solar-driven interfacial evaporation using low-cost and eco-friendly biomass-derived photothermal conversion materials has emerged as a key, widely applicable, and energy-efficient strategy for freshwater production. Herein, a multifunctional waste biomass-derived photothermal (MWBP) evaporator was first developed using carbonized vinegar residue, an abundant waste biomass material, via a convenient and scalable method combining KOH activation and high-temperature pyrolysis. Benefiting from its synergistic advantages in efficient light harvesting, superior photothermal energy conversion, and optimized water transport pathways, the MWBP evaporator achieved a solar-to-vapor conversion efficiency of 91.5% and an optimal evaporation rate of 1.45 kg m⁻² h⁻¹, maintaining unaffected evaporation efficiency in seawater or wastewater under various pollution conditions. Additionally, the MWBP evaporator effectively removed 99% of typical organic pollutants, such as methylene blue, methyl orange, and heavy metals, facilitated by chelation and hydrogen bonding interactions with –OH and –NH₂ groups on its surface. Moreover, antibacterial functional groups, including oxygen-containing functional groups and amino groups, primarily contributed to the good biological cleanliness of the recycled water by disrupting the cellular structure of bacteria or interfering with their metabolic processes. Hence, the as-prepared MWBP evaporator exhibits tremendous potential as an innovative system for interfacial water evaporation and purification, which is particularly beneficial for economically deprived regions with multisource pollution.

With the improvement of the energy density and sensing accuracy of wearable devices, there is increasing interest in applying wearable electronics in daily life. However, traditional rigid plate-structured wearable devices cannot meet the human body’s wearing habits and make users may feel uncomfortable after wearing them for a long time. Fabric-type wearable electronics can be conformably coated on human skin without discomfort from mismatches in mechanical properties between the human body and electronics. Although state-of-the-art textile-based wearable devices have shown unique advantages in the field of e-textiles, real-world scenarios often involve stretching, bending, and wetting. Further efforts should be made to achieve “comfortable wearing” due to the great challenge of achieving both promising electrical properties and comfort in a single device. This review presents a comprehensive overview of the advances in smart fabric-based wearable electronics toward comfortable wearing, emphasizing their stretchability, hydrophobicity, air permeability, stability, and color-change abilities. Through addressing the challenges that persist in fabric-type wearable electronics, we are optimistic that these will be soon ubiquitous in our daily lives, offering exceptionally comfortable wearing experiences for health monitoring, sports performance tracking, and even fashion, paving the way for a more comfortable and technologically advanced future.

Adsorbate transport during the electrochemical process mostly follows the electric-field direction or the high-to-low direction along the concentration gradient and thus often limits the reactant concentration at the adsorption site and requires specific mechanical or chemical bonds of adsorbates to trigger local excess aggregation for advanced framework structure assembly. Herein, we have discovered an active pumping channel during electrochemical adsorption of a manganese colloid, which follows a low-to-high direction inverse concentration gradient. It triggers surface excess micelle aggregation with even over 16-folds higher concentration than that in bulk owing to hydrogen-bonding difference of the micelle surface between in bulk and at the water surface. Micelles in the channel exhibit unique polymerization behaviors by directly polymerizing monomer micelles to form highly catalytic MnO₂ of dendritic frameworks, which can serve as a scalable thin-layer aqueous-phase reactor. It increases the understanding of the interface-dependent dynamic nature of micelle or more adsorbates and inspires transformative synthesizing approaches for advanced oxide materials.