In article number 202000186 by Liangzhi Hong, Jianyu Su and coworkers, a water‐soluble antibacterial agent is developed by integrating membrane‐active natural borneol with a hydrophilic PDMAEMA chain. Cotton fabrics with sustained antibacterial activity can be fabricated by grafting the borneol‐based antibacterial agents on the surface.

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Environmentally responsive cotton fabrics were fabricated by dip-coating ABC miktoarm star terpolymers, which contain reactive poly(3-triisopropyloxysilylpropyl methacrylate) blocks, hydrophobic poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) blocks, and hydrophilic poly( N , N -dimethylaminoethyl methacrylate) (PDMAEMA) blocks. The functionalized cotton fabrics with perfectly alternating PDMS and PDMAEMA blocks show underoil superhydrophobicity and underwater superoleophobicity. The wettability and permeability of the functionalized fabrics can be readily adjusted by the contacting medium. More interestingly, surface reconstruction causes a reduction in the breakthrough pressure of the nonwetting phase. The adaptive permeability endows the functionalized cotton fabrics with the capability to separate heavy oil–water–light oil ternary mixtures.

Polymer/inorganic colloidal nanocomposites can be prepared via Pickering emulsion polymerization (PEP); however, this process usually requires the use of surfactants, auxiliary comonomers, and volatile organic compounds. Herein, we report a versatile and efficient method for synthesizing stable monodisperse polymer/silica colloidal nanocomposite particles via PEP. First, silica nanoparticles were modified by depositing a multifunctional polydopamine (PDA) film. The outermost PDA film could enhance the precipitation of oligomeric polymer radicals on the silica surface, which is crucial for the preparation of stable polymer/inorganic colloidal nanocomposites via PEP. Notably, this PDA modification approach can employ different initiator systems, such as cationic initiators and redox initiator couples, and can be applied to various monomers and monomer pairs (St, St/nBA, MMA, MMA/nBA, Vac, Vac/nBA). The influence of the concentration and size of polydopamine-coated silica (SiO2@PDA) on the colloidal nanocomposite was investigated. Increasing the diameter of SiO2@PDA and decreasing the concentration of SiO2@PDA both lead to the formation of larger nanocomposite particles. Considering its wide applicability, the proposed PDA modification approach can be applied to other functional inorganic particles to prepare multifunctional polymer/inorganic nanocomposite particles.

Surface‐segregated micelles (SSMs) have shown potential applications in drug delivery, bioimaging, and Pickering emulsions due to their adaptive characteristics. A diverse set of SSMs are prepared by reversible addition–fragmentation transfer (RAFT)‐mediated polymerization‐induced self‐assembly (PISA). However, the obtained self‐assembled structures are mostly limited to spherical forms, and SSMs with a hierarchical structure are not yet prepared. In this study, SSMs with various hierarchical structures are generated by the dispersion polymerization of benzyl methacrylate (BzMA) co‐mediated by a binary mixture of poly(2‐(dimethylamino)ethyl methacrylate) and polydimethylsiloxane as macromolecular chain‐transfer agents (macro‐CTAs). The obtained structures include cylinders, vesicles, large compound micelles, and bundles of hoops. The morphological evolution of these structures and vesicle size can be readily tuned by varying the composition of the binary mixture of macro‐CTAs. This study expands the scope of RAFT‐mediated PISA for synthesizing well‐defined polymer nano‐objects with higher‐order morphologies for various applications.