Animals living in the extremely cold environment, such as polar bears, have shown amazing capability to keep warm, benefiting from their hollow hairs. Mimicking such a strategy in synthetic fibers would stimulate smart textiles for efficient personal thermal management, which plays an important role in preventing heat loss and improving efficiency in house warming energy consumption. Here, a "freeze-spinning" technique is used to realize continuous and large-scale fabrication of fibers with aligned porous structure, mimicking polar bear hairs, which is difficult to achieve by other methods. A textile woven with such biomimetic fibers shows an excellent thermal insulation property as well as good breathability and wearability. In addition to passively insulating heat loss, the textile can also function as a wearable heater, when doped with electroheating materials such as carbon nanotubes, to induce fast thermal response and uniform electroheating while maintaining its soft and porous nature for comfortable wearing.
A nature-inspired
water-cycling system, akin to trees, to perform
effective water and solar energy management for photosynthesis and
transpiration is considered to be a promising strategy to solve water
scarcity issues globally. However, challenges remain in terms of the
relatively low transport rate, short transport distance, and unsatisfactory
extraction efficiency. Herein, enlightened by conifer tracheid construction,
an efficient water transport and evaporation system composed of a
hierarchical structured aerogel is reported. This architecture with
radially aligned channels, micron pores, and molecular meshes is realized
by applying a radial ice-template method and in situ cryopolymerization technique. This nature-inspired design benefits
the aerogel excellent capillary rise performance, realizing a long-distance
(>28 cm at 190 min) and quick (>1 cm at 1 s, >9 cm at 300
s) antigravity
water transport on a macroscopic scale, regardless of clean water,
seawater, sandy groundwater, or dye-including effluent. Furthermore,
an efficient water transpiration and collection is performed by the
bilayer-structured aerogel with a carbon heat collector on an aerogel
top, demonstrating a solar steam generation rate of 2.0 kg m–2 h–1 with the energy conversion efficiency up to
85.7% under one solar illumination. This biomimetic design with the
advantage of water transport and evaporation provides a potential
approach to realize water purification, regeneration, and desalination.
The Quaternary glacial history of the Rongbuk valley on the northern slopes of Mount Everest is examined using field mapping, geomorphic and sedimentological methods, and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) and 10
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