Human skin and hair can simultaneously feel pressure, temperature, humidity, strain, and fl ow-great inspirations for applications such as artifi cial skins for burn and acid victims, robotics, and vehicular technology. Previous efforts in this direction use sophisticated materials or processes. Chemically functionalized, inkjet printed or vacuum-technology-processed papers albeit cheap have shown limited functionalities. Thus, performance and/or functionalities per cost have been limited. Here, a scalable "garage" fabrication approach is shown using off-the-shelf inexpensive household elements such as aluminum foil, scotch tapes, sticky-notes, napkins, and sponges to build "paper skin" with simultaneous real-time sensing capability of pressure, temperature, humidity, proximity, pH, and fl ow. Enabling the basic principles of porosity, adsorption, and dimensions of these materials, a fully functioning distributed sensor network platform is reported, which, for the fi rst time, can sense the vitals of its carrier (body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, and skin hydration) and the surrounding environment.

Unprecedented 800% stretchable, non-polymeric, widely used, low-cost, naturally rigid, metallic thin-film copper (Cu)-based flexible and non-invasive, spatially tunable, mobile thermal patch with wireless controllability, adaptability (tunes the amount of heat based on the temperature of the swollen portion), reusability, and affordability due to low-cost complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) compatible integration.

Current marine research primarily depends on weighty and invasive sensory equipment and telemetric network to understand the marine environment, including the diverse fauna it contains, as a function of animal behavior and size, as well as equipment longevity. To match animal morphology and activity within the surrounding marine environment, here we show a physically flexible and stretchable skin-like and waterproof autonomous multifunctional system, integrating Bluetooth, memory chip, and high performance physical sensors. The sensory tag is mounted on a swimming crab (Portunus pelagicus) and is capable of continuous logging of depth, temperature, and salinity within the harsh ocean environment. The fully packaged, ultra-lightweight (<2.4 g in water), and compliant "Marine Skin" system does not have any wired connection enabling safe and weightless cuttingedge approach to monitor and assess marine life and the ecosystem's health to support conservation and management of marine ecosystems.

As we are advancing our world to smart living, a critical challenge is increasingly pressing -increased energy demand. While we need mega power supplies for running data centers and other emerging applications, we also need instant small-scale power supply for trillions of electronics that we are using and will use in the age of Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Everything (IoE). Such power supplies must meet some parallel demands: sufficient energy supply in reliable, safe and affordable manner. In that regard, thermoelectric generators emerge as important renewable energy source with great potential to take advantage of the widely-abundant and normally-wasted thermal energy. Thanks to the advancements of nano-engineered materials, thermoelectric generators' (TEG) performance and feasibility are gradually improving. However, still innovative engineering solutions are scarce to sufficiently take the TEG performance and functionalities beyond the status-quo. Opportunities exist to integrate them with emerging fields and technologies such as wearable electronics, bio-integrated systems, cybernetics and others. This review will mainly focus on unorthodox but effective engineering solutions to notch up the overall performance of TEGs and broadening their application base. First, nanotechnology's influence in TEGs' development will be introduced, followed by a discussion on how the introduction of mechanically reconfigurable devices can shape up the emerging spectrum of novel TEG technologies. The technology-driven age we are currently in, have brought great advantages to establish a more comfortable and smarter living and it is leading the way for an even faster-growing development in all areas of science and engineering, but at the same time it brings an incredibly fast growing demand for energy. Current and future energy consumption mandate the need for alternative energy sources, with reduced environmental impact. Readily available solar and wind energies have lead the way as alternative energy sources to environmentally challenging fossil fuels.1 Moreover, thanks to more recent developments in thermoelectric (TE) materials and devices, the possibility of making a better use of the widely abundant and normally wasted thermal energy, has becoming a popular and feasible alternative.2 More importantly, thermal waste has become a very important and environmentallyfriendly source of otherwise wasted energy.3,4 There has been already an important set of studies covering the mechanism involved during the conversion from thermal to electric energy. [5][6][7][8] Such studies have been the starting point to develop and optimize novel TE materials with the resourceful aid of uprising nanotechnologies. 9,10 In this review, we will first shortly introduce some important basic concepts and relations about thermoelectrics, as well as some of the current efforts to use nanotechnologies and nano-materials to improve performance and viability. Next, we will focus on identifying innovative devices, novel engineering approach...

Flexible and semi‐transparent high performance thermoelectric energy harvesters are fabricated on low cost bulk mono‐crystalline silicon (100) wafers. The released silicon is only 3.6% as thick as bulk silicon reducing the thermal loss significantly and generating nearly 30% more output power than unpeeled harvesters. This generic batch processing is a pragmatic way of transforming traditional silicon circuitry for extremely deformable high‐performance integrated electronics.