Under-oil superhydrophilic desert sand layer was used for efficient gravity-directed water-in-oil emulsions separation with high flux.

Oil/water separation is of great importance for the treatment of oily wastewater, including immiscible light/heavy oil-water mixtures, oil-in-water or water-in-oil emulsions. Smart surfaces with responsive wettability have received extensive attention especially for controllable oil/water separation. However, traditional smart membranes with a switchable wettability between superhydrophobicity and superhydrophilicity are limited to certain responsive materials and continuous external stimuli, such as pH, electrical field or light irradiation. Herein, a candle soot coated mesh (CSM) with a larger pore size and a candle soot coated PVDF membrane (CSP) with a smaller pore size with underwater superoleophobicity and underoil superhydrophobicity were successfully fabricated, which can be used for on-demand immiscible oil/water mixtures and surfactants-stabilized oil/water emulsion separation, respectively. Without any continuous external stimulus, the wettability of our membranes could be reversibly switched between underwater superoleophobicity and underoil superhydrophobicity simply by drying and washing alternately, thus achieving effective and switchable oil/water separation with excellent separation efficiency. We believe that such smart materials will be promising candidates for use in the removal of oil pollutants in the future.

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It is an urgent need that defect repair can develop from simple device fixation to living tissue reconstruction, from short life function replacement to permanent regeneration repair. At present, bone transplantation has become the second largest transplantation surgery after blood transfusion, and artificial bone transplantation generates great hope for the repair and treatment of bone defect. In order to repair bone defect, artificial bone must have good biological properties and sufficient mechanical properties, and it should also have the shape matching to bone defect site and the connected porous structure. For structures and properties requirements of artificial bone, in this review three major challenges faced by artificial bone transplantation are systemtically analyzed and current methods and strategies to address these issues are discussed: 1) the need for developing a type of bone scaffold material with both biological and mechanical properties, 2) the need for realizing the controllable fabrication of individual shape and multistage pore structure of bone scaffold, 3) the need for realizing the transformation from man‐made structure to biological structure. Besides, it summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of these methods and discusses the potential future directions of structural and functional adaptive artificial bone for bone defect regeneration.