Anti-icing surfaces have a critical footprint on daily lives of humans ranging from transportation systems and infrastructure to energy systems, but creation of these surfaces for low temperatures remains elusive. Non-wetting surfaces and liquid-infused surfaces have inspired routes for the development of icephobic surfaces. However, high freezing temperature, high ice adhesion strength, and high cost have restricted their practical applications. Here we report new magnetic slippery surfaces outperforming state-of-the-art icephobic surfaces with a ice formation temperature of −34 °C, 2–3 orders of magnitude higher delay time in ice formation, extremely low ice adhesion strength (≈2 Pa) and stability in shear flows up to Reynolds number of 105. In these surfaces, we exploit the magnetic volumetric force to exclude the role of solid–liquid interface in ice formation. We show that these inexpensive surfaces are universal and can be applied to all types of solids (no required micro/nano structuring) with no compromise to their unprecedented properties.

Solar steam generation at high pressure is demonstrated through heat localization approach by a flexible artificially-networked material structure.

COMMUNICATION (1 of 7)Droplet manipulation on a surface is a crucial phenomenon in a broad spectrum of disciplines from energy and water systems, [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] chemical microreactors, [11,12] droplet-based microfluidics [13][14][15][16] to biosciences. [17][18][19] In these embodiments, droplet manipulation is required for transporting, guiding, removing, splitting, merging, or trapping of droplets for intended physical and chemical interactions. A variety of approaches have been developed for controlled droplet manipulation including surface