Carbon aerogels with biomimetic structures have shown excellent physicochemical properties and brought great potential applications to a wide range of fields. The utilization of renewable resources as the carbon precursors offers a low-cost and scalable way to fabricate biomimetic carbon aerogels with intriguing properties such as ultralight weight, superelasticity, and high conductivity. Inspired by the unique hierarchical mineral bridge structure of Thalia dealbata stem, we fabricated an ultralight, superelastic, highly conductive carbon aerogel (KGA) by using konjac glucomannan and graphene oxide as the carbon precursors. The unique mineral-bridged layered structure not only endows the carbon aerogel with a low density of 4.2 mg cm–3 but also a high electrical conductivity (12.9 S m–1). In addition, the carbon aerogel also exhibits a superelastic property of 80% maximal strain and no obvious degradation after 1000 cycles of compression. We demonstrated that this Thalia dealbata inspired carbon aerogel has potential applications in supercapacitor electrodes and piezoresistive sensors.

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The influence of silk fibroin (SF) and magnesium ions (Mg2+) on calcium carbonate (CaCO3) bio-mineralization has been investigated.

Carbonate mineralization microbe is a microorganism capable of decomposing the substrate in the metabolic process to produce the carbonate, which then forms calcium carbonate with calcium ions. By taking advantage of this process, contaminative uranium tailings can transform to solid cement, where calcium carbonate plays the role of a binder. In this paper, we have studied the morphology of mineralized crystals by controlling the mineralization time and adding different concentrations of montmorillonite (MMT). At the same time, we also studied the effect of carbonate mineralized cementation uranium tailings by controlling the amount of MMT. The results showed that MMT can regulate the crystal morphology of calcium carbonate. What is more, MMT can balance the acidity and ions in the uranium tailings; it also can reduce the toxicity of uranium ions on microorganisms. In addition, MMT filling in the gap between the uranium tailings made the cement body more stable. When the amount of MMT is 6%, the maximum strength of the cement body reached 2.18 MPa, which increased by 47.66% compared with that the sample without MMT. Therefore, it is reasonable and feasible to use the MMT to regulate the biocalcium carbonate cemented uranium tailings.

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