Solar‐driven interfacial evaporation materials for seawater desalination and wastewater treatment have attracted extensive research interest in recent years. Nevertheless, salt accumulation, costly materials, and complex preparation processes greatly hinder the practical application of solar steam generation. Herein, with low‐cost materials such as carbon black (CB), polystyrene‐b‐polybutadiene‐b‐polystyrene (SBS), and commercial cotton fabric, the CB@SBS/cotton fabric Janus evaporator is fabricated via a breath figure template (BFT) method for scalable, long‐term, and stable solar‐driven interfacial desalination. The BFT is a simple yet efficient self‐assembly method that endows the hydrophobic surface of CB@SBS/cotton fabric with a porous structure for high light absorption (≈95.5%) and steam escape. As a result, the CB@SBS/cotton fabric Janus evaporator can achieve a water evaporation rate of 1.37 kg m–2 h–1 and conversion efficiency of 91.3% even in a 3.5 wt% NaCl solution, as well as stably cycling over 15 times without salt accumulation (each cycle: 8 h for illumination and 16 h for rest). The work demonstrates an effective strategy for achieving high‐performance solar steam generation and superior salt rejection capability, which can be potentially utilized in seawater desalination, sterilization, and disinfection.

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Membrane distillation (MD) is a promising technique for water reclamation from hypersaline wastewater. However, fouling and wetting of the hydrophobic membranes are two prominent challenges for the widespread application of MD. Herein, we developed an antiwetting and antifouling Janus membrane comprising a hydrogel-like polyvinyl alcohol/tannic acid (PVA/TA) top layer and a hydrophobic polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) membrane substrate via a facile and benign strategy combining mussel-amine co-deposition with the shrinkage−rehydration process. Interestingly, the vapor flux of the Janus membrane was not compromised, though a microscale PVA/ TA layer was introduced, possibly due to the high water uptake and reduced water evaporation enthalpy of the hydrogel-like structure. Moreover, the PVA/TA-PTFE Janus membrane sustained stable MD performance while treating a challenging saline feed containing surfactants and mineral oils. The robust wetting resistance arises from the synergistic effects of the elevated liquid entry pressure (1.01 ± 0.02 MPa) of the membrane and the retardation of surfactant transport to the substrate PTFE layer. Meanwhile, the hydrogel-like PVA/TA layer hinders oil fouling due to its strongly hydrated state. Furthermore, the PVA/TA-PTFE membrane exhibited improved performance in purifying shale gas wastewater and landfill leachate. This study provides new insights into the facile design and fabrication of promising MD membranes for hypersaline wastewater treatment.

Advanced SiO2–Al2O3 aerogel materials have outstanding potential in the field of thermal insulation. Nevertheless, the creation of a mechanically robust and low-cost SiO2–Al2O3 aerogel material remains a considerable challenge. In this study, SiO2–Al2O3 aerogel based on coal gangue, which is a type of zero-cost inorganic waste, was constructed in porous agarose aerogel beads, followed by simple chemical vapor deposition of trimethylchlorosilane to fabricate SiO2–Al2O3/agarose composite aerogel beads (SCABs). The resulting SCABs exhibited a unique nanoscale interpenetrating network structure, which is lightweight and has high specific surface area (538.3 m2/g), hydrophobicity (approximately 128°), and excellent thermal stability and thermal insulation performance. Moreover, the compressive strength of the SCABs was dramatically increased by approximately a factor of ten compared to that of native SiO2–Al2O3 aerogel beads. The prepared SCABs not only pave the way for the design of a novel aerogel material for use in thermal insulation without requiring expensive raw materials, but also provide an effective way to comprehensively use coal gangue.

SUMMARYWSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) is a promising Web services specification used to standardize presentation-based access to remote Web portal content. In combination with the JSR-168 standard, portlet developers are freed of doing the hard work in publishing their portlets to a remote portal: ideally it is the duty of a portal framework to publish the portlets it manages. Code reusability can now be achieved with JSR-168 while 'deploy once' is achieved through WSRP. In this paper the WSRP support provided by selected open-source portal frameworks including the eXo platform, Liferay, StringBeans and uPortal are reported. WSRP4J, which is not a portal framework but a reference implementation of the WSRP 1.0 specification, is also discussed. Based on our test results, a WSRP consumer has been developed for Sakai, a collaboration and learning environment, based on the WSRP4J consumer, which enables Sakai to consume JSR-168 portlets.

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A conceptually novel multi-bioinspired strategy based on structures and functions derived from the Namib desert beetle and lotus leaf is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme synergistically combines the features of alternating wettability patterns and asymmetric wettability for improved directional water transport. Consequently, a Janus copper mesh, which substantially outperforms other single-bioinspired synthetic materials, is produced. The Janus copper mesh achieves directional self-transportation of tiny water droplets and continuous water flow in a gravity-irrelevant or an anti-gravity manner without energy consumption. This depends on the asymmetric wettability and alternating hydrophobic-hydrophilic wettability patterns on the hydrophobic surface of the mesh. In particular, Janus copper shows remarkable selective directional water transport in a water−oil system, rendering it a promising candidate for practical applications.

The integration of existing Grid tools into the Sakai VRE (Virtual Research Environment) will be discussed in this paper. In particular we describe the integration of the business logic and JSR 168 compliant portlets through presentationoriented Web Services, via WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets). A set of JSR 168 compliant portlets were developed for the UK NGS (National Grid Service) Portal and have been published using WSRP4J and consumed within Sakai successfully, which proves re-use of portlets as web components is a practical option. With the help of the WSRP consumer tool, the Sakai VRE has been successfully extended to support the JSR 168 specification.