Integrating personal thermoregulation technologies into wearable textiles has enabled extensive and profound technological breakthroughs in energy savings, thermal comfort, wearable electronics, intelligent fabrics, and so forth. Nevertheless, previous studies have suffered from long-standing issues such as limited working temperature, poor comfort, and weak reliability of the textiles. Here, we demonstrate a skin-friendly personal insulation textile and a thermoregulation textile that can perform both passive heating and cooling using the same piece of textile with zero energy input. The insulation textile material is composed of biomaterial microstructured fibers that exhibit good thermal insulation, low thermal emissivity, and good dyeability. By filling these microstructure fibers with biocompatible phase-change materials and coating them with polydimethylsiloxane, the insulation textile becomes a thermoregulation textile that shows good water hydrophobicity, high mechanical robustness, and high working stability. The proposed thermoregulation textile exhibits slow heating/cooling rates with improved thermal comfort, offering feasible and adaptive options for personal cooling/heating scenarios and enabling scalable manufacturing for practical applications.

Natural nanoparticles are present in soils but their abundance, properties and interactions with other soil components have not been studied widely. We used an ultrasonic‐centrifugal method to disperse and extract nanoparticles from 12 soils sampled in different regions of China. Various techniques were used to study the characteristics of the nanoparticles obtained, including particle size and zeta potential analysis, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and X‐ray diffraction (XRD). The results showed that not all soils released nanoparticles by ultrasonic perturbation. For most Mollisols and Alfisols, large amounts of nanoparticles of relatively small size (around 25 nm) and simple composition (only muscovite and montmorillonite) were released preferentially at low ultrasonic energy. The suspension conditions (3–4 g kg−1 nanoparticle in solution with 0.4–0.6 mm ionic strength) were unfavourable for nanoparticle aggregation and the suspensions remained stable for up to 100 days. In contrast, it was difficult to release nanoparticles from Ultisols and Entisols. Ultisols and Entisols released small amounts of nanoparticles (size around 70 nm) and the suspension was very unstable, and some released no nanoparticles unless the dispersant was added. The study also indicated that the characteristics of the isolated nanoparticles were directly related to their respective matrix soils.

Characterization of nanoparticles (NPs) in coal fly ashes (CFAs) is critical for better understanding the potential health-related risks resulting from coal combustion. Based on single-particle (SP)-inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) coupled with transmission electron microscopy techniques, this study is the first to determine the concentrations and sizes of metal-containing NPs in low-rank coal-derived fly ashes. Despite only comprising a minor component of the studied CFAs by mass, NPs were the dominant fraction by particle number. Fe- and Ti-containing NPs were identified as the dominant NPs with their particle number concentration ranging from 2.5 × 107 to 2.5 × 108 particles/mg. In addition, the differences of Fe-/Ti-containing NPs in various CFAs were regulated by the coalification degree of feed coals and combustion conditions of all of the low-rank CFAs tested. In the cases where these NPs in CFAs become airborne and are inhaled, they can be taken up in pulmonary interstitial fluids. This study shows that in Gamble’s solution (a lung fluid simulant), 51–87% of Fe and 63–89% of Ti (ratio of the mass of Fe-/Ti-containing NPs to the total mass of Fe/Ti) exist in the NP form and remain suspended in pulmonary fluid simulants. These NPs are bioavailable and may induce lung tissue damage.

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