Plasmonic metal nanoparticles are a category of plasmonic materials that can efficiently convert light into heat under illumination, which can be applied in the field of solar steam generation. Here, this study designs a novel type of plasmonic material, which is made by uniformly decorating fine metal nanoparticles into the 3D mesoporous matrix of natural wood (plasmonic wood). The plasmonic wood exhibits high light absorption ability (≈99%) over a broad wavelength range from 200 to 2500 nm due to the plasmonic effect of metal nanoparticles and the waveguide effect of microchannels in the wood matrix. The 3D mesoporous wood with numerous low‐tortuosity microchannels and nanochannels can transport water up from the bottom of the device effectively due to the capillary effect. As a result, the 3D aligned porous architecture can achieve a high solar conversion efficiency of 85% under ten‐sun illumination (10 kW m−2). The plasmonic wood also exhibits superior stability for solar steam generation, without any degradation after being evaluated for 144 h. Its high conversion efficiency and excellent cycling stability demonstrate the potential of newly developed plasmonic wood to solar energy‐based water desalination.

Strategic manipulation of wave and particle transport in various media is the key driving force for modern information processing and communication. In a strongly scattering medium, waves and particles exhibit versatile transport characteristics such as localization, tunnelling with exponential decay, ballistic, and diffusion behaviours due to dynamical multiple scattering from strong scatters or impurities. Recent investigations of graphene have offered a unique approach, from a quantum point of view, to design the dispersion of electrons on demand, enabling relativistic massless Dirac quasiparticles, and thus inducing low-loss transport either ballistically or diffusively. Here, we report an experimental demonstration of an artificial phononic graphene tailored for surface phonons on a LiNbO integrated platform. The system exhibits Dirac quasiparticle-like transport, that is, pseudo-diffusion at the Dirac point, which gives rise to a thickness-independent temporal beating for transmitted pulses, an analogue of Zitterbewegung effects. The demonstrated fully integrated artificial phononic graphene platform here constitutes a step towards on-chip quantum simulators of graphene and unique monolithic electro-acoustic integrated circuits.

The evolution of agriculture towards intensive farming leads to an increasing demand for animal identification associated with high traceability, driven by the need for quality control and welfare management in agricultural animals. Automatic identification of individual animals is an important step to achieve individualised care in terms of disease detection and control, and improvement of the food quality. For example, as feeding patterns can differ amongst pigs in the same pen, even in homogenous groups, automatic registration shows the most potential when applied to an individual pig.