Flexible electronics have aroused great interest over the past few years due to their unique advantages of being wearable and lightweight. Introducing the self-healing function into wearable electronics will contribute to the practical applications of wearable electronics by prolonging the devices’ lifetime. In this study, a flexible essential oil (EO)-loaded mesoporous silica (EO@AMS)/polyacrylate hybrid hydrogel with superb self-healing and antibacterial properties was prepared. The prepared hybrid hydrogel was found to have excellent piezoresistive sensing performance, which could be particularly suitable for human vital activity monitoring. Benefiting from the strong ionic bonding and multiple hydrogen bonds between polyacrylate and EO@AMS, the hybrid hydrogel could repair its damaged areas with restored sensing and mechanical properties, which suggested excellent self-healing ability. In addition, this hybrid hydrogel, when applied in wearable devices, was found to have high antibacterial ability owing to the slow release of the lemon EO from AMS to kill bacteria. This promising self-healing and antibacterial hybrid hydrogel shows a promising application in wearable electronics for posture monitoring, human–computer interaction, and artificial intelligence.

Snake sloughs in bird nests can reduce nest predation and serve as an anti-predator strategy. However, the anti-predator function of snake sloughs in nests has only been tested twice, and it is difficult to speculate around the origin of the differences, which may well include habitat, as predator species and predation risk vary in different habitat types. Habitat would be a good place to speculate as to how differences in habitats could explain differences in responses by nest predators. Thus, we selected three different habitats, namely, the Diaoluoshan National Nature Reserve in Hainan (DLS, tropical forest), the Hainan Normal University campus (HNU, urban area), and Qingchuifeng National Forest Park in Hebei (QCF, suburban area), to verify the anti-predator function of snake sloughs in bird nests. The experimental results showed that snake sloughs in the nests reduced the predation rate of the experimental nests in HNU, whereas no such effect occurred in DLS and QCF. This suggests that the anti-predatory function of snake sloughs may not be the same over some environmental gradients and could be dependent on the species of nest predators and food resources in the habitat, which does not apply to all types of habitats.

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