Animals living in the extremely cold environment, such as polar bears, have shown amazing capability to keep warm, benefiting from their hollow hairs. Mimicking such a strategy in synthetic fibers would stimulate smart textiles for efficient personal thermal management, which plays an important role in preventing heat loss and improving efficiency in house warming energy consumption. Here, a "freeze-spinning" technique is used to realize continuous and large-scale fabrication of fibers with aligned porous structure, mimicking polar bear hairs, which is difficult to achieve by other methods. A textile woven with such biomimetic fibers shows an excellent thermal insulation property as well as good breathability and wearability. In addition to passively insulating heat loss, the textile can also function as a wearable heater, when doped with electroheating materials such as carbon nanotubes, to induce fast thermal response and uniform electroheating while maintaining its soft and porous nature for comfortable wearing.

Materials combining lightweight, robust mechanical performances, and multifunctionality are highly desirable for engineering applications. Graphene aerogels have emerged as attractive candidates. Despite recent progresses, the bottleneck remains how to simultaneously achieve both strength and resilience. While multiscale architecture designs may offer a possible route, the difficulty lies in the lack of design guidelines and how to experimentally achieve the necessary structure control over multiple length scales. The latter is even more challenging when manufacturing scalability is taken into account. The Thalia dealbata stem is a naturally porous material that is lightweight, strong, and resilient, owing to its architecture with three-dimensional (3D) interconnected lamellar layers. Inspired by such, we assemble graphene oxide (GO) sheets into a similar architecture using a bidirectional freezing technique. Subsequent freeze-drying and thermal reduction results in graphene aerogels with highly tunable 3D architectures, consequently an unusual combination of strength and resilience. With their additional electrical conductivity, these graphene aerogels are potentially useful for mechanically switchable electronics. Beyond such, our study establishes bidirectional freezing as a general method to achieve multiscale architectural control in a scalable manner that can be extended to many other material systems.

A nature-inspired water-cycling system, akin to trees, to perform effective water and solar energy management for photosynthesis and transpiration is considered to be a promising strategy to solve water scarcity issues globally. However, challenges remain in terms of the relatively low transport rate, short transport distance, and unsatisfactory extraction efficiency. Herein, enlightened by conifer tracheid construction, an efficient water transport and evaporation system composed of a hierarchical structured aerogel is reported. This architecture with radially aligned channels, micron pores, and molecular meshes is realized by applying a radial ice-template method and in situ cryopolymerization technique. This nature-inspired design benefits the aerogel excellent capillary rise performance, realizing a long-distance (>28 cm at 190 min) and quick (>1 cm at 1 s, >9 cm at 300 s) antigravity water transport on a macroscopic scale, regardless of clean water, seawater, sandy groundwater, or dye-including effluent. Furthermore, an efficient water transpiration and collection is performed by the bilayer-structured aerogel with a carbon heat collector on an aerogel top, demonstrating a solar steam generation rate of 2.0 kg m–2 h–1 with the energy conversion efficiency up to 85.7% under one solar illumination. This biomimetic design with the advantage of water transport and evaporation provides a potential approach to realize water purification, regeneration, and desalination.