Solid deposition, such as the formation of ice on outdoor facilities, the deposition of scale in water reservoirs, the sedimentation of fat, oil, and grease (FOG) in sewer systems, and the precipitation of wax in petroleum pipelines, cause a serious waste of resources and irreversible environmental pollution. Inspired by fish and pitcher plants, we present a self‐replenishable organogel material which shows ultra‐low adhesion to solidified paraffin wax and crude oil by absorption of low‐molar‐mass oil from its crude‐oil environment. Adhesion of wax on the organogel surface was over 500 times lower than adhesion to conventional material surfaces and the wax was found to slide off under the force of gravity. This design concept of a gel with decreased adhesion to wax and oil can be extended to deal with other solid deposition problems.

Synthetic gels with switchable interfacial properties have great potential in smart devices and controllable transport. Herein, we design an organogel by incorporating a binary liquid mixture with an upper critical solution temperature (UCST) into a polymer network, resulting in reversible modulation of lubrication and adhesion properties. As the temperature changes, the lubricating mechanism changes reversibly from boundary lubrication to hydrodynamic lubrication due to phase separation within the binary solution permeating the gel (friction coefficient 0.4-0.03). Droplets appear on the gel surface at low temperature and disappear with temperature higher than the critical phase separation temperature (T ps) of the organogel. The organogel possesses a relatively low ice adhesive strength (less than 1 kPa). This material has potential applications in anti-icing and smart devices, and we believe that this design strategy can be expanded to other systems such as aqueous solutions and hydrogels.

Seamlessly bridging the hard and the soft, a strategy to fabricate hierarchically porous NiTi/hydrogels nanocomposites is reported. The nanocomposite surface can hold high-content water while keeping its hierarchical nanoscale topography, thus showing exceptional antibiofouling performance. This strategy will lead to antibiofouling alloy (e.g., NiTi)/hydrogel nanocomposites for improved stents and other blood-contacting implants and medical devices.

Conductive hydrogels have attracted considerable attention due to their promising applications in a variety of fields. However, conductive hydrogels prepared by conventional strategies usually suffer from poor mechanical properties and low fatigue resistance. In this study, a synergistic strategy to fabricate macroporous conductive hydrogels (PC‐hydrogels) by introducing macroporous structure to the hydrogels is reported. The polypyrrole can distribute uniformly in the hydrogel network, thus endowing the hydrogels with good electrical conductivity and outstanding fatigue resistance. Moreover, the combination of stiff polypyrrole and soft hydrogel network can enhance the mechanical properties of the hydrogel. As a result, the PC‐hydrogels show negligible performance degradation after being compressed for more than 1200 cycles. Furthermore, the PC‐hydrogels‐based sensors can detect a variety of human motions with different intensities and ranges. The outstanding mechanical reliability and electrical conductivity make these PC‐hydrogels suitable for application in areas of strain sensors and wearable devices.

Enormous research efforts have been made to self-assemble monodisperse colloidal spheres into special microscopic shapes (e.g., superbeads, superballs, or doughnuts), due to their widespread applications in sensors, displays, separation processes, catalysis, etc. But realization of photonic crystal (PC) assemblies with both facile microshape control and a noniridescent property is still a tough task. Herein, we demonstrate the controllable fabrication of noniridescent microshaped PC assemblies by evaporation-induced self-assembly inside aqueous colloidal dispersion droplet templates on superhydrophobic substrates. The microshapes of the PC assemblies could be tuned from microbeads to microwells to microellipsoids by manipulating the dynamic behaviors of the three-phase contact line of the colloidal droplets during the evaporating process. Structure characterization shows that the PC assemblies are crack-free, consisting of an ordered periodic arrangement of colloidal spheres in the surface layers and amorphous inner layers. The incorporation of black Fe3O4 nanoparticles into the PC assembly lattice is demonstrated to endow the PC assemblies with enhanced noniridescent structural colors with wide-viewing angles and a superparamagnetic property. The crack-free noniridescent PC assemblies with controlled microshapes have promising applications in the fields of nontoxic, nonbleaching pigments and energy-efficient full-color display pixels, and their facile fabrication procedure may provide guidance for creating new types of substructured colloidal particles.