Femtosecond-Laser-Ablated Porous Silver Nanowire Heater with Ultralow Driven-Voltage and Ultrafast Sensitivity for Highly Efficient Crude Oil Remedy.

The development of viscous-crude oil and water separation technology is important for overcoming pollution caused by oil spills. Although some separators responding to light, electric, and temperature have been proposed, their poor structural homogeneity and inferior controllability, together with weak capillary forces, hinder the rapid salvage of viscous crude oil. Herein, a Joule-heated hydrophobic porous oil/water separator is reported, which has advantages of low energy consumption (169.

Self-assembly driven regulation of 3D brush-/flower-like silk nanostructures with robust structural effects on composites construction.

Natural designs provide abundant inspirations for constructing structure regulated, performance enhanced and function enriched materials. An impressive 3D brush-like silk nanostructure (SNB) was designed and regulated via template-guided self-assembly approach in our previous work. While fundamental issues on template-guided self-assembly process to construct SNBs and followed by regulating flower-like silk nanostructure (SNF) mineralization have not been studied in detail yet.

Fiber-integrated hybrid achromatic microlenses by combined femtosecond laser 3D printing.

Compact achromats for visible wavelengths are crucial for miniaturized and lightweight full-color endoscopes. Emerging femtosecond laser 3D printing technology offers new possibilities for enhancing the optical performance of miniature imaging lenses on fibers. In this work, we combine refractive and diffractive elements with complementary dispersive properties to create thin, high-performance hybrid achromatic lenses within the visible spectrum, avoiding the use of different optical materials.

Design Strategy, On-Demand Control, and Biomedical Engineering Applications of Wet Adhesion.

The adhesion of tissues to external devices is fundamental to numerous critical applications in biomedical engineering, including tissue and organ repair, bioelectronic interfaces, adhesive robotics, wearable electronics, biomedical sensing and actuation, as well as medical monitoring, treatment, and healthcare. A key challenge in this context is that tissues are typically situated in aqueous and dynamic environments, which poses a bottleneck to further advancements in these fields. Wet adhesion technology (WAT) presents an effective solution to this issue.

Light-Triggered Droplet Gating Strategy Based on Janus Membrane Fabricated by Femtosecond Laser.

The characteristics of the directed transport of liquids based on Janus membranes play a crucial role in practical applications in energy, materials, physics, chemistry, medicine, biology, and other fields. Although extensive progress has been made, it is still difficult to realize the accurate controllability of liquid directional transmembrane transport. The current gating strategies for the directed transport of liquids based on Janus membranes still have some limitations: (a) using magnetic fluid may cause contamination due to the addition of new substances and (b) utilizing hydrophobicity/hydrophilicity conversion of titanium dioxide requires a long switching time (over 30 min).

Femtosecond laser writing of ant-inspired reconfigurable microbot collectives.

Microbot collectives can cooperate to accomplish complex tasks that are difficult for a single individual. However, various force-induced microbot collectives maintained by weak magnetic, light, and electric fields still face challenges such as unstable connections, the need for a continuous external stimuli source, and imprecise individual control. Here, we construct magnetic and light-driven ant microbot collectives capable of reconfiguring multiple assembled architectures with robustness.

Femtosecond Laser Fabrication of Three-Dimensional Bubble-Propelled Microrotors for Multicomponent Mechanical Transmission.

Inspired by the reverse thrust generated by fuel injection, micromachines that are self-propelled by bubble ejection are developed, such as microrods, microtubes, and microspheres. However, controlling bubble ejection sites to build micromachines with programmable actuation and further enabling mechanical transmission remain challenging. Here, bubble-propelled mechanical microsystems are constructed by proposing a multimaterial femtosecond laser processing method, consisting of direct laser writing and selective laser metal reduction.

High-Throughput Two-Photon 3D Printing Enabled by Holographic Multi-Foci High-Speed Scanning.

The emerging two-photon polymerization (TPP) technique enables high-resolution printing of complex 3D structures, revolutionizing micro/nano additive manufacturing. Various fast scanning and parallel processing strategies have been proposed to promote its efficiency. However, obtaining large numbers of uniform focal spots for parallel high-speed scanning remains challenging, which hampers the realization of higher throughput.

Durable Janus membrane with on-demand mode switching fabricated by femtosecond laser.

Despite their notable unidirectional water transport capabilities, Janus membranes are commonly challenged by the fragility of their chemical coatings and the clogging of open microchannels. Here, an on-demand mode-switching strategy is presented to consider the Janus functionality and mechanical durability separately and implement them by simply stretching and releasing the membrane. The stretching Janus mode facilitates unidirectional liquid flow through the hydrophilic micropores-microgrooves channels (PG channels) fabricated by femtosecond laser.

Femtosecond-laser-patterned origami Janus membrane toward enhanced water fog harvesting.

Fog harvesting is an effective way to relieve water shortages in arid regions; thus, improving the efficiency of fog harvesting is urgently needed for both academic research and practical applications. Here, we report an origami patterned Janus (O-P-Janus) membrane using laser-ablated copper foams inspired by origami handcraft and traditional Chinese architecture. Compared to the planar fully ablated Janus membrane, our O-P-Janus membrane, with selectively ablated rectangular areas, exhibits an exceptional water collection rate (WCR) of approximately 267%.

Magnetic Janus origami robot for cross-scale droplet omni-manipulation.

The versatile manipulation of cross-scale droplets is essential in many fields. Magnetic excitation is widely used for droplet manipulation due to its distinguishing merits. However, facile magnetic actuation strategies are still lacked to realize versatile multiscale droplet manipulation.

Deciphering the Timing of Naphthalenic Ring Formation in the Biosynthesis of 8-Deoxyrifamycins.

Although the biosynthesis of rifamycin has been studied for three decades, the biosynthetic formation of the naphthalenic ring remains unclear. In this study, by deletion of all post-PKS modification genes, we identified macrolactam precursors released from PKS. Isolated prorifamycins ( and ) have a benzenic chromophore and exist in two sets of macrocyclic atropisomers.

Light-triggered multi-joint microactuator fabricated by two-in-one femtosecond laser writing.

Inspired by the flexible joints of humans, actuators containing soft joints have been developed for various applications, including soft grippers, artificial muscles, and wearable devices. However, integrating multiple microjoints into soft robots at the micrometer scale to achieve multi-deformation modalities remains challenging. Here, we propose a two-in-one femtosecond laser writing strategy to fabricate microjoints composed of hydrogel and metal nanoparticles, and develop multi-joint microactuators with multi-deformation modalities (>10), requiring short response time (30 ms) and low actuation power (<10 mW) to achieve deformation.

Bioinspired magnetism-responsive hybrid microstructures with dynamic switching toward liquid droplet rolling states.

The functionality of tunable liquid droplet adhesion is crucial for many applications such as self-cleaning surfaces and water collectors. However, it is still a challenge to achieve real-time and fast reversible switching between isotropic and anisotropic liquid droplet rolling states. Inspired by the surface topography on lotus leaves and rice leaves, herein we report a biomimetic hybrid surface with gradient magnetism-responsive micropillar/microplate arrays (GMRMA), featuring dynamic fast switching toward different droplet rolling states.

Geometry-Gradient Magnetocontrollable Lubricant-Infused Microwall Array for Passive/Active Hybrid Bidirectional Droplet Transport.

Manipulation of droplets has increasingly garnered global attention, owing to its multifarious potential applications, including microfluidics and medical diagnostic tests. To control the droplet motion, geometry-gradient-based passive transport has emerged as a well-established strategy, which induces a Laplace pressure difference based on the droplet radius differences in confined state and transport droplets with no consumption of external energy, whereas this transportation method has inevitably shown some critical limitations: unidirectionality, uncontrollability, short moving distance, and low velocity. Herein, a magnetocontrollable lubricant-infused microwall array (MLIMA) is designed as a key solution to this issue.

Temperature-Regulated Bidirectional Capillary Force Self-Assembly of Femtosecond Laser Printed Micropillars for Switchable Chiral Microstructures.

Bottom-up self-assembly is regarded as an alternative way to manufacture series of microstructures in many fields, especially chiral microstructures, which attract tremendous attention because of their optical micromanipulations and chiroptical spectroscopies. However, most of the self-assembled microstructures cannot be tuned after processing, which largely hinders their broad applications. Here, we demonstrate a promising manufacturing strategy for switchable microstructures by combining the flexibility of femtosecond laser printing induced capillary force self-assembly and the temperature-responsive characteristics of smart hydrogels.

Direct laser writing structural color for reversible encryption and decryption in different mediums.

Structural color (SC) has enormous potential for improving the visualization and identification of functional micro/nano structures for information encryption and intelligent sensing. Nevertheless, achieving the direct writing of SCs at the micro/nano scale and the change of color in response to external stimuli simultaneously is rather challenging. To this end, we directly printed woodpile structures (WSs) utilizing femtosecond laser two-photon polymerization (fs-TPP), which demonstrated obvious SCs under an optical microscope.

Microclaw Array Fabricated by Single Exposure of Femtosecond Airy Beam and Self-Assembly for Regulating Cell Migratory Plasticity.

The highly aligned extracellular matrix of metastatic breast cancer cells is considered to be the "highway" of cancer invasion, which strongly promotes the directional migration of cancer cells to break through the basement membrane. However, how the reorganized extracellular matrix regulates cancer cell migration remains unknown. Here, a single exposure of a femtosecond Airy beam followed by a capillary-assisted self-assembly process was used to fabricate a microclaw-array, which was used to mimic the highly oriented extracellular matrix of tumor cells and the pores in the matrix or basement membrane during cell invasion.

Self-Driving Underwater "Aerofluidics".

Here, the concept of "aerofluidics," in which a system uses microchannels to transport and manipulate trace gases at the microscopic scale to build a highly versatile integrated system based on gas-gas or gas-liquid microinteractions is proposed. A kind of underwater aerofluidic architecture is designed using superhydrophobic surface microgrooves written by a femtosecond laser. In the aqueous medium, a hollow microchannel is formed between the superhydrophobic microgrooves and the water environment, which allows gas to flow freely underwater for aerofluidic devices.

Active Droplet Transport Induced by Moving Meniscus on a Slippery Magnetic Responsive Micropillar Array.

Intelligent droplet manipulation plays a crucial role in both scientific research and industrial technology. Inspired by nature, meniscus driving is an ingenious way to spontaneously transport droplets. However, the shortages of short-range transport and droplet coalescence limit its application.

Nanosilk Template-Guided/Induced Construction of Brush-/Flower-like 3D Nanostructures.

Biomaterials with natural hierarchical structures typically exhibit extraordinary properties because of their multilevel structural designs. They offer many templates and models as well as inspiration for material design, particularly for fabricating structure-regulated, performance-enhanced, and function-enriched materials. Biopolymer-based nanocomposites with ingenious nanostructures constructed through ecofriendly and sustainable approaches are highly desirable to meet the multifunctional requirements of developing bioinspired materials.

Circular RNA protein tyrosine kinase 2 aggravates pyroptosis and inflammation in septic lung tissue by promoting microRNA-766/eukaryotic initiation factor 5A axis-mediated ATP efflux.

Purpose: Sepsis is characterized by an acute inflammatory response to infection, often with multiple organ failures, especially severe lung injury. This study was implemented to probe circular RNA (circRNA) protein tyrosine kinase 2 (circPTK2)-associated regulatory mechanisms in septic acute lung injury (ALI).

Methods: A cecal ligation and puncture-based mouse model and an lipopolysaccharides (LPS)-based alveolar type II cell (RLE-6TN) model were generated to mimic sepsis.

Optical Encryption in the Photonic Orbital Angular Momentum Dimension via Direct-Laser-Writing 3D Chiral Metahelices.

Vortex beams, which intrinsically possess optical orbital angular momentum (OAM), are considered as one of the promising chiral light waves for classical optical communications and quantum information processing. For a long time, it has been an expectation to utilize artificial three-dimensional (3D) chiral metamaterials to manipulate the transmission of vortex beams for practical optical display applications. Here, we demonstrate the concept of selective transmission management of vortex beams with opposite OAM modes assisted by the designed 3D chiral metahelices.