SCIENCE CHINA Materials•2026•DOI: 10.1007/s40843-025-3683-y
Effective management of traumatic hemorrhage requires rapid blood loss control and facile removal of hemostatic materials to minimize secondary tissue damage. We fabricated a strongly adhesive aerogel (OPA) via Schiff-base crosslinking of oxidized hyaluronic acid (OHA) and ε-polylysine (ε-PL), enabling rapid hemostasis in lethal arterial trauma and on-demand removal via phase transition. OPAs exhibited tunable porosity and rapid blood absorption. Surface hydroxyl, amino, and carboxyl groups promoted strong hydrogen bonding with tissues, blood cells, and plasma proteins, enhancing tissue adhesion and platelet capture/activation. In a rabbit femoral-artery-injury model, OPA4 shortened hemostatic time by ~80% and reduced blood loss to 38% of the blank group. Notably, OPAs retained only 2% of initial adhesion after hydration, allowing gentle removal. OPAs also demonstrated excellent antibacterial activity, biocompatibility, and biodegradability. The simple one-step freeze-drying process and tailorable shapes offer scalable production and versatile applications. This study provides a versatile strategy for emergency and surgical hemostasis, combining rapid control of life-threatening arterial bleeding with on-demand atraumatic removal, promising improved patient outcomes and streamlined postoperative care.
New Carbon Materials•2026•DOI: 10.1016/S1872-5805(26)61066-9
Carbon materials suffer from limited dielectric loss, resulting in poor impedance matching and inadequate microwave attenuation. To address this, hierarchical structures with synergistic loss mechanisms are sought. Here, biomass cattail serves as a sustainable precursor for nitrogen-doped carbon nanotube arrays decorated with Fe3C nanoparticles via chemical vapor deposition, yielding Fe3C@NCNTs/CMTs composites. The crystallinity, tuned by calcination temperature, critically influences microwave absorption. At 800 °C, the composite achieves a minimum reflection loss of –35.8 dB and an effective absorption bandwidth of 7.02 GHz at a thickness of only 1.7 mm, with an ultralow filler loading of 10 wt%, covering the entire Ku band and part of the X band. This performance stems from enhanced magnetic loss and multiple dielectric polarization mechanisms. The study demonstrates a promising strategy for designing biomass-derived carbon-based broadband microwave absorbers.
SCIENCE CHINA Materials•2026•DOI: 10.1007/s40843-025-4015-5
Mechanochromic photonic crystals are promising for smart optical materials due to their tunable photonic stop band. Here, we report interface-engineered transparent and mechanochromic non-close-packed photonic crystals (NPCs) by incorporating polystyrene@vinyl-modified SiO2 (PS@V-SiO2) nanospheres (n_PS=1.59, n_V-SiO2=1.46) into a photocurable phenoxypolyethylene glycol acrylate (PEGPEA) matrix (n_PEGPEA=1.52). The nanospheres formed solvation-mediated liquid NPCs in the precursor. Ultraviolet (UV) curing promoted copolymerization between surface C=C bonds of nanospheres and the matrix, which reduced interfacial scattering and enabled highly transparent NPC films. Meanwhile, non-uniform polymer shrinkage led to variations in the ordering of nanospheres, especially in structures with a low volume fraction (φ ≤ 0.23). Under external strain (ε: 0–64%), the film exhibited a dynamic color response. Initially, stretching enhanced the ordering of the nanospheres and the reflection intensity of NPCs, thereby activating the structural color. Further deformation, however, introduced defects and reduced the reflectivity. A blue shift of ~213 nm was achieved in an NPC (φ = 0.23) fabricated by 170 nm of PS@V-SiO2 nanospheres, accompanied by a color gradient from red to blue. Comparisons across SiO2–poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA, n_PEGDA=1.45), SiO2–PEGPEA, and PS@V-SiO2–PEGDA NPC systems highlighted the key role of interfacial scattering, which is affected by the synergistic effects of interfacial covalent polymerization, refractive index matching between the elastomer matrix and nanospheres, and the crosslinking density. This work demonstrates spectrally tunable mechanochromism via size control and patterned anti-counterfeiting labels, thereby providing insights for designing advanced anti-counterfeiting materials applicable in flexible electronics and displays.
SCIENCE CHINA Materials•2026•DOI: 10.1007/s40843-025-3997-9
Contactless human-machine interaction (HMI) is rapidly evolving, yet it remains constrained by the latency, redundancy, and power consumption inherent in conventional frame-based vision sensors. While bio-inspired event-driven sensors offer a low-power alternative, existing architectures are often complex or fail to accurately encode the magnitude of light intensity changes. Herein, we report a solution-processed, two-terminal event-driven sensory device based on CuIn(Se,S)2 colloidal quantum dots (QDs) integrated with an Sb-doped TiO2 layer. Unlike traditional dynamic vision sensors (DVS), this device exhibits a transient photoresponse that encodes both the polarity and the magnitude of light intensity variations into the output current amplitude. This preservation of magnitude information significantly enhances the feature extraction capability, leading to faster convergence and superior clustering performance in gesture recognition. Based on these unique optoelectronic properties, we constructed a hierarchical HMI system that synergizes the strengths of event-based and frame-based sensing. The system utilizes the event-driven sensor for low-latency gesture control of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and a frame-based sensor for high-precision gaze control of an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). The proposed system achieves a gesture recognition accuracy of more than 92.5% while substantially reducing data redundancy, offering a promising strategy for efficient, robust, and low-cost intelligent interaction systems.
SCIENCE CHINA Materials•2026•DOI: 10.1007/s40843-025-4074-6
Achieving carbon neutralization relies heavily on green hydrogen and electrochemical carbon-nitrogen cycles. However, the complexity of these systems and the cost of traditional Edisonian trial-and-error methods hinder rapid progress. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative tool, enabling high-throughput data processing and dynamic adaptation. This review surveys the landscape of AI-driven electrochemistry, bridging the gap from atomic-scale design to industrial-scale implementation. Specifically, we focus on three areas: atomic structure-function decoding, fully automated “self-driving” laboratories, and macro-scale simulations for device durability. Furthermore, we elucidate the critical challenges in integrating AI with materials science. By mapping current trends and future directions, this work aims to unlock the full transformative potential of AI in next-generation energy storage and conversion.