Monolithic piezoelectric sensors commonly used for acoustic emission and ultrasonic inspection are non-conforming, bulky, costly and heavy. This means they do not fit well to complex geometries, they can be susceptible to damage, and on larger structures their cost and weight can be prohibitive. An alternative to this is the use of piezo-electric thick films, which comprise of piezo-electric pa...

Porous materials are highly preferred for bone tissue engineering due to space for blood vessel ingrowth, but this may introduce extra experimental variations because of the difficulty in precise control of porosity. In order to decide whether it is absolutely necessary to use porous materials in in vitro comparative osteogenesis study of materials with different chemistries, we carried out ost...

Porous materials have been widely used in many fields, but the large-scale synthesis of materials with controlled pore sizes, pore volumes, and wall thicknesses remains a considerable challenge. Thus, the controllable synthesis of porous materials is of key general importance. Herein, we demonstrate the "pearl milk tea" freeze-drying method to form porous materials with controllable pore charac...

Starfish and octopuses control their infinite degreeof-freedom arms with panache—capabilities typical of nature where the distribution of reflex-like intelligence throughout soft muscular networks greatly outperforms anything hard, heavy, and man-made. Dielectric elastomer actuators show great promise for soft artificial muscle networks. One way to make them smart is with piezo-resistive Dielec...

The sophisticated control of surface wettability for target-specific applications has attracted widespread interest for use in a plethora of applications. Despite the recent advances in modification of non-porous materials, surface wettability control of porous materials, particularly single crystalline, remains undeveloped. Here we contribute a general method to impart amphiphobicity on single...

Abstract Developing nano‐ferroelectric materials with excellent piezoelectric performance for piezocatalysts used in water splitting is highly desired but also challenging, especially respect to reaching large piezo‐potentials that fully align required redox levels. Herein, heteroepitaxial strain BaTiO 3 nanoparticles a designed porous structure successfully induced by engineering their surface...