This review provides guidance for solar absorber design, selection, and optimization, and evaporation system engineering for efficient solar-driven evaporation.

Although engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) have tremendous potential to generate technological benefits in numerous sectors, uncertainty on the risks of ENMs for human health and the environment may impede the advancement of novel materials. Traditionally, the risks of ENMs can be evaluated by experimental methods such as environmental field monitoring and animal-based toxicity testing. However, it is time-consuming, expensive, and impractical to evaluate the risk of the increasingly large number of ENMs with the experimental methods. On the contrary, with the advancement of artificial intelligence and machine learning, in silico methods have recently received more attention in the risk assessment of ENMs. This review discusses the key progress of computational nanotoxicology models for assessing the risks of ENMs, including material flow analysis models, multimedia environmental models, physiologically based toxicokinetics models, quantitative nanostructure–activity relationships, and meta-analysis. Several challenges are identified and a perspective is provided regarding how the challenges can be addressed.

The remarkable progress of applied black phosphorus nanomaterials (BPNMs) is attributed to BP's outstanding properties. Due to its potential for applications, environmental release and subsequent human exposure are virtually inevitable. Therefore, how BPNMs impact biological systems and human health needs to be considered. In this comprehensive Minireview, the most recent advancements in understanding the mechanisms and regulation factors of BPNMs’ endogenous toxicity to mammalian systems are presented. These achievements lay the groundwork for an understanding of its biological effects, aimed towards establishing regulatory principles to minimize the adverse health impacts.

There is a challenge in effectively removing ionic organic compounds from aqueous solution. Inspired by the high drug loading capacity of black phosphorus (BP), here we show that the few-layered BP has high adsorption capacities for both cationic methylene blue (1232 ± 283 mg g⁻¹) and anionic congo red (230 ± 9 mg g⁻¹); these values are among the highest capabilities reported. The maximum theoretical specific surface area of single layered BP is calculated to be 2400 m² g⁻¹ for the first time. Both electrostatic and hydrophobic interactions are responsible for methylene blue sorption on BP, whereas hydrophobic interactions are the main force for congo red sorption. A sorption kinetic study indicates that the intraparticle diffusion mechanism was involved in both dyes sorption. Most importantly, the wrinkle-induced sorption mechanism was demonstrated by TEM and AFM analyses, and was verified via DFT calculations to account for the high adsorption capacities. These findings demonstrate the promising use of BP as an innovative adsorbent for IOCs in environmental management.