Aerogels have been considered as an ideal material for thermal insulation. Unfortunately, their application in textiles is greatly limited by their fragility and poor processability. We overcame these issues by encapsulating the aerogel fiber with a stretchable layer, mimicking the core-shell structure of polar bear hair. Despite its high internal porosity over 90%, our fiber is stretchable up to 1000% strain, which is greatly improved compared with that of traditional aerogel fibers (~2% strain). In addition to its washability and dyeability, our fiber is mechanically robust, retaining its stable thermal insulation property after 10,000 stretching cycles (100% strain). A sweater knitted with our fiber was only one-fifth as thick as down, with similar performance. Our strategy for this fiber provides rich possibilities for developing multifunctional aerogel fibers and textiles.

Two dimensional MXene materials have demonstrated attractive electrical and electrochemical properties for various applications, particularly in energy storage, benefiting from their intrinsic 2D atomic thick topological structures. However, assembling MXene into macroscopic fibers with regular alignment still remains a huge challenge, inherently due to the insufficient interlaminar interaction between MXene sheets and the lack of well-developed assembling techniques. Herein, we report a wet-spinning assembly strategy for the continuous fabrication of MXene-based fibers through a synergistic effect between graphene oxides liquid crystals and MXene sheets. MXene sheets are orderly aligned between graphene oxides liquid crystalline templates and assembled into hybrid fibers with the highest MXene mass ratio achieving 95 w/w%. An excellent overall fiber electrical conductivity (2.9 × 10⁴ S m⁻¹) and superior volumetric capacitance (586.4 F cm⁻³) of the integrated fiber-constructed supercapacitor exceeding those of neat reduced graphene fibers were achieved.

Materials combining lightweight, robust mechanical performances, and multifunctionality are highly desirable for engineering applications. Graphene aerogels have emerged as attractive candidates. Despite recent progresses, the bottleneck remains how to simultaneously achieve both strength and resilience. While multiscale architecture designs may offer a possible route, the difficulty lies in the lack of design guidelines and how to experimentally achieve the necessary structure control over multiple length scales. The latter is even more challenging when manufacturing scalability is taken into account. The Thalia dealbata stem is a naturally porous material that is lightweight, strong, and resilient, owing to its architecture with three-dimensional (3D) interconnected lamellar layers. Inspired by such, we assemble graphene oxide (GO) sheets into a similar architecture using a bidirectional freezing technique. Subsequent freeze-drying and thermal reduction results in graphene aerogels with highly tunable 3D architectures, consequently an unusual combination of strength and resilience. With their additional electrical conductivity, these graphene aerogels are potentially useful for mechanically switchable electronics. Beyond such, our study establishes bidirectional freezing as a general method to achieve multiscale architectural control in a scalable manner that can be extended to many other material systems.

Rechargeable aluminum-ion batteries are promising in high-power density but still face critical challenges of limited lifetime, rate capability, and cathodic capacity. We design a “trihigh tricontinuous” (3H3C) graphene film cathode with features of high quality, orientation, and channeling for local structures (3H) and continuous electron-conducting matrix, ion-diffusion highway, and electroactive mass for the whole electrode (3C). Such a cathode retains high specific capacity of around 120 mAh g⁻¹ at ultrahigh current density of 400 A g⁻¹ (charged in 1.1 s) with 91.7% retention after 250,000 cycles, surpassing all the previous batteries in terms of rate capability and cycle life. The assembled aluminum-graphene battery works well within a wide temperature range of −40 to 120°C with remarkable flexibility bearing 10,000 times of folding, promising for all-climate wearable energy devices. This design opens an avenue for a future super-batteries.