Oil/water separation is a worldwide challenge to prevent serious environmental pollution. The development of sorbent materials with high selectivity, sorption capacity, easy collection and recyclability is of high demand for spilled oil recovery. In this field, magnetic controllable materials have received wide attention due to the possibility of easily being driven to polluted areas and recovered by simple magnetic interaction. However, most of them exhibited low reusability, low oil uptake ability and low mechanical properties. Moreover, their synthesis is complex and expensive. Here, we propose for the first time the fabrication of a porous reusable magnetic nanocomposite based on polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) via a low cost approach. The material can selectively collect oil from water reaching equilibrium in less than two minutes, evidencing a higher volume sorption capacity with respect to other already proposed materials for oil sorption from water. Furthermore, the material evidenced excellent mechanical properties with a stress at 60% strain at least 10 times higher with respect to other proposed similar materials and maintained its characteristics after 50 cycles at 90% strain, along with high thermal and chemical stability, making them useful as high-performance systems for plugging oil leakage.

Over the last decade, scientists have dreamed about the development of a bioresorbable technology that exploits a new class of electrical, optical, and sensing components able to operate in physiological conditions for a prescribed time and then disappear, being made of materials that fully dissolve in vivo with biologically benign byproducts upon external stimulation. The final goal is to engineer these components into transient implantable systems that directly interact with organs, tissues, and biofluids in real‐time, retrieve clinical parameters, and provide therapeutic actions tailored to the disease and patient clinical evolution, and then biodegrade without the need for device‐retrieving surgery that may cause tissue lesion or infection. Here, the major results achieved in bioresorbable technology are critically reviewed, with a bottom‐up approach that starts from a rational analysis of dissolution chemistry and kinetics, and biocompatibility of bioresorbable materials, then moves to in vivo performance and stability of electrical and optical bioresorbable components, and eventually focuses on the integration of such components into bioresorbable systems for clinically relevant applications. Finally, the technology readiness levels (TRLs) achieved for the different bioresorbable devices and systems are assessed, hence the open challenges are analyzed and future directions for advancing the technology are envisaged.