A stronger, cooler wood: One good way to reduce the amount of cooling a building needs is to make sure it reflects away infrared radiation. Passive radiative cooling materials are engineered to do this extremely well. Li et al. engineered a wood through delignification and re-pressing to create a mechanically strong material that also cools passively. They modeled the cooling savings of their wood for 16 different U.S. cities, which suggested savings between 20 and 50%. Cooling wood would be of particular value in hot and dry climates. Science , this issue p. 760

With the intensification of the global energy crisis, green, low-carbon, and environmentally friendly biomass materials have become the focus of research. Among them, biomass-derived carbon dots (B-CDs), a novel class of sustainable zero-dimensional carbon nanomaterials, attract significant interest due to their environmental friendliness, low toxicity, and unique optical properties. Research findings indicate that B-CDs, utilizing biomass materials as carbon sources, demonstrate significant potential in numerous application fields through structural design and photo-functionalization. However, the underlying mechanisms and formation processes of B-CDs remain inadequately elucidated, and systematic summarization still requires further refinement. Therefore, this review systematically summarizes the synthesis methods, precursor structures, formation mechanisms, luminescent properties, and prevailing applications of B-CDs, with a particular emphasis on recent advances in their use for sensing, anti-counterfeiting, bioimaging, and optronics. In addition, the challenges encountered in performance-oriented controllable preparation and large-scale production were also clarified. This comprehensive review provides a theoretical foundation for further research and multidisciplinary applications of B-CDs, thereby contributing to promoting large-scale commercialization and industrial implementation.

Personal thermal management materials integrated with phase-change materials have significant potential to satisfy human thermal comfort needs and save energy through the efficient storage and utilization of thermal energy. However, conventional organic phase-change materials in a solid state suffer from rigidity, low thermal conductivity, and leakage, making their application challenging. In this work, polyethylene glycol (PEG) was chosen as the phase-change material to provide the energy storage density, polyethylene oxide (PEO) was chosen to provide the backbone structure of the three-dimensional polymer network and cross-linked with the PEG to provide flexibility, and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) were used to improve the mechanical and thermal conductivity of the material. The thermal conductivity of the composite fiber membranes was boosted by 77.1% when CNTs were added at 4 wt%. Water-resistant modification of the composite fiber membranes was successfully performed using glutaraldehyde-saturated steam. The resulting composite fiber membranes had a reasonable range of phase transition temperatures, and the CC₄PCF-55 membranes had melting and freezing latent heats of 66.71 J/g and 64.74 J/g, respectively. The results of this study prove that the green CC₄PCF-55 composite fiber membranes have excellent flexibility, with good thermal energy storage capacity and thermal conductivity and, therefore, high potential in the field of flexible wearable thermal management textiles.

Recently, blue-emitting phosphors have attracted great interest due to their application in full-spectrum white light illumination. In this paper, a novel blue-emitting MgAl₂Si₄O₆N₄:Eu²⁺ phosphor was successfully synthesized through the solid-state reaction method in a reducing atmosphere. Under the excitation of near-ultraviolet (n-UV) light, the MgAl₂Si₄O₆N₄:0.02Eu²⁺ phosphor effectively emits a broad blue emission band centered at 456 nm with the FWHM as large as 81 nm. With the increasing Eu²⁺ concentration, the emission bands of MgAl₂Si₄O₆N₄:Eu²⁺ shift to a shorter wavelength and the FWHMs broaden gradually. Moreover, the MgAl₂Si₄O₆N₄:0.02Eu²⁺ phosphor exhibits a slight thermal quenching at a higher temperature. After fabricating the as-prepared MgAl₂Si₄O₆N₄:0.02Eu²⁺ phosphor into a white LED device, the intense neutral white light emission is obtained with excellent CRI (87.4) and CCT (5645 K). These results suggest that the blue MgAl₂Si₄O₆N₄:Eu²⁺ phosphor is a promising candidate in n-UV excited white LEDs.