Reactive Black 5 is a widely used textile dye that is difficult to degrade and commonly found in industrial wastewater. Researchers investigated the treatment potential of a constructed wetland-derived Clostridium sp. strain T4 by combining metabolite identification with ecotoxicological assessment. Although the bacterium removed up to 97% of the dye, toxic aromatic amines accumulated during treatment, increasing aquatic toxicity and demonstrating that decolorization does not necessarily mean detoxification.

Flat optics can shape light with ultrathin nanostructures, but single-layer devices are often limited by fixed in-plane designs. In a new Review, scientists summarize how stacking two or more nonlocal flat-optical layers introduces new interlayer degrees of freedom, including spacing, translation, twist, and lattice mismatch. These knobs enable tunable resonances, high-Q states, moiré flat bands, optical vortices, beam steering, chirality, and programmable nonlinear emission.

The rapid evolution of modern warfare toward distributed, intelligent, and global stealth has posed severe energy supply and information perception bottlenecks for combat nodes. Traditional energy supply strategies are unable to meet the strategic needs of long-range stealth operations and extreme environmental survival. Triboelectric nanogenerators provide a disruptive path for constructing self-sustaining military microsystems with high-efficiency and zero-power-sensing characteristics. This review establishes a comprehensive framework that systematically evaluates recent technological advances across an escalating hierarchy, encompassing individual soldier combat platforms, unmanned combat systems, strategic aerospace equipment, and special tactical scenarios. Crucially, moving beyond generic laboratory demonstrations, this review adopts a rigorous defense engineering perspective by conducting an integrated failure mode analysis to evaluate device degradation under severe battlefield stressors. Furthermore, it critically analyzes the primary engineering bottlenecks currently hindering military adoption, such as inherent impedance mismatch and scalable manufacturing barriers, and proposes targeted mitigation strategies. To systematically validate these solutions, we explicitly propose a concise evaluation framework strictly aligned with established military testing protocols. Ultimately, this review outlines several forward-looking strategic priorities, thereby constructing a highly actionable roadmap to accelerate the practical deployment of self-driven intelligent technologies.

Solid-state thermoelectric (TE) power generation through the direct conversion of a temperature difference into electricity has received worldwide attention. In this work, a segmented GeTe/BST-SKD TE module is optimized and fabricated to achieve outstanding power density and energy conversion efficiency. To enable high module-level TE performance, p-type GeTe with a ZTmax of 2.47 is used, while p-type BST (Bi2−xSbxTe3, with high ZT in the low temperature range) and n-type SKD (skutterudite, Yb0.3Co4Sb12) are optimized to reach ZTmax values of 1.38 and 1.33, respectively. Furthermore, module structure optimization is conducted using multiphysics-field simulations for three shape factors, including the segmentation ratio, height-to-area ratio, and cross-sectional area ratio between p- and n-type legs. When the three factors are 0.35, 0.67 mm−1, and 1.85, respectively, both the maximum power density and energy conversion efficiency reach their optimal values. Finally, Ni foil is applied at the GeTe/BST interface to serve as both a metallization layer and a diffusion barrier, minimizing internal contact resistances and enhancing high-temperature stability. The maximum power density and energy conversion efficiency of the segmented module are increased by 35% and 21 %, respectively, compared with those of the unsegmented one. The segmented module achieves a substantial power output of ∼0.43 W at ΔT = 500 K, corresponding to a power density of 0.35 W/cm2 per module area and 143 W kg−1 per module weight, with an effective material-level power density of 1.51 W/cm2. The segmented module achieves an outstanding energy conversion efficiency of 12.7%, demonstrating the effectiveness of the optimized leg-segmentation strategy for highperformance solid-state energy harvesting.