We designed a soil-inspired chemical system that consists of nanostructured minerals, starch granules and liquid metals. The soil-inspired material possesses chemical, optical and mechanical responsiveness to yield write–erase functions in electrical performance. The composite can also modulate bacterial growth both in vitro and in vivo, such as enriches gut bacteria diversity, rectifies tetracycline-induced gut microbiome dysbiosis and ameliorates dextran sulfate sodium-induced rodent colitis symptoms within rodent models.

In this work, we showed that a porosity-based heterojunction, a largely overlooked system in materials science, can yield an efficient photoelectrochemical response from the semiconductor surface.

In this work, we identified several soft- hard composite designs in naturally occurring systems, and we use these designs to categorize the existing bioelectric interfaces and to suggest future opportunities in bioelectric studies.

In this review, we systematically summarize the attributes, fabrication methods, and applications of gallium-based liquid metal particles. Existing challenges and future opportunities regarding liquid metal particles are discussed herein.

We designed a liquid metal based composite that can change from non-conductive states to fully conductive states with mechanical pressure. Therefore, we can simply use a pen to create arbitrary conductive circuits on a soft substrate.

We presented a completely soft, stretchable silicone composite doped with thermochromic pigments and innervated with liquid metal. The ability to deform the liquid metal couples geometric changes to Joule heating, thus enabling tunable thermo-mechanochromic sensing of touch and strain.

We developed a super facile way to pattern liquid metal into complicated microstructures with branches and dead-ends. The process only took less than 1 minute.

We described here a light-fueled liquid-metal transformer for effective endosomal escape-facilitated cargo delivery via a chemical-mechanical process. Such liquid metal transformer could absorb and convert photoenergy to drive the simultaneous phase separation and morphological transformation from nanospheres to hollow nanorods to promote endosomal escape of payloads.

We designed a liquid metal based composite that can change from non-conductive states to fully conductive states with mechanical pressure. Therefore, we can simply use a pen to create arbitrary conductive circuits on a soft substrate.

We designed a liquid metal based composite that can change from non-conductive states to fully conductive states with mechanical pressure. Therefore, we can simply use a pen to create arbitrary conductive circuits on a soft substrate.