Highly Elastic and Conductive Lamellar Wood Sponge via Cell Wall Reconfiguration Toward Smart Multifunctional Applications

• A sustainable top-down cell wall reconfiguration strategy converts natural balsa wood into a highly elastic and conductive lamellar wood sponge. • The PPy-coated cross-linked wood sponge (CWS@PPy) exhibits excellent fatigue resistance with only ~3.5% plastic deformation after 10,000 compression cycles at 40% strain. • Strain-induced conductivity changes enable tunable EMI shielding effectiveness and high-sensitivity pressure sensing (0.72 kPa−1). • The wood sponge shows low through-plane thermal conductivity (0.037 W m−1 K−1) that is compression-tunable for smart thermal management.