Porous materials cover a broad multidisciplinary scientific and technological domain. They are used in numerous existing and emerging devices and processes related to key societal issues both in environmental protection and for the benefit of the economy. Our choice was to illustrate advances in porous materials through three specific examples: porous materials engineering in the case of organic mesoporous materials prepared from block polymers, modeling and numerical simulation of adsorption of molecular species at the nanoscale and, finally technological applications as thermal insulators.