Concrete doesn’t usually tend to feature in media headlines. But it dominated the front pages of British newspapers in early September thanks to the revelation that several schools and other public buildings, including hospitals, in the UK are thought to be at risk of catastrophic collapse because of the deterioration of a form of concrete used in their construction. Specifically, the alarm is about

Overcoming the intrinsic brittleness of inorganic glasses and ceramics improves structural reliability under operation, while also increasing their competitiveness for flexible devices.

Peer review has long been established as the gold standard for scientific publishing, but changes in the publishing ecosystem should not influence author response to the views of their peers.

Typical strategies of this kind aim to reduce heat conduction, for example by using porous structures such as fibreglass and polymeric foams for insulation. But heat transport across walls and other barriers can also be reduced by lowering radiant gains and losses using materials with low infrared emissivity (low-e), such as metallized foils inserted within walls1.

Ferroelectricity in wurtzites is of interest as they possess low processing temperatures and contain common non-toxic elements. However, the large coercive electric field needed to reverse polarization is close to the breakdown field that degrades these materials. There are workarounds to reduce the coercive field, but mechanistic insight at the atomic scale is lacking.