At this point, the terms “bio-inspired” or “biomimicry” are near cliché. People have been turning to nature for inspiration to help them solve problems for millennia. Humankind is nature’s ultimate scribe. From buildings and bridges, materials and medicine, and architecture and art, designers, scientists, and engineers continue to study the complex solutions nature has devised to persist, develop,

Fabrics are on the most valuable real estate in the world—the surface of our bodies. Exposed to troves of data, important health insights would be revealed if only fabrics could compute: sense, store, analyze, infer, alert, and act while retaining their traditional qualities. A fiber-based vision for fabric computing and AI is introduced that can appreciate fabrics into valuable information tracts

Integrating social media into your daily academic activities will connect you with a broader network of researchers, diversify your sources of knowledge, and expand your influence, provided you implement best practices in online communication.

This issue of Matter shows the versatility of smart textiles as healthcare monitors and textile-based displays in a pair of research articles. By taking advantage of intrinsic fiber behaviors such as stretching, twisting, and knittability, the authors enhance device functionality while maintaining user comfort.

A nervous sweat may seem like an inconvenience, but your body could be releasing important signals. Herein, Gao and colleagues develop a wearable sensor with integrated microfluidics, immunoassays, and electronics for tracking cortisol in sweat—as a biomarker of stress.

It remains challenging to integrate protonic conductive metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) with efficient electrical conductivity. Recently in Matter, Su et al. reported a novel two-dimensional (2D) MOF with carboxylic acid groups showing high electrical conductivity, originating from the superprotonic conduction and protonic/interfacial pseudo-capacitance coupling.

In the recent anniversary issue of Trends in Chemistry, Brennan et al. review halide segregation in mixed-halide perovskites, discussing multiple perspectives on the underlying origins and reported routes to retard halide segregation. Here, we argue that only slowing down the segregation may be insufficient to achieve long-term stability.

It is well established that one weakness of metallic glasses is their characteristic strain softening and resulting sudden failure. In a recent work in the journal Nature, Greer, Li and colleagues demonstrate an ingenious method to instill strain hardening into metallic glasses.

Vanadium dioxide (VO2) shows great potential as next-generation smart glazing for architecture owing to its automatic thermochromic effect depending on environmental temperatures. Besides widely studied aspects such as phase-transition temperature, luminous transmittance, and solar-modulation ability, there emerge several novel but necessary challenges of VO2-based smart glazing for real-world applications

The COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented surprise, to say the least. Academia is rooted in group assemblies – from classroom to conferences – which were promptly cancelled and/or shifted to remote efforts. Here are some perspectives from Professors involved.

Nobody chooses the academic life for the glamour and the pay. At the same time, an offer as an assistant professor at an R1 institute is statistically unlikely, and the road to tenure is tenuous at best. If you’re one of the lucky few to start down this path, you may appreciate some tips for the journey.

In this issue of Matter, Li et al. used in situ electron microscopy to investigate the equilibration pathway of Au nanoribbons that are metastable in terms of both crystal structure and morphology when they are subjected to thermal stress.

Fracture has been a grave concern for practical applications of graphene and other atomically thin and brittle materials. By contrast, in this issue of Matter, Ming et al. present a method to harness the power of fracture in controlled fabrication of ordered graphene ribbons, which may initiate a new approach to making structures and devices based on two-dimensional (2D) materials.

In this issue of Matter, Malmir and colleagues use sophisticated methods to give an atomic-scale view of saltwater permeation through a graphitic pore with high salt rejection. Na+ and Cl− traverse the pore at different rates, leading to an electrostatic potential across the membrane.

Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are promising materials for use in electrocatalytic and electrochemical energy-storage systems owing to their exceptional physicochemical properties, including large surface area, remarkable mechanical properties, high catalytic activity, chemical stability, and low cost. In further improving material properties tailored to meet application-specific requirements

What’s the best media platform for science? Clearly, researchers are steadfast on their reliance of traditional academic journals to disseminate work among peers. This is a low-tech solution in a connected world. Perhaps it’s time for an audible change.

Electrospinning is a powerful and scalable synthesis technique capable of producing spun polymer fibers across a range of diameters from nano to micro. It has been extensively studied and successfully implemented for over 100 years. But what does the future hold for electrospinning methods and its products?

Charged parallel conductance pathways were integrated into a molecular nanocircuit through rational molecular engineering to reveal a synergistic effect of chemical gating and constructive quantum interference, thus leading to a giant enhancement of conductance.

Lee et al. reported the first metal-organic framework (MOF)-fiber composite for the catalytic detoxification of a mustard gas simulant. The development of such wearable catalytic materials is an important step toward developing protection equipment that can simultaneously detoxify several chemical warfare agents (CWAs) under ambient conditions.

It is challenging to endow artificial synthetic materials with autonomous self-healing capacity. In this issue of Matter, He and coworkers used in situ generated electroluminescence to initiate photopolymerization to autonomously heal electrical trees in dielectric polymers without the introduction of external stimuli.

The ability for materials to self-heal or grow new material to replace damaged material is an easy task for Nature, but not so common in engineering. Current approaches implement crystal-producing bacteria within concrete materials. In this issue of Matter, Srubar and colleagues explore the use of a photosynthetic cyanobacterium embedded in a sand-hydrogel scaffold to produce a promising concrete-alternative

The practical application of mechanoluminescent luminophores has been severely limited by random crystal collapse because it would break down the quantitative relationship between pressure and brightness. In this issue of Matter, Li and co-workers designed a pure organic mechanoluminescent material, tPE-2-Th, by taking advantage of thiophene rings, which endow the molecule with a new equilibrium of

In a recent work in Nature, the Xu group at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) demonstrate the ability to tune strain to alter the optical and electrical properties of halide perovskites. Strained α-formamidinium lead iodide (α-FAPbI3) shows phase stability up to 360 days compared with the metastable strain-free α-FAPbI3.