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.

In multi-principal-element alloys the local chemical order is of increasing research interest for understanding their structures and correlation with properties, requiring systematic exploration with definitive and quantitative characterizations.

In Francis Bacon’s vision of a techno-utopia New Atlantic (1626), the proto-scientific scholars of Salomon’s House, a research institution on the fictional island of Bensalem, declare that they can modify nature to their whims. “We make, by art”, they say, “trees and flower to come earlier or later than their seasons … We make them also by art greater much than their nature … of differing taste, smell