The ability to communicate clearly is an essential skill for scientists, but it is rarely taught. Katie Yurkewicz, Head of Scientific and Technical Communications at Argonne National Laboratory, shares three steps to follow to captivate an audience and craft a compelling narrative for any topic or medium.

An article in Advanced Materials reports biosensor arrays based on a field-effect transistor that can identify bladder cancer with high accuracy from untreated urine samples.

An article in Angewandte Chemie International Edition discovers a pair of colloidal semiconductor magic-size clusters that can isomerize through either a direct and intra-cluster pathway or an indirect and inter-cluster pathway.

An article in Nature Communications reports on a flexible semimetal with high thermopower that can enable low-temperature solid-state cooling.

A manuscript in Advanced Materials reports a strategy to use electrode design to control the formation of the conduction channels in memristors, improving their reliability.

An article in Nature Communications combines electron diffraction and hierarchical cluster analysis to determine the precise, atom-level structure of covalent organic frameworks.

An article in Angewandte Chemie International Edition finds that a frozen environment can accelerate the degradation of microplastics.

An article in Nature Materials uses entropy engineering to fabricate capacitors with high energy density.

An article in Nature Materials sheds light on the mechanisms underlying dendrite formation in solid-state batteries and shows that a well-chosen metallic interlayer at the electrode–electrolyte interface can mitigate dendrite growth.

An article in Nature Communications reports a wireless theranostic contact lens that can sense and treat the onset of glaucoma.

Scientists need to come together to fight for human rights, science diplomacy and peace, says Zafra Lerman, a chemist who has been working for many years on human rights abuses against scientists and on the use of science as a bridge to peace.

The survival of vertebrate organisms depends on highly regulated delivery of oxygen and nutrients through vascular networks that pervade nearly all tissues in the body. Dysregulation of these vascular networks is implicated in many common human diseases such as hypertension, coronary artery disease, diabetes and cancer. Therefore, engineers have sought to create vascular networks within engineered

An article in Nature Synthesis uses dynamic covalent chemistry to synthesize crystalline graphyne on a large scale.

The development of new and more accurate fabrication technologies has, in the past few years, boosted interest in advanced device manufacturing. 2D materials, thanks to their diverse properties and dispersibility in liquid carriers, constitute a rich toolbox for ink-based applications. However, the lack of standardized production methods offering a good compromise between performance and affordability

An article in Communications Engineering reports the upcycling of waste plastics from vehicles into graphene that can be then used as an additive in foams for cars.

An article in Nature Communications presents a hardware implementation of a stochastic artificial neural network.

An article in Science Advances presents a platform with embedded metal–organic framework nanoparticles for efficient stem cell differentiation with minimal external input.

Power supply is one of the bottlenecks to realizing untethered wearable electronics, soft robotics and the internet of things. Flexible self-charging power sources integrate energy harvesters, power management electronics and energy-storage units on the same platform; they harvest energy from the ambient environment and simultaneously store the generated electricity for consumption. Thus, they enable

A deep understanding of defects is essential for the optimization of materials for solar energy conversion. This is particularly true for metal oxide photo(electro)catalysts, which typically feature high concentrations of charged point defects that are electronically active. In photovoltaic materials, except for selected dopants, defects are considered detrimental and should be eliminated to minimize

Atomically thin transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are 2D semiconductors with tightly bound excitons and correspondingly strong light–matter interactions. Owing to the weak van der Waals bonding between layers, TMDs can be isolated and stacked together to form synthetic heterostructures with emergent electronic and excitonic properties. In this Review, we focus on the emergent exciton physics

An article in Nature presents a superconducting diode that works without the need for a magnetic field.

An article in Nature Communications reports a 3D nanoprinting platform that combines a microfluidic atomic force microscope to precisely deposit tiny amounts of polymer ink and surface-initiated crosslinking chemistry to solidify the ink immediately upon delivery.

Many graduate students experience mental health struggles that lead them to question their place in academia. Two scientists who experienced extreme lows in graduate school reflect on what helped them during their low points, and suggest strategies for everyone to contribute to mentally healthier workplaces in academia.

Research on electronic devices and materials is currently driven by both the slowing down of transistor scaling and the exponential growth of computing needs, which make present digital computing increasingly capacity-limited and power-limited. A promising alternative approach consists in performing computing based on intrinsic device dynamics, such that each device functionally replaces elaborate

An article in Nature presents an all-polymer light-emitting diode that can be stretched to 100% strain while preserving a high brightness.

Producing low-carbon hydrogen to use as a clean energy carrier is an important step towards a decarbonized economy. Plasma pyrolysis is an emerging technology that has great potential for the large-scale production of low-carbon and affordable hydrogen.

Since the first report of ferroelectricity in a Si-doped HfO2 film in 2011, HfO2-based materials have attracted much interest from the ferroelectric materials and devices community. However, in HfO2-based bulk materials, the ferroelectric phase is not the one with the lowest free energy. It is, therefore, crucial to identify the possible thermodynamic and kinetic drivers for such an unexpected phase

The Hall effect, in which a current flows perpendicular to an electrical bias, has been prominent in the history of condensed matter physics. Appearing variously in classical, relativistic and quantum guises, the Hall effect has — among other roles — contributed to the establishment of the band theory of solids, to research on new phases of interacting electrons and to the phenomenology of topological

Calls to minimize greenhouse gas emissions and demands for higher energy efficiency continue to drive research into alternative cooling and refrigeration technologies. The caloric effect is the reversible change in temperature and entropic states of a solid material subjected to one or more fields and can be exploited to achieve cooling. The field of caloric cooling has undergone a series of transformations

An article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society reports a family of metal–organic macrocycles that can be envisioned as discrete versions of electrically conductive metal–organic frameworks.

An article in Advanced Materials reports the development of a stretchable, breathable and stable energy harvester that harnesses energy from a range of human movements to power electronic devices.

An article in Nature Materials reports a 3D-printing method to fabricate electrodes that efficiently harness energy from photosynthetic cells.

An article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports a surface treatment method that enables biocompatible, versatile and chemically stable functionalization of diamond quantum sensors.

Solar fuel production provides a sustainable route towards simultaneous energy harvesting and storage. However, this technology is hampered by the complexity and slow manual screening of the chemical design space to find suitable catalytic and light-harvesting materials. One solution is offered by automation, which has begun changing the landscape of material discovery and energy research.

Wearable devices with skin-like mechanical properties enable continuous monitoring of the human body. However, wearable device design has mainly focused on recording superficial signals from the skin thus far, which can only reveal limited information about health and disease. Deep-tissue signals, for example, electrophysiologic, metabolic, circulatory, thermal and mechanical signals, often have stronger

Crystalline silicon (c-Si) photovoltaics has long been considered energy intensive and costly. Over the past decades, spectacular improvements along the manufacturing chain have made c-Si a low-cost source of electricity that can no longer be ignored. Over 125 GW of c-Si modules have been installed in 2020, 95% of the overall photovoltaic (PV) market, and over 700 GW has been cumulatively installed

Methane hydrate and shale gas are predicted to have substantial reserves, far beyond the sum of other fossil fuels. Using methane instead of crude oil as a building block is, thus, a very attractive strategy for synthesizing valuable chemicals. Because methane is so inert, its direct conversion needs a high activation energy and typically requires harsh reaction conditions or strong oxidants. Photocatalysis

Inflammation plays an important role in the response to danger signals arising from damage to our body and in restoring homeostasis. Dysregulated inflammatory responses occur in many diseases, including cancer, sepsis and autoimmunity. The efficacy of anti-inflammatory drugs, developed for the treatment of dysregulated inflammation, can be potentiated using biomaterials, by improving the bioavailability

An article in Nature Synthesis reports a rapid and scalable strategy to synthesize a range of high-entropy nanoparticles at atmospheric temperature and pressure.

Plastics have profoundly changed what is possible in modern society. But between their reliance on fossil fuels and their massive accumulation as waste, plastics are also at the heart of a dual environmental crisis.

Intercalation chemistry has dominated electrochemical energy storage for decades, and storage capacity worldwide has now reached the terawatt-hour level. State-of-the-art intercalation cathodes for Li-ion batteries operate within the limits of transition metal cation electrochemistry, but the discovery of anion-redox processes in recent decades suggests rich opportunities for substantially increasing

Trained immunity refers to a hyperresponsive functional state of the innate immune system, which is induced by certain stimuli, such as infections or vaccination. Trained immunity plays a key part in a variety of diseases, including cancer and inflammation, and is regulated through epigenetic and metabolic reprogramming of haematopoietic stem and progenitor cells in the bone marrow, giving rise to

An article in Nature Communications reports the construction of a material with switchable rigidity and surface lubrication that is inspired by the ability of catfish to evade capture by predators.

Polymer materials provide solutions to some of the most pressing environmental, manufacturing and health-care challenges. Traditional thermoplastic and thermoset networks, however, have a limited capacity to reconfigure and restructure, and fail to match the dynamics required for many applications. Introducing dynamic bonding interactions into polymer networks can produce materials that are more easily

2D semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides comprise an emerging class of materials with distinct properties, including large exciton binding energies that reach hundreds of millielectronvolts and valley-contrasting physics. Thanks to the van der Waals interaction, individual monolayers can be assembled to produce synthetic crystals with tailored properties not found in the constituent materials

An article in Advanced Materials reports an environmentally friendly hybrid mineral that presents the same flexibility and moldability as traditional plastics.

An article in Advanced Functional Materials reports a fully edible, strong and plastic-free straw based on bacterial cellulose.

Chemistry plays a determining role in every stage of the plastic life cycle. We reflect on the challenges and limitations of plastics — their sheer abundance, chemodiversity and imperfect recoverability leading to loss of material — and on the need for chemical and non-chemical approaches to overcome them.

An article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society reports a method to exploit the stereochemical differences between two sugar-based monomers to fabricate a family of plastic-like materials with a range of degradation and mechanical properties.