The convergence of tissue engineering and patient-specific stem cell biology has enabled the engineering of in vitro tissue models that allow the study of patient-tailored treatment modalities. However, sex-related disparities in health and disease, from systemic hormonal influences to cellular-level differences, are often overlooked in stem cell biology, tissue engineering and preclinical screening

An article in Nature Biomedical Engineering reports an in vivo workflow for the design of lipid nanoparticles to efficiently deliver mRNA to the lungs via nebulization.

An article in Nature Chemistry reports a tip-manipulated approach to build custom nanoarchitectures on a surface by activating, orienting and coupling together individual building blocks.

An article in Nature reports the observation of the quantum anomalous Hall effect in freestanding bilayer graphene.

Materials science has had a key role in lowering CO2 emissions from the electricity sector through the development of technologies for renewable energy generation and high-performance energy storage. However, outside of the energy sector, there remain considerable greenhouse gas emissions linked to materials production, particularly due to growth in the built environment infrastructure, transportation

Plastics are a ubiquitous class of synthetic polymer materials used in virtually all commercial and industrial sectors. The majority of global plastics consists of polymers with carbon–carbon backbones, whose environmental persistence and low cost have resulted in a massive reservoir of plastic waste that resides in landfills and the environment. Although plastic debris contaminating the ocean has

Scientists have reacted to COVID-19 restrictions by organizing virtual seminars and journal clubs to maintain engagement. We reflect on our experiences and lessons learned from organizing such initiatives and highlight how, far from being temporary substitutes of in-person counterparts, they can help foster more diverse, inclusive and environmentally friendly scientific exchange. Scientists have reacted

Silica nanoparticles have entered clinical trials for a variety of biomedical applications, including oral drug delivery, diagnostics, plasmonic resonance and photothermal ablation therapy. Preliminary results indicate the safety, efficacy and viability of silica nanoparticles under these clinical scenarios.

Ferroelectric domain walls have emerged as a new type of interface in which the dynamic characteristics of ferroelectricity introduce the element of spatial mobility, allowing real-time adjustment of position, density and orientation of the walls. Because of electronic confinement, and of their distinct symmetry and chemical environment, the spatially mobile domain walls offer a wide range of functional

Qubits come in many shapes and forms. Some are better developed, some will make it easier to scale up to big quantum processors and some will require less effort to correct errors. One thing they have in common: they will all benefit from materials optimization.

Service activities are critical in the pursuit of a more equitable and inclusive academic environment. We must ensure that the efforts required by these activities are properly recognized through rebalancing the academic workload, such that service is not provided at the expense of career progression.

Vaccines are the key technology to combat existing and emerging infectious diseases. However, increasing the potency, quality and durability of the vaccine response remains a challenge. As our knowledge of the immune system deepens, it becomes clear that vaccine components must be in the right place at the right time to orchestrate a potent and durable response. Material platforms, such as nanoparticles

Biomaterials, biomedical devices and engineered cell grafts can be implanted to restitute tissue anatomy and function. Such implants can either integrate physiologically, with no or minimal scarring, or induce chronic inflammation and the foreign body response, which leads to graft failure. Intravital microscopy in small animal models can be applied to visualize the structure and integration of implanted

Bio-based compounds with unique chemical functionality can be obtained through selective transformations of plant and other non-fossil, biogenic feedstocks for the development of new polymers to displace those produced from fossil carbon feedstocks. Although substantial efforts have been invested to produce bio-based polymers that are chemically identical to and directly replace those from petroleum

Advances in materials science and engineering have played a central role in the development of classical computers and will undoubtedly be critical in propelling the maturation of quantum information technologies. In approaches to quantum computation based on superconducting circuits, as one goes from bulk materials to functional devices, amorphous films and non-equilibrium excitations — electronic

Lipid nanoparticles are essential to mRNA vaccines. The groundwork for lipid-based drug delivery systems was laid more than 40 years ago in the lab of Pieter Cullis, Professor at the University of British Columbia. Nature Reviews Materials talks to Pieter Cullis about the history and future of lipid nanoparticle–nucleic acid drugs.

The CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) is a potential means of using renewable electricity to synthesize commodity chemicals and fuels. The CO2RR can be performed at industrially relevant product formation rates in an electrolyser, which must simultaneously manage the transport of electrons, water, CO2 and protons at a cathode. Gas diffusion electrodes (GDEs) and polymer electrolyte membranes are used

The rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including strains that are resistant to last-resort antibiotics, and the limited ability of antibiotics to eradicate biofilms have necessitated the development of alternative antibacterial therapeutics. Antibacterial biomaterials, such as polycationic polymers, and biomaterial-assisted delivery of non-antibiotic therapeutics, such as bacteriophages, antimicrobial

Nanostructured catalysts incorporating supported metal atoms or small clusters of defined size and chemical composition attract considerable attention because of their potential to maximize resource efficiency. When optimally assembled, all the metal nuclei can participate in the catalytic cycle with properties tailored to deliver high specific activity and stable performance. Over the past decade

A paper in Nature reports a laser-free method to entangle two trapped-ion qubits that has high fidelity and potential for scalability.

Liquid crystalline elastomers (LCEs) are crosslinked polymer networks that combine the elastic properties of rubber with the anisotropic properties of liquid crystals. Multifunctionality and responsivity can be programmed into LCEs by patterning their local orientation, which is difficult to achieve in other monolithic material systems. Advances in the synthesis and alignment of LCEs have paved the

As the pandemic extends into a third academic year, we must admit that mental health has become a major problem in academia. The responsibility to change academic culture begins at the top.

Biomaterials have evolved from inert materials that lack interaction with the body to biologically active, instructive materials that host and provide signals to surrounding cells and tissues. Engineered living materials contain living cells (responsive function) and polymeric matrices (scaffolding function) and, thus, can be designed as active and response biomaterials. In this Review, we discuss

An article in Physical Review Letters reports a formalism enabling the use of a D-Wave quantum annealer to sample the equilibrium ensemble of dense polymer mixtures.

An article in Physical Review Applied reports an architecture based on a ring resonator that supports a network of superconducting qubits with enhanced connectivity and negligible crosstalk.

Zeolites are a family of microporous crystalline materials, which, since the 1940s, have had an indispensable role in the chemical industry as catalysts, adsorbents and ion exchangers. Advances in synthetic methodologies and characterization techniques have enabled the fabrication of new zeolitic materials, with emerging applications in diverse areas. By tuning their porous architectures, framework

An article in Scientific Data reports a universal application programming interface that can be implemented across a range of materials databases, giving researchers standardized access to materials science data.

Rechargeable Li metal batteries are currently limited by safety concerns, continuous electrolyte decomposition and rapid consumption of Li. These issues are mainly related to reactions occurring at the Li metal–liquid electrolyte interface. The formation of a passivation film (that is, a solid electrolyte interphase) determines ionic diffusion and the structural and morphological evolution of the Li

An article in Nature Communications maps the adsorption of molecules at different sites on a gold nanoparticle, uncovering varying degrees of positive and negative adsorption cooperativity.

An article in Nature Computational Science reports a recommender system that can identify promising compositions for high-entropy alloys based on information available in existing databases.

Generating charge carriers with lifetimes long enough to drive catalysis is a critical aspect for photoelectrochemical and photocatalytic systems, and a key determinant of their efficiency. Metal oxides are widely explored as photoanodes for photoelectrochemical water oxidation. However, their application is limited by the disparity between the picosecond–nanosecond lifetimes of electrons and holes

An article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA reports the engineering of lymphatic vessels in collagen matrices.

An article in ACS Nano reports the design of polymer nanoparticles for the delivery of antiviral therapies across the blood–brain barrier to target HIV in the brain.

Messenger RNA (mRNA) has emerged as a new category of therapeutic agent to prevent and treat various diseases. To function in vivo, mRNA requires safe, effective and stable delivery systems that protect the nucleic acid from degradation and that allow cellular uptake and mRNA release. Lipid nanoparticles have successfully entered the clinic for the delivery of mRNA; in particular, lipid nanoparticle–mRNA

The experiences of Black scientists and engineers reveal that science is not a meritocracy. Here is a list of recommendations to combat anti-Black racism in academic institutions.

Machine learning holds great potential to accelerate materials research. Many domains in materials science are benefiting from its application, but several challenges persist, and it remains to be seen whether the field will live up to the hype that surrounds it.

Computational sustainability harnesses computing and artificial intelligence for human well-being and the protection of our planet. Materials science is central to many sustainability challenges. Exploiting synergies between computational sustainability and materials science advances both fields, furthering the ultimate goal of establishing a sustainable future.

Good mental health and wellbeing of research staff and students lead to better science: it is time to reflect on what we can do as team leaders to create a positive research culture.

Alloy modelling has a history of machine-learning-like approaches, preceding the tide of data-science-inspired work. The dawn of computational databases has made the integration of analysis, prediction and discovery the key theme in accelerated alloy research. Advances in machine-learning methods and enhanced data generation have created a fertile ground for computational materials science. Pairing

An article in Science Robotics presents an autonomous excavator system able to recognize and load a range of materials in different environments.

An article in npj Computational Materials reports a deep-learning workflow for the analysis of microscopy images that can adapt to changing conditions.

An article in Nature Chemistry uses the knowledge gathered in the Cambridge Structural Database to build a machine-learning model that predicts the oxidation states of metal–organic frameworks.

An article in npj Computational Materials reports a machine learning-based solver that predicts local stresses in mechanically heterogeneous solids.

Google Applied Science is a division of Google Research that applies computational methods, and in particular machine learning, to a broad range of scientific problems. Patrick Riley, until recently one of their software engineers and now head of artificial intelligence at Relay Therapeutics, talks to Nature Reviews Materials about his experience working on machine-learning projects in an industrial

Experimental approaches to study tissue specificity enable insight into the nature and organization of the cell types and tissues that constitute complex multicellular organisms. Machine learning provides a powerful tool to investigate and interpret tissue-specific experimental data. In this Review, we first provide a brief introduction to key single-cell and whole-tissue approaches that allow investigation

Magnonics addresses the dynamic excitations of a magnetically ordered material. These excitations, referred to as spin waves and their quanta, magnons, are a powerful tool for information transport and processing on the microscale and nanoscale. The physics of spin waves is very rich, ranging from a coexistence between dipole–dipole interaction and symmetric and antisymmetric exchange interaction,

Many properties of nanoparticles are governed by their shape, size, polydispersity and surface chemistry. To apply nanoparticles in chemical sensing, medical diagnostics, catalysis, thermoelectrics, photovoltaics or pharmaceutics, they have to be synthesized with precisely controlled characteristics. This is a time-consuming, laborious and resource-intensive task, because nanoparticle syntheses often

Science has a diversity and racism problem, which can only be addressed by changing our traditional academic practices — this also includes the way we handle and promote scientific articles.

Among the major avenues that are being pursued for realizing quantum bits, the Majorana-based approach has been the most recent to be launched. It attempts to realize qubits that store quantum information in a topologically protected manner. The quantum information is protected by non-local storage in localized and well-separated Majorana zero modes, and manipulated by exploiting their non-abelian

An article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society reports the large-scale synthesis of an elongated carbon nanobelt with unusual host-guest behaviour.

Optical imaging in disease diagnosis and treatment benefits from high spatiotemporal resolution and the availability of numerous optical agents. However, many optical imaging probes are cleared by the reticuloendothelial system, which can lead to probe accumulation in the liver and spleen and hence organ toxicity. By contrast, renal-clearable optical agents (RCOAs) are rapidly excreted from the body

Metal halide perovskites (MHPs) constitute a rich library of materials with huge potential for disruptive optoelectronic technologies. Their main strength comes from the possibility of easily tuning their bandgap to integrate them in devices with different functionalities — in principle. In reality, this cannot be achieved yet. In fact, whereas defect tolerance can be claimed for MHPs with a bandgap

Na-based batteries have shown substantial progress in recent years and are promising candidates for mitigating the supply risks associated with Li-based batteries. In this Review, Na and Li batteries are compared in terms of fundamental principles and specific materials. Principles for the rational design of a Na battery architecture are discussed. Recent prototypes are surveyed to demonstrate that

An article in Nature Biomedical Engineering reports that softening the surface of silicone implants prevents the foreign body response and thus fibrotic encapsulation of the material.

Scientific visibility is key to an academic career and rooted in the traditional academic cycle of training, (informal) connections, support, publications, citations, recognition and funding — a cycle from which under-represented groups are often excluded. In this Viewpoint, five scientists discuss experiences and thoughts about disparities in scientific visibility and provide action points.

Atoms serve as an inspiration for colloidal self-assembly, whereby building blocks can combine and confer endless functionality using a few design principles, including directionality, valence and reversible binding. Tetrahedral structures inspired by the bonding of carbon atoms have long been targeted as candidates for metamaterials and are now becoming accessible through molecular mimetic colloidal

Meeting global emission reduction goals will require the large-scale deployment of renewable energy infrastructure and electric vehicles. Ensuring a fair and sustainable supply of the required critical primary and secondary raw materials will be essential to a greener future.

The defossilization of our economy requires that materials for renewable energy conversion technologies are themselves green, renewable and circular. To this end, components such as batteries, electronic devices and electric motors should be recycled and regenerated, and produced solely from secondary raw materials.

Solid-state batteries (SSBs) have recently been revived to increase the energy density and eliminate safety concerns associated with conventional Li-ion batteries with flammable liquid electrolytes. To achieve large-scale, low-cost production of SSBs as soon as possible, it would be advantageous to modify the mature manufacturing platform, involving slurry casting and roll-to-roll technologies, used