Volume 11 Issue 4, April 2012

Strong competition and funding squeezes require scientists to look for ways to increase their profile and impact within and beyond the scientific community. Online tools and services can help them communicate and publicize their research more effectively.

Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and author of a blog and a recent book titled Marketing for Scientists, talked to Nature Materials about his views on the progress of scientific business from Versailles in the 1700s to modern days.

When quenching a liquid to form a glass, order-of-magnitude changes in cooling speed have small effects on the glass's properties. It is now shown that laser-assisted vapour deposition produces nanostructured glassy polymer films with a higher glass transition temperature and lower density than conventional quenched polymer glasses.

Self-assembled microsponges of hairpin RNA polymers achieve, with one thousand times lower concentration, the same degree of gene silencing in tumour-carrying mice as conventional nanoparticle-based siRNA delivery vehicles.

The pronounced temperature dependence of crystal-growth speed in phase-change materials not only rationalizes their favourable characteristics for non-volatile memory applications, but also suggests a profound new insight into their fundamental properties.

The demonstration of strong coupling between electromagnetic fields and excited molecular states represents a powerful new strategy for controlling quantum-mechanical states and chemical reaction dynamics.

A study reveals that spider orb webs fail in a nonlinear fashion, owing to the hierarchical organization of the silk proteins. The discovery may serve as inspiration for engineers for the design of aerial, light-weight, robust architectures.

The finding that metallic glasses inherit their elastic properties from solvent atoms leads to a new understanding of the complex relationship between glassy structure, deformation and mechanical properties.

Self-assembled barrel-like DNA nanostructures carrying active payloads and pre-programmed with logic operations to reconfigure in response to cell-surface cues can trigger a variety of intracellular functions.

Even though phase-change materials are used in optical as well as electronic information storage applications, some issues, such as their fast crystallization kinetics, remain poorly understood. The use of ultrafast differential scanning calorimetry now reveals that the fast kinetics is based on properties similar to those of fragile liquids.

Oxide materials show a versatile range of phenomena that in many cases can be controlled by growing thin films of oxides next to each other. The observation now that electrical conductance of domain walls in a ferroelectric can be tuned simply through the domain-wall orientation offers a flexible way of controlling functionality in complex oxides.

Magnetic tunnel junctions play an important role in controlling electron spin in spintronic devices. The reversible, remanent switching of electron-spin polarization in multiferroic tunnel junctions now enables significant technological possibilities for spin electronics.

Raman spectroscopy has already proved to be a powerful tool for studying the properties of single graphene layers. It is now shown that this technique can also provide information on the interaction between graphene sheets in multilayered graphene structures. In particular, a Raman peak corresponding to the interlayer shear mode, and probably linked to the interlayer coupling, is unveiled.

The slow decay of photoconductivity in amorphous oxide semiconductors hampers their use in photosensor arrays with viable frame rates. A gated sensor architecture now provides direct control over the Fermi-level position in the semiconductor layer, and eliminates persistent photoconductivity by accelerating electron recombination with ionized oxygen vacancy sites.

Although the superior electrochemical performance of supercapacitors capable of rapidly storing electrical energy is due to reversible ion adsorption in porous carbon electrodes, the molecular origin of this phenomenon is still poorly understood. A quantitative picture of the structure of an ionic liquid adsorbed inside realistically modelled microporous carbon electrodes is now proposed.

The development of reliable diagnostic tools to investigate the performance of a battery in situ is required at present. Techniques based on magnetic resonance imaging are now shown to be able to non-invasively visualize and characterize the changes occurring in Li-ion battery electrodes and electrolyte.

siRNA delivery has so far been hampered by carriers that inefficiently encapsulate RNA, and by its degradation prior to cellular uptake. Now, self-assembled crystalline microsponges consisting solely of cleavable RNA strands — which are converted to siRNA only after cellular uptake — achieve, with three orders of magnitude lower concentration, the same degree of gene silencing as conventional siRNA nanocarriers.

In most unconventional superconductors, the superconducting phase is adjacent to a phase with some type of magnetic order. However, this is not a universal feature. For example, no magnetic order has so far been observed in Sr₂RuO₄. Now, low-energy muon relaxation experiments show the presence of a static magnetic order for this material, suggesting that this feature may in fact be universal.

It is well known that to reduce dissipation in a superconductor it is necessary to introduce artificial pinning centres, that is, small regions in which superconductivity is suppressed. This is usually achieved by introducing small regions of non-superconducting phases. A new concept of pinning centres, the local suppression of superconductivity induced by strain, is now demonstrated.

The realization of ultrastable, nanostructured glassy polymer films by pulsed-laser evaporation is reported. Compared with standard poly(methyl methacrylate) glass, these polymer glasses are 40% less dense and have a 40-degree-higher glass transition temperature. Their unique properties, which are a manifestation of their globular nanostructure, should make these glasses attractive for applications where weight and stability are critical.

Mesoporous colloidal gels with solid-like viscoelasticity formed from oil-in-water nanoemulsions are reported. Gelation is thermoreversible and occurs through interdroplet bridging of an end-functionalized oligomer. The gels can be photocrosslinked to encapsulate lipophilic biomolecules for their subsequent release through ultraviolet photolysis.

To ensure that their work gets the attention it deserves, scientists need to engage with different stakeholders ranging from colleagues to funding agencies and the general public. In this focus issue we explore concepts from marketing that could help scientists in this effort, and highlight the latest online tools and services for successful science communication.