Mathematics and computing articles within Nature Materials

Featured

  • Review Article |

    Multiscale modelling is a powerful tool to simulate materials behaviour, which has important features across multiple length and time scales. This Review provides an overview of multiscale computation methods and discusses their development for use in material design.

    • Jacob Fish
    • , Gregory J. Wagner
    •  & Sinan Keten
  • Article |

    Computational analysis and mechanical testing demonstrate that the skeletal system of a marine sponge has, through the course of evolution, achieved a near-optimal resistance to buckling.

    • Matheus C. Fernandes
    • , Joanna Aizenberg
    •  & Katia Bertoldi
  • Article |

    Vectorial electromagnetic modes in coupled metallic nanolasers are used to emulate the behaviour of complex magnetic materials, providing an integrated nanophotonic platform to study spin exchange interactions and map large-scale optimization problems.

    • Midya Parto
    • , William Hayenga
    •  & Mercedeh Khajavikhan
  • News & Views |

    Aligned anisotropic organization of the extracellular matrix by fibroblasts has now been shown to depend on cell reorientation following collision, with the cell collision guidance dependent on the transcription factor, TFAP2C.

    • Paolo P. Provenzano
  • Letter |

    Zeolites are industrially useful catalysts, but their synthesis is poorly understood and many predicted structures remain unsynthesized. Machine learning and graph theory are used respectively to mine the literature on zeolite transformations and to predict similar zeolite pairs that may easily be transformed into each other.

    • Daniel Schwalbe-Koda
    • , Zach Jensen
    •  & Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli
  • Comment |

    This Comment describes some of the common pitfalls encountered in deriving and validating predictive statistical models from high-dimensional data. It offers a fresh perspective on some key statistical issues, providing some guidelines to avoid pitfalls, and to help unfamiliar readers better assess the reliability and significance of their results.

    • Andrew E. Teschendorff
  • Article |

    Molecular simulations reveal the self-assembly of small molecules into nanoparticle drug carriers. Targeting of colon and liver cancer cells by the nanoparticles via kinase inhibitors is employed in anti-tumour therapy in vivo.

    • Yosi Shamay
    • , Janki Shah
    •  & Daniel A. Heller
  • Letter |

    Metal–dielectric Janus colloids subjected to perpendicular a.c. electric fields can self-organize into swarms, chains, clusters and isotropic gases, depending on the frequency of the field.

    • Jing Yan
    • , Ming Han
    •  & Steve Granick
  • Feature |

    Computational materials science has grown in China in recent times. Hai-Qing Lin gives an overview of China's efforts towards a Materials Genome Initiative and the challenges faced.

    • Hai-Qing Lin
  • Article |

    Elementary geometric constructions and constrained optimization algorithms can be used to fit origami tessellations to any curved surface.

    • Levi H. Dudte
    • , Etienne Vouga
    •  & L. Mahadevan
  • Editorial |

    This year we will offer the option of double-blind peer review and introduce a reproducibility checklist for life sciences articles that helps authors adhere to data-reporting standards.

  • Letter |

    Colloidal particles dispersed in liquid crystals induce nematic fields and topological defects that are dictated by the topology of the colloidal particles. However, little is known about such interplay of topologies. It is now shown that knot-shaped microparticles in liquid crystals induce defect lines that get entangled with the colloidal knots, and that such mutually tangled configurations satisfy topological constraints and follow predictions from knot theory.

    • Angel Martinez
    • , Miha Ravnik
    •  & Ivan I. Smalyukh
  • News & Views |

    In a uniformly aligned liquid crystal, colloidal particles having a number of holes give rise to arrays of topological defects that are associated with the particles' topology.

    • Eugene Terentjev
  • Letter |

    It is demonstrated that graphene coatings do not alter the wetting behaviour of copper, gold or silicon surfaces. Such wetting transparency—shown to occur only for surfaces where surface–water interactions are dominated by van der Waals forces—and graphene’s ability to suppress copper oxidation result in a 30–40% increase in condensation heat transfer on copper. The findings have implications for graphene-based coatings with independently tunable electronic and wetting properties.

    • Javad Rafiee
    • , Xi Mi
    •  & Nikhil A. Koratkar