News & Views

The human body can be used as a medium to couple ambient energy and transmit power to wearable devices.

Magnetic tunnel junctions with a hybrid free layer design can be used to electrically read and write domain walls.

Boron arsenide could be used as a high-thermal-conductivity cooling substrate in gallium nitride power devices.

Sub-1-nm vertical field-effect transistors can be created by transferring pre-made metal film contacts onto two-dimensional materials.

A superconducting electromechanical device at cryogenic temperatures can be probed using optical fibres and a commercial phase modulator.

Transistors that are printed on paper substrates using all-carbon inks can be completely recycled, providing a potential route to helping solve the problem of electronic waste.

Woven displays with a high number of light-emitting pixels can be created by interlacing two electrically conducting fibres and forming electroluminescent units at the crossover points.

An AI-assisted smart textile can be used to record, model and understand human–environment interactions.

Programmable metasurfaces can be used to encode wireless signals between users at different locations.

The electrical and mechanical robustness of thin metal film electrodes can be improved by adding an atomically thin interlayer, such as graphene, between the metal and the flexible substrate.

Conformable electrodes can be used to manipulate the electrical properties of a Venus flytrap, creating actuators that can be wirelessly controlled.

Wearable electronic devices, which allow physiological signals to be continuously monitored, can be used in the early detection of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic cases of COVID-19.

A flexible biosensing system with in-sensor machine-learning functionality can recognize up to 21 hand gestures in real time based on surface electromyography patterns from a forearm.

Isolated point defects in silicon that emit light at telecom wavelengths could help accelerate the development of quantum information technologies using commercial platforms.

A magnonic directional coupler based on yttrium iron garnet could be used to create integrated magnonic nanocircuits for logic operations.

An ultrashort pulse of electric current can be used to switch the magnetization of a micrometre-scale magnetic element via spin–orbit torques.

A cleaning–healing–cleaning method can effectively eliminate ionic defects at the surface of perovskite films, resulting in reliable and high-performance perovskite transistors.

Field-effect transistors that use carbon nanotubes as the channel material and an ion gel as the gate exhibit a high tolerance to radiation and can be recovered following radiation damage using a simple annealing process.

With the help of a gate electrode to control the charge state of individual molecules on graphene, information can be moved along a one-dimensional molecular chain, mimicking the behaviour of an electronic shift register.

A monocentric lens and a sensitive hemispherical imager can be combined to create a miniaturized camera that offers a field of view of 120°, deep depth of field and minimal optical aberration.