Comment

The Palestinian–German Science Bridge (PGSB) is a science diplomacy pilot project financed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and implemented jointly by Forschungszentrum Jülich and the Palestinian Academy for Science and Technology. Its goal, as its founder and its project coordinator discuss in this Comment, is to develop joint research and education programmes.

Getting diagnosed with a physically disabling illness in graduate school can be overwhelming and isolating. This article shares a researcher’s personal journey with such an experience, offering advice and encouragement to those facing similar challenges. By confronting the disease, the author found resilience and developed appreciation for life beyond work.

Progress in biomimetics allows for the fabrication of man-made materials and surfaces with properties similar to biological ones. These advancements enable the development of a new generation of building materials for architecture that have remarkable properties typically unachievable with a traditional approach.

Academia can offer a wonderful career path, but the power differentials at play in university life can turn promising careers into nightmares. Academic bullying is an age-old serious issue that affects people in a variety of positions across all branches of science. This Comment discusses how bullying slows the progress of science.

High-performance ferroelectric materials are used in many applications, ranging from actuators to capacitors. Now, high entropy is emerging as an effective and flexible strategy for enhancing the physical properties of ferroelectrics via the delicate design of local polarization configurations.

In Israel, as in most countries, the number of girls who choose to study STEM subjects in high school is still too low, and the number of women occupying leadership positions in academia and tech companies even more so. Neta Blum, a mechanical engineer who founded a programme to inspire female high-school students to choose a path in STEM, argues that mentoring is key to empower the next generation of female scientists and engineers.

The transition to climate-friendly cities has led to a renaissance of wood as a renewable building material. To prevent severe raw material shortages in the future, the material-first utilization of wood in long-living, resource-efficient engineered wood products and constructions will be key.

The solutions to many of today’s challenges will be found at the frontier of advanced materials research and will require collaboration across synthesis, characterization, fabrication and theory. While good ideas can be generated anywhere by anyone, scientific opportunities are often concentrated among select groups. National user facilities democratize access to world-class expertise and instrumentation, acting as innovation multipliers on the scientific enterprise.

Peptides are small yet versatile building blocks of biomaterials. This Comment highlights recent progress in the design of liquid-like microdroplets, or coacervates, based on peptides and produced through liquid–liquid phase separation. This emerging platform holds promise as efficacious delivery vehicles for multi-purpose biomedical applications.

Despite concrete being the most prominent building material of the twentieth century, the cultural heritage relevance of concrete buildings and the importance of their preservation is not widely recognized. The European Union project InnovaConcrete’s purpose is to develop nanotechnology-based treatments for concrete preservation and to increase citizen awareness around the importance of concrete-based heritage.

Efforts to increase diversity in quantum information science education often centre on individual minority students. The co-founder of the IBM-HBCU Quantum Center argues that more resources should go towards faculty enablement strategies targeting schools with a proven track record of graduating minorities in STEM.

Pressure-sensitive adhesives are familiar household items spanning applications in everyday repair, office supplies and topical wound care. Through innovations in material and polymer science, pressure-sensitive adhesives will advance from current commodity to new specialty materials with resulting new clinical uses and improved patient care.

Liquid metals are promising multifunctional materials, but their single-colour physical appearance limits their applicability. There are several methods to endow liquid metals with colour and fluorescence, and although breakthroughs have been made in controlling their optical and interfacial properties, more work is needed to refine the synthetic strategies, better understand the coloration effects and enable the applications of colourful liquid metals.

A group of scientists at Imperial College collaborated with The Blackett Lab Family, a collective of UK-based Black physicists, to host the UK’s first research school for Black physicists and engineers. Here they reflect on what they learnt and why we should all join in the mission to end inequality in academia.

Next-generation light-emitting displays should be not only flexible and bright but also soft and stretchable. Newly emerging light-emitting materials will enable body-conformable light-emitting devices with potential applications in a variety of fields, including displays, lighting, sensing, imaging, stimulation and therapy.

The metaverse may change the way we live and interact with one another, and its potential applications range from entertainment to health care. Extended reality is the main technology to realize the highly realistic, interactive and immersive metaverse experience, and wearable electronic devices and materials are at its core.

Organic photovoltaic cells are thin, lightweight, flexible and semi-transparent. These characteristics unlock new possibilities for applications in agriculture, architecture, wearable electronics and health science.

Rationally creating an intense colorant has been a challenge for centuries. Serendipity often played a role in the discovery of important pigments and dyes. In particular, inorganic pigments are promising because of their durability under different conditions. However, in spite of recent advancements in quantum mechanical theories and computational methods, predicting a crystal lattice that will produce an intense inorganic pigment of a desired colour is still elusive.

Electronic waste, with printed circuit boards (PCBs) at its heart, is the fastest-growing category of hazardous solid waste in the world. New materials, in particular biobased materials, show great promise in solving some of the sustainability and toxicity problems associated with PCBs, although several challenges still prevent their practical application.

Thanks to the lifespan and efficiency benchmarks set by the current generation of white light-emitting diodes (WLEDs), the lighting industry is quickly replacing traditional LEDs that use monochromatic light. Building upon research advances in framework solids for WLEDs and capitalizing on their bottom-up design principles, modular crystalline hybrids are paving paths to energy-efficient lighting alternatives.