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Volume 9 Issue 3, March 2024

Microscale robots' unique active motion enables their precise navigation in different aqueous biological or environmental media. The image shows an artist’s impression of microrobots using photocatalysis to degrade chemical and biological warfare agents for environmental remediation. See Chen C. et al

Cover image: David Johnston.

Comment

  • Solar photovoltaics has tremendous potential to address current gaps in electricity access for resource-challenged settings, such as sub-Saharan Africa. However, a rapid surge in installations and future growth will lead to an increase in waste from panels and batteries, which needs to be tackled urgently. Innovative technical solutions and improved policies and standards are required to address end-of-life challenges for solar photovoltaics in sub-Saharan Africa.

    • Priti Parikh
    • Ryan Wang
    • Jing Meng
    Comment

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Q&A

  • Materialism, a podcast exploring the past, present and future of materials science, is turning five. Co-founders and co-hosts Taylor Sparks (a professor at the University of Utah) and Andrew Falkowski (a PhD student in Sparks’ group) discuss how they use storytelling to create compelling episodes and share their journey and lessons learned.

    • Giulia Pacchioni
    Q&A
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Research Highlights

  • An article in Science Advances presents a method to create starch superstructures to potentially improve food supply.

    • Charlotte Allard
    Research Highlight
  • An article in Matter uses rice grains as scaffolds for cultivated beef cells to produce an innovative beef-infused rice.

    • Ariane Vartanian
    Research Highlight
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Reviews

  • Single-atom catalysts benefit from metal–support interactions that enable the support to be directly involved in the reaction, accelerating specific mechanistic steps to obtain unique electrocatalytic properties. This Review discusses state-of-the-art techniques for synthesizing active co-catalytic single-atom structures and explores the design strategies that enhance their catalytic performance.

    • Lucy Gloag
    • Samuel V. Somerville
    • Richard D. Tilley
    Review Article
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Perspectives

  • Peptides and nucleic acids inspired the creation of synthetic analogues that fold and assemble on demand. By contrast, programmable glycan architectures remain mostly unexplored. In this Perspective, the authors propose that advances in synthesis and analysis could fuel the use of well-defined glycans in materials science and supramolecular chemistry.

    • Surusch Djalali
    • Nishu Yadav
    • Martina Delbianco
    Perspective
  • Multijunction solar cells can overcome the fundamental efficiency limits of single-junction devices. This Perspective article highlights tandem solar cells based on a wide-gap perovskite and a narrow-gap organic subcell, which could achieve efficiencies beyond 30% and can be produced without large carbon emissions.

    • Kai O. Brinkmann
    • Pang Wang
    • Thomas Riedl
    Perspective
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