Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
The first race involving molecular ‘cars’ stimulated technical advances in scanning tunnelling microscopy and provided insights in surface science and synthetic chemistry — it also attracted wide interest from the public.
Multiferroics can be used to address fundamental questions on the nature of the universe, providing a platform to test concepts in cosmology and high-energy physics, such as the formation of cosmic strings and the existence of an electron electric dipole moment.