Reviews & Analysis

Deaf scientists who use American Sign Language need to be able to communicate specialized concepts with ease. In this Viewpoint, four deaf scientists — a quantum physicist, a marine ecologist, an immunologist and an organic chemist — discuss their experiences in developing scientific lexicons and the resulting shift in their science communication.

Although perovskite solar cells now have competitive efficiencies compared with silicon solar cells, their low stability has hindered their commercial application thus far. This Review summarizes the tremendous improvements made over the past decade and offer a perspective on how to reach >25-year stable perovskite solar cells.

Nanotheranostics — nanoparticle-based systems combining diagnostic and therapeutic functions — hold great promise, but their implementation in the clinic is challenging. This Review discusses the design and clinical development of nanotheranostics and defines the critical steps needed to overcome technical, manufacturing, regulatory and economical challenges for their safe and effective clinical translation.

Sodium-ion batteries (SIBs), an emerging type of sustainable battery, still need to be recycled for environmental and economic reasons. Strategies to recycle spent SIBs should be made during the initial stages of commercialization to ensure that SIBs are designed for ease of recycling, efficiency and low operation costs. This Perspective article summarizes the material components of SIBs, discusses strategies for their recycling and outlines the associated challenges and future outlook of SIB recycling.

Integrating single-functional fibre devices into multifunctional systems can enable promising wearable applications. This Perspective article summarizes challenges and strategies for the design, fabrication and assembly of fibre electronic systems, highlighting specifications for real applications.

Owing to the many-body nature of quantum materials, a microscopic understanding of the interactions dictating their ground state is essential to control their dynamics. This Review summarizes how THz light is effective for both probing quantum materials and driving them into new types of out-of-equilibrium phases.

Electrified processes offer a chemical-free approach to the removal of a wide range of contaminants from water, including many that are difficult to remove using conventional methods. This Review discusses the fundamentals of several important electrified processes and highlights the role of electrode materials in contaminant transport and transformation.

Engineered materials with intrinsic chirality can affect biological processes from cell uptake to nerve repair. This Perspective article discusses the design and function of intrinsically chiral carbon dots, metal-based materials and patterned geometries, highlighting the different effects of the two enantiomers on biological responses.

Two-dimensional perovskites with phase-pure structures have considerable potential for optoelectronic applications because of their reduced defects, flattened energy landscape and enhanced lattice protection. This Perspective article investigates advancing progress on achieving phase-pure perovskite by tailoring the precursor interactions and preparation methods and discusses their prominent optoelectronic properties and applications.

Integrating various two-dimensional materials and three-dimensional nanomembranes via van der Waals interactions enables novel hetero-integrated photonic layouts and ways to explore exotic nanophotonic phenomena. This Review discusses photonic van der Waals integration, from film preparation to device implementation.

Understanding the protein corona can advance nanomedicinal developments and elucidate how nanomaterials impact the environment. This Review discusses the evolution and challenges in characterizing the protein corona, explores how artificial intelligence can supplement experimental efforts and exposes emerging opportunities in nanomedicine and the environment.

Ternary organic solar cells adhere to a simple device fabrication strategy and are among the highest performing organic solar cells to date. This Review examines the multiple models of operation that have emerged for ternary cells, highlighting new insights and still-existing gaps in knowledge.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are lipid-bound nanoscale mediators of intercellular communication. This Review discusses EVs in the context of the extracellular matrix, highlighting how the understanding of their interactions inspires materials design to control the release, retention and production of EVs for various biological and therapeutic applications.

Exascale computers — supercomputers that can perform 10¹⁸ floating point operations per second — started coming online in 2022: in the United States, Frontier launched as the first public exascale supercomputer and Aurora is due to open soon; OceanLight and Tianhe-3 are operational in China; and JUPITER is due to launch in 2023 in Europe. Supercomputers offer unprecedented opportunities for modelling complex materials. In this Viewpoint, five researchers working on different types of materials discuss the most promising directions in computational materials science.

Solution-processable semiconductors based on small molecules, polymers or halide perovskites combine sustainable manufacturing with exceptional optoelectronic properties that can be chemically tailored to achieve flexible and highly efficient optoelectronic and photonic devices. A new exciting research direction is the study of the influence of chirality on light–matter interactions in these soft materials and its exploitation for the simultaneous control of charge, spin and light. In this Viewpoint, researchers working on different types of chiral semiconductors discuss the most interesting directions in this rapidly expanding field.

The field of organic electronics has acknowledged that the key to process and device optimization is to elucidate the correlation between the active layer morphology and performance. This Review outlines how this can be achieved using accessible approaches from materials science and classical polymer thermodynamics.

Monolayer-protected metal clusters are a unique class of versatile, atomically precise nanomaterials that have drawn attention in diverse areas of materials science owing to their molecular-like properties. This Review discusses how understanding these properties through tightly connected experimental and computational investigations can strengthen their impact from catalysis to biomedical applications.

Ultrafast spectroscopies enable the characterization of quantum materials and of their functional properties arising from strong correlations and electronic topology. This Review discusses three emerging techniques: attosecond transient absorption spectroscopy, solid-state high-harmonic generation spectroscopy and extreme ultraviolet-second harmonic generation spectroscopy.

Biology can help to design materials and approaches for tumour tissue engineering. Biomaterials are a requisite for modelling cancer to rebuild tissue organization, composition and function. This Review discusses bioengineering strategies that recreate the pathophysiology of tumour tissues to address questions in cancer research.

Machine learning is increasingly popular in materials science research. This Review generalizes learnings from applied machine learning in robotics and gameplaying and extends it to materials science. In particular, hybrid approaches combining model-based and data-driven models are seeding the transition from the application of machine learning to discrete tools and workflows towards emergent knowledge.