Volume 5 Issue 6, June 2020

An article in Science Advances reports a wireless smart contact lens for diabetic diagnosis and the delivery of drugs to treat diabetic retinopathy.

An article in Physical Review Letters reports the properties of iron — the main element in the Earth’s core — at extreme temperatures and pressures, providing clues to the core’s composition.

Over the past five years, advances in materials science, chemistry, engineering and artificial intelligence have yielded a new class of affordable image cytometers for automated single-cell phenotyping of scant samples. In this Review, these technologies are introduced and their potential molecular-diagnostic roles in resource-limited oncology settings are discussed.

Chiral hybrid organic–inorganic perovskites combine the remarkable optical, electrical and spintronic properties of perovskites with chirality. This Review systematically introduces the latest advances in chiral perovskites, surveys their structure–property relationships and details their chiroptical and ferroelectric applications.

Engineering the phase of metal nanocrystals while simultaneously achieving shape-controlled synthesis can enable new and desirable properties. This Review highlights the synthetic strategies for generating Ru nanocrystals with different crystal phases and surface structures, and outlines their implementation in catalytic applications.

Reducible oxides are tunable, multifunctional materials used in many applications, particularly in catalysis; their attractive properties arise from their interacting charge carriers, complex electronic structure and propensity to form mobile defects. This Review surveys theoretical methods to model and understand reducible oxides, using TiO₂ as a prototypical example.