Volume 8 Issue 5, May 2023

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.

An article in Advanced Materials reports an edible rechargeable battery that can power edible and digestible electronic devices for health care and food monitoring.

An article in Science Advances reports a mechanical nanosurgery approach to treat glioblastoma.

An article in Nature Communications reports a solid-state epitaxy strategy to disperse single cobalt atoms in silicon, synthesizing single-atom photocatalysts that outperform any other so far for visible-light-driven syngas production.

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.

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.

One of the most advanced and challenging topics in modern reticular chemistry is structure multivariation. This Perspective defines the fundamentals of multivariation by considering sequences of chemical species as its true essence, thereby addressing the classification of multivariate structures and presenting new concepts for their analysis and application.

Halide perovskite light-emitting diodes display excellent optoelectronic properties and are easy to fabricate. This Perspective article discusses the potential of perovskite emitters for the miniaturization of perovskite light-emitting diodes and provides a technical roadmap for the fabrication of microscale emitting devices.