Volume 8 Issue 6, June 2023

Progress in biomimetics allows for the fabrication of man-made materials and surfaces with properties similar to biological ones. These advancements enable the development of a new generation of building materials for architecture that have remarkable properties typically unachievable with a traditional approach.

An article in Nature reports an alloy that can be 3D printed and has improved mechanical properties at high temperatures compared with current state-of-the-art 3D-printable alloys.

A paper in Nature Nanotechnology reports the room-temperature generation and control of meron–antimeron pairs in an antiferromagnet by means of electrical pulses.

An article in Angewandte Chemie reports the synthesis of chiral supramolecular glasses that exhibit room-temperature colour-tunable ultralong phosphorescence and circular polarized luminescence.

An article in the New Journal of Chemistry reports the synthesis of a chiral metal–organic framework that can be used to separate limonene enantiomers.

An article in Nature Chemistry reports the use of a single-molecule junction to monitor the individual steps of a Michael reaction in real time through the chirality-induced spin selectivity effect.

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.

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.

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.

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.