News & Views

Lattices of micrometre-sized metamaterials embedded in thermoresponsive hydrogels deform upon heating to reveal encrypted images from a blank gel canvas.

An additively manufactured AlSi10Mg alloy shows high fatigue strength, even close to its tensile strength, for micro-sized samples. The fine cells in its inherent three-dimensional network are considered as cages to limit damage accumulation.

Quantum dots couple to form artificial molecules that allow for variable colour emission in response to an electric field.

Remotely powered vertical electrochemical transistors are demonstrated to track subtle nerve-cell activity even when the transistor core is fully shielded from the biological environment.

Oxide glasses can be intrinsically toughened by forming crystal-like, medium-range order clusters, which transform inversely to the amorphous state under stress, exciting multiple shear bands for plastic deformation.

Using the van der Waals crystal Sb₂O₃ as a buffer layer enables the growth of high-κ dielectrics on two-dimensional materials via atomic layer deposition.

In a non-collinear antiferromagnet, elementary spins rotate with opposite handedness with respect to the collective octupole magnetic moment when stirred by spin currents.

Amorphization can be an additional mechanism to assist plastic deformation in crystalline materials, providing a strategy to improve the load-bearing ability of brittle materials.

By tracking the electrochromic doping front, a hole-limited electrochemical doping mechanism is discovered in organic mixed ionic–electronic conductors.

By means of a precise folding–tearing process, screw dislocations with helical cores — appearing in pairs and taking on a DNA-like double-helix structure — are engineered to control the growth of twisted bilayer graphene.

An alloy engineering approach is developed to reliably grow atomically thin bilayers with predictable and tunable moiré patterns.

Piezoresponse microscopy and spectroscopy reveal the inextricable role of surface electrochemistry in stabilizing and controlling ferroelectricity in doped hafnia.

Photochromic molecular crystal arrays aligned in the micropores of a polymer membrane show high-performance actuation when stimulated by light. These soft composites might find applications in soft robotic devices.

Metamaterial adhesives with nonlinear cut architectures provide strong and reversible adhesion, directionality and spatially programmable adhesive strength.

An electric field is found to be capable of controlling dislocation movement in semiconducting zinc sulfide, as observed in real time by in situ transmission electron microscopy.

Detailed transmission electron microscopy imaging of the dynamics of domain walls in twisted van der Waals ferroelectrics is obtained, capturing the transition to a hysteretic response.

By monitoring the lattice dynamics of single-crystal argyrodite Ag₈SnSe₆ through the superionic transition, low thermal conductivity and ionic transport are found to arise from extreme phonon anharmonicity.