Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
The investigation of geometrically frustrated magnets can be complicated by crystalline disorder. New high-quality crystals of a Kagomé antiferromagnet offer neutrons a clearer path for determining their intrinsic order.
Materials that undergo a structural transformation between amorphous and crystalline phases under the influence of an electrical current have been known for decades. But with the discovery of new phase-change materials and new device configurations to make them switch, interest in them is being rejuvenated.
A new design of a gas cell based on advanced fibre-optic solutions overcomes the practical difficulties that have so far hindered the use of gas-phase materials in optical science and technology.
Wrinkling is a ubiquitous form of mechanical instability, occurring in such widely different systems as skin and lava flows. Hierarchical wrinkling leading to topographical features, with length scales spanning five orders of magnitude, has now been observed and harnessed in an artificial skin.
The concept of a Luttinger liquid has recently been established as vital to our understanding of the behaviour of one-dimensional quantum systems. Although this has led to a number of theoretical breakthroughs, only now has its descriptive power been confirmed experimentally.