Materials science articles from across Nature Portfolio

Self-healing behaviour in a nanotwinned diamond composite, at room temperature, has been quantitatively evaluated through tensile testing. The phenomenon is shown to arise from a transition of atomic interactions from repulsion to attraction and the formation of nanoscale diamond ‘osteoblasts’, in analogy to the process of bone healing in living organisms.

A nickel-based compound has shown evidence of a superconducting state at a temperature of 80 kelvin. The material bridges a gap between other nickelates and a notable class of superconductor containing copper.

An intercalation strategy has been developed to produce bulk-monolayer MoS₂ which retains single-layer semiconductor properties.

The development of highly ordered intermetallic catalyst for oxygen reduction reactions suffers from large diffusion barrier for atom ordering. Here, the authors use a low melting-point metal doping strategy to synthesize a series of highly ordered metal-doped platinum–cobalt alloy fuel cell catalysts.

The photodiode, FET, spintronic, piezoelectric, thermoplastic and molecular sensing applications of free-standing 2D GaN synthesized by sonochemical and Hummer’s method.

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) tape is widely used for lithium-ion batteries but its chemical stability has been largely overlooked. Reversible self-discharge is now shown to be virtually eliminated in LiFePO₄–graphite cells by replacing PET with polypropylene jellyroll tape.

Despite the promise that machine learning (ML) can accelerate catalyst development, truly novel catalysts are challenging to find through ML approaches because of their inability to extrapolate. Here, the authors show an extrapolative ML approach to develop new multi-elemental catalysts.

Self-healing behaviour in a nanotwinned diamond composite, at room temperature, has been quantitatively evaluated through tensile testing. The phenomenon is shown to arise from a transition of atomic interactions from repulsion to attraction and the formation of nanoscale diamond ‘osteoblasts’, in analogy to the process of bone healing in living organisms.

Emily Draper explains how to design and build electrochemical equipment for neutron scattering experiments with simple, at-hand components and techniques.