Soft materials articles within Nature Materials

Featured

  • Letter |

    Soft filamentous bundles, including F-actin, microtubules or bacterial flagella, can experience large frictional forces that scale logarithmically with sliding velocity, and such frictional coupling can be tuned by modifying lateral interfilament interactions.

    • Andrew Ward
    • , Feodor Hilitski
    •  & Zvonimir Dogic

  • News & Views |

    A theory explains the role of curvature in controlling wrinkle patterns on elastic shells.

    • Christian Santangelo

  • News & Views |

    Cracks in stretched epithelial tissue are caused by a build-up of hydraulic pressure beneath the cells when the tissue is unloaded.

    • Emad Moeendarbary
    •  & Guillaume Charras

  • News & Views |

    Using a scanning tunnelling microscopy-based method it is now possible to get an atomistic-level description of the most probable binding and contact configuration for single-molecule electrical junctions.

    • Richard J. Nichols
    •  & Simon J. Higgins

  • Editorial |

    Model colloidal systems are a testbed for understanding aspects of the organization of matter.

  • News & Views |

    Temperature can switch the thermodynamic phase of colloid–polymer mixtures by tipping the balance between competing attractive interactions induced by polymer depletion or adsorption.

    • Ah-Young Jee
    • , Boyce Tsang
    •  & Steve Granick

  • News & Views |

    Janus ellipsoids self-assemble into self-limiting fibres that can be reversibly actuated by applying an electric field.

    • Eric M. Furst

  • News & Views |

    The nucleation of a crystal within another can involve intermediate liquid nuclei.

    • Eduardo Sanz
    •  & Chantal Valeriani

  • Commentary |

    Understanding entropic contributions to common ordering transitions is essential for the design of self-assembling systems with addressable complexity.

    • Daan Frenkel

  • News & Views |

    Computer simulations of one-component three-dimensional icosahedral quasicrystals will help to understand the mechanisms that may stabilize them in experiments.

    • Marc de Boissieu

  • News & Views |

    Circularly polarized light actualizes the formation of chiral twisted ribbons from achiral semiconductor nanoparticles.

    • Bart Kahr
    •  & Alexander G. Shtukenberg

  • Commentary |

    Two conceptual strategies for encoding information into self-assembling building blocks highlight opportunities and challenges in the realization of programmable colloidal nanostructures.

    • Ludovico Cademartiri
    •  & Kyle J. M. Bishop

  • Letter |

    Soft acoustic metamaterials that consist of a concentrated suspension of macroporous microbeads and that show a broadband negative acoustic refractive index are now demonstrated.

    • Thomas Brunet
    • , Aurore Merlin
    •  & Olivier Mondain-Monval

  • Letter |

    Entropic elasticity, typical of rubbers and known to also occur in organic polymers with certain network structures, is now demonstrated for phosphate-glass fibres with highly anisotropic structures.

    • Seiji Inaba
    • , Hideo Hosono
    •  & Setsuro Ito

  • Research Highlights |

    • John Plummer

  • Article |

    Experiments and computer simulations show that Janus ellipsoids can self-assemble into self-limiting fibres that have shape-memory properties and can be actuated by applying an external electric field.

    • Aayush A. Shah
    • , Benjamin Schultz
    •  & Michael J. Solomon

  • News & Views |

    Extracellular-matrix stiffness regulates cell behaviour even when decoupled from ligand density and tethering.

    • Sanjay Kumar

  • News & Views |

    Effective limiting of the intensity of low-power light transmitted through organic thin films under ambient conditions has been achieved by proper design of donor–acceptor systems.

    • Anjun Qin
    •  & Ben Zhong Tang

  • Article |

    Single-particle-resolution video microscopy of films of colloidal particles shows that solid–solid transitions between square and triangular lattices occur through a two-step nucleation mechanism that involves liquid nuclei.

    • Yi Peng
    • , Feng Wang
    •  & Yilong Han

  • News & Views |

    Inspired by the chemistry of adhesive proteins in mussels, hydrogels can now be made to self-heal in water without the aid of metal chelates.

    • Jonathan J. Wilker

  • News & Views |

    Although promising, the use of organic semiconductors has not yet revolutionized consumer electronics. Synthesis of high-performance materials, enhanced control of morphology and smart exploitation of unique photophysical phenomena are the way forward to overcome the technological hurdles of this field.

    • John E. Anthony

  • News & Views |

    The structural similarity of organic semiconductors to biological compounds suggests the use of these materials in biomedical applications, yet their implementation is not straightforward. Research in this area is growing fast, thanks to the combined efforts of the multidisciplinary bioelectronics community.

    • Guglielmo Lanzani

  • Article |

    Malignant phenotypes in the mammary epithelium have been correlated to increases in extracellular matrix stiffness. It is now shown that the effect of matrix stiffness in normal mammary epithelial cells can be offset by an increase in basement-membrane ligands and that both the stiffness and composition of the matrix are sensed by the β4 integrin. The results suggest that the relationship between matrix stiffness and composition is a more relevant predictor of breast-cancer progression.

    • Ovijit Chaudhuri
    • , Sandeep T. Koshy
    •  & David J. Mooney

  • Letter |

    Block copolymers can self-assemble into nanostructures that simultaneously facilitate ion transport and provide mechanical stability. Highly asymmetric charge cohesion effects are now shown to induce the formation of nanostructures with percolated phases desired for ion transport. This strategy could lead to the design of enhanced battery electrolyte materials.

    • Charles E. Sing
    • , Jos W. Zwanikken
    •  & Monica Olvera de la Cruz

  • Letter |

    Liquid-crystalline elastomers combine rubber-like elasticity with the optical properties of liquid crystals, yet some of their properties depend on the particular liquid-crystal phase. Now, stretchable gels of the liquid-crystalline blue-phase I are reported. The blue-phase gels are electro-optically switchable under a moderate applied voltage, and their optical properties can be manipulated by an applied strain.

    • F. Castles
    • , S. M. Morris
    •  & H. J. Coles

  • News & Views |

    Physical cues from the extracellular environment influence the lineage commitment of stem cells. Now, experiments on human mesenchymal stem cells cultured on photodegradable hydrogels show that the cells' fate can also be determined by past physical environments.

    • Jeroen Eyckmans
    •  & Christopher S. Chen

  • Article |

    At sufficiently low temperature, liquid water crystallizes into ices with cubic or hexagonal symmetry. A simulation study now shows that the nucleation of water into atomic stackings of cubic and hexagonal ices occurs through a metastable precursor phase with tetragonal symmetry, and that this scenario provides an explanation for the unusual pressure dependence of water’s homogeneous crystal-nucleation temperature.

    • John Russo
    • , Flavio Romano
    •  & Hajime Tanaka

  • Article |

    The use of encoded microparticles in industrial settings is hampered by issues of scalability, decoding robustness and encoding density. Now, easily decodable microparticles with spatially patterned rare-earth upconversion nanocrystals, exponentially scalable encoding capacities and ultralow decoding false-alarm rates that are insensitive to harsh processing environments and can be used in practical applications such as durable anti-counterfeiting labels and multiplexed bioassays are reported.

    • Jiseok Lee
    • , Paul W. Bisso
    •  & Patrick S. Doyle

  • Article |

    Biofilms are multifunctional and environmentally responsive assemblies of living and non-living components. By using synthetic gene networks in engineered cells to regulate the production of extracellular amyloid fibrils, and by interfacing the fibrils with inorganic materials such as metal nanoparticles, stimuli-responsive synthetic biofilms with switchable functions and tunable composition and structure have now been produced.

    • Allen Y. Chen
    • , Zhengtao Deng
    •  & Timothy K. Lu

  • News & Views |

    The macroscopic alignment of dilute dispersions of graphene oxide can be controlled, with extremely large optical sensitivity, through the application of weak electric fields.

    • Ju Young Kim
    •  & Sang Ouk Kim

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