Soft materials articles from across Nature Portfolio

A miniature hydrogel launcher inspired by the squirting cucumber achieves record-high jumping height through water evaporation and fracture-driven power amplification.

Anisotropic gels made from supramolecular nanofibres are formed from mechanical or magnetic forces applied with orchestrated enzymatically-triggered pH changes.

On-demand underwater adhesives with excellent adhesive and gentle detachment properties enable stable connections to various biomedical devices and bio-interfaces and avoid the risk of harmful tissue damage upon detachment. Herein, we present a Janus hydrogel adhesive that can reversibly switch its adhesion strength, which is controlled by temperature, using a thermoresponsive polymer and mussel-inspired molecules. This thermoswitchable adhesive hydrogel displays both strong adhesion and gentle detachment with an over 1,000-fold gap in underwater adhesion strength. The thermoswitchability of the hydrogel adhesives, with its robust adhesion and gentle detachment, offers significant potential for biomedical applications characterized by minimally invasive procedures.

Hybrid glasses are considered the fourth category of glass, and they exhibit different structures and properties to inorganic, organic or metallic glasses. This Review discusses hybrid glasses through the lens of crystalline metal–organic frameworks and glass chemistry, physics and engineering, providing a vision for the future of this class of materials.

Advanced recycling is an end-of-life option for plastics waste toward the generation of high-value products. This Review highlights the importance of developing holistic analyses of candidate recycling technologies, with a focus on industrial pitfalls, key assessment parameters, complexities of recycling infrastructure, scale-up considerations, and environmental and economic trade-offs.

Polyolefins are used across packaging, automotive and construction but variability in recycled polymer feedstocks renders it difficult to assure a consistent manufacturing quality. Here, the authors use rheology-simulated and extrusion-based recycling experiments to explore the degradation pathways of high-density polyethylene and present a rheology-based method to assess the quality of the recycled material.

Plants are vital to future long-term space missions as a renewable food source and ecological system for producing essential substances. NASA has been developing special chambers to grow fresh vegetables in space, and printed electronics may be the key to monitoring the health and growth of these plants with minimal human effort, resources and energy.

High-mobility emissive organic semiconductors integrate efficient charge transport and strong emission features. The development of these materials, which have the potential to overcome performance bottlenecks in organic electroluminescent and photoelectric conversion devices, is opening up new research directions in organic optoelectronics.

Professor Hongjing Dou is a full Professor at the Institute of Composite Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, where she leads a research group focused on bionanomaterials and their biomedical applications.

A miniature hydrogel launcher inspired by the squirting cucumber achieves record-high jumping height through water evaporation and fracture-driven power amplification.

Anisotropic gels made from supramolecular nanofibres are formed from mechanical or magnetic forces applied with orchestrated enzymatically-triggered pH changes.