Comment in 2023

Biochar is proposed as a promising solution for sustainable development, but proper risk management and careful evaluation are essential when considering its use. It is crucial to acknowledge the limitations of biochar and recognize that it is not a magic bullet for green technologies.

Higher education and research institutions are critical to the well-being and success of societies, meaning their financial support is strongly in the public interest. At the same time, value-for-money principles demand that such investment delivers. Unfortunately, these principles are currently violated by one of the biggest sources of public funding inefficiency: sexism.

3D printing can be used to automate the manufacturing of building elements for large-scale structures such as skyscrapers, aircraft, rockets and space bases without human intervention. However, challenges in materials, processes, printers and software control must first be overcome for large-scale 3D printing to be adopted for widespread applications.

This Comment discusses metal–organic frameworks and their progress towards translation in a health-care setting. We explore their prospects in clinical applications, why translation seems slow, and what opportunities and obstacles await as they move towards the clinic.

Sorption working pairs, which can convert low-grade heat into cold energy or seasonally store thermal energy, are potential future carbon-neutral materials for thermal management. This Comment highlights the superiorities of metal–organic framework (MOF)–ammonia working pairs for adaptable thermal management under extreme climates and discusses strategies to design MOFs with high stability and ammonia sorption capacity.

Nature provides an endless source of inspiration for advanced materials, fuelled by evolutionary innovations over many millions of years. Capitalizing on this wealth of biological solutions requires an approach to materials innovation that is informed by a holistic understanding of multi-functional biological systems and leverages the defining feature of the natural world — diversity.

Active learning and automation will not easily liberate humans from laboratory workflows. Before they can really impact materials research, artificial intelligence systems will need to be carefully set up to ensure their robust operation and their ability to deal with both epistemic and stochastic errors. As autonomous experiments become more widely available, it is essential to think about how to embed reproducibility, reconfigurability and interoperability in the design of autonomous labs.

Today’s world is filled with ‘grand challenges’ that cannot be solved with knowledge from a single academic field, and interdisciplinary learning opportunities at the undergraduate level are important to overcome barriers between fields. This article takes some of the lessons learned from the co-development and co-teaching of an interdisciplinary course on climate change at the University of Waterloo in Canada to offer suggestions on how to incorporate interdisciplinary education in the materials science and engineering undergraduate curriculum, while providing practical advice on how to create opportunities for students to become interdisciplinary thinkers.

The translation of soft biomedical devices from academia to commercialization remains limited despite the substantial growth of the field over the past decade. To drive the next stage of innovation, it is crucial to identify applications that can be uniquely addressed by soft devices. Neurological surgery presents numerous opportunities for harnessing the potential of soft devices in medical applications.

The Palestinian–German Science Bridge (PGSB) is a science diplomacy pilot project financed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and implemented jointly by Forschungszentrum Jülich and the Palestinian Academy for Science and Technology. Its goal, as its founder and its project coordinator discuss in this Comment, is to develop joint research and education programmes.

Getting diagnosed with a physically disabling illness in graduate school can be overwhelming and isolating. This article shares a researcher’s personal journey with such an experience, offering advice and encouragement to those facing similar challenges. By confronting the disease, the author found resilience and developed appreciation for life beyond work.

Progress in biomimetics allows for the fabrication of man-made materials and surfaces with properties similar to biological ones. These advancements enable the development of a new generation of building materials for architecture that have remarkable properties typically unachievable with a traditional approach.

Academia can offer a wonderful career path, but the power differentials at play in university life can turn promising careers into nightmares. Academic bullying is an age-old serious issue that affects people in a variety of positions across all branches of science. This Comment discusses how bullying slows the progress of science.

High-performance ferroelectric materials are used in many applications, ranging from actuators to capacitors. Now, high entropy is emerging as an effective and flexible strategy for enhancing the physical properties of ferroelectrics via the delicate design of local polarization configurations.

In Israel, as in most countries, the number of girls who choose to study STEM subjects in high school is still too low, and the number of women occupying leadership positions in academia and tech companies even more so. Neta Blum, a mechanical engineer who founded a programme to inspire female high-school students to choose a path in STEM, argues that mentoring is key to empower the next generation of female scientists and engineers.

The transition to climate-friendly cities has led to a renaissance of wood as a renewable building material. To prevent severe raw material shortages in the future, the material-first utilization of wood in long-living, resource-efficient engineered wood products and constructions will be key.

The solutions to many of today’s challenges will be found at the frontier of advanced materials research and will require collaboration across synthesis, characterization, fabrication and theory. While good ideas can be generated anywhere by anyone, scientific opportunities are often concentrated among select groups. National user facilities democratize access to world-class expertise and instrumentation, acting as innovation multipliers on the scientific enterprise.

Peptides are small yet versatile building blocks of biomaterials. This Comment highlights recent progress in the design of liquid-like microdroplets, or coacervates, based on peptides and produced through liquid–liquid phase separation. This emerging platform holds promise as efficacious delivery vehicles for multi-purpose biomedical applications.

Despite concrete being the most prominent building material of the twentieth century, the cultural heritage relevance of concrete buildings and the importance of their preservation is not widely recognized. The European Union project InnovaConcrete’s purpose is to develop nanotechnology-based treatments for concrete preservation and to increase citizen awareness around the importance of concrete-based heritage.