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The green energy revolution is heavily reliant on raw materials, such as cobalt and lithium, which are currently mainly sourced by mining. We must carefully evaluate acceptable supplies for these metals to ensure that green technologies are beneficial for both people and planet.
Following the 2015 migration wave to Europe, numerous French academic institutions organized themselves to welcome refugee students and researchers. As witnessed in the past, initiatives coming from universities largely preceded national dispositions, which took place in a second phase and worked towards reinforcing them. These initiatives provide some examples demonstrating the commitment of academic communities as a whole to crucial societal issues.
Nature Reviews Materials speaks to Donald Ingber, Founding Director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, about the animal testing conundrum and the importance of human-relevant models in biomedical research.
Intense efforts are underway to produce circuits that integrate a technologically relevant number of qubits. Although qubit control in most material systems is by now mature, device variability is one of the main bottlenecks in qubit scalability. How do we characterize and tune millions of qubits? Machine learning might hold the answer.
An article in Nature Sustainability reports the use of a common plastic, polyethylene, to make fabrics that have a low environmental footprint and are cheap and recyclable.
The European Environmental Agency (EEA) has formulated five early warning signs to be considered by regulators when it comes to materials and substances. These warning signs reflect many concerns raised about plastics and are thus worth considering during the design and regulation of new and established polymeric materials.
The future of our species and planet hinges on our scientific creativity to tackle future challenges. However, the trust of the public in scientific processes needs to be earned and kept, which will require inclusive, self-reflecting, honest and inspiring science communication.
The virtual world offers countless opportunities to interact with each other, yet, it remains difficult to replace valuable in-person scientific discussions that often happen spontaneously at a conference.
Nd-Fe-B permanent magnets are essential for the transition to clean energy and mobility. Given the burgeoning demand for neodymium and other rare earths, this Comment discusses the role of recycling and the need for government intervention in securing a sustainable rare-earth supply.
An article in Science Advances reports a new approach to stabilizing perovskite precursor solutions for the reproducible fabrication of high-performance solar cells
Scientists worldwide struggle to identify suitable animal models to study SARS-CoV-2 infections. Interspecies-related differences, such as host specificity, divergent immune responses, or the unavailability of species-specific reagents hamper the research. Human-based models, such as micro-engineered multi-organs-on-chip, may hold the solution.
Three years after the observation of superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene, the study of the rich variety of phenomena that arise in moiré materials is keeping researchers fruitfully busy.
Understanding electrified interfaces is crucial to enabling a multitude of applications, including photo(electrocatalysis), supercapacitors, pseudocapacitors and batteries. However, reaching an atomistic understanding of electrified interfaces remains challenging and will require the combination and development of refined computations and experiments.
Near-field communication (NFC) emerged as a high-security, wireless, short-range, data exchange technology nearly two decades ago; its ability to simultaneously transfer power and data between devices offers exciting opportunities for the design of miniature, battery-less and disposable sensing systems in healthcare and food quality monitoring.
An article in Nature Materials reports a detailed characterization of the atomic and electronic structure of WS2/WSe2, highlighting the influence of the 3D structural reconstruction of the moiré superlattice on the correlated phenomena observed in this material.
An article in Nature Biomedical Engineering reports a wearable sensor for the simultaneous non-invasive monitoring of heart rate, blood pressure and multiple biochemical markers.
An article in Physical Review Letters shows that changing the twist angle of MoSe2/WSe2 samples can lengthen the lifetime of excitons in the system by an order of magnitude.
