News & Views

Remotely powered vertical electrochemical transistors are demonstrated to track subtle nerve-cell activity even when the transistor core is fully shielded from the biological environment.

Oxide glasses can be intrinsically toughened by forming crystal-like, medium-range order clusters, which transform inversely to the amorphous state under stress, exciting multiple shear bands for plastic deformation.

Using the van der Waals crystal Sb₂O₃ as a buffer layer enables the growth of high-κ dielectrics on two-dimensional materials via atomic layer deposition.

In a non-collinear antiferromagnet, elementary spins rotate with opposite handedness with respect to the collective octupole magnetic moment when stirred by spin currents.

Amorphization can be an additional mechanism to assist plastic deformation in crystalline materials, providing a strategy to improve the load-bearing ability of brittle materials.

By tracking the electrochromic doping front, a hole-limited electrochemical doping mechanism is discovered in organic mixed ionic–electronic conductors.

By means of a precise folding–tearing process, screw dislocations with helical cores — appearing in pairs and taking on a DNA-like double-helix structure — are engineered to control the growth of twisted bilayer graphene.

An alloy engineering approach is developed to reliably grow atomically thin bilayers with predictable and tunable moiré patterns.

Piezoresponse microscopy and spectroscopy reveal the inextricable role of surface electrochemistry in stabilizing and controlling ferroelectricity in doped hafnia.

Photochromic molecular crystal arrays aligned in the micropores of a polymer membrane show high-performance actuation when stimulated by light. These soft composites might find applications in soft robotic devices.

Metamaterial adhesives with nonlinear cut architectures provide strong and reversible adhesion, directionality and spatially programmable adhesive strength.

An electric field is found to be capable of controlling dislocation movement in semiconducting zinc sulfide, as observed in real time by in situ transmission electron microscopy.

Detailed transmission electron microscopy imaging of the dynamics of domain walls in twisted van der Waals ferroelectrics is obtained, capturing the transition to a hysteretic response.

By monitoring the lattice dynamics of single-crystal argyrodite Ag₈SnSe₆ through the superionic transition, low thermal conductivity and ionic transport are found to arise from extreme phonon anharmonicity.

Circularly polarized photoexcitation initiates spin domain formation in polycrystalline halide perovskite films with strong spin–orbit coupling and local inversion symmetry breaking, as revealed by ultrafast optical microscopy.

Multiwalled WS₂ and WSe₂ nanotubes with predominantly a single chiral angle are produced in a chemical vapour deposition reactor using gold nanoparticles as a catalyst. This strategy paves the way for the growth of transition metal dichalcogenide nanotubes with controllable structures for further exploring their physical properties and potential applications.

Quantum dots are engineered to use dopant states to achieve substantially enhanced impact ionization, which is potentially useful for light-harvesting applications.