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Nanoporous tripeptide crystals mechanically deform upon water evaporation due to the strengthening of the water hydrogen bonding inside the pores, which causes the distortion of the surrounding supramolecular network, creating stresses that extend through the crystal lattice and result in actuation.
Stress fibres form a fully integrated meshwork with the submembranous contractile actin cortex that generates and propagates traction forces across the entire cell.
Liquid-metal networks have been developed that can be stretched to extreme deformations with minimal change in electrical resistance, ushering in approaches for breathable and integrated soft and stretchable electronic devices.
This Review highlights the progress that has been made in the development of diagnostic tools for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 in the fight against COVID-19.
This perspective describes recent developments in genetically encoded protein contrast agents for non-invasive biological imaging, namely ultrasound, magnetic resonance and optoacoustic imaging modalities.
Deposition of a one-atom-thick layer of Ag or Cu on Au electrodes proves to be an effective strategy to tune the band alignment and conductivity of molecular junctions.
An immune cell population enriched in inflamed gut tissue is shown to play a role in driving CD44+ intestinal organoid proliferation, while also regulating extracellular matrix deposition and remodelling in a synthetic hydrogel platform.
Two-dimensional superconductors have been produced via a mild intercalation-assisted, exfoliation approach, providing large-size, high-quality single layers with the ease and versatility of liquid-phase processing.
Automated extrusion-based bioprinting has been shown to enable human kidney organoid generation with improved throughput, quality control and scale, representing an important step towards macro-scale kidney tissue engineering.
Linking π-conjugated, electron-deficient ligands into atomically precise large single crystals of conducting 2D metal–organic frameworks can allow the determination of intrinsic electrical conductivity and charge transport mechanism.
Ferroelectricity in bulk crystals of hafnium oxide demonstrates that these properties are not limited to films prepared by thin-film deposition techniques.
Hybrid materials constructed from the assembly of inorganic building blocks and organic linkers have shown unique properties and applications. Superstructures of semiconductor magic-sized nanoclusters linked by diamines now join this class of materials.
A multifunctional device produces a much-improved thermoelectric-driven transverse voltage by exploiting a thermoelectric current to drive an anomalous Hall effect in a ferromagnet.
Large reversible shear strain has been achieved by electric-field-driven bipolar switching in a hybrid ferroelectric, facilitating development of shape-memory-type actuators with outstanding figures of merit.
Use of polymer and small-molecule semiconductors with relatively poor miscibility helps the long-term stability of the morphology and photovoltaic performance of bulk heterojunction films used in organic solar cells.
Recent developments in the emerging field of hybrid plasmonics focusing on fundamental aspects related to nanoscopic flow of energy and excited charge carriers in these multicomponent materials and their potential applications are now discussed.
