News & Comment

A panel discussion at a recent Nature Conference highlighted the role of mentorship programmes to tackle gender disparity in Indian universities.

Programmes to inspire the next generation of researchers can have a huge impact, as Rachel Lou explains in the recounting of her own experience.

Nanotechnology is intimately intertwined with efforts to bring bottom-up synthetic cell research to the forefront, and only strengthening these bonds will expand the scope of what this might achieve.

Scientists encounter pressure to validate their research work, leading to varied benchmarks and methods for performance assessment in the broad energy research field. Interlaboratory studies help highlight discrepancies in reported figures of merit, underscoring the need for standardized protocols, transparent reporting, and detailed analysis for fair comparisons. Here, we discuss this topic, focusing on battery materials.

The legal definition of a nanomaterial differs around the world, meaning that the same material may be classified as a nanomaterial, or not, depending on the country where it is classified. The first steps towards converging on an international definition are to recognize the differences between existing nanomaterial definitions and to agree on particle counting methods. Meanwhile, we propose a naming convention that indicates the key criteria of a specific definition of a nanomaterial.