News & Comment

2D materials face challenges along the road to commercialization, with increasing efforts being made in order to satisfy industrial needs.

Machine learning is swiftly infiltrating many areas within the healthcare industry, from diagnosis and prognosis to drug development and epidemiology, with significant potential to transform the medical landscape.

The redefinition of SI units removes materiality from science’s weights and measures. There’s logic to the decision, but it reminds us what we still don’t know about nature’s scales.

Much academic and industrial effort has been devoted to the study of multiferroics, but if related technologies are to have real-world impact, market awareness and reproducibility are also key.

As the periodic table reaches the age of 150, we reflect on the historical search for new elements, and consider element usage trends in some key research fields.

The 2018 Nobel prizes in chemistry and medicine celebrate tools for engineering biological materials.

There is room for improvement in materials sustainability, provided we examine carefully the whole value chain.

Prostheses today can trace their roots to the rudimentary designs of the First World War, but since then there have been significant advances that have improved the quality of life of amputees.

Highly sophisticated materials properties and engineering efforts are crucial for the success of missions for space exploration and settlement.

Treating living matter as a material has immense biomedical potential, but it’s worth acknowledging how the notion unsettles longstanding preconceptions and raises challenging new questions.

Lessons learnt from Horizon 2020 and a determination to become a world-class hub for entrepreneurship form the basis of the European Commission’s ambitious Research and Innovation budget.

Large-scale, environmentally friendly hydrogen production will rely on steam methane reforming coupled with carbon capture and electrolysis, but solar fuels could have a disruptive role to play.

As the interaction of the immune system with the tumour microenvironment becomes increasingly understood, more evidence indicates how immunotherapy can be employed to better eliminate cancers.

Whether you like exploring the mysteries of light–matter interactions, playing with a versatile chemical platform, or developing the most efficient devices, metal halide perovskites could be the materials for you.

US research funding sees both winners and losers as the Trump administration outlines its agenda.

Materials research in Africa can contribute to addressing global challenges by tapping into a growing number of talented scientists.

Art historians have joined forces with material scientists in order to better understand the objects of interest but also develop better conservation treatments and preservation approaches.

As the electronic performance of organic semiconductors and other emergent materials improves, researchers call for attention in extracting charge mobility values from field-effect transistors.

As the role of biophysical cues in regulating cell behaviour is increasingly understood, more evidence in the field of bioengineering indicates how such signals can affect cells and tissues.

From a combined effort by theorists, materials scientists and spectroscopists, topology has moved from a purely mathematical idea to the realization of unique properties in several condensed matter systems.