Reviews & Analysis

Multilamellar lipid vesicles with crosslinked walls carrying protein antigens in the vesicle core and immunostimulatory drugs in the vesicle walls generate immune responses comparable to the strongest live vector vaccines.

A study of nitrogen doping of graphene reveals the potential of high-resolution electron microscopy for imaging charge transfer around chemical bonds.

Tunnelling and capacitance spectroscopies are able to image the wavefunctions of electrons in atom-like solid-state systems as they are shaped by an external magnetic field.

The observation that disorder leads to a transition from metallic to insulating behaviour in the crystalline phase of GeSb₂Te₄ provides a new look at its transport properties, crucial for old and new applications of phase-change materials in non-volatile-memory devices.

The formation of a two-dimensional electron liquid at the interface between two insulating oxides, now extended to oxides on Si, joins a wealth of observations that reveal how electron transfer between layers is responsible for this unusual effect.

The realization of a self-assembled kagome lattice from colloids with attractive hydrophobic patches offers a simple but powerful example of the bottom-up design strategy.

The presence of metal centres in synthetic polymers can impart interesting functionality on the resultant material. This Review Article focuses on the use of metal-containing polymers in a diverse range of applications, for example, in emissive and optical materials, in nanomaterials, as sensors, stimuli-responsive gels, catalysts and artifical metalloenzymes.

Bodies in relative motion, separated by nanometres of vacuum, experience a tiny friction force. Experiments involving a conductor–superconductor transition provide essential information for distinguishing the contribution of electrons from that of lattice vibrations in this non-contact form of friction.

Metallic glasses are strong but can be brittle. The discovery of a metallic glass that also shows a high toughness against fracture is remarkable, and establishes metallic glasses, at least those based on noble metals, as materials with the highest known damage tolerance.

A knot-containing protein is found to fold reversibly at biologically relevant timescales despite not having naturally evolved for this ability.

By combining gene cloning and amplification techniques, a new one-pot, parallel synthesis method for the generation of long, repetitive genes is realized. The method promises to open up the discovery of protein polymer biomaterials.

Single dopants in semiconductors have an atom-like electron-energy spectrum whose discrete character gives them the potential for applications such as quantum information or transistors. This Review describes the marked advances in the past decade towards observing, controllably creating and manipulating single dopants, as well as their application in devices.