Volume 24 Issue 10, October 2025

Pioneer of high-pressure physics and superconductivity.

Bulk inorganic semiconductors can show remarkable plasticity and extensibility, defying their inherent brittleness and enabling opportunities in advanced semiconductor manufacturing and processing.

Fracture behaviours and related atomic-scale phenomena of van der Waals materials are elucidated through the use of electron microscopy, which highlights the important role of interlayer coupling and re-bonding, providing valuable insights for engineering mechanical properties of layered materials and structures.

Investigation of a long-lived metallic state in a low-dimensional cuprate demonstrates a strategy for on-demand light-driven metastability.

The brine network in common sea ice boosts its flexoelectric response by three orders of magnitude, matching high-quality piezoelectrics and pointing to cost-effective energy harvesters for cold environments.

Phonon dynamics of self-assembled two-dimensional nanoparticle crystals is resolved by liquid-phase transmission electron microscopy.

Deep learning-based generative tools are used to design protein building blocks with well-defined directional protein bonding interactions, allowing for the generation of a variety of scalable protein assemblies from a small set of reusable subunits.

Lipid nanoparticles formulated with ionizable lipids inspired by brain-targeting small molecules facilitate the delivery of mRNA past the blood–brain barrier and into the brain.

A simple physical model based on electronic interactions between excited configurations enables the quick and reliable prediction of singlet–triplet energy gaps in polycyclic heteroaromatic emitters. Guided by this model, organic emitters with small singlet–triplet energy gaps can be designed for applications in organic light-emitting diodes with high efficiency and colour purity.

Materials design and informatics have become increasingly prominent over the past several decades. Using the Materials Project as an example, this Perspective discusses how properties are calculated and curated, how this knowledge can be used for materials discovery, and the challenges in modelling complex material systems or managing software architecture.

By doping ice with NaCl, it is shown that a flexoelectric coefficient of up to 10 μC m⁻¹ is generated, enabling effective piezoelectric coefficients that are comparable to those of ceramics. This arises from the streaming current of quasi-liquid flow through grain boundaries from one side of the sample to the other.

The authors show that bulk brittle semiconductors can be plastically manufactured like metals by warm metalworking into free-standing, metre-scale films with decent physical properties.

Sublattice amorphization is revealed as the deformation mechanism of Ag₂Te_1–xS_x (0.3 ≤ x ≤ 0.6), based on which an iterative crystalline–amorphous transition strategy is proposed to enable these bulk inorganic semiconductors with metal-like processability.

Fracture behaviours in multilayer h-BN, involving interlayer-friction toughening and edge-reconstruction embrittlement, are identified through in situ experiments and theoretical analyses.

Intrinsic toughening in two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides can be achieved simply by twisting the layers. This twisting promotes cross-layer healing and grain boundary formation, which shield fracture tips from stress concentration.

The authors combine the strong confinement of hyperbolic polaritons with leaky nano-waveguides to demonstrate directional in-plane emission of fast phonon polaritons and their acceleration and deceleration by tailoring waveguide dispersion.

Insight into the singlet–triplet energy gap and molecular structure relationship in polycyclic heteroaromatic molecules enables organic light-emitting diodes based on multiresonance thermally activated delayed fluorescence, with improved efficiency and roll-off.

A long-lived photoinduced metastable state in a quasi-one-dimensional cuprate, Sr₁₄Cu₂₄O₄₁, is reported.

Nitrogen-vacancy-centre microscopy and anisotropic magnetoresistance measurements reveal the evidence of magnetism in zigzag graphene nanoribbons embedded in hexagonal boron nitride.

Cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries typically possess octahedral coordination, which may exclude other possible solutions to degradation during deep cycling. A series of tetrahedral-framework-based amorphous Li–V–O–F materials are investigated, and shown to demonstrate O–O formal redox at 4.1 V.

Cotton yarns encapsulated by a gel layer show dynamic swelling in methanol, creating interfacial self-reinforcement and pressure modulation mechanisms that enable the fabrication of fibre-shaped methanol fuel cells.

The realization and phonon imaging of nanoscale mechanical metamaterials has remained challenging. Here the authors resolve the phonon dynamics and band structures of five different self-assembled nanoparticle lattices, revealing the role of nanoscale colloidal interactions in modulating the lattice properties.

A hybrid cathode interfacial layer (AZnO-F3N) is developed, delivering 21.0% efficiency along with excellent stability, mechanical robustness and broad versatility, highlighting its potential to advance organic solar cells.

Predictive protein design and experiments are combined to develop anisotropic bifaceted protein nanomaterials using pseudosymmetric hetero-oligomeric building blocks.

Deep learning-based generative tools are used to design protein building blocks with well-defined directional bonding interactions, allowing the generation of a variety of scalable protein assemblies from a small set of reusable subunits.

A lipid-nanoparticle-based formulation incorporating engineered lipids containing a blood–brain-barrier-crossing moiety effectively delivers mRNA to neurons and astrocytes following systemic administration in mice.