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Elucidating the dynamics of non-equilibrium orders remains a challenge. Here, the authors show that time-varying electrostatic interactions drive confined alginate hydrogels to self-organize into tunable, hexagonally ordered lattices.

Total internal reflection structural colors often lack dynamic response. Here, the authors develop Janus droplet systems with dual surfactant/temperature responsiveness, creating cold-chain labels to monitor pharmaceutical freeze history via color changes.

A dual-symmetry-guided strategy is used to assemble a broad class of complex Archimedean lattices and two-dimensional quasicrystalline structures, providing a general and experimentally accessible route to complex-symmetry materials.

Synthetic self-propelled particles often emulate the dynamics of microorganisms but are typically limited to a single mode of active Brownian motion. Here, the authors introduce a method to encode diverse motion types into active Brownian particles, revealing how individual propulsion modes shape the emergent organization of active matter systems.

This study reports a self-driven nanoemulsification mechanism via surfactant-flux-induced interfacial instability, enabling the rapid, scalable production of highly uniform nanocarriers, such as nanodroplets, micelles, vesicles and polymeric nanoparticles, under mild conditions.

Liquid crystal-aqueous interfaces can optically respond to phospholipid interactions, yet quantifying vesicle transport and fusion kinetics remains challenging. Here, the authors use microfluidic chips with stabilized liquid crystal interfaces to reveal that lipid adsorption kinetics vary with vesicle rigidity, offering a rapid diagnostic platform for detecting mechanical alterations in lipid bilayers linked to disease.

Glasses characterized by solid-like dynamics yet liquid-like order are described as a phase out of equilibrium. Besseling et al. show a new equilibrium glass-forming rotator phase with glass-like positional coordinates and liquid-like rotations, reversibly switchable to a crystal under an electric field.

Grain boundaries in polycrystalline systems display complicated dynamics. Now, a general framework is presented that predicts the microscopic dynamics of both particles and dislocations underlying grain boundary migration in two-dimensional colloids.

A method is described for the manufacture of pivoting colloidal assemblies comprising rotating diamond and rotating triangle geometries that show tunable folding and unfolding by thermal fluctuations and actuation by magnetic attractions.

Liquid metal inks are promising for flexible electronics, but it is challenging to produce liquid metal inks due to surface tension and density. Here, the authors design a liquid metal-cryogel system to increase liquid metal concentration.

Placing particles at the interface between immiscible fluids usually enhances emulsification. However, now it is shown that if the particles are ferromagnetic, emulsification is suppressed and a non-planar recoverable interfacial shape develops.

Natural complex systems are often constructed by sequential assembly but this is not readily available for synthetic systems. Here, the authors program the sequential self-assembly of DNA functionalized emulsions by altering the DNA grafted strands.

It has been previously shown theoretically that the average path length of random walks inside a closed domain is invariant. Here the authors demonstrate that this invariance property can be used to predict the mean residence time of swimming bacteria exploring structured micro-environments.

Conductive colloidal chains are promising for electronics but difficult to synthesize outside of a liquid environment. Here, the authors use field-directed assembly and capillary effects to pull conductive particle chains out of a suspension, which remain held together by flexible liquid bridges even after the external field is turned off.

Some types of fish can change color by modifying their intracellular guanine crystal in response to external stimuli. Here, Sano et al. mimic this effect in a dilute aqueous dispersion containing titanate nanosheets, whose interlayer distance is tunable to match the entire visible light spectrum.

Creating new materials requires novel approaches to design and synthesize small building particles. Sacanna et al. develop a versatile synthetic strategy to design and mass-produce colloidal building blocks starting from two different colloids that leads to selectively functionalized surface areas.

Colloidal self-assembly at liquid interfaces has important emulsion applications, for food, household or personal care products, and drug encapsulation. Here, the authors develop a method of forming patchy heterogeneous capsules by electro-coalescence of multiple liquid drops.

Mimicking the intrinsic adaptability of biological systems in synthetic materials has been a challenge. Here, Sacanna and co-workers have used dewetting forces between an oil phase and solid colloidal substrate to facilitate shape shifting particles that can change geometry by chemical and optical signals.

Patchy colloids are colloidal particles with chemically or physically patterned surfaces that result in complex interactions arising between them. By means of numerical simulations, Romano and Sciortino show that suitably tailored patches can induce the crystallization of patchy colloids into specific crystal structures.

Precise assembly of undecorated colloids demands a clever approach. Here, the authors draw unlikely inspiration from vector graphics to direct colloids into 2D structures, pinning the ends and corners of assembled patterns with optical tweezers and manipulating the segments like vectors.

Water treatment processes mostly rely on the use of membranes and filters, which have high pumping costs and require periodic replacement. Here, the authors describe an efficient membraneless method that induces directed motion of suspended colloidal particles by exposing the suspension to CO₂.

Pickering emulsions are particle-stabilized droplets suspended in an immiscible liquid, and the study of individual droplet coalescence has yielded many interesting findings. Here, Wu et al. move towards larger droplet numbers to investigate the influence of population on coalescence.

Self-driven particles can drive the system out of equilibrium without the help of external forces. Here Bainet al. develop a model for two groups of motile bodies targeting opposite directions and show that the system exhibits critical behaviour as a function of particle density.

Synchronization may occur when naturally oscillating systems are driven by an external modulation, for example, in charge density waves. Here, Juniper et al. visualize the locked modes of synchronization at a microscopic level using a colloidal system.

New examples of natural antireflective coatings are rare. Here, Yang et al. report the fabrication and optical characterization of a biologically inspired antireflective surface that emulates the surface architecture of the leafhopper-produced brochosomes with antireflective performance from 250 to 2000 nm.

Colloids consist of small particles distributed in another medium such as liquids or gases. Here, the demonstration that forces arising from the critical Casimir effect can control the interaction between particles offers new possibilities for the formation of colloidal nanostructures.

Self-oscillators are critical in various natural and engineered systems, as they enable complex collective behaviors through interactions among individual units. This study demonstrates that populations of Quincke colloids-self-oscillators whose back-and-forth motion defines both a phase and a nematic oscillation axis-can achieve a form of collective order, termed synchronematic order, characterized by hydrodynamic interactions that synchronize their oscillation phases and align their orientations.

Most active particles studied to date lack the ability to undergo controlled shape transformations and control over their propulsion in response to environmental stimuli. Here, the authors present a class of active particles made from stimuli-responsive materials that exhibit fully reversible shape-dependent propulsion.

Photonic crystals have a range of desirable properties for manipulating light. Here, the authors calculate and use the photonic band gap for thousands of such crystals to examine heuristics for their design and predict new photonic crystal structures.

Magnetic soft robots show advantages in wireless actuation, but normally demand complicated device preparations and three-dimensional magnetic manipulation. Won et al. show helical soft robots responsive to a magnetic field rotating along a single axis, whose velocity and orbits can be controlled independently.

Monodisperse biaxial colloidal particles are used as model systems to understand the phase behavior of biaxial molecules but high-quality biaxial colloids are limited. Here the authors describe gram-scale synthesis of uniform biaxial colloidal cuboids and their assembly into mesophasic structures.

Colloidal particles experience capillary interactions at liquid interfaces, but modifying these interactions is challenging as shape change is required. Here, the authors report polymer particles that change shape with polarised light, and therefore create flow patterns with unusual paths.

Rearrangements govern many properties of materials and molecules, but it has been largely unexplored how to create flexible structures from the bottom up. Here, the authors use colloidal particles to explore how to guide the kinetic self-assembly pathways into ordered structures that maintain flexibility.

Colloidal suspensions often contain mixtures of particles that must be sorted by size or density, but the sediment structure resulting from polydisperse particles settling rapidly remains unclear. Bidisperse colloids with soft-sphere interactions are now shown to spontaneously arrange into two macroscopic layers after sedimentation.

It is shown that long-lived reactive oxygen intermediates are formed in heterogeneous reactions of ozone with aerosol particles, resolving apparent discrepancies between earlier quantum mechanical calculations and kinetic experiments. These intermediates play a key role in the chemical transformations and adverse health effects of toxic and allergenic air particulates.

Porous-alumina filter discs typically used to prepare graphene-oxide films are found to corrode during filtration and release aluminium ions that crosslink the negatively charged sheets and make the films insoluble in water. In contrast, aluminium-free graphene-oxide films are significantly weaker and readily disintegrate in water.

Experiments combining dynamic and static light scattering have probed a colloidal hard-sphere system for the formation of dynamical and structural heterogeneities, which play a role in both forms of solidification: crystallization and vitrification.

Protein motion in crowded environments governs cellular transport and reaction rates. Here, the authors use megahertz X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy to reveal anomalous diffusion of ferritin, linking hydrodynamic and direct interactions to cage-trapping at microsecond time scales.

Reconfigurable cell-sized compartments can act as artificial cellular models that dynamically respond to environmental stimuli, mimicking the adaptive behaviours of living cells. Here, the authors present enzymatically active liquid crystalline (LC) coacervate microdroplets as a protocell model, which undergoes differentiation into helicoidal vesicles and eventually membranous protocells containing artificial organelles.

A material’s internal structure is known to dictate its macroscopic properties through structure-dependent particle dynamics, as exemplified by the so-called de Gennes narrowing. Through experiments and simulations on soft colloid suspensions, the authors reveal a breakdown of this correlation, showing that the q-dependent relaxation time remains unchanged across length scales and that single-particle elasticity facilitates structure-independent relaxation.

Phase separation is driven by the component activity, elasticity, or composition of a homogeneous mixture. Here the authors, develop heterogeneous colloidal suspensions exhibiting both liquid-liquid phase separation of polymers and liquid crystal phase separation of nanoparticles controlled by the trade-off between thermodynamics and kinetics.

In heterogeneous colloidal systems, composition, shape, structure and physical properties result from the trade-off between thermodynamic and kinetic effects during nucleation and growth. Here, the authors demonstrate that kinetic and thermodynamic effects can be disentangled by careful selection of a colloidal systems and controlling phase separation in microfluidic devices

Aerogels are traditionally synthesized using reagent-induced sol-gel transitions, though it is challenging to precisely control the aerogel structure. Here the authors use electrophoresis-driven self-assembly combined with electrochemical gelation to more precisely control the aerogel structure.

Janus colloids with an attractive patch on the surface are model systems to explore structure formation but experimental realizations of such particles are rare. Here, the authors report a scalable method to precisely vary the Janus balance over a wide range and observe the formation of various structures including fibers, bilayers, and nonequilibrium rings catalyzed by substrate binding.

Skyrmions, known for their robust topological protection, hold great promise for spintronic applications, but controlling their topological invariants has been a long-standing challenge. This work demonstrates light-induced manipulation of half skyrmions via eight identified monopole types, enabling topological transformations, tunable monopole interactions, and particle transport.

Efficient and sustainable lithium supply is increasingly important, but solvent extraction techniques are not yet practical. Here, the authors report the development of a Pickering emulsion for lithium extraction from salt-lake brine.

Cubosomes, cubic-phase lipid nanoparticles, are of interest for delivery application but have failed in the delivery of long RNA. Here, the authors report on a premixing strategy which allows for the loading of long RNA into cubosomes with the advantage of consistent delivery after room temperature storage.

Active particles are useful for microscale functions, but they lack the necessary complexity to be suitable for wide application. Here, the authors present a fabrication method to create patchy active particles of arbitrary shape by microstenciling.

To understand and design interactions between individual entities giving origin to different dynamical collective behaviors is one of the current challenges in active matter. Here we show that a bean-shaped swarm is spontaneously formed from a mixture of particles with perception-dependent motility and opposite misaligned visual-like perception.