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Nanometre-scale columnar structures in tooth enamel inspire novel nanocomposites containing layers of vertically aligned nanowires, produced by layer-by-layer fabrication and combining high values of both storage modulus and energy dissipation.

Solution-processable semiconductors based on small molecules, polymers or halide perovskites combine sustainable manufacturing with exceptional optoelectronic properties that can be chemically tailored to achieve flexible and highly efficient optoelectronic and photonic devices. A new exciting research direction is the study of the influence of chirality on light–matter interactions in these soft materials and its exploitation for the simultaneous control of charge, spin and light. In this Viewpoint, researchers working on different types of chiral semiconductors discuss the most interesting directions in this rapidly expanding field.

Lithium dendrite growth is a serious hazard in battery operations. Here, the authors report an ion-conducting membrane based on aramid nanofibers, and demonstrate effective suppression of copper and lithium dendrites.

A study of several longitudinal birth cohorts and cross-sectional cohorts finds only moderate overlap in genetic variants between autism that is diagnosed earlier and that diagnosed later, so they may represent aetiologically different conditions.

Inorganic nanoparticles with non-uniform size distributions can spontaneously assemble into uniformly sized supraparticles with core-shell morphologies.

Implantable neural microelectrodes are critical to neuroscience research and emerging clinical applications including brain-controlled prostheses. A composite electrode consisting of a carbon fibre core, an insulating polymer coating and a polythiophene-based recording pad has now been developed that shows reduced chronic reactive tissue response in rats compared with existing architectures, owing to its smaller size and improved mechanical compliance with brain tissue.

The spontaneous organization of semiconductor nanoparticles into uniform pairs of parallel nanorods bridged at their ends illustrates the potential of hierarchical self-assembly processes for the formation of inorganic superstructures with complexity comparable to that of small self-organized biological aggregates.

Although it has been predicted that chirality metrics such as the pseudoscalar Osipov-Pickup-Dunmur (OPD) index can exhibit “chiral zeros”, which occur when a chiral object is incorrectly assigned a chirality index value of zero, their occurrence in biomolecules remains underexplored. Here, the authors study the differences between OPD and another chirality measure, the Hausdorff Chirality Measure (HCM), in different systems, including single amino acids, subsets of protein structures, naturally occurring α-helices, and protein interaction sites, showing that chiral zeros are prevalent in all of those cases and that OPD is unsuitable for quantifying chirality in complex molecular structures with the exception of simple helicoids.

Achieving simultaneous high storage and loss moduli in gels is difficult due to the opposite chemical structure requirements needed for such properties. Here the authors show a spectrum of gels containing CdTe nanoparticles stabilized by glutathione that have such properties which can be rationalised through the developed model.

Multilayer composites of 2D nanomaterials manufactured using a layer-by-layer methodology demonstrates strong polarization rotation, mechanical robustness and operational temperatures as high as 250 °C, despite being nano-achiral and partially disordered.

An efficient scheme that realizes broad tunability of photon upconversion in core–shell nanoparticles may lead to applications in biosensing, security labelling and more.

A general method for particle assembly allows access to a diverse range of modular microscale supraparticles from nanoparticles, nanowires and even cells.

Nanoparticles with different chiralities have different in vitro and in vivo effects on the immune system, suggesting new ways of creating vaccine adjuvants.

Chiral gold nanoparticles coated with enantiomerically pure phenylalanine were assembled into nanoporous membranes, whose ionic conductivity depends on the handedness of the incident circularly polarized light.

Generative AI has made it trivial to generate fake microscopy images that are indistinguishable from real images, even for experts. As researchers in nanoscience, it is time for us to face this reality and discuss strategies to conserve the integrity of our discipline.

We report a simple method to fabricate chiroptical flexible layers via supramolecular helical ordering of conjugated polymer chains, providing direct, scalable realization of on-chip detection of the spin degree of freedom of photons.

Self-limited assembly of 'imperfect' chiral nanoparticles enables formation of bowtie-shaped microparticles with size monodispersity and continuously variable chirality to be used for printing photonically active metasurfaces.

Spiky hedgehog particles are reported to access a photocatalytic pathway for alkane oxidation directly to industrially relevant epoxides in one step, providing a lower cost and less energy-intensive pathway as compared to common alkene feedstocks.

The mechanical properties and hierarchical structure of nacre have been widely investigated as a biomimetic template for applications. Here, the authors demonstrate that nacre-like fibres made from nanoplatelets and polymers show exceptional stretchability and toughness.

Chiral photons can accelerate the differentiation of neural stem cells into neurons in vitro and in vivo when DNA-bridged chiral assemblies of gold nanoparticles are tightly entangled with the cells’ cytoskeletal fibres.

Self-organization of nanoparticles allows the assembly of complex structures with distinct properties. Here, the authors combine similarly charged nanoparticles with proteins to form hybrid organic/inorganic supraparticles, capable of incorporating biological components.

Despite the potential of nanostructures as crop protection agents, antiviral pesticides remain essentially based on organic molecules. Now, the antiviral activity of chiral copper sulfide nanoparticles is demonstrated for the light-mediated inactivation of tobacco mosaic virus via selective protease-like hydrolysis.

Chiroptically active pinwheel assemblies on substrates are formed by tetrahedral gold nanoparticles from the effective ‘compression’ of a perovskite-like, low-density phase, thereby enabling the manufacture of metastructured coatings with special chiroptical characteristics as identified by photon-induced near-field electron microscopy and chirality measures.

Nanoscale plasmonic assemblies are known to display exceptionally strong chiral optical activity. Here, the authors assemble gold nanorods into DNA-bridged chiral systems, and demonstrate their high efficiency for DNA detection at very low concentrations.

Unified structural descriptors of geometrical and graph-theoretical features are developed, allowing knowledge about protein lock-and-key complexes to be utilized to predict the formation of and interaction sites in protein–nanoparticle pairs.

Multi-ancestry genome-wide analyses identify 95 loci associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and implicate candidate genes, pathways and neurobiological systems underlying its pathophysiology.

Third-harmonic Mie scattering optical activity from suspensions of semiconductor (CdTe) nanostructured helices is observed, opening ways for chiroptical characterization of semiconductor and other chiral non-metallic particles in volumes potentially of the order of 10^–17 m³.

Lithium–sulfur batteries have a high specific capacity, but lithium polysulfide diffusion (LPS) and dendrite growth reduce their cycle life. Here, the authors show a biomimetic aramid nanofiber membrane for effectively suppressing LPS diffusion as well as lithium dendrites while allowing lithium ions to be transported. The membranes resists performance degradation at high temperatures and can be produced at scale by Kevlar recycling.

Chiral phonons—long-range lattice vibrations with rotational motion of atoms—are observed by terahertz chiroptical spectroscopy in biocrystals. Terahertz circular dichroism peaks between 0.2 and 2.0 THz clearly identify the chirality of these phonons in various microcrystalline and nanofibrils of biomolecules.

Nonaqueous redox flow batteries may offer high energy and power densities, but development of separators is key for optimization. Here the authors achieve high coulombic efficiency with a nanoporous aramid nanofibres-based separator with low permeability, high ion conductivity, and exceptional stability.

Study shows PTSD predisposition shares distinct genes and genomic regions with several cardiovascular conditions. Here the findings reveal neuronal, immune, and metabolic pathways, and repurposed drug targets that further the understanding of the comorbidity.

Nanoscale biological assemblies play crucial roles in all living systems and display a variety of chemical functionalities. Here the authors show that it is possible to replicate some of the biochemical functions in similarly-sized assemblies made from inorganic nanoparticles.

Networks of notches in nanocomposite sheets prevent unpredictable local failure and increase the ultimate strain of the sheets from 4% to 370% without affecting their electrical conductance.

Biomolecular nanoscale compartments are ubiquitous in living systems. Although their formation is fairly straightforward, the same cannot be said of their inorganic counterparts. In this study, uniform nanoshells are observed self-assembling from stabilizer-free inorganic nanoparticles in water, under ambient conditions, and without the need for spherical tiling. This enables further study of inorganic prebiotic systems and compartmentalized biomimetic catalysis.

Macroscopic stretching can convert achiral nanoparticle composites into chiral materials whose optical properties can be reversibly modulated.

Kirigami metamaterials show significant terahertz circular dichroism and are adopted as tunable optical elements in the terahertz region.

The ability to spectroscopically pinpoint whether nanoparticles are located inside or outside of cells represents an overarching need in biology and medicine. Here, the authors show that the chirality of DNA-bridged particle dimers reverses when they cross the cell membrane, providing a real-time chiroptical signature of their intra- or extracellular location.

Micrometre-sized particles covered with stiff, nanoscale spikes are shown to exhibit long-term colloidal stability in both hydrophilic and hydrophobic media, without the need for chemical coating, owing to the effect of the spikes on the contact area and, consequently, the force between the particles.

Genome editing relies on engineered nucleases to change an organism’s DNA, but has not yet been achieved using abiotic materials. Now, chiral cysteine-capped CdTe nanoparticles are found to specifically recognize and, following photoirradiation, cut between bases T and A at the GATATC restriction site in DNA with over 90 base pairs.

High-throughput electron tomography has been challenging due to time-consuming alignment and reconstruction. Here, the authors demonstrate real-time tomography with dynamic 3D tomographic visualization integrated in tomviz, an open-source 3D data analysis tool.

Widely existing self-organised complex structures in nature exhibit a high level of sophistication, yet can one program the self-assembly process to achieve similar result in the lab remains unanswered. Here, Serafin et al. present a non-Euclidean self-assembly theory for polyhedral nanoparticles that offers insight on how to manipulate the process for realising new material capabilities.