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57 published articles
A shirt with not a single sensor. The anatomy of a fabric that hears
At ETH Zurich, engineers wove a 130-micrometre glass strand into an ordinary T-shirt and turned it into a sound sensor — without a single transistor. The fabric recognises touch, hand gestures and the rhythm of breathing.
A superconductor without a press. Three layers of atoms did what 14 gigapascals couldn't
In Shenzhen, Zhuoyu Chen's team achieved superconductivity above 40 kelvin at atmospheric pressure — replacing the diamond anvil press with strain in an atomic layer.
Horses versus computers. A duel over snake antivenom
For 130 years, snake antivenom has been produced in horses' veins. Nobel laureate David Baker's team has designed a protein that does it better — no refrigeration, no horse, and 100% survival of mice after a lethal dose of venom.
Sugar in a mask. How one spray gave wheat what GMO could not
Trehalose-6-phosphate, a plant's own growth signal, cannot cross the cell membrane. A masked precursor sprayed onto leaves releases it in sunlight — lifting wheat yields by 10 percent with no extra fertiliser.
Hydrogen under lock and key. Without 300 degrees.
Hydrogen is the best fuel we know — and the hardest to store. Japanese scientists found a way to lock it in metal and release it again at 90 degrees, without heating it to three hundred.
The element that appeared out of nowhere. Caesium unlocked lead-free perovskite
For a decade, labs tried to replace lead with tin in perovskite solar cells. It never worked. A team in Brisbane found the hidden reason — and fixed it with caesium, an element nobody considered.
As stiff as cartilage, heals like skin. The anatomy of a gel that should not exist
A Finnish–German team from Aalto University and the University of Bayreuth showed in Nature Materials a hydrogel that is at once stiff (50 MPa) and self-healing (up to 100%). The secret lies in polymer entanglements under nanoconfinement between sheets of synthetic clay. The anatomy of a material that should not exist.
The computer that lies. It designed a real crystal
ChatGPT invents court rulings that cost a lawyer a fine. The same mechanism — hallucination — designed a crystal that existed in no database on Earth. Then chemists synthesized it. This is the paradox of generative AI in materials design.
A fish built from salt and gelatin. The fillet that never swam
In winter we scatter salt on the pavement so the ice melts. In a lab in Qingdao, salt does the opposite — it makes ice grow in a carefully planned way. The result is an edible scaffold on which five million cells become two and a half billion — and a fish fillet that never swam.
Schrödinger's cat was a joke. Now it fixes quantum computers
In 1935, Schrödinger dreamed up a cat to mock quantum mechanics. Today that same cat — as a cat qubit — is the best candidate for fixing the greatest flaw of quantum computers: that they keep making mistakes. Amazon and Yale have just shown that errors can be corrected without a thousand spare qubits.
The missing atom. How a catalyst defect turns plastic into an amino acid
Singapore's Ning Yan team showed that a missing sulfur atom — long seen as a flaw — turns PLA plastic into the amino acid alanine: 4.95 mmol/g/h at 70°C, twice the previous best.
0.04 percent. The machine that breathes at night and exhales fuel at dawn
A Cambridge machine captures CO2 from the air at night and turns it into fuel at dawn, using only sunlight and plastic from a bottle. Direct air capture from Nature Energy 2025.