Volume 10

What happens to the stuff we throw away—and where is ‘away’, exactly? As the burden of waste grows, we must confront the tension between creating new materials and handling them responsibly. Circularity principles might offer a path forward, but only if they are rooted in the realities of infrastructure, policy, and equity. See the Series and Editorial

High-entropy nanomaterials are characterized by the incorporation of five or more principal elements in nearly equal proportions, and different synthetic methods can facilitate control of their phase and particle size and shape for applications such as catalysis. The cover shows an artistic illustration of a high-entropy nanoparticle. See Nabojit Kar & Sara E. Skrabalak

Solid-state battery electrolytes offer the potential for enhanced safety, stability and energy density in both current and future technologies, and atomistic modelling and machine learning techniques play a key role in their development. The cover shows an artistic illustration of ions moving through a solid-state material. See Dutra A.C.C. et al..

Biomaterials have a crucial role in the development of future foods, particularly in cellular agriculture and plant-based systems. Key requirements of biomaterials for future foods include aspects such as structure, nutrition, safety, sensory attributes, sustainability and consumer preferences. The cover illustrates this topic trough an artistic illustration of a burger with a Petri dish in place of a patty. See Gordon E.B. et al.

Altermagnets exhibit non-relativistic alternating spin splitting and collinear compensated magnetic moments, combining advantages of ferromagnets and antiferromagnets, which makes them good candidates as functional materials for different applications. The cover shows an artistic illustration of an altermagnet. See Song C. et al.

Large language models can accelerate the design and discovery of reticular materials by helping researchers extract knowledge from literature and interpret experimental data. The cover, which features a metal-organic framework superimposed on the featured Review article, is an artistic illustration of the promise of these models. See Zheng Z. et al.

Oxide nanoparticles, particularly iron oxide, ceria and silica nanoparticles, hold significant promise for diagnostic and therapeutic applications owing to their unique magnetic, catalytic and porous properties. The cover shows an artistic impression of oxide nanoparticles for biomedical applications. See Bowon Lee et al.

Crystalline metal halide perovskites have garnered substantial attention given their outstanding semiconducting character, unprecedented tunability and wide-range application. This focus can be extended beyond long-range order — that is, to glassy and melt states. The cover shows an artistic impression of a perovskite material in three phases: crystalline, glass and melt. See Akash Singh & David B. Mitzi

Ligand-protected metal nanoclusters, with their molecule-like structures and properties, represent the molecular state of metal materials. Advances in their precise synthesis enable size control at the molecular level, as well as composition and morphology control at the atomic level. The cover shows an artistic impression of a nanocluster. See Yao Q. et al.

Tissue biomechanics provides essential biological information that is important for various biomedical applications, and conformable electronic devices are instrumental for decoding this information. The cover shows an artist’s impression of island-bridge structures, consisting of rigid functional "islands" connected by flexible "bridges", which allow devices to be stretched or bent without losing functionality. See Yoon H. et al.