If you haven’t heard of a tardigrade before, prepare to be wowed. These clumsy, eight-legged creatures, nicknamed water bears, are about half a millimeter long and can survive practically anything: freezing temperatures, near starvation, high pressure, radiation exposure, outer space and more. Researchers reporting in ACS’ Nano Letters took advantage of the tardigrade’s nearly indestructible nature and gave the critters tiny “tattoos” to test a microfabrication technique to build microscopic, biocompatible devices.

Conservators and museum technicians protect precious archaeological metal objects, such as tools and weapons, with clear coatings, leaving preserved and unobstructed views of these detailed treasures. However, researchers have reported in ACS Central Science that some of the resins used for these coatings react with iron-containing metals and can cause damage. The team developed a non-invasive fluorescence imaging strategy that reveals early signs of these damaging chemical reactions and confirmed its utility on ancient artifacts.  

Studying the charge behavior inside multi-layered organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) is crucial to improve the efficiency and lifetime of such devices. But, this is extremely challenging to examine under operating conditions. To address this, researchers from Chiba University, Japan, used electronic sum-frequency generation (ESFG) spectroscopy to investigate interface-specific charge behavior inside OLEDs under light-emitting conditions and reported ESFG as a non-invasive and innovative method to observe electric-field formation in OLEDs.

Researchers at HSE University and the Institute of Petrochemical Synthesis of the Russian Academy of Sciences have discovered a way to control both the colour and brightness of the glow emitted by rare earth elements. Their luminescence is generally predictable—for example, cerium typically emits light in the ultraviolet range. However, the scientists have demonstrated that this can be altered. They created a chemical environment in which a cerium ion began to emit a yellow glow. The findings could contribute to the development of new light sources, displays, and lasers. The study has been published in Optical Materials.

In a paper recently published in Chinese Physics Letters, a research team from Peking University report their latest discovery in the field of high-temperature superconductivity, revealing the existence of pair density modulation within a single unit cell of iron-based superconductors. This finding provides unprecedented microscopic insights into unconventional Cooper pairing mechanisms at the atomic scale.

MIT engineers have fabricated a metamaterial that is not only strong but also stretchy. Their new method could enable stretchable ceramics, glass, and metals, for tear-proof textiles or stretchy semiconductors.

Given the multitude of conditions that must be optimized in synthesis routes, chemical synthesis remains a complex and multidimensional challenge. The rapid development of computational guidelines and machine learning (ML) techniques has brought exciting hope to this dilemma. A new study published in the journal National Science Review highlights the advancement of computationally guided and ML-assisted approaches in inorganic material synthesis.