Soft materials articles within Nature

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  • Letter |

    Ordering in liquid-crystal applications is usually achieved using surfactants, but here, in modelled nanodroplets of liquid crystals and surfactants, the liquid crystals control the ordering effects, which resemble those seen in block copolymer ordering, such as spots and stripes.

    • J. A. Moreno-Razo
    • , E. J. Sambriski
    •  & J. J. de Pablo

  • News & Views |

    By making polymers whose central blocks have a range of lengths, materials have been prepared that contain separate, intermeshed domains extending throughout the material — a highly desirable structure.

    • Richard A Register

  • News & Views |

    A combination of two light-induced reactions has been used to attach peptides to a polymeric gel, and then to detach them from it. This feat opens up opportunities for studying the effects of signalling molecules on cell behaviour in vitro.

    • Matthias P. Lutolf

  • News & Views |

    The ligand-mediated binding of colloid particles to each other is more effective if the particles are flat rather than curved. This finding opens up opportunities for the design of self-assembling materials.

    • Sharon C. Glotzer

  • News & Views |

    Most soft materials, such as sand, can be in either a solid-like or a liquid-like state. New experiments probe the surprisingly rich nonlinear physics that can occur in between these two states. See Letter p.355

    • Vincenzo Vitelli
    •  & Martin van Hecke

  • News & Views |

    Some biological macromolecules can control their own assembly into elegant hierarchical structures. Synthetic supramolecules are catching up fast, promising new advances for optical and biomedical materials. See Letter p.364

    • Ivan I. Smalyukh

  • News & Views |

    The slick interior of the pitcher plant has inspired a slippery material possessing self-lubricating, self-cleaning and self-healing properties. The secret is to infuse a porous material with a liquid that repels oils and water. See Letter p.443

    • Michael Nosonovsky

  • News & Views |

    Single chains of a specially designed polymer fold up in water to form an encapsulated catalytic chamber. This supramolecular assembly strategy mimics the one used by enzymes in nature.

    • Nicolas Giuseppone
    •  & Jean-François Lutz

  • News & Views |

    Creating coloured polymer films without the use of pigments might seem impossible. But using miniature polymer spheres, and a novel assembly process, this feat has been accomplished over large film areas.

    • Paul V. Braun

  • News & Views |

    A new study reports that the shapes and surface patterns of thin films of a stretched material can be modified by shining ultraviolet light at it. The resulting topologies depend on the exposure pattern, the applied stress and the sample thickness.

    • Wilhelm T. S. Huck

  • News & Views |

    Rubbery polymers have been made in which damage is healed by exposure to light. The healing mechanism allows localized, on-demand repair, and might help to extend the lifetimes of materials for many applications. See Letter p.334

    • Nancy R. Sottos
    •  & Jeffrey S. Moore

  • News & Views |

    Solvent vapour annealing processes are used to optimize the material properties of thin films of semiconducting polymers used in electronic devices. One such process has now been examined at the molecular level.

    • Yi Fu
    •  & Joseph R. Lakowicz

  • News & Views |

    Spherical micelles can aggregate into highly organized structures. New micelle arrangements mimic known atomic crystals, both periodic and aperiodic, and provide evidence for a material with 18-fold rotational symmetry.

    • Sharon C. Glotzer
    •  & Michael Engel

  • Letter |

    Scanning probe techniques such as atomic force microscopy can be readily harnessed to prepare nanoscale structures with exquisite resolution, but are not in general suited for high-throughput patterning. Techniques based on contact printing, on the other hand, offer high throughput over large areas, but can't compete on resolution. Now, an approach is described that offers the best of both worlds: by attaching an array of hard, scanning-probe-like silicon tips to a flexible elastomeric substrate (similar to those used in contact printing), it is possible to rapidly create arbitrary patterns with sub-50-nm resolution over centimetre-scale areas.

    • Wooyoung Shim
    • , Adam B. Braunschweig
    •  & Chad A. Mirkin

  • News & Views |

    A neat study that involves placing colloidal particles on curved oil-glycerol interfaces reveals a new form of crystal defect. The defect is called a pleat, by analogy to the age-old type of fabric fold. See Letter p.947

    • Francesco Stellacci
    •  & Andreas Mortensen

  • Letter |

    Some beetle shells exhibit iridescence owing to the chiral organization of chitin making up the beetle's exoskeleton. Inspired by this, these authors fabricate thin glass films with helical pores introduced using a renewable cellulose template. The chiral structure allows the material, which can be free-standing, to selectively reflect light at a specific wavelength that can be tuned across the visible spectrum by altering the ratio of silica to cellulose during synthesis.

    • Kevin E. Shopsowitz
    • , Hao Qi
    •  & Mark J. MacLachlan

  • Letter |

    Electrophoresis is a motion of charged dispersed particles relative to a fluid in a uniform electric field. Here it is described how an anisotropic fluid — a nematic liquid crystal — can lead to motion of both charged and neutral particles, even when they are perfectly symmetrical, in any type of electric field. The phenomenon is caused by a distortion in the orientation of the liquid crystals around the particles. The approach could see applications in, for example, display technologies and colloidal assembly and disassembly.

    • Oleg D. Lavrentovich
    • , Israel Lazo
    •  & Oleg P. Pishnyak

  • Letter |

    What defines the boundary between the Earth's lithosphere and asthenosphere? Here it is shown experimentally that the instability of the hydrous mineral pargasite at depths greater than about 90 km causes a sharp drop in the water-storage capacity of a fertile upper-mantle mineralogy, and accordingly a sharp drop in its solidus temperate. This effect might define the lithosphere–asthenosphere boundary.

    • David H. Green
    • , William O. Hibberson
    •  & Anja Rosenthal

  • News & Views |

    Droplets of a liquid alloy on a silicon surface can rearrange the surface atoms so that they mimic the short-range ordering of atoms in the alloy. Remarkably, this effect inhibits freezing of the droplets.

    • A. Lindsay Greer

  • News & Views |

    Colloid particles that form bonds to each other at specific orientations might self-assemble into all sorts of useful materials. The key — and the lock — to such binding has been discovered.

    • Michael J. Solomon

  • Letter |

    When a shape memory polymer is deformed at a temperature defined by a specific phase transition, the deformed shape is fixed upon cooling, but the original shape can be recovered on reheating. Here the perfluorosulphonic acid ionomer Nafion is shown to exhibit at least four different shapes as a result of its broad reversible phase transition.

    • Tao Xie

  • Letter |

    Many plants and animals make use of biological surfaces with structural features at the micro- and nanometre-scale that control the interaction with water. The appearance of dew drops on spider webs is an illustration of how they are one such material capable of efficiently collecting water from air. The water-collecting ability of the capture silk of the Uloborus walckenaerius spider is now shown to be the result of a unique fibre structure that forms after wetting.

    • Yongmei Zheng
    • , Hao Bai
    •  & Lei Jiang

  • Letter |

    In the search to reduce our dependency on fossil-fuel energy, new plastic materials that are less dependent on petroleum are being developed, with water-based gels — hydrogels — representing one possible solution. Here, a mixture of water, 3% clay and a tiny amount of a special organic binder is shown to form a transparent hydrogel that can be moulded into shape-persistent, free-standing objects and that rapidly and completely self-heals when damaged.

    • Qigang Wang
    • , Justin L. Mynar
    •  & Takuzo Aida

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