At present, food manufacturing waste is repurposed mainly as low-value animal feed and soil additives. Roy Goswami et al. describe how closed-loop recycling of protein-rich wastes could provide bioplastics, packaging composites and materials for water purification, CO₂ capture and renewable energy that support environmental stewardship.

Advances in material science have greatly extended the capabilities of 3D bioprinting. This Review discusses material design principles for in vivo biomanufacturing technologies and describes challenges and opportunities for the clinical translation of applications in tissue regeneration, wound repair, therapy and bioelectronics.

As alternatives to bismuth telluride, Te-free thermoelectric materials are emerging as promising candidates for low-temperature power generation. This Review discusses the design principles and future prospects of Te-free thermoelectric materials and devices across scales, from materials and interfaces to devices and system-level integration.

MXene nanocomposites hold promise for aerospace, energy and biomedical applications, yet their macroscopic properties fall short of intrinsic MXene nanosheet performance. This Review discusses bioinspired confined assembly strategies that suppress void defects, yielding mechanically robust nanocomposites with scalable fabrication.

Nanomedicine has advanced through increasingly sophisticated particle design, yet generalizable rules for productive delivery remain scarce. This gap persists in part because the receiving cell is still treated as assay background rather than as an active design variable. Bringing cell state into the design space can help to translate context-dependent performance into more actionable and predictive rules for nanomedicine development.

An article in Physical Review Letters describes how the momentum dependence of the superconducting pairing potential can be probed using the quantum twisting microscope.

A paper in Nature demonstrates a fully integrated, closed-loop system that links machine learning-guided molecular design with robotic device fabrication, enabling both the discovery of new passivation molecules and the reproducible manufacture of high-efficiency perovskite solar cells.

Artificial intelligence has outgrown the computers built to run it. Advances of the past decade have made clear that catching up is no longer a problem that any one discipline can solve. Can neuromorphic computing offer a way forward?

Joining dissimilar materials has long been limited by brittle intermetallics and mismatched mechanical properties, thereby constraining innovation across manufacturing. A newly identified kinetic regime enables bonding at sub-microsecond timescales, providing a bypass to conventional solid-state constraints and opening routes to integrate materials once considered incompatible.

The shift towards electrified transportation, aerospace and distributed technologies demands energy-storage systems that are efficient and structurally integrated. Rechargeable batteries, conventionally implemented as monofunctional components, introduce mass, volume and carbon penalties at the system level, revealing the need to rethink batteries as multifunctional materials rather than stand-alone devices.