John B. Goodenough, the "father of lithium batteries," as the corresponding author, published two articles on JACS in one day talking about all-solid electrolytes.

The nanometerization of metal surfaces was initiated by Ke Lu, a famous Chinese nanoscientist. The surface grain nanometer greatly improves the mechanical strength and hardness of the metal, but at the same time it also increases the surface grain boundary density. Due to the high surface energy of nanocrystals, the high-density nanocrystal boundaries lead to the thermodynamic instability of nanocrystals, which are prone to coarsening at high temperatures or even room temperature, thereby losing the nanometer effect and reducing the mechanical properties.

Turing structure often appears in the reaction-diffusion process that is thermodynamically unbalanced. When the diffusion rate is unbalanced, the fast-moving inhibitor controls the movement of the slow-moving activator, resulting in a Turing structure. The steady-state system formed by the Turing structure is very sensitive to tiny heterogeneous disturbances.

The renewable sources of energy such as solar and wind were intermittent, thus the electrochemical energy storage devices like batteries are necessary. The development of lithium-ion, lead–acid, redox-flow, sodium–sulfur and liquid-metal batteries shows promise for grid-scale energy storage. However, they have various issues of low energy density, poor rechargeability, high cost at the battery pack level and high operating temperature, which limited their application.

It is found that the macromolecular ferritin crystals with hydrogel polymers can expand to 180% of their original size in an isotropic manner, and exceed 500% of their original volume, while maintaining periodic ordering and multiplanar Wulff morphology. Even if the neighboring ferritin molecules are separated by 50 angstroms during lattice expansion, the specific molecular contact between them can be re-formed during lattice contraction, which achieves the atomic level periodic and highest resolution recovery of ferritin structure reported so far.

Prof. Wang Hongjie's research group prepared an ultra-light, compressible and high-temperature resistant ceramic aerogel by using the method of chemical vapor deposition and in-situ growth and self-assembly of silicon carbide ceramic nanowires.

Professor Yu of University of Science & Technology China has developed a new synthetic strategy of phenolic resin (PFR) and SiO2 copolymerization and nano scale phase separation with chitosan as the three-dimensional template and PFR/SiO2 composite aerogel with dual network structure has been successfully developed.

The high elasticity exhibited by polymer elastomers is a unique mechanical property, which has an irreplaceable position in various fields of daily life and national economy. The high deformation of polymer elastomers is mainly derived from the huge difference in the mean square end distance of linear polymer segments in the curled and straightened state, which is a kind of entropy elasticity. However, in inorganic materials, due to strong internal covalent bonds, ionic bonds, metal bonds and other strong forces, the elastic deformation of inorganic materials is much smaller. Therefore, how to prepare highly stretchable pure inorganic elastomer has been a difficult problem for a long time.

Irina Smirnova and Pavel Gurikov of Hamburg University of Technology in Germany published a paper entitled "Aerogel production: current status, research direction, and future opportunities. From the perspective of large-scale commercial applications, the article reviews the aerogel products' current situation, existing research areas and future development directions, and tries to analyze the potential applications of aerogels, so as to provide reference for the determination of academic research direction.

Through piezoelectric, triboelectric, thermoelectric, photoelectric and other effects, materials and devices with micro-nano structures are selected and designed, and the underutilized mechanical and physical energy in the environment is collected and stored to power electronic devices. This green, Sustainable nano generators have become one of the frontier research directions in recent years.

According to the latest issue of "Science and Materials" magazine, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a new process for the production of ultrafine fibers called gel electrospinning. The resulting nano-scale fibers have exceptional strength and toughness, it may become a new choice for protective armor and nanocomposites.

Luminescent hydrogels have attracted widespread interest due to their important applications in bioimaging, drug delivery, OLED, and fluorescence sensing. Compared with luminescent groups such as quantum dots and organic dyes, rare earth complexes are considered to be an ideal luminescence center due to their strong light absorption ability, long excited state lifetime, high color purity, rich emission lines, and high quantum efficiency.

Ultra-soft cell scaffolds can be printed with frozen hydrogel in 3D. January 12, 2018/Imperial College London recently developed a new technology, which can create flexible scaffolds that more accurately imitate human soft tissues. Researchers believe that this method can help the regeneration of soft tissue, and one day can cultivate neuron cells, which can then be used for the regeneration of brain and spinal cord.

Aerogels have many attractive properties but are usually costly and mechanically brittle, which always limit their practical applications. While many efforts have been made to reinforce the aerogels, most of the reinforcement efforts sacrifice the transparency or superinsulating properties. Here we report superflexible polyvinylpolymethylsiloxane, (CH2CH(Si(CH3)O2/2))n,aerogels that are facilely prepared from a single precursor vinylmethyldimethoxysilane or vinylmethyldiethoxysilane without organic cross-linkers.