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Even brilliant technological advances can face significant implementation barriers if trust in and acceptance of them are limited, and if perceptions of new technologies are critically influenced by cognitive biases and heuristics. While considerable resources are invested in...

Advanced self-assembly strategies enable the targeted synthesis of supramolecular systems and materials with increasing structural and functional complexity. In the field of nanosized coordination cages, we develop non-statistical assembly methods based on...

Engineers often use high temperatures, pressures and polluting chemicals to make synthetic materials. By contrast, biology produces remarkable materials like wood and bone using widely available chemical resources in water and at ambient temperature. The ability of organisms to create materials under such mild processing conditions relies on the intricate biological machinery of living cells. Notably, natural selection processes have evolved such machinery for hundreds of millions of years to fulfill the demands of biological environments. In this context, we asked the question: ...

Optimizing devices like robotics hands requires fine control of the interface’s friction law. We recently proposed a generic surface design strategy to prepare dry rough soft interfaces having predefined relationships between normal and friction forces. Such metainterfaces...