Speedy ceramic sintering: Synthesizing ceramics can require heating for long times at high temperatures, making the screening of high-through-put materials challenging. C. Wang et al. developed a new ceramic-sintering technique that uses resistive heating of thin carbon strips to ramp up and ramp down temperature quickly. This method allows for the quick synthesis of a wide variety of ceramics while mitigating the loss of volatile elements. Ultrafast sintering is ideal for synthesizing many compositions to screen for ideal properties for a variety of applications, including the development of new solid-state electrolytes. Science , this issue p. 521

Advances in additive manufacturing techniques have enabled the creation of stimuli-responsive materials with designed three-dimensional (3D) architectures. Unlike biological systems in which functions such as sensing, actuation, and control are closely integrated, few architected materials have comparable system complexity. We report a design and manufacturing route to create a class of robotic metamaterials capable of motion with multiple degrees of freedom, amplification of strain in a prescribed direction in response to an electric field (and vice versa), and thus, programmed motions with self-sensing and feedback control. These robotic metamaterials consist of networks of piezoelectric, conductive, and structural elements interwoven into a designed 3D lattice. The resulting architected materials function as proprioceptive microrobots that actively sense and move.

The metal-halide ionic octahedron is the optoelectronic unit for halide perovskites, and a crown ether–assisted supramolecular assembly approach can pack various ionic octahedra into tunable symmetries. In this work, we demonstrate near-unity photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) blue and green emission with the supramolecular assembly of hafnium (Hf) and zirconium (Zr) halide octahedral clusters. (18C6@K) ₂ HfBr ₆ powders showed blue emission with a near-unity PLQY (96.2%), and green emission was also achieved with (18C6@K) ₂ ZrCl ₄ Br ₂ powders at a PLQY of 82.7%. These highly emissive powders feature facile low-temperature solution-based synthesis conditions and maintain high PLQY in solution-processable semiconductor inks under ambient conditions, and they were used in thin-film displays and emissive three-dimensional–printed architectures that exhibited high spatial resolution.