Nanoscience News (<front>)

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=== Hybrid talk ===

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Meeting ID: 898 5609 1954 Passcode: ITPtalk

• Speaker: Jovan Gerbsheid (University of Cambridge)
• Thursday 30 October 2025, 17:00-18:00
• Venue: Centre for Mathematical Sciences, MR14.
• Series: Formalisation of mathematics with interactive theorem provers ; organiser: Anand Rao Tadipatri.

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=== Online talk ===

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Meeting ID: 898 5609 1954 Passcode: ITPtalk

• Speaker: Jasmin Blanchette (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
• Thursday 06 November 2025, 17:00-18:00
• Venue: Online; live-streamed at MR14 Centre for Mathematical Sciences.
• Series: Formalisation of mathematics with interactive theorem provers ; organiser: Anand Rao Tadipatri.

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Statistics Clinic Michaelmas 2025 II

This free event is open only to members of the University of Cambridge (and affiliated institutes). Please be aware that we are unable to offer consultations outside clinic hours.

If you would like to participate, please sign up as we will not be able to offer a consultation otherwise. Please sign up through the following link: https://forms.gle/kNUUmMP3FE5JtP6BA. Sign-up is possible from Oct 16 midday (12pm) until Oct 20 midday or until we reach full capacity, whichever is earlier. If you successfully signed up, we will confirm your appointment by Oct 22 midday.

• Speaker: Speaker to be confirmed
• Wednesday 22 October 2025, 16:30-18:00
• Venue: MR5.
• Series: Cambridge Statistics Clinic; organiser: tm681.

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=== Hybrid talk ===

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• Speaker: René Thiemann (University of Innsbruck)
• Thursday 27 November 2025, 17:00-18:00
• Venue: MR14 Centre for Mathematical Sciences.
• Series: Formalisation of mathematics with interactive theorem provers ; organiser: Angeliki Koutsoukou-Argyraki.

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Kuhn and Feyerabend on pluralism, education and history

Abstract not available

• Speaker: Hasok Chang (Department of History and Philosophy of Science)
• Wednesday 26 November 2025, 13:00-14:30
• Venue: Seminar Room 2, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
• Series: CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) seminar; organiser: Matt Farr.

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The myth of the naïve empiricist

The naïve empiricist is a stock figure in the humanities. According to legend, the naïve empiricist believes that knowledge is a direct result of experience, unmediated by theories, interests, instruments, or human labour. That this is indeed a legend – that it bears little resemblance to what the historical empiricists actually wrote – is known to scholars of Francis Bacon, Auguste Comte, Ernst Mach, Rudolf Carnap, and the like. There has been much revisionist literature on these and other empiricists in recent decades. But there has been no attempt to weave together the revisionist studies into a single story about European empiricism over the last four centuries. I argue that we can tell such a story by turning the legend on its head. The history of empiricism is the history of efforts to show just how indirect is the relationship between experience and knowledge. This has implications for a range of projects in the humanities that have taken the myth of the naïve empiricist for granted.

• Speaker: Michael Bycroft (University of Warwick)
• Wednesday 12 November 2025, 13:00-14:30
• Venue: Seminar Room 2, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
• Series: CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) seminar; organiser: Matt Farr.

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The problem of artificial consciousness

Abstract not available

• Speaker: Tom McClelland (Department of History and Philosophy of Science)
• Wednesday 05 November 2025, 13:00-14:30
• Venue: Seminar Room 2, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
• Series: CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) seminar; organiser: Matt Farr.

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Is historical mathematics largely true?

(Joint work with Fabian Pregel)

Historical mathematics is widely regarded as a repository of truths. It would seem unusually sceptical to deny that, say, early Chinese, Babylonian, or Greek mathematicians established many truths about numbers and shapes, such as Pythagoras’ Theorem or instances of it for specific right-angled triangles. But is this assumption correct, and if so, what exactly justifies it?

To test the assumption, I raise and address a series of objections to it. I’ll look at two case studies in particular, both involving apparently extra-mathematical beliefs that ‘infect’, or in some way threaten the truth of, older mathematics. The first is 18th-century geometry, and the second 19th-century matricial algebra.

• Speaker: A.C. Paseau (University of Oxford)
• Wednesday 29 October 2025, 13:00-14:30
• Venue: Seminar Room 2, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
• Series: CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) seminar; organiser: Matt Farr.

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Do mathematical explanations impose a necessity on the natural world?

Abstract not available

• Speaker: Aditya Jha (Department of History and Philosophy of Science)
• Wednesday 22 October 2025, 13:00-14:30
• Venue: Seminar Room 2, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
• Series: CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) seminar; organiser: Matt Farr.

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Hacks and explanations via program execution

This talk is about hacks – seemingly ad hoc, unprincipled bits of code used to make a program run more efficiently, or, in some cases, simply run at all. Hacks are exceedingly common, but their philosophical significance has not been fully appreciated. First, using an infamous hack for computing fast inverse square roots as a motivating example, I sketch an account of what it is to explain how hacked programs work. On this account, we cannot explain how a hacked program works without reference to facts about a system’s computational architecture and notation. Then, I suggest that this has ramifications for accounts of computational explanation that foreground a system’s abstract causal structure or its semantic properties. The ramification is that these accounts are in trouble.

• Speaker: Andre Curtis-Trudel (University of Cincinnati)
• Wednesday 15 October 2025, 13:00-14:30
• Venue: Seminar Room 2, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
• Series: CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) seminar; organiser: Matt Farr.

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Energy Environ. Sci., 2025, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D5EE05097A, PaperYoung-Hoon Lee, Hee Jeong Park, Eunbin Park, Geumbi Na, Ji Hwan Kim, Se-Woong Baek, Seunghwan Bae, June Huh, Yung-Eun Sung, Seung-Ho Yu
Incorporating provitamin B5 co-solvent for aqueous zinc-ion batteries facilitates the formation of a provitamin B5–Zn ion complex, which promotes uniform zinc deposition over extended distances and superior long-term cycling stability.
To cite this article before page numbers are assigned, use the DOI form of citation above.
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From Scarcity to Sovereignty: Media of Abundance at Taiwan Indigenous Television

In January 2025, Taiwan’s Chinese Nationalist Party proposed sweeping budget cuts across the cultural and creative sectors, including Taiwan Indigenous Television (TITV) — a public station by and for Taiwan’s diverse Indigenous peoples. Far from being an exception, these experiences are shared by other Indigenous media broadcasters around the world, as they navigate industries shaped by colonial values and capitalist economics of scarcity. Drawing on fieldwork with Indigenous media producers in Taiwan, I suggest that producers at TITV respond to these precarities through what I call “media of abundance.” Inspired by emergent studies of Indigenous economies of abundance in environmental contexts (Fujikane 2021; Kimmerer 2025), I theorize abundance within Taiwan’s Indigenous media worlds, focusing on the daily practices of production at TITV . From language game shows to children’s programs, producers mediate abundance through reciprocity, gifting, and inclusivity, embedding production in extended kin relations with ancestors and future generations, lands and waters, and more-than-human persons. I argue that abundance activates an entwined politics of refusal and possibility: a refusal to let economies of scarcity define Indigenous media production, and a commitment to producing decolonial futures that flourish far beyond the limits of capitalist and colonial imaginations.

• Speaker: Dr Eliana Ritts, CRASSH, Associate member, Darwin College
• Tuesday 28 October 2025, 13:10-14:00
• Venue: Richard King room, Darwin College.
• Series: Darwin College Humanities and Social Sciences Seminars; organiser: Janet Gibson.

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A halogen ion-mediated strategy is proposed for the controllable preparation of diverse MXenes and their heterostructures with well-defined interfacial architectures. NH4F etchant enables potential high-throughput synthesis of Mo2CTx, while NH4X -intercalant (X = Cl, Br, I) combinations facilitate large-scale production of hetero-Mo2CTx. This moderate hydrothermal strategy achieves precise structural control on a variety of MXenes and hetero-MXenes.

Abstract

Two-dimensional transition metal carbides and nitrides (MXenes) have attracted significant attention due to their exceptional physicochemical properties. Despite extensive studies, efficient methods for the production of MXenes with precise structural control still remain a challenge, thus hindering their potential in many specific applications. Herein, a halogen ion-mediated hydrothermal approach is proposed for the controllable preparation of diverse MXenes and their heterostructures with well-defined interfacial architectures, demonstrating its potential as a high-throughput synthesis strategy. As proof of concept, Mo2C can be synthesized on a gram scale by employing NH₄F in the hydrothermal etching process of Mo2Ga2C. Subsequently, this approach is applied to various MXenes, including Ti3C2, V2C, and Nb4C3. Moreover, NH4X (X = Cl, Br, I) etchants combined with small-molecule intercalants enabled the targeted synthesis of MXene-based heterostructures, such as Mo2CTx@MoS2 featuring ≈15 nm amorphous MoS2 surface layers. Notable, the Mo2CTx(Br) heterostructure exhibited outstanding electrochemical stability, delivering a capacity of 465.5 mAh g⁻¹ after 300 cycles at 1 A g⁻¹, and achieving high coulombic efficiency of 99.8% during lithium-ion battery cycling. This work establishes a versatile and scalable platform for the synthesis of MXene-based materials, thus paving the way for accelerating their potential in various fields.

To mitigate proton-induced side reactions, a lean-water polymer electrolyte with distinctive sacrificial solvation structure is developed to suppressing zinc chemical self-discharge corrosion and electrochemical corrosion for high-stable Zinc-Vanadium batteries.

Abstract

Compared to the free water molecules induced chemical corrosion, the electrochemical corrosion arising from the structured water elicits more pronounced zinc anode degradation, result in the limited cycle lifespan, especially at low current densities. However, the interfacial degradation mechanism remains inadequately resolved. Herein, for the inhibition of proton-induced side reactions, a lean-water polymer electrolyte is developed through the chelation of carboxymethyl chitosan (CCS) with Zn2+ ions. In accordance with Fajans' rules, CCS with highly polar carboxylate and strong electron-withdrawing amino groups exhibits enhanced ionic polarizability, which forms distinctive solvation structures with reduced deprotonation energy. Such solvation structures demonstrate competitive advantages in interfacial deprotonation dynamics and minimize proton release to suppress electrochemical corrosion via sacrificial protection. Furthermore, the crosslinked framework induced by molecular crowding restricts free water mobility, thereby alleviating zinc chemical corrosion and cathodic structure deterioration. By employing advanced MRI technology, the movement trajectories of water molecules and the dynamic deprotonation evolution process are directly visualized. Therefore, the cyclically rested Zn symmetric cell impressively operates 4000 h at low current density of 0.1 mA cm−2. Additionally, the Zn||NH4VO full cell exhibits 81% capacity retention after cycling over 1000 cycles at 1 A g−1, while the aqueous electrolyte only maintains 31%.

The newly synthesized π-extended viologen-based lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal (πV-LCLC) reactive mesogen (RM) is used for the fabrication of polarization-dependent and color-tunable optical device. The πV-LCLC EC optical device has the potential for advancing optical applications.

Abstract

To advance the development of an electrochromic (EC) smart glass, a π-extended viologen-based lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal (πV-LCLC) reactive mesogen (RM) is newly designed and successfully synthesized in this study. By extending the π-conjugation length of viologen, the πV-LCLC RM forms a stable LCLC phase at room temperature and retains its chemical integrity during the EC reactions, exhibiting reversible transitions across three redox states: dication (D), cation-radical (C), and neutral (N). A uniaxially oriented nanostructure is constructed on the macroscopic scale through shear-coating and molecular self-assembly. Subsequent photopolymerization of the uniaxially oriented πV-LCLC film significantly enhances its mechanical and chemical stability while enabling polarization-dependent transmittance and distinct color transitions. This newly developed πV-LCLC RM facilitates the fabrication of energy-efficient EC optical devices with tunable transmittance and multicolor modulation, and it is operable at a low voltage of 2.5 V.

Advanced Materials, Volume 37, Issue 40, October 9, 2025.

Advanced Materials, Volume 37, Issue 40, October 9, 2025.

Flame-Crafted Luminescent Pigments

This artwork illustrates the synthesis of ultra-bright copper tetrasilicate (CTS) nanosheets via flame-spray pyrolysis, resulting in novel blue-colored pigments. Emitting in the NIR-II window with quantum yields up to 34%, these wavelength-tunable pigments enable high-speed, super-resolution bioimaging, visualizing brain microcirculation and tracking immune cells in vivo. More details can be found in article number 2503159 by Robert Nißler, Inge K. Herrmann, and co-workers. Art by the team of INMYWORK Studio.

Smart Glass

In article number 2503367, Kwang-Un Jeong and co-workers developed electrochromic smart glasses with controllable color and polarization by employing π-extended viologen-based lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals (πV-LCLCs). Through simple self-assembly and polymerization processes, they constructed uniaxially oriented hierarchical nanostructures exhibiting three stable redox states and polarization-dependent transmittance, demonstrating potential applications in privacy protection and information security technologies.

Pancreas Targeting Lipid Nanoparticles

In article number 2507657, Chandrabali Bhattacharya and co-workers report pancreas targeting lipid nanoparticles that work through intravenous (i.v.) administration with unprecedented 99% selectivity. On the cover image they are showing LNPs through the bloodstream and reaching the pancreas selectively and lighting up.