Researchers have developed a composite material that has the ability to repair small cracks within itself, a characteristic that could be used to extend the reliability and service life of electronic and aerospace components. (p. 101)

Materials scientists have turned the tools of their trade on some of the most familiar substances in the world: food. (p. 108)

Researchers have stumbled upon the first all-metal, aromatic molecules. (p. 111)

Cooking will kill almost any microbe. But when it comes to serving raw foods, such as the vegetables in a garden salad, neutralizing germs with heat is not an option and washing the greens doesn't reliably disinfect. Although raw produce can be sanitized in a bath of dilute bleach, a team of Georgia scientists is developing an alternative--acidic electrolyzed water--that appears to kill microbes even more effectively and could be just as cheap and easy."The technology is not new," explains Yen-Con Hung of the University of Georgia in Griffin. It relies on an electric current between two electr...

Under the right conditions, mixing two incompatible polymers can produce drops that organize themselves into strings. (p. 87)

Some chemists are sharing their research results more quickly and broadly as they begin to venture into electronic archives, where they can immediately post new, unreviewed papers, as physicists have done for a decade; others think such archives could mean the end of reliable chemistry research. (p. 76)

A newly developed process encourages water droplets at the hydrophobic center of a wafer to speed outward to a water-friendly edge. (p. 55)

Networks of fabricated, squishy vesicles as tiny as red blood cells and connected by thin tubules may one day serve as microscopic chemical laboratories, sensors, and even chemical computers.