Themed collection Celebrating the 60th birthday and achievements of Professor Ulli Steiner

A brief memoir in honour of Professor Ullrich Steiner’s 60th birthday.

Photonic films produced by cellulose nanocrystal self-assembly offer a sustainable source of colouration. Their angular optical response reveals the suspension conditions at kinetic arrest and how common additives affect this liquid–solid transition.

This work elucidates a route to mesoporous magnetic materials with co-continuous morphologies from block copolymer self-assembly. The co-continuous structure impacts the magnetic behavior compared to non-structured chemically-identical materials.

The peels of lime, lemon, pomelo and citron are investigated at macroscopic and microscopic level.

While artificial photonic materials are typically highly ordered, biological photonic structures often lack long-range order. We here show that the colours of the scales of a longhorn beetle arise from a non-close-packed, diamond-coordinated assembly of 200-nm-sized chitin spheres.

Micelle sizes are critical for a range of applications where the simple ability to adjust and lock in specific stable sizes has remained largely elusive.

The ability to monitor mechanical stresses and strains in polymers via an optical signal enables the investigation of deformation processes in such materials and is technologically useful for sensing damage and failure in critical components.

Bottlebrush random copolymers (BRCPs), consisting of a random distribution of two homopolymer chains along a backbone, can segregate to the interface between two immiscible homopolymers.

Disorder in a colloidal assembly and the photonic response can be tuned by changing the electric field strength.

Probing biomolecular interactions between a forest foliar pathogen, Erysiphe alphitoides and English oak (Quercus robur) leaves via hybrid Raman spectroscopy and accompanying analytical techniques.

By experiments and simulations on structured surfaces, we show that S. aureus cells have adhesive patches that are heterogeneously distributed across the cell envelope.

Polycyclooctene-polylactide triblock copolymer synthesis and subsequent processing via solvent casting, polylactide etching, and plasma etching to yield tunable and tough nanoporous membranes with high surface porosities and hydrophilic properties.

Peptide–polyurea hybrids (PPUs) demonstrate rapid hierarchical assembly into non-covalent hydrogels, which display tunable gel strength, shear recovery, and thermal stability.

Pigment can efficiently create bright structural colors at wavelengths outside its absorption band.