Access to affordable and reliable energy has been a cornerstone of the world’s increasing prosperity and economic growth since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Our use of energy in the 21st century must also be sustainable. This article provides a techno-economic snapshot of the current energy landscape and identifies several research and development opportunities and challenges, especially where they relate to materials science and engineering, to create the foundation for this new industrial revolution.

Comparative silk research has begun to provide us with valuable insights into a class of biopolymers that have evolved an enormous range of material performance based on highly adapted structure-property interactions. As outlined in this article, such insights cover the analysis of biological and bioinspired spinning technologies, the discovery of a novel type of melt spinning at ambient temperatures, and an advanced predictive modeling framework that uses ab initio calculations. Importantly, the huge diversity and extensive range of material properties found in natural silks is providing a fertile field for discoveries that could change the polymer paradigm and our approach to using proteins as structural materials. For example, highly relevant to both sustainability and engineering properties is the role of water in silk processing and function, as this article will explore in some detail.

Kohn–Sham density functional theory is the most widely used method of electronic-structure calculation in materials physics and chemistry because it reduces the many-electron ground-state problem to a computationally tractable self-consistent one-electron problem. Exact in principle for the ground-state energy and electron density, it requires in practice an approximation to the density functional for the exchange-correlation energy. Common approximations fall on the rungs of a ladder, with higher rungs being more complicated to construct and use but potentially more accurate. Each rung of the ladder introduces an additional ingredient to the energy density. From bottom to top, the rungs are (1) the local spin density approximation, (2) the generalized gradient approximation (GGA), (3) the meta-GGA, (4) the hybrid functional, and (5) the generalized random phase approximation. The semi-local rungs (1–3) are important, because they are computationally efficient, they can be constructed non-empirically, they can serve as input to fourth-rung functionals, and the meta-GGA by itself can be accurate for equilibrium properties. Recent and continuing improvements to the meta-GGA are emphasized here.

Fifty years after the Nobel Prize was awarded to Ziegler and Natta, the transition-metal catalyzed polymerization of olefins remains one of the most important reactions conducted on the industrial scale and the subject of industrial as well as academic research. This introductory article will provide a short historical review of the discovery of catalyzed olefin polymerization by Ziegler, Natta, and others and its development in the years following the Nobel Prize, as well as giving insight into Ziegler-Natta polymerization for the nonspecialist.