Timber, steel, and concrete form the triumvirate of structural materials used in construction. Each material possesses particular attributes, with cost and ease of use often providing the determining factor in selection when structural requirements are equal. This article aims to provide insight into the unique capabilities that steel can offer in construction. Beginning with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, developments in alloy chemistry, impurity control, and thermomechanical processing to produce different geometries have continued to make steel an attractive choice in residential and commercial construction. Changing demographics and the needs of future cities are discussed in terms of steel construction members, construction strategies, and functional coatings.

Transmission electron microscopy is a powerful technique for the analysis of solid samples, but it can also be used to image in liquid environments, gaining a unique view of processes and structures in liquids. Here, we describe recent developments in electron microscopy of liquids and discuss applications in several areas. We first describe closed-liquid-cell microscopy with its opportunities for visualizing electrochemical processes. We then discuss imaging of low-vapor-pressure liquids relevant to the operation of rechargeable batteries. Finally, we describe imaging of thick biological materials to obtain information on membrane proteins in intact mammalian cells that cannot be observed classically under dry or frozen conditions. Electron microscopy in liquid environments is developing rapidly and has the potential to solve key problems in materials science, physics, chemistry, and biology.

Universal access to abundant scientific data, and the software to analyze the data at scale, could fundamentally transform the field of materials science. Today, the materials community faces serious challenges to bringing about this data-accelerated research paradigm, including diversity of research areas within materials, lack of data standards, and missing incentives for sharing, among others. Nonetheless, the landscape is rapidly changing in ways that should benefit the entire materials research enterprise. We provide an overview of the current state of the materials data and informatics landscape, highlighting a few selected efforts that make more data freely available and useful to materials researchers.

Our energy needs drive widespread materials research. Advances in materials characterization are critical to this research effort. Using new characterization tools that allow us to probe the atomic structure of energy materials in situ as they operate, we can identify how their structure is linked to their functional properties and performance. These fundamental insights serve as a roadmap to enhance performance in the next generation of advanced materials. In the last decade, developments in synchrotron instrumentation have made the pair distribution function (PDF) method and operando x-ray studies more readily accessible tools capable of providing valuable insights into complex materials systems. Here, the emergence of the PDF method as a versatile structure characterization tool and the further enhancement of this method through developments in operando capabilities and multivariate data analytics are described. These advances in materials characterization are demonstrated by several highlighted studies focused on energy storage in batteries.