As 2013 draws to a close, we take a look at the most viewed news stories over the last 12 months...
1. Printing artificial bone
In the top spot, a story from June 2013, on work performed by researchers at MIT. The group was able to move directly from a multiscale computer model of a synthetic material to the creation of physical samples in just a few hours.
2. Brittle or ductile
Glass doesn’t have to be brittle, and this story from March 2013 looked at work that allows the prediction of whether a given glass will be brittle or ductile.
3. The mystery of the 1/f noise
The low-frequency 1/f noise – fluctuation process is a ubiquitous phenomenon. In this story, also from March 2013, Alexander Balandin and colleagues studied the origin of the noise in graphene.
4. A new class of solids?
In August 2013, researchers from NIST and Argonne National Laboratory reported possible evidence for a new category of solid: neither pure glasses, crystals, nor even exotic quasicrystals. Something else.
5. Researchers develop catalyst material for fuel cell
Back to June 2013, and scientists from Jülich and Berlin developed a material for converting hydrogen and oxygen to water using a tenth of the typical amount of platinum that was previously required.
Of course there were many more breakthroughs over the course of the last 12 months: head over to the news page to browse the archive. And here's to a fascinating 2014!