Prof. Tao Deng and Wen Shang's group at the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, together with Prof. Michael D. Dickey's group at North Carolina State University and Dr. Jun Wang at the R&D Center of A123 Systems, have recently made an important breakthrough in the field of flexible packaging materials and technologies after more than three years of collaborative efforts. This work entitled "Liquid metal-based soft, hermetic, and wireless-communicable seals for stretchable systems" was published in Science.

On Dec. 9 (Beijing time), the group of Prof. Yiping Guo from the State Key Laboratory of Metal Matrix Composites of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, School of Materials Science and Engineering, together with the Shanghai Institute of Silicate, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of Wollongong, Australia, made a major breakthrough in the field of lead-free piezoceramic materials, the related results were published in Science under the title "Giant electric-field-induced strain in lead-free piezoceramics". The study found that by introducing defective dipoles and modulating the phase structure and ferroelectric domain structure, a giant strain (1.05%) and a large-signal piezoelectric strain coefficient (d33*~2100 pm/V) were achieved in Sr2+-doped (K,Na)NbO3 (KNN) lead-free piezoceramics, while the research strategy endowed the piezoceramics with a low driving electric field, superior temperature stability and fatigue resistance, and low hysteresis. It paves the way for replacing commercial PZT lead-based ceramics with promising applications in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), ultra-precision processing, integrated circuit manufacturing, precision optical instruments, bioengineering, and medical science. Prof. Yiping Guo is the corresponding author of this paper, PhD student Geng Huangfu is the first co-author, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University is the first unit. The main collaborators of the research work include the research groups of Researcher Fangfang Xu and associate researcher Zhengqian Fu, at the Shanghai Institute of Silicate, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Professor Shujun Zhang's group at the University of Wollongong, Australia.