Baptiste Gault

The temperature in a room drops by a few degrees while the refrigerator runs without a single moving compressor. Inside, there is no Freon, but a piece of metal that is alternately magnetized and demagnetized.

A crystal one atom thick is like a sheet of paper you can write on with electricity. Such a material promises to become the foundation for tiny, fast microchips. But before putting it into production, you need to know exactly what it's made of. And that's where the usual formula falls apart.

Metal is like a rope made of many strands: pull too hard and it snaps. Engineers have long sought a way to make it both strong and flexible at the same time. Typically, additives that increase strength make the metal brittle. But a team of materials scientists found a loophole: they added a small amount of nitrogen to the CrMnFeCoNi alloy, just one atom in a hundred, and got an unexpected result.