The Singapore-China collaboration could be the best place to invest in materials science – sharing experiences with other European countries is a key motivating factor for the cooperation between India and China

The potential for fundamental research to promote their manufacturing industry is one of the reasons India and China support materials-science research.

According to the United Nations organization UNESCO, the country is a spender of research and development because of it’s large population. South Korea has challenges to overcome to remain as a world leader in science because of the low birthrate and lower number of students going into higher education.

The importance of the Singapore–China collaboration might reflect the city state’s ongoing engagement with China’s global infrastructure development strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). A previous analysis by Nature Index showed Singapore as China’s strongest BRI partner. But country-specific trends in how researchers are identifying themselves on papers might mean high international collaboration scores between China and countries such as Singapore might in part be made up by Chinese researchers working with Chinese researchers.

The research community in Italy is moving to other European countries at a significantly higher rate than the European Union average, according to data from a survey by the European Commission. Italy might need to consider talent retention if it wants to become a leader in materials science.

There is evidence that Denmark punches above its weight in the field, however: normalizing its Share for population gives it a higher figure per million people than the United States, United Kingdom or Germany. Many Danes think that their country is the best place to be a leader of green transition and new technologies because of its connections to sea related industries. In 2023, researchers from Aarhus University showed that chemical recycling approaches for thermoset epoxy resins and composites were achievable2. This new approach could mean a reduction in the number of wind-turbine blades sent to landfill.

Count and Share: An Online Metadata Supplement for Tracking and Graphing Research Output from a Global Scientific Institution to the World’s Leading Institutions

A description of terminology and methodology used in the supplement and a guide to the online functions that are free are included.

Count and Share are used to track research output. Each piece of article has a Count of 1 for the author from the country/territory. This is the case regardless of the number of authors an article has, and it means that the same article can contribute to the Count of multiple countries/territories or institutions.

There is a small variation in the number of articles found in the Nature Index journals. It is arrived at by calculating the percentage difference in the total number of articles in the Index in a given year relative to the number of articles in a base year and adjusting Share values to the base year levels.

The amount of each of their shares on the papers to which they have contributed is considered to be the bilateral collaboration score. At least one article in the journals tracked by the Nature Index is co-authored by two institutions or countries.

Each query returns a profile page that shows the country and institution’s output in the last few weeks, making it easy to find more information. You can display articles by journal or article. The research outputs are categorized by their subject area. The pages list the institution or country’s top collaborators and its relationship with other organizations. Users can see the performance of an institution over time through their indexes and table data.

The leading institutions in the world are shown in the tables in this supplement as well as the top institutions in each sector by the same metric. The institutions with the largest Change in Share from 22 to 23 are included.

There is an acute awareness that economic goals often underpin cross-border relationships and might impact them as emerging technologies mature from fundamental research into serious commercial prospects. Japan’s government, for example, is wary of China’s potential to dominate emerging green industry markets, Domen says. “China is our very good collaborator and our very good competitor.”

Real-world applications were far from Domen’s mind when he started researching water-splitting photocatalysts in the 1980s. “Initially, I just found it interesting. But since 2000, when the need to produce green hydrogen to reduce carbon dioxide emissions became clear, our government started to provide a continuous, relatively big, budget.”

A next-generation system, using a higher performance catalyst, will be demonstrated on a 3,000 m2 array. Now in its second phase, the project is increasingly funded by industry collaborations.

Long-term state investment with strong support for collaboration has also underpinned the growth in sustainable-materials research in Japan, says Kazunari Domen, who studies metal-based photocatalyst materials for green hydrogen production at the University of Tokyo and at Shinshu University in Matsumoto.

The fact that it is collaborating with the East and the West is unusual with today’s geopolitics. “We can form collaborations with the best partners, to complement our own strengths.”

The government also nurtures collaboration with leading researchers from other countries. TheCampus for Research excellence and technological enterprise is one of the initiatives. To develop their research areas and materials, the researchers from very good foreign universities are invited to come to Singapore. The University of Cambridge, UK, the Technical University ofMunich, Germany and the University of California, Berkeley will be sending researchers to study decarbonization after being awarded a grant of S$90 million.

“Singapore is very short of natural resources,” says Bin Liu, a materials-science researcher at the National University of Singapore, and director of the university’s Flagship Green Energy Programme. “If we can convert CO2 emissions into a large-scale green fuel, that will solve sustainability and also energy-import issues in Singapore,” she says. The funding support for materials is incredible because this area has been prioritized by the government.

Liu’s own lab explores organic photocatalytic materials, which can absorb the energy in sunlight and use it to drive chemical reactions. The team used carbon atoms from CO2, and hydrogen atoms from water to make hydrocarbons that can be used as fuel sources, such as green methanol.

In Singapore, sustainable-materials research is prioritized more than the region’s major manufacturing economies due to the fact that the light can convert CO2 into valuable products.

The team is developing a version of the film for sustainable biomanufacturing3. “We also want to tailor the solar spectrum for the fast growth of microalgae,” Yin says. The idea is to use microalgae to turn carbon dioxide emissions into useful products because they absorb CO2 as they grow, making them rich in oils andProteins that can be used. The team is focused on niche, high value applications. “But the more we scale up, the lower production costs, and the broader the range of products we could consider,” Yin says.

One of the areas of research in Asia that has been very active is to develop materials that make use of sunlight for sustainable gains. Yin focused on the creation of a material that could capture green light from the Sun and convert it to red light. Yin says they are trying to tailor the solar spectrum for better crops. Plants rarely use the green light in sunlight for photosynthesis, so if you turn the green portion of the spectrum into red light, you can convert it into a form that plants can use.

Enhancing the Environment through Radiative Cooling Materials: Evidence from a Hong Kong University study of solar-seismic studies of ice-cream

Asian countries do well in terms of investing in research that connects academic ideas with industry, Ma says. “It’s a win–win situation because in return, industry partners offer more financial support for fundamental research.”

The current evidence that environmental challenges can be met through technology is one of the points made by Zhu, who spent 9 years studying and working in the US before joining Nanjing University. He returned to China and atmospheric pollution was very bad. He says that it was clear how industrialization was impacting the environment. But a range of government measures — including encouraging electric-vehicle uptake — have since made a difference, he says.

By keeping objects cool without consuming energy, such radiative cooling materials could be key to combating rising urban heat, says materials scientist Xiaobo Yin, who develops passive-cooling materials at the University of Hong Kong. Yin says that air conditioning brings heat from inside the house to the outside and adds more heat to the environment. Buildings or roads that are capable of radiative cooling are the only way to free the heat from the Earth.

“In nature, light and heat are the two most powerful forms of energy,” Zhu says. I explore ways to control heat and light. The ice-cream study showed a hierarchy in action. Solar heat can bounce away from the scuplture of pores in the film when it’s at the microscale. At the nanoscale, the film’s atomic structure radiates heat within a band of infrared light known as the atmospheric transparent window. The Universe is used to keep objects on Earth cool because heat is not reabsorbed by atmospheric gases.

Much of the green-materials work is dominated by research on next-generation batteries and solar cells, but numerous other technologies are under investigation, often with a focus on materials designed to interact with sunlight in unusual and potentially useful ways.

The experiment had an important motive. A materials-science researcher from the Nanjing University showed that such materials have huge potential in a warming climate. After just 20 days, the covered section of the 80 m2 sheet of the same material was more than 70 cm higher. Other researchers have used similar materials on rooftops to cool buildings without consuming energy.