Turing patterned membrane takes on water purification

Materials structured at the nanoscale can have useful properties, but making structures this small is technically challenging. A team working in China has found a neat way around that problem: let spontaneous self-organisation do the assembly for you. They used a patterning process first identified in the 1950s by the mathematician Alan Turing – famed for his work breaking the Nazi Enigma cipher – to make nanostructured polymer membranes that show promise for water-purification technology.¹