Researcher Laura Rossi and her group at TU Delft have found a new way to build synthetic materials out of tiny glass particles—so-called colloids. Together with their colleagues from Queen’s University and the University of Amsterdam, they showed that they can simply use the shape of these colloids to make interesting building blocks for new materials, regardless of other properties of the colloidal particles. “This is striking, because it opens up a completely new way to think about materials design,” Rossi says. Their work is published in Science Advances this Friday.