The Nature journals are the home of eye-opening chemistry. This collection presents our pick of the chemical sciences from 2014. A News Feature tells you all you need to know about the reinvention of rechargeable batteries. There’s expert opinion about papers in three exciting areas: electrochemistry for fuel production; flexible metal–organic frameworks for molecular separations; and synthetic organic chemistry. And a brace of papers includes top research from the fields of carbon nanotechnology and chemical biology. If you want to know what’s hot in chemistry, this is the place to look!