For the past centuries, metallic materials have been usually used for structural applications. Till recent years, some metallic materials, especially light metals such as Li, Mg, and Ti, are attracting increasing attention as functional materials owing to their superior functional properties for energy and biomedical applications. For example, Mg has a high hydrogen storage capacity up to 7.6 wt%, a high specific capacity as battery electrodes, and a good biocompatibility as biodegradable implants. These superior properties render the possibility of applying light-metal-based alloys/compounds in energy and biomedical industries. However, light-metal-based materials are facing some serious disadvantages when used for energy and biomedical applications, such as sluggish hydriding/dehydriding kinetics for hydrogen storage, slow ion embedding speed for battery electrodes, and poor corrosion resistance in body fluids. These shortcomings have strongly limited their further industrial applications. One of the efficient approaches to solve these problems is to create nanostructures in light-metal-based materials so that their global performance as functional materials can be highly improved.

We are here inviting investigators to contribute their original research articles as well as review articles on light-metal-based nanostructures for energy and biomedical applications. Emphasis will be placed on the advances in design, preparation, and characterization of nanostructures in light-metal-based materials with the aim of improving their functional properties for energy- and biomedical-related applications. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Nanostructured light-metal-based materials for hydrogen storage
• Nanostructured light-metal-based materials for rechargeable Li/Mg batteries
• Nanostructured light-metal-based materials for energy conversion
• Nanostructured light-metal-based biomaterials
• Design of light-metal-based nanostructures through first principle or molecular dynamic simulations
• Surface nanocrystallization of light-metal-based materials for biomedical applications

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jnm/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable: