The challenge to link understanding and manipulation at the microscale to functional behaviour at the macroscale defines the frontiers of mesoscale science. O ver the course of the past decade, the impact of computation on materials research has expanded dramatically. A number of panel reports In 2012, the Office of Science, part of the US Department of Energy, initiated a dialogue with the science community through a series of town-hall meetings, the purpose being to identify new science frontiers at the mesoscale 10 . A website (www.meso2012.com) 4 was established to solicit community input. A report, From Quanta to the Continuum, has been released 4 along with an overview of the findings relevant to the materials community 11 . (Reference 4 is particularly relevant in that it gives a complete account of the broad community discussions of strategic research that connects materials science and engineering to the science and technology community at large.) It seems that 'mesoscale science' (MSS) should be viewed as an open concept, the principles of which are not precisely specified until a problem context is established. In other words, MSS can be characterized in many different ways. An early approach looked for organizing principles governing certain phenomena, such as energy landscape descriptions of transition states, selforganization and dynamical feedback, and frustration (or localization) effects, known , and corresponding theoretical calculations (solid curves
