The 30th volume of the Handbook of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials is a special one. This volume should celebrate a landmark number of volumes and we had big plans to gather a few nice viewpoint articles from famous scholars, but the COVID-19 pandemic has occupied people in a way that we got hardly any response. Actually at TU Delft we also struggled a lot with finding alternative ways of teaching. Particularly experimental projects were hampered and many students did their Bachelor or Master thesis on data they did not gather themselves but analyzed some data supervisors still had at hand. Alternatively, many students did theoretical studies or simulations. From this the current volume matches the pandemic situation, it's a theoretical study to explore where to look for new materials, when the labs are open again.
In silico materials science has gained a lot of maturity, and combining knowledge from data bases with first-principle calculations can nowadays help a lot in finding new candidate materials for new materials. Search for permanent magnet materials is one example, but magnetocaloric materials are even more in need for new candidate materials. Ivan Batashev did a great job in first reducing the huge amount of known materials down to numbers which nowadays can be handled, and then explored the magnetoelastic coupling in these candidate materials. The single chapter is again intended to be both of interest and inspiring for students entering the field and professionals for inspiration.