In a May 15 paper released in the journal Physical Review Letters, Virginia Tech physicists revealed a microscopic phenomenon that could greatly improve the performance of soft devices, such as agile flexible robots or microscopic ...
Knitting, the age-old craft of looping and stitching natural fibers into fabrics, has received renewed attention for its potential applications in advanced manufacturing. Far beyond their use for garments, knitted textiles ...
University of Michigan physicists have devised a way to manipulate active fluids, a type of fluid composed of individual units that can propel themselves independently, by taking advantage of topological defects in the fluids.
Researchers discovered that microscopic liquid droplets swim toward solvent conditions that favor their dissolution. This mechanism may underlie some transport processes within living cells, and could be exploited to develop ...
Tagging marine animals with sensors to track and study their movements can provide researchers with important environmental and behavioral information, including energy usage, habitat changes, and migration patterns. But ...
Researchers at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology) in collaboration with the University of Freiburg have developed a biohybrid robot, which consists of a flour-based capsule created using ...
University of Wollongong researchers achieved a significant milestone in novel soft-matter transport by demonstrating the transfer of liquid metal from an anode to a cathode without creating a short circuit, defying conventional ...
Fire ants form rafts to survive flooding, but how do those bonds work? And what can we learn from them? A Binghamton University, State University of New York professor is researching those questions to expand our knowledge ...
Magnetic cilia—artificial hairs whose movement is powered by embedded magnetic particles—have been around for a while, and are of interest for applications in soft robotics, transporting objects and mixing liquids. However, ...
In their ambitious goal to understand and ultimately communicate with sperm whales, research scientists from Project CETI have enlisted the help of unlikely collaborators—clingfish.
