Researchers have demonstrated that tiny micrometer-sized crystals—just barely visible to the human eye—can "walk" inchworm-style across the slide of a microscope. Other crystals are capable of different modes of locomotion ...
Researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed a simple 'recipe' for combining multiple materials with single functions into a single material with multiple functions: movement, recall of movement and sensing—similar ...
(Phys.org) —The tail of a seahorse can be compressed to about half its size before permanent damage occurs, engineers at the University of California, San Diego, have found. The tail's exceptional flexibility is due to ...
A new approach to studying conjugated polymers has made it possible for an Army-funded research team to measure, for the first time, the individual molecules' mechanical and kinetic properties during polymerization reaction. ...
A team of researchers from Seoul National University and Eumam Middle School has developed a type of ionic spiderweb that is able to imitate dual functions found with real spiderwebs. In their paper published in the journal ...
Spider silk, already known as one of the strongest materials for its weight, turns out to have another unusual property that might lead to new kinds of artificial muscles or robotic actuators, researchers have found.
(Phys.org) —A team of researchers at Harvard University has come up with a way to move objects in three-dimensional space without touching them. As they describe in their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy ...
Popping the top on house paint usually draws people to look inside the can. But Princeton researchers have turned their gaze upward, to the underside of the lid, where it turns out that pattern of droplets could inspire new ...
A team of researchers with member affiliations to a large number of universities in the U.S. has created clusters of colloidal particles (spheres) in a liquid that is able to be manipulated in such a way as to represent different ...
The electrostatic motor, used more than 200 years ago by Benjamin Franklin to rotisserie a turkey, is making a comeback in a promising new design for motors that is light, soft, and operates without external electronic controllers.
