The Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador are home to more than a thousand plant and animal species found nowhere else on Earth—things like marine iguanas and giant tortoises. In a new paper in the journal Zootaxa, scientists ...
An interdisciplinary student research team at the University of Waterloo has achieved an advance in materials science with the creation of a tissue-like hydrogel for artificial muscles to make soft robots move.
Living organisms sustain themselves through intricate metabolic processes that continuously convert energy and materials into useful functions. Inspired by these biological systems, researchers are now engineering synthetic ...
Researchers have developed a sensor about the size of a grain of rice that can measure forces and twisting motions in all directions using light instead of traditional electronics. The new sensor could help robotic tools ...
Researchers at Tampere University have recently demonstrated that light can be used to precisely reshape soft materials without mechanical contact. They have developed light-responsive hydrogel thin films that enable programmable ...
Natural rubber, tapped from trees as latex, is the world's most widely used bio-elastomer. Comprising long molecular chains that make it pliable and stretchy yet highly resistant to cracking and strain, natural rubber is ...
Under a microscope, a bouquet of lollipop-like structures, each smaller than a grain of sand, waves gently in a Petri dish of liquid. Suddenly, they snap together, like the jaws of a Venus flytrap, as a scientist waves a ...
Biological tissues have a remarkable ability to organize and change shape, driven by forces generated by their own cells. One of the major challenges in bioengineering is harnessing this natural behavior to design synthetic ...
From ketchup to quicksand, non-Newtonian fluids have long fascinated and puzzled scientists. Unlike ordinary fluids, their flow properties change depending on how much force is applied, but the precise mechanics governing ...
Seals are carnivorous marine mammals that are well adapted to hunting for fish underwater, where visibility is poor. In such conditions, seals rely on their highly sensitive whiskers to detect tiny water movements left behind ...
