A new rubber band stretches, but then snaps back into its original shape and size. Stretched again, it does the same. But what if the rubber band was made of a material that remembered how it had been stretched? Just as our ...
Since the beginning of civilization, humans have exploited new materials to improve their lives, from the prehistoric Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age to the modern Silicon Age. With each period came technological breakthroughs ...
Pen drawings can allow simple, inexpensive and intuitive two-dimensional (2D) fabrication. Materials scientists aim to integrate such pen drawings to develop 3D objects. In a new report now published on Science Advances, ...
Researchers have demonstrated that stretching shape-memory polymers embedded with clusters of gold nanoparticles alters their plasmon-coupling, giving rise to desirable optical properties. One potential application for the ...
Nanoscale applications in energy, optics and medicine have enhanced performance with nano-shaped structures. Such architectures can be fabricated at high-throughput beyond the capabilities of advanced optical lithography. ...
The Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and its research collaborators have successfully demonstrated the four-dimensional (4-D) printing of shape memory polymers in submicron dimensions which are comparable ...
Hydrogel-polymer hybrids are widely used across a variety of applications to form biomedical devices and flexible electronics. However, the technologies are presently limited to hydrogel-polymer hybrid laminates containing ...
Engineers at Caltech have developed a process for generating three-dimensional architected polymers with heat-dependent "shape memory" properties: That is, when heated, the material folds and unfolds itself into a new preordained ...
While the film "Transformers" introduced intelligent robots that morphed between shapes with multiple functionalities, researchers are developing intelligent soft transformers to significantly accelerate research applications ...
Airplanes are behemoths of the sky; a commercial airliner is over 6,000 times as heavy as a large Canadian goose. At 500 mph, however, these behemoths are not impervious to impact, even from the seemingly innocuous goose. ...
