Repairing and reusing plastics and delivering cancer drugs more effectively are only two of many of the potential applications a new 3-D/4-D printing technology might have, thanks to the pioneering work of a research collaboration ...
Painful hypodermic needles may not be needed in the future to give shots, inject drugs and get blood samples.
Today's 3-D printers, in which devices rather like inkjet-printer nozzles deposit materials in layers to build up physical objects, are a great tool for designers building prototypes or small companies with limited product ...
Imagine smart materials that can morph from being stiff as wood to as soft as a sponge—and also change shape.
Recent advances in digital factory science make it possible to print more compliant objects across a wider range of length-scales than conventional engineering processes. A bottleneck for enabling the next technological progress ...
We often think of the everyday materials we use to build our human world as static, but we should think again: MIT's Self-Assembly Lab programs such materials to transform themselves to handle tasks more simply and efficiently, ...
Skylar Tibbits SM '10 was constructing a massive museum installation with thousands of pieces when he had an epiphany. "Imagine yourself facing months on end assembling this thing, thinking there's got to be a better way," ...
The complex architecture of bone is challenging to recreate in the lab. Therefore, advances in bone tissue engineering (BTE) aim to build patient-specific grafts that assist bone repair and trigger specific cell-signaling ...
It sounds like something from a science fiction plot: So-called three-dimensional printers are being used to fashion prosthetic arms and hands, jaw bones, spinal-cord implants - and one day perhaps even living human body ...
Living organisms expand and contract soft tissues to achieve complex, 3-D movements and functions, but replicating those movements with man-made materials has proven challenging.
