Electrical circuit made of gel can repair itself

(Phys.org)—Scientists have fabricated a flexible electrical circuit that, when cut into two pieces, can repair itself and fully restore its original conductivity. The circuit is made of a new gel that possesses a combination ...

Completely new kind of polymer developed

Imagine a polymer with removable parts that can deliver something to the environment and then be chemically regenerated to function again. Or a polymer that can lift weights, contracting and expanding the way muscles do.

Spatiotemporal segregation of chiral supramolecular polymers

In 1848, Louis Pasteur successfully segregated two types of crystals of double sodium-ammonium salt of tartaric acid, which were mirror images of each other. Back then, this was done manually through a painstaking process ...

Self-templating, solvent-free supramolecular polymer synthesis

A polymer that catalyzes its own formation in an environmentally friendly solvent-free process has been developed by an all-RIKEN team of chemists. The discovery could lead to the development of inherently recyclable polymer ...

Polymer that folds and unfolds under UV radiation

Polymers, the basis of all plastics, usually do not have an ordered structure, in contrast to biopolymers such as proteins. A team of researchers has now developed a polymer that can be differentiated into folded (ordered) ...

Controlling the length of supramolecular polymers

Systems made up of one supramolecular polymer are well understood, but much remains unknown for systems involving the combination of multiple supramolecular polymers, such as what affects the length of the resulting copolymers. ...

Fine-tuned supramolecular polymerization

In nature, supramolecular complexes—chain-like structures that are composed of many small units linked mainly by weak non-covalent bonds—are assembled and disassembled in a precisely controlled way. Now, in work published ...

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