MIT researchers have developed a method for 3D printing materials with tunable mechanical properties, which can sense how they are moving and interacting with the environment. The researchers create ...

Nature is replete with slender filaments that bend and coil—from climbing grape vines, to folded proteins, to elephant trunks that can pick up a peanut but also take down a tree.

(Nanowerk Spotlight) The materials we interact with every day—whether they are steel, glass, or rubber—have properties like strength, flexibility, or brittleness that stem from their chemical ...

This is a summary of a story that originally appeared on the Pratt School of Engineering. Mechanical engineers at Duke University have made a breakthrough in programmable materials that can be ...

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and their collaborators have created a new class of programmable soft materials that can absorb impacts like never before, while also ...

Researchers at Tampere University have recently demonstrated that light can be used to precisely reshape soft materials ...

Synthetic proteins based on those found in a variety of squid species' ring teeth may lead the way to self-healing polymers carefully constructed for specific toughness and stretchability that might ...

Scientists at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg have created intelligent materials that change shape and mechanical properties under specific light wavelengths. By linking molecular ...

For some time, researchers have assumed that solid materials could gain more useful properties by making their microscopic ...

HAVE IDEAS ABOUT BOTH, FROM SPECIAL FILMS THAT ADAPT TO CHANGES IN HEAT. THE REALLY GREAT THING ABOUT THIS IS IT COULD BECOME, YOU KNOW, A SHADING SYSTEM. SO IT’S REALLY EASY TO RETROFIT ONTO EXISTING ...

Information can be encoded into all sorts of patterns, whether it’s short and long beeps for Morse code, raised bumps for Braille, or ones and zeroes for computers. Now researchers have demonstrated a ...

Definition: Programmable Matter refers to materials that can change their physical properties (shape, density, modality, conductivity) in real-time, based on user input or autonomous sensing. This ...