(Nanowerk Spotlight) Imagine a material that doesn’t just respond to one stimulus, like heat or light, but can sense multiple environmental triggers and adjust its behavior accordingly. Picture this ...

(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 ...

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 ...

Scientists are harnessing cells to make new types of materials that can grow, repair themselves and even respond to their environment. These solid “engineered living materials” are made by embedding ...

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 ...

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 ...

The newest generation of microrobots is so small that a single unit can perch on the ridge of a fingerprint and practically ...

In the fast-paced world of medical innovation, the development of programmable microbots is emerging as a revolutionary force, offering groundbreaking ...

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 ...

Researchers have developed a process by which 2-D hydrogels can be programmed to expand and shrink in a space- and time-controlled way that applies force to their surfaces, enabling the formation of ...