(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 ...

Recent advances in nanotechnology of two-dimensional (2D) layered materials combined with parallel improvements in biotechnology and synthetic biology demonstrated that more complex composites ...

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 ...

The Wave Engineering for eXtreme and Intelligent maTErials (We-Xite) lab, led by engineering assistant professor Osama R. Bilal, has developed a reconfigurable metamaterial that can control sound ...

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 ...

Natural materials like bone, bird feathers and wood have an intelligent approach to physical stress distribution, despite their irregular architectures. However, the relationship between stress ...

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 ...

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 ...