(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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

DNA information is stored in a sequence of chemical building blocks; computers store information as sequences of zeros and ones. Researchers want to transfer this concept to artificial molecules.

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 ...

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 ...

What if you could have gym clothes that could automatically open cooling vents whenever you work up a sweat and close them when you’ve dried out? You might be able to get your hands on gear that does ...

A recent study published in Advanced Materials introduced a 4D printing method to create tubular moisture-responsive actuators called meta biocomposites. These structures use continuous flax fiber ...

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