/ en-us Â鶹ÒùÔº internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Â鶹ÒùÔºics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Imagine pulling on the long ends of a rectangular piece of rubber. It should become narrower and thinner. But what if it instead became wider and fatter? Now, push in on those same ends. What if the rubber became narrower and thinner? /news/2024-05-auxetic-materials.html Analytical Chemistry Materials Science Fri, 31 May 2024 12:05:03 EDT news636375902 Origami is a paper folding process usually associated with child's play mostly to form a paper-folded crane, yet it is, as of recently a fascinating research topic. Origami-inspired materials can achieve mechanical properties that are difficult to achieve in conventional materials, and materials scientists are still exploring such constructs based on origami tessellation at the molecular level. /news/2023-12-metamaterials-origamic-metal-organic-frameworks.html Nanomaterials Thu, 07 Dec 2023 11:20:01 EST news621168048 There are young children celebrating the holidays this year with their families, thanks to the 3D-printed medical devices created in the lab of Georgia Tech researcher Scott Hollister. For more than 10 years, Hollister and his collaborators have developed lifesaving, patient-specific airway splints for babies with rare birth defects. /news/2023-11-architected-auxetics-flexibility-3d.html Polymers Analytical Chemistry Thu, 30 Nov 2023 11:58:48 EST news620567925 Most materials—from rubber bands to steel beams—thin out as they are stretched, but engineers can use origami's interlocking ridges and precise folds to reverse this tendency and build devices that grow wider as they are pulled apart. /news/2022-08-unfold-elegant-equations-enigma-origami.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Tue, 23 Aug 2022 08:55:44 EDT news580463732 In a new report now published in Science Advances, Mathias Oster, and a team of scientists at the Institute for Mathematics at the Berlin Institute of Technology and the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburg in the U.K., presented a three-periodic, chiral tensegrity structure and demonstrated that it is auxetic, i.e., such materials become thicker perpendicular to the applied force when stretched. An auxetic structure has a negative Poisson's ratio and can form materials with unexpected behavior. The tensegrity structure is a form of tensile architecture held together by the balance of tensile and compression forces acting on them. The scientists constructed the tensegrity structure using chiral symmetry cylinder packing to transform cylinders to elastic elements and cylinder contacts to incompressible rods. The outcome showed local re-entrant geometry at its vertices, which they confirmed using finite element modeling. The architecture represented a simple three-dimensional (3D) analog to the two-dimensional (2D) re-entrant honeycomb model to form an interesting design target for multifunctional materials. /news/2021-12-reentrant-tensegrity-auxetic-three-periodic-chiral.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Condensed Matter Mon, 20 Dec 2021 11:30:02 EST news559220027 New research published in Scientific Reports has revealed that a simple but robust algorithm can help engineers to improve the design of cellular materials that are used in a variety of diverse applications ranging from defense, bio-medical to smart structures and the aerospace sector. /news/2021-08-algorithm-cellular-materials.html Mathematics Fri, 13 Aug 2021 06:48:54 EDT news548056125 An international research team led by chemist Prof. Thomas Heine of TU Dresden has discovered a new two-dimensional material with unprecedented properties: regardless of whether it is strained or compressed, it always expands. This so-called half-auxetic behavior has not been observed before and is therefore very promising for the design of new applications, especially in nano-sensorics. /news/2021-03-compression-strainthe-material.html Nanomaterials Fri, 05 Mar 2021 11:11:30 EST news534165069 Materials scientists aim to use bioinspired soft robots to carry out advanced interactions between humans and robots, but the associated technology remains to be developed. For example, soft actuators must perform quickly with force to deliver programmable shape changes and the devices should be easy to fabricate and energy efficient for untethered applications. In a new report on Science Advances, Zoey S. Davidson and an interdisciplinary research team in the departments of Â鶹ÒùÔºical Intelligence, Materials Science and Engineering, and the School of Medicine in Germany, U.S. and Turkey, combined several characteristics of interest using two distinct active materials systems to build soft robots. /news/2019-12-shape-programmable-dielectric-liquid-crystal-elastomer.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Mon, 09 Dec 2019 09:30:01 EST news495099424 Three-dimensional (3-D) printing or additive manufacture (AM) is a popular technique that has presently attracted tremendous attention as a promising method to revolutionize design and manufacture. Researchers have expanded its applications from rapid prototyping to tissue engineering, electronic devices, soft robotics and high-performance metamaterials, but most 3-D printing techniques only use a single material to print parts or form components using multiple discrete properties with complex mechanical gradients that cannot be cohesively controlled. /news/2019-05-d-grayscale-digital-g-dlp-highly.html Materials Science Tue, 21 May 2019 09:30:05 EDT news477555091 UCLA researchers and collaborators at eight other research institutions have created an extremely light, very durable ceramic aerogel. The material could be used for applications like insulating spacecraft because it can withstand the intense heat and severe temperature changes that space missions endure. /news/2019-02-ultra-lightweight-ceramic-material-extreme-temperatures.html Materials Science Thu, 14 Feb 2019 16:18:13 EST news469383470 In a recent study published in Science Advances, materials scientists Julie A. Jackson and colleagues presented a new class of materials architecture called field-responsive mechanical metamaterials (FRMM). The FRMMs exhibit dynamic control and on-the-fly tunability for designing and selecting the construct's composition and structure. Typically, properties of mechanical metamaterials are programmed and set when the architecture is designed and constructed, without changing in response to shifting external environmental conditions or applications thereafter. The diverse characteristics of FRMMs were first demonstrated by printing complex structures of polymeric tubes filled in with magnetorheological (MR) fluid suspensions to allow remote magnetic fields to control the materials. Accordingly, the scientists observed rapid, reversible and sizable changes of the effective stiffness in the new metamaterial constructs. /news/2018-12-field-responsive-mechanical-metamaterials-frmms.html Materials Science Tue, 11 Dec 2018 09:30:11 EST news463735634 Reversible shape change is a highly desirable property for many biomedical applications, including mechanical actuators, soft robotics and artificial muscles. Some materials can change size or shape when irradiated with light, triggering mechanical deformation without direct contact offering prospects for remote control. To engineer reversible, shape changing (RSC) structures—active materials that respond to external stimuli such as light, heat or electric fields are used together with other nonactive materials. Although advanced multi-material 3-D printing has enabled the design and fabrication of RSC structures, only specific materials can be printed, restricting broad use. /news/2018-09-d-reversible-materials-light-based-grayscale.html Materials Science Tue, 04 Sep 2018 10:30:01 EDT news455267848 Researchers have confirmed the existence of a naturally occurring exotic property in which a material becomes thicker when stretched - the opposite of most materials - a discovery that could lead to new studies into the fundamental science of nano-materials behavior. /news/2016-10-exotic-property-natural-material-fundamental.html Nanomaterials Thu, 06 Oct 2016 17:07:56 EDT news394992470 In a new study, researchers explain why one particular cathode material works well at high voltages, while most other cathodes do not. The insights, published in the 19 June issue of the journal Science, could help battery developers design rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that operate at higher voltages. /news/2015-06-x-ray-imaging-reveals-secrets-battery.html Materials Science Thu, 18 Jun 2015 14:00:04 EDT news353849316 Wake up in the morning and stretch; your midsection narrows. Pull on a piece of plastic at separate ends; it becomes thinner. So does a rubber band. One might assume that when a force is applied along an axis, materials will always stretch and become thinner. Wrong. Thanks to their peculiar internal geometry, auxetic materials grow wider when stretched. After confounding scientists for decades, University of Malta researchers are now developing mathematical models to explain the unusual behaviour of these logic-defying materials, unlocking a plethora of applications that could change the way we envision the future forever. /news/2015-02-blocks-future-defy-logic.html Condensed Matter Thu, 26 Feb 2015 12:14:45 EST news344175269 Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and universities in China and Japan have discovered a new structural variant of carbon called "penta-graphene" - a very thin sheet of pure carbon that has a unique structure inspired by a pentagonal pattern of tiles found paving the streets of Cairo. /news/2015-02-penta-graphene-variant-carbon.html Nanomaterials Tue, 03 Feb 2015 15:46:42 EST news342200785 (Â鶹ÒùÔº) —Carbon nanomaterials come in many different forms, such as diamond, aerogels, graphene, and soot. Sometimes carbon nanomaterials are even used as building blocks for making more complex nanomaterials. One recent example of this is nanotube forests that are grown to provide the raw material to make nanotube yarns that are woven into custom-made artificial muscles. In short, carbon nanomaterials are a versatile group that seem to provide endless opportunity for innovation. /news/2014-03-graphene-cardboard-highly-tunable-properties.html Nanophysics Fri, 21 Mar 2014 14:08:55 EDT news314629642 (Â鶹ÒùÔºOrg.com) -- A new biomaterial designed for repairing damaged human tissue doesn’t wrinkle up when it is stretched. The invention from nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego marks a significant breakthrough in tissue engineering because it more closely mimics the properties of native human tissue. /news/2011-05-biomaterial-mimics-human-tissue.html Biochemistry Thu, 26 May 2011 08:30:04 EDT news225615022 A team of nanotechnologists at The University of Texas at Dallas, along with Brazilian collaborators, have discovered that sheets of carbon nanotubes can produce bizarre mechanical properties when stretched or uniformly compressed. These unexpected but highly useful properties could be used for such applications as making composites, artificial muscles, gaskets or sensors. The team’s findings are reported in the April 25 issue of the journal Science. /news/2008-04-properties-nanotube-sheets.html Nanophysics Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:47:52 EDT news128350072 Day-to-day experience teaches us that stretching an object makes it thinner; pushing it together makes it thicker. However, there are also materials that behave contrary to our expectations: they get thicker when stretched and thinner when compressed. /news/2006-08-unusual-rods-thicker.html Thu, 24 Aug 2006 14:10:11 EDT news75647411