A team of Georgia Tech and Ohio State University researchers has developed a soft polymer material, called magnetic shape memory polymer, that uses magnetic fields to transform into a variety of ...

For nearly 20 years, physicists and engineers have chased the idea of invisibility. Early efforts focused on hiding objects from light using so-called metamaterials with extreme and often unrealistic ...

How could you build an artificial tadpole? Or simulate the motion of a cilium? Those would be hard to do with mechanical means — even micromechanical because of their fluid motion. Researchers have ...

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and ETH Zurich have developed a new material whose shape memory is activated by magnetism. It retains a given shape when it is put into a magnetic field.

Besides superfluous features like touchscreens and internal cameras, basic refrigerator technology hasn't changed much in decades. They still chill your milk by way of chemical refrigerants and ...

In a recent study published in Nature Communications, researchers presented magnetic soft-robotic chains (MaSoChains) that use magnetic and elastic energies to fold themselves into large stable ...

[Moritz v. Sivers] has a knack for making his own displays, which are typically based on some obscure physical effect. Magnetic viewing films, those thin plastic sheets that change color in response ...

What are shape memory polymers? Shape memory polymers were first conceived back in the 1940s when L. B. Vernon and his colleagues discovered the shape memory properties of polymers, reported in a 1941 ...

New maps of the nearby galaxy IC 342 show that its magnetic fields closely mimic its spiral arms of gas and stars. The similar pattern suggests that galactic magnetic fields have some role to play in ...

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have developed a new type of shape-shifting nanoprobe that can perform ...