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 ...

[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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

Small shapes 3-D printed with a special magnetic ink can be remotely controlled with the wave of a magnet and made to move, carry objects and even catch a ball. Stuart McDill reports. 27,637 people ...

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 ...