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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

Some of the most breathtaking objects in the cosmos are the jets of matter streaming out of stars, but astrophysicists have long been at a loss to explain how these jets achieve their varied shapes.