Programmable material systems are emerging architectural structures but the co-design of structure, material, and external stimuli present grand challenges. A team with Northwestern Engineering’s Wei ...

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 ...

(Nanowerk Spotlight) Imagine a material that doesn’t just respond to one stimulus, like heat or light, but can sense multiple environmental triggers and adjust its behavior accordingly. Picture this ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

(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 ...

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.

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