Liquid crystalline polymers and elastomers have received considerable attention because of their remarkable macroscopic properties that result from the alignment of rigid, rod-like segments at the ...

Ryan Hayward's self-folding crane begins as a flat, trilayer sheet. The middle pNIPAM hydrogel layer swells as the water around it is heated, and the folding is guided by slits patterned into the more ...

What if a complex material could reshape itself in response to a simple chemical signal? A team of physicists from the University of Vienna and the University of Edinburgh has shown that even small ...