Chen designed a more resilient tiny drone using soft actuators instead of hard, fragile ones. The soft actuators are made of thin rubber cylinders coated in carbon nanotubes. When voltage is applied to the carbon nanotubes, they produce an electrostatic force that squeezes and elongates the rubber cylinder. Repeated elongation and […]

A team at MIT has engineered small coils lined with living cells, that they say could act as stretchy scaffolds for repairing damaged muscles and tendons. The coils are made from hundreds of thousands of biocompatible nanofibers, tightly twisted into coils resembling miniature nautical rope, or yarn. The researchers coated the […]

Researchers at MIT have studied octopuses and other cephalopods skilled at camouflage in order to create a flexible material that can change its appearance on demand. The mechanism these creatures use to change both color and texture happen through muscle contractions, something researchers have been able to mimic by applying voltage […]