The room looks like a set for one of those grade-B horror movies Ed Wood loved to make. In one corner, a skeleton draped in wires spasmodically jerks its arm up and down-meet "Mr. Bony." In another corner, strange, gelatinous creatures undulate like jellyfish inside tanks. More of the slippery blobs wiggle inside Tupperware containers that overrun the cabinets. "On campus, they call this the spooky lab,'" notes Mohsen Shahinpoor, director of the University of New Mexico's Intelligent Materials Laboratory. "And to tell you the truth, it can get a little scary around here."

Shahinpoor, the genial assistant dean of the College of Engineering, is an unlikely successor to Dr. Frankenstein. Although he is not trying to create life in his laboratory, the inanimate materials he melds together squirm and writhe like living entities. His true objective is to develop a host of supple artificial muscles that may eventually run machines and robots, and perhaps replace worn-out or defective human parts.

This tantalizing prospect stems from a discovery made by Israeli scientists in the late 1940s: certain plastic-liquid mixtures called polymer gels can flex and relax like natural muscles. The slimy fiber bundles shrink when the solution they're immersed in becomes acidic; but stir in some base and they swell to many times their former size.

The same effect can be induced by attaching electrodes to the material and passing a current through it. This works because of electrical attraction and repulsion: when polymer gels are in an acid solution, negative ions from the gel are attracted to positive ions from the acid that permeate the gel, causing the material to contract. The opposite phenomenon occurs in an alkaline solution: the material expands when its negative ions are repulsed by negative ions that have infiltrated from the solution.