A new polymer morphs from one pre-programmed shape to two others: as the flattened tube (top) is heated, it opens up (middle); heating it further makes it shrink.
Credit: GKSS Research Center
New publications, experiments, and breakthroughs in nanotechnology--and what they mean.
Morphing Materials
New shape-memory polymers can take on three successive shapes
Source: "Polymeric Triple-Shape Materials"
Ingo Bellin et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103(48): 18043-18047
Results: Researchers at MIT and the GKSS Research Center in Germany have engineered polymers that can be programmed to sequentially take on three different predefined shapes in response to changes in temperature.
To read the entire article you must log in:
Most of our content — all daily news, blogs, and videos — is free. Magazine stories are paid. To read this story, you must have a subscription or you must use a reading credit. Registration to Technology Review is free and entitles registrants to three free reading credits.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
View full PDF >
Listen to story > 
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed