New Material Can Fold Itself Into Hundreds of Shapes (sciencemag.org) 32
sciencehabit writes: Researchers have created the first heat-reactive polymer material that can not only remember its current shape but also memorize new ones. The material—which currently requires high temperatures to change shape and reset its memory—could lead to a new generation of reusable self-folding materials that could be useful for everything from medical implants to shape-shifting electronics (abstract). The new substance has transition temperatures of 70C and 130C for elasticity and plasticity, respectively. To demonstrate its multishape capabilities, Xie's team turned a 30-millimeter square of the material into an origami masterpiece that could fold between two shapes using elasticity and change into other shapes using plasticity. Not only did the material fold into multiple different shapes, but it could also snap between them hundreds of times with little sign of fatigue—a critical feature if the material is to be used in real-world applications, they report today in Science Advances.
A million uses for this (Score:2)
I can think of a million uses for something like this, starting with medical technology and moving out into any number of fields.
Re: (Score:2)
name two
Re:A million uses for this (Score:4, Interesting)
name two
Injectable stents for heart patients.
Contraceptive devices
Penile implants
Artery-clearing devices
Surgical implants for plastic surgery
Anti-snoring devices
Adjustable joint parts
Adjustable eye/vision implants
FFS sake, your imagination must be thinner than a coat of paint. These took me ~30 seconds to come up with and I've got no medical background. I'm sure any doctor or surgeon or orthopedic specialist could come up with dozens in a minute or two. And those are just from one field.
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You had me at penile implants.
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the lower transition temperature is 70C.. I'm not sure medical implants are going to be such a great idea...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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name two
(1) Fun with origami inside a warm oven.
(2) Internet rule 34.
needs a video (Score:2)
needs a video
Re: (Score:3)
Buried in the paper which is blind-linked in the article:
http://advances.sciencemag.org... [sciencemag.org]
http://advances.sciencemag.org... [sciencemag.org]
http://advances.sciencemag.org... [sciencemag.org]
http://advances.sciencemag.org... [sciencemag.org]
http://advances.sciencemag.org... [sciencemag.org]
"All movies are accelerated by a factor of 2."
So they're triple speed videos. (If they meant that they're double speed they should have said they're accelerated by a factor of 1, or by 100 percent. I'm going to take them at their actual word.)
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And FF refuses to play the files, saying they're corrupt. Chrome shows a blank image but does happily tick the clock through the length of the video. Opening them in WMP triggers a data execution mitigation prevention in EMET, which closes WMP immediately. I don't have any other media players on this box, but Windows 7 does render a thumbnail of the video (via the media presentation foundation horseshit), so I'm going to assume there's some sort of video data in these files.
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They play in mpc-hc. According to that player, they're 11fps, flagged as mpeg4 SP@L3 yet the res is 720x576. Maybe they won't play because they're mistagged by the encoder. Wiki suggests level3 is limited to 352x288.
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I played them in MPC-HD as well, didn't investigate further but it's typical of research papers to have shitty / badly formatted photos and videos. No idea why.
Like a brooch? (Score:4, Funny)
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Wish I had mod points to give! Awesome reference!
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Given! :)
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Surely you can't be serious.
But could it fold itself seven times? (Score:1)
Roswell? (Score:2)
This stuff sounds strangely familiar to the stuff that was describe in the Roswell crash stuff. The metal that could be crumpled up and it would go back to it's original shape... Hmmmm.....
Shape Memory Alloy (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Autobots Unfold! (Score:1)
My wife asked "Why did you bring a gun to breakfast?"
I said "To kill Decptacons!"
She laughed. I laughed. The toaster laughed. I shot the toaster.
It was a good morning..
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What about a T-1000?
missing name of research team and lab? (Score:2)
researchers Tao Xie and colleagues from State Key Laboratory of Chemical Engineering in Hangzhou, China.
these things should be mentioned in post above (and usually are in other posts here).
oversight?