
Turning Buildings into Carbon Storage Structures
The University of Pennsylvania will receive $2.4M in funding from the US Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) …
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Twisted Soft Robots Navigate Mazes Autonomously
Autonomy is crucial for soft robotics that are constructed of soft materials. It remains challenging to create autonomous soft robots …
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Universal inverse design of surfaces with thin nematic elastomer sheets
The Yang lab and collaborators transform a two-dimension sheets made from liquid crystal elastomers into complex three-dimensional geometries, such as …
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Wearable UV Indicators from Photochromic Fibers and Yarns
Wearable sensors allow for continuous and real-time monitoring of the human health and potential environmental hazards such as ultraviolet (UV) …
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Responsive and Foldable Soft Materials
Stimulus-responsive soft materials that can enable folding of a 2D sheet into a 3D object have potential significant applications, including …
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Smart windows
Commonplace as they are, windows are an important piece of technology. Beyond architectural aesthetics, a building’s ecological footprint depends heavily …
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Intrinsically Reversible Superglues via Shape Adaptation Inspired by Snail Epiphragm
We often meet with this dilemma: material’s adhesion could be strong but not reversible, or it is reversible but not …
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Soft Robots using Muscle-like Composite Actuators
Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs), known for their reversible and anisotropic deformation, are promising candidates as embedded intelligent actuators in soft …
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Molecular heterogeneity drives reconfigurable nematic liquid crystal drops
Liquid crystals are composed of rod- or disc-like molecules called mesogens, and, as a result of the alignment of these …
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Broadband and Pixelated Camouflage by Exploiting Large Poisson Effect in Main-Chain Chiral Nematic Liquid Crystalline Elastomers
Inspired by cephalopod’s skin, the Yang lab creates an artificial chromatophore that can change colors instantly—from near-infrared to visible to …
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