New Materials from MIT Could Lead to Furniture that Builds Itself

(All Photos Self Assembly Lab, MIT)


h/t - @Instapundit

Popular Mechanics - In Skylar Tibbit's world, clothes adapt automatically to the world around them. Furniture assembles itself. So do water systems, robots, interactive retail spaces, and space infrastructure. When you’re the director of MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab, just about anything can adapt on its own.

"We think the applications are currently limitless," he says.

Tibbits, leads an MIT team of designers, scientists, architects, and engineers who are exploring what they call 4D printing, which takes 3D materials and adds another dimension by having them adjust to their changing environments. While this type of work has happened at the nanoscale in chemistry, Tibbits says, it’s about to scale up.

By taking well-known materials, anything from wood to carbon fiber, and adding in other materials that respond actively to energy, the pieces can form specific geometries designed by the engineers. For example, the lab has designed wood pieces that fold into small toys—elephants, in this case—when water hits the wood, because the wood moves in a particular way in response to moisture. A future application could involve weaving fabric that responds to heat into a garment.

"We try to design specific geometries that can respond to energy sources," Tibbits says. "When you mix geometry and material properties they can respond and change their state."     Read More

MIT’s Nano-Bio-Bandage Can Stop Your Bleeding Almost Immediately

Thrombin A clotting agent already found in the blood, 

thrombin is being layered onto sponges that can stop 

bleeding almost immediately. via Wikimedia

PopSci - Bleeding out on the battlefield–far from the trauma wards and triage units that might save their lives–is a scenario that soldiers simply have to live with.

But thanks to a nanoscale breakthrough at MIT, the chances of it happening could be significantly reduced. Researchers there have created a nanoscale coating that can stop bleeding nearly instantaneously using a clotting agent already found naturally in blood.

That agent, called thrombin, is coated onto sponges that can be easily packed by soldiers and field medics (or civilian medical personnel for that matter) and shaped to fit just about any kind of wound. Those pre-coated sponges are a pretty big improvement over tourniquets and gauze, which are limited in their ability to stop every kind of bleeding. Tourniquets obviously can’t be used on many parts of the body (the neck is a good example), and other glues and chemically treated bandages designed for dressing battlefield wounds come with their own complications and shortcomings.               More