Chemis-tree

Origami, 3D printing merge to make complex structures in one shot

By merging the ancient art of origami with 21st century technology, researchers have created a one-step approach to fabricating complex origami structures whose light weight, expandability, and strength could have applications in everything from biomedical devices to equipment used in space exploration. Until now, making such structures has involved multiple steps, more than one material, and assembly from smaller parts.

“What we have here is the proof of concept of an integrated system for manufacturing complex origami. It has tremendous potential applications,” said Glaucio H. Paulino, a professor at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a leader in the growing field of origami engineering, or using the principles of origami, mathematics and geometry to make useful things. Last fall Georgia Tech became the first university in the country to offer a course on origami engineering, which Paulino taught.

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Types as Ya Boy Bill Nye quotes

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Roommate -> roomsister

November 28 2017

Afternoon study session at my university’s library with my astronaut friend @redplanet44 ☆

Origami-inspired materials could soften the blow for reusable spacecraft

Space vehicles like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 are designed to be reusable. But this means that, like Olympic gymnasts hoping for a gold medal, they have to stick their landings.

Landing is stressful on a rocket’s legs because they must handle the force from the impact with the landing pad. One way to combat this is to build legs out of materials that absorb some of the force and soften the blow.

University of Washington researchers have developed a novel solution to help reduce impact forces – for potential applications in spacecraft, cars and beyond. Inspired by the paper folding art of origami, the team created a paper model of a metamaterial that uses “folding creases” to soften impact forces and instead promote forces that relax stresses in the chain. The team published its results May 24 in Science Advances.

“If you were wearing a football helmet made of this material and something hit the helmet, you’d never feel that hit on your head. By the time the energy reaches you, it’s no longer pushing. It’s pulling,” said corresponding author Jinkyu Yang, a UW associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics.

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Biomimicry

Brittle starfish shows how to make tough ceramics

Nature inspires innovation. An international team lead by researchers at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, together with ESRF -the European Synchrotron, Grenoble, France- scientists, have discovered how a brittle star can create material like tempered glass underwater. The findings are published in Science and may open new bio-inspired routes for toughening brittle ceramics in various applications that span from optical lenses to automotive turbochargers and even biomaterial implants.

A beautiful, brainless brittle star that lives in coral reefs has the clue to super tough glass. Hundreds of focal lenses are located on the arms of this creature, which is an echinoderm called Ophiocoma wendtii. These lenses, made of chalk, are powerful and accurate, and the deciphering of their crystalline and nanoscale structure has occupied Boaz Pokroy and his team, from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, for the past three years. Thanks to research done on three ESRF beamlines, ID22, ID13 and ID16B, among other laboratories, they have figured out the unique protective mechanism of highly resistant lenses.

As an example, take tempered glass. It is produced by exerting compressive pressure on the glass which compresses it and leaves it more compact than in its natural state. Glass tempering is performed by rapidly heating and then rapidly cooling the material. In this process, the outside of the material cools more quickly than the inside and thereby compresses the inside. Ophiocoma wendtiilenses are created in the open sea, at room temperature, unlike tempered glass. “We have discovered a strategy for making brittle material much more durable under natural conditions. It is ‘crystal engineering’ and tempering without heating and quenching – a process that could be very useful in materials engineering,” explains Pokroy.

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"Who is afraid of Super Woolf?"

Apply independently produced drug to the burnt area

Fed Up With Drug Companies, Hospitals Decide to Start Their Own

"A group of large hospital systems plans to create a nonprofit generic drug company to battle shortages and high prices.

The perfect news in EVERY WAY.

I have nothing to do with this mission, but damn do I feel proud. What peculiar beings we, humans, are. Sending into space a doll in a spacesuit, named “Starman”, seated in an electric car, with a sign “Don’t Panic” on the car’s dashboard, blasting David Bowie’s “Life On Mars?”. I’m not crying, you are.

Researchers develop ‘self-healing’ robotics material

Image: Victor Habbick Visions/Science Photo Library

Traditional electronics are made from rigid and brittle materials. However, a new ‘self-healing’ electronic material allows a soft robot to recover its circuits after it is punctured, torn or even slashed with a razor blade.

Made from liquid metal droplets suspended in a flexible silicone elastomer, it is softer than skin and can stretch about twice its length before springing back to its original size.

Soft Robotics & Biologically Inspired Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. Video: Mouser Electronics 

‘The material around the damaged area automatically creates new conductive pathways, which bypass the damage and restore connectivity in the circuit,’ explains first author Carmel Majidi at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The rubbery material could be used for wearable computing, electronic textiles, soft field robots or inflatable extra-terrestrial housing.

‘There is a sweet spot for the size of the droplets,’ says Majidi. ‘We had to get the size not so small that they never rupture and form electronic connections, but not so big they would rupture even under light pressure.’

To read the full article, by Anthony King, in C&I, the members’ magazine for SCI, click here.