Watch a swarm of 1000 mini-robots assemble into shapes - tech - 14 August 2014 - New Scientist

Watch a swarm of 1000 mini-robots assemble into shapes - tech - 14 August 2014 - New Scientist: To do the assembling, the desired end shape is first transmitted to all the robots and then four stationary robots are positioned by hand to mark the shape's starting point. Next, some of the robots start to shuffle until they reach a place-holding robot and then fan out from that point to stop in the right place. Each robot can only communicate with the others nearby. Successive robots build up the shape by stopping near the robots already in place. It can take about 12 hours for 1000 robots to fill in a pattern.

Self-organising origami robot unfolds itself… and walks - tech - 07 August 2014 - New Scientist

Self-organising origami robot unfolds itself… and walks - tech - 07 August 2014 - New Scientist

Engineers design ‘living materials’ | MIT News Office

Engineers design ‘living materials’ | MIT News Office: By programming cells to produce different types of curli fibers under certain conditions, the researchers were able to control the biofilms’ properties and create gold nanowires, conducting biofilms, and films studded with quantum dots...

“It’s a really simple system but what happens over time is you get curli that’s increasingly labeled by gold particles. It shows that indeed you can make cells that talk to each other and they can change the composition of the material over time,” Lu says. “Ultimately, we hope to emulate how natural systems, like bone, form. No one tells bone what to do, but it generates a material in response to environmental signals.”

Fire ants writhe to make unsinkable rafts - life - 26 November 2013 - New Scientist

Fire ants writhe to make unsinkable rafts - life - 26 November 2013 - New Scientist: A raft of live fire ants, on the other hand, resists and dissipates external forces equally well on all scales. The ants can act as tiny, resistive springs by flexing and extending their legs, and they break and reform connections with their neighbours to create a flow around external forces, like being prodded with sticks. Importantly, rafts of live ants are significantly more elastic than those made of flash-frozen dead ants.

Quantum effects in nanowires at room temperature

Quantum effects in nanowires at room temperature: Further examination of the nanowires formed produced namely a surprising discovery: nearly all the wires that were formed had a length of 4.8 nanometers, or multiples thereof, and they nearly all contained twelve iridium atoms, or a multiple thereof. The researchers found the explanation for this in quantum effects. The wires of 4.8 nanometers (or multiples thereof) appear to be electronically stabilized by conduction electrons whose (half) wavelength (or a multiple thereof) fits precisely in the nanowire. The existence of these standing electron waves in the nanowires could be demonstrated experimentally. As this stabilizing effect will not occur in nanowires of iridium of a different length, they are formed more slowly.

ORNL superconducting wire yields unprecedented performance

ORNL superconducting wire yields unprecedented performance: A team led by ORNL's Amit Goyal demonstrated that superconducting wires can be tuned to match different operating conditions by introducing small amounts of non-superconducting material that influences how the overall material behaves...

A wire sample grown with this process exhibited unprecedented performance in terms of engineering critical current density...

"We report a record performance at 65 Kelvin and 3 Tesla, where most rotating machinery applications like motors and generators are slated to operate," he said.

"When you're making the wires, you can dial-in the properties because the defects self-assemble," Goyal said. "You change the composition of the superconductor when you're depositing the tape."

Printed inchworm robot makes self-assembly moves (w/ Video)

Printed inchworm robot makes self-assembly moves (w/ Video): This robot uses shape-memory polymers (SMPs) for the self-folding process. These are "smart" materials that can go from one state to another via a stimulus such as temperature change. With the SMPs, the inchworm robot is able to fold into desired shapes. Once it folds, a battery and motor are attached. With enough current, the team's robot was able to fold into its functional form with fold angle deviations within six degrees. The printed robot demonstrated locomotion at a speed of two millimeters per second.

Brilliant Robot Scraps Can Form Selves Into Anything

Brilliant Robot Scraps Can Form Selves Into Anything: But Skylar Tibbits today offered a very provocative alternative: technology for 3-D printing where the chunks start separated and intelligently arrange themselves into basically any object.

Tibbits’ latest technology for so-called “4-D printing...” uses water to activate and power strands of material that fold themselves into desired shapes.

The Swiss Army Knife Robot | MIT Technology Review

The Swiss Army Knife Robot | MIT Technology Review: The device is called a milli-motein—a reference to its millimeter-sized components and a motorized design inspired by proteins, which naturally fold themselves into incredibly complex shapes. "It’s effectively a one-dimensional robot that can be made in a continuous strip, without conventionally moving parts, and then folded into arbitrary shapes," says Neil Gershenfeld...

To build it, the research team had to invent an entirely new kind of motor: one that is not only small and strong but also able to hold its position firmly even with the power switched off. (When an ordinary electric motor is switched off, its shaft can rotate freely.) The researchers met these needs with a new system called an electropermanent motor.

First Toy Multiverse Created in a Laboratory, Say Physicists

First Toy Multiverse Created in a Laboratory, Say Physicists: Cobalt is ferromagnetic so the nanoparticles tend to become aligned in a magnetic field. In fact, if the density of nanoparticles is high enough, the field causes them to line up in columns. When this happens, the nanocolumns form a metamaterial which is mathematically equivalent to a 2+1 Minkowski spacetime...


The secret here is to keep the density of nanoparticles just below the threshold required to form nanocolums. That’s just over 8 per cent of the fluid by volume in this case. When that happens, natural variations in the density cause nanocolumns to form in small regions of the liquid. In effect, tiny universes are leaping in and out of existence. Smolyaninov and co can even “see” these universes by their effect on polarised light passing through the fluid.

That’s a fascinating result that demonstrates the potential of self-organisation to create metamaterials.

Man-made synthetic pores mimic important features of natural pores

Man-made synthetic pores mimic important features of natural pores: The pores the scientists built are permeable to potassium ions and water, but not to other ions such as sodium and lithium ions...

To create the synthetic pores, the researchers developed a method to force donut-shaped molecules called rigid macrocycles to pile on top of one another. The scientists then stitched these stacks of molecules together using hydrogen bonding. The resulting structure was a nanotube with a pore less than a nanometer in diameter. "This nanotube can be viewed as a stack of many, many rings," said Xiao Cheng Zeng, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Ameritas University Professor of Chemistry, and one of the study's senior authors. "The rings come together through a process called self-assembly, and it's very precise. It's the first synthetic nanotube that has a very uniform diameter. It's actually a sub-nanometer tube. It's about 8.8 angstroms."

Chiral asymmetry can emerge from maximal symmetry

Chiral asymmetry can emerge from maximal symmetry: Chirality normally occurs when different types of particle or atoms combine into complex molecules. Researchers at Chalmers have now, however, demonstrated something completely new in the field of physics: chirality can occur spontaneously, even in systems that comprise only a single type of basic, spherically symmetric particle. This means that it doesn’t matter how the particles are rotated in relation to one another. The forces acting between the particles depend only on the distance between them.

Enzymes grow artificial DNA : Nature News & Comment

Enzymes grow artificial DNA : Nature News: The artificial polymers, dubbed XNAs, carry the normal genetic 'alphabet' on a backbone made using different sugars. Scientists have previously developed XNAs that recognize and bind genetic sequences for experimental and biomedical applications, but is it difficult to make them in large quantities.

“Any time you want another XNA molecule, you’ve got to make more, but you can’t copy what you already made — until now,” says Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

Holliger and his team engineered enzymes that helped six types of XNA to assemble and replicate genetic messages. The enzymes transcribed DNA into the various XNAs, then back into new DNA strands — with 95% accuracy or more.

Pulse of light creates instant origami

Pulse of light creates instant origami: Watch a self-folding material produce a range of 3D shapes when subjected to heat.

Self-replication process holds promise for production of new materials

Self-replication process holds promise for production of new materials: In order to achieve self-replication of the BTX tile arrays, a seed word is needed to catalyze multiple generations of identical arrays. BTX's seed consists of a sequence of seven tiles -- a seven-letter word. To bring about the self-replication process, the seed is placed in a chemical solution, where it assembles complementary tiles to form a "daughter BTX array" -- a complementary word. The daughter array is then separated from the seed by heating the solution to ~ 40 oC. The process is then repeated. The daughter array binds with its complementary tiles to form a "granddaughter array," thus achieving self-replication of the material and of the information in the seed -- and hence reproducing the sequence within the original seed word. Significantly, this process is distinct from the replication processes that occur within the cell, because no biological components, particularly enzymes, are used in its execution -- even the DNA is synthetic.
"This is the first step in the process of creating artificial self-replicating materials of an arbitrary composition," said Paul Chaikin, a professor in NYU's Department of Physics and one of the study's co-authors.

Life-like cells are made of metal - New Scientist - New Scientist

Life-like cells are made of metal: "I am 100 per cent positive that we can get evolution to work outside organic biology," says Lee Cronin (see photo, right) at the University of Glasgow. His building blocks are large "polyoxometalates" made of a range of metal atoms – most recently tungsten – linked to oxygen and phosphorus. By simply mixing them in solution, he can get them to self-assemble into cell-like spheres.

DNA Origami Revolutionizes Metamaterial Manufacture - Technology Review

DNA Origami Revolutionizes Metamaterial Manufacture - Technology Review: The idea here is to cover gold nanoparticles with short strands of single strand DNA. At the same time, the complement of this strand is built into a bigger DNA structure called a scaffold. When the nanoparticles are placed in solution with the DNA scaffold, the complementary DNA strands bond together, attaching the nanoparticles to the scaffold...
Kuzyk and co have used this process to bind nine gold nanoparticles just 10nm across to strands of DNA, forming a helical shape. So the particles form the steps in a tiny spiral staircase...
The result is a fluid that takes on the optical properties of the helical nanoparticle structures. Any circularly polarised light travelling through the spiral will excite electronic waves called plasmons on the surface of the gold nanoparticles.

MAKE | 3D Printed Model of a Virus Self Assembles When Shaken

MAKE | 3D Printed Model of a Virus Self Assembles When Shaken: Professor Arthur J. Olson of Scripps demonstrates a 3D printed model of a virus that self assembles when shaken. Olson is head of the Molecular Graphics Laboratory, which uses 3D computer models, 3D printing, and augmented reality to create tools for life science researchers and educators.

Archimedean molecule creates brand new compounds - physics-math - 22 July 2011 - New Scientist

Archimedean molecule creates brand new compounds: ...has eight hexagonal and six square faces, by blending two types of carefully-designed molecular "tiles", one made of chemical groups known as guanidiniums, the other ringed by sulfonate groups. These assembled into the truncated octahedron by forming 72 hydrogen bonds.

iMobot modular robot technology licensed

iMobot modular robot technology licensed: Similar to Lego, iMobot is designed as a building block. However, unlike Lego, a single iMobot module is a fully functional robot with four controllable degrees of freedom. iMobot can roll, crawl, and creep.