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posted by on Wednesday January 25 2017, @03:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-laymen-call-it-silly-putty dept.

Now you can be both rubber and glue:

Rubber and steel are at different ends of the spectrum when it comes to hardness, and wherever an object falls on that scale is typically where it will stay. But researchers at the University of Michigan have now developed a metamaterial that can change the stiffness of its surface, from hard to soft and back, in response to a small amount of stress.

As artificial materials that can be finely tuned for a specific purpose, metamaterials can do some pretty incredible things that you won't find in nature. Interestingly, what they're made of doesn't seem to matter: instead, their attributes stem from their structure, and by manipulating that, engineers can develop metamaterials that could replace optic lenses, make objects effectively invisible, or create vehicle parts that are both very strong and very light.

The University of Michigan team says its new metamaterial specializes in switching its surface between hard and soft states. Applying a small amount of strain allows that stiffness to be changed by several orders of magnitude, without damaging or weakening the material itself.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @04:12AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @04:12AM (#458807)

    One of them was a fender bender, on the others the car was smashed in nearly to the windshield on one, hit the sidewall of the freeway side on, and one I nearly got t boned, but it was more like L.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @04:26AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @04:26AM (#458812)

    This is interesting, that much damage seems like you should have seen airbags firing...in at least one or two of the crashes you describe. As someone else noted, congrats on still being here.

    How old was your car(s) at the time of the accident(s)?
    Are you in a climate that promotes corrosion (salty water near ocean, or winter road salt) such that parts of the airbag electronics could be non-working due to bad connectors?

    Airbags are not perfect (I saw an early test crash, c.1975, where they all failed to work), but they do have a pretty good reliability record now (excluding Takata!!)