A new strategy has been introduced to exploit mechanical buckling for autonomic origami assembly of three-dimensional (3D) microstructures across a wide range of material classes, including soft polymers and brittle inorganic semiconductors, and length scales from nanometers to centimeters. The engineered folding creases are created through spatial variation of thickness in the initial two-dimensional structures.

Joanna Aizenberg and her colleagues at the Harvard MRSEC developed Hydroglyphics to use readily accessible and safe materials to visually demonstrate the differences between hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces to a broad audience. This hands-on learning activity has been effective at teaching both elementary school students and their parents.

This University of Pennsylvania program immerses students in hands-on materials research while incorporating a recently piloted initiative: training participants to become effective science communicators. While students spend 10 weeks conducting advanced research projects, they simultaneously develop crucial skills in translating complex scientific concepts for broader audiences, particularly younger students.

UT Austin researchers used polarization-dependent terahertz magnetospectroscopy to observe Zeeman splittings and diamagnetic shifts in a series of Pb1-xSnxTe films, which transition from a topologically trivial insulator to a topological crystalline insulator (TCI) phase as the Sn concentration increases beyond 0.32. This study demonstrates a substantial phonon magnetic moment films in the TCI phase exhibited phonon magnetic moment values significantly larger—by two orders of magnitude—than those in the topologically trivial sample.

Anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR) is the difference in the resistivity of ferromagnetic materials in external magnetic field when the field is applied along or perpendicular to the current. In macroscopic materials the conductance is diffusive (the mean free path of the electron is much smaller than the device dimensions) and AMR is due to spin dependent scattering of impurities. Until recently AMR used to be the primary way of detecting magnetic fields (as in hard-drive read heads).

Here, we control the valence of DNA-functionalized emulsion droplets to make flexible colloidal polymers. We examine their conformational statistics to show that they are freely jointed. We demonstrate that their end-to-end length scales with the number of bonds in agreement with 2D Flory theory, and that their diffusion follows the Zimm model.

Take a trip down the microworld as roboticists Paul McEuen and Marc Miskin explain how they design and mass-produce microrobots the size of a single cell, powered by atomically thin legs -- and show how these machines could one day be "piloted" to battle crop diseases or study your brain at the level of individual neurons.

We investigated the electronic properties of interfaces between two laminated polymer films. The top polymer film (Fig. (a)) is transferred to a soft PDMS stamp, and laminated against the bottom film, previously spin-coated on a substrate. Using electron spectroscopy and Kelvin micro-probe techniques, we demonstrated that the process does not introduce any molecular shift due to interface dipole or surface states. We also showed that the interface is transparent to charge carrier transport, as shown in Fig. (b).

Researchers John Crocker and Andrew Liu at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered that biopolymer networks pruned by tension-inhibited methods remain rigid at much lower coordinations than those pruned randomly. This finding helps explain the evolutionary advantage of tension-inhibited filament-severing proteins in biological systems.

Disordered particulate solids are ubiquitous in items ranging from plastic to concrete. Despite their prevalence, applications can be limited because they are often brittle. In contrast, ductile materials can be deformed smoothly and significantly without fracturing. Strategies for tuning ductility of disordered solids are empirical and system-specific.  Liu, Riggleman and Durian used computer simulations of atomic and polymeric glasses and laboratory experiments on granular packings to develop a general Structuro-Elasto-Plastic (StEP) framework for understanding large-scale deformation of disordered solids in terms of the system-specific interplay between local structure, local rearrangements and larger-scale elasticity.