ScienceDaily: Engineering and Construction News

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• Robot folds itself up and walks away: Demonstrates potential for sophisticated machines that build themselves
• Learning from origami to design new materials
• Synthesis of structurally pure carbon nanotubes using molecular seeds

Robot folds itself up and walks away: Demonstrates potential for sophisticated machines that build themselves Posted: 07 Aug 2014 11:59 AM PDT A team of engineers used little more than paper and Shrinky dinks -- the classic children's toy that shrinks when heated -- to build a robot that assembles itself into a complex shape in four minutes flat, and crawls away without any human intervention. The advance demonstrates the potential to quickly and cheaply build sophisticated machines that interact with the environment, and to automate much of the design and assembly process.

Learning from origami to design new materials Posted: 07 Aug 2014 11:58 AM PDT A challenge increasingly important to physicists and materials scientists in recent years has been how to design controllable new materials that exhibit desired physical properties rather than relying on those properties to emerge naturally. Now physicists and polymer scientists are using origami-based folding methods for 'tuning' the fundamental physical properties of any type of thin sheet.

Synthesis of structurally pure carbon nanotubes using molecular seeds Posted: 07 Aug 2014 07:43 AM PDT For the first time, researchers have succeeded in "growing" single-wall carbon nanotubes (CNT) with a single predefined structure -- and hence with identical electronic properties. And here is how they pulled it off: the CNTs "assembled themselves", as it were, out of tailor-made organic precursor molecules on a platinum surface. In future, CNTs of this kind may be used in ultra-sensitive light detectors and ultra-small transistors.

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