In this video excerpt from NOVA's "Making Stuff: Smarter", host and New York Times technology columnist David Pogue visits Virginia Tech, where scientists are developing an artificial jellyfish that ...

Engineers are closing in on a long imagined goal in aviation, wings that can subtly change shape in midair instead of relying ...

Humanity may be divided on a great many issues, but most would agree that it would be very cool to have airplane wings made of shapeshifting metal. The geometry of those fabulous foils affects ...

The secret to how steel hardens and shape-memory alloys snap into place lies in rapid, atomic-scale shifts that scientists have struggled to observe in materials. Now, Cornell researchers are ...

What is a shape memory alloy? Shape memory alloys or SMA's are metals that exhibit shape memory properties. The shape memory effect was first discovered in 1932 in a silver-cadmium alloy. It allows ...

Besides superfluous features like touchscreens and internal cameras, basic refrigerator technology hasn't changed much in decades. They still chill your milk by way of chemical refrigerants and ...

Some metal alloys will "remember" a shape when you heat them to the same temperature they were originally shaped at. So a straight wire made from one of these "shape memory alloys" might change back ...

Imagine a world of shape-shifters. A surgeon inserts a small lump of plastic into an anesthetized patient and, like magic, it expands into a life-saving mesh tube that keeps a formerly clogged artery ...

The basis of the nickel-titanium shape memory alloy (SMA) class is the intermetallic equiatomic binary alloy NiTi. Its moderate solubility range allows its composition to be changed, and also enables ...