A German research team has prototyped an extraordinary heating/cooling system that stresses and unloads nickel-titanium "muscle wires" to create heated and cooled air at twice the efficiency of a heat ...

Manfred Wuttig, a material scientist at the University of Maryland who helped lead the team, said the metal's "fortuitous discovery," was part of a long, frustrating hunt for durable shape-memory ...

A new material that once deformed will automatically return to its original shape when heated has been developed by researchers in the US. While this is not the first such “shape-memory metal”, the ...

You’ve likely heard of Nitinol wire before, but we suspect the common base knowledge doesn’t go much beyond repeating that it’s a shape-memory alloy. [Bill Hammack], the Engineer Guy, takes us on a ...

Shape-memory metals, which can revert from one shape to a different one simply by being warmed or otherwise triggered, have been useful in a variety of applications, as actuators that can control the ...

Another Kickstarter, another opportunity for people to get mad at delayed and poorly functioning (if delivered at all) gadgets. This project aims to make airless tires for bikes and scooters using ...

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. A metal that can move on its own will play a key role in NASA’s next voyage to Mars A metal that can move on its ...

A good tire means a lot when the nearest roadside assistance is 34 million miles (55 million kilometers) away. For future rovers that will explore the surface of Mars, NASA scientists have created a ...

The NASA project Spanwise Adaptive Wing (SAW) has been around for a few years. The idea is to control outboard wing tip positions as much as 75 deg. to meet optimal demands in landing and takeoff, as ...

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 ...