Origami-inspired Materials Could Soften The Blow For Reusable Spacecraft

Origami-inspired Materials Could Soften The Blow For Reusable Spacecraft

Origami-inspired materials could soften the blow for reusable spacecraft

Space vehicles like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 are designed to be reusable. But this means that, like Olympic gymnasts hoping for a gold medal, they have to stick their landings.

Landing is stressful on a rocket’s legs because they must handle the force from the impact with the landing pad. One way to combat this is to build legs out of materials that absorb some of the force and soften the blow.

University of Washington researchers have developed a novel solution to help reduce impact forces – for potential applications in spacecraft, cars and beyond. Inspired by the paper folding art of origami, the team created a paper model of a metamaterial that uses “folding creases” to soften impact forces and instead promote forces that relax stresses in the chain. The team published its results May 24 in Science Advances.

“If you were wearing a football helmet made of this material and something hit the helmet, you’d never feel that hit on your head. By the time the energy reaches you, it’s no longer pushing. It’s pulling,” said corresponding author Jinkyu Yang, a UW associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics.

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More Posts from Redplanet44 and Others

7 years ago

Do 5s often develop complexes about being fuckups or incompetent over small things, like not understanding something they weren't taught, or being forgetful, etc (I ask because I believe I have adhd and am a 5 core, and some of the difficulties from the disorder have given me a complex, which is one of the main reasons I typed myself as a 5, along with my really annoying tendency to need to show off my intelligence)

Yes, but it also sounds like you have a strong 3 fix. 5s hate this on a gut level because they can’t keep up their self image as completely competent and intelligent. 3s hate this because others see them failing at a task and 3s have trouble contextualizing that everyone fails at stuff and no one really cares. 

Plus “annoying tendency to show off my intelligence” is the hallmark of 3+5

7 years ago

What doesn't tear you makes you doper

Substitutional Defects ( 2 ) Are Point Defects In Which An Impurity Atom Takes The Place Of A Native
Substitutional Defects ( 2 ) Are Point Defects In Which An Impurity Atom Takes The Place Of A Native

Substitutional defects ( 2 ) are point defects in which an impurity atom takes the place of a native atom within the crystal lattice. Semiconductors often intentionally add substitional defects through doping, such as adding boron or phosphorous to silicon to create an n- or p-type semiconductor, and certain alloys include extraneous elements to create substitional defects for solution hardening purposes.

Image source.

7 years ago

So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.


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7 years ago
Scientists Print All-liquid 3-D Structures

Scientists print all-liquid 3-D structures

Reconfigurable material could be used for liquid electronics and chemical synthesis, among other applications

Scientists from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to print 3-D structures composed entirely of liquids. Using a modified 3-D printer, they injected threads of water into silicone oil – sculpting tubes made of one liquid within another liquid.

They envision their all-liquid material could be used to construct liquid electronics that power flexible, stretchable devices. The scientists also foresee chemically tuning the tubes and flowing molecules through them, leading to new ways to separate molecules or precisely deliver nanoscale building blocks to under-construction compounds.

The researchers have printed threads of water between 10 microns and 1 millimeter in diameter, and in a variety of spiraling and branching shapes up to several meters in length. What’s more, the material can conform to its surroundings and repeatedly change shape.

“It’s a new class of material that can reconfigure itself, and it has the potential to be customized into liquid reaction vessels for many uses, from chemical synthesis to ion transport to catalysis,” said Tom Russell, a visiting faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division. He developed the material with Joe Forth, a postdoctoral researcher in the Materials Sciences Division, as well as other scientists from Berkeley Lab and several other institutions. They report their research March 24 in the journal Advanced Materials.

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6 years ago
Carrying And Releasing Nanoscale Cargo With ‘nanowrappers’

Carrying and releasing nanoscale cargo with ‘nanowrappers’

This holiday season, scientists at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) – a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory – have wrapped a box of a different kind. Using a one-step chemical synthesis method, they engineered hollow metallic nanosized boxes with cube-shaped pores at the corners and demonstrated how these “nanowrappers” can be used to carry and release DNA-coated nanoparticles in a controlled way. The research is reported in a paper published on Dec. 12 in ACS Central Science, a journal of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

“Imagine you have a box but you can only use the outside and not the inside,” said co-author Oleg Gang, leader of the CFN Soft and Bio Nanomaterials Group. “This is how we’ve been dealing with nanoparticles. Most nanoparticle assembly or synthesis methods produce solid nanostructures. We need methods to engineer the internal space of these structures.”

“Compared to their solid counterparts, hollow nanostructures have different optical and chemical properties that we would like to use for biomedical, sensing, and catalytic applications,” added corresponding author Fang Lu, a scientist in Gang’s group. “In addition, we can introduce surface openings in the hollow structures where materials such as drugs, biological molecules, and even nanoparticles can enter and exit, depending on the surrounding environment.”

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7 years ago

The end of heartless b*tches

Swiss scientists just 3D printed an artificial heart that beats like the real thing
Scientists at Switzerland’s ETH Zurich have used 3D printing to create a functional beating heart made of silicone. Here's why.

This realistic 3D-printed silicon heart could help people in need of heart transplants when there are not enough donors.

7 years ago

I need some C - H - O - CO late

My Friend Just Sent Me This So Y'all Have To Suffer Too

My friend just sent me this so y'all have to suffer too

7 years ago

Biggest Ferris wheel ever: the Jupiter Eye

NASA Just Released Juno’s Brand-new Images Of Jupiter’s Red Spot — And They’re Jaw-dropping
NASA Just Released Juno’s Brand-new Images Of Jupiter’s Red Spot — And They’re Jaw-dropping
NASA Just Released Juno’s Brand-new Images Of Jupiter’s Red Spot — And They’re Jaw-dropping
NASA Just Released Juno’s Brand-new Images Of Jupiter’s Red Spot — And They’re Jaw-dropping
NASA Just Released Juno’s Brand-new Images Of Jupiter’s Red Spot — And They’re Jaw-dropping

NASA just released Juno’s brand-new images of Jupiter’s red spot — and they’re jaw-dropping

follow @the-future-now

6 years ago
Fish-Inspired Material Changes Color Using Nanocolumns

Fish-Inspired Material Changes Color Using Nanocolumns

Inspired by the flashing colors of the neon tetra fish, researchers have developed a technique for changing the color of a material by manipulating the orientation of nanostructured columns in the material.

“Neon tetras can control their brightly colored stripes by changing the angle of tiny platelets in their skin,” says Chih-Hao Chang, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of a paper on the work.

“For this proof-of-concept study, we’ve created a material that demonstrates a similar ability,” says Zhiren Luo, a Ph.D. student at NC State and first author of the paper. “Specifically, we’ve shown that we can shift the material’s color by using a magnetic field to change the orientation of an array of nanocolumns.”

The color-changing material has four layers. A silicon substrate is coated with a polymer that has been embedded with iron oxide nanoparticles. The polymer incorporates a regular array of micron-wide pedestals, making the polymer layer resemble a LEGO® brick. The middle layer is an aqueous solution containing free-floating iron oxide nanoparticles. This solution is held in place by a transparent polymer cover.

Read more.

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