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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Here’s an idea for a surgical procedure that would be right at home as a plot device in a science fiction film long before it receives FDA approval. It combines robot technology with a metal alloy ...

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 ...