Shapeshifting to Order

This elegantly blooming flower isn’t growing on a plant and it’s certainly not natural. Instead, it’s been constructed in the lab from shape-shifting hydrogels – special polymers that can switch on cue from one form into another. Over the years a number of shape-changing materials have been developed, but they all need an external trigger to transform themselves. It might be something like altering the temperature or acidity, or adding particular chemicals. The polymers making up this flower are different, as they’re programmed to change shape at predetermined times without any external input. This clever trick happens due to the way that energy is stored up in the chemical bonds between the hydrogel molecules when the structure is created. While this flower might be pretty, a more useful application could be to make delayed-release drug delivery systems or even shape-shifting implants that spring into shape once they’re in the right place.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image/video from work by Xiaobo Hu and Jing Zhou, and colleagues
• Department of Polymer Science, University of Akron, OH and Department of Chemistry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA
• Image/video licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY-4.0) licence
• Published in Nature Communications, September 2016