On a structural level, the properties featured by a majority of mechanical metamaterials can be ascribed to the finite number of soft internal degrees-of freedom allowing for low-energy deformations.

Errors are everywhere, and mechanical failures are especially common: buckled grain silos and cracked support columns are, justly, seen as an issue to be avoided.

Without electronics carrying out computational tasks our daily lives would look very different. Devices such as elevators, vending machines, turnstiles, washing machines and even traffic lights use a simple form of electronic computing to switch from state to state. But, what if power supply is not…

Martin van Hecke and Lennard Kwakernaak (Leiden university and AMOLF) develop a mechanical metamterial that can count to ten in their research.

PhD candidate Jiangnan Ding explores how you can design a thick slab of rubber in a way that it might act as a mechanical computer bit. This so-called mechanical metamaterial is pushed in a specific way to change its shape. ‘With a very simple material, we might be able to do simple calculations in…