Physicists and material scientists have succeeded in constructing a motor and an energy storage device from one single component. They used an elastic polymer fibre closed into a ring that was made to rotate on application of an external energy supply. The researchers from the universities in Heidelberg and Strasbourg (France) hope that this mechanism will spur the development of intelligent materials with precisely defined functions.
,,Our approach is minimalistic. We don’t rely on complex, high-tech materials but instead ask ourselves how the geometry and topology of a piece of material can elicit an intelligent function, such as rotation. ...
