Auxetics defy common sense, widening when stretched and narrowing when compressed. NIST researchers have now made the process of using them much easier. Such common-sense-defying materials do exist.

Pick up an elastic band and stretch it lengthways as if you were going to `ping' it at somebody. Before letting fly, look at the width of your elongated missile - it's thinner than an unstretched band ...

Imagine pulling on the long ends of a rectangular piece of rubber. It should become narrower and thinner. But what if, instead, it got wider and fatter? Now, push in on those same ends. What if the ...

If you stretch an elastic band, it becomes thinner - a physical behavior that applies to most "common" materials. Since the 20th century, an opposite behavior has been known in materials research: The ...

Stem cells -- the body's master cells -- demonstrate a bizarre property never before seen at a cellular level, according to a study. The property -- known as auxeticity -- is one which may have ...

Most of us think we have a pretty solid grasp on basic physics, and one of the assumptions we've come to form is that any material gets thinner as it's stretched. It makes sense, since the same amount ...

As materials age, they 'remember' prior stresses and external forces, which scientists and engineers can then use to create new materials with unique properties. A new study published in Science ...

Inspired by the humble deep-sea sponge, RMIT University engineers have developed a new material with remarkable compressive strength and stiffness that could improve architectural and product designs.

Stretch just about any material and what happens to it? It gets thinner, of course. It turns out that this isn’t a universal rule, however. Scientists at the U.K.’s University of Leeds have discovered ...

A new study by University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania scientists shows that as materials age, they ‘remember’ prior stresses and external forces, which researchers can then use to create ...

Such common-sense-defying materials do exist. They’re called auxetics, and they have a raft of unique properties that make them well-suited for sneaker insoles, bomb-resilient buildings, car bumpers ...