They also designed LEGO-like hydrogel building blocks that can be carefully assembled then tightly sealed together to form customized microfluidic devices —"lab-on-a-chip" systems used for drug ...

Soft building blocks, such as micelles, cells or soap bubbles, tend to adopt near-spherical geometry when densely packed together. As a result, their packing structures do not extend beyond those ...

Soft matter has evolved considerably since it became recognized as a unified field. This has been driven by new experimental, numerical and theoretical methods to probe soft matter, and by new ways of ...

A team of University of Waterloo researchers has created smart, advanced materials that will be the building blocks for a future generation of soft medical microrobots. These tiny robots have the ...