Materials that change their properties in response to different environmental triggers promise all kinds of versatility for all kinds of applications, and an international team of scientists has just come up with a particularly inventive one.

With an ability to stiffen up under a certain type of light and go soft in the dark, the new material shows particular promise for the world of 3D printing, where it could be used as a temporary support for complex structures that melts away when the job is done.

The new material is the handiwork of scientists from Australia’s Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Belgium’s Ghent University and Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and consists of a polymer structure that can change its structure in response to light, and then revert back again. Key to […]

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