Scientists have created a moving magnetic slime capable of encircling smaller objects, self-healing and “very large deformation” to squeeze and travel through narrow spaces.
The slime, which is controlled by magnets, is also a good electrical conductor and can be used to interconnect electrodes, its creators said.
The dark-colored magnetic blob has been compared on social media to Flubber, the eponymous substance in the 1997 sci-fi film, and described as a “magnetic turd” and “amazing and a tiny bit terrifying.”
The slime contains magnetic particles so that it can be manipulated to travel, rotate, or form O and C shapes when external magnets are applied to it.
The blob was described in a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Advanced Functional Materials as a “magnetic slime robot.”
“The ultimate goal is to deploy it like a robot,” said Li Zhang (張立), a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, who cocreated the slime.
For the time being, the slime lacks autonomy, he said, adding: “We still consider it as fundamental research — trying to understand its material properties.”
The slime has “visco-elastic properties,” Zhang said, meaning that “sometimes it behaves like a solid, sometimes it behaves like a liquid.”
It is made of a mixture of a polymer called polyvinyl alcohol, borax — which is widely used in cleaning products — and particles of neodymium magnet.
“It’s very much like mixing water with [corn] starch at home,” Zhang said.
Mixing the two produces oobleck, a non-Newtonian fluid whose viscosity changes under force.
“When you touch it very quickly it behaves like a solid. When you touch it gently and slowly it behaves like a liquid,” Zhang said.
While the team has no immediate plans to test it in a medical setting, the scientists envisage the slime could be useful in the digestive system, for example in reducing the harm from a small swallowed battery.
“To avoid toxic electrolytes leak[ing] out, we can maybe use this kind of slime robot to do an encapsulation, to form some kind of inert coating,” he said.
However, the magnetic particles in the slime are toxic. The researchers coated the slime in a layer of silica — the main component in sand — to form a hypothetically protective layer.
“The safety [would] also strongly depend on how long you would keep them inside of your body,” Zhang said.
He added that pigments or dye could be used to make the slime — which is currently an opaque brown-black hue — more colorful.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS