Imagine repeatedly lifting 165 times your weight without breaking a sweat -- a feat normally reserved for heroes like Spider-Man.
New Brunswick engineers have discovered a simple, economical way to make a nano-sized device that can match the friendly neighborhood Avenger, on a much smaller scale. Their creation weighs 1.6 milligrams (about as much as five poppy seeds) and can lift 265 milligrams (the weight of about 825 poppy seeds) hundreds of times in a row.
Its strength comes from a process of inserting and removing ions between very thin sheets of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), an inorganic crystalline mineral compound. It's a new type of actuator -- devices that work like muscles and convert electrical energy to mechanical energy.
The Rutgers discovery -- elegantly called an "inverted-series-connected (ISC) biomorph actuation device" -- is described in a study published online today in the journal Nature.
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