NYT: "A Shape-Shifting Plastic With a Flexible Future"

 Via the New York Times, this pretty cool new paper: 

With restrictions on space and weight, what would you bring if you were going to Mars? An ideal option might be a single material that can shift shapes into any object you imagine.

In the morning, you could mold that material into utensils for eating. When breakfast is done, you could transform your fork and knife into a spade to tend to your Martian garden. And then when it’s happy hour on the red planet, that spade could become a cup for your Martian beer.

What sounds like science fiction is, perhaps, one step closer to reality. Researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have created a new type of plastic with properties that can be set with heat and then locked in with rapid cooling, a process known as tempering. Unlike classic plastics, the material retains this stiffness when returned to room temperature.

The findings, published in the journal Science on Thursday, could someday change how astronauts pack for space.

Do click through to see the pretty cool video of the plastic doing its work. What a cool material - will be interesting to see what uses it gets up to.