Many of us have become familiar with the distinctive sound of multirotor toys, a sound frequently punctuated by sharp sounds of crashes. We’d then have to pick it up and repair any damage before ...

Catastrophic collapse of materials and structures is the inevitable consequence of a chain reaction of locally confined damage—from solid ceramics that snap after the development of a small crack to ...

Tensegrity structures are an impressive demonstration of how to achieve mechanical stability through tensile forces. Since the topic is currently trending it was probably only a matter of time before ...

Despite the fact that they bang their heads against trees on a daily basis, woodpeckers don't suffer brain injuries. Inspired by the tough-headed birds, scientists have developed a fixed-wing drone ...

Through his extensive research, inventions and structural experiments, Buckminster Fuller created the term tensegrity to describe "self-tensioning structures composed of rigid structures and cables, ...

A termite mound does not look engineered. It rises in rough, uneven towers, full of crooked passages and shifting pockets of air, yet it can regulate temperature, manage airflow and stay standing in ...

Much like sphere packing, crystalline materials can be similarly described via periodic packing of cylinders in 3D space. In this instance, the cylinders represented rods of strongly bonded atoms or ...

Tensegrity structures are isolated rigid compression components held in place by a continuous network of tensile components, and are central to natural systems such as the extracellular matrix and the ...

Engineers describe the creation of a new class of mechanical metamaterials that delocalize deformations to prevent failure. They did so by turning to tensegrity, a century-old design principle in ...