Imagine pulling on the long ends of a rectangular piece of rubber. It should become narrower and thinner. But what if it instead became wider and fatter? Now, push in on those same ends. What if the ...

I would say the largest man-made auxetic structure I am aware of was probably designed in the 1950s in the case of the graphite core in a number of nuclear reactors. So, on the scale of graphite ...

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 ...

Regardless of whether it is strained or compressed, the new material always expands. Copyright: Thomas Heine et al. Researchers have discovered a two-dimensional ...

Most materials get thinner when stretched, but “auxetics” do the opposite and get thicker. Helen Gleeson describes her group’s discovery of a material that is auxetic at the molecular level, which ...

Auxetics defy common sense, widening when stretched and narrowing when compressed. NIST researchers have now made the process of using them much easier. Such common-sense-defying materials do exist.