New Class of Materials that Self-Assemble Discovered by Scientists in Illinois

Imagine you have just bought a very nice lamp. The box that it comes in is small enough to fit in your pocket. When you get home and open the box, the lamp is just a small clump of some unusual material. But when you put it in some salt water, the small clump grows into a lamp base. All you have to do is put the wiring in and you have a functional lamp.

Now imagine doing this with other things in your life. For example, anything that is made of plastic, for example, could grow itself from scratch and then regenerate. And this futuristic material would even defy physics, being made from something different from your standard molecules and atoms. Sound impossible? Well, actually, scientists have already done it.

According to Medical News Today:

"Researchers at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University have demonstrated bio-inspired structures that self-assemble from simple building blocks: spheres. The helical "supermolecules" are made of tiny colloid balls instead of atoms or molecules."

The findings of the researchers will be published in the January issue of Science. The scientists can now make a whole new class of materials with functions that couldn't even be imagined in the past.

The spheres have both a positive and negative side. The positive sides attract while the negative sides repel each other.

If you put the stuff in pure water it simply dissolves because the sides all repel each other, but with the addition of salt, the ions in the salt soften the repel reaction and the spheres can bind together and grow.

Just like atoms that assemble into molecules, these spheres can assemble themselves into supracolloids, Up until this point, no one realized that particles could behave in this way before. These smart materials could be designed to fall into patterns that nature wouldn't choose. They also choose the highest energy pattern.

In science fiction, when an alien spacecraft crashes to the Earth and the pieces are recovered, they are always made out of a material with super properties that we have never seen before. Could the new material discovered by the scientists in Illinois be eventually leading up to that? Who knows?

Right now, finding materials that can travel through the extreme elements of space and survive re-entry into our atmosphere are extremely hard to produce. But if these materials can self-replicate, then journeys to new planets may be realized.

Source: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/213758.php