Jiyun Kim

Tensegrity structures provide both structural integrity and flexibility through the combination of stiff struts and a network of flexible tendons. These structures exhibit useful properties: high stiffness-to-mass ratio, controllability, reliability, structural flexibility, and large deployment. The integration of smart materials into tensegrity structures would provide additional functionality and may improve existing properties. However, manufacturing approaches that generate multimaterial par

Soft magnetic materials have shown promise in diverse applications due to their fast response, remote actuation, and large penetration range for various conditions. Herein, a new soft magnetic composite material capable of reprogramming its magnetization profile without changing intrinsic magnetic properties of embedded magnetic particles or the molecular property of base material is reported. This composite contains magnetic microspheres in an elastomeric matrix, and the magnetic microspheres a

Soft inflatable robots are a promising paradigm for applications that benefit from their inherent safety and adaptability. However, for perception, complex connections of rigid electronics both in hardware and software remain the mainstay. Although recent efforts have created soft analogs of individual rigid components, the integration of sensing and control systems is challenging to achieve without compromising the complete softness, form factor, or capabilities. Here, we report a soft self-sen

Large-scale screening of sequential drug combinations, wherein the dynamic rewiring of intracellular pathways leads to promising therapeutic effects and improvements in quality of life, is essential for personalized medicine to ensure realistic cost and time requirements and less sample consumption. However, the large-scale screening requires expensive and complicated liquid handling systems for automation and therefore lowers the accessibility to clinicians or biologists, limiting the full pote

Inspired by the adaptive features exhibited by biological organisms like the octopus, soft machines that can tune their shape and mechanical properties have shown great potential in applications involving unstructured and continuously changing environments. However, current soft machines are far from achieving the same level of adaptability as their biological counterparts, hampered by limited real-time tunability and severely deficient reprogrammable space of properties and functionalities. As

Technology for transforming a 2D pen drawing into a designed 3D structure enables highly accessible, rapid 3D fabrication.

Pen-drawing is an intuitive, convenient, and creative fabrication method for delivering emergent and adaptive design to real devices. To demonstrate the application of pen-drawing to robot construction, we developed pen-drawn Marangoni swimmers that perform complex programmed tasks using a simple and accessible manufacturing process. By simply drawing on substrates using ink-based Marangoni fuel, the swimmers demonstrate advanced robotic motions such as polygon and star-shaped trajectories, and

Advances in cancer research have shown that a tumor can be likened to a foreign species that disrupts delicately balanced ecological interactions, compromising the survival of normal tissue ecosystems. In efforts to mitigate tumor expansion and metastasis, experimental approaches from ecology are becoming more frequently and successfully applied by researchers from diverse disciplines to reverse engineer and re-engineer biological systems in order to normalize the tumor ecosystem. We present a r

Gas sensors are of great interest to portable and miniaturized sensing technologies with applications ranging from air quality monitoring to explosive detection and medical diagnostics, but the existing chemiresistive NO₂ sensors still suffer from issues such as poor sensitivity, high operating temperature, and slow recovery. Herein, a high-performance NO₂ sensors based on all-inorganic perovskite nanocrystals (PNCs) is reported, achieving room temperature operation with ul

Incorporating perception into robots or objects holds great potential to revolutionize daily human life. To achieve this, critical factors include the design of an integrable three-dimensional (3D) soft sensor with self-powering capability, a wide working range, and tuneable functionalities. Here, we introduce a highly compressible 3D-printed soft magnetoelastic sensor with a wide strain sensing range. Inspired by the lattice metamaterial, which offers a highly porous structure with tuneable mec

This protocol describes a way to introduce topography to three-dimensional (3D) biomaterials. The self-assembling behavior of magnetic particles can be exploited to form nanoscale to microscale fibers, such that one can dissect the contribution of topography on cell behavior, which is independent of other physical properties of the biomaterial (e.g., stiffness). The magnetic particles are chemically cross-linked with several extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins and then using magnetic force-media

This study aimed to raise awareness of maker education for pre-service teachers and discuss maker education in their major subjects by developing and applying a maker education course for pre-service teachers with various majors based on novel engineering (NE), a teaching and learning method that combines humanities and engineering. Accordingly, the course was developed following the procedure of the Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADDIE) model, and the educational

Molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂) is a promising electronic material owing to its excellent electrochemical features, high carrier mobility at room temperature, and widely tunable electronic properties. Here, through precursor engineering and post-treatments to tailor their phase and doping, electronic characteristics of MoS₂ are significantly modified. It is found that 2H semiconductor phase with nitrogen doping (N-doping) in flexible gas sensors constructed with Ag electrodes e