After being severely and quasi-plastically distorted, shape memory materials (SMMs) are able to recover their original shape when a right stimulus is applied 1. This phenomenon is known as the shape ...

Polymers that exhibit shape-memory effect (SME) are an important class of materials in medicine, especially for minimally invasive deployment of devices. Professor Subbu Venkatraman and his group from ...

MedShape (Atlanta, GA) has been granted a U.S. patent for a shape memory polymer-based technology used in orthopedic applications. Shape memory polymers can "remember" more than one shape and ...

Shape memory materials that can revert back into a desired form after being bent, twisted and stretched are finding their way into a number of applications, ranging from sports bras to more efficient ...

The technique of keyhole surgery minimises scarring, speeds healing and reduces the risk of infection. However, it is extremely difficult to carry out delicate surgical procedures accurately in a ...

Imagine a world of shape-shifters. A surgeon inserts a small lump of plastic into an anesthetized patient and, like magic, it expands into a life-saving mesh tube that keeps a formerly clogged artery ...

While shape-memory materials do have some interesting potential applications, many of them require the application of heat in order to change shape – and that could cause problems, in ...

Technique could offer solutions for current limitations of static substrates used in bioengineering. Scientists report that they used shape memory polymers (SMPs) to study how cells sense and respond ...