Chinese team creates ‘lifelike’ hydrogel that changes shape for smart devices
Por Victoria Bela — South China Morning Post – News feed
Advertisement Science China Science Chinese team creates ‘lifelike’ hydrogel that changes shape for smart devices
Light-activated hydrogel that can evolve with living tissue may ultimately help make more flexible brain-computer interfaces and robots
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Victoria Bela Published: 10:00pm, 6 Oct 2026 Chinese researchers have developed a “lifelike” shape-changing hydrogel they say could provide a platform for next-generation developments, such as flexible tissue engineering scaffolds, brain-computer interfaces and humanlike robots .
Inspired by living organisms, the team created a light-triggered system called STERS, which uses liquid metal particles to generate slow, self-sustaining chemical reactions that allow a hydrogel to change its structure over time.
Capable of growing and changing alongside living tissues, this adaptive system could inspire next-generation biomedical materials and devices . It could also have broad implications in fields such as regenerative medicine and soft robotics, according to the researchers.
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“This novel approach enables programmable, lifelike morphological evolution in hydrogels, spanning microscopic to macroscopic scales, minutes to weeks, and single to multiple transformation cycles,” the team said in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Matter on September 4.
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