Adhesive loses its stick with heat

Like the sticky stuff on Post-It notes, a new epoxy adhesive can bind and unbind

A strip of rubbery adhesive (left) bonds one cylinder inside another. After heating, the cylinders slide apart (right). Patricia Sawyer

materials repeatedly.

The adhesive is the first epoxy that’s sticky enough to hold materials together at

low temperatures but that reversibly loses its grip when hot, says Jim Aubert,

whose team developed the epoxy at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque.