Beefing up some muscles doesn’t take steroids or exercise — paraffin wax will do. Incorporating wax into artificial muscles spun from carbon nanotubes gives them superior flexing power, a discovery that could lead to smart materials such as fabrics that respond to environmental changes.
The new artificial muscles, about twice the diameter of a human hair, can lift 175,000 times their weight, outperforming mammalian muscles and all previously made artificial muscles (SN: 12/4/10, p. 20), a team reports in the Nov.16 Science.
“This is a new kind of smart material, different from all the rest,” says Mark Schulz, a mechanical engineer at the University of Cincinnati who was not involved in the research.