Making Big Things Out of Small Pieces

It looks like they’ve been playing, but researchers at MIT have developed a super strong material created out of interlocking small parts.

The new approach was described in a paper last week in the journal Science.

The concept, Gershenfeld says, arose in response to the question, “Can you 3-D print an airplane?” While he and Cheung realized that 3-D printing was an impractical approach at such a large scale, they wondered if it might be possible instead to use the discrete “digital” materials that they were studying.

Read more about the material from the MIT news office.