![MRS Bulletin Materials News Podcast artwork](https://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Podcasts113/v4/6d/7b/08/6d7b08c6-549c-9606-a4f7-76693377b522/mza_6858712600852089095.jpg/100x100bb.jpg)
Episode 4: CareGum stretches, conducts electricity, and heals itself
MRS Bulletin Materials News Podcast
English - October 11, 2021 10:00 - 9 minutes - 6.3 MB - ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsScience News Tech News materials research materials science 3d bioprinting artificial intelligence machine learning bioelectronics perovskites quantum materials robotics and synthetic biology Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Omar Fabian: It’s summer and film director James Cameron has just dropped another scorching hit. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, we find mother-son duo Sarah and John Connor running for their lives, and for the lives of all humankind, with the help of a bad cyborg turned good played by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger. There are so many undoubtedly cool visual features to take away from this iconic film. Little known fact: it actually won four Academy awards for its sound and visual effects. But if you ask around, more than likely, you’ll find that the coolest has to be the T-1000: the liquid-metal robot sent from the future to destroy John Connor and ensure victory for our machine overlords.
Alireza Dolatshahi-Pirouz: You have this robot that, it’s not electronic but it’s still a robot and it’s because somehow that material that made it is self-healing and it’s animated in some ways that we couldn’t understand back then.
[OF]: That’s Alireza Dolatshahi-Pirouz, a professor in the Department of Micro- and Nanotechnology at the Technical University of Denmark.
You might remember him from a previous episode of our podcast, where he described how his group is developing stretchy, eco-friendly electronics they describe as “fleco”—
[ADP]: “So flexible and eco, fleco”.
[OF]: Now, they’re back with a new material that stretches, conducts electricity, and perhaps most astoundingly, heals itself—not unlike the T-1000 from Terminator 2, which Dolatshahi-Pirouz admits was the inspiration for his lab-work.
The team calls their new wonder material CareGum.