In other words, this biodegradable polymer material, just a few atoms in size, can target and kill harmful microbes.

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In a process the researchers describe in articles published today in Science and Advanced Materials, they used a silicon needle with a tip about ten thousand times smaller than an ant to sculpt a polymer material known as polyphthalaldehyde.

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The bills' polymer material was exposed to temperatures as high as 284 degrees Fahrenheit and as low as minus-103 degrees in the central bank's laboratories and in a series of independent labs, according to Martine Warren, chemist and scientific adviser at the Bank of Canada.

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They turned an electroactive polymer into an actuator so that the material could change to exert force with an electrical signal, basically creating an exomuscle.

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Wherever the light hits the material, it hardens into a polymer, creating a grid of cells full of liquid crystal.

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Takao Someya of the University of Tokyo has built for himself a stretchy, flexible conducting material using carbon nanotubes mixed with a polymer.

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However, it is not possible to anneal the metal oxides, an active material, at this high temperature on flexible polymer substrates.

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Dr Greenhalgh's solution was to use a polymer gel-based resin that combines two networks of cross-linking structures, one that holds the material together and the other providing a conduit for charged particles.

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