Engineers at North Carolina State have created a polymer structure that does something almost unsettling: it remembers multiple stable shapes and snaps between them on command. Inspired by the geometry of a Chinese lantern, the design compresses into one form, twists into another, and can be triggered remotely with a magnetic field.
The breakthrough sits at the intersection of materials science and mechanical engineering—the kind of work that feels abstract until you realize it could grip a live fish without crushing it, or seal a water filter that suddenly needs to open.
How It Actually Works
Start with a thin polymer sheet cut into a diamond shape. Add evenly spaced cuts across the middle, creating parallel ribbons held together at the top and bottom by solid strips. Join those strips at the ends, and the sheet bends outward into a rounded lantern form. This is stable. Push down from the top, and something remarkable happens: the structure resists, resists, then suddenly snaps into a completely different shape—like a spinning top—storing all the energy you just applied. Release it, and that stored energy snaps it back just as fast.
We're a new kind of news feed.
Regular news is designed to drain you. We're a non-profit built to restore you. Every story we publish is scored for impact, progress, and hope.
Start Your News Detox"This basic shape is bistable," explains Jie Yin, the mechanical engineering professor who led the work. "It has two stable forms." But the team didn't stop there.
Yaoye Hong, who conducted the research as a Ph.D. student at NC State, discovered the lantern could be reshaped in dozens of ways. Twist it. Fold the solid strips. Combine compressions and twists. Each variation is also multistable—some flipping between two states, one capable of four stable configurations depending on how you manipulate it.
Then came the practical leap: the researchers embedded a thin magnetic film into the bottom strip. Now the shape-shifting happens remotely, triggered by an external magnetic field. In demonstrations, they showed a gentle gripper that could hold a fish without injury, a water filter that opened and closed to control flow, and a collapsed tube that suddenly extended upward to reopen itself.
Why This Matters
The real power is that none of this is magic—it's engineered. The team developed a mathematical model that predicts how the geometry influences stability, stored energy, and the force released when the structure snaps. "This model allows us to program the shape we want to create, how stable it is, and how powerful it can be," Hong says. "All of those things are critical for creating shapes that can perform desired applications."
That's the shift from novelty to utility. You're not just watching a shape-shifter; you're designing one for a specific job.
The work, published in Nature Materials in October 2025, opens a path toward what Yin calls "shape-morphing mechanical metamaterials"—building blocks that could be assembled into 2D and 3D structures for robotics, adaptive infrastructure, and systems that need to change form without motors or complex electronics. A single polymer unit that stores and releases energy on demand is simpler, lighter, and more reliable than most alternatives.
The next phase is scaling up: assembling these lantern units into larger architectures to see what becomes possible when one shape-shifter connects to another.
