Hydrogels—natural or synthetic polymer networks that swell in water—can be made
mechanically, chemically and electrically compatible with living tissues. There has been …

Stretchable materials, such as gels and elastomers, are attractive materials in diverse
applications. Their versatile fabrication platforms enable the creation of materials with …

Hydrogels have been developed since the 1960s for applications in personal care,
medicine, and engineering. Evidence has accumulated that hydrogels under prolonged …

The mechanical properties of polymer gels devote to emerging devices and machines in
fields such as biomedical engineering, flexible bioelectronics, biomimetic actuators, and …

Abstract Design of tough hydrogels maintaining structural integrity under multivariable
mechanical loads remains hugely challenging because the anticipated characteristics such …

A real polymer network is never perfect, but the quantification of network imperfection has
been elusive. Here we quantify the network imperfection of a polyacrylamide hydrogel …

Abstract Design of mechanical metamaterials with a negative Poisson's ratio (NPR), known
as auxetics, is of great importance in the development of flexible electronics and tissue …

Double-network (DN) hydrogels have received extensive attention owing to their excellent
mechanical properties such as high fracture toughness. It is widely accepted that the …

A rubber band is an elastic dissipater. It has narrow hysteresis on load and unload, but
dissipates all its elastic energy on snap. We hypothesize that the dissipation of elastic …

The resistance of a material to the growth of a crack is characterized by fracture toughness
under monotonic load, and by fatigue threshold under cyclic load. The fatigue threshold of …