4D Printing: dawn of an emerging technology cycle

Biomimetic 4D printing.

Shape-morphing systems can be found in many areas, including smart textiles, autonomous robotics, biomedical devices, drug delivery and tissue engineering. The natural analogues of such systems are exemplified by nastic plant motions, where a variety of organs such as tendrils, bracts, leaves and flowers respond to environmental stimuli (such as humidity, light or touch) by varying internal tur...

Direct 4D printing via active composite materials

We describe an approach to print composite polymers in high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) architectures that can be rapidly transformed to a new permanent configuration directly by heating. The permanent shape of a component results from the programmed time evolution of the printed shape upon heating via the design of the architecture and process parameters of a composite consisting of a gl...

\"Internet of Things\": An Emerging Real-Time Technology for Environmental Health Monitoring

Chipless RFID, an emerging technology

Radiofrequency identification (RFID) is an established technique for automatic data captures exploiting reflected electromagnetic waves by scatters, usually called tags or transponders. In the last decades, roughly since the mid-1960s, very effective integrated circuit-based tags have been developed and implemented in numerous applications from the most simple like the electronic surveillance a...

What is an emerging technology?

There is considerable and growing interest in the emergence of novel technologies, especially from the policy-making perspective. Yet as an area of study, emerging technologies lacks key foundational elements, namely a consensus on what classifies a technology as ’emergent’ and strong research designs that operationalize central theoretical concepts. The present paper aims to fill this gap by d...