Professor Pedro Reis transforms today’s annoyances, such as cables kinking and columns buckling, into tomorrow’s technology, according to the Spring 2014 issue of Spectrum. By exploring the mechanics and physics underlying natural and manufactured structures, he identifies and predicts how thin objects deform, and uses that knowledge to solve other engineering problems. “The ultimate goal is to discover, understand, and harvest mechanical instabilities in soft mechanical structures,” he says, “and then exploit those as novel functionalities over a wide range of length scales.” Read the full story: https://spectrum-mit-edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/articles/todays-annoyances-tomorrows-technology/