Chemomechanical Coupling In their Research Article (10.1002/adma.202518567), Yuhang Hu and co-workers introduce a chemomechanically coupled “living” polymer that integrates concurrent mass transport, dynamic network remodeling, and evolving elasticity to enable continuous growth, degrowth, and post-fabrication stiffness tuning up to 100×. Light-activated localized growth and degradation enables precise spatial control. These capabilities enable new applications including transformative soft robotics, growable electronics, and regenerative devices.
Huang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.