DR KEITH WHEELER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
To make an artificial muscle, you need a material with both strength and flexibility. A new gel-infused wood does the trick, and could someday be used for implanted muscles or external prosthetics.
Liangbing Hu at the University of Maryland and his colleagues created this new hydrogel material, starting with a block of wood. The structure of wood, with its strong, aligned fibres, is similar to the underlying structure of muscles.
Hu and his colleagues submerged the wood in bleach to …