Flex Appeal: Researchers Create Carbon Nanotube Muscles

Researchers for decades have been developing polymers and other materials they hope to someday use to create artificial muscles that, when given an electrical charge, mimic the real thing more cheaply and effectively than the hydraulic systems and electric motors used today. A group of scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas' Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute reports in Science today that they have demonstrated a fundamentally new type of artificial muscle, consisting almost exclusively of carbon nanotubes, which can operate at extreme low temperatures that would cause other artificial muscles systems to freeze and at very high temperatures that would cause other muscle systems to decompose