Active matter could revolutionize everything from clothing to robots, but what is it?

“Normal passive matter like a book lying on your table won’t open the pages by itself and turn the pages. It’s passive and sits there unless an external force acts on it,” says Seth Fraden, a physicist from the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at Brandeis University.

“With active matter, you can take the internal energy and have that be converted into mechanical energy that can lead to self-propulsion,” he says.

In this episode of The Take: Big Ideas Explained in Under Five Minutes, Fraden explains what active matter is and how it can be used to create machines and materials that behave like living organisms.

Source: Brandeis University

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