The News
Science Friday NEWS BRIEF - POSTED MONDAY, APRIL 16, 2007
CRYSTAL BALL
Scientists have grown a bendable crystal. Masahiro Irie, a researcher at Osaka City University, Sugimoto in Osaka, Japan, and his colleagues grew microscopic, needle-shaped crystals from biological molecules. When zapped with ultraviolet light, the crystal bent a few degrees towards the incident light. It remained bent until it was exposed to visible light, which caused it to straighten. It bent and straightened eighty times without cracking and was even able catapult a gold ball that is ninety times heavier than itself, the researchers report in the journal Nature.
“It’s sort of a ‘gee whiz’ thing,” says J. Michael McBride, a researcher at Yale University in New Haven, CT and the author of an accompanying article in Nature.

The Research
Read the research behind this story in the journal Nature.
McBride's article.