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Scientists Discover Way to Send Information into Black Holes Without Using Energy

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Scientists Made One Material Behave Like Several Different Materials

 What if a single sustainable material could be made rigid in one area, flexible in another and strong somewhere else—without joining different materials together?

Researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) have developed a new approach that could make this possible. By adding tiny amounts of different metal ions to chitosan, the team found a way to locally control how stiff, strong and flexible the material becomes while keeping the same basic polymer.

The research, published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A, takes inspiration from one of nature’s most efficient designs: the insect exoskeleton.

Learning from insect exoskeletons

Modern products often depend on several different materials. A bottle may have a rigid body and a flexible cap or seal. Electronic devices can contain hard casings, soft protective layers and flexible components.

Although combining materials can provide useful properties, it creates a major problem when the product reaches the end of its life.

Different materials usually have to be separated before they can be recycled effectively.

“Today, the main bottleneck in recycling isn't the material itself—it's recovering and sorting the different materials that make up a single object,” explains Javier G. Fernández, ICREA research professor at IBEC and leader of the study.

The researchers wanted to explore a different idea: What if one material could perform several mechanical functions simply by changing its properties from one location to another?

Nature already uses this strategy.

Insects, for example, have exoskeletons made primarily from chitin. Yet their bodies are not uniformly rigid. Some regions need to be hard and protective, while others must remain flexible enough for movement.

Their joints need flexibility, while structures such as the thorax require greater stiffness and strength.

Instead of building these structures from completely different materials, nature modifies the properties of the same basic material.

The IBEC team attempted to reproduce this principle using chitosan.

A renewable material with adjustable properties

Chitosan is a biopolymer derived from chitin. Chitin is commonly found in the shells of crustaceans such as shrimp and crabs, but it can also come from fungi, insects and other renewable sources.

This makes chitosan particularly interesting for sustainable material development.

The researchers began with thin films of chitosan and introduced small amounts of copper, zinc or nickel ions while the polymer was dissolved.

As the material dried, the metal ions became trapped within its structure.

The team then used an alkaline treatment to make natural binding sites within the chitosan more available. These sites could interact with the metal ions and influence how the polymer chains were connected and organized.

Importantly, the researchers did not need to create completely new polymers.

Instead, they could change the mechanical behavior of the same underlying material by selecting a different metal.

One material can behave in very different ways

The results showed significant differences between the metal-treated versions of chitosan.

Under dry conditions, zinc-doped chitosan became more than 50% stronger and stiffer than ordinary chitosan. However, this increased strength came with reduced stretchability.

Copper produced almost the opposite effect.

Copper-doped chitosan became more compliant and could stretch much further before breaking, although it sacrificed some strength.

Nickel-doped chitosan showed properties between the copper and zinc versions under dry conditions.

This means that researchers could potentially choose the metal depending on what a particular section of a product needs to do.

A section that needs to provide structural support could be made stiffer, while another area designed to bend or move could remain more flexible.

An unexpected change in water

One of the most interesting findings appeared when the materials were exposed to water.

Ordinary chitosan, along with the copper- and zinc-doped versions, became weaker when wet.

That behavior is not surprising. Many biological and bio-inspired materials lose mechanical strength when they absorb water.

But the nickel-doped chitosan behaved differently.

Instead of becoming weaker, it became stronger and stiffer when wet.

The researchers had previously observed this unusual behavior in a related chitosan-nickel material and investigated its underlying mechanism in an earlier study published in Nature Communications.

The finding could be particularly useful for applications where a sustainable material needs to operate in humid or wet environments.

Building a material that folds like an insect wing

To demonstrate the concept, the researchers created a fan-shaped, origami-inspired structure using different versions of chitosan.

The structure combined stiff, nickel-doped chitosan with flexible, untreated chitosan within a single continuous sheet.

This allowed different areas of the sheet to perform different mechanical roles.

The idea was similar to an insect wing, where different regions of a continuous structure can provide movement and support without requiring separate pieces to be attached.

“We wanted to show, in a single object, that you can fold and unfold it in a controlled way—like an insect wing—without any glue, seams or separate parts,” says Akshayakumar Kompa, a postdoctoral researcher in Fernández's group and first author of the study.

This is an important difference from conventional multimaterial manufacturing.

Instead of manufacturing several components and assembling them afterward, manufacturers could potentially create one continuous material with programmed mechanical regions.

What happens when the material enters soil?

The researchers also examined how the different chitosan films degraded in soil.

After three weeks, the materials showed significant differences.

The zinc-doped films had completely degraded. Copper-doped films lost approximately half of their mass, while nickel-doped films lost around a quarter of their mass.

The slower degradation of nickel-doped chitosan is consistent with its greater mechanical stability, particularly under wet conditions.

However, the researchers emphasize that more work is needed to fully understand what happens during this breakdown.

Future studies will need to distinguish biological degradation from processes such as dissolution and fragmentation. Researchers also plan to measure how much metal is released and determine the environmental safety of the resulting materials.

Could this change sustainable product design?

The research presents a different way of thinking about sustainable materials.

Instead of searching for one material that has every desired property, engineers could potentially start with one renewable material and locally program its properties.

That could make it possible to design objects containing rigid, flexible and moving regions without relying on multiple permanently joined materials.

Such an approach could eventually be useful for biointegrated devices, flexible structures, packaging, soft robotics and other applications where different mechanical behaviors are required in different areas.

However, the technology is still at an early research stage. The team needs to test how these materials perform after repeated movement, determine whether the manufacturing process can be scaled up and understand their long-term environmental behavior.

The bigger idea is inspired by nature: one material does not necessarily have to behave the same way everywhere.

By controlling its local structure, scientists may be able to create sustainable objects that are strong where they need to be strong and flexible where they need to move—all without turning the final product into a complicated mixture of different materials.

The study, by Akshayakumar Kompa and colleagues, is titled “Artificial reproduction of chitinous mechanical versatility through metal doping and its use in resource-efficient product design” and was published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A in 2026. DOI: 10.1039/d6ta04260k.

Reference: Akshayakumar Kompa, Javier G. Fernandez; Artificial reproduction of chitinous mechanical versatility through metal doping and its use in resource-efficient product design. J. Mater. Chem. A 2026; 14 (52): 35871–35878. https://doi.org/10.1039/d6ta04260k

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