{"id":234635,"date":"2026-04-05T02:05:30","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T07:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/scientists-discover-strange-property-of-rice-and-turn-it-into-a-smart-material"},"modified":"2026-04-05T02:05:30","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T07:05:30","slug":"scientists-discover-strange-property-of-rice-and-turn-it-into-a-smart-material","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/scientists-discover-strange-property-of-rice-and-turn-it-into-a-smart-material","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Discover Strange Property of Rice and Turn It Into a Smart Material"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-discover-strange-property-of-rice-and-turn-it-into-a-smart-material.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Rice behaves in an unexpected way under pressure. When compressed quickly, it becomes weaker, but under slow pressure it stays strong. This insight is helping scientists develop a new material that could be used in \u201csoft\u201d robots that automatically adjust stiffness, as well as protective gear that responds to how fast an impact occurs.<\/p>\n<p>Using this property, researchers created a new type of \u201cmetamaterial,\u201d an engineered structure designed to exhibit behaviors not found in natural materials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rice behaves in an unexpected way under pressure. When compressed quickly, it becomes weaker, but under slow pressure it stays strong. This insight is helping scientists develop a new material that could be used in \u201csoft\u201d robots that automatically adjust stiffness, as well as protective gear that responds to how fast an impact occurs. Using [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1635,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-234635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234635\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}