Artificial Muscle

What if a synthetic substance could contract like a muscle — fast, quietly, and powerfully? A team that has developed a new material to do this expects it to power systems for everything from helping nurses lift patients to powering torpedoes silently.

Interviewees from the MIT BioInstrumentation Laboratory: Ian Hunter, Director, and Patrick Anquetil and Naomi Davidson, researchers

2004

About These Documentaries

Upland created 20 short documentaries about topics in science, design, technology, and their intersections.

For each, we started by doing careful research and planning so that we could in most cases do all the interviewing and filming in a single day and edit to final cut within a week.

Most were funded in part by Technology Review and shown on the magazine's website alongside articles on the same topic. We selected topics with its editor-in-chief, but then did the rest of the work completely independently.

A few were funded in part by Children's Hospital Boston and used to raise funds for the hospital's medical research.