TUDelta News: Delft researchers have made hydrogels with tunable stiffness that seem promising for culturing stem cells and cleaning up oil slicks at sea.
Whether it is for applications in biomedical industry, petrochemicals or cosmetics, you don’t want your hydrogel to be too slimy or too stiff. Dr. Rienk Eelkema, and colleagues from his Advanced Soft Matter group (AS faculty), have recently discovered a simple way to make gels at room temperature with tunable stiffness thereby solving a long-standing problem of adjusting the texture. They published an article about it earlier this month online in Nature Chemistry. Read more.