Cover feature: https://www.science.org/toc/sciadv/7/19

After over 3 years, ‘Morphing Pasta and Beyond’, cover feature of Science Advances! I am so proud. Our dream comes true - design curiosity inspires and promotes science! Even our leading author, Tara Tao, is an industrial designer by training.

I am so proud. The dream of authentic morphing pasta we talked about a lot back when two of my co-authors (Teng Zheng and Wen Wang) and I were still researchers at MIT working with Hiroshi Ishii, Chin-Yi Cheng, and Daniel Levine in 2016 finally became true.

I am so proud, because ‘low-tech’ food is appreciated by a high-tech world.

I also really appreciate the process of co-writing for Science Advances, the academic rigor pushed us to reflect how to combine design creativity with scientific inquiry.

To all my 17 co-authors across Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Carnegie Mellon Mechanical Engineering Department, Material Science and Engineering, Carnegie Mellon College of Engineering, Syracuse University, Zhejiang University! They are: Tara Tao, Yi-Chin Lee, Haolin Liu, Xiaoxiao Zhang, Jianxun Cui, Catherine Mondoa, Mahnoush Babaei, Jasio Santillan, Guanyun Wang, Danli Luo, Di Liu, Humphrey Yang, Youngwook Do, Lingyun Sun, Wen Wang, Teng Zhang, and Lining Yao.

📣News: New York Times , Science Magzine, Scientific American, Fast Company, National Geographic, PBS, BBC, ABC NEWS, Science Friday, Smithsonian Magzine, Inverse, UK Daily Mail, Science News, Designboom, Yahoo, GIZMODO, TechXpore, physicsworld, NewScientist, cnet | Tracking Live Metrics
🏅 Honors: Cover Story of Science Advances, Fast Company Innovation by Design Award | Creative Food Cycles Honorable Mention Award

ONLINE COVERTo help ease society’s reliance on plastic, a major contributor to landfill waste, researchers previously proposed designing foods that can be flat-packed during transportation and storage, and later take on 3D shapes during preparation. One technique explored to aid the morphing of flour-based foods that met with some success was surface grooves, but previous research failed to reveal a reliable design to precisely yield specific shapes on-demand. To explore this mechanism, Tao et al. conducted simulations based on a polymeric gel model, then an edible pasta model, finding that they could accurately predict morphing in both materials. Next, the researchers demonstrated the mechanism and its ability to morph food by creating simple surface grooves in semolina flour dough while preparing an authentic Italian pasta recipe. The pasta swelled when they cooked it in boiling water, assuming 3D shapes based on the positioning of the grooves. Tao et al. modelled this swelling process, observing that the morphing caused by the surfaces grooves was temporary and reversible. Further experiments confirmed that the specific parameters of the grooves, including side angle, gap, width, and depth, are critical for determining how the pasta morphs into different 3D forms. [CREDIT: MORPHING MATTER LAB, CMU]

Science Advances