Real life morphing technology

[Michael Pajaro]

I've never been a fan of morphing in science fiction. It always seemed too magical to me. A writer would throw out some buzzwords about nano-technology and then think that gave them free reign to do whatever they wanted with the science. It just seemed like cheating to me. I wasn't happy to hear that the Knight 3000 morphs.

Turns out, the geeks at Carnegie Mellon are doing research creating morphing materials at a much higher level than the "smart metals" I've seen before. The concept is that they would have millions of tiny magnetic robots which could cling to eachother in any imaginable shape, and then reconfigure themselves to form other shapes. They call the technology "claytronics".

Here's the website describing the program, including a video showing how claytronics could be used in car design. This level of morphing is purely in the theoretical stage, but they're saying that the concept is sound:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~claytronics/

If it's good enough for Carnegie Mellon, then as far as I'm concerned it's good enough for Knight Rider.