Is Mona Lisa smiling or frowning…and why does she have tentacles?!
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Octopi and squids can alter pigments in their skin to change how they look. What if we could too?
Enter Haoqing Yang and team at Pennsylvania State University.
They created printable gels with the same properties as octopi. Adapting to their environment, these gels change color over time. To show it off, the team printed the Mona Lisa onto the gels. When submerged in ethanol, she was invisible, but reappeared when the temperature changed!
This new technology could camouflage wearables and soft robots.
As for Mona Lisa, maybe she WANTED to be invisible… and live under the sea!
Reference: Yang, H., Li, H., Zhang, J., Liu, T., Qi, H. J., & Sun, H. (2025). Halftone-encoded 4D printing of stimulus-reconfigurable binary domains for cephalopod-inspired synthetic smart skins. Nature communications, 16(1), 9931.