Featured on the cover of a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a paper by Physics graduate student Hunter King, former postdoc Robert Schroll, and professors Benny Davidovitch and Narayanan Menon. Their work identifies a fundamental difference in the symmetry-breaking processes that lead to wrinkling and crumpling of a thin sheet.

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A story in Physics Today highlights the work of UMass postdoc James Hanna and Professor Christian Santangelo. Along with colleagues in the Polymer Science Department, they have developed a method to program 2D polymer films to buckle into nearly arbitrary 3D shapes. A polymer film is patterned with an array of dots whose size determines the degree a region of the gel will swell in response to a temperature change. Their research appears in the March 9th issue of Science magazine and is featured in a Perspective.