Materials engineers at MIT have created the carbon fiber equivalent of Lego bricks or K’Nex — interlocking carbon fiber blocks that can be formed into large structures that are 10 times stiffer than comparable ultralight materials. These structures could be mass-produced by automated robots, and fashioned into airplane and rocket fuselages, wings, and bridges, among other things. Interestingly, unlike almost every other object made from composite materials, objects made from MIT’s new structure can be easily disassembled or have individual “bricks” replaced when they break. “Can you 3D-print an airplane?” That is the question that MIT’s Neil Gershenfeld asked himself. As it turns out, 3D printing is a bit impractical for creating large objects like airplane wings or fuselages, but Gershenfeld working with Kenneth Cheung found that it was perfect for creating components that can then be fashioned into larger objects. Each of the bricks is fashioned out of carbon fiber impregnated with epoxy resin, formed into the shape of a flat X. Each X has a hole in the middle, which the leg of another X slots into (pictured above). The end result is a very stiff structure of vertex-connected octahedrons, or, as the researchers call them, “cubocts.” These cubocts can be added, removed,

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