Versatile building blocks make structures with surprising mechanical properties

[Drashner1]

It would be interesting to do some additional research on metamaterials and attempt to extrapolate future advances. I'll look over the submission guidelines for articles. What would you like to see?
Those voxels were huge, assembled by hand. Really useful commercial applications probably won't start being seen until they're manufacturing and assembling these at a microscopic level. At a guess, utility fog and utility sand would already include this technology, allowing different objects to have different properties based on which nanovoxels assembled where. Very complex group behaviors would arise from very simple unit behaviors, much like you see with ants, only with macroscopic physical properties.

In terms of what I'd like to see - Nothing specific really - although some notions were mentioned in the article itself. The description of the car 'bouncing back' would see to offer some initial applications up front.

In terms of making smaller voxels - While I agree with that in principle, I think that if this tech is already being demonstrated then it will likely have applications long before utility fog and such become available. Note that in the OA timeline, ufog isn't developed until about 1000 years from now. It very likely does use this tech in some fashion, and that could be mentioned in the article certainly. But more near term applications - such as flexible car bodies, aircraft hulls, wind turbines, etc. all come to mind. These wouldn't be as 'actively flexible' as ufog - which can restructure itself actively and in real time - but might be sort of 'universal building blocks' out of which a lot of stuff gets made.

Thinking about this a bit further - in RL there have been demonstrations of 3D printing tech that can build houses. What would combining that tech with voxels perhaps accomplish?

Agreed complex group behaviors could play a role to an increasing degree as the tech advances and is integrated with active automation.

One area with applications might be artificial muscles. There's fascinating ongoing research;
article with examples https://physicsworld.com/a/artificial-mu...the-twist/
Now combine this most recent research.

Agreed.

Todd