share an interesting but somewhat confusing research demonstration seen today: a researcher made a Rubik's cube out of gel material. This is what the Rubik's cube looks like when it turns:

what's so special about this Rubik's cube? It is all based on the same gel material, with no additional adhesive and no connection structure in the middle of the Rubik's cube. Just stack 27 small gel squares together, they can stick to each other without falling apart, they can also rotate, and the color patch affixed to the surface of the gel square will not fall off.

here is the assembly process of gel Rubik's cube:

Gel sheets with different fluorescent colors are pasted on six sides of the cube:

27 such squares are stacked together:

so, what exactly is this trying to say?

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in fact, a self-healing gel material based on acyl Hydrazone bond and an aggregation-induced luminescence (AIE) technique for fluorescent color generation are demonstrated here. When such gel materials come into contact with each other, they will form a covalent bond (acyl Hydrazone bond) on the contact surface over time, and the gel will automatically stick together. If exposed for a short time (1 hour), the adhesion is still weak and can be broken relatively low, while if exposed for a long time (24 hours), they will stick together firmly.

(this is an illustration in the paper, where the gels touch each other to form an acyl Hydrazone bond)

and this gel Rubik's cube actually shows different adhesion effects for a short time and a long time at the same time. The color patch and the gel cube are placed together for a long time, while the cube is assembled into a Rubik's cube for only a short time. Therefore, when turning the Rubik's cube, the small cubes can still be separated from each other, and the color patch on the surface will not fall off.

of course, it's easy to cheat if you want to restore such a Rubik's cube: it's easy to reassemble the cubes one by one. In addition, if the Rubik's cube has been kept for too long, it may not work.

this magical research paper is published on Advanced Materials. The original article can be found at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adma.201902365