Do good stories really lead to good lives? Studies suggest they do. York University psychology professor Ian McGregor and Holmes found that if you provide students with a story about a breakup and ask them to place the blame on just one of the parties, the students begin to believe their own stories. Two weeks later, even after re-reading the story, the students still said the person they previously defended was relatively innocent. Forty weeks after the first study, the participants had forgotten almost all the details, but they still knew who to blame.

“ Stories shape memory so dramatically,” says Holmes. “Once you tell a story, it’s hard to get out of that story’s framework and they get more dramatic over time. ”

This can either form a foundation (基础) for good marriages or separate couples. People who tell stories about partners that focus on their negative qualities will remember things that fit into that thesis and forget the positive characters they reported before. Negative storytellers tended to get divorced while people who told stories about. their partners’ strengths saw their relationships strengthen over time.

Taken together, psychologists’ research makes one point: We don’t just tell stories, stories tell us. They shape our thoughts and memories and even change how we live our lives.

Storytelling isn’t just how we construct our identities. Stories are our identities. Every story is a gift, a little part of yourself that you share with the audience. Who doesn’t like gifts?

4D printing creates objects capable of rearranging themselves in response to environmental stimulation. Given that they change with time, the fourth dimension in 4D printing is time. Printing with a material that changes in response to its environment has been done before to create some objects that can grow or shrink, open or close. To do these changes, the objects needed to be placed underwater.

The new ink developed by Del Pozo will make reversible (可逆的) change possible in normal conditions. The ink itself is made with liquid crystals instead of the previously used shape-memory polymers or hydrogels (水凝胶). Shape-memory, polymers cannot reverse their form changes and hydrogels can only reverse their changes underwater.

“ What we didn’t yet have was a more flexible material, capable of reversing its shape-shifting in various environments in response to stimulation (刺激). Now, we can adapt liquid crystals in multiple ways. We can play with not only the chemical composition but also the molecular (分子的) arrangement,” said Del Pozo.

“ Thus, materials can be designed that are responsive to humidity (湿度) or temperature and whose movement can be controlled. And by combining materials with different functionalities, printed objects can be organized to form a communicating system,” Del Pozo continued.

The ink is also light-sensitive, which provides many possible applications for the technology in combination with the other stimulation. Del Pozo looks forward to the potential for soft robots and medical applications such as printable artificial eyes.