A new smart material developed by researchers at the University of Waterloo, Canada, can be activated by both heat and electricity, making it the first fabric ever to respond to two different stimuli.

Stimuli-responsive materials (SRMs), as a novel category of smart materials, are able to change certain properties in response to external stimuli such as heat, light, pH, moisture and electricity, as well as magnetic fields. However, most researchers have mainly focused on single-responsive materials such as the shape memory of colour-changing properties, an academic paper on the technology explains (Multi-Stimuli Dually-Responsive Intelligent Woven Structures with Local Programmability for Biomimetic Applications).