Research on Carbon nanostructures has been intense over the last three decades. One critical result of this investigation was the discovery of materials with extraordinary mechanical, electronic, and thermal properties, such as fullerenes, carbon nanotubes, and graphene. Further exploration revealed that mechanical strain can be used to control many of these properties. In this talk, we will discuss recent articles showing that deformation can control motion and adsorption at the nanoscale. In the first work presented, the topic will be the use of mechanical stimuli to control the motion of nanostructures. We will discuss the challenge of controlling the movement at the nanoscale and previous attempts at solving this issue. Then, recent results will be presented, which show how curved nanostructures can direct the movement of graphene and carbon nanotubes. The second topic discussed will be the use of strain to control the adsorption of gases on the surface of two-dimensional materials. After an overview regarding the control of properties with deformation, we will consider cases where strain increases and decreases gas adsorption. The use of strain to tune the channel size in porous materials for gas separation applications will also be explored.