Microscopic origami boxes build themselves

Origami just got microscopic ? and autonomous. It's now possible to select the best flat starting shapes for making tiny boxes that build themselves.

This is tough as the number of possible 2D cut-outs is overwhelming. For a simple cube, there are just 11 different options, but a dodecahedron of 12 pentagon faces has 43,380.

A team led by David Gracias of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, made hinged nickel cut-outs, edged with alloy, using algorithms to choose the fastest-folding starting shape. Melting the alloy made the shapes fold into boxes less than a millimetre wide. The team found that the least spread-out starting shapes folded fastest.

"We have lots of cool technology from the chip manufacturing world for printing to 2D forms," says Erik Demaine of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who specialises in the mathematics of folding. "How do you nanomanufacture 3D surfaces? This provides a natural way to bridge that gap."

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1110857108

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