Know when to fold ‘em is the basic tenet of Dr. George Barbstathis’s principle of nano-origami. The MIT engineer is developing basic principles that allows engineers to fold nanomaterials into simple 3-D structures.
Instead of paper cranes or frogs that most people associate with origami, engineers are making cubes that can be used as motors or capacitors that could help build better computer memory storage, faster microprocessors and even nanophotonic devices.
In this MIT video, flaps of a polymer sheet are folded to make the corner of a cube. An external magnetic field interacts with a current flowing through wires embedded in the sheet, causing the sheets to fold up.
