This has been evolving through my own lifetime and the concepts extend into chemistry to produce proteins. It has a clear game like aspect that has given it life. Now we have 30,000 + shapes and a number of evolved memes that are allowing us to potentially model the behavior of proteins.
It will become a natural extension of organic chemistry and it will become possible to engineer behavior. It will lend itself to AI assistence.
No one could ever have imagined this from folding a paper airplane.
Origami
Playing with paper
With the ancient art of origami, a sheet of paper can become almost anything. But in the modern age, the practice has moved beyond decorative planes and cranes. By fusing paper folding and technology, scientists and engineers are using the art form to help shape the future.
“When you understand how paper folds, you can apply it to other things,” Robert Lang, a former NASA physicist who left to pursue his origami enthusiasm full time, tells Great Big Story. From self-folding robots to portable research stations, the underlying principles of origami have proved crucial for technological progress. Origami, after all, is an intrinsic part of life on earth. But more on that later. First, come into the fold.
Brief History
Once upon a fold
Paper-folding
traditions have long existed around the world, although these separate
histories didn’t converge into origami until the 20th century. According
to Nick Robinson’s The Origami Bible, Japanese origami began when Buddhist monks folded paper to use in ceremonies during the 6th century. The paper came from China, where it was often folded and burned during burial rites. In Europe, napkin folding thrived during the 16th and 17th centuries, though paper folding in Spain could date back as far as the 12th century.
Akira Yoshizawa, considered the father of modern origami,
created a universally accessible system for origami instructions in
1954, which meant that folders around the world then had a uniform way
to practice their art. This caught the eye of Samuel Randlett and Robert
Harbin, two other origami enthusiasts, who added their own symbols to
create the standard Yoshizawa-Randlett system in 1961. (You can find an introduction to basic origami folds here.)
That’s when origami started to gain interest in the West. Erotic folklorist and paper-folding enthusiast Gershon Legman organized an exhibition of Yoshizawa’s art
at a gallery in Amsterdam in 1955. Shortly thereafter, well-connected
New York housewife Lillian Oppenheimer, who would popularize the art in
books with pioneering puppeteer Shari Lewis, began what would become the Origami Center. One of its members was Martin Gardner,
then just starting a decades-long run as a beloved Scientific American
columnist; one of his early columns, in 1959, was devoted to origami.
By the digits
50,000: Origami models made by Akira Yoshizawa during his lifetime
913: Folds required for Hans Birkeland’s Red Sea Urchin7: Number of axioms describing the geometry of origami, discovered by mathematicians Humiaki Huzita and Koshiro Hatori
100: Number of standard origami designs circa 1950
30,000: Number of origami designs five decades later
Quotable
“When I’m folding, it’s like working with an old friend. It’s like dancing with a partner whose moves I know.”
True story
The girl who wanted to live
Sadako Sasaki
was only two kilometers (1.2 miles) away from where the atomic bomb
fell on Hiroshima in 1945. She was two years old. As a result of
radiation sickness, Sasaki was diagnosed with leukemia when she was 12.
With only a year to live, she decided to fold 1,000 paper cranes. In Japanese culture, cranes are known as “birds of happiness,” and the myth goes that if you fold 1,000 paper cranes, known as senbazuru, your wish will come true.
Sadako and the 1000 Paper Cranes is
a historical novel by Eleanor Coerr based on the real story of Sasaki.
In Coerr’s retelling, Sasaki’s only wish was to live, but she only made
it to 644 cranes when she became too weak to fold any more, and she died
shortly after. However, according to Sadako’s older brother, Masahiro Sadako, she actually exceeded her goal in real life.
The Children’s Peace Monument
in Hiroshima commemorates Sadako, as well as all the other children who
lost their lives because of the atomic bombs. Every year, thousands of
paper cranes are left there.
Origamibots
If you think a an origami dragon
is cool, imagine how awesome an origami robot would be. In 2014, the
first ever self-folding robot that could work without an operator was
created, based on the art of origami. Samuel Felton, at the time a
graduate student at Harvard who designed the robot, told the New York Times
that he hoped Ikea-like tables could assemble themselves, or that
computers could soon use the math of origami folding to build even more
complex bots.
The latter seems to have happened. In 2016, researchers at MIT created an ingestible origami robot
made of meat that can perform tasks inside the body once it unfolds. In
2017, a team from MIT also created exoskeletons for origami bots, which
would allow them to shape-shift to
complete different activities. Just this year, scientists at Seoul
National University even built an origami claw for a drone—you can watch this Quartz video to learn how they work.
Life source
The origami in me
When
you’re looking at just the notations that make up origami instructions,
how can you tell what it will become? A bird, a tiger, a giraffe? “That
challenge, incidentally, is exactly what many scientists have struggled
with for decades, because life—all life—depends on origami,” Ed Yong writes for The Atlantic.
Human life depends on proteins, which
carry out cell functions that keep us alive. Proteins are built in
sequences of amino acids according to instructions that are already
encoded in our genes. That two-dimensional protein chain “naturally
folds into a complicated three-dimensional shape in a feat of
spontaneous origami,” Yong writes.“It’s that shape that determines what
proteins can do; it’s that shape that we need to understand.” How
complicated? It’s one of the hardest problems in science, one we’ve collectively thrown vast amounts of computing power at.
From creating antibodies to fighting off disease, to sending signals between different cells and tissues, proteins are a vital part of the human body—as is the origami that forms them.
Fun fact
In 2013, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation issued a challenge for someone to design the “next generation condom.” The “Origami Condom,” which features accordion-like folds made out of silicone, was one of the top designs.
To infinity, and beyond
Origami
is already, quite literally, out of this world. Origami expert Robert
Lang, the former NASA physicist, has used his folding techniques to
design compact, foldable, and expandable structures that can be sent to outer space in rockets or satellites. (He’s also written a software program, TreeMaker, to work out crease patterns for his most complex origami models.)
Just this month, the EuroMoonMars project completed prototypes
for human habitats and research stations on other planets based on
origami. According to the researchers, these structures are lightweight
and can be re-used in different configurations, making them ideal for
intergalactic exploration.
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