Recently, the ancient art of origami has begun to merge with modern engineering. Origami principles have inspired novel ways of packaging airbags, fashioning heart stents, folding solar sails designed to propel spacecraft, and even collapsible bullet-proof shields.
Modern research in origami began in 1970 when an astrophysicist named Koryo Miura came up with a simple but elegant fold. Known as the Miura fold, or Miura-ori, he later repurposed the fold as a way to package large, flat membranes for deploying into space. In 1995, a Japanese satellite used the fold to store its solar panels for launch and unfurl them once in orbit.
Today, origami is being used to create strong, rigid panels that can fold themselves in less than a second. These self-folding structures are about the size of a biological cell, which would make them potentially useful for medicine: imagine sending tiny, self-folding robots into the body to attack a virus or a tumor.
