The Power of Origami

There's far more to origami than paper swans. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie explore the mathematics and real-world applications of intricately folded sheets.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
are you aware of the ongoing crisis Julie's face, Uh,
in this country, but also been really around the world, um,

(00:26):
in which normal sheets of paper, flat sheets of paper
have taken on the former, perhaps with the aid of
human hands, into three dimensional shapes, often animal shapes. Um.
And then they're just loose, they're they're they're they're on
our Chinese takeout, they are in our hotel rooms in

(00:48):
the form of towel creatures. It's the Origami menace. And
I've seen it everywhere. Yeah, and then what are you
supposed to do when you need a towel? It's taken
on the form of a duck or a monkey, or
he's a paper for your grocery list. It's all twisted
up into this elegant swan, and you have to essentially
murder the swan in order to find out what you're

(01:09):
supposed to buy. You have to murder a monkey in
order to tale yourself off. Actually sometimes cut the heads off.
That's really frowned upon. Yeah, my daughter doesn't like it
cutting the heads off of monkeys, of her monkeys. No,
no paper monkeys, she cuts the heads off. I do, okay,
just all right, kid, I kid, But actually her babysitter

(01:33):
creates oregony. Her babysitter we could do an entire episode
on because she's like one of those like super teens
who is you know, volunteering in a neuroscience lab and
also practices falconry as well as softball and oregonmy excellently.
So I have been introduced to it in several different ways,

(01:55):
but one of my favorite ways is in a documentary
Between the Full Yes, this is an excellent documentary came
out a few years back, and I saw it for
the first time, I think on Netflix streaming, and I
think I did a blog post about it, and then
convinced myself that we had recorded a podcast about it
because I was looking for the other day and with
that podcast we did on oregony, and there I was, oh,

(02:17):
we never did one. I think we both saw it
and we were so like, oh, this is great and
really amped up and then checked it off. Yeah, that
was an awesome pal pest on it. Um so we're
really happy that it came back around because, Uh, that
documentary is fascinating and really plumbs the depth of this
artistic form which is informing all sorts of stuff like

(02:41):
applied mathematics and engineering, and we'll talk about that. Yeah,
it is organ me such a fascinating topic because it
it all begins with paper, which is essentially a recent
occurrence on the planet. Yeah. Actually, the Chinese first invented
paper around one D and five a d. And then

(03:03):
during the sixth century, Buddhist monks introduced paper to Japan,
and as in China, it became a rare and expensive
product and it was prized and it was reserved usually
for special occasions in religious rituals. But as it became
more common, so did paper folding. And if you look
at the word or a gami, it's a Japanese word

(03:26):
in oru means to fold and commy means paper. Yeah,
the the premium status of paper, I feel like I
can't be overstated because again, for the for the longest,
for the vast majority of human history, there was no paper,
and then as paper began to present itself, paper was
was a premium item to possess and if you had it,
you were you were making proper use of it. You

(03:47):
were writing on it, you were in you know, and
you were you were drawing on it. You were creating
art or or or committing language to the paper, and
in many cases erasing that information or writing or drawing
or painting. Oh, because the paper itself was so valuable
that you were never going to crumple it up, even
just to throw it in the waste basket. Now, if

(04:07):
you could elevate it to an art form, you could
also begin to involve it in some serious ceremonial purposes, right,
so then it could be used as this other representation
of I guess you could say religion or spirit to
express some of the thoughts and philosophy behind that. Yeah,
because I mean, I mean, it's easy to to see

(04:28):
how you end up putting these sacred ideas into the
paper itself, because the language becomes sacred, artistic interpretations of
things become sacred, and if they're committed to the paper,
the paper becomes sacred in its own right. And then
you began to manipulate this two dimensional, essentially two dimensional
surface into three dimensions. And uh, and just the the

(04:50):
symbolic power of that is pretty obvious. Yeah, and there
it's no accident that nature is highly represented in the
form of origami, right, because this is something would have
been in the Japanese tradition to really uphold nature as
something that you would want to replicate in any way
that you could. Yes, you get into the Shinto aspects

(05:10):
of of their being a sort of holiness in all
in all the corners of nature, and certainly in animals,
and therefore u to to transform the paper into an
animal is itself a sacred thing. Now. This comes from
the house Stuff Works article how Origami Works. It says

(05:30):
that one of the oldest and most direct references to
paper folding appeared in a sixteen eighty Japanese poem by
Ahara saka Ku, in which the author writes about paper
butterflies that appear in a dream, which I think is
just lovely, yes, and then in the se that's when
you see. Akasto Rito wrote the first instructions for paper

(05:52):
folding and a work called simbarazo ricata, which means thousand
crane foldings um ricata trans like it means folded shapes.
But in nine in the nineteenth century or agamy becomes
the more common term now, the thousand crane foldings that
plays into this ancient Japanese legend that promises that anyone

(06:13):
who folds a thousand or agamy cranes will be granted
a wish by the crane, or you'll have some sort
of the dream manifested. And I actually have a couple
of friends who did this one year. I think they
did for for like a New Year's type of thing,
where they set out to fold a thousand paper cranes,
and I think one I I don't remember how the
dream uh, you know, wish granting thing worked out, but

(06:35):
there seems to be a law in place that the
the closer you get to that thousand crane point, the
more your paper cranes are going to resemble art varks
rather than because your fingers are gonna get kind of sore,
your works become becoming more and more imperfect, and by
the end they look they still look like animals, but
maybe not crane. Maybe it's your perceptionist cued too, because

(06:56):
you know how if you you stare at certain words,
all of a sudden they become alien to you. They
stopped being elegant swans full of wishes, and they're more
art arts that are trying to chew your fingers off. Now,
the father of origami, considered the father of origami, is
a Kira your Shizawa, whose majority of work came to
notice in the fifties and sixties. And we're talking about

(07:18):
a Japanese self taught oregami artist. And in the documentary
Between the Folds, he says, quote, all oregami starts with
a flat surface, as the as this paper transforms into
three dimensions, Origami has within it all the possibilities we
associate with creative art. And I thought that to me
is really underscoring the power of origami, especially when we

(07:42):
talk about it and applied mathematics and engineering, these possibilities
that it contains within it. And just to give you
an idea of how prolific you Shizawa was, he created
fifty thousand models, but he never sold a single one.
And he sort of red volutionized the whole oregamy because

(08:02):
he used moist paper so that he could sculpt more
expressive lines into his creations. And some say that he
even um created the language for oragamy, diagramming all of them.
So now today, if you crack open an orogami book,
you'll see these diagrams, which is what your Shizawa started

(08:24):
doing to document his process, you know. And I think
that's one of the the the aspects of Oregonmy that
really appeals to everyone is because and so certainly I
find myself thinking about this. You see a really neat
piece of origami, and and you you admire the beauty
of it, you admire the skill in the artistry, but
then you also know that there is a diagram that

(08:45):
shows you, step by step how to get from point
A this blank, featureless paper right out of the stack
beside your printer, and how to transform that into that
elegant creature. That there are steps to fall, and therefore
it seems so achievable that every time I look at Oregonmy,
I I kind of think, hey, maybe I'll learn how
to do oregonmy. That could be my thing. Uh, And

(09:07):
then I sort of imagine myself doing it and realized
that I could probably do a lot of it just
by following the instructions, and then I don't even bother
to actually go down that road. Well, it is really cool,
especially when you look at it in the context of
the between the Folds documentary because it will really challenge
your notion of what oregonmy is. You think of a swan,
and then all of a sudden you see this one

(09:29):
guy in Israel who is creating these concentric spirals nested
in one another that are actually active. Do they actually move?
And you see that sometimes people are coming to this
in a very organic, intuitive way, and sometimes people are
coming at it in a very mathematical way. In fact,
that the documentary really deals with those two schools of thoughts. Yeah,

(09:52):
because even the simplest crane, even the you know, the
the most adorable oregonomy creature, that is the product of
of mathematical precision. That's a matter of these folds, these
creases in the paper ultimately creating the mathematical design of
that animal in abstract. Yeah. And lest you think that

(10:12):
oregonmy is just the sort of you know, informal field, uh,
that is very wrong. It's um. There are many different
schools of thoughts and forms of origami. In fact, there
are different kinds. There's the one that we just describe,
which is sort of like your traditional swan. Um. Maybe
it has I don't know, twenty steps of diagrams, that

(10:33):
you would follow, while you have other ones that are
more like three hundred steps of diagram to follow. And
you have something called modular, which is just like what
you would think of in terms of architecture, like taking
two modular units and putting them together. We're talking about
separate pieces of paper that are merged to create an
incredibly complex sculpture. Then you have action oregonmy and this

(10:55):
is oregony that can move with a little human assistance.
I believe the oragamy creatures in Blade Runner worked like this,
didn't they. You had the the the mustachioed character who
kept living little swans, right, the detective yeah, played by
Edward almost almost almost yes, Yeah, yeah, great, great actor,

(11:18):
and of course he was he played that particularly rolling
Blade Run. Yeah. I think that was part of the metaphor.
You know, they here is something of human creation that
is brought to life with the human touch. Uh be
it a replicant or an oregonmy crane, but yes, so
action oregamy is designed so that you can manipulate it
inneral cause it to move like wings to flap or
a frog to jump, et cetera. Yeah. And then you

(11:39):
have something called pure land, which is a style of
Oregonmy that restricts artists making only one fold at a time,
so complex folds are forbidden altogether. And in this you
really this example, you see some of this, uh, some
of the puzzle solving aspects I think of oregamy emerging
how to create things by folding the paper and and

(12:02):
having to follow certain rules. I mean not only the
physical rules of folding paper, but but also the rules
of the particular style of origami. Yeah, and I remember
in the documentary, um, it was really interesting they were
talking about Euclidean lines. And we've talked about this before.
Euclidean lines do not exist in our reality, right, but

(12:25):
if you mash, if you fold everything and you mash
it down right to one plane again, then you do
have Euclidean lines again that they would they would go
off into infinity. But you have this idea of how
those would work. And that's what's so beautiful about origami
is that it really obeys the laws of mathematics. And

(12:47):
this was plumped to quite a degree in that documentary,
especially with Tom Hall, who works in the math department
at marymatt College in and Over, Massachusetts, and he says
oregonmy is just such a great way to get your
hands dirty with math. It becomes your laboratory for doing math.
It can do everything from geometry but also number theory
and abstract algebra and linear algebra in bizarre and weird

(13:11):
geometry like geometry of the sphere. This isn't just compartmentalized math,
but math. It can be wrapped together in weird ways.
And in this this all describes, oregony becomes an engineering problem.
It ties into the structure of the natural world, of
biology of the cosmos. Uh. Again, you're you're you're you're
taking mathematics and mathematical purity, and you're also taking this,

(13:35):
uh the sheet of paper, which is also a humans construct,
and you're using that to to bring math alive in
a sense. Yeah, and that's what he was saying. Is
so interesting about teaching it that way because essentially, with
geometry it's very abstract. And so if you can create
this model that has us he says, math and all

(13:57):
all different types of math wrapped up in it, and
all of a sudden, it becomes something to you. It
becomes representational, and that's such a huge part of learning.
Now we meet Tom holl in the documentary folds. But
we also meet another individual who is quite remarkable, a
man by the name of Eric Domain, who is the

(14:19):
top Oregami theorist in the world, a professor of computer
science at at m I T and a former child prodigy,
although he would say it has nothing to do with
his accomplishments. No, but but he's a Sherry Bright did
He started college at twelve. He got his PhD at twenty,
youngest professor ever at m I T. McArthur Genius Award

(14:40):
for his research into folding um. He's a remarkable cat
and no two ways around. Yeah, And what's interesting is
that his dad homeschooled him, and he and his dad
are very much a team still, it seems like, because
they're their puzzle solvers in addition to doing you know,
oregamy and and and him being professor of computers acis
as an m I T. But they come at oregamy

(15:04):
in this problem solving manner. Yeah, and he's he's very
elegant when he's talking about paper to which you might
not expect from from a child prodigy M I T
computer science paper folding enthusiasts. He's also in a glass
blown by the way, but he he describes oregonmy as
quote changing the memory of the paper, which is which

(15:24):
is a notable statement to make, especially when you get
into some of the applications for oregonmy that we're going
to discuss about that the physical memory of paper. Uh,
you know about about about paper taking on three dimensional forms,
et cetera. Yeah, he says that those folds create a
kind of tension when there's an organic shape emerging. And

(15:47):
I love this. He says, physics finds the right answers
and you see this in paper at play. And we'll
go into this a bit more. But he has been
instrumental in UM looking at d n A proteins and
diseases in terms of our agamy, because he says, essentially,
when you're looking at DNA, you're looking at a folding pattern,

(16:10):
and just to be reductions about it, he's saying that
if there's a disease, there's a fold in the wrong place. Yeah.
He his work takes him from the micro level to
UH to two outer space as well discussed, and his
work is really a great example of why oregamy is
far from being just this mere hobby, from being this

(16:31):
mirror UM you know, abstraction even mathematically speaking, but it
is something with various real world applications. Again cloth the
side of the human body and in the future out
in the boy um. That note, let's take a quick break,
and when we get back, we're going to talk about
the practical applications of origami. All right, we're back, and

(16:59):
we're going to discussed now that some of the practical
applications of origami. Some of these are already in place,
They're already at work in the world around us. The
oregamy has already escaped and is out there. In other cases,
we're definitely looking into the future of way that oregamy
is going to inform the shape of future technology essentially though,

(17:20):
uh a number of these anyway, I'll relate to a
basic principle, and that is, if you want to make
a flat sheet smaller, you're gonna want to fold it.
And if you want mathematical precision in the way you
fold it, if you want certain other attributes in play
in the way you fold something, then origami is the
discipline to seek out. That's right, because we're talking about

(17:40):
um in this sense, a kind of action o agami. Right,
So you're you're you're shaping the thing and then you're
reducing it back to one plane so that it's compact.
So if you could do the same thing while you're
packing your suitcase, for instance, which I think might be
impossible with clothes origami, but you could flatten and then
just pop it back up, it would be pretty amazing, right,
You could probably get like thirty pounds of clothes into

(18:03):
your suitcase. And so if you look at air bags,
this is the perfect example of all these things that
we've been talking about, because the algorithm used in computer
designed air bags is based on artistic folds of origami.
So those air bags aren't, you know, arbitrarily just wadded up,
but they're folded to create that one dimensional plane that

(18:24):
springs into action, that three dimensional life when it's deployed.
And in fact, according to Robert J. Ling, who is
another one of these um like foremost masters of origami,
the air bag flatten algorithm came from all the developments
of circle packing and the mathematical theory that was really

(18:45):
developed just to create insects. Because he says that in
the nineties, if you went to this certain oregamy convention,
people were going nuts with insects and seeing how intricate
they could get them, and so every year you'd have
more and more intricate insects being introduced, or you'd see

(19:06):
scorpions one year. It's that desire and drive for artistic
excellence that helped to inform the algorithms that created the
air bags that we now have in our cars. Yeah,
that's crazy. I mean to go back to to your
example about packing a suitcase. I mean, it's it's essentially there.
There are there's a bad way to pack a suitcase.
You could probably set around and think of the most

(19:28):
impractical way to pack a suitcase so that it would
be more of an effort to unpack it. And then
there is the most effective way that allows for rapid unpacking.
And when an air bag goes off, it's essentially the
rapid unpacking of the materials in there. Someone has to
come up with this sort of close packing suitcase or
a gami. Imagine you just open your suitcase and everything

(19:50):
just springs to life. That would that would be good? Yeah,
it's just it's out there and then you're you're ready
to to move on with your stay in the hotel.
Um Another area that we see application of oregonmy is
in the world of telescopes. Um. Surprisingly enough, Um, we
see this in the Eyeglass Telescope and ASA's eyeglass telescope.
We see a foldable satellite lens that's designed to unfurl

(20:12):
in orbit. And this is just simply a practical way
to fold and store a lens that's made of many segments.
And again it comes back to the basic principle of Oregonmy.
I have something it's large and more or less flat
or composed of flat components, and I need to store
that in a smaller form. Yeah. And Robert ja ling
Uh he actually created this, and he used the umbrella

(20:35):
design that folds down to a cylinder and then it
pops up. And just as a side note, this guy
he ditched his day job at a fiber optics company
thirteen years ago to devote himself to folding paper, just
as a folding paper artist. And these are some of
the applications that have come out of his work. And

(20:56):
and just in case anyone is wondering that you will
see these individ wills refer to it as folding they
because it can sort of sound like, oh, you quit
your job to fold paper. But but now they often
refer to their passion as as folding um in addition
to the use of the more elegant or a gami.
As long as we're in space, let's talk about solar sales. UM.

(21:18):
There's a there's a particular fold known as the Myriori fold,
and this was invented by Japanese astrophysicist Coro Maura. And
this is a technology that well you actually see used
in various Japanese space program satellites. UM. And again it
comes back to the principle. You have this solar sale

(21:38):
and we're all familiar with this. This is the uh,
the more or less flat surface that is out there
to to absorb solar energy for the benefit of the
satellite to power the satellite. So you want to be
able to pack that into a very compact shape. UH.
And you want to fold that can be unpacked in
a very in a single motion by pulling an opposite

(21:58):
end of the folded material. So this way you reduce
because it's it's all about the economy of getting something
in orbit. UH. So you want to you want the
best fold arrangement possible, and you want to be able
to unfold it with a limited amount of energy. You
can't have enormous motors cranking that thing out. So the
the economy of oregony and the potential of oregony really

(22:22):
comes into play here. Yeah, And Brian Tres, who is
an engineer a NASA's Jet Propulsion lab, is looking into
using this full of this Mariori fold to take materials,
apply the fold and then kind of create useful instruments
from them. And he's talking about size of meters or
atmosphere detectors and sending them up into orbit essentially. So

(22:46):
he's talking about even having a printer, sending it into
orbit and then if you need a different sensor or
a different part, you would just upload the design and
then print it out. Why in space. Now this is
super sort of like future stuff here, but at the
same time, you can see how you can go from

(23:07):
something like solar sales to creating these objects that can
be you know, flat packed essentially, like you know, ikea
parallelogram out there and then printed and creating creating new
ones that could be packed down and then uh inflated. Yeah,
I mean to bear in mind that you know, we
can currently print things like electric circuits like solar cells

(23:31):
and and and displays directly onto a into a essentially
a two D paper surface, and that that that fact
alone really opens up the possibilities of what oregami can be,
especially that mariori kind of fold because um, that kind
of fold creates this stiffness, but it also can um

(23:54):
apparently have other properties to it, like spongy nous, which
is really important and engineering in the dream. According to
Cornell's I tie Cohen, who is an associate professor of
physics and graduate student Jesse Silberg, the dream is to
have atomic scale machines programmed based unfolding patterns that could
snap into place and perform mechanical functions, kind of like

(24:17):
the Transformers where robots fuld themselves up but then the
unfurl into these locked sort of human forms. In this
dream has been kind of realized right now. Yes, the
dream of essentially an oregonmy robot, which this idea really
takes me back because when I was in junior high

(24:37):
I wrote a short story that involved in oregonmy robot. Now,
it was very much informed by like there was. The
story was probably like me having watched Terminator, having watched
Blade Runner, and then a little bit too of having
caught Demon Seed on TBS or something. I don't know

(24:58):
if you remember this, but it was the ninete the
seven sci fi horror film based on a Dean Koont's novel,
and in it there's essentially it's about a robot that
wants to get a lady pregnant. So it's a little
don't they all, Yeah, yeah, So it's a little little seedy,
little exploitive. But the robot uses these robotic I mean,
the computer uses these robotic pseudopods, which in the movie

(25:21):
at least take on the form of these metallic folding
geometric constructions. They're not quite origami, but they called to
mind oorgamy. So I was thinking about, what have you
had like this, this kind of metal oregamy creature that's
essentially a flat sheet, but it can confold itself into
all the possible forms of a of a of a

(25:41):
sheet of paper, that it could essentially become an oragamy
spider or a crane and run around and and you know,
probably stab people with the sharp ends. But in a sense,
that's kind of what researchers have been working on, not
so much the stabbing nous and certainly not the the
impregnating part. But yeah, no stabbing, no impregnant. But Samuel Felton,
I feel that's graduate student at Harvard may have hacked

(26:04):
into your brain a bit. Yeah. Two thousand fourteen, Uh,
team at a m T and Harvard University, which incidentally
does involve Eric Domain a little bit um the the
oregamy expert that we mentioned earlier. They've been working on
Oregonmy robots, essentially robots that fold themselves into arbitrary shapes,

(26:24):
and in two thousand fourteen they succeeded in producing a
robot made entirely from parts produced by laser cutting, that
folds itself up and crawls away as soon as batteries
are attached to it. This is this thing which looks
kind of like a kind of like an Oregonmy spider,
but very much like a robot. Um. You look at
and you definitely realize that it's a little robotic construction,

(26:45):
But essentially it's made of five layers of material. The
middle layer is copper etched into a network of electrical leads,
and then that sandwich between two between two structural layers
of paper, and the outer layers are composed of a
shape memory polymer that folds when heated. So after the
laser cut materials are layered together, a microprocessor and one

(27:07):
or more small motors are attached to the top surface.
And at least in this prototype that they have, that
attachment is done manually, but it could be performed by
a robotic system in the future. So essentially what we're
talking about here again is not on Oregony, that monster
that runs around in stats people, but it gets more
in line with that idea of a manufacturing technique of

(27:27):
a shape that emerges from a packed form. So instead
of it being merely a suitcase that opens and unpacks itself,
it could be a cube that unpacks itself. Um, a
structure that unpacks itself for use in space or on
another planet, or drug delivery, which we'll talk about in
a second. Um. But yeah, that that's a self folding robot.

(27:50):
Took about two hours to make the prototype, and we're
talking about a hundred bucks, so pretty simple and cheap,
And according to kind of Chang, who is running through
New York Times, the hope is this will allow computer
software to figure out the cuts and folds needed to
create complex robots capable of doing just about anything, and
Fountain is now adapting the technique on a smaller scale

(28:10):
to pursue the creation of insect robots. So conceivably we
could look to a future in which a spaceship using
origami solar sales, goregamy solar panels, and various oregamy inspired parts,
would sail to a distant planet, say Mars, and then
it would send a package down to the surface, perhaps

(28:32):
using a parachute type device that is folded like Oregonmy,
and then once it once it hits the surface, it
will unpack these structures using Oregonmy style um memory materials
and oregamy inspired robotic insects. Although at this point I
feel like it might be photons that are Origami packed.

(28:57):
I feel like quantum physics has to be involved with
the eventually. What I love about this is that that
in this scenario, Oregonmy kind of becomes the form that
humanity takes and human culture takes when it moves beyond Earth,
like it kind of becomes the idealized version of who
and what we are. Maybe I'm stretching a bit there,
but probably and you have an oregomy soul an action

(29:20):
induced one. It's lovely. Yes, it's very it's very thin,
but if folded enough, it seems to take on a
substant form. Yes, it's just springs into action. Um. Now,
another way of using oregamy is with drug delivery. As
we said, so if you look at DNA, it's inherently
a programmable molecule. In most people know that adenine binds
to finding and that side design binds to guanin. So

(29:44):
you have your A, your T, you have your C in,
your G right, your DNA pattern and the simple pattern
together with an ability to build custom DNA strands from
scratch that lets scientists design these A, C, T, G
sequences that create very specific patterns of inter and intra
strand binding. So why is this important to origamy? It

(30:07):
means that researchers can design DNA molecules which fold into
incredibly complex three dimensional shapes. And this is how the
term oregamy began to become associated with the industry, especially
if you look at eric domains work with proteins. Yeah,
because essentially this this is how nanotechnology works. It's not

(30:30):
about taking a human scale robot and shrinking it down.
It's about figuring out how things work at the at
the molecular level. And it's easy to to think about
drugs and medications and think of it in a chemical
sense and think of that that is distinct from physical
reality and physical properties. But but but clearly, when we're

(30:50):
talking about proteins interactingly, this is a physical interaction. And uh,
and so we're we're looking even further into the future
to the possibility of molecular scale sheens that can snap
into place and perform mechanical tasks inside the body outside
of the body. Again, the future, when you is very
uh organic, if you will an organic future, I like, Yeah.

(31:14):
The more you more you look at the applications of
oregony and where, um, where it's being used, and where
it has potential for use, Uh, it gets more and
more fascinating. If you want to try to imagine that.
Here's an example. Let's you have a tube shaped piece
of DNA or a gamy and that could deliver payloads
of drugs to cancer cells. So the tube could open
like a clam, but it's clasped shut by two DNA

(31:37):
strands called aptamers, and the aptomers are designed to recognize
molecules on the surface of cancer cells and when they do,
they spring apart and they open the tube and they
release the drugs from within. So again it's a more
effective drug delivery system. Yeah, you've essentially made a little
box out of out of these these proteins, and then

(31:58):
you have the lid to the box is hinged on
a on another protein. Again, it's like it's building the robot,
building the machine, building the structure out of the materials
available at that level that can recognize other molecules. It's amazing. Alright.
So you're probably wondering what's the largest Oregonami sculpture in

(32:18):
the world, because you know, we think about this more
in the tiny scale. Yeah, I mean, because that's that's
where you get excited, right, look at all the detail
and that small little paper creature. And yet there are
some some very large pieces. And the largest so far
is a life size white elephant that was created by
oregonmy artist Cypho Mabona. And this is following a successful

(32:41):
campaign on Indigo Go which raised nearly twenty six thousand
dollars so that he could he could bring this to life.
It stands ten feet tall and it took a team
of nearly a dozen people over four weeks to fold
it into life. Yeah, a single two hundred and twenty
pounds square of handmade paper. And he made a thirty

(33:03):
seven second time lapse video of the project, and he says,
a lot of people said, maybe you shouldn't show it
because it takes away from the magical aspects of it.
And he says, it's you know, it's one square of
paper and now it's this, how's it possible? But the
most important idea of the transformation is that anything is possible,
and I wanted people to be able to witness that.
So again I think it's it's really has that sort

(33:25):
of elegant idea of the possibilities of this one thing
becoming an entirely different thing just with your imagination and
just with the sort of physical properties of the world
at your disposal, and knowing that there are definite steps
to follow to get there. You know, in a way,
it's a perfect symbol for for science itself. And uh,
you know, when when science works and when science is

(33:47):
as accurately described a process. Now, the tiniest example we
could find comes by way of Christian L. Brant of Denmark,
who folded the world's smallest jumping or a gami frog.
It measures only point one inch that's two point seven
millimeters long, but it can jump four inches or millimeters.

(34:08):
And Elbernt used tweezers scalpel in a pocket lens to
create this, this tiny little amphibian. But just in case
you're out there and you think this would be really
awesome to do, but you have pulpus lacerata phobia, you
should stay with from this. That is a fear of
org it's a fear of paper cuts. Oh yeah, that

(34:31):
would be an inherent risk, wasn't it. It would maybe
doing that wet folding technique though maybe that that makes
things a little less sharp. But yeah, there you go
for anybody who has pulpis lacerata. That was just it
just occurred to me. Another example of what is essentially
oregony that a lot of people probably have experienced with

(34:52):
is what do you call that thing that particularly like
second graders will do. Will you make the little four
away foldy thing? It has like answers on the inside
and you kind of open it one way and then
it opens the other. Do you like me? Yes? Maybe no,
I have to think about it. It's like the mouth
of prophecy for for second grade. I do not I
don't know what it's called, but I know exactly what

(35:14):
you're talking about in a bit that listeners out there
have had that experience. Yeah, because that's a definite oregonmic creation.
I mean, a paper airplane is essentially a functional piece
of oregonmy. So I love that that you can take
this what is a sort of like highly charged question
at that age, Let's say nine year old, right, and
you have a crush on someone and you create this

(35:37):
oregamy ish moving sculpture to try to express your feelings.
I know, it's like it's it's like oregonmy is this
powerful thing in human culture that we just totally take
for granted, despite the fact that we we essentially pray
to it when we're young children and and then as
adults turned to it for answers to some of our

(35:58):
most challenging engineering problems. Indeed, um, I want to remind
everybody we've got the article on how stuff work, how
origami works, Yes, and the documentary is between the folds. Yes.
And if you go to stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com and you're streaming this sub podcast episode off
of our website, I will have links to those and
other related sources on the page there with you, so

(36:19):
you you don't have to go go anywhere while listening
to it. In fact, that site is chuck full of stuff, yes,
chock full of all the podcast episodes way back to
the beginning, uh the ancient days of stuff Color Yourline podcasting.
You'll find all of our videos on the site that
you can check out the different things we're doing in
the video medium, as well as well as all of

(36:39):
our blog posts going back through the years. And if
you've got some oregamy tinged thoughts to share with us, yes,
maybe no, you have to think about it. You can
send those two. Blow the mind at how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics,
because it how stuff works dot com