Extreme Mechanics: Buckling down If you’re an engineer, you usually try to design things that don’t collapse. But when it comes to some structures (like car crumple zones), designing instability can be very important. They are studying math, folding, origami and complex geometry. Read above about the engineers who are trying to design the artfully unstable.  Very cool stuff! (via Nature News)
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Extreme Mechanics: Buckling down

If you’re an engineer, you usually try to design things that don’t collapse. But when it comes to some structures (like car crumple zones), designing instability can be very important. They are studying math, folding, origami and complex geometry. Read above about the engineers who are trying to design the artfully unstable. 

Very cool stuff!

(via Nature News)

Source: nature.com

laboratoryequipment:

Technique Enables Fast Mass-Production of Microbots

A new technique inspired by elegant pop-up books and origami will soon allow clones of robotic insects to be mass-produced by the sheet. Devised by engineers at Harvard, the ingenious layering and folding process enables the rapid fabrication of not just microrobots, but a broad range of electromechanical devices.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Technique-Enables-Fast-Mass-Production-of-Microbots-022112.aspx

I, for one, welcome our new pop-up microrobot overlords.

Also check out these DNA nanobots that target cancer cells and this awesome collection of computational origami.

(via thenextweb)

Source: laboratoryequipment