If you have a fear of heights and find yourself falling out of an airplane, you probably don’t want to look up to find your parachute full of holes. However, if the designer took inspiration from ...

A new form of robot unveiled this week could power daring search-and-rescue missions…by curling up at the first sign of heat. The “active kirigami” robots, developed by a team at North Carolina State ...

Kirigami is a traditional Japanese art form that entails cutting and folding paper to produce complex three-dimensional (3D) structures or objects. Over the past decades, this creative practice has ...

New options for making finely structured soft, flexible and expandable materials called hydrogels have been developed by researchers at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT). Their ...

It all started at Peet's. Ten years ago, neuroscientist Sergiu Pasca was just getting his lab up and running. He had not yet published the research for which he would become renowned: a novel ...

Traditionally, when it comes to high-tech self-assembling microscopic structures for use in medicine delivery, and refined, delicate grippers for robotics, there’s been a dearth of effective, ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Like a yoga novice, electronic components don’t stretch easily. But that’s changing thanks to a variation of origami that involves cutting folded pieces of paper. In a study published ...

Researchers developed a soft robot inspired by snakeskin that crawls without any rigid components. The soft robotic scales are made using kirigami -- an ancient Japanese paper craft that relies on ...

A team of engineers is using ideas taken from paper-folding practices to create a sophisticated alternative to 3D printing. Paper snowflakes, pop-up children's books and elaborate paper cards are of ...