{"id":7080,"date":"2021-03-22T09:14:05","date_gmt":"2021-03-22T09:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyrapidnews.com\/eng\/?p=7080"},"modified":"2021-03-22T09:15:45","modified_gmt":"2021-03-22T09:15:45","slug":"cornell-creates-the-worlds-tiniest-self-folding-origami-bird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailyrapidnews.com\/eng\/2021\/03\/22\/cornell-creates-the-worlds-tiniest-self-folding-origami-bird\/","title":{"rendered":"Cornell creates the world\u2019s tiniest self-folding origami bird"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cornell University has just announced what may be the smallest origami bird ever folded. While a typical origami animal is the product of an artist’s dexterous hands, the Cornell bird was folded by the strategic application of small electrical voltages. It had to be: The material of which the bird is comprised is just 30 atoms thick.<\/p>\n

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Creative expression isn’t the point of the university’s little avian \u2014 its construction previews principles and techniques that will lead to new generations of moving, nano-scaled robots that “can enable smart material design and interaction with the molecular biological world,”\u00a0says\u00a0Dean Culver of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory, which supported the research.<\/p>\n

According to Cornell’s\u00a0Paul McEuen, “We humans, our defining characteristic is we’ve learned how to build complex systems and machines at human scales, and at enormous scales as well. But what we haven’t learned how to do is build machines at tiny scales. And this is a step in that basic, fundamental evolution in what humans can do, of learning how to construct machines that are as small as cells.”<\/p>\n

The lead author of the paper describing the tiny bird is postdoctoral researcher\u00a0Qingkun Liu. The\u00a0paper, “Micrometer-Sized Electrically Programmable Shape Memory Actuators for Low-Power Microrobotics,” is the cover story of the March 17 issue of the journal Science Robotics.<\/p>\n