Quantum origami and light knots, we just can't get enough.
image credit: Microphoto of a human hair by Robert Vierthaler for the the Nikon Small World 2020 competition.
Origami microbots - Centuries-old artform guides cutting-edge advances in tiny machines
Aug 2020, phys.org
Origamibots.
They change shape depending on what they need to do. It's more efficient, and they can now be made smaller, faster, and more precise. It also sounds like it's covered in a thin layer of gold, then polymer, and this allows heat to be applied and to travel across the surface of the microbot, controlling its folds with hots and colds.
via University of Michigan, Yi Zhu et al, Elastically and Plastically Foldable Electrothermal Micro‐Origami for Controllable and Rapid Shape Morphing, Advanced Functional Materials (2020). DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202003741
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| This is a Kressling pattern, courtesy of NOVA |
Building mechanical memory boards using origami
Aug 2020, phys.org
It's an origami mechanical memory board. It's called a Kresling-inspired mechanical switch, or KIMS. Kressling pattern origami are ones that can flip between two shapes, depending on how you configure them, and this one is configured by vibrating a platform on which it rests. The vibration activates a mechanical switch.
This is just fucking crazy. Imagine making origami metamaterial that have properties like an electric circuit. It would be like a 3D computer where the transistors are an integral part if the structure, instead of being in a central location, they're all over, like cells in a body.
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Framed Trefoil Knot, University of Ottawa |
Classified knots - Researchers create optical framed knots to encode information
Oct 2020, phys.org
More origami people. Made of lights, of course.
Optical framed knots distributing secret cryptographic keys, providing a platform for topological quantum computations, they say.
Framed knots are when you take a strip of paper and try to tie a knot with it, kind of like M.C.Escher's mobius strip.
It has to do with light beams, structured light beams, using beam-shaping techniques that can actually shape the light beam to have knots in it? Cryptographic code knots sounds like a great idea.
Hugo Larocque et al, Optical framed knots as information carriers, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18792-z
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