If you want to print something a few inches tall, extruded plastic is a good medium. But when you need something at the nanometer scale, DNA is a better bet — but who has the time to design and ...

Researchers used their new technique to fold a glass bar (a), create an optical resonator (b) to achieve helical bending (c) and to create a table with a parabolic reflector (middle, lower row).

Back in 1999, Erik Demaine was a PhD student who created an algorithm that determined the folding patterns necessary to turn a piece of paper into any 3D shape. However, the algorithm was far from ...