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How many shapes can be obtained by folding a paper and applying just one straight cut? You'll be surprised...

"The theorem is that every pattern (plane graph) of straight-line cuts can be made by folding and one complete straight cut. Thus it is possible to make single polygons (possibly nonconvex), multiple disjoint polygons, nested polygons, adjoining polygons, and even floating line segments and points." - So the you can cut any assembly of polygons but not a single curved edge (with a finite number of folds (points don't count)): useless. :-P

link to the paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nsmb.2119 additional info at: http://fold.it/portal/

They are cheating however as they fold a paper of 6x7cm to 1.6cm2 and then say the capacity has increased. But the interesting point here is that planar paper-batteries are very cheap to manufacture in roll-2-roll, plus there are many folding techniques thanks to the Japanese

Origami bot!

It's really cool when it folds up, but then it's such a disappointing walk :) I also fail to see an advantage over regular robots. If you care about saving space during transportation, you could design a robot with that in mind without much sacrifice to it's locomotion capabilities.

It's cute but I've seen better from amateurs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK8OjwMdn5I

haha! is this a joke...?

well i guess the news headline is a bit too much trying to be attractive :)

You can use idle computers as extra computing power in a big run, or you can use idle personnel as extra computing power by making them play computer games:

Protein Folding solved by AI?

The Robobee takes off without guide wires! It is still powered via a wire, and the control is done with the help of a VICON system and on an external computer, but this still is an amazing feat!

The way they make this thing is just as impressive. The manufacturing technique is "pop-up book" folding, a method that has been developed by the same group and that allows a two dimensional monolithic MEMS structures to be easily assembled into a 3D structure. I actually put this as an item of the "Technology List 2020" on the wiki this morning.

I agree, manufacturing is the amazing thing here ..... as soon as the power-consumption/density problem is solved these things will really take off :)

In case you are interested in Martin's past project, this article covers his master thesis. Potential for space? One of the biggest challenges with swarms of robots is manufacturing and deploying the swarm itself. Even if the robots are relatively small and relatively simple, you're still dealing with a whole bunch of them, and every step in building the robots or letting them loose is multiplied over the entire number of bots in the swarm.

apparently first time that somebody filmed a meteorite falling after the luminous phase .... impressive pics

I've seen someone suggest it could have been a rock that ended up inside the parachute bag when it was folded, and then fell when the parachute was deployed.

Amazing what robots learn to do these days :). Any background music ideas for the video?

Nice try, but humans are still better in it... on so many levels: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzFwn064cFE

Apparently, I becomes possible to create proteins from scratch already. Things become interesting...

Some new technique to produce graphne based flexible electronic circuits.

very nice approach ...

The link didn't work for me. Try that one: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/11/18/0907390106.abstract?sid=348d3f4f-cc68-47e8-9099-a3310134ae68