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 team of engineers from Polytechnique Montréal report a new and unique parachute concept inspired by the Japanese art of kirigami today in Nature. This simple, robust and low-cost approach has a wide ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Engineers attempting to make solar energy more affordable for the average user have long faced a conundrum. Solar panels capture much more energy when they can shift to follow the movement of the sun ...

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 ...

Cutting kirigami-style slits in stretchy films could make for stickier bandages, heat pads, wearable electronics, according to a new study. Scraped up knees and elbows are tricky places to securely ...