BUCKLE IN
Inspired by a toy, the ‘buckliball’ — a collapsible structure fabricated from a single piece of material — represents a new class of 3-D, origami-like structures.
Motivated by the desire to determine the simplest 3-D structure that could take advantage of mechanical instability to collapse reversibly, a group of engineers at MIT and Harvard University were stymied — until one of them happened across a collapsible, spherical toy that resembled the structures they’d been exploring, but with a complex layout of 26 solid moving elements and 48 rotating hinges.