The beauty of origami appeals to the eye as well as the mind. Designs using paper can yield both detailed sculptural works of animals and flowers.

They also employ powerful mathematical principles. Since the 1960s, modern engineering and design have been able to harness both the beauty and the power of origami techniques to introduce efficient alternatives that can be seen in many scientific disciplines today.

10 Emergency Shelters

Zipper tubes can be used for natural disaster relief or emergency shelters. They were created by the amazing researchers at the University of Illinois, Georgia Institute, and University of Tokyo.

They are simply two zigzag pieces of paper glued together. Although a single strip of paper can be quite flexible, two pieces will interlock in a tube design. This provides a much stronger and resilient structure.

Materials that might be used for this design include paper, plastic, or metal. It can be as big as a house or microscopically small. The tubes can be made into shelters as well as buildings or bridges by combining geometric angles for every purpose.^[1]

9 Battery Poisoning

If someone accidentally swallowed a button battery, then this might just save their life. In 2017, there were 3,244 cases of ingested batteries—with almost 2,000 of those by children under age six.^[2]

This origami design has a permanent magnet folded within and is swallowed inside an ice capsule. It is able to take medicine to specific locations in the body. A magnet is used to manipulate where the robot goes in the body, and the bot moves in a “stick-slip” motion. The protuberances can stick to a surface within the body and slip away with body movements. The device also moves around when in contact with stomach fluids.

The origami robot works by allowing the magnetic field outside the body to help process the battery through the digestive system before any harm comes to the person. Instead of paper, the origami design was made from dried pig intestines that are normally used in sausage casing.

This ingenious idea and design is the brainchild of researchers at MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

8 Space

Space missions use nuclear fuel to power the technology to explore the galaxy. This energy source is not particularly economical and has a definite time frame until it is depleted. With space programs hampered by limited budgets to power missions, the ability to combine solar and nuclear energy would mean longer missions for less expense.

Shannon Zirbel from Brigham Young University has imagined a way of using the ancient art of origami to one day do this. Today’s solar arrays (panels) are made of rectangular pieces that fold out in space similar to an accordion. But their size and weight limit how large the arrays can be and, therefore, how much solar energy can be captured.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Brigham Young University, and Robert Lang, an origami expert, have suggested a more efficient design based on origami principles. This could produce up to 250 kilowatts of power compared to the 84–120 kilowatts produced by the solar arrays on the International Space Station.

Based on the Miura fold, invented by Japanese astrophysicist Koryo Miura, their design opens out like a flower to expand into a large, flat, circular area. Simple designs that hark back to origami techniques are already in use in space exploration and research, but the team is constantly searching for more efficient methods of deploying space arrays for missions.^[3]

7 The Ocean

Robert Wood from Harvard University came up with an origami-inspired design to enable soft-bodied marine animals to be captured in deep-sea dives without harming them. The robot’s design had to be simple as a lot can go wrong at those depths, and there are no means to fix any problems without surfacing.

Wood settled on a five-arm feature of interconnected triangles and pentagons that fold together into a 12-sided compartment. Sea slugs, sponges, and corals could be easily captured using the grabber, which is animated by a single motor and attached to a robotic submarine.

In addition, the grabbers are all 3-D printed in mere hours. So you have the means to revolutionize the methods by which marine biologists conduct research at such inhospitable depths.^[4]

6 Shields

Professor of mechanical engineering Larry Howell from Brigham Young University invented a bulletproof shield that was based on a folding pattern dating back nearly 100 years. Bulletproof shields used today can weigh 40 kilograms (90 lb) or more and only protect a single person at a time.

Using an old origami technique, Howell designed a shield that weighs only 25 kilograms (55 lb) and is wide enough to protect several people at once. Even better, the improved design can be easily folded into the trunk of a police vehicle.

The product needed some additional improvements to ensure that the thick bulletproof fabric could fold like paper. The engineers solved the problem by sewing rigid panels into the soft areas between the plates that then behaved like hinges.^[5]

5 Muscles

Robots usually have jerky movements that make interaction with living organisms difficult and potentially harmful.

Researchers at Harvard University and MIT have designed origami-like artificial muscles that can lift objects up to 1,000 times their own weight. It is the equivalent of a duck being able to lift a car.

Using water or air pressure, these muscles have the strength that was missing from other soft designs that were also flexible and dexterous. They look like folded skeletons that are covered with fluid-filled sacs that collapse and contract like real muscles when a vacuum is applied. They can be used for space and deep-sea exploration as well as for miniature surgical devices or wearable robotic exoskeletons.^[6]

4 Airbags

Robert J. Lang gave up his career as a prolific physicist and mathematician with NASA to devote himself to his first love—paper folding. Lang was employed by German engineering company EASi Engineering to help with the design of an airbag using origami techniques.

During a crash, an airbag must fully inflate in only milliseconds. It also needs to be firm enough to stop an accelerating person from injury while cushioning them. Computer simulation of the design is critical, and inventors must be experts in thermodynamics, engineering, physics, and geometry.

Origami begins with a single sheet of paper where polygons can be folded into a design, but an expanded airbag looks nothing like a sheet of paper. Lang used an algorithm called the “universal molecule” to create an airbag with polyhedral facets which could fold into a small space and then open into a device that would protect drivers and passengers without causing damage on impact.^[7]

3 Stents

A stent is a flexible tube design that can be folded into a tiny structure, inserted into problem areas in the body, and then expanded. Esophageal stents are used in the gastrointestinal tract to treat cancers found in the bile duct and esophagus.

This is vital as many of these cancers are inoperable and do not respond to conventional treatment. These stents can instantly allow the patient to swallow. They restore bile flow and often make hospital admission unnecessary for the affected individual.

Zhong You from Oxford University developed a heart stent based on the techniques of the origami “water bomb base” that expands in a similar way to the popular expanding origami boxes. Made of plastic materials, it is small enough to pass through a catheter. Once in position, the stent can be inflated to open up arteries.^[8]

2 Retinal Implants

Sergio Pellegrino, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, has developed a retinal implant inspired by origami that creates a 3-D structure from a 2-D one, a concept vital to this amazing design. The implants are constructed from 2-D parylene-C film and transformed into 3-D spherical structures to help those with retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration.^[9]

These conditions result in the loss of photoreceptors that respond to light. The elastic design accommodates a variety of retina sizes and allows for many electrodes to be placed near the retina to relay electrical signals from a camera placed near the eyeball. The device can be built flat to keep costs down.

1 Fighting Cancer

Katerina Mantzavinou, a PhD student at MIT, worked on implants for delivering even doses of chemotherapy to patients whose cancers had spread to their abdomens. The surgeons and oncologists collaborating with her team explained that a sheet design would be better than the existing tube model to increase the surface area reached by the drug.

Having had some experience using origami designs in biomedical engineering, she realized that the tools had to be narrower than 1 centimeter (0.4 in) to reach the area. They also needed to unfurl in the body.^[10]

Stretchy polymers containing the drugs were used to create the folding patterns that were then 3-D printed. Due to her prototypes, Mantzavinou won the MIT Koch Institute image award for 2018. She is currently researching how to make the prototypes thinner to fully realize the design.

Alexa is a writer based in Dublin, Ireland.

Many of the greatest minds in physics and engineering have spent considerable time thinking about interstellar travel. They have come up with detailed concepts and designs for spaceships that are capable of sending humans to the stars. Each design has its own way to overcome the main challenge of interstellar travel: the distance to the stars.

At 4 light-years away, Proxima Centauri is the closest star to the Earth (other than our own Sun, of course). With conventional rocketry, it would take around 137,000 years to get there. The goal of these designs is to accelerate the ships to a fraction of the speed of light to allow the trip to be completed in less than a human lifetime. All these designs have been proposed as feasible solutions that may actually be put to use in the future.

10 Ion Propulsion

Ion propulsion is a type of engine that has undergone serious development over the past few years. Rockets based on ion propulsion produce far less thrust than conventional rockets.

Although conventional rockets stop accelerating as soon as they leave Earth, ion propulsion rockets can continue propelling the rocket for decades on end. The idea behind this engine is to constantly accelerate the rocket so that it will attain a significant velocity up to 145,000 kilometers per hour (90,000 mph) after several years.

Even so, this is not nearly enough speed to reach the nearest stars. This spacecraft would be better suited for exploring the outer solar system.

Ion propulsion works by taking advantage of the electrostatic properties of particles (the tendency for particles with like charges to repel and opposite charges to attract). The process starts by injecting an inert gas, usually xenon, into an ionization chamber. Then a stream of electrons is injected into the chamber using simple electricity generated by solar panels or nuclear reactors.^[1]

As the electrons collide with the xenon atoms, the xenon atoms have some of their electrons knocked off, making a positively charged atom (a positive ion). The like charges of the ions in the chamber push against each other, accelerating the ions.

Using a negatively charged grid, the ions are attracted toward holes at the end of the chamber. There, they are shot out of the spacecraft at tremendous speeds, pushing the spacecraft as they do so.

As a propellant, xenon is extremely efficient and can be stored in vast quantities, making it an amazing fuel source. In addition, ion propulsion systems glow bright blue, making them look exactly like the spaceships in space operas.

9 Nanotechnology

Researchers at the University of Michigan have made an improvement to ion propulsion. The technology is called nanoFET. Instead of xenon atoms, the propellants are large, man-made particles called carbon nanotubes. They can be charged and accelerated just as easily as xenon atoms, if not better. But they are far more massive, meaning their ejection will give the spacecraft a much bigger push.

However, this process is messy and very complex. A spacecraft would require trillions of these particles to be ejected constantly. NanoFET has a long way to go.^[2]

8 Nuclear Bombs

Yes, this is real. Nuclear bombs could actually be used for interstellar spaceships. It may sound barbaric, but it is one of the most practical designs on this list.

Every three seconds, a small nuclear bomb, or bomblet, would be ignited at the rear of the spacecraft. The energy from the explosion would be absorbed by shock absorbers on a “pusher plate” that would accelerate the spacecraft to 3 percent of the speed of light.

You might expect that the passengers of these spaceships would experience the worst turbulence of their lives. However, the energy of the bombs is expected to be transferred quite nicely and the trip would be smooth.^[3]

7 Ramjets

Nuclear fusion is a process that occurs in the cores of all stars and is the source of each star’s heat. Fusion happens when atoms are subjected to extreme temperatures and pressures. Under these conditions, light atoms fuse together to make heavier ones. A by-product of this reaction is tremendous amounts of thermal energy.

Fusion is a far more powerful and energetic process than fission (when nuclear bombs split atoms). The most common form is hydrogen fusion, which creates helium. Several designs for interstellar spacecraft capitalize on hydrogen fusion.

Using high-powered lasers or magnets, hydrogen is compressed and heated until fusion ignites. The thermal energy released from the fusion is transferred to the surrounding atoms, accelerating them. These are expelled from the spacecraft by a nozzle, accelerating the spacecraft to a ridiculous 90 million kilometers per hour (55.9 million mph).^[4]

The hydrogen can be stored on board or collected from the interstellar medium (the matter and radiation that exists between stars) as the ship travels. Spacecraft that scoop up hydrogen as they go are called ramjets.

6 Antimatter

A particle of antimatter has the opposite properties of its regular matter counterpart. A proton has a positive charge, and an antiproton has a negative charge.

What does antimatter look like? You have never seen it because it is only synthesized in laboratories. The reason: If a particle of antimatter comes into contact with a particle of regular matter, they will annihilate each other in an astonishing explosion. One hundred percent of the particles’ mass is converted into a tsunami of energy.

To give you perspective, the largest nuclear bombs today convert 0.1 percent of their mass to energy. However, before all the mass has been converted to pure energy, a few short-lived particles are created as products of the reaction. A majority of these particles are called pions.

In an antimatter rocket, these pions would be used as a propellant and then expelled from the ship before they completely convert to energy. It is estimated that a ship propelled by antimatter annihilations could travel at 40 percent of the speed of light. Unfortunately, antimatter is incredibly difficult to synthesize. At present, we do not have the technology to create sufficient amounts of it.^[5]

5 Solar Sails

You may have seen them in Star Wars, but solar sails are a reality. Tests of these spacecraft have already been conducted by NASA and The Planetary Society.

The spacecraft works like a sailboat. Instead of wind, however, the propellant is sunlight. The ship consists of a small payload attached to a massive, ultrathin mirror, sometimes 30 meters (100 ft) across.

Pressure is exerted on the sail as vast amounts of photons are reflected off the surface of the mirror. Over time, the pressure builds and the spacecraft can reach speeds up to 241,000 kilometers per hour (150,000 mph).^[6]

While fast, these spacecraft do not go anywhere near the speeds required for interstellar travel. However, as you will see soon, the concept of solar sails can be modified to reach some of the fastest speeds on this list.

4 Laser Beams

The idea to propel spacecraft to extreme speeds using powerful laser beams has received the support of many powerful people, including Mark Zuckerberg and the late Stephen Hawking. The proposal, called Breakthrough Starshot, would send thousands of tiny probes 4 light-years away to Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth other than the Sun.

Besides its distance, Proxima Centauri is a prime target because it contains an Earthlike exoplanet called Proxima Centauri b (aka Proxima b) orbiting in the habitable zone. The goal of the project is to take photos and collect other valuable data on the exoplanet and send it back to Earth to see if Proxima Centauri b is indeed habitable or, even better, already inhabited.

The probes will be tiny, pellet-like wafers containing many valuable instruments and weighing only a few grams each. Like solar sails, they will be connected to “lightsails” and sent into space.

From a station back on Earth, large arrays of ultrapowerful lasers will shoot 100 gigawatts of focused laser beams at the lightsails, propelling them at 20 percent of the speed of light—over 160 million kilometers per hour (100 million mph). At that speed, even the tiniest obstacles in space, such as dust, can destroy a probe.^[7]

Thousands of probes will be sent to ensure that at least a few will reach their destination. The probes from Breakthrough Starshot should be able to make it to Proxima Centauri b in 20 years.

3 Beamed Particle Propulsion

One of the flaws in Breakthrough Starshot is an effect called “beam spreading.” This is the tendency for beams of light to spread out as they move. Beam spreading threatens to reduce the power that lasers can have on a lightsail. Some scientists have proposed using jets of particles instead of lasers. However, these also suffer from beam spreading.

Scientists at Texas A&M have come up with a novel solution: Use both lasers and particles. Their project is called PROCSIMA. Beam spreading can be eliminated in the laser by manipulating the properties of particles and eradicated in the particles by manipulating the properties of light.^[8]

2 Gas Station On Saturn’s Moon

Traditional rocket fuel uses liquid hydrogen and an oxidizer, usually liquid oxygen. Besides being toxic, the fuel is difficult to store as it is not very dense, meaning you cannot stockpile a lot of it. In addition, it must be stored at -252.9 degrees Celsius (-423.2 °F).

For those reasons, rocket pioneers such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have shifted toward the new methane fuel. Methane (CH₄) is nontoxic, can be stored at much higher temperatures, and is denser than hydrogen—allowing for a lot more of it to be stored.

There is one caveat, though. Although common on Earth, methane is not easily accumulated. However, a place nearby has lakes of liquid fuel waiting to be taken. Titan is Saturn’s largest moon. Besides Earth, Titan is the only known place in the universe with a liquid on its surface. Titan has vast lakes of ethane, propane, and, best of all, methane.

If we could build a launchpad on the surface of Titan, we could fill the rocket with vast amounts of methane fuel. Furthermore, Titan’s gravity is much lower than that of Earth. As a result, far less fuel would be required for liftoff, which consumes more fuel than any other phase of the trip. Launching a spacecraft from Titan could take us to the stars.^[9]

1 Black Hole Starship

Of all the spaceships on this list, the black hole starship is obviously the most unrealistic. Nonetheless, it is an intriguing idea. It takes advantage of Hawking radiation, a phenomenon discovered by Stephen Hawking.

Hawking radiation is what happens to a black hole when it evaporates. Over its lifetime, a black hole will emit radiation and shrink. For starships, the key lies in the fact that the process speeds up as the black hole becomes smaller. Therefore, by artificially creating a microscopic black hole, the Hawking radiation from the black hole can be used as a propellant by reflecting the radiation away from the spacecraft.^[10]

Tovi Sonnenberg is a high school student in New York and an amateur astronomer affiliated with the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). Follow him on Instagram and YouTube.