Inventions

"This device could be sent somewhere and function without anyone else being involved," says Sam Felton, a Harvard doctoral student in mechanical engineering and lead author of the paper, published in the journal Science, that announced the robot. As befits a robot that relies on the principles of origami, it's made of paper, layered with a circuit board and "a contractile layer of prestretched polystyrene," as the paper describes. It's the same prestretched polystyrene that make up Shrinky Dinks, those colorful sheets children color and cut into shapes, then pop into the oven so they shrink and harden. Cleverly, the Shrinky Dink material in this case was used to make the folds—when the joints are heated by internal heating elements, the prestretched polystyrene contracts, causing the joint to buckle into the desired angle fold.

The joints are left to cool between foldings, allowing them to harden. In that sense, the robot is not a true transformer, since once it has folded itself up it can't be unfolded. When it has finished its origami metamorphosis, the robot can start to walk, powered by two motors on its back.

While 3D printing has gotten the lion's share of attention, Felton and others at his Harvard lab see origami-inspired folding as a promising alternative. Complex machines could be printed on two-dimensional sheets, then fold themselves into shape, either immediately or when needed.  "We were originally inspired by making robots as quickly and cheaply as possible," says Felton. "The long-term plan is printable manufacturing; the short-term plan is building robots that can go into places where people can't go. You could send a ream of sheets into space that then unfold into a satellite."

The $1 Paper Foldscope Microscope That Could Change the World

When diagnosing people in the developing world, health workers often go into the field lugging bulky, fragile, and expensive microscopes. "We ship research equipment and hope it'll survive," says Manu Prakash, a biophysicist. While traveling in Thailand, the scientist dreamt up a lightweight, low-cost alternative: a pocket-sized paper microscope made from a single sheet of folded paper, a pair of lenses, and an LED. Approximate cost: $1. Prakash's Foldscope could have a big impact on diagnosing disease in remote or resource-poor regions of the world. The microscope is not only cheap to produce, it's also relatively sophisticated, achieving a magnification of 2,000 times—equal to the power of a desktop instrument costing $1,000. Prakash, a 34-year-old assistant professor at Stanford, is currently working on refining the optics to improve the resolution from 700 nanometers, which is sharp enough for diagnosing African sleeping sickness, shistosomiasis, loiasis, and many other diarrheal diseases. Malaria and tuberculosis are next, he says.

Foldscope, a Paper Microscope to Help Diagnose Disease

Foldscopes take about five minutes to fold into shape from a color-coded sheet. They require no external power, weigh less than two nickels, and are waterproof. They're also extremely robust, capable of surviving being trampled or dropped from a three-story building. If, for whatever reason, a part does fail, it is easily and cheaply replaced—all the components, lenses included, are modular. That also means that any Foldscope can be modified depending on the disease being diagnosed and lighting conditions. Attaching a bright LED can even transform the microscope into a projector for teaching children or training health workers.  For those accustomed to lab microscopes, a Foldscope might take some getting used to. Users insert samples prepared on standard glass slides and then focus by sliding paper tabs right or left with their thumbs. Prakash's lab received $100,000 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for initial development, and a four-year, $700,000 grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to distribute 10,000 Foldscopes to beta-testers who are chosen based on the scientific questions they'd like to study. Prakash is producing the first batch of 50,000 microscopes with a manufacturer of greeting cards using a traditional die-cutting process.  Foldscope isn't commercially available yet, though Prakash imagines a day when every child carries one, much as their parents keep ballpoint pens in their pockets. By seeing organisms invisible to the naked eye, children could develop a better understanding of how good hygiene plays a part in stemming the spread of disease. "Try explaining to a kid who has never seen anything microscopic why he should wash his hands," he says. "A microscope completely changes the dialogue of sanitation."

Edison: A Toy Robot Injects Steroids Into Lego Projects

Lego is, first and foremost, fun. Building with those small plastic blocks also teaches some fundamentals of engineering: how to build a structure that won't topple over—that is, one stable enough to survive getting trampled by the family dog. A new robotic toy on Kickstarter can also make playing with Lego a lesson in computer programming. So you can hedge your bets by steering your kid toward two lucrative careers at once, under the guise of unstructured playtime.

Edison, as the robot is called, is essentially a battery-operated toy car equipped with sensors that allow it to see and hear. It can detect obstacles, move along a path, and respond to changes in light levels and sound commands such as clapping. Brenton O'Brien, founder of Australian company Microbric, says he developed Edison as an affordable teaching tool for schools: At about $36, it's cheaper than most textbooks.

Edison comes loaded with some pre-programmed functions, such as the ability to follow commands from an ordinary TV or DVD remote, activated when the car drives over corresponding bar codes that can be downloaded online. Kids can also build their own features with Edware, an open-source programming language that uses drag-and-drop graphic icons to make the process intuitively easy. "It's as though [students] start learning science, technology, engineering and maths by stealth—they don't even know they're doing it," says O'Brien, an electronics engineer with an MBA from the Australian Institute of Business.  Kids can program Edison to respond to simple environmental cues like beeping when it gets dark. But they can also get more creative by throwing Lego into the mix to invent such things as an automatic drawbridge for a Lego castle. Two robots could be combined to create a bulldozer, for instance, with one serving as the drive and the other controlling a bucket used to pick up additional Lego pieces.  O'Brien offers consolation to parents and teachers who might hesitate to place even a modestly priced, high-tech toy in the hands of a child bent on destroying everything in sight. Drive a truck over Edison, he says, and it will still work.

Click Here to Read: Singularity, When Computers Take Over the Human Brain