Research: 'Buckliball' Opens New Avenue in Design of Foldable Engineering 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. (Read more here)