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The earwig\u2019s delicate, paper-thin wings can open 10x their folded size due to its origami-like creases \u2013 Credit: ETH Zurich \/ Purdue University<\/p>\n The earwig\u2019s delicate, paper-thin wings can open 10x their folded size due to its origami-like creases \u2013 Credit: ETH Zurich \/ Purdue University<\/p>\n
(Article by Rohini Subrahmanyam originally published by Knowable Magazine)<\/p>\n
As the microscopic, tear-shaped Lacrymaria olor\u2009 swims around hunting for food, it does something remarkable: In a blink, the tiny protist extends its neck more than 30 times its body length, snatching up unwitting prey.<\/p>\n
Then, just as quickly, the neck withdraws, returning to its original size. The movement is akin to a six-foot human suddenly stretching their neck some 200 feet and then snapping it back to normal.<\/p>\n
This acrobatic behavior had been observed for more than a hundred years, yet only in 2024 did scientists finally understand how L. olor manages to whip out and store its neck so deftly.<\/p>\n
The tiny hunter uses a kind of cellular origami<\/a>: It folds its external membrane in pleats that it can unfold, deploy, and retract at will.<\/p>\n \u201cThis particular origami, which we named Lacrygami \u2014 humans did not invent it, nature invented it,\u201d says Stanford University bioengineer Manu Prakash.<\/p>\n Like releasing tightly spooled fishing line, the tiny, single-celled hunter Lacrymaria olor can rapidly extend its neck 30 times its body size and just as quickly whip it back into itself.<\/p>\n Anyone who has dabbled in origami knows that it can be frustratingly complicated, yet somehow its intricate folds have arisen naturally many times in living things. In recent years, scientists have taken a closer look at these complex folds of the biological realm, such as in delicate insect wings, a chick\u2019s developing gut, or the lightning-fast neck of L. olor.<\/p>\n Some of what they\u2019re finding is inspiring practical applications such as drones and robots, but the nature of origami itself is enough to keep scientists fascinated. Origami exists at a particular boundary, says Harvard University physicist Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, \u201cwhere there is just enough balance between constraints and freedom, so that you can do remarkable things.\u201d<\/p>\n Frontiers in space<\/p>\n Japanese people started practicing origami some time around the sixth century, but it wasn\u2019t until about 40 years ago that scientists and engineers began investigating origami in earnest. Early studies focused on usefulness in space: With origami, one could tightly pack solar panel arrays on a rocket for unfolding later on.<\/p>\n Japanese astrophysicist Koryo Miura published what became a standard folding technique for such applications in 1985. Called the Miura-ori, this rigid fold is made of mountain and valley creases; it\u2019s essentially a pattern of closely packed parallelograms.<\/p>\n With one pull, you can unfurl an entire folded sheet, such as a map or an array of solar panels, and then just as easily fold it up again. In 1995, the fold was used to efficiently pack solar panel arrays in Japan\u2019s Space Flyer Unit satellite.<\/p>\n The Miura fold, or Miura-ori has been used to compactly fold structures such as solar arrays that can then be unfolded in a single motion.<\/p>\n But long before then, the fold was deployed in nature. In a classic 2005 paper published in Science, Mahadevan and physicist Sergio Rica, currently at Pontificia Universidad Cat\u00f3lica de Chile, posited that a Miura-ori-like pattern could naturally occur in leaves or insect wings, due to inherent physical instabilities. Using mathematical models and a drying slab of gelatin, they demonstrated how light compression on a stiff, thin skin that\u2019s supported by a soft, thick substrate can prompt the skin to settle into a Miura-ori like pattern, akin to how compression of the Earth\u2019s crustal plates can lead to mountains<\/a> and valleys.<\/p>\n More recently, Mahadevan and his team investigated how different parts of a chick gut \u2014 the large intestine with wrinkles, for example, the small intestine with zigzag folds \u2014 develop their very different creases. It turns out that the layers of gut tissue vary in thickness and stiffness across each portion. As the gut elongates during development, their mechanical properties cause these portions to buckle in different ways, the researchers reported in the<\/a> Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2024. Other complex biological folds \u2014 like the wrinkles on our brain<\/a> \u2014 are also likely to form during development due to similar physical force considerations.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is essentially a very natural consequence of pattern formation in physics,\u201d Mahadevan says.<\/p>\n Insights from insect wings<\/p>\n Scientists are also investigating how insects neatly fold and unfold their wings. Andres Arrieta, a mechanical engineer at Purdue University, and Andr\u00e9 Studart, a materials science engineer at ETH Zurich, turned to earwigs, which have hindwings tucked away under their forewings. Just before flying, the earwig unfurls the hindwings, and all the tightly packed creases elegantly open as thin, delicate wings stretching out to more than 10 times their folded size. The process takes place without the use of muscles.<\/p>\n The researchers were drawn to the earwig wing for three reasons: It has a large change in area as it folds or unfolds; it\u2019s what scientists call bistable (it can be at rest in two different states, open and folded); and it doesn\u2019t just have standard straight origami creases \u2014 it has curved creases.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Curved creases don\u2019t fold flatly along a straight line, they fold along a curve, like a folded-over shirt collar. They are trickier than a standard flat crease; as you fold along a curve, the crease changes direction ever so slightly at every point. So, at each point, the sheet needs to fold in two directions: radially along the crease, where the two parts of the sheet bend like a hinge and come closer, and tangentially to the crease. Because the crease is curved, every part of it is angled slightly differently.<\/p>\n It turns out that earwigs stretch their wings ever so slightly at the curved crease along the wing\u2019s middle. It manages this stretching with an elastic protein called resilin that can store and release energy like a spring. In the middle of the earwig wing \u2014 a spot the researchers call the mid-wing mechanism \u2014 the resilin is distributed both symmetrically and asymmetrically. The former helps the wing\u2019s creases extend, like a stretchy spring, and the latter gives the creases the energy to rotate, like a bendy spring. Together, the two types of springs help to lock the wing in position, whether folded or unfolded.<\/p>\n Incorporating the stretchy springs into the folds was key to capturing the behavior of the wing, says Arrieta, who calls the approach \u201cspring origami.\u201d<\/p>\n After modeling how the insect wing folded mathematically<\/a>, the researchers designed and 3D-printed a membrane that incorporated springs<\/a> and could fold up on its own.<\/p>\n With some origami applications, the creases have to be folded in the right order to get the final shape. That requires a lot of control, says Arrieta. In contrast, a bistable structure has only two states, open and closed. \u201cIt\u2019s just a little bit of effort and boom! the thing deploys.\u201d<\/p>\n Eventually these bistable, foldable structures (see them open in this GIF<\/a>) might be deployed as wings for drones, helping them fold up more compactly. Inspired by the earwig wing (in the video below), engineers incorporated a spring-like mechanism into a self-folding structure that may have applications in robotics.<\/p>\n Lo and be-fold<\/p>\n The single-celled hunter L. olor\u2009 presented a similar puzzle \u2014 and a similar solution. The scientists knew that the protist\u2019s body had microtubule proteins that give it a helical structure, the way rods give tents their shape. But could those microtubules help explain its massively extending, then retracting, neck?<\/p>\n After all, the membrane can\u2019t just appear and disappear, says Prakash, so where does it come from and where does it go?<\/p>\n On a trip to Japan, Prakash saw chochin lanterns that have paper stretched over bamboo frames and realized that the membrane of the single-celled creature might similarly stretch out over the bamboo-like microtubules. By testing this paper-based set-up using origami with his kids, he discovered that \u201cthere is a very easy way to fold and unfold this architecture.\u201d<\/p>\n Cross-checking with L. olor\u2019s microscopy data confirmed his hunch: The protist\u2019s cell is folded up into pleats using curved creases, and anchored to a scaffold of helical microtubules. Opening and closing of these pleats drives the extraordinary extending neck.<\/p>\n Folding and storing the membrane and microtubules in this curved, helical fashion allows the cell to keep a lot of its gelatinous cytoplasm in a ready-to-release configuration. But L. olor doesn\u2019t just release all that cytoplasm at once, says study coauthor Eliott Flaum, Prakash\u2019s former graduate student who is now a biophysicist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. \u201cIt can control the neck length,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd that is only possible if it had really fine control over the material being stored.\u201d<\/p>\n It exerts this fine control with the help of what are called singularities \u2014 points or kinks along the curved creases where the membrane sharply goes from being folded to being unfolded. Similar to resilin and the mid-wing mechanism in the earwigs, these points concentrate a lot of the bending energy when the membrane is all folded up. And by controlling how these points move, L. olor is able to rapidly unfurl its pleats and just as easily fold them back up again.<\/p>\n As the little hunter either deploys or reels its neck back in, the singularities move along with the neck \u2014 ensuring that all the creases open and fold back in sequentially \u2014 in the same way every time. Thus L. olor perfectly folds and unfolds its origami without fail \u2014 like the pleats of an accordion that open and tuck themselves back in.<\/p>\n \u201cMathematically, it does not allow any other folds,\u201d says Prakash, \u201cwhich is why it\u2019s so robust \u2014 the cell folds and unfolds tens of thousands of times and does not make a mistake.\u201d<\/p>\n Learn more about nature\u2019s fantastic folding below\u2026<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n SHARE THE AWE-INSPIRING INFO With Friends on Social Media\u2026<\/p>\n This article originally appeared<\/a>\u00a0in Knowable Magazine under\u00a0CC BY-ND 4.0<\/a>\u00a0license, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all.\u00a0Sign up<\/a>\u00a0for Knowable Magazine\u2019s newsletter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The earwig\u2019s delicate, paper-thin wings can open 10x their folded size due to its origami-like creases \u2013 Credit:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":254998,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[2851,1897,4911,1120,59,102,5133,548,2302,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-254997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-animals","tag-art","tag-biology","tag-design","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-insects","tag-nature","tag-physics","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/254998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Knowable_Magazine_Logo-326x72.jpg\"){kind=logo}
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