It feels the DNA origami.

Robert Lang folds way new origami

You can use DNA origami for that.

So, what we've done is we've succeeded in making something much bigger than a DNA origami by combining DNA origami with tiles.

Surprisingly, origami and the structures that we've developed in origami turn out to have applications in medicine, in science, in space, in the body, consumer electronics and more.

The DNA origami is a proof that that compiler actually works.

Here is a DNA origami rectangle, and here are some tiles growing from it.

But then we told them, we said, Look, this origami really belongs to us.

After Robert Lang's talk on origami at TED2008, Bruno Bowden stepped onstage with a challenge he would fold one of Lang's astonishingly complicated origami figures, blindfolded, in under 2 minutes. He's accompanied by the cellist Rufus Cappadocia.

It folds in thirds. It's a very simple pattern you wouldn't even call that origami.

And so we are going to use molecules and refashion this thing, rebuild everything from the bottom up, using DNA in ways that nature never intended, using DNA origami, and DNA origami to seed this algorithmic self assembly.

So, now you can say, all right, why isn't DNA origami the end of the story?

Or do you think, I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?

At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how do you fold origami.

You get a high level description of the computer program, a high level description of the origami.

So that's DNA origami. That's one way. There are many ways of casting molecular spells using DNA.

Alzheimer s disease starts when a protein that should be folded up properly misfolds into a kind of demented origami.

Most people think they know what origami is. It's this flapping birds, toys, cootie catchers, that sort of thing.

Here's the DNA origami, and what we can do is we can write 32 on both edges of the DNA origami, and we can now use our watering can and water with tiles, and we can start growing tiles off of that and create a square.

So now, we can use this counting to try and get at much bigger things than DNA origami could otherwise.

And in the 1990s, origami artists discovered these principles and realized we could make arbitrarily complicated figures just by packing circles.

Now when we looked at the easy origami, we saw the same thing Builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less.

But this is very promising because the origami can organize parts just one tenth the size of those in a normal computer.

Norman Jayden Jayden is an FBI profiler sent from Washington to support the police force with their investigation into the Origami Killer.

It was started by Erik Winfree, and what it does, it has tiles that are a hundredth the size of a DNA origami.

And like this magnificent origami, cells are developing at one million cells per second at four weeks, as it's just folding on itself.

So if you want to build a human from DNA origami, the problem is, you need a long strand that's 10 trillion trillion bases long.

So in origami, to obey these laws, we can take simple patterns like this repeating pattern of folds, called textures and by itself it's nothing.

Poet Rives does 8 minutes of lyrical origami, folding history into a series of coincidences surrounding that most surreal of hours, 4 o'clock in the morning.

Now you could say, if you were a builder, do you think that, Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?

But if we use a little computation we use origami, plus some tiles that count then we can get away with using 100, 200 or 300 DNA strands.

Robert Lang is a pioneer of the newest kind of origami using math and engineering principles to fold mind blowingly intricate designs that are beautiful and, sometimes, very useful.

They took a DNA origami, organized some carbon nano tubes, made a little switch, you see here, wired it up, tested it and showed that it is indeed a switch.

So what I did, I took all those emails, and I put them together into something called Angrigami, which was an origami template made out of this sort of vile stuff.

If you look at the square that you build with the origami and some counters growing off it, the pattern that it has is exactly the pattern that you need to make a memory.

She wrote all her own software to design and built this DNA origami, a beautiful rendition of China, which even has Taiwan, and you can see it's sort of on the world's shortest leash, right?

And what we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami, and they were willing to pay for them five times more than the people who just evaluated them externally.

So I came up with a new method a couple of years ago I call DNA origami that's so easy you could do it at home in your kitchen and design the stuff on a laptop.

But if we follow the laws of origami, we can put these patterns into another fold that itself might be something very, very simple, but when we put it together, we get something a little different.

You can encode the number 32 in the right hand side of a DNA origami, and when you add those tiles that count, they will start to count they will read that 32 and they'll stop at 32.

If we wanted to make a square of size 10, 100 or 1,000, if we used DNA origami alone, we would require a number of DNA strands that's the square of the size of that square so we'd need 100, 10,000 or a million DNA strands.

When you look at DNA origami, you can see that what it really is, even though you think it's complicated, is a bunch of double helices that are parallel to each other, and they're held together by places where short strands go along one helix and then jump to another one.

So then, we think we can do that. And my first question doing this or one of my questions doing this was how can you make an arbitrary shape or pattern out of DNA? And I decided to use a type of DNA origami, where you take a long strand of DNA and fold it into whatever shape or pattern you might want.