Scientists… create single, clonable strand of DNA that folds into an octahedron:
Similar to a piece of paper folded into an origami box, the strand of DNA that Shih and Joyce designed folds into a compact octahedron – a structure consisting of twelve edges, six vertices, and eight triangular faces. The structure is about 22 nanometers in overall diameter.
These miniscule[sic] octahedral structures are the culmination of a design process that started one day when Shih was building a number of shapes with flexible ball and stick models in the laboratory. This exercise attracted his attention to an important structural principle: frames built with triangular faces are rigid, while cubes and other frames built with non-triangular faces are easily deformed.
Buckminster Fuller would have loved this…
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