Tom is an origami artist.

It feels the DNA origami.

Origami is the art of folding paper.

You can use DNA origami for that.

Robert Lang folds way new origami

He told me where to buy origami.

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

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

An origami book was released in November 1999.

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

It ties to origami. So let me start.

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.

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

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

And where it has led in origami is to things like this.

Now, there is actually a little origami in the James Webb Space Telescope, but it's very simple.

I'm all thumbs when it comes to origami, or paper folding.

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

The common theme what makes it origami is folding is how we create the form.

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

So that's four simple laws. That's all you need in 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

And if you do that, the origami's the same size, but the resulting square that you get is three times bigger.

The secret to productivity in so many fields and in origami is letting dead people do your work for you.

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

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

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

The secret to productivity in so many fields and in origami is letting dead people do your work for you.

We had the people who built it, and we had the people who did not build it and just looked at it as external observers.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.